In 1939, the fiery new manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers set the tone for his famous tenure at the beleaguered team.
The Dodgers, Leo Durochers thought, were nice guys.
However, the Thirties were a Virile Age, with no time for tortoises or 97 pound weaklings.
Showing posts with label penicillin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label penicillin. Show all posts
Friday, June 14, 2013
Friday, May 24, 2013
WWII's the Mighty and the Wise "confounded" by bacteria and bazooka Resistance Movements
It is clear now that WWII's twin defeats of Sulfa drugs and Armoured tanks by the bacterial and bazooka "Resistance Movements" spelt the beginning of the end for prewar Reductionist cum Constructionist Modernity.
(Martin) Henry Dawson could publish endless articles on the commensality of reality till the end of time ,but they cut no ice with the Mighty and the Wise compared to the short sharp lessons they learned at the great university of real life that was WWII.
Sir Edward Mellanby , mentor of Dawson's rival Sir Howard Florey and head of Britain's agenda-setting MRC (Medical Research Council) from 1933 to 1949, famously claimed in the late 1930s that the synthesis of the sulfa drugs meant we could soon close all our infectious hospitals and kiss infection deaths goodbye.
But by 1943, Bacterial Resistance rendered the sulfa drugs almost useless and allowed penicillin's vast family of antibiotics to become the first port of call for the never ending new strains of bacterial death , though we are still racing very hard to produce new antibiotics to match ever new bacterial resistance.
And always will : that is the way of Commensality Modernity , the way of real reality.
The armoured tank, immune to mere infantry weapons and the indirect fire of artillery, was widely proclaimed as the major reason why the Great Powers would always quickly and easily overrun small powers, particularly those small powers without natural barriers to easy tank passage.
But by 1943 the Bazooka Resistance, today represented by the soviet-era RPG 7 anti-tank rocket propelled grenade seen in every revolution and insurrection, transformed that certitude.
The light, man-carriable , easily concealed bazooka-style anti-tank weapons ensures that an invading Great Power would now have a very tough time invading and successfully occupying a small power.
Tanks would now have a tough time evading the lethal bazooka --- particularly in rocky hilly mountain valley roads, in muddy swamps and while making their way along narrow forests and jungle trails.
Above all the tank was now incredibly vulnerable to hand-held anti-tank weapons while threading their way through the built-up urban areas found in even the flattest, smallest and barest of small powers.
Reductionist/Constructionist Modernity held that effectively reality was binary, with Particle Physicists at one end and Plasma Particles at the other, and everything else in between being basically useless mouths or useless molecules.
But the medium sized stuff in between had proved unwilling to just go away and had gummed up the works of both the Axis and Allied great powers during WWII, again and again.
I rather doubt that commensal expert and infantry veteran Henry Dawson was truly surprised.....
(Martin) Henry Dawson could publish endless articles on the commensality of reality till the end of time ,but they cut no ice with the Mighty and the Wise compared to the short sharp lessons they learned at the great university of real life that was WWII.
Sir Edward Mellanby , mentor of Dawson's rival Sir Howard Florey and head of Britain's agenda-setting MRC (Medical Research Council) from 1933 to 1949, famously claimed in the late 1930s that the synthesis of the sulfa drugs meant we could soon close all our infectious hospitals and kiss infection deaths goodbye.
But by 1943, Bacterial Resistance rendered the sulfa drugs almost useless and allowed penicillin's vast family of antibiotics to become the first port of call for the never ending new strains of bacterial death , though we are still racing very hard to produce new antibiotics to match ever new bacterial resistance.
And always will : that is the way of Commensality Modernity , the way of real reality.
The armoured tank, immune to mere infantry weapons and the indirect fire of artillery, was widely proclaimed as the major reason why the Great Powers would always quickly and easily overrun small powers, particularly those small powers without natural barriers to easy tank passage.
But by 1943 the Bazooka Resistance, today represented by the soviet-era RPG 7 anti-tank rocket propelled grenade seen in every revolution and insurrection, transformed that certitude.
The light, man-carriable , easily concealed bazooka-style anti-tank weapons ensures that an invading Great Power would now have a very tough time invading and successfully occupying a small power.
Tanks would now have a tough time evading the lethal bazooka --- particularly in rocky hilly mountain valley roads, in muddy swamps and while making their way along narrow forests and jungle trails.
Above all the tank was now incredibly vulnerable to hand-held anti-tank weapons while threading their way through the built-up urban areas found in even the flattest, smallest and barest of small powers.
Reductionist/Constructionist Modernity held that effectively reality was binary, with Particle Physicists at one end and Plasma Particles at the other, and everything else in between being basically useless mouths or useless molecules.
But the medium sized stuff in between had proved unwilling to just go away and had gummed up the works of both the Axis and Allied great powers during WWII, again and again.
I rather doubt that commensal expert and infantry veteran Henry Dawson was truly surprised.....
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
WWII : Constructionists vs Commensalists
Reductionism, still the philosophy of today's Popular Science, has admittedly had a lot of glass-half-filled success in the last few centuries.
It has totally succeeded in burrowing down below the surface of reality to the tiny objects at the base of all energy and matter ; reducing big macro objects that we can directly see and touch down to zillions of incredibly tiny objects we can only assume exists by way of indirect evidence.
But while Reductionism can explain how these tiny objects interact, more or less, it has totally failed to fulfill the real purpose behind all of its efforts : to construct new , better-built, versions of macro reality based on what we have learned about the tiny building blocks that make it up.
It turns out, to use today's Net jargon, that the so called laws of physics do not actually 'scale up' ( or 'scale down') all that well.
What we know about tiny quarks does not help us at all to account for the unexpected behavior of slightly bigger objects like the atoms in various phases of condensed matter, such as in solids and liquids for example.
To use a life-sized example of another scientific failure to scale up, this one from WWII logistics, we need only to look at the total failure of the German fuel truck on the Russian Front, after doing so well in Poland and France.
A sturdy army truck like the famous American deuce and a half can go pretty well everywhere a railway can't and so is the best means to get fuel to a fast moving invading armoured army.
But it burns a whole lot of fuel itself to get its few tons of fuel to the front.
But over distances of about one hundred miles from end of rail, it still is the best single way to get fuel to tracked armoured vehicles well out ahead of the slower ,wider, line of rail-supported advance.
But move the distance required to be travelled up to 800 miles out (and remember 800 more miles back in to get more tank and truck fuel) and the truck is a flop and a disaster.
Any truck trying to move up behind an aggressively invading armoured army that has been fighting an equally determined enemy , one who leaves nothing but scorched earth behind, is sure to be travelling over miles of badly damaged, badly overcrowded, muddy or dusty potholed roads and bridges.
The truck's gas and oil consumption soars as its miles per hour slows to a crawl. It can expect major damages from bad roads at least a few times on its 800 mile trek out and back - requiring the services of equally gas-guzzling repair vehicles.
Effectively, the truck is soon consuming more petro products on its two way trek than it can deliver to the tanks. (Remember, it must haul all of its own fuel and oil on itself, for the trip out and back, leaving ever less room for tank fuel.)
This wouldn't happen in peacetime, where the roads between Berlin and Moscow would be in excellent, fuel efficient, shape and where fuel and oil can be picked up at filling stations on route as required.
Once the cargo was delivered to Moscow, a return cargo is picked up to take back, to cover costs.
But war trucks 'dead-head' back, unless they can be used to safely carry lightly wounded men back to rear base hospitals.
Hitler's gambit to take over the world failed in 1941 when his physics of truck transport failed to 'scale up' to the world of real life.
Similarly the fact that chemistry had constructed totally new molecules of dyes and plastics out of little atoms didn't mean human chemists could construct molecules of penicillin just because the fungi could do so naturally.
Penicillin's formula was not the formula for nylon, 'scaled up'.
In biology, the ham-fisted efforts of human-sized geneticists to construct genes they wanted by massive doses of x-rays failed to work as well as the elegant way the tiny bacteria transformed each other with tiny but efficient HGT (horizontal gene transfers).
I am not dismissing the value of human railways and human chemical plants nor do I expect to see skyscrapers made by bacteria : I just insist along with (Martin) Henry Dawson, that there is a niche for everyone and we all are best at activities scaled to our own size and niche.
Reality can not be reduced to tenured human particle physicists at the top and quarks at the bottom (Reality reduced to Professors and Plasma), with all of the rest of the stuff in between just useless feeders, not wanted on the voyage, yesterday's booster stages, enroute in Man's journey to the stars.....
It has totally succeeded in burrowing down below the surface of reality to the tiny objects at the base of all energy and matter ; reducing big macro objects that we can directly see and touch down to zillions of incredibly tiny objects we can only assume exists by way of indirect evidence.
But while Reductionism can explain how these tiny objects interact, more or less, it has totally failed to fulfill the real purpose behind all of its efforts : to construct new , better-built, versions of macro reality based on what we have learned about the tiny building blocks that make it up.
It turns out, to use today's Net jargon, that the so called laws of physics do not actually 'scale up' ( or 'scale down') all that well.
What we know about tiny quarks does not help us at all to account for the unexpected behavior of slightly bigger objects like the atoms in various phases of condensed matter, such as in solids and liquids for example.
To use a life-sized example of another scientific failure to scale up, this one from WWII logistics, we need only to look at the total failure of the German fuel truck on the Russian Front, after doing so well in Poland and France.
A sturdy army truck like the famous American deuce and a half can go pretty well everywhere a railway can't and so is the best means to get fuel to a fast moving invading armoured army.
But it burns a whole lot of fuel itself to get its few tons of fuel to the front.
But over distances of about one hundred miles from end of rail, it still is the best single way to get fuel to tracked armoured vehicles well out ahead of the slower ,wider, line of rail-supported advance.
But move the distance required to be travelled up to 800 miles out (and remember 800 more miles back in to get more tank and truck fuel) and the truck is a flop and a disaster.
