Inventing "small" Penicillin

Martin Henry Dawson did not discover penicillin or Horizontal Gene Transfer or DNA as the location of the genes and all the other discoveries that his memory is usually associated with.

What he did invent (but not "discover") and what he should be remembered for and honored for, is "small" penicillin.

In a war of mass bombings and gassings and burnings led by the Bigs and fought over values exalting the Big, Dawson dared suggest that the small at all levels of Life are at least as worthy of life and dignity as the Big.

In 1940, he said that primitive penicillin produced by the small penicillium was good enough, particularly during a horrific global war of dead and dying, to start its mass production now and to start saving lives now.

And he acted upon his belief, on October 16th 1940, almost 75 years ago.

He worked to save the lives of everyone, not just the Big and the Best and most Fit and most A1.

Particularly because in a war against the Axis that was at least moral as it was material, he felt we must save the weak, the unfit, the 4Fs during the conflict itself not just after, lest we match the Nazis stroke by stroke as they rode a fast train down to Hell.

Primitive 'good enough' penicillin, produced by the small of the world for the small of the world, as well as the Big and the medium sized, now !

The assembled Big of the Anglo-American medical elite wanted wartime penicillin kept as a secret weapon of war, not as a medicine to save lives of all and sundry.

But the dying doctor Dawson (I did mention he was dying all through this unequal battle didn't I ?) won out, when the world's population outvoted their leadership with their voices.

Today wartime-produced penicillin is still regarded as history's best known and best loved medicine.

But Penicillin's moral dignity was a near run thing - it could just as easily be remembered today has being right up there with the world's collective refusal to help Europe's Jews escape Hitler as one of the great moral evils of the Allied side of WWII....

"Primitive Penicillin For Everyone, Now !"

By 1945, this was Henry Dawson's winning approach in the battle over what direction wartime penicillin should take.

Of course, that year the Swedes chose to give their Nobel Prize to the losing side in this debate over penicillin's course, rewarding it to losers Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey.

Label the losers' approach as "Synthetic Penicillin For Some, Someday."

On October 16th 1940, Dawson considered primitive penicillin (concentrated, semi-purified excretions from the tiny penicillium) fully ready for primetime.

Fully ready to inject - now ! - into dying patients, civilian or serviceman, of all races, genders and incomes, in an effort to save their life when nothing else worked.

Good enough to put into unlimited mass production - by government owned plants if need be.

By contrast, his opponents in the medical establishments of Britain and America - people like Fleming and Florey and their warm friends at Vannevar's OSRD and at Merck - didn't want penicillin to go into (limited) mass production until it had been synthesized  by big Pharma, if and when that ever came about.

(It never has been totally synthesized commercially and we still have Dawson's primitive penicillium making the base penicillin that lies behind all our best antibiotics to this day.)

Even if it was synthesized to produce a cheap and abundant pure penicillin, the drug was still to be held back, for use as a secret weapon of war, rather than to be used among the general soldier and civilian population, saving lives.

Penicillin was intended to finally be introduced only on D-Day, to the total surprise of the Germans.

All to return lightly wounded Allied combat troops back into the line of fire far faster than what the Germans could for their lightly wounded with only Sulfa drugs at their command, giving the Allies a little extra break at the odds.

If I was telling this tale to daycare kids like Sam, I say it was a argument between giving small penicillin to small people versus giving Big penicillin to Big people....

Theory explaining inexact weather predicting is salient : theory explaining dual slit particle-wave experiment is not

It is quite easy to spot the difference between "political scientists" and "scientists".

The Poli Sci types are always on about saliency or lack thereof --- the boffins never ever are.

Never never never never ever are.

Any theory that claims that the stock market or the economy or the weather is virtually impossible to predict accurately can be tested - for free - by the seven or eight billion of us.

The results affect all of us - daily - and we ourselves can conduct the experiment.

But most of the supposedly epoch breaking experiments, the type that scientists love to bang on about, we can only take on the word of well educated journalists making sense of long articles in journals like Nature or Science.

We can't even follow the logic of a written report on a written report of an experiment, let alone conduct the experiment ourselves and besides nothing it claims to report seems to make a bit of difference to our lives.

It totally lacks saliency.

It is really nothing but 'science porn' - fun for a few minutes to relieve the stress of our day to day lives, but nothing more.

