the ACCIDENTIAL Manhattan Project

 I can't say I was exactly wrong the last eight years to emphasize how different from the much more famous (atomic) Manhattan Project was Henry Dawson's own tiny wartime Manhattan project, involving a little of his homegrown penicillin and a handful of SBE patients.

But I do now think I got it far more right the first time I test-drove the idea of 'comparing and contrasting' the penicillin and atomic Manhattan Projects, back about nine years ago.

For my point then was - my point now is - that both the atomic and penicillin projects started off as very small fry indeed and only became huge when the Allied governments (atomic) or the world's public (penicillin) adopted them as their own.

Henry Dawson: Fermenting IV, STAT !

Historians of medicine and science, to the small extent that they care at all about it, have never had any problem deciding what in the name of God Dr Henry Dawson was up to, back in the Fall of 1940 seventy five years ago.

But I think they got it completely wrong. And this blog is the result of my doubts - the forum for expressing all my doubts --- and proving them up.

The inspiration for HFAx2

As a kid, I was convinced WWII only ended because the small penicillin molds began saving kids faster than the Big People could bomb or burn them.

And why not?

As an adult, I discovered that Dr Henry Dawson and Dr Josef Mengele, from vastly opposing moral positions, had totally upended pre-war notions of "Progress" and put the fatal post into Modernity.

Draft, Antibiotics : 75 Years Young Today !

On October 16th 1940, seventy five years ago today, began two world-shaking processes that have continued ever since --- processes so important that one must ask why then that the MSM (mainstream media) is still ignoring these important twin anniversaries.

HGT a model for humanity's survival ?

Incredibly small, usually immobile, fragile bags of mostly water : they hardly sounds like creatures capable of giving advanced human civilization, circa the 21st century, a vital formula for surviving the worst the Cosmos can throw at us.

But for almost four billion years, the supposedly 'stupid' and 'unfit' tiny microbes have not just survived but dominated life on Earth.

I follow people like Dr Martin Henry Dawson and *Dr Lois Almon who, way back before WWII, believed that much of the credit for this unlikely survival success lies in something that these small and the weak creatures have that we big and smart people do not have.

And that is a process we now call HGT, but which Dawson first established under the name of 'bacterial transformation'.

HGT stands for Horizontal Gene Transfers --- 'the genetics of inclusion'.

It usually involves the release of bits of an individual microbe's personal DNA genome into the environment, to be taken up potentially by any other type of microbe near by, who can then pass it on to other species of microbes who are both physically and genetically far more remote from the original individual microbe.

(By contrast, most big creatures can only have access to the DNA genome of their mother and father - not trillions times trillions of other individual microbe genomes.)

The net result is a vast global lending library of survival ideas, with the key concept that every single microbe is both a borrower and an author : "With help from all, there is hope for all".

"What's the Gen ?"

I have a weakness for WWII ER (enlisted ranks) slang and one of the best was the constant question at a time when rumours rather than hard facts dominated life.

ERs from all services generally greeted each other not with "how you doing?" but rather with an urgent "what's the Gen?".

North Americans today in peacetime might re-phrase it as "what's the scoop?", "what's the score?" or "what's the buzz?".

'Gen' was short for information that might be vital for survival, whether merely surviving the chickenshit of daily military life at the rear bases or surviving bad assignments out on the frontlines.

While we humans sometimes pass valuable "Gen" from person to person, microbes have always passed valuable "Genes" from one to another.

Over almost four billion years, microbes have excelled at producing endless numbers of seemingly 'unfit' and useless gene mutations and at allowing microbes with these oddball genes to survive and reproduce - albeit often at less than optimal population levels.

These genes, like all microbe genes, are routinely released into the environment, for all other microbes to potentially take up with HGT.

Most of the time, there is no point to either the mutated new genes or to their takeup by microbe species genetically far away from the species and strain that first produced them.

Antibiotic resistance is merely the best known example of HGT

But when a new crisis suddenly emerges anywhere in the world - say a new deadly antibiotic produced for the benefit of humanity - in only a handful of years all microbe populations around the world have taken up and then 'expressed' a hitherto obscure (but ancient) gene that offers sturdy resistance to this human antibiotic.

But the weird useless/unfit genes can vary all over the map - why bother with a gene that allows microbes to go into a suspended state of existence when the environment freezes over for thousands of years ?