Any truck trying to move up behind an aggressively invading armoured army that has been fighting an equally determined enemy , one who leaves nothing but scorched earth behind, is sure to be travelling over miles of badly damaged, badly overcrowded, muddy or dusty potholed roads and bridges.
The truck's gas and oil consumption soars as its miles per hour slows to a crawl. It can expect major damages from bad roads at least a few times on its 800 mile trek out and back - requiring the services of equally gas-guzzling repair vehicles.
Effectively, the truck is soon consuming more petro products on its two way trek than it can deliver to the tanks. (Remember, it must haul all of its own fuel and oil on itself, for the trip out and back, leaving ever less room for tank fuel.)
This wouldn't happen in peacetime, where the roads between Berlin and Moscow would be in excellent, fuel efficient, shape and where fuel and oil can be picked up at filling stations on route as required.
Once the cargo was delivered to Moscow, a return cargo is picked up to take back, to cover costs.
But war trucks 'dead-head' back, unless they can be used to safely carry lightly wounded men back to rear base hospitals.
Hitler's gambit to take over the world failed in 1941 when his physics of truck transport failed to 'scale up' to the world of real life.
Similarly the fact that chemistry had constructed totally new molecules of dyes and plastics out of little atoms didn't mean human chemists could construct molecules of penicillin just because the fungi could do so naturally.
Penicillin's formula was not the formula for nylon, 'scaled up'.
In biology, the ham-fisted efforts of human-sized geneticists to construct genes they wanted by massive doses of x-rays failed to work as well as the elegant way the tiny bacteria transformed each other with tiny but efficient HGT (horizontal gene transfers).
I am not dismissing the value of human railways and human chemical plants nor do I expect to see skyscrapers made by bacteria : I just insist along with (Martin) Henry Dawson, that there is a niche for everyone and we all are best at activities scaled to our own size and niche.
Reality can not be reduced to tenured human particle physicists at the top and quarks at the bottom (Reality reduced to Professors and Plasma), with all of the rest of the stuff in between just useless feeders, not wanted on the voyage, yesterday's booster stages, enroute in Man's journey to the stars.....
WWII Brooklyn to be home to war's biggest killing machine or war's smallest life-saver ?
In the end, the Borough of Brooklyn (NYC) became home to both : the Iowa class of battleships and the home of most of the war's penicillin.
But it had been a near run thing ; this battle over the moral soul of Brooklyn.
After all, from the beginning of the war, the leaders of the Great Powers (Churchill, FDR,Tojo,Stalin and Hitler) were determined to show the world what the greatest entities on Earth could do, if they set their mind to it.
WWII is proof that they succeeded in spades .
Opposing them, Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson was also determined to show the world something too.
In this case, just what the world's smallest,weakest entities (cells of penicillium fungi) were also capable of.
So, as part of that Great Power display of massive size and killing force, the USA had commissioned the last series of battleships it ever built : heavily gunned, heavily armoured and extremely fast.
No war machine has ever been built that was better at going in, taking huge punishment, and still delivering lethal blows in return.
If the editors of machine-porn publications like Popular Mechanics are capable of having wet dreams, the Iowa class battleships were what they (and their mostly male readers) had wet dreams over.
The Iowa class was an extremely potent blend of what a battleship needs to shine and the design (now 75 years old) must have worked because WWII-built ships of that class remain to this day , still in reserve, ready to go back in action.
The Brooklyn Naval Yard built the two most famous, the USS Iowa itself and the USS Missouri ("Big Mo") --- they took 70,000 people in the huge yard several years to do so, working around the clock.
It was the war-related work that the Borough of Brooklyn liked best to be remembered for.
But in a small discarded ice-making plant in another less well known part of the Borough, another item of war was made and shipped all over the world - spreading the good word about Brooklyn in places the USS Iowa class couldn't even think of going.
On a corner of Marcy Avenue was a improvised plant that the then tiny Charles Pfizer Company cobbled together to make naturally-made penicillin (penicillin made by Dawson's little fungi cells) as fast as Pfizer could, as hard as Pfizer could, starting in March 1944.
By June 6th of that same year, natural penicillin underwent its first mass clinical trials : a baptism literally of fire.
Because 80% of the penicillin that came ashore on the Normandy beaches that day was made in the Pfizer Marcy Avenue ice plant.
And Pfizer's naturally-made penicillin continued to be the largest single source of that life saving medicine, around the world, for the remainder of the war.
It doesn't take much natural penicillin to save a life in 1944 - a gram will do nicely - and a tiny glass ampoule, the world's smallest lifesaver, will easily hold it.
By contrast, a full loaded USS Iowa weighed 25 billion grams.
From his luxury apartment high above the exclusive Prospect Slopes area of Brooklyn, the manufacturing head of Pfizer, John L Smith, could easily see the building of the USS Iowa and USS Missouri .
Perhaps as a result he felt that Brooklyn was pulling more than its weight in the effort to stop Hitler and Tojo.
A cautious, frugal man, he wasn't about to bet the shop against the best brains in the world drug industry by producing massive amounts of natural penicillin when the smart money said cheaper synthetic penicillin was only another test tube away.
Sure Henry Dawson was always on his case, urging him to mass produce natural penicillin now, because a ampoule in the doctor's hand was worth a million in the mind of some drug company chemist.
"People are dying needlessly, daily, all over the world because the sulfa drugs are meeting more and more bacterial resistance and there will never be anymore new sulfas in the pipeline."
But John L long resisted (even if his wife was perhaps more open to Dawson's appeal) .
Maybe Smith was feeling that Pfizer had already done enough for the boys overseas, because didn't the firm's exclusive citric acid fuel the cold soda pops that all the overseas GIs, wounded or healthy, craved so avidly?
Soda pops hit the spot for sure, but to a GI dying of blood poisoning, only penicillin could really save their lives.
What if Smith's sole surviving daughter shipped out as a nurse and got seriously ill ?
Would she be grateful to her dad for providing the cold soda pop that eased her dying moments or would she have preferred the penicillin that could have saved her life, if only her father had been more decisive?
But nothing Dawson said seemed to have cut much ice with Smith.
Not until the plight of a dying two year old , saved by penicillin, touched Smith's heart, along with the rest of the world, in mid-August 1943.
Perhaps the crisis for the two parents of young Patty Malone reminded Mr and Mrs Smith all too vividly of the similar agony they went through a dozen years earlier with their first daughter, who died from a disease that penicillin could have saved her from.
Something must have clicked in the soul of John L, because despite strong reports that synthetic penicillin actually was 'just around the corner' this time, Smith suddenly committed Pfizer to an all out effort to mass produce natural penicillin both for the boys overseas by D-Day and for those dying back home for lack of it.
Smith's beloved Dodgers went on to chokedlike never before, during that summer of 1944, but Brooklyn (the Borough) scored big in its own extended road trip.
'Knocked them alive' in fact, in places like Omaha, Utah, Juno, Silver and Gold ....
But it had been a near run thing ; this battle over the moral soul of Brooklyn.
After all, from the beginning of the war, the leaders of the Great Powers (Churchill, FDR,Tojo,Stalin and Hitler) were determined to show the world what the greatest entities on Earth could do, if they set their mind to it.
WWII is proof that they succeeded in spades .
Opposing them, Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson was also determined to show the world something too.
In this case, just what the world's smallest,weakest entities (cells of penicillium fungi) were also capable of.
So, as part of that Great Power display of massive size and killing force, the USA had commissioned the last series of battleships it ever built : heavily gunned, heavily armoured and extremely fast.
No war machine has ever been built that was better at going in, taking huge punishment, and still delivering lethal blows in return.
If the editors of machine-porn publications like Popular Mechanics are capable of having wet dreams, the Iowa class battleships were what they (and their mostly male readers) had wet dreams over.
The Iowa class was an extremely potent blend of what a battleship needs to shine and the design (now 75 years old) must have worked because WWII-built ships of that class remain to this day , still in reserve, ready to go back in action.
The Brooklyn Naval Yard built the two most famous, the USS Iowa itself and the USS Missouri ("Big Mo") --- they took 70,000 people in the huge yard several years to do so, working around the clock.
It was the war-related work that the Borough of Brooklyn liked best to be remembered for.
But in a small discarded ice-making plant in another less well known part of the Borough, another item of war was made and shipped all over the world - spreading the good word about Brooklyn in places the USS Iowa class couldn't even think of going.
On a corner of Marcy Avenue was a improvised plant that the then tiny Charles Pfizer Company cobbled together to make naturally-made penicillin (penicillin made by Dawson's little fungi cells) as fast as Pfizer could, as hard as Pfizer could, starting in March 1944.
By June 6th of that same year, natural penicillin underwent its first mass clinical trials : a baptism literally of fire.
Because 80% of the penicillin that came ashore on the Normandy beaches that day was made in the Pfizer Marcy Avenue ice plant.
And Pfizer's naturally-made penicillin continued to be the largest single source of that life saving medicine, around the world, for the remainder of the war.
It doesn't take much natural penicillin to save a life in 1944 - a gram will do nicely - and a tiny glass ampoule, the world's smallest lifesaver, will easily hold it.
By contrast, a full loaded USS Iowa weighed 25 billion grams.
From his luxury apartment high above the exclusive Prospect Slopes area of Brooklyn, the manufacturing head of Pfizer, John L Smith, could easily see the building of the USS Iowa and USS Missouri .
Perhaps as a result he felt that Brooklyn was pulling more than its weight in the effort to stop Hitler and Tojo.
A cautious, frugal man, he wasn't about to bet the shop against the best brains in the world drug industry by producing massive amounts of natural penicillin when the smart money said cheaper synthetic penicillin was only another test tube away.
Sure Henry Dawson was always on his case, urging him to mass produce natural penicillin now, because a ampoule in the doctor's hand was worth a million in the mind of some drug company chemist.