We can respect the fact that without proven quantum theories, GPS systems won't be accurate enough to safely land the planes that billions of us have flown in.

But we still tend to more admire the applied technology of GPS than the basic science behind it.

Truly epoch breaking changes in the basic tenets of physics, chemistry, geology and astronomy all occurred in the first half of the 20th century without really changing the classical - Newtonian and Platonic - ways we ordinary people were taught to view reality.

My book argues that it rather took changes in the way we viewed (a) biology in general (b) human and social activities like consciousness and the economy in particular and (c) 'the weather' to really change us --- to really make us post-progress, post modern, post Newton, post Plato after 1945.

(I include with 'the weather' such events as earthquakes, volcanoes, asteroids, pandemics : ---- all of the globe's massive, sudden and unpredictable catastrophes.)

The three things these items all had in common is that they are close at hand, they envelope us daily and most importantly, they happen over relatively short (in terms of an typical human life) time periods.

Yes, tectonic plates move, but extremely slowly - yes, the universe is expanding and cooling, again seemingly slowly - yes, the Earth's radioactive atoms are decaying and diminishing in number, but oh so slowly.

WWII : inducing epoch-making changes in the way we view Biology, human/social behavior and catastrophes like The Weather 

WWII was a catastrophe by any measure, particularly to people who make confident predictions for a living, and served as the catalyst to put the fatal post into modernity and progress and the enlightenment project.

I won't spend much time in my book arguing that Auschwitz and Hiroshima played a key role in modernity's demise - gazillions have already trotted down that path before me.

I obviously want to add the unexpected success of penicillium slime poo (standing in as the very mental image of 1940's anti-civilization) to help account for WWII's upending of progress and civilization.

But I also want to give a fuller account of the hundreds of embarrassing failures in supremely confident prediction - that very hallmark of left brain science - that so marked that unexpectedly long six year war.

Like the drip drip drip of water torture, they too played a big role in the sense of fatigue against anymore Progress Talk that so marked post 1945 intellectual and artistic thought and eventually became the commonplace of many ordinary folks as well.

One prediction made about the coming war, made by most people in the years 1931-1939, certainly was proven true - millions of civilians did die and did die by gas.

But they certainly did not die, as was generally predicted, in the first few days of a sharp short war.

Because I know of no one notable who claimed the war would last six years because all such predictions of quick successes (and from all sides) would fail time and time and time again.

So parallel to Dawson and Meyer's daily work on penicillin-for-all, I will watch these two frontline veterans of WWI parse the news of the unexpectedly long course of WWII, as seen from by far the best served city in the world for abundant wartime media, New York ....

The twenty year old effort to 'civilize' penicillin was well funded, well studied, well honoured (and a big failure ...)

By contrast, the tiny and relatively brief (less than four years) effort to win (grudging) acceptance for 'primitive' penicillin was unfunded and unsupported, received no scholarly study or public honours ---- and was a huge, world-changing, success.

Seventy five years later, annually thousands of tons of 'Primitive' penicillin are still made the good old primeval way - by incredibly tiny fungal factories - and still form the basis for almost all of our life-saving antibiotics.

"Upending" - the blog, the musical and backstory non-fiction book - tries to make amends.

For "Upending" is based around the proposition that massive success usually deserves more attention than failure, even if (particularly if ?) that failure was supported by all the Smartest Men in the Universe...

Dr Martin Henry Dawson, MD , LLB (Hon) : always about defending the underdog ?

From would-be lawyer (destined to defend the underdog) to a doctor and scientist defending the underdog ?

With no private papers available, it is hard to know for sure what really motivated pioneering medical scientist Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson, the first person to ever put DNA to work in a test tube and the first to ever inject an antibiotic (Penicillin) into a patient.

Dr Dawson, MD was actually enrolled in Arts at Dalhousie University, before the Great War changed everything.

But, from what we know of his adult personality and from his best marks in university, I would see him, if the war hadn't intervened, more as a university teacher - perhaps in history or perhaps teaching theory in law school.

Unusually for a scientist, he took no sciences courses as an undergraduate - except one in biology (where he topped his class).

His skill in German turned out to be very helpful - no great scientist before 1945 could really succeed if they couldn't read scientific German with smooth facility.

But his best courses are in areas like history, economics and philosophy.

It is important to recall he got his wartime BA degree after attending relatively few classes because he had such good marks in the few courses he did complete, before he left for the effort overseas.

