How would Jesus have made WWII penicillin ?

Ethical systems aren't usually advocated solely on the basis that they produce 'better outcomes' than other ethical systems.

But what if one claims that a system of ethics is based on the behavior of the tiny, weak and primitive microbes, who have survived all that the Universe has thrown at them for 4 billion years?

Double V campaign called for a more inclusive WWII Victory

The Double V campaign, mounted by a relatively small number of black journalists for a relatively short time during WWII, is generally considered a failure at the time ---- despite its subsequent fame.

But Henry Dawson's contemporary effort to see abundant natural penicillin produced for all was much more successful, then and now, in changing hearts towards a much inclusive view of humanity and nature.

Though very little attention was ever shone upon it - back then and even today....

Dawson's Burrs - Part Two

During the inter-war period and for long time afterwards, medical researchers who wanted to fit inside (and more importantly, rise inside) their profession's norms focussed exclusively on studying virulent microbes and treating acute illnesses.

But right from the start, at two of the world's top medical research centres (Rockefeller Hospital and Columbia Presbyterian Hospital), Henry Dawson defied those norms, taking a wide 'inclusive' view of research possibilities that took him well outside the medical Pale.

And ten billion and counting of us, since 1940, have had better lives, because he chose to do so.

Dawson's burrs - physically small / symbolically big

Part I : the SBEs

Dr Henry Dawson's (non-publicized) decision to quietly inject a truly tiny amount of his homegrown version of an impure and untested new medicine, into two no-account patients in a near empty hospital, surely qualifies as one of the clearest possible examples of a journalistic non-story.

Particularly when set against the really big news story on that same day, October 16 1940 : America's first ever peacetime draft registration.

But yet the sum of an event's symbolic impact can be far larger than its small physical presence - that historical first ever injection of a life-saving antibiotic still echoes down to us today.

Helpers & Helpees Beyond the Pale

Dr Henry Dawson, seemingly so meek and so mild, so the 'Clem Atlee of medicine research' among all the alpha males occupying the upper reaches of the Allied scientific effort.

Or was the terminally ill Henry Dawson really a quietly and deeply subversive 'Inside Agitator' ?

Physically small but Morally big

Despite its nickname, the other ("Big Tent") Manhattan Project was actually physically quite small, but morally as big as could be.

The Unsavable & the Unspeakable

One can have easily predicted that Dawson's wartime Manhattan Project would (a) seek to help the much neglected chronically ill among the minority poor by (b) using similarly neglected microbes to do so.

Open Source 'artisan' penicillin

Dr Henry Dawson well understood that creating a "Big Tent coalition of all possible talents" to win the moral and military war against the Axis really meant letting the small and the powerless inside the tent, both as those to be helped and those doing the helping.

After all everybody knew that the big and the powerful were already inside the tent, were always already there.

Dawson had already selected those he felt would be a potent symbol of those not being helped in the Axis+Allied rush to deify the big and the fit over the small and the unfit.

SBE patients from working class minorities, considered to be unworthy of any scarce wartime medical care : the very '4Fs of the 4Fs'.

Dawson's next decision was to employ the tiny penicillium cells to make his pioneering systemic penicillin, instead of using man-made artificial penicillin made in huge factories.

This also would be serve as a potent symbol of what good can happen when small helpers were allowed to join the war effort.

Finally Dawson knew the that the resulting natural penicillin made by the small penicillium could be made by small teams of researchers on the cheap.

And thus they could remain independent of government, university and foundation authorities trying to centralize all penicillin research into one big group-thinking agency such as had happened with atomic research.

Natural penicillin could do this for two reasons : one technical and the other legal.

It proved much easier and certainly much cheaper to make clinical natural penicillin on a very small"artisan" scale (ultimately even on an ordinary domestic kitchen table) than to try to synthesize it with a mess of pungent and dangerous chemicals in high pressure, high temperature chemical reactors.

Most importantly, natural penicillin was inherently open source and PD (public domain) : it could not be patented and hence controlled by Big Pharma and Big Government (as happened with atomic research).