"People are dying needlessly, daily, all over the world because the sulfa drugs are meeting more and more bacterial resistance and there will never be anymore new sulfas in the pipeline."
But John L long resisted (even if his wife was perhaps more open to Dawson's appeal) .
Maybe Smith was feeling that Pfizer had already done enough for the boys overseas, because didn't the firm's exclusive citric acid fuel the cold soda pops that all the overseas GIs, wounded or healthy, craved so avidly?
Soda pops hit the spot for sure, but to a GI dying of blood poisoning, only penicillin could really save their lives.
What if Smith's sole surviving daughter shipped out as a nurse and got seriously ill ?
Would she be grateful to her dad for providing the cold soda pop that eased her dying moments or would she have preferred the penicillin that could have saved her life, if only her father had been more decisive?
But nothing Dawson said seemed to have cut much ice with Smith.
Not until the plight of a dying two year old , saved by penicillin, touched Smith's heart, along with the rest of the world, in mid-August 1943.
Perhaps the crisis for the two parents of young Patty Malone reminded Mr and Mrs Smith all too vividly of the similar agony they went through a dozen years earlier with their first daughter, who died from a disease that penicillin could have saved her from.
Something must have clicked in the soul of John L, because despite strong reports that synthetic penicillin actually was 'just around the corner' this time, Smith suddenly committed Pfizer to an all out effort to mass produce natural penicillin both for the boys overseas by D-Day and for those dying back home for lack of it.
Smith's beloved Dodgers went on to chokedlike never before, during that summer of 1944, but Brooklyn (the Borough) scored big in its own extended road trip.
'Knocked them alive' in fact, in places like Omaha, Utah, Juno, Silver and Gold ....
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Henry Dawson vs Newton, Dalton & Darwin...
During his brief life, (Martin) Henry Dawson managed to have three seemingly wildly different careers : in the Military during WWI, in Academic Science in the interwar years, and in Popular Science during WWII.
His career in the Infantry showed him the distinct limits to the uses of Newtonian physics, just as his academic research in Horizontal Gene Transfer suggested Darwin's Vertical Gene Transfer was by no means the whole picture.
His career in the Infantry showed him the distinct limits to the uses of Newtonian physics, just as his academic research in Horizontal Gene Transfer suggested Darwin's Vertical Gene Transfer was by no means the whole picture.
And his support for the ultimately successful Naturally-produced Penicillin highlighted the spectacular failure of Daltonian Chemistry's claim to be able to synthesize anything and everything, including Penicillin.
Hubris is a terribly addictive drug and WWII turned out to be its largest, longest and most brutal clinical trial to date.
Only to date, because with Global Warming we appear headed to a rematch between Hubris and Reality, only with this time much worse than the last.
There are lessons - lessons unlearned - both good and bad - we can apply from WWII to the current rematch that might help us avoid the worst of it.
But only if we are prepared to listen.
But only if we are prepared to listen.
Henry Dawson can certainly give us some of the good lessons , while his many opponents can provide us with all the bad lessons, in spades.....
Friday, May 10, 2013
1945 : as apogee AND nadir of Modern Science
Hitler may have successfully convinced his most rabid followers that the murder of every last Jew in Europe was a fitting consolation prize for his failure to deliver up western Russia as the new frontier for the Aryan super race in 1941.
But the rest of humanity regarding Auschwitz as a particularly (and peculiarly) modern and scientific crime made it particularly hard for modern scientists in the rest of the world to present their continuing support of eugenics as the public face of postwar biology.
Still Auschwitz in the end proved a godsend to Oswald Avery's 1944 reductionist claims that Free Will didn't really exist but was simply manipulated by the chemical workings of a simple molecule called DNA.
Thanks to DNA, the old science of eugenics, ( ie its old positive program, along with a reduced version of its old negative program (now to be limited to families agreeing, semi-voluntarily, to the abortions of genetically 'damaged' foetuses) could carry on as before, but as the new science of DNA genetics.
DNA thus joined Atom-busting and Penicillin as three of the biggest triumphs of Modern Science, the three big Plan As that had emerged during WWII, if not all as actual products of that war.
But let us look at these claims more closely.
Atom-busting and atomic re-arranging is a natural event, discovered, rather than invented, by Modern Scientists.
It is based upon the discovery in 1896 (the same year that Henry Dawson was born) of natural radioactivity.
This is an event that is totally random and totally anti-deterministic ; we still have no idea when and why an individual atom breaks into two or more pieces.
I would thus take natural radioactivity as anti-modern, post modern, science at its most characteristic because it refutes one of three cornerstones of all Modern Science : strong determinism .
This holds not just that every thing has a cause as to by it happens, but also that humans can discern that cause and then manipulate it to our advantage.
Another cornerstone of modern science is reductionism.
In the weak version of genetic reductionism, the one that we virtually all hold, it was already known by everybody before 1944, that whatever a gene was, at the bottom it had to exist as some arrangement of atoms.
(By contrast, strong genetic reductionism (chemical eugenics), as held by Avery, holds that once we know how those atoms are arranged, we can predict whether or not a girl will agree to date a particular boy.)
Viewed in this light, we might do well to remember that DNA manipulation was not invented by humans, but rather was only discovered by them ---- and discovered by medical doctors, not geneticists.
Those medical doctors, led , above all, by Henry Dawson, discovered that some bacteria (intellectually as far from the mind of the modern scientist as can be) easily manipulate DNA in ways directly contrary to the Central Dogma of Biology and Genetics that genetic inheritance in vertical forward only.
(This vertical inheritance is the view that all that we are or can ever be , came directly from our (past) parents and their parents, an inheritance that is always strictly limited to remaining within our own species.)
In fact, microbes ( bacteria, viruses,sub-viruses, together with the smallest plants and animals are happy to snip DNA from here and drop it there, willy nilly : horizontal inheritance, HGT, across species, genus and families.
This is the major source for most of the real interesting genetic variety, including why all the world's bacteria can become resistant to a new drug in just ten years.
HGT is another 'difficult-to-get-your-head-around-if-you-have-High-School-Science', postmodern scientific concept, but it was guised in 1945 as another Plan A from Modern Science.
Penicillin was not invented like the totally synthetic sulfa drugs that proceeded it but rather it is produced by incredibly tiny fungus factories smaller than the eye can see.
Henry Dawson - again - led the way in proposing and using natural penicillin today over obtaining synthetic penicillin - maybe - tomorrow.
But the chuzpha-bound men of modern science, naturally, tried to "point-to-with-pride" to the large stainless steel human factories that (nominally) held the smaller fungus factories doing all the work, as the source of our penicillin : just another Plan A of Modern Science.
Cheek !
In fact Chemistry, the Queen of the Sciences until 1945, faded after the war as a direct result of the rise of postmodern science of microbiology ---- directly as a result of the failure of wartime synthetic chemists to make penicillin and most other antibiotics.
So much of modern science's triumphs of 1945 can just as readily be shown to be the anti-modern triumphs of postmodern science....
But the rest of humanity regarding Auschwitz as a particularly (and peculiarly) modern and scientific crime made it particularly hard for modern scientists in the rest of the world to present their continuing support of eugenics as the public face of postwar biology.
Still Auschwitz in the end proved a godsend to Oswald Avery's 1944 reductionist claims that Free Will didn't really exist but was simply manipulated by the chemical workings of a simple molecule called DNA.
Thanks to DNA, the old science of eugenics, ( ie its old positive program, along with a reduced version of its old negative program (now to be limited to families agreeing, semi-voluntarily, to the abortions of genetically 'damaged' foetuses) could carry on as before, but as the new science of DNA genetics.
DNA thus joined Atom-busting and Penicillin as three of the biggest triumphs of Modern Science, the three big Plan As that had emerged during WWII, if not all as actual products of that war.
But let us look at these claims more closely.
Atom-busting and atomic re-arranging is a natural event, discovered, rather than invented, by Modern Scientists.
It is based upon the discovery in 1896 (the same year that Henry Dawson was born) of natural radioactivity.
This is an event that is totally random and totally anti-deterministic ; we still have no idea when and why an individual atom breaks into two or more pieces.
I would thus take natural radioactivity as anti-modern, post modern, science at its most characteristic because it refutes one of three cornerstones of all Modern Science : strong determinism .
This holds not just that every thing has a cause as to by it happens, but also that humans can discern that cause and then manipulate it to our advantage.
Another cornerstone of modern science is reductionism.
In the weak version of genetic reductionism, the one that we virtually all hold, it was already known by everybody before 1944, that whatever a gene was, at the bottom it had to exist as some arrangement of atoms.
(By contrast, strong genetic reductionism (chemical eugenics), as held by Avery, holds that once we know how those atoms are arranged, we can predict whether or not a girl will agree to date a particular boy.)
Viewed in this light, we might do well to remember that DNA manipulation was not invented by humans, but rather was only discovered by them ---- and discovered by medical doctors, not geneticists.
Those medical doctors, led , above all, by Henry Dawson, discovered that some bacteria (intellectually as far from the mind of the modern scientist as can be) easily manipulate DNA in ways directly contrary to the Central Dogma of Biology and Genetics that genetic inheritance in vertical forward only.
(This vertical inheritance is the view that all that we are or can ever be , came directly from our (past) parents and their parents, an inheritance that is always strictly limited to remaining within our own species.)
In fact, microbes ( bacteria, viruses,sub-viruses, together with the smallest plants and animals are happy to snip DNA from here and drop it there, willy nilly : horizontal inheritance, HGT, across species, genus and families.
This is the major source for most of the real interesting genetic variety, including why all the world's bacteria can become resistant to a new drug in just ten years.
HGT is another 'difficult-to-get-your-head-around-if-you-have-High-School-Science', postmodern scientific concept, but it was guised in 1945 as another Plan A from Modern Science.