Henry Dawson was far too studious to ever stop at a mere BA and then go on to teach high school - yet he never (so far as we can tell) formally enrolled in the pre-law, pre-engineering or pre-med options at Dal.

But ever loyal to his slightly older brother Howard, he might have joined him at law school but for the war.

Yet he didn't seem to have the commanding personality needed to be a successful courtroom lawyer defending the underdog.

And he certainly never ever wanted to be well off, let alone rich, as in 'rich corporate lawyer'.

But while at Dal, Dawson was busy helping teaching English to various foreign seamen at the YMCA mission to seamen, perhaps parallel to his brother Howard's similar involvement in evangelical good works.

And for what it is worth, his older brother Frank, while an engineering Dean in the American Mid West, so impressed a pioneering black engineering student with his non-prejudiced kindnesses, that the man fulsomely remembered Frank Dawson years later in his autobiography.

The entire family was not military minded but when they were needed - when poor little bleeding Belgium was betrayed by the Hun - all five boys stepped into the breach.

Belgium - again an underdog.

Henry was a (medically untrained) private in a university organized overseas military hospital at first.

Later Dawson was made an officer in the infantry and while badly wounded in the foot, still gave up his place in a stretcher for another much more wounded ordinary soldier, (an underdog) this after solving a battlefield crisis by running about on his wounded foot for ten hours.

His foot never really recovered as a result, but he received the Military Cross with citation for this selfless act.

Then at the very end of his wartime service and wounded yet again, Dawson changed his peacetime occupation from just "student" to "medical student".

His career changed - but I argue - not his urge to helping the underdog.

His lifelong concerns, as a ward doctor, were the chronically ill poor - then as now a low priority in high prestige teaching hospitals.

Underdogs of the medical world.

As a medical scientist, his interest was in the underdogs of the underdog microbes - then universally seen as primitive, primeval, weak, simple, small --- the ultimate in the living fossils.

So why then were they still here ?

If evolutionary theory was correct, Dawson wondered, shouldn't the weak and the small have long ago been vanquished by the big and the brutal ?

The microbes were once again the underdogs, the Rodney Dangerfields, of the Living World.

As a medical scientist, Dawson was particularly concerned about the harmless - hence uninteresting to other medical scientists - avirulent commensal bacteria.

Avirulent versions of 'normally' pathogenic bacteria were considered to be defective versions (of a lifeform already -see above - considered to be a living fossil).

So why then ,asked Dawson, were they still here inside us, often inside us for perhaps our entire lives -- undestroyed ?

Here is the contemporary explanation that Dawson objected to - see if you too can see its flaws in basic logic :

(1) The pneumonia bacteria can only survive in or on us - we are its only home.

(2) The normal variant of the bacteria that causes lung pneumonia and blood poisoning is deadly virulent and lives alone, floating in the blood and human intercell liquids, usually killing us (and them) in a week or two.

(3) The disease of lung pneumonia is not really contagious -- we can't really catch it from the coughing of a dying man -and remember with his death, so to die the bacteria (see #1 above).

(4) The abnormal, defective, avirulent, version harmlessly exists in tight massive colonies on the inner surfaces of our nose and throat - sometimes for our whole lives, without ever making us sick.

(5) We all have these harmless pneumonia bugs in our noses some of the time -  some of us all our lives - and when we have them, we are known as 'carriers' of these harmless commensal pneumonia bacteria.

Dawson wondered how a short life of a week or two in the lungs or blood streams of just a few of us (for even before penicillin, pneumonia bugs only killed perhaps 8% of us) could qualify as the normal form of existence for this bug.

All this, when 100% of us had the abnormal quote unquote bug in our noses for periods ranging from months and months to decades and decades ?

Haven't the normal definitions of usual and unusual been deliberately up-ended to suit an universally accepted but ultimately bizarre medical theory ?

Dawson's alternative explanation was that whether floating about alone in liquid or clinging in masses to walls, these were just normal evolutionary responses to changed niches.

If bacteria do the shapeshifting so quickly, it is not really just that they are much more plastic in the forms that they can adopt than we are capable of - it is also the simple math that a new generation to them can mean 25 minutes later not 25 years later as with us.

As a result, evolutionary response to a new crisis can happen a million times faster with them than us.