But that turns out to be very useful when the Earth has become a frozen solid iceball, almost overnight, several times in its history.

And so on and so - no environmental crisis in four billion years (and there has been some real hellish ones) has yet succeeded in wiping the microbes out.

By contrast, evolutionary history suggests that big creatures, practising 'the genetics of exclusion', have had no luck surviving even a small environmental crisis.

We aren't going to survive the latest environmental crisis, not unless we give up the dogwhistle scientific politics of first giving everyone offering to help a blood test to find out if they are WASP enough to be taken seriously.

We need a global coalition of all possible talents, need to make the biggest of all possible Big tents, to get us through this crisis.

This blog is all about creating a human equivalent to microbial HGT...

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*Dr Almon thought HGT might account for sudden variations in the nitrogen fixing abilities of bacteria and since almost all life would cease without these efforts, she thought it was well worth looking into.

As a blogger who loves his grub, I fully agree .

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The days when we can afford to let the WASP males, perhaps 1% of the world's population, rule (and ruin) this planet are over.

The crisis we face is such way too big, way to existential.

And the WASPs are fading fast - it sometime seems easier to get two Pandas to breed than to get two WASPs to breed.

Instead  of relying exclusively upon their fading numbers, we need the biggest possible of Big Tents, a coalition of 'all the possible talents', 'all hands on deck', if we are to come up with the creative solutions we so desperately need.

What we don't need is blood tests at every frontier guard post to determine if a person is "Pure Laine" enough, Aryan enough, WASP enough, before being allowed in to make their case.

Good ideas that will let humanity survive for a few more thousand years can emerge just as well from under niqabs as those that leisurely filter out from the gated communities and exclusive country clubs.

Nobel to NS-born Dal grad

It is fair to say that Canadian-born scientists have had fewer than expected Nobel Prizes in physics - only two.

Both, interestingly enough, were awarded to scientists born in tiny Nova Scotia.


The latest Nova Scotian Nobel winner, Arthur B MacDonald, was born in Sydney and got his B.Sc and M.Sc at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

Dalhousie, which will be marking two hundred years of existence in 2018, is certain to prominently mention MacDonald's Nobel prize as among its achievements over the centuries.

Hopefully, it will also mention the Manhattan-based project of another Dalhousie graduate, Martin Henry Dawson, in its celebrations.

Dawson's pioneering research in revealing the unexpectedly sophisticated abilities of supposedly stupid 'unfit' microbes (HGT,Quorum Sensing etc) and his pioneering efforts to research treatments for the then much neglected chronically ill 'unfit' came together in this wartime project.

Dawson hoped to see wartime penicillin provided-for-all, even for the 'unfit', much against the wishes of the Allied scientific and political hierarchy to only use it for the 'fit'.

And he planned to do so by using 'unfit' microbes rather than 'fit' humans to make it, again very much against the wishes of the Allied hierarchy.

Dawson was dying himself all through this period from a fatal and chronic disease and was pushing his project basically all alone.

Metaphorically turning an ocean liner around, on a dime, is never easy - and the ocean liner that was the Allied war effort in WWII was probably the biggest ocean line of all time.

But this stubborn and brilliant scientist did just that : by 1944, the Allied high command was dancing to his tune when it came to both the production and distribution of wartime penicillin.

His combination of scientific smarts and high moral intent represented, I believe, the best of what Dalhousie traditionally hoped to instil into its graduates...

Other Manhattan Project is *still* not finished

In late 1943, many people all over the Allied world rightly got very furious when they realized that the new hope that lifesaving penicillin represented was only going to unfaithful husbands and boyfriends who had got a dose of the clap overseas.

Hope without Frontiers

For Dr Henry Dawson's Manhattan-based 'penicillin-for-all' Project which began in the Fall of 1940 actually hoped to do two 'good things', first do something good for all of the small of the world and secondly, to do good by also inviting in all the small of the world to help make it happen.

All this really to make a much larger point to the Allied leadership.

That point was that a military-only approach to defeating the Axis wasn't likely to work, if the Allied coalition remained as small as it was in 1940 and remained as non committal as it was in putting its back into it.

In addition then, the Axis needed to be combatted, the Allies rallied and the Neutrals brought on side by also fighting on the moral front.

And here the world was quite rightly cynical that all of Winston Churchill's high sounding radio rhetoric and all the paper behind FDR's Atlantic Charter was really just 100% NATO : no action, talk only. 