Penicillin was not invented like the totally synthetic sulfa drugs that proceeded it but rather it is produced by incredibly tiny fungus factories smaller than the eye can see.
Henry Dawson - again - led the way in proposing and using natural penicillin today over obtaining synthetic penicillin - maybe - tomorrow.
But the chuzpha-bound men of modern science, naturally, tried to "point-to-with-pride" to the large stainless steel human factories that (nominally) held the smaller fungus factories doing all the work, as the source of our penicillin : just another Plan A of Modern Science.
Cheek !
In fact Chemistry, the Queen of the Sciences until 1945, faded after the war as a direct result of the rise of postmodern science of microbiology ---- directly as a result of the failure of wartime synthetic chemists to make penicillin and most other antibiotics.
So much of modern science's triumphs of 1945 can just as readily be shown to be the anti-modern triumphs of postmodern science....
Saturday, April 27, 2013
Commensal thoughts were parents to the Humanitarian penicillin deed ...
Before 1945 and the rise of post-Modernity, it was rare for scientific doubts to turn into humanitarian actions, but Martin Henry Dawson's wartime efforts against the weaponizing of penicillin was an important exception.
From 1926 till 1940 , Dr Dawson had intensely studied how Nature's smallest beings ( the bacteria) managed to survive upon and co-exist with the smartest and most successful of Nature's largest beings (Man) .
His fourteen years of intense research in Commensality was dismissed by most of his colleagues as a sad mis-directed use of his considerable talents.
As with his colleagues, no one today really doubts that humanity is a large being and very intelligent( ie is wise as well as mighty) while most of us still regard bacteria as barely living, incredibly small, blobs of jelly : as dumb as they are weak.
But as Dawson discovered, as fast as Man's sophisticated internal immune system and his equally sophisticated external medical system came up with ways to remove these commensal bacteria, the bacteria equally found ways to claw their way back.
Just as he knew that any forthright and honest look at the current and past workings of Nature would show that the tiny and the big are co-existing today and have been doing so for a very long time -----with no sign at all that the small were on their way out.
If anything, the fossil record showed how vulnerable the big could be to mass extinction in times of trouble.
Despite this rather bleak record for the bigger beings of Nature, it was precisely to Nature ( rather than to the traditional arbiter, God) that Dawson's Era of Modernity appealed to.
All to back its central claim that 'only the strong survive', 'might is right' , 'law of the jungle', 'survival of the fit', 'Nature is on the side of the bigger battalions' and many other similar phrases.
Dawson was a dutiful fully paid-up member of Modernity.
But the more he investigated the many varied and ingenious ways his oral commensal strep bacteria hung in against Man's best efforts, the less willing he was to endure this constant claim of Nature's support for the self-centred and ruthless actions of the world's biggest human societies.
Once, (younger, unmarried, childless and without any old war wounds), he had been able to show his support for the smaller human societies by enlisting in WWI to fight for poor, pitiful Belgium and for the memory of Edith Carvell.
Now in October 1940, as an even more squalid WWII slid into its second year, he still hadn't found an equivalent way to do something in support of the small and the weak in this war.
Then echoes of the Nazi war on the weak reached his own American medical school and gave him the emotional opening he needed.
Suddenly "Social" medicine (the 1930s efforts to reduce sickness among the poorest and most vulnerable) , something he had much a part of through his advocacy on behalf of the neglected chronically ill poor, was to be downplayed in the school's curriculum.
Instead now all possible attention was to be directed to teaching "War" medicine and maximizing the health of America's most fit young men.
So the majority of his colleagues cheerfully clumped off , on the first day of America's first ever peacetime draft registration, (October 16th 1940), to help with medical examinations.
But while America's doctors attended to seeking out the most 1A men possible among America's youth, Dawson heard the beat of a different drummer.
He instead deliberately sought out the 4Fs of the 4Fs, young men dying of SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis), an invariably fatal progressive disease that mostly afflicted the poor, immigrants and minorities.
His team hadn't planned to start their first clinical trials till next year, 1941, but he changed all that with one sudden decision.
He chose to make Draft Day, October 16th 1940, the first day of his new Age of Humanitarian Antibiotics, picking that day to give History's first ever shots of penicillin.
Two young men (black man Aaron Alston and a young Jewish boy named Charles Aronson) couldn't be part of that historical first day of peacetime draft registration because, as clearly terminal patients, it didn't seem worth the bother of the draft officials.
But as the first ever patients of the Age of Antibiotics, they still ended up living on forever in the memory of anyone ever saved by this overdue (humanitarian-driven) advent of antibiotics....
From 1926 till 1940 , Dr Dawson had intensely studied how Nature's smallest beings ( the bacteria) managed to survive upon and co-exist with the smartest and most successful of Nature's largest beings (Man) .
His fourteen years of intense research in Commensality was dismissed by most of his colleagues as a sad mis-directed use of his considerable talents.
As with his colleagues, no one today really doubts that humanity is a large being and very intelligent( ie is wise as well as mighty) while most of us still regard bacteria as barely living, incredibly small, blobs of jelly : as dumb as they are weak.
But as Dawson discovered, as fast as Man's sophisticated internal immune system and his equally sophisticated external medical system came up with ways to remove these commensal bacteria, the bacteria equally found ways to claw their way back.
Just as he knew that any forthright and honest look at the current and past workings of Nature would show that the tiny and the big are co-existing today and have been doing so for a very long time -----with no sign at all that the small were on their way out.
If anything, the fossil record showed how vulnerable the big could be to mass extinction in times of trouble.
Despite this rather bleak record for the bigger beings of Nature, it was precisely to Nature ( rather than to the traditional arbiter, God) that Dawson's Era of Modernity appealed to.
All to back its central claim that 'only the strong survive', 'might is right' , 'law of the jungle', 'survival of the fit', 'Nature is on the side of the bigger battalions' and many other similar phrases.
Dawson was a dutiful fully paid-up member of Modernity.
But the more he investigated the many varied and ingenious ways his oral commensal strep bacteria hung in against Man's best efforts, the less willing he was to endure this constant claim of Nature's support for the self-centred and ruthless actions of the world's biggest human societies.
Once, (younger, unmarried, childless and without any old war wounds), he had been able to show his support for the smaller human societies by enlisting in WWI to fight for poor, pitiful Belgium and for the memory of Edith Carvell.
Now in October 1940, as an even more squalid WWII slid into its second year, he still hadn't found an equivalent way to do something in support of the small and the weak in this war.
Then echoes of the Nazi war on the weak reached his own American medical school and gave him the emotional opening he needed.
Suddenly "Social" medicine (the 1930s efforts to reduce sickness among the poorest and most vulnerable) , something he had much a part of through his advocacy on behalf of the neglected chronically ill poor, was to be downplayed in the school's curriculum.
Instead now all possible attention was to be directed to teaching "War" medicine and maximizing the health of America's most fit young men.
So the majority of his colleagues cheerfully clumped off , on the first day of America's first ever peacetime draft registration, (October 16th 1940), to help with medical examinations.
But while America's doctors attended to seeking out the most 1A men possible among America's youth, Dawson heard the beat of a different drummer.
He instead deliberately sought out the 4Fs of the 4Fs, young men dying of SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis), an invariably fatal progressive disease that mostly afflicted the poor, immigrants and minorities.
His team hadn't planned to start their first clinical trials till next year, 1941, but he changed all that with one sudden decision.
He chose to make Draft Day, October 16th 1940, the first day of his new Age of Humanitarian Antibiotics, picking that day to give History's first ever shots of penicillin.
Two young men (black man Aaron Alston and a young Jewish boy named Charles Aronson) couldn't be part of that historical first day of peacetime draft registration because, as clearly terminal patients, it didn't seem worth the bother of the draft officials.
But as the first ever patients of the Age of Antibiotics, they still ended up living on forever in the memory of anyone ever saved by this overdue (humanitarian-driven) advent of antibiotics....
Friday, April 26, 2013
The promise of Penicillin : the only good news to ever come out of The Bad News War
Six long years later and in a very different world from what they had so confidently predicted they'd be in, back in 1939, the Allied world celebrated that they had won.
(Those of the world - the majority - who had remained neutral during some or all of the moral battle against Hitler's evil chimed in that they had helped, too, by killing this latter day Kaiser with their mouths.)
More accurately, the Allies had survived : calling it 'winning' was going more than a bit too far.
The Soviet Empire was in ruins, with its population base and physical superstructure permanently damaged.
Its 1939 belief that the capitalist nations would fight it out during WWII, while the Soviets stayed neutral awaiting the inevitable triumph of a wonderful world of Communism was revealed to be hopelessly wrong.
Its buoyant pre-war self confidence in the rightness of the Soviet cause was pretty well gone by 1947.
Over the next 45 years, it slowly, slowly, slowly slip down into third world conditions by the time the empire formally imploded in 1992.
The British Empire of 1939 - holding 25% of the world - the biggest and richest ever seen - began formally collapsing much earlier, in fact the day Labour was elected in July 1945.
But for many Britons and their world-wide admirers, the bounce had gone out of the Anglo strut around the time of the Fall of Singapore.
America in 1939 had said it had no Empire and wished only to live apart and above the worldly fray.
It instead ended up as the world's policeman - at such a high cost in terms of money and moral certitudes - that is still dragging itself ever downwards today.
But let's rehearse all the good things that came out of of WWII , at least as 1945 saw it.
Victory ( see above) .
Jet planes - jet fighter planes with radar , atomic bombs, proximity fused shells and napalm.
Rockets - with atomic bombs.
Nuclear powered submarines - armed with atomic missiles.
Cheap ,clean power from atomic power plants. Energy too cheap to meter, with radiation levels too low to monitor.
Plastics, lots of plastics and other synthetic chemicals.
Chemical insecticides - based on nerve gas and the gases used at Auschwitz.
The United Nations for peace - with an absolute veto over any possible action for peace handed over to the only nations powerful enough to cause a serious war.
