battling penicillins : ancient & modern / battling medicines : social & warlike

Whom would make wartime penicillin ?

Henry Dawson's tiny ancient "natural" fungi factories with a few hundred million of years of experience under their belt ?

Or Howard Florey's big clumsy lumbering "synthetic" chemists' factories, built along lines more familiar to Heath Robinson or Rube Goldberg fans than to fans of the ever graceful Nijinski ?

To whom would wartime penicillin go to ?

Just to lightly injured front line Allied troops, but only after D-Day, with penicillin used for a secret weapon of war, as Florey and the American OSRD planned ?

Or to everyone in a war-shattered world who was dying for lack of it, as Dawson wanted ? Penicillin to be used both as a medical lifesaver and as tardy but tangible proof of the long claimed moral difference between Allies and Axis ?

January 1943 : that penicillin cured the incurable SBE is a military secret, but penicillin's chemical formula is not !

The American scientific journal "The Journal of Bacteriology" is a top journal in its field, read - at least in peacetime - by workers in that field the world over.

Yet in January 1943, it is revealing that one of the earliest and most persistent researchers as to the chemical structure of penicillin , Karl Meyer, is still free to publish his informed opinion on the formula for penicillin : C14H19NO6 or C14H17NO5 + H2O.

His co-author, clinician Henry Dawson, by way of contrast, is NOT free to reveal that he has achieved a truly spectacular medical event : curing the incurable, invariably fatal SBE with penicillin , still the acid test of all infectious diseases.

His first penicillin success with this disease, a young woman known to us only as Miss HH , had just gone home cured - in time for Christmas - just days before Dawson team member Gladys Hobby was due to deliver this paper in Columbus Ohio in late December 1942.

Few members of the January 1943 public, falling by chance upon this journal were likely to care about the chemical formula of a largely unknown new drug - but curing SBE - Oh My, oh my !

Now that was a good news story, with legs.

The OSRD hated good news not of their own making ...

Which is precisely why it was banned  ---- and the chemical formula was not.

The very last way the OSRD wanted the public to first hear about penicillin a full year and a half before D-Day, was in the context of a widely publicized civilian miracle cure.

Dropping the miracle-work of D-Day penicillin on a surprised German Army medical corps was not going to work, if the Germans had first heard rumours of miracle cures with penicillin coming from every local American newspaper some two years earlier and had time to grow their own penicillin.

If the price for Dawson continuing to receive penicillin, once his hitherto semi-independent supplier Pfizer joined the OSRD cartel in the Fall of 1942, was to became a OSRD "principal investigator" (aka COC "accredited investigator") then he had to take an extraordinary oath not to reveal anything to anyone, without full OSRD approval.

So nothing public on the success penicillin was having in pulling bodies back from the grave : but if the Germans wished to make penicillin ; well then here is the formula.......

Howard Florey sole hero of 1944 American national radio play on Penicillin

Here, Howard Florey rules !

Du Pont's Cavalcade of America  on NBC was a very well financed American national radio and later tv show, popular before and after WWII (1935-1957), that as Marcel Lafollette points out , often featured heroes from medicine and science.

Not surprising then that the series featured an half hour show on "The Story of Penicillin" as soon as the censors would let it : which interestingly enough was April 24th 1944  --- starring Howard Florey as the one-and-only who brought us the miracle of penicillin !

(CALV 440424 380 The Story of Penicillin : episode 380, April 24 1944 is very easy to stream or download from the internet.)

Which is to say this half hour national show aired at a time when the OSRD-AMA-NAS triad was still successfully holding back all press interest in penicillin the miracle (by claiming the triad had legal censorship powers that it actually didn't possess.)

Could it be that even the powerful OSRD had to bow before the enough more powerful chemical giant, in part because it was a prime contractor of the A-Bomb ?

But what I  find so interesting about this show - beyond the fact that I do not recall reading about it from any penicillin historian's writing - is that it clearly announces at its onset that its one and only star is "Howard Florey".

Was the show an attempt to discredit Pfizer's sudden success  with non-chemically produced penicillin ?

(Because of all the months of the six years of war, April 1944 was the one I'd been most inclined to credit Pfizer's John L Smith as the man who finally brought us penicillin.)

Because that months of all months was the very first month that billions of units of the hitherto invisible miracle suddenly started pouring out of his rapidly-improvised Marcy Avenue ice plant cum biological penicillin brewery.)

Perhaps the triad felt a need to suddenly burnish the reputation of the big loser in the race to provide penicillin for D-Day :  that loser being synthetic penicillin and Florey's synthetic efforts at Oxford University.

 And believe me, having listened to as much of this half hour show as I could stand, Florey is indeed portrayed as the one and only star of this miracle of medicine.

Florey has an entire army of fans among present-day historians claiming he was elbowed out the fame-feeding-trove by that big mean bully Alec Fleming.

I have always found this hard to stomach.

Florey, in fact, was seemingly born with at least four sharp elbows of his own.

He also had a strong reputation, as a scientist, of being as ready to use his fists to win scientific arguments as  Fred Banting or Vannevar Bush ever did.

I wonder if his academic defenders will still howl " he wuz robbed" after listening to this old radio show ?