But a "Big Tent" approach, one that honestly sought to invite in all the small and the weak in the world into the Allied effort, as helpers and as people to be helped, would remove that impression.

Penicillin diplomacy, the flying of penicillin around the world to save lives, regardless of their race, gender or social status, would be the quickest (and frankly, the cheapest) way to make that claim credible.

Dawson's unwavering conviction came from his belief that his scientific results was superior to that of the current "pop science" consensus.

That consensus basically held to a view, however cloaked in soft sawder and velvet, of the 'survival of the fit', that might was always right, bigger was always better, God always on the side of the Big Battalions.

This consensus gave anyone of empathy and conscience the resigned sense that, regrettably, the small were Nature's inevitable losers and couldn't be saved even with the best will in the world.

Dawson felt he had a new explanation (what we today call HGT) as to why the small (microbes) were still around two billion years later while the mighty (dinosaurs, for example) were but a passing flash in Nature's pan.

Basically HGT, to put it into human terms, was as if the microbes opened up the biggest of Big Tents in times of crisis, rather than running blood tests on the few they trusted to fight the fight (the human and Allied/Axis approach).

HGT allowed genes traditionally viewed as 'useless' and unused by human researchers, say the ones to allow microbes to resist an antibiotic, to spread very rapidly among all the various and very different microbes species - horizontally.

As result no microbe species is at all pure, all are totally mixed hybrids - and judging by two billion years of survival, all the better for it !

(I might add that the extended penicillin family genes also spread, via HGT, from bacteria to bacteria and then into the fungus family as well.)

Penicillin without borders

Think of HGT as spreading hope throughout the entire microbe world, regardless of borders or frontiers.

It might just be the meme we need to adopt today if the Earth and humanity is to survive human created ecological disaster....

Dawson's 'Penicillin without Frontiers'

If Vannevar Bush and Winston Churchill had had their way, penicillin would have become a secret and exclusive weapon of war, just as DDT and atomic energy became during WWII.

But penicillin escaped this fate, thanks to Dr Martin Henry Dawson's "Big Tent"  Manhattan Project.

Dawson thought that natural penicillin - cheap abundant "PD" penicillin - should be made available to all in the world in need of its lifesaving properties.

Particularly during a total war against a evil Axis.

As a concrete example of how the Allies really were different from Hitler - and not just differing only in their high-sounding (but ultimately hollow) rhetoric.

Doctors without Frontiers didn't emerge formally for twenty five years after Dawson's premature death, but if he had lived, he would have cheered its birth to the rafters....

"Dead nations never rise again" ?

When Emma Lazarus read Longfellow's otherwise moving poem about the old Jewish cemetery in Newport, Rhone Island, she hated the concluding line that - with Social Darwinistic finality - flatly stated that dead nations (ie Zion) never rise again.

Emma promptly wrote a poem on the same Newport Jewish cemetery that said, au contraire, America was the new Zion.

I like to think that Dr Henry Dawson caught a little of Emma's determined spirit in his own later Manhattan Project when he told his critics that his (frequently Jewish*) SBEs were 'swimming, not drowning'.....

*By surname, I'm convinced that four of the six SBE patients of his for which we have names, were Jewish...

A Bomb's foreigners behind bared wire

Allied America was not terribly different from Axis Germany when it came to employing hands and brains from dozens of foreign lands, often behind barbed wire fences, to do the heavy lifting for a super weapon they then had the chutzpah to claim as fully their own.

The atomic bomb project represented one vision of the future of world, one where the many labour so the few can benefit : think of it as country club Manhattan.

Big Tent Manhattan

Dr Henry Dawson also invited the small and the many in to labour on his Manhattan project as well.

But in this case, he worked to ensure that the benefits of that project (natural lifesaving penicillin) went as well to the small and the many, not just to the few that the Allies had originally intended it for.

His vision was of a world consisting of 'coalition of all possible talents' working to benefit all : think of it as Big Tent Manhattan.

So did Janus Manhattan's 1945 beacon shine dividedly forth to a tired and huddled world.

What, in the end, was that beacon to reveal : a vision of a Big Tent for all, be they powerless or powerful ----- or a vision of an exclusive country club, just the powerful ?

ConBloc's Fourth Wave Feminism

Bloc & Cons' older, less educated, rural, conservative, white men oppose niqab because (wait for it !) :  'it oppresses women' !