And penicillin.
Penicillin and other life-saving antibiotics.
That's my case .
Please add your choices for the best news out of WWII in the comment section below.....
(Those of the world - the majority - who had remained neutral during some or all of the moral battle against Hitler's evil chimed in that they had helped, too, by killing this latter day Kaiser with their mouths.)
More accurately, the Allies had survived : calling it 'winning' was going more than a bit too far.
The Soviet Empire was in ruins, with its population base and physical superstructure permanently damaged.
Its 1939 belief that the capitalist nations would fight it out during WWII, while the Soviets stayed neutral awaiting the inevitable triumph of a wonderful world of Communism was revealed to be hopelessly wrong.
Its buoyant pre-war self confidence in the rightness of the Soviet cause was pretty well gone by 1947.
Over the next 45 years, it slowly, slowly, slowly slip down into third world conditions by the time the empire formally imploded in 1992.
The British Empire of 1939 - holding 25% of the world - the biggest and richest ever seen - began formally collapsing much earlier, in fact the day Labour was elected in July 1945.
But for many Britons and their world-wide admirers, the bounce had gone out of the Anglo strut around the time of the Fall of Singapore.
America in 1939 had said it had no Empire and wished only to live apart and above the worldly fray.
It instead ended up as the world's policeman - at such a high cost in terms of money and moral certitudes - that is still dragging itself ever downwards today.
But let's rehearse all the good things that came out of of WWII , at least as 1945 saw it.
Victory ( see above) .
Jet planes - jet fighter planes with radar , atomic bombs, proximity fused shells and napalm.
Rockets - with atomic bombs.
Nuclear powered submarines - armed with atomic missiles.
Cheap ,clean power from atomic power plants. Energy too cheap to meter, with radiation levels too low to monitor.
Plastics, lots of plastics and other synthetic chemicals.
Chemical insecticides - based on nerve gas and the gases used at Auschwitz.
The United Nations for peace - with an absolute veto over any possible action for peace handed over to the only nations powerful enough to cause a serious war.
And penicillin.
Penicillin and other life-saving antibiotics.
That's my case .
Please add your choices for the best news out of WWII in the comment section below.....
Thursday, April 25, 2013
WWII: the horrific medical 'Triaging' of New York Jews and Blacks
Here is a challenge I throw out to New York City's many amateur historians and genealogical detectives : find out more about the young New Yorker who was the first person ever in the world to be treated - successfully - with penicillin-the-antibiotic.
Particularly if you interested in uncovering more about the harsh wartime treatment afforded many first generation inner city New York Blacks and Jews.
So, again, a challenge : find out more about PATIENT ONE , the young New Yorker(s) who first introduced the Age of Antibiotics against fierce resistance from the medical establishment.
Here's a little what we already know for certain (past and future posts on this blog will add more details : the keywords to search are Charles Aronson , Aaron Alston and (Martin) Henry Dawson.)
Actually, two young New Yorkers were given a needle of penicillin by Doctor Martin Henry Dawson on that same history-making day (October 16th 1940) at the famed Columbia Prebyterian Medical Centre : a young Black and a young Jew, both probably poor.
Its quite a story from how these two young ,poor, men from these ethnicities, traditionally regarded as 'last' , came to be 'first' ever in the world to receive the miracle of antibiotics.
Both young men were dying of then common dreaded and 99% invariably fatal SBE (Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis), a disease that hits the heart valves.
Heart valves damaged earlier by RF (Rheumatic Fever).
Working in tandem, these two related diseases were the most common way for school age children to die in the 20th Century , until about 1960.
RF was "The Polio of the Poor", because just as the much less common Polio was highly selective and tended to hit the children of well to do WASPs in the leafy suburbs, RF tended to hit hardest among the poor children of inner city immigrants and minorities.
Unless you are wilfully naive , you probably have guessed by now why you have heard so very much more about relatively uncommon serious cases of Polio than about the much more common - and commonly fatal - RF & SBE !
There is no doubt at all that first patient to be selected for this experimental treatment was a young black man, Aaron Alston.
Penicillin had been discovered exactly 12 years earlier and a little ( very primitive work) had been even been published on growing it , but it remained basically unknown and unused in 1940.
So Dawson and his co-workers ( Meyer, Hobby and Chaffee) were still at the square one of square one, a few weeks into their first attempt to try and grow the mold in their hospital lab, when a seriously ill Aaron Alston arrived on a ward that Dawson 'attended' (had some limited medical authority over).
It had not been expected that they would have enough penicillin made, purified and tested for clinical trials for another four months.
But Dawson's heart went out to Alston, because Dawson reasoned, based on what little he knew of penicillin, that penicillin might finally conquer SBE.
(A disease by the way he had never published even one word on - he was in fact hired to work in an area that was very neglected and directed to leave a well researched disease like SBE to the time- proven experts.)
The disease then (and perhaps still now) was regarded as the Mount Everest of all infectious disease, the Gold Standard test of any new anti-bacterial medication.
He decided to ignore laborious hospital protocols for pre-testing new drug treatments : Alston would die before he got this one last shot at life , if they choose to wait four further months down the road.
Dawson would first test penicillin's potential toxicity (of which there was , to put it extremely mildly, absolutely no evidence of, judging by lots of previously published work on small animals and human blood cells) on himself.
Then he'd give a little at a time to Alston, slowly and cautiously.
The team was only making very little amounts of a very weak penicillin at that time, so this was really just making a virtue of necessity !
How did Dawson know that Alston was so rapidly dying, that haste was imperative ?
There is no direct evidence but the indirect evidence is compelling, I believe, that Alston had already received the conventional treatment for SBE in 1940, prolonged and massive treatments by the new miracle drugs, the sulfas.
Most SBE patients in 1940 got at least a brief improvement with sulfa drugs.
But the bacteria fought back and the same miserable one percent survived with sulfa treatments (only to die when the disease returned a year or two later)...... as with those receiving no treatment what so ever.
However some patients got no relief from sulfa - the number of bacteria colonies in the blood went up (and not down) after treatment and the doctors then knew these patients' particular strain of oral strep bacteria in their heart valves were particularly resistant to the sulfa drugs and that death would be swift and certain.
I believe Alston was one of these patients and this is why Dawson decided to go to clinical trial four months early, and after only five weeks from first even learning of what very little was known about penicillin.
And why the other more senior doctors let him try his penicillin on the clearly dying Alston.
Since massive and prolonged amounts of sulfa had failed to kill off all the heart valve bacteria, it seemed pointless to hope that a very little bit of very weak penicillin would do the trick.
But it was worth the effort to Dawson and the others doctors really couldn't see why he couldn't at least try, this once - but only in his own spare time, when he won't be neglecting his own proper duties.
Dawson's ideas on the immense worth of penicillin were regarded as madness by his hospital colleagues and he really needed to show even a small , if temporary, reduction in the number of bloodstream bacterial colonies if he hoped to receive further help, not further hinderance, from his hospital chiefs.
In fact, it took three more years before any more than a few dozen doctors in the whole world thought that penicillin was worth bothering about.
Need I add, three more war years, filled with additional millions of patients dying from war-related bacterial infections ?
For the fact is that for the first fifteen long years, penicillin's worst enemy wasn't bacteria but rather doctors themselves.
By and large, the Age of Antibiotics arrived in this world despite the best efforts of doctors, not because of their efforts.
Hence Dawson's decision to use all of a tiny amount of a weak solution, pushed into just one patient, in hopes of seeing even a hint of successful, if temporary, results.
A chance to keep his hospital bosses off his back and a chance they'd let him continue his massive mold-growing efforts inside their precious neat and tidy ultra-modern medical centre.
That first needle offered up a potential lifeline to a young dying black man.... and a potential lifeline to billions of future patients.
But then Dawson deliberately chose to blow it - or so it seemed.
Another dying young man, a twenty seven year old Jewish boy named Charles Aronson, arrived on the ward, days before Alston was to get all the meagre penicillin that had been hand-grown so far.
Spontaneously, Dawson added him to this first clinical trial, dividing the meagre lifeline into two thinner lifelines, like a latter day Solomon.
Why ? Why when this further weakened any slim hopes of observing a clinical response?
Several reasons.
Firstly, lots of test tube results had confirmed that penicillin, by weight, was thousands as times potent as the sulfas.
This, despite the fact that their 1940 homegrown 'penicillin' was actually 99.5% dross -- but luckily they'd didn't know this .
Ordinarily, even their small amounts of weak penicillin, even divided in two, would have given clear signs of response, in almost any other bacterial disease.
Except SBE : its unique combo of 'gotchas' rightly made it the Mount Everest of infection, and thought Dawson ultimately did cure SBE with penicillin, he did so only after rolling many massive stones of Sisyphus penicillin up that Mount.
But again they didn't know this at the time.
Secondly, Aronson had an uniquely complicated, and sad, medical history revolving around repeated attacks from all kinds of seemingly different strep bacteria diseases.
To Dawson, 'seeming different' was the key phrase.
For Dawson's personal/private research interest was in relating all the varied survival techniques he saw as shared by the strep bacteria that co-exist with us.
They live in our mouths, throats and nose much of the time and very occasionally causing serious disease by the ways some of our bodies choose to respond to those sophisticated survival techniques.
But I think this was a minor part of what got Dawson to add Aronson to that first clinical trial.
Because one of the abiding qualities of Dawson was his lifelong hatred of Triage , which unfortunately happened to be the chief and defining characteristic of the era he lived in, The Era of Modernity.
Modernity was all about, always, the dividing the world into two piles ---- those humans, beings and places worthy of continued life and succour and those unworthy of further life and support : in a word, Triage.
Think of all those medical doctors in jack boots, standing at the railway siding in places like Auschwitz, deciding in an instant if you were to die quickly in a shower or die slowly working too hard for too little food : Triage.
