Is Super-Hero violence the only way to "do good" ?

If you are a parent , grandparent or loving care-giver, you can't help but worry about the moral values the entertainment media is trying to foster upon our very young : the claim that one has to be big and powerful and violent , a comic book styled Super Hero , to do good.

"Un-Super heroes" is an attempt to offer an alternative vision : to tell a true story from 1940s Gotham when agape love , not super hero violence, brought about as much good as this world has ever seen.

The original Penicillin - Penicillin G - remains naturally grown and hence un-patentable.

Because of that , it is that rarest of drugs - cheap, abundant , safe and highly effective and so it enabled the world to reduce those pools of long endemic deadly bacterial infections among the world's poorest and most powerless.

It greatly - and directly - benefitted the poor and weak of course.

But then , in a form of Herd Immunity , it also greatly benefitted all the rest of the world - indirectly - by cutting off the flow of deadly strains of common bacteria.

Diseases like Rheumatic Fever, long the leading cause of school age deaths (Polio killed comparatively few , by contrast) quickly became a word in a dusty history book , rather than the cause of your grandchild's death.

Ten billion of us - so far - have better healthier lives as a result of  a series of miraculous events begun in Gotham City on October 16th 1940.

Dr Martin 'Henry' Dawson - himself dying from a terminal illness - gathered around him a tiny team of unfits and misfits.

That little team was dedicated to combatting the Allied consensus that natural penicillin was unfit to be used as a mainstream medicine - and that some unfit patients were to be Code Slowed to death , to better aid the war effort against Hitler.

Dr Dawson argued we can never really hope to beat Hitler by racing him to the moral bottom - killing off the unfit to aid the war effort was already well underway in Germany under the name of Aktion T4.

Our best rebuttal was to publicly demonstrating that we still care for our most weak and powerless --- even under the demands of Total War.

Dawson held off his own failing body and his own government  just long enough to see his vision of abundant natural penicillin-for-all grip the global imagination .

So WWII, despite its terrible scenes of hunger and homelessness, did not see global epidemics like WWI's war-ending Spanish Flu that killed tens of millions.

Now is that epic enough a tale for a child raised to think that only mighty Batman is fit enough to save a world in woe ?

Granddad's penicillin (G) still saving lives - from mushroom poisons, some of the most toxic poisons known !

Seventy five years young and still ticking, penicillin G (WWII penicillin, by the needle penicillin , the first of all the antibiotics) continues to amaze.

For reasons totally totally unknown, it helps saves lives of those who have eaten death cap mushrooms which contain some of the most potent toxins known.

Exactly why and how a anti-bacteria killer from one form of fungi reduces the impact of a RNA killing toxin from another fungus is so unknowable as to boggle the mind.

One might as well expect pumpkin spice to do the job as penicillin G.

Its wonders never cease to amaze ....

How a handful of Gotham unfits rescued the unbroken bronco of modern medicine (un-patentable natural lifesaving penicillin-for-all) and set it free to do good

When your life hangs in the balance because of bacterial infection and all else has failed, hospitals reach for Plan G - a needleful of Penicillin G - 87 years old and still our most potent , safest and yet by far the cheapest lifesaver.

Big Pharma practically giving away its most potent and yet safest lifesaver - that hardly sounds like the Big Pharma you and I know --- and hate !

Penicillin still remains un-patentable - still remains made naturally by tiny bugs in a bottle , not by human chemists in a factory.

It still finds its main use as an internal lifesaver not as an external antiseptic for cuts and scrapes.

And it still is a widely available lifesaver - regardless of skin color or lack of income .

Partly because it is cheap because it is un-patentable so no one firm or nation can control its production  but mostly because making it available for all is a longstanding tradition since the last year of WWII.

But if Alexander Fleming , that Presbyterian-raised Scot from Old Scotland had had his will, none of this good news would have happened.

Thankfully, another Presbyterian-raised Scot , but this time from New Scotland (Henry Dawson), was there to thwart his will ...

Penicillin G : its very low price has given all of us a quasi Herd Immunity against many once endemic infections

I would claim my book a complete success if it only got a single favourable review on Amazon.com - if that review came from Ramzi Yousef himself.

Recall that in 1993, Ramzi became the first to attempt to blow up the World Trade Center, hoping to kill tens of thousands to revenge those killed by the Atomic bombs of the best known wartime Manhattan Project.

I want Ramzi Yousef and others akin to him worldwide to see that like most things in life, Manhattan is Janus-faced.

Yes it has a Gordon Gekko side, but it also has its Emma Lazarus side.