Not because their deepest nightmare is the thought the darkie immigrants might someday re-populate the lands their aryan ancestors had wrestled away from its darkie aboriginals a century earlier, in a sort of a 'Revenge of the Melanin'.

Rather familiar to anyone writing about the opponents of Dr Martin Henry Dawson, this particular brand of hypocrisy.

As in the Fall of 1940, when American medical Isolationists used the excuse that they were preparing for the possibility of intervening to help the small people of Europe (albeit many years too late), as an excuse to stop intervening to deal with the health issues of the small people of America...

NYC 2016 is hardly NYC 1926

I'd never go on a walk or a run just for the sake of running and walking, but I will walk anywhere in any weather, if walking gets me to something I want to go to.

(I am also very cheap and hate to pay for taxis and its almost the same when it comes to spending money on our  quite cheap local transit service.)

So I didn't take any special trips to Pictou, Truro, Montreal,Vancouver, Detroit, the UK, New Jersey and New York City, etc, to research the life and times of Martin Henry Dawson.

Oh yes, I have been to almost all the places of great significance in Dr Dawson's short life, but only in passing, while attending to other affairs.

But if my brother hadn't got serious ill, I doubt I would have ever travelled to NYC, en route to his home in Belfast Northern Ireland, for example.

I guess I don't want to get into the bad journalistic habit of over-selling the claim that viewing the exteriors of the buildings of 2016 Truro will tell you a great deal about the interior lives of the residents of 1896 Truro...

Dawson asked why move to WWII not stopped

In the 1930s, Germany and Japan had big appetites and the means to war, at least upon smaller others near-by, to satisfy them.

Italy merely had a big appetite.

This we are all taught in school --- 'the causes of WWII'.

But is this a truly complete explanation for all of WWII - above all for its extraordinary long length and the almost surprising defeat of the victorious Axis ?

If 'the-rest-of-the-world-combined' had been seriously willing to war with 1930s Japan, Italy and Germany to stop their aggression, even 1940s Japan, Italy and Germany, the Axis would have been quickly defeated.

The Axis simply had far too little manpower and far too little strategic resources , even far too little capital resources such as existing factories, science labs, locomotives and merchant vessels - let alone enough tanks, planes and battleships.

What these three nations did have, along with their fellow travellers around the world, was boundless will power and self confidence produced by the conviction that Science and Nature was on the side of their aggression.

That ------ and the fact that their very large (but also very reluctant) opponents basically agreed with them on the science of the matter.

Martin Henry Dawson's 'other Manhattan Project' had nothing really new to say as to why WWII was started.

But by successfully challenging the science that united Allied and Axis, it had plenty to say as to why it wasn't stopped ....

Dawson's Smalls

A small team of just four, working with small penicillium fungoid growths helpers, all to heal some small patients, working class SBE youths, the very "4Fs of the 4Fs".

Dr Henry Dawson seemed to have kept his team deliberately small, not just to maximize his freedom from the people and institutions who wanted to financially shut him down, but also to make a point of the continuing abilities of small science and small science teams to still do major work.

Again, he deliberately chose to rub the fur of Allied medical science the wrong way when he decided to break a worldwide medical taboo, and after only all five weeks into his project, inject the raw penicillin made from the dismissed-as-too-primitive penicillium mold into his patients' blood stream.

This, rather than wait years or decades for Big Pharma and Big Medicine to painstakingly and slowly bring mass clinically tested synthetic penicillin to market.

Finally of course, Dawson seemed to doom his 'penicillin project' to years of failure by picking by far the hardest disease on the books to try and cure with the limited amounts he could make or obtain.

But of course his project was never about penicillin and he deliberately picked the SBEs because they were 'the least of these' on everyone else's medical priority list, if a shooting war broke out.

Dawson's small team picked the small penicillium mold and the small SBEs out of the dustbin of history, where they had been both dismissively tossed, and then made out of them something truly wondrous and globe-changing to behold....

Dawson did it all for 'the little ones'

Henry Dawson's other Manhattan Project wasn't really to advance the cause of penicillin, to aid the Allied military effort or even to save the SBEs : rather he did it all for 'the little ones', to persuade Humanity to build a "Big Tent" that included everyone.

For with rare exceptions (perhaps the early days of the Communist revolutions in some countries) a Big Tent doesn't need to invite the big and the powerful inside - for they are already there.