Triage had hit Dawson's hospital that Fall of 1940 : orders had gone out to focus resources on the diseases that affect front line 1A troops and to downplay devoting resources on diseases that only affect the useless 4Fs.
A wonderful time for medical political conservatives to gleefully call for a massive rollback of 1930s efforts to reduce the death rates among the poor, the minorities and the immigrants ("Social" Medicine) , under the guise that all resources were needed to keep our "boys" alive at the up-coming frontline : "War" Medicine.
Now if there ever was a Poster Child of a disease the war medicine hawks didn't want to treat, it was SBE and here is why.
Unlike Polio ( whose research efforts expanded during the war years) , the conservatives' own kids weren't likely to get RF and SBE.
And unfortunately both diseases were different from many other potentially fatal diseases like smallpox where if you got it once and survived, it would never hit you again.
Even 'curing' a bout of RF and SBE left behind permanent damage which made it not just likely you'd be hit again with new bouts, but hit harder each time as your delicate heart valves further weakened.
These were progressive, re-occuring, infectious diseases with a strong component of deadly auto-immunity to add to the mix.
Any success with SBE was going to be long and expensive in hospital resources, leave the cured patient still unable to serve in the military and do anything very arduous in a war plant - and a year later they be back in hospital again with another potentially fatal bout.
Neglect them and let them die quickly and quietly at home, at least until this war is over, was the Allied medical establishment's decision worldwide.
Since this also was the Nazis' line, Dawson doubted we would really 'win' a war against them by taking up their horrific tactics.
This is why he deliberately choose to begin the new Age of Antibiotics on October 16 1940, the first registration day for the
first ever peacetime draft, a day devoted to seeking out and celebrating the 1A youth of America.
He would mark that historical date by instead seeking out and celebrating the 4Fs of the 4Fs of America, celebrating the worthiness of the least of these.
Conventionally having two (or more) patients suffering from the same disease under your medical wing at the moment when you are about to begin a new form of medical treatment was considered a godsend.
One half would get the old treatment and the other half the new treatment.
Officially and publicly the doctor(s) claimed to agnostic between the virtues of both treatments but that was rarely really true for the first pioneering medical teams.
Inside the privacy of their mind and conscience, they really didn't think the older treatment worked or at least didn't work very well.
This is because a strong belief in the likely success of a new drug was needed before any doctor is willing to do the extremely arduous work of being the first to try out a totally new treatment.
If the disease being treated was acute and had a high fatality rate, the trial would mean some would die who could have been saved , by the time good results came in.
The discussion of the early mass clinical trials of sulfa for dangerous diseases like pneumonia make extremely disturbing reading 75 years later.
Blithely it is - briefly - noted that hundreds died in these various trials.
Hundreds who could have lived if these pioneering true believers in the virtues of sulfa had consistently given their (abundant) supplies to everyone they felt might be saved by it.
The worst moral dilemma for many initial trials is that only a tiny amount of a potentially life-saving drug for an acute (rapid) disease has been made - because making this new drug is still hard and expensive and the pharma firm is unwilling to scale up production before there are good signs it might work.
(One drug in a thousand survives the normally long, long expensive trek from the first look at it, to mass production and mass use.)
Such new life-saving drugs tend to go to specialists in the disease it is judged best suited for and these doctors frequently have many
rapidly dying patients at hand who might live if they get it.
The only moral, ethical, solution is to grit one's teeth, stop up your tears and resolve to divide the limited supply among the healthiest/youngest/smallest patients, hoping in this way to get a few successes that will spur on greater production of the drug.
A dozen small children might use the same weight of limited drug as one elderly , weak, fat, adult ---- and get better results.
But with this very biased success could come more of the drug, to then humanely treat all the dying without selecting one over another.
Carefully applied, triage can be highly moral.
But there didn't seem any reason, in advance, to pick one of these young men over the other for the initial clinical trial.
The war medicine hawks had already put the 1As in one worthy pile and the 4Fs in another unworthy pile and Dawson did not want to divide 4Fs into further piles based on no morally fit grounds.
Dawson refused to pick and choose between Alston and Aronson : both got a few days treatment until the supply ran out.
As it turned out, Alston later got a more extensive penicillin treatment but still died. Aronson got no further penicillin but lived - because his particular strain turned out to respond well to massive sulfa doses given for months at a time.
He didn't get another bout of SBE for about three and a half years - a true cure by even exacting standards.
This is why I believe, despite the fact that both men both penicillin within minutes of each other, Aronson got the first needle.
Alston , I feel certain, had been getting sulfa for weeks but it is known that Aronson didn't get any sulfa until a few more weeks after his first penicillin treatment.
If Alston was in fact the very first patient ever treated by penicillin , any success with penicillin would be quickly and loudly explained away by the many, many pioneers of sulfa --- all claiming it was really due to the use of their drug.
But if the first ever patient was Aronson, any success penicillin had with him would be due to penicillin alone and hard to refute.
The sad fact is that success in science is based on facts and evidence and is relatively easy to achieve.
But convincing other scientists of that success in science really means reminding a lot of awfully big egos that their particular hobby horse isn't the right path to success after all - an extremely difficult process.
Rhetoric, not facts, is key here ----- it might seem ridiculous to highlight the success of one patient given a medication just moments before another , but to truthfully claim that my medicine cured the very first patient it treated was (and is) a potent bragging point.
Dawson's ego was small but he was not naive : I believe he did treat Aronson first, if only by mere moments, to help him win his rhetorical battle with his doubting bosses.
Dawson was extremely modest and truthful : he only ever claimed that Aronson lived through this first bout of SBE due to sulfa, not his penicillin.
(Though Dawson later did cure him of a second bout in 1944 with enough penicillin to make a real difference.)
But perhaps you believe, along with the world famous Dr William Osler and a boatload of distinguished clinicians ever since, that bedside moral support is at least as important as drugs in helping a body fight off an infection.
Then you might be forgiven in thinking that the compassion Dawson displayed to Charles Aronson, in not 'triaging' him out of the penicillin trial, was at least as important as the tiny amount of penicillin he did receive, in allowing him to live.
One way to look at Dawson's early penicillin was regard it as only .56 of one percent pure.
But alternatively - particularly if, like me, you are a big fan of New York born Eddie Rabbit - you could regard it as being made of "nighty nine and forty four one hundreds percent pure love".
Then you can rationally believe that Dawson's penicillin did at least help cure an invariably fatal disease in the very first person in history ever to be treated by an antibiotic ....
Particularly if you interested in uncovering more about the harsh wartime treatment afforded many first generation inner city New York Blacks and Jews.
So, again, a challenge : find out more about PATIENT ONE , the young New Yorker(s) who first introduced the Age of Antibiotics against fierce resistance from the medical establishment.
Here's a little what we already know for certain (past and future posts on this blog will add more details : the keywords to search are Charles Aronson , Aaron Alston and (Martin) Henry Dawson.)
Patient One , A and B
Actually, two young New Yorkers were given a needle of penicillin by Doctor Martin Henry Dawson on that same history-making day (October 16th 1940) at the famed Columbia Prebyterian Medical Centre : a young Black and a young Jew, both probably poor.
Its quite a story from how these two young ,poor, men from these ethnicities, traditionally regarded as 'last' , came to be 'first' ever in the world to receive the miracle of antibiotics.
Both young men were dying of then common dreaded and 99% invariably fatal SBE (Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis), a disease that hits the heart valves.
Heart valves damaged earlier by RF (Rheumatic Fever).
Working in tandem, these two related diseases were the most common way for school age children to die in the 20th Century , until about 1960.
The Polio of the Poor
RF was "The Polio of the Poor", because just as the much less common Polio was highly selective and tended to hit the children of well to do WASPs in the leafy suburbs, RF tended to hit hardest among the poor children of inner city immigrants and minorities.
Unless you are wilfully naive , you probably have guessed by now why you have heard so very much more about relatively uncommon serious cases of Polio than about the much more common - and commonly fatal - RF & SBE !
There is no doubt at all that first patient to be selected for this experimental treatment was a young black man, Aaron Alston.
Penicillin had been discovered exactly 12 years earlier and a little ( very primitive work) had been even been published on growing it , but it remained basically unknown and unused in 1940.
So Dawson and his co-workers ( Meyer, Hobby and Chaffee) were still at the square one of square one, a few weeks into their first attempt to try and grow the mold in their hospital lab, when a seriously ill Aaron Alston arrived on a ward that Dawson 'attended' (had some limited medical authority over).
It had not been expected that they would have enough penicillin made, purified and tested for clinical trials for another four months.
But Dawson's heart went out to Alston, because Dawson reasoned, based on what little he knew of penicillin, that penicillin might finally conquer SBE.
(A disease by the way he had never published even one word on - he was in fact hired to work in an area that was very neglected and directed to leave a well researched disease like SBE to the time- proven experts.)
The disease then (and perhaps still now) was regarded as the Mount Everest of all infectious disease, the Gold Standard test of any new anti-bacterial medication.
Delay meant Death
He decided to ignore laborious hospital protocols for pre-testing new drug treatments : Alston would die before he got this one last shot at life , if they choose to wait four further months down the road.
Dawson would first test penicillin's potential toxicity (of which there was , to put it extremely mildly, absolutely no evidence of, judging by lots of previously published work on small animals and human blood cells) on himself.
Then he'd give a little at a time to Alston, slowly and cautiously.
The team was only making very little amounts of a very weak penicillin at that time, so this was really just making a virtue of necessity !
How did Dawson know that Alston was so rapidly dying, that haste was imperative ?
There is no direct evidence but the indirect evidence is compelling, I believe, that Alston had already received the conventional treatment for SBE in 1940, prolonged and massive treatments by the new miracle drugs, the sulfas.
Most SBE patients in 1940 got at least a brief improvement with sulfa drugs.
But the bacteria fought back and the same miserable one percent survived with sulfa treatments (only to die when the disease returned a year or two later)...... as with those receiving no treatment what so ever.