Any medical researcher in the world who truly cared about saving the dying right now (never as many as you might think) could make clinical natural penicillin and for a time in late 1943 and early 1944, it seemed they all were.

Small patients, small helpers from Nature, small human helper teams : working together to give a war-torn world the best possible boon : the gift of life.

Penicillin certainly helped the Allied military effort, though less than the myth claims.

However its biggest effect was on the longstanding Allied effort to create a 'moral coalition' of all the world's people against the evil of the Axis ideology.

In late 1943, the Allies began to fly some of their now abundant natural penicillin (thanks to Dawson and Pfizer) around the world to save the lives of small children in Neutral countries.

This act finally convinced a hitherto skeptic world about the Allies' moral worthiness.

Now that they finally saw some flesh put on the Allies' high blown but hollow rhetoric of their moral superiority over the Axis.

If penicillin had been patented like the atomic bomb, this pax penicillia would never have left the starting gate in WWII.

Chalk another one up for the virtues, practical and moral, of the open source movement ...

#HumanityWashesAshore ---- a threatening flood or a saving fountain ?

Aylan Kurdi : potentially harmful or potentially helpful ?

One can view this week's refugee crisis (just as one can view WWII and WWII Penicillin) as a conflict over varying ways to best control our fears of the future.

Because all humanity, all the time (sometimes consciously but often also unconsciously) worries about the unknown future.

It remains the sole most distinctive thing that we humans do that other lifeforms don't seem to do.

Controlling fears of Future by controlling everything... or nothing

Many of us humans feel that we can best control our fears of the future by controlling everything ---- after totally eliminating everything else that we judge potentially harmful. What remains is a knowable future we can control and direct.

Control freaks.

(Think Adolf Hitler, Howard Florey and their ilk.)

But others of us humans feel that we can best control our fears of the future by not controlling anything  ---- diversifying our biological portfolio to totally retain everything potentially helpful, giving humanity lots of Plan Bs, Cs,Ds, etc.

Portfolio diversifiers.

(Think Henry Dawson and his supporters.)

To many of a Vancouver newspaper's letter writers, a little three year old refugee boy seems a potential terrorist, best drowned at birth - overseas if possible.

If this was 1940, perhaps by drowning on a badly overcrowded boat, filled with Europe's Jews, on its way to exile in Madagascar.

If not drowned, then perhaps gassed and burned, just in case any little baby grows up as a Jewish terrorist.

But this is 2015, and their new phobia is Arabs not Jews, so a Turkish beach will have to do instead until new furnaces can be stoked up.

To other newspaper letter writers the little three year old boy was potentially a genius and savior who would grow up to solve our environmental crisis (or perhaps not), but in any case a child to be held and cherished, a fellow human being.

Potential terrorist or potential savior - or just little three year old -- now we will never know...

Victoria Oats Blight, 1940s : don't ever say Dawson didn't warn ya

To the sound of loud yawns, in 1930 Dr Henry Dawson dared publicly suggest that a phenomenon he called 'bacterial transformation' (the name was general from the 1930s till the 1980s when it was replaced by today's horizontal gene transfer or HGT), could explain the mysterious and sudden rise of epidemics of new highly virulent diseases.

Sometimes, he thought, a previously mildly virulent pathogen suddenly acquires, from other species of organisms, a new gene or three that made this former 97 pound pathogenic weakling suddenly highly virulent against its traditional victims.

And we now also know that the human breeding of plants and animals for commercial exploitation can also instantly flood the world with an entire population of long domesticated beings with an 'improvement'---- that in fact suddenly makes them very vulnerable to a long existing, mild pathogen.

Dawson died in 1945, before he could point to a clear case of a new epidemic thrown up by HGT like behavior from the victim or the pathogen --- or both.

Victoria oats blight fell upon the world very suddenly in the late 1940s - the result of two genetic events colliding.

Man had introduced an new gene into commercial oat species that made them better resist the much feared crown rust fungus disease.

Great --- except that a mild pathogen of oats had also gained a new gene cluster from HGT.