Plutonium 239, with its half life of more than 24,000 years is atomic Manhattan's dubious gift of death that keeps on giving.

But inexpensive natural penicillin ,the wartime gift from the other face of Janus Manhattan, is a gift of life that just keeps on giving.

Beginning in 1940, in a selfless act of Agape, a dying Manhattan doctor, Henry Dawson, sacrificed his own life to try and save the lives of ten others, insisting (against the Allied governments' dictates) that wartime penicillin should be produced and released in quantities enough for ALL humanity.

Since 1940, Martin Henry Dawson's selfless act has indirectly benefited ten billion of us -- all through a form of quasi Herd Immunity against formerly dreaded bacterial infections.

Because of Dawson's moral argument,  penicillin G is today not just our best loved and most effective lifesaver.

It is also are cheapest and this has allowed poor people not normally treated for lack of money to be cured .

This in turn means that the untreated don't act as reserve pools of virulent strains that have kept these dreaded killers endemic or epidemic for millenniums.

Dawson's gift should go on benefiting billions more, in the years ahead.

Ten billion (plus), all freely benefiting from a single act of selflessly helping ten : 'Bread cast upon waters' indeed !

Repaying, with gratitude, Henry Dawson's selfless act of Agape

Thanks to her genes, my mother and her children never met a strep disease we didn't like and if it weren't for Henry Dawson's selfless act of Agape, it is possible that I won't even be here today.

Grateful ?! Of course, I'm bloody grateful !

Grateful enough to be glad to spend tedious years tracking down the missing history of the man who improved our lives and the lives of ten billion others since 1940.

My mother was born in October 1928, the same time Alex Fleming started messing about with penicillin and the same year Gerhard Domagk started on the path that led to the sulfa drugs.

She was about seven or eight, around 1936, when she got GN (glomerular nephritis) after a case of strep throat.

In children her age, this relatively common auto immune reaction of certain people to certain strains of  GAS strep, only damages their kidneys for a few months and recovery appears to be full.

Prompt treatment with sulfa, then very new on the market, would only have helped if given at the time of the strep throat - an event then very unlikely to happen with any child.

But sometimes with GN the damage left behind is permanent and in certain circumstances leads to a chronic form of this kidney disease.

In 1947-1948, my mother was in newly communist Hungary, studying under extremely impoverished circumstances.

She got sick with GN nephritis again (a condition much more serious in adults) and was given sulfa - and got a severe sulfa allergy reaction and so was taken off it.

The Cold War meant Hungary didn't have much penicillin.

As a result, her kidneys and high blood pressure never seemed to have fully recovered and in fact got worse and worse.

Usually as a result of the extra strain put on her kidneys and blood pressure with each new pregnancy (she had seven).

It didn't help she literally had each pregnancy (except for the last two) several thousands of miles away from the last one, each time with different doctors and no back medical records to check.

In the Spring of 1962, she was dying of acute kidney infection and after throwing everything at her, the doctors tried a single course of streptomycin and saved her life .

She was permanently deaf in one ear as a result (a common side effect) but she never ever complained.

Many, many times she told me , "Why complain - that antibiotic saved my life - if I had died your father would have been left with four very young kids and a brand new baby - and him still a grad student."

I didn't then connect her adult disease with her childhood disease because she never told me - only telling of her childhood disease in girl talk with my partner Rebecca and I believe, my sister Margo or Tracy.

My only known childhood encounter with strep was tonsillitis acute enough that my swollen tonsils so affected my voice that I sounded like I was a midget on helium.

But after they were removed, that seemed to have ended me having childhood strep throat instead of ordinary colds, though it is hard to tell for sure.

But my sister Kathi got the once deadly strep disease SF (scarlet fever), a childhood disease that is very highly contagious.

So the authorities came and put a big black Q on a bright yellow back upon our door to indicate we were under legal quarantine and so no one could visit us and we kids had to stay in our yard for weeks.

Kathi got antibiotics at the time but continued to have severe chronic tonsillitis until her teen years.

She has had serious medical problems all her adult life -- they don't seem to be directly related to her love affair with strep bugs -- but there is still a lot we don't know about GAS bacteria.

Next to meet the streps was my brother Bruce. He too had tonsils big and bad enough to make the doctors want to take them out.

But more seriously, one day he suddenly dropped to the carpet in our Victoria BC living room complaining he didn't feel good.

Rushed to a doctor, it was quickly revealed that he had RF (rheumatic fever) because of his persistent heart murmur. Persistent as in he still has it 55 years later.