However some patients got no relief from sulfa - the number of bacteria colonies in the blood went up (and not down) after treatment and the doctors then knew these patients' particular strain of oral strep bacteria in their heart valves were particularly resistant to the sulfa drugs and that death would be swift and certain.
I believe Alston was one of these patients and this is why Dawson decided to go to clinical trial four months early, and after only five weeks from first even learning of what very little was known about penicillin.
And why the other more senior doctors let him try his penicillin on the clearly dying Alston.
Since massive and prolonged amounts of sulfa had failed to kill off all the heart valve bacteria, it seemed pointless to hope that a very little bit of very weak penicillin would do the trick.
But it was worth the effort to Dawson and the others doctors really couldn't see why he couldn't at least try, this once - but only in his own spare time, when he won't be neglecting his own proper duties.
Dawson's ideas on the immense worth of penicillin were regarded as madness by his hospital colleagues and he really needed to show even a small , if temporary, reduction in the number of bloodstream bacterial colonies if he hoped to receive further help, not further hinderance, from his hospital chiefs.
In fact, it took three more years before any more than a few dozen doctors in the whole world thought that penicillin was worth bothering about.
Need I add, three more war years, filled with additional millions of patients dying from war-related bacterial infections ?
For the fact is that for the first fifteen long years, penicillin's worst enemy wasn't bacteria but rather doctors themselves.
Antibiotics arrives, despite doctors' best efforts
By and large, the Age of Antibiotics arrived in this world despite the best efforts of doctors, not because of their efforts.
Hence Dawson's decision to use all of a tiny amount of a weak solution, pushed into just one patient, in hopes of seeing even a hint of successful, if temporary, results.
A chance to keep his hospital bosses off his back and a chance they'd let him continue his massive mold-growing efforts inside their precious neat and tidy ultra-modern medical centre.
That first needle offered up a potential lifeline to a young dying black man.... and a potential lifeline to billions of future patients.
Enter Charles Aronson
But then Dawson deliberately chose to blow it - or so it seemed.
Another dying young man, a twenty seven year old Jewish boy named Charles Aronson, arrived on the ward, days before Alston was to get all the meagre penicillin that had been hand-grown so far.
Spontaneously, Dawson added him to this first clinical trial, dividing the meagre lifeline into two thinner lifelines, like a latter day Solomon.
Why ? Why when this further weakened any slim hopes of observing a clinical response?
Several reasons.
Firstly, lots of test tube results had confirmed that penicillin, by weight, was thousands as times potent as the sulfas.
This, despite the fact that their 1940 homegrown 'penicillin' was actually 99.5% dross -- but luckily they'd didn't know this .
Ordinarily, even their small amounts of weak penicillin, even divided in two, would have given clear signs of response, in almost any other bacterial disease.
Except SBE : its unique combo of 'gotchas' rightly made it the Mount Everest of infection, and thought Dawson ultimately did cure SBE with penicillin, he did so only after rolling many massive stones of Sisyphus penicillin up that Mount.
But again they didn't know this at the time.
Secondly, Aronson had an uniquely complicated, and sad, medical history revolving around repeated attacks from all kinds of seemingly different strep bacteria diseases.
To Dawson, 'seeming different' was the key phrase.
For Dawson's personal/private research interest was in relating all the varied survival techniques he saw as shared by the strep bacteria that co-exist with us.
They live in our mouths, throats and nose much of the time and very occasionally causing serious disease by the ways some of our bodies choose to respond to those sophisticated survival techniques.
But I think this was a minor part of what got Dawson to add Aronson to that first clinical trial.
Dawson hated Triage
Because one of the abiding qualities of Dawson was his lifelong hatred of Triage , which unfortunately happened to be the chief and defining characteristic of the era he lived in, The Era of Modernity.
Modernity was all about, always, the dividing the world into two piles ---- those humans, beings and places worthy of continued life and succour and those unworthy of further life and support : in a word, Triage.
Think of all those medical doctors in jack boots, standing at the railway siding in places like Auschwitz, deciding in an instant if you were to die quickly in a shower or die slowly working too hard for too little food : Triage.
Triage had hit Dawson's hospital that Fall of 1940 : orders had gone out to focus resources on the diseases that affect front line 1A troops and to downplay devoting resources on diseases that only affect the useless 4Fs.
A wonderful time for medical political conservatives to gleefully call for a massive rollback of 1930s efforts to reduce the death rates among the poor, the minorities and the immigrants ("Social" Medicine) , under the guise that all resources were needed to keep our "boys" alive at the up-coming frontline : "War" Medicine.
Now if there ever was a Poster Child of a disease the war medicine hawks didn't want to treat, it was SBE and here is why.
Unlike Polio ( whose research efforts expanded during the war years) , the conservatives' own kids weren't likely to get RF and SBE.
And unfortunately both diseases were different from many other potentially fatal diseases like smallpox where if you got it once and survived, it would never hit you again.
Even 'curing' a bout of RF and SBE left behind permanent damage which made it not just likely you'd be hit again with new bouts, but hit harder each time as your delicate heart valves further weakened.
These were progressive, re-occuring, infectious diseases with a strong component of deadly auto-immunity to add to the mix.
Any success with SBE was going to be long and expensive in hospital resources, leave the cured patient still unable to serve in the military and do anything very arduous in a war plant - and a year later they be back in hospital again with another potentially fatal bout.
Neglect them and let them die quickly and quietly at home, at least until this war is over, was the Allied medical establishment's decision worldwide.
Since this also was the Nazis' line, Dawson doubted we would really 'win' a war against them by taking up their horrific tactics.
This is why he deliberately choose to begin the new Age of Antibiotics on October 16 1940, the first registration day for the
first ever peacetime draft, a day devoted to seeking out and celebrating the 1A youth of America.
He would mark that historical date by instead seeking out and celebrating the 4Fs of the 4Fs of America, celebrating the worthiness of the least of these.
Cynical, clinical, trials
Conventionally having two (or more) patients suffering from the same disease under your medical wing at the moment when you are about to begin a new form of medical treatment was considered a godsend.
One half would get the old treatment and the other half the new treatment.
Officially and publicly the doctor(s) claimed to agnostic between the virtues of both treatments but that was rarely really true for the first pioneering medical teams.
Inside the privacy of their mind and conscience, they really didn't think the older treatment worked or at least didn't work very well.
This is because a strong belief in the likely success of a new drug was needed before any doctor is willing to do the extremely arduous work of being the first to try out a totally new treatment.
If the disease being treated was acute and had a high fatality rate, the trial would mean some would die who could have been saved , by the time good results came in.
The discussion of the early mass clinical trials of sulfa for dangerous diseases like pneumonia make extremely disturbing reading 75 years later.
Blithely it is - briefly - noted that hundreds died in these various trials.
Hundreds who could have lived if these pioneering true believers in the virtues of sulfa had consistently given their (abundant) supplies to everyone they felt might be saved by it.
The tiny amounts moral dilemma
The worst moral dilemma for many initial trials is that only a tiny amount of a potentially life-saving drug for an acute (rapid) disease has been made - because making this new drug is still hard and expensive and the pharma firm is unwilling to scale up production before there are good signs it might work.
(One drug in a thousand survives the normally long, long expensive trek from the first look at it, to mass production and mass use.)
Such new life-saving drugs tend to go to specialists in the disease it is judged best suited for and these doctors frequently have many
rapidly dying patients at hand who might live if they get it.
The only moral, ethical, solution is to grit one's teeth, stop up your tears and resolve to divide the limited supply among the healthiest/youngest/smallest patients, hoping in this way to get a few successes that will spur on greater production of the drug.
A dozen small children might use the same weight of limited drug as one elderly , weak, fat, adult ---- and get better results.
But with this very biased success could come more of the drug, to then humanely treat all the dying without selecting one over another.
Carefully applied, triage can be highly moral.
But there didn't seem any reason, in advance, to pick one of these young men over the other for the initial clinical trial.
The war medicine hawks had already put the 1As in one worthy pile and the 4Fs in another unworthy pile and Dawson did not want to divide 4Fs into further piles based on no morally fit grounds.
Dawson refused to pick and choose between Alston and Aronson : both got a few days treatment until the supply ran out.
As it turned out, Alston later got a more extensive penicillin treatment but still died. Aronson got no further penicillin but lived - because his particular strain turned out to respond well to massive sulfa doses given for months at a time.
He didn't get another bout of SBE for about three and a half years - a true cure by even exacting standards.
This is why I believe, despite the fact that both men both penicillin within minutes of each other, Aronson got the first needle.
Alston , I feel certain, had been getting sulfa for weeks but it is known that Aronson didn't get any sulfa until a few more weeks after his first penicillin treatment.
If Alston was in fact the very first patient ever treated by penicillin , any success with penicillin would be quickly and loudly explained away by the many, many pioneers of sulfa --- all claiming it was really due to the use of their drug.
But if the first ever patient was Aronson, any success penicillin had with him would be due to penicillin alone and hard to refute.
Convincing scientists - and their egos - is harder than making major scientific discoveries
The sad fact is that success in science is based on facts and evidence and is relatively easy to achieve.
But convincing other scientists of that success in science really means reminding a lot of awfully big egos that their particular hobby horse isn't the right path to success after all - an extremely difficult process.
Rhetoric, not facts, is key here ----- it might seem ridiculous to highlight the success of one patient given a medication just moments before another , but to truthfully claim that my medicine cured the very first patient it treated was (and is) a potent bragging point.
Dawson's ego was small but he was not naive : I believe he did treat Aronson first, if only by mere moments, to help him win his rhetorical battle with his doubting bosses.
Dawson was extremely modest and truthful : he only ever claimed that Aronson lived through this first bout of SBE due to sulfa, not his penicillin.
(Though Dawson later did cure him of a second bout in 1944 with enough penicillin to make a real difference.)