One that normally would have been quickly lost by evolutionary pressure  --- due to its added energy cost of making this new gene cluster versus null gain for the blight producer.

Except.

That now there were millions of acres of oats, all over the world, all bearing the a new gene that turned this pathogen's new virulency factor a decided advantage for it surviving and flourishing on oats.

Presto - all the world's oat crops, all with the same commercially-added gene, were suddenly under attack.

Science mucky--mucks investigated and reluctantly reversed one of their century old central dogmas --- that biodiversity was a bad bad bad thing (cue here, eugenics et al).

Amazing that anyone could make a million bucks (or get a PhD and do a post doctoral term of servitude) without ever hearing that old old folk saying about never putting all your eggs (or oat seed) in one basket, but there you are.

Commercial greed meet scientific hubris - you two suckers were born for each other ...

This Era of Plentudism : the post modern welcoming of plenitude vs modern plenticide

We are - deniers aside - all plentudists these days.

We actually welcome and cherish the chaos and complexity of a multilayered world - welcome and cherish communities composed of  many wildly different little neighbourhoods.

'The more the merrier' is today our motto.

We are all Jane Jacobs and not Robert Moses today - we are all Henry Dawson and not Howard Florey these days.

We no longer have a an almost physical phobia against the mere thought of anything that is all mixed together.

Be that a bunch of different New York City ethnicities,  New York City neighbourhoods or various unknown compounds in New York City crude penicillin juice.

We no longer seek to replicate the chemists' process of separation and purification outside the beaker and flask.

We no longer practise it on human cities ( via the doctrine of widely separated uses and strict zoning) or on so called human 'races' ( with white separated and superior to blacks and Jews).

Adolf Hitler, Robert Moses and Howard Florey all tried that during WWII , and all failed and all were eventually discredited .....

Henry Dawson DIDN'T discover penicillin , but after penicillin endured underemployment for 12 years , he did give it its first real job : lifesaving

There are always tons of people who claim to have "discovered" this or that movie star, after the fact, but only a handful who actually gave them their first part way back when.

As Scottish Christians are wont to say : there is a huge difference between all those who just talk the talk and the very few that actually walk the walk.

They should know.

Because when it came to giving penicillin a real job (saving lives) old scotsman Alexander Fleming only talked the talk - it was new scotsman Henry Dawson who actually walked the walk : October 16th 1940...

The Big Apple's (green) un-super heroes

The biggest horse races offer the biggest prize money so every jockey naturally wants to win big in the biggest of Big Apples - New York City.

Nothing living and green is implied in the term  --- nothing beyond the green colour of cold hard cash.

Its ironic then, isn't , that wartime's penicillium green grew best in The Big Apple's (The Green Apple's ?) concrete jungle.

Not in leafy green Oxford University.

Brewed up in Gotham by Henry Dawson's small group of unfits, misfits and rebels - fermenting up a revolution in how the world of medicine now views the natural world....

Abundant Penicillin by 1942 - only if Howard Florey didn't come to America ?

When ,in April 1941, Howard Florey learned that his best shot at world acclaim (as the only begetter of systemic penicillin) was at risk because Henry Dawson had got there first, the old claim jumper boot scooted over to America to shake a little dust.

Unfortunately, while in America he met and bonded with an old friend, A Newton Richards, the chief medical advisor (sans MD degree !) to both Merck and the US government's war science research arm , Vannevar Bush's OSRD.

Together the pair agreed that most of the wartime penicillin effort should go into first synthesizing it - rather than merely scaling up existing natural penicillin fermentation technology and getting penicillin to the military and civilian patients dying for lack of it - now.

Richards (who never met a conflict of interest he didn't like) was mindful that Merck's cross harbour rival, Pfizer, was likely to be the big winner if natural fermentation - and not Merck's strength artificial synthesis - was used to produce this priceless new drug.

Left alone, Pfizer (with Henry Dawson's team assisting) was already on the way, during that Fall in 1941 , to producing enough penicillin to get the show on the road.

A pity then that Florey had to spoil the show ...