Instead a Big Tent always newly invites in the small, the weak, those traditionally judged unworthy and unfit.

Their ideas, emotions, fears, feelings, efforts are now considered to be as worthy as those of any other --- and worthy to be judged for their suitability to the collective task at hand.

Dawson felt his earlier scientific studies had revealed that a Big Tent approach (aka a tolerance for 'unfit' mutations and a global HGT system) had helped keep the microbes alive for four billion years.

Now it might just do the same for humanity : help keep human civilization alive for another four thousand years, if only given a chance to prove itself.

From tiny beginnings, his Big Tent Penicillin, produced by an unlikely 'coalition of all the talents' and given freely to all in need in a war-torn world, has since indirectly benefited ten billion of us (and counting) since 1940.

All through a form of herd immunity to formerly endemic deadly infectious diseases.

In doing so, I think he has successfully scaled up (and proven up) that this Big Tent concept also works for humanity !

Survival of the Fit over the Unfit ?

Particularly after the whirlwind defeat of the effete French by the German Blitzkrieg in May-June 1940, it seemed obvious to most middle class people in the world that the fit 1As were bound to win , every time, over the unfit 4Fs.

Survival of the fit over the unfit : bigger is better/might is right : Q.E.D.

A Fact of Nature : the classic 'Appeal to Nature'.

But Dr Martin Henry Dawson strongly and fundamentally disagreed with this particular Appeal to Nature, or at the very least, he wished to make another and stronger scientific appeal to the Facts of Nature.

For he felt he had found another (and statistically much better) method for assuring long term survival, as revealed by his study of Nature.

Young Dawson had made his scientific mark, initially, by studying the pneumococcus "R"s.

Even though these "R" type was considered by most others to be unworthy of serious scientific study.

They were the deviants, the unfits, the 4Fs, the non-virulent and non-virile members, of what even human scientists had to admit were Life's most successful survivors, the microbes.

Exit the big and mighty (and very fit) dinosaurs

For almost four billion years, the microbes had survived all that the Cosmos and Nature had thrown at them and lived to see another day while the big creatures, like the dinosaurs, went extinct at the first downturn.

Dawson's study found that almost four billion years of existence had produced no evolutionary pressures to eliminate the 'unfit' among the present day populations of microbes that he had studied.

This despite Social Darwinist claims to see evidence of the same in the mere four thousand year recorded history of human civilization.

Evolutionary pressures of survival, the Social Darwinists claimed, would ensure that humanity's portfolio of genes would be gradually drained and reduced, down to a 'small tent' of just to the most fit 1A types.

But Dawson no doubt had already noted to himself that the microbes had been around a million times longer than human civilizations - surely the slowly grinding wheels of even Darwin's ultra leisurely concept of evolutionary change must have produced something by now.

Because his microbes seemed quite tolerant of what human scientists called the 'unfit' among them.

Indeed Dawson found that the 'fit' and 'unfit' among the pneumococcus microbes were free to be both patrons and authors in the microbes' world wide lending library of potentially useful genes.

In this "Big Tent" concept for a global library, any microbe - whether judged 'fit' or 'unfit' by human scientists, could freely offer up bits of DNA with potentially useful genes for a new crisis situation and any other microbe could take it up and in turn pass it on to another microbe and so on, quickly circling the world.

The miracle of HGT

This use of the unique-to-the-microbe HGT system (horizontal gene transfer), by the way, is how resistance to a brand new antibiotic can spread to the remotest corners of the world in a few years.

It is one of the key ways that microbes have survived for four billion years.

Most microbes would be considered in 1940 to be among the "lower" forms of life because they almost never reproduced sexually - that is by taking bits from the genome of both mom and dad.

Creatures unable to do that were considered to be incredibly primitive.

But Dawson showed that if the microbes could think, they might feel that sexual beings were truly incredibly primitive - for why stop at sharing the genes of just mom and dad when you could share the genes of a trillion times a trillion times a trillion of other microbes ?

In human equivalent terms, when microbes were under attack by a powerful new antibiotic, as powerful as Hitler + Stalin + Mussolini + Tojo combined, they made the biggest possible Big Tent of all the talents, be they female or male microbes, black, red or yellow microbes, fit or unfit.

All hands on deck, without regard to limiting racism or prejudice !