William Osler's take on the whole affair ?
But perhaps you believe, along with the world famous Dr William Osler and a boatload of distinguished clinicians ever since, that bedside moral support is at least as important as drugs in helping a body fight off an infection.
Then you might be forgiven in thinking that the compassion Dawson displayed to Charles Aronson, in not 'triaging' him out of the penicillin trial, was at least as important as the tiny amount of penicillin he did receive, in allowing him to live.
One way to look at Dawson's early penicillin was regard it as only .56 of one percent pure.
But alternatively - particularly if, like me, you are a big fan of New York born Eddie Rabbit - you could regard it as being made of "nighty nine and forty four one hundreds percent pure love".
Then you can rationally believe that Dawson's penicillin did at least help cure an invariably fatal disease in the very first person in history ever to be treated by an antibiotic ....
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
1939-1945 : Nesvizh Jews fight for life, at home and abroad
While Jews in the democratic West during WWII were unwilling to do something even as minor as chaining themselves to government fences ( a la the suffragettes) to protest the mass killing of their counterparts in Europe, this did not mean that other Jews were not fighting for their right to life in those years.
Consider the brave Jews of Nesvizh.
Ninety percent of the Jews of that small city, 60 miles south west of Minsk (today part of Belarus, then part of Poland), were killed by the Germans, in one day, in October 1941.
The remaining 600, locked in a tiny ghetto, resolved to try an armed breakout, rather than die quietly.
The forests were right next to the city and the ghetto and once the Jews were in the woods, filled with lethal partisans hidden behind dark trees, the Germans and their helpers quickly lost their dutch courage and gave up the chase.
On July 21 1942, hearing a police company of Nazi collaborators was coming to kill the remaining 600, the Jews started their break out.
Yes, most got killed in the process, but perhaps 10% of the 10% got away to try and survive the grim and short lives of forest partisans.
Maybe a handful of the original 6000 survived to the end of the war.
Nevertheless, this tiny ghetto was the first, or one of the very first, groups of Eastern European Jews to fight to the death in an effort to stay alive.... and is widely honored worldwide today for doing so.
Particularly by those children of Western Jews who know their own parents and grandparents, under far more safe circumstances, did basically nothing, certainly nothing so bold and courageous, during WWI to hinder the Nazi efforts to kill all of the world's Jews.
Most of the Jewish people of Nesvizh survive today as the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of the people of that shtetl who emigrated to places like New York in the brief window of opportunity between the 1890s and the start of WWI.
We still know very little about this man, the very first person to receive lifesaving penicillin-the-antibiotic (systemic penicillin) and who did so on October 16 1940 in New York.
We do know a fair bit of his medical history, but as to Charles Aronson himself, we only know he was born about 1913.
We are very lucky that in 1944 much of his complicated medical history was abstracted by his doctor in a published article because today's America would let us know nothing of this man born a 100 years ago.
America is a country where it is much easier to buy an assault rifle then it is for a historian to get any personal information about historical figures.
But importantly we do know a fair bit of the career of his doctor (Dr Henry Dawson) , particularly with regard to the disease that Charlie Aronson was being treated for (subacute bacterial endocarditis) (SBE).
Prior to Charlie, Dawson had never treated SBE and obviously , at that point, no one had treated anyone anywhere with systemic penicillin.
From these few scant facts, we can make a few educated , aka statistical, guesses about the identity of Charlie.
Because some academics have studied the matter thoroughly, we have a pretty good idea of how ordinary (non well-to-do) New Yorkers picked the solutions to their medical problems in 1940.
The densely populated centre of New York City is also home to one of the world's largest arrays of hospitals and doctors in the world.
A short bus ride in any direction in the three mile circle around your home threw up lots of possible healers.
Even the poorest weren't short of choices - many NYC hospitals and doctors were also research oriented and if you submitted to their new therapy trials, you got (hopefully) cutting edge treatment for little or no cost.
Generally, distance was a big factor : since so many good hospitals lay close at hand in every direction, so why go further only to find your family and friends can't easily visit you daily ?
The exception was if a doctor or hospital was very famous for its special advanced treatment of a particular fatal disease : then people would come from all over the continent or the world, desperate for a possible lifeline.
Dr Henry Dawson ,and systemic penicillin, in October 1940, were the furthest possible from that sort of fame in the case of SBE.
In October 1940, nobody had a cure for SBE : when you got very sick with it, you went to any old hospital and patiently waited to die from this 99% invariable fatal disease.
So in looking for a patient named Charles Aronson, born around 1913, who attended Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in upper Manhattan in October 1940, the first place to look is in the recent release of the 1940 federal US census, seeking a man of that name and age living pretty close to the hospital.
As it happens, the only man having that name and age in the 1940 census living within a few miles of Columbia- Presbyterian lived very close indeed: two miles away at 1202 Vyse Avenue in the (South) Bronx.
(The handwritten census indication of the street is often misread as Nyse Avenue (sic!).
Most - but not all - of the people in New York City in 1940 named Aronson were recent Jewish immigrant families from The Pale of Russia , places like today's Poland, Ukraine and Belarus.
Places like Nesvizh.
The Charles Aronson born around 1913 living at 1202 Vyse Avenue, has a brother Samuel, a sister Lillian, a mother Olga and a father Alex.
Vyse Avenue, in 1940, was home to a closely knit community from the Minsk and Nesvizh areas and so when we see an Alex Aronson from the Bronx on two lists of members of a Nesvizh landsmanshaften, we may well have something.
(Landsmanshafts were Jewish fraternal organizations based on all members being former residents of a very small part of the Old World. Think of it as a big neighbourhood emigrating en masse and re-constituting itself in another country. It functioned as a hometown collective self-help, burial and social organization.)
The 1940 census says that Alex and Olga were born in the former Russian Empire in the late 1880s (and Minsk/Nesvizh was certainly part of that Empire back then.)
Charlie and his siblings were all born in New York and I feel we can safely speculate that Olga and Alex migrated to New York as twenty year olds just before WWI and started their family there.
The 1940 census tells us not just ages and birthplaces and current residence, it tells us of the education, occupations and incomes of all on the census.
Luckily the youngest Aronson of this family , Samuel, was asked a few more questions - in particular he said his childhood home language was Jewish (Yiddish), indicating this family was in fact Jewish.
Alex had 3 years of school, worked as a machine operator making ladies cloaks, earning $1400 a year ( a typical skilled working class wage in that year.) Olga had no formal education and worked at home as a homemaker.
Samuel had one year of college and was looking for work as a machine operator making ladies belts.
Lillian had 4 years of High School and made $900 a year as a machine operator making ladies belts.
Charles also had 4 years of High School and was making $950 a year working as a teletype operator at a newspaper.
Perhaps at a gentile newspaper but far more likely at a Jewish newspaper.
If this Charles Aronson was the same one who received history's first ever shot of antibiotic and went on to recover from invariable fatal SBE not just once but twice, it was remarkable he had so much education and had a skilled job.
Because the SBE Charlie had had many close calls with death and permanent disability.
When he was eight,in the early 1920s, Charlie had gotten Rheumatic Fever (RF) , which until 1960, the leading case of death in school age children.
His was an unusually severe version, as it hit the cells of his joints, the cells of his heart and the cells of his nerves.
He was lucky not to die - most poor kids at that time did die outright from this severe an attack.
Then he went right on to get a severe attack of the post WWI worldwide epidemic of a mysterious sleeping sickness, encephalitis lethargica, not at all to be confused with the disease caused by the tropical tsetse fly.
Today the evidence points away from what was originally seen as the cause, flu, and towards an auto immune response to particular strains of strep bacteria causing a case of strep throat weeks or months before the onset of this particular disease.
Rheumatic Fever is another in a whole series of auto-immune diseases caused by some people's particular gene set over-reacting to certain strains of strep throat bacteria.
Thanks to Oliver Sacks, most people today know far more about sleeping sickness than do they of Rheumatic Fever, and most know that while many died of the initial attack, others survived it only to become victims of permanent post-infection parkinsonism.
Such was SBE Charlie's unlucky fate.
Still he survived two should-be fatal attacks by strep before 1940 and remarkably he would survive two more should-be fatal attacks by different strep bacteria between 1940 and 1944.
And a life-threatening stroke : a cat of more than just nine lives !
These latter strep were the normally harmless mouth strep bacteria than can invade damaged heart valves caused by Rheumatic Fever and almost always (before systemic penicillin) kill the patient : the dreaded SBE.
Attacks to your nerve cells such as hit Charlie twice, can give a person temporary or semi-permanent mental, emotional and behavioral issues.
The Nazis in particular feared those with this form of sleeping sickness and their Aktion T4 murder teams usually sought out and killed such people, even when the person generally functioned as a hard working tax paying citizen.
Such as poor Martin Bader, who was murdered by German doctors in late June 1940.
This was the very same time as two American doctors, Dawson along with Dr Karl Meyer, were first learning of penicillin's unknown systemic potential from unpublished verbal reports from an American student forced to leave Oxford University after the Fall of France.
Already the two were thinking of it for a new use as a life-saving therapy.
Dawson was a humanitarian doctor but in addition his particular private research interest was oral strep diseases.
Charlie may have been a last minute attention to the initial SBE penicillin trial (despite Dawson not having enough penicillin for one, let alone two SBE patients) because he had survived both RF and sleeping sickness and now was under attack from strep bacteria for a third time.
Charlie never faced direct assault from Nazis as did his remaining relatives in Nesvizh, if that is where indeed his dad came from.
But Charlie's life was threatened by Nazi-like thinking by the American medical elite, who felt, like Himmler and Hitler, that SBE patients, particularly if they also suffering from parkinsonism, were just useless mouths to feed in an all-out total war, and so should be left to die---- in this case, by deliberate neglect.
They ordered doctors not to waste penicillin on SBE patients.
Charlie and