Finally, a penicillin hero who is NOT "Box Office Poison"

Hollywood has never done a film about the exciting wartime history of the world's best known medicine, penicillin, because the character of two best known protagonists, Alexander Fleming and Howard Fleming - on closer examination - proved 100% pure Box Office poison, particularly to women who are the main customers for medically-oriented dramas.

What exactly Henry Dawson contributed to the success of penicillin has never been in doubt, but what has frustrated American, British and Australian writers on penicillin has been determining just why this normally non-assertive, and now dying, doctor did what he did .

Why exactly did he push so hard  and so long to save the "4Fs of the 4Fs" , against the full force of wartime bureaucracy and at the cost of his own life ?

Here indeed was a hero on the Hollywood scale , if only it was clear why he did what he did .

I think the answer as to why he did what he did, is to consider the character-building events in his life,  before he settled permanently in New York and ultimately took out American citizenship.

After all, he spent the first two thirds of his relatively short life in Canada , in Nova Scotia ,where he was born and raised, in particular.

An instinctive feel for the uniqueness of Nova Scotia's history and culture in the tremulous period just after the turn of the last century is what all these foreign writers, fine as their other talents are, simply lack.

The story of Henry Dawson's quixotic-seeming but ultimately world-shaking Manhattan Project, his drive to see penicillin provided for ALL humanity, is as much character-driven as it is events-driven.

It is his quietly heroic character that will bring customers to buy the book, see the movie, attend the play and musical, above all to bring out those three hankies.

Any history of wartime penicillin seems like a chaotic jumble of events, one damn thing after another ,with no overarching theme to tie them all together.

But now wartime penicillin will be recast as the leading part of a globe wide conflict, taking place underneath the military events of WWII, between two very different ways of treating our fellow human beings .

And the clashing personalities of Henry Dawson and Howard Florey will aptly represent both sides.

But it is Henry Dawson's noble, selfless character, revealed for the first time, that will finally make the story of wartime penicillin the feel-good movie of the year it has always deserved to be....

"Agape's Penicillin : Henry Dawson's Manhattan Project"

Only six words this time : title and sub-title.

I should remind readers that the cover image for all my various book title and sub-titles remains the same.

It is a painting of a stylized pair of unnaturally thin and curving arms and hands lifting up a glowing petri dish of radiated* penicillium mold as if it was a monstrance* , the whole effect at a casual glance looking exactly like a stylized atomic mushroom cloud.

(Hopefully !)

(*Penicillium mold is extremely variable genetically and will usually mutate a few variants, even during the course of growing for a only few days on the petri dish, even if grown from a single spore - these variants are visible as the slightly different pie shaped wedges radiating outwards from the centre of the penicillium mold.

*Monstrances are that glowing sun-like thingy that the priests hold the communion host aloft in, on certain joyous occasions.)

The visual connection to an artist's painting of an upheld monstrance is immediately apparent if one has seen both.

Gladys Hobby, of Dawson's team, records in her book that she daily held up the mold on petri dishes ,in just such a manner, to lift up the spirits of the dying SBE patients.

So it is non-negotiable for me -- I must see the words "Manhattan Project" somewhere in title or sub-title.

I want to play off the idea that this tiny life-oriented Manhattan project, occurring in the same university campus and at the same time as as the atomic Manhattan project, was in every way its antithesis.

But I don't really care if title becomes sub-title etc - its all of one piece in the end.

The idea of someone no one has ever heard of, Henry Dawson, having something equal in importance to the very ultimate in Big Science/Big Government/Big Money/Big War hopefully will intrigue the potential customer enough to look inside the book.

             "Agape's Penicillin" 
The Manhattan Project of Henry Dawson 

is a slightly more academic a sub-title - but longer-winded and windier too....

ALL life is worthy of life as a full citizen or are just SOME judged 'worthy' ?

Nazi Germany - even at the depths of its imminent defeat - treated its full citizens well : recall that POW Kurt Vonnegut was working in a Dresden factory that made food supplements for pregnant mothers at the time of that city's Allied firebombing in February 1945.

But its non full citizens it killed outright or worked to death as starved slaves.