RF is still deadly today, still potentially fatal, but fortunately rare - at least in in the industrialized world. But until 1960, it was still the leading cause in the industrial world
of school age children having long hospital stays ,dying or facing a lifetime of potentially fatal heart worries.

Yes, RF not Polio!

 Severe Polio was relatively uncommon and inclined to be a middle class suburban disease, while RF traditional hit the urban and rural poor, minorities and immigrants (the so called "Polio of the Poor").

Just guess which disease got by far the bigger press when I was growing up in the 1950s ?

By the time my mother was born and growing up, dying of RF was less common for kids in urban settings, even if poor.

How it did kill them was the fact that the same permanently damaged heart valves that left their mark with their irregular murmur, also became the attractive home for the kind of strep bacteria that form that unattractive green film on unbrushed teeth.

This much different strep from deadly GAS strep was usually harmless.

But it grew as successfully on heart valves (normally impossible for bacteria) as it did on teeth and its little home on the valves would eventually kill all patients, in a great variety of ways, before Henry Dawson got involved.

It was called subacute bacterial endocarditis but not even doctors ever called it that : it was SBE and spoken of in a whisper or a sigh : as in 'invariably fatal SBE'.

SBE usually started killing former RF patients in their late teens and twenties but it could hit babies and the elderly.

RF and SBE packed quite a punch in both the death and terror department.

This is because unusually, both could come back again and again, each time leaving more damage which only made the next attack far more likely.

Because the deadliest strains of RF and SBE came and went intermittently while strep throats were an inevitable fact of life for child and adult, literally no one was potentially free of falling to this combo until they were safely in their forties.

If my mother had gotten severe RF instead of GN, she was statistically likely to get her first, and usually fatal, bout of SBE in her teen years, during WWII.

The Allied medical authorities around the world ignored the fact that Dawson was curing this hitherto invariably fatal disease with penicillin and proclaim that no one, (potentially including my mother) with SBE was to get penicillin and was to be pretend- treated with useless Sulfa doses and left to die (the notorious so called 'Code Slow').

If my mother had had SBE in Canada during WWII and left to die, I won't have even been born.

But she , thank God, didn't get RF or SBE and I was born, only to get her disease GN, was I was 18.

GN for adults is more serious than for children and my abnormal chemical readings, recorded by a brand new hospital machine on paper with a wet ink pen, were impressive indeed.

The technician told my family doctor that some of values recorded were so literally 'off the paper' that the tech had to shut off the machine for fear it would break.

But the kidney disease seemed to have cleared itself by the time I got to hospital six months later --- just as well , as in adults it can lead to renal failure deaths or permanent dialysis.

Only partly my fault for the unusual delay - but of course as a young teenage male I hadn't gone to my doctor until a month after I first got my sore throat, by which time the bacteria was gone but I had so much edema and high blood pressure that I walked like a very old and sick man.)

Characteristically, I was too cheap to consider a taxi and slowly, slowly,slowly walked the mile downhill to my doctor's office --- and back up the hill again afterwards !

Now, unfortunately, in some cases, GN is accompanied by acute haemorrhagic cystitis in a sort of syndrome - and that will be me !

Severe or mild, this bladder condition, if it is permanent, is a life-altering condition.

I will spare you all the embarrassing personal effects, but if you look it up online, I can assure you I have had them all as described here - though fortunately in relatively minor forms.

Now generally me and my family have survived this family tendency to form auto immune responses to GAS strep fairly well - this is mostly down to the fact that the most virulent strains of this bug were knocked back by the fact that unusually cheap penicillin g allowed people normally too poor to receive treatment to get the antibiotic.

So, finally, the reserve pools of virulent GAS found among poor and isolated populations that kept these diseases endemic or epidemic for millenniums ,were wiped out or severely cut down to a minimum.

So when we did get these diseases , we got a less frequent and less virulent strain and we got prompt antibiotics to wipe the diseases out in ourselves.

But this would never have happened without Henry Dawson's moral cry that wartime penicillin must be made available to ALL humanity.

When the general public bought into his radical un-Republican, un-Conservative notion, a vast potential market opened up and as profit-seeking firms flooded in, ways were found to cut the cost of penicillin G from the equivalent of today's Avastin ($100,000 a year) to a price cheaper than water, literally too cheap to meter.

When dealing with a medicine that cures a contagious disease, a cheap drug is also an effective drug - by curing even the poorest and thus wiping out the traditional reserve pools of virulency, this produces a quasi-herd immunity for all the rest of us ---- free !