Big Tent Penicillin

Dawson thought the Allied cause should not just rhetorically claim to do the same but actually and concretely do the same.

Not just for the traditional moral reasons, but because he had scientifically demonstrated that it had a proven record of success.

But in fact Dawson's earlier studies had largely been ignored.

This time though, he would combine microbe 4Fs ( in this case ,the lower fungi penicillium) with human 4Fs (the working class SBE patients), all to show just what a "Big Tent" approach could do in a time of grave human crisis...

'We're doing this all for the little ones'

World powers (or parents) who too stridently claim they're doing it all 'for the little ones' invariably are not.

One case in point, Great Britain and her Allies.

Britain never actually conducted its war in 1914-1918 - or the peace process in 1919 - with a prime objective the protecting of the rights of 'poor little Belgium'.

Ditto for Belgium, and a dozen other small nations, in 1939-1945 and afterwards.

Henry Dawson bought into the propaganda claim in 1914-1918 --- but not again in 1940.

His response was to set "The other Manhattan Project" in motion....

Natural 'Pen' proof small science beautiful

If small science is beautiful and bountiful then no smaller (or better) example exists then the tiny penicillium factories that produced penicillin when the biggest factories of Man could not

In the Fall of 1940, Dr Henry Dawson set out to embarrass the Allies to actually do something concrete to match their high sounding (but actually empty) Atlantic Charter style rhetoric about protecting the rights of the small in the war against Big Evil.

So he deliberately recruited some very small (and very overlooked) individuals into his "Big Tent Coalition of All the Talents" that came to be the other Manhattan Project.
Dawson specifically went out of his way to go to the bottom, not the top, of the hospital patient pecking order when he asked some young Black and Jewish patients dying of SBE if they wished to volunteer to form his pioneering clinical trial of the world's first systemic antibiotic.

Systemic but not synthetic antibiotic.

For on October 16th 1940, he deliberately chose to snub received scientific opinion and instead inject natural raw penicillin into this pair of nobodies.

Penicillin that was also made by nobodies : some of the smallest, most despised but also most sophisticated chemical scientists in the world : individual penicillium 'fungoid growth' cells.

Each one a complete chemical plant but each also so tiny that they are best seen with electron microscopes.

Millions and ultimately billions of us in the biggest, richest and most sophisticated civilizations have benefitted greatly ever since from these efforts of the small individuals who were so despised and overlooked by the Big back then.

I can't help but feel that that was the ironic point intended by Dr Dawson...

"4Fs, Slime and a Cracked Pot"

Re-reading Hotchkiss and Dubos's various 1940 era papers on their quick "small science" success at extracting, crystallizing and analyzing high yields of gramicidin, an early (unfortunately deadly) antibiotic exuded by microbes, one is struck by the apparent ease of the whole project.

By contrast, penicillin, another antibiotic exuded by another microbe, was extremely difficult to successfully handle - in every single aspect of it --- from growing the microbe to the ultimate failure to commercially synthesize penicillin itself.

This despite a multi-nation effort that eventually rivalled the Manhattan atomic Project for "Big Science" funding and skilled manpower levels.

But biochemist Dr Karl Meyer was not to know this in September 1940 when he recruited his co-worker, bacteriologist Dr Martin Henry Dawson, to "just" grow a little bit of the fungus microbe, for a "little while".

A seemingly small request, for a short period of time, that cost Dawson his life but also ended up changing our entire world, for the better, forever.

Dawson then only needed to test tiny amounts of its raw penicillin (and the breakdown products and synthesis attempts from Dr Meyer) for their anti-bacterial effects on a few bacteria isolated upon small microscope slides.

A Piece of Cake, I promise !

Like all other would be penicillin synthesizers, Meyer had absolutely no plans to develop a simultaneous clinical program of treating patients with his naturally grown penicillin.

Not only would that would require producing vastly bigger amounts of penicillin and delivered on a reliable timetable, it would also absorb scarce penicillin that he really needed to destroy, as part of his destructive analysis process.

Meyer had a long and close relationship with Schering, a big (chemically sophisticated) drug company, and if he had any success at all in penicillin synthesis, they would quickly take over the process.

Schering would then mass synthesis the drug from off the shelf standard chemical reagents, in quantities at least large enough for a large collective clinical effort to test it out on first animals and then various human patients suffering different diseases.