'Life worthy of Life' - 'Life unworthy of Life' are infamous German cum Nazi catchphrases that have come to symbolize THEM, so as to separate US for any shared responsibility for the horrors of  the
eugenic mass murder of WWII.

But when we re-cast those catchphrases as' life worthy or unworthy of life as full citizens' , we become uneasily aware that no society in the early 1940s was free of the sin of treating some of its members as less than fully human.

None .

When Henry Dawson proved this up for the Anglo Allies over their denying of life saving penicillin to young SBE patients deemed useless for the war effort - judged just 'useless mouths' consuming valuable medical resources - he made it clear to many just how close the Nazis and their erstwhile opponents really were, morally......

Hating the handicapped isn't a crime in the Canada of Henry Dawson's birth

When an Ontario mom living a few doors away wrote a letter urging a couple euthanize their autistic grandchild, the general public was outraged.

 But not the police ---- or the academics in this area of the law.

Apparently hating the handicapped is not a hate crime in Canada : but hating Jews, Blacks , Orientals, Catholics or Gays definitely is.

Despite this mile-wide gap in current law, it won't hurt to remind Canadians that Hitler started off by killing the handicapped and only moved onto killing Jews and Gypsies later.

Which is why Henry Dawson was so focused on protecting handicapped individuals, deemed "4Fs of the 4Fs",  from the baneful neglect of Allied governments seemingly intent on matching the Nazis' policies in a muted "me too", step by step ......

In moral terms, WWII boils down to one simple - scientific - question : are the small a part of the future, or just of the past ?

 G F Hegel, the 19th century's most influential philosopher, was famous for claiming that history wasn't an endless cycles of birth, maturity and death laced with infinite variations , as people had always observed.

Instead, he ventured that history has a single purpose and a single goal  - together with a linear unbreakable path upwards to that goal  - linear, unidirectional "Progress" with a capital "P".

Herbert Spencer and a thousand others said that , scientifically, Progress of this sort actually existed, wasn't just an intellectual debating point, and that Darwin's Evolution showed not just why it happened but why it had to happen.

Species and cultures and societies and businesses and empires started out young as small ,weak and foolish and just mightier and mightier and wiser and wider as they got older and older.

The small were useful - yesterday - but now they were just speed bumps in the way of Progress.

Tomorrow had no place for them.

This was the general tenor of the Modern Age between the 1870s and the 1960s.

Many people made moral arguments against this claim - but morality carried far less weight in this age than did science.

Henry Dawson also made moral arguments against this scientific central dogma , but where he seemed downright foolish to his colleagues was that he also said that he had scientific evidence - proof - that this dogma wasn't actually confirmed out there,  in the real world.

A man of deeds ,not words, his scientific articles cut little ice : that had to wait for someone like Stephen Jay Gould a half century later.

By then  ,of course, Gould was writing to the half converted.

But what had made the world change its mind ?

Blame on the events of that momentous year 1945.

1945 was both the apogee and nadir of the Modern Age.

Apogee with one project from Manhattan that assembled a scientific team almost as big and strong as The Bomb's explosion itself.

Nadir with another project from Manhattan that had a scientific team almost as small and as weak as those that manufactured the cure and almost as small and as weak as the intended patients.

Robert Oppenheimer led one team ; Henry Dawson the other.

Time is starting to tell as to who ultimately had the greater impact.....

Group love and Group think --- formula for a disaster : or WWII

It is well accepted that an excessive group love, for the so called Aryan Race, led Germany on endless wars of conquest and that excessive groupthink by Hitler's inner circle defeated an hope of permanent success in those conquests.

I want to suggest that group-love and group-think are intimately related and equally doomed and that by contrast, an expansive openness to others, all others - as individuals and as collectivity, in need or not in need - is the best way for humanity to survive in a dynamic uncertain world.

I plan to contrast the WWII career of little known doctor Henry Dawson, with his manhattan project to save SBE patients by de-weaponizing penicillin, with the mistakes made by those WWII excessive lovers of their own groups and their groupthink, in both the Axis and Allied camps ....