If we are honest with ourselves, an evolutionary response time like that is a big advantage and a big reason why these living fossils are still around.

Dawson spent his life tracking down the variants of bacteria that he believed demonstrated why these supposed underdogs were really Life's evolutionary topdogs.

He was the first, or among the first, to look at things like DNA-HGT,quorum sensing, molecular mimicry, CWD bacteria, biofilms and persisters.

Three quarters of a century or more later, those are still cutting edge scientific topics.

In 1940, scientific opinion was again convinced the underdog fungal slimes were incapable of making penicillin as efficiently and as cheaply as the topdog chemists of advanced human civilizations could.

Dawson disagreed - pioneering the Antibiotics Age - when he injected their 'primitive' penicillin into Aaron Alston and Charles Aronson on October 16 1940.

He was right - the topdog chemists failed totally and the underdog slime still makes all the basis of our lifesaving beta-lactam antibiotics to this very day.

When the Allied medical-political elite agreed that wartime penicillin would only go to the topdog frontline troops, Dawson characteristically objected and said all of us, dying for lack of penicillin, should receive it, war or not.

Dawson was himself dying but he gave up his life to - once again - fight for the underdog.

A life full of variations but always with that same consistency of conduct ....

Dawsonian Revolution's twin triumphs : primitive penicillin and its 'primitive' distribution

The man at the top of the Anglo-American civilization (Winston Churchill) fully backed the Allied medical-scientific experts who insisted upon first civilizing and synthesizing (and patentizing) primitive penicillin before considering its civilized (hierarchical/restricted) distribution during WWII.

By contrast, Dr Martin Henry Dawson insisted from the start (October 1940) that primitive (fungus-made) penicillin was safe enough and efficiently enough produced to enable the world to start right now - today ! - saving those people dying of diseases penicillin could cure.

And he also demanded that his primitive made penicillin be distributed as a primitive society would distribute it - equally to all those in need, war or no war.

We really shouldn't be surprised by all this.

An essential characteristic of all 'civilizations', experts insist, is that it has a high measure of both social and geographic stratification - a hierarchy of inequality.

Those same experts say that 'primitive' and barbaric societies share a common egalitarian spirit of sharing equally.

True, in politicians' rhetoric, 'the civilized' show a great egalitarian spirit while 'the barbaric' have a hierarchy of cruel rulers and enslaved subjects.

Of course remember that $6 and politicians' rhetoric will get you a small cup of Starbucks, with any luck ....

Auschwitz AND Penicillin created Post-Modernity

No matter how many scholars say it while dancing on the sharp point of a pin, it simply isn't true.

The horrors that Auschwitz came to represent simply weren't enough to break through human civilization's enormous hubris in the heady post-victory days of 1945.

In fact, the journalists had already all been squared and the agreed story was to be that the Nazis had long been openly at war, well before 1939, against the modern world.

That they were a throwback to our barbaric past, trying to destroy civilization.

But Modern Civilization had been stronger, with better, more modern science, and had so cast out this one bad apple from the European basket.

Primitive barbaric Nazi science had been bested.

And soon all would be once again bright and cheery in the broad uplands of this best of all possible current worlds.

(And please put your sunglasses on and hold onto your hats, because the Future's going to be so Bright, you gonna wanna wear shades !)

Yes, Modern Civilization had had one bad outlier, its tame apologists boldly admitted, but the structure itself was sound.

But in fact it was 'the best of Allied science' that had been bested - and not by some yet more advanced civilization - but rather by the most primitive and despicable creature imaginable : stinky smelly basement fungal slime.

All the Smartest Chemists in the Universe, from all civilizations in the world, working full out with unlimited funds, had failed to make penicillin - something the despised slime tossed off with the ease and grace of Nijinsky.

The 'primitive' slime was supposed to remain securely at the very bottom of the Ladder of Progress - with 'advanced' civilizations like Germany and America supposed to be secure at the very top.

When suffering humanity needed advanced civilization the most, it let them down - instead a despised being, a broken vessel, a stone all builders rejected, gave them life...

Now human hubris had a tough contrast to reconcile : all civilization (not just a nasty outlier of it) had failed to produce the priceless lifesaver penicillin - instead that was done - and worse, done easily and effortlessly - by the supposedly most primitive life form imaginable - a lower fungus.

What on Earth then was truly Progressive and what was truly Primitive ?