I hope the impression I have given you of Meyer's initial project was how small it was and how leisurely it could proceed.

This is perhaps the total opposite to the set of conditions that Dawson's fellow Canadian Dr Banting imposed upon himself.

Banting's small team are busy trying to learn how to extract large amounts of fairly pure (natural) insulin consistently, while scores of dying children awaited that insulin in the hospital next door as the eyes of the entire world are rapt upon their heroic efforts.

No pressure !

I have written many times before how Dawson decided to aid the war effort not by attacking the bully Hitler but rather to attack Allied bystander hypocrisy, in the difference between the Allies' public war aims of helping the small and their actual inactions (or worse) on that front.

So he decided, in late September, to irk the Allied medical authorities the most offensive way he could think of, by deliberating inviting two of the Allied cultures' most worthless beings into his wartime Big Tent of all possible talents.

Patients with invariably fatal SBE had already been written off as "life unworthy of scarce wartime medicine" and were 'the 4Fs of the 4Fs' on the bottom scale of wartime medical priority.

That the first two patients invited to introduce the new Age of Antibiotic were a working class Black and a Jew added an extra frisson to his lateral move.

Next, he decided to buck a twelve year long world wide medical taboo against injecting fungoid growth metabolical waste (aka natural penicillin) directly into the temple of the human blood stream.

The medical consensus was that it was better to let patients die than inject patients with this highly effective and totally non-toxic lifesaver, before 'the chemists' synthesized it as totally artificial and totally pure, to paraphrase Alexander Fleming.

Along with all the doctors, many others among the educated, among them A Hitler and HP Lovecraft, shared this characteristically Modern irrational fear of fungoid growths.

Dawson would attempt to save the lives of the worthless '4Fs of the 4Fs' with the yellow poop/pee of the worthless fungoid slime !

Immediately, Dawson was into 'Doing a Banting', hijacking Meyer's tiny leisurely project, but doing a worse Banting, if that could be possible.

It was.

Few places feared fungus molds more than 1940s hospitals, home to the excessively house proud nursing fraternity, in an age when their excessive cleanliness was almost the only defence against hospital-spread infection.

Dawson would have to grow his penicillium in a very busy hospital itself, unlike Hotchkiss or Banting and resistance to his efforts from his bosses could be expected to be fierce.

Particularly as he would be growing 700 two litre flasks of the stuff on a regular two week turn cycle !

That amount, 50 US gallons of extraction liquid every two weeks, was the amount engineers mean when they talk about industrial 'pilot plant' levels.

This would have been a big undertaking for any drug company in 1940, let alone for a tiny team of four part time staffers, working in a hostile hospital, trying to keep up with their busy fulltime day jobs.

This was because the yield of penicillin, in 1940, from penicillium was incredibly low - one part in a million extracted as final 'medicine' output from one million parts of 'food' input.

And even in treating ordinary patients, penicillin presented unique difficulties that made its clinical use require larger than expected amounts of this miracle drug.

This despite the fact that tiny amounts of penicillin were highly effective bacteria killers - that is worked in tiny amounts was one of the many reasons why penicillin was so extraordinarily non toxic in the human body.

Just as well - because another reason it was so non-toxic was that it didn't get to hang about inside us - the kidneys excreted it all in a very rapid manner - as fast as in one half hour.

Frequent new injections were needed to maintain it at an effective germ killing level in the blood serum.

Wait !

it gets worse, much much worse.

SBE was - and is - considered the Mount Everest of all infectious diseases for any number of reasons.

This disease of the vital and very delicate heart valves is one that usually returns again and again, each time further weakening the valve while also providing a better place (a sturdy biofilm then know as vegetations) for the infectious bacteria to hide and survive drug attacks, until the patient dies.

But the real difficulty is the fact that the valves are literally a case of "blood, blood everywhere but not a drop to drink" - though all of the blood inside us flows through them repeatedly, ironically they themselves are basically not supplied with any tiny blood capillaries and hence no blood.

Drugs that arrive via the traditional capillary route trickle in slowly and leave slowly, making a little drug go a long way.

Instead the drug that could impact heart valves had to fill the entire blood system at a clinically effective level and yet only brush by the valves for a fraction of a second as the blood supply is at its very fastest being pumped through the valves.

Dawson's history-making first ever injections of an antibiotic into a patient, technically were fully internal systemic in nature but then acted rather like an internal antiseptic being dabbed on the outside of a cut !