Henry Dawson gave his life to save only ten from a heartless government, but ten billion have benefited since.

I think there is still a lesson here for all , 75 years on, for all of us involved in Obamacare-like disputes over why provide health care for those who can't pay.

I hope to offer my book for free, or if that is not possible, at least ensure I don't profit from any book sales.

Selfless ? Hardly - I merely intend to give up any book profits - by contrast Henry Dawson "GAVE ALL" ....

World's most effective lifesaver is also the most beloved AND the cheapest

That's not at all like Big Pharma, the world's least beloved industry.

Usually their effective lifesavers cost a big fortune and their ineffective ones merely cost a small fortune.

By contrast, our beloved inexpensive penicillin G has seen wide use among the world's poorest patients and as a result  billions of us have had a 'free ride' :  a quasi-herd immunity to millennium old contagious bacterial infections like Rheumatic Fever.

Diseases today most of us under the age of 50 have never even heard of and most doctors have never seen.

But it almost didn't happen ; we almost lost inexpensive- penicillin-for-all

At the height of WWII, when the only other anti-bacterial agent, the Sulfa drugs, were visibly failing, Big Pharma in Britain and America held off mass production of the only alternative (Penicillin) until they had synthesized it and patented it.

Meanwhile , in the middle of that desperate world war, American and British diplomats sat down to leisurely haggle over how to divide the massive world profits on synthetic penicillin ; visions of post-war sugar plums dancing through their heads.

Now you don't have to be a student of foreign affairs to suspect that America is very, very, very reluctant to sign international treaties --- so this alone suggests how profitable the two superpowers thought patented penicillin would be.

That could only mean sticker shock at the drugstore cash register for ordinary families, of course.

And the world's poor ? Forget it !

One doctor bucked the combined Anglo-American scientific-medical establishment ,and eventually when even Doctor Moms joined in,  the American politicos smelling electoral disaster backed off.

The British politicians did not and the election shock of 1945 was the price they paid.

The story of the smallest Manhattan Project and its battle for inexpensive-penicillin-for-all is fascinating  ---- and almost totally unknown even to penicillin historians....

PEN ,"G" Floor, Oct 16th 1940

((This article was originally published in my discontinued blog PEN "G" in the spring of 2012 ))


The very first natural systemic penicillin ever made came out of  a small lab in the Physicians & Surgeons Medical School (P & S) Building of Columbia University in Upper Harlem, New York.


In just five weeks, start to finish, it was ready to be injected by team leader Dr Martin Henry Dawson into a young man named Charlie Aronson on October 16 1940.


It was the first ever day of America's peacetime Selective Service (a system still with us 75 years later).


A day for America to separate (and celebrate) its 1A men and to dismiss and ignore its 4F men - like Charlie.


 For Dawson, it was 25 years to the day when the news of the execution of nurse Edith Cavell first reached North America - 25 years to the day when he, along with tens of thousands of others world wide, resolved to join up to fight the wicked Huns who killed Cavell.


In Dawson's case, he first joined up as a medical orderly - so today marked his 25th year in the world of medicine.


Despite Charlie being diagnosed with a then invariably fatal disease called SBE , the semi-purified penicillin didn't seem to hurt Charlie at all.


Instead - and unexpectedly - he survived and became the presumably   ever-grateful PATIENT ONE of the Antibiotics Revolution.


The penicillin for the very first life-saving use of the 75 year old gold standard of antibiotics (injectable penicillin) was labelled PEN "G".


This was not because "G" stands for G-old Standard, or because the original penicillin was a G-olden Yellow in color or because "G" denotes Benzyl (injectable) Penicillin or because some drug company thought PEN "G" would make a catchy brand name for the horsey set.


All these things are true - completely true --- but they are all pretty latecomers to this particular party.


That very first life-saving penicillin was called PEN "G" for one very simple reason: the labs of Dr Dawson and his co-workers on his tiny team ( Karl Meyer ,Gladys Hobby and Eleanor Chaffee) were on Floor"G" of that building.


Their doubting colleagues at P&S Columbia regarded this 'pen.. (what ever) stuff' as something pretty crackpotty ; something being brewed up by that free spirit Dawson and his motley crew back in the remote North West corner of Floor "G" .


Being the first ever in the world - hell in the entire universe - to use systemic natural penicillin to save lives gives Dawson's team bragging rights to call their homebrew penicillin whatever they wanted to:


Their brew was penicillin  from "G" Floor  of  P & S : and hence familiarly know as PEN "G" , for short...