The only good news was that penicillin readily killed the particular bacteria of SBE infections and because it was so non-toxic, the entire body could be safely filled with the drug to kill an infection in only a tiny part of the body.

In addition, Dawson noted that the drug seemed readily diffusible - meaning it could better penetrate deep into the SBE vegetations than most other drugs.

The problem for the highly moral upright Dawson, was that once he committed to trying to save SBEs when they came forth in the new admissions mix to the single ward he effectively controlled, he would have to keep producing the penicillin until the current patient died or was cured.

And then the same for the next SBE patient and so on.

Until penicillin was (a) mass produced and (b) authorized to be given to the written-off SBEs.

This didn't happen for four more years.

Dawson created for himself a moral and physical treadmill he couldn't climb off of.

The initial stress quickly gave him a case of MG, a dangerous auto immune disease, and the continuing stress finally made it fatal four years later.

No wonder that most in the medical world considered him a crackpot.

But I consider him a cracked pot ---- in the full biblical sense of that term....

Rachel Harper : Niqab in Riyadh but in not QC ?

Was Harper willing to pimp out Rachel in Niqab in Riyadh, to hustle arms deal for General Dynamics , while refusing to let her wear Niqab in Quebec City ?

The Economist Magazine says Canada has been revealed to the world as exhibiting an unexpected mean streak in the current election.

This election has indeed been unusual but not because Canada has a new mean streak.

During WWII, Canada, the country of birth of my biographic subject Dr Martin Henry Dawson, had a secret internal plan than "No (Jews) Is Too Many" --- while publicly proclaiming itself as the Peaceable Kingdom.

Infrequently admitted by Canada-boosters, the country ended up with the worst record in the entire world when it came to accepting Jews fleeing the Holocaust.

What is really new is that Canadians are suddenly reversing this hundred and fifty year old policy and being mean in public.

Given that traditionally Canadians have been secretly mean to outsiders all the while being publicly hypocritically proud of their exalted human rights record, Canadians being forthrightly mean in public might even be seen as a moral step forward !

The elevation of a forthright Australian gun-for-hire named Lynton Crosby to run the Canadian Conservative Party's electoral campaign begins then to make sense.

Crosby has orders to re-elect PM Stephen Harper by creating some of his infamous 'dog whistle' wedge issues: in this election, in this country, by suddenly turning the election ballot question onto the mostly ignored but very divisive minor issue over whether women should be allowed to wear Niqabs at government offices.

Harper has always said he'd never put the almighty dollar above defending human rights when it comes to personally hustling massive Canadian weapon sales abroad.

Campaigning in Quebec City, Harper insists he is totally opposed to forcing women to wear Niqabs - a form of face covering most often seen in ultra traditional Moslem countries like Saudi Arabia, where this is hardly the Saudis' worst violation of individual rights - the country executes almost as many people each year as North Korea, China or even America.

Daughters for Dollars

But Harper would hardly be the first world leader (or monarch !) who has been willing to meet the Saudis' strict social customs more than half way, at least while in Riyadh and at least long enough to successfully hustle a few billion more dollars in arms contracts.

I believe Stephen Leacock's once highly popular "Arcadian Adventures among the Idle Rich" may hold the key to the Canadian character.

For Dr Dawson was an young man when this searing attack on Canadian hypocrisy by a professor at his university came out.

Perhaps partially as the result of this famous book, Dawson, born into an atmosphere of traditional Canadian hypocrisy but raised with a pronounced moral conscience, was always particularly sensitive to the contrast between high blown public sentiments and low blown private government inactions.

For example, the very public Atlantic Charter versus the very private reality that all Allied governments sharply restricted volunteer colored recruitment in the Allied invasion armies, even if it meant Hitler had a military advantage as a result.

Combatting (Allied) bystander hypocrisy rather than bully (Axis) meanness was what Dawson chose to focus on in 1940 -1945.

In 1984-1993, I chose to do exactly the same here in Nova Scotia when I found people laughing about an open secret, a powerful politician's serial sex crimes, yet were unwilling to stop him, so more young girls wouldn't assaulted.

Sexual assaults and then the brutal murders of hundreds of women, aboriginal women in particular, is the issue Canada and PM Harper should really be discussing in this election - not a handful of women choosing, of their own free will, to wear niqabs, at a public ceremony in a supposedly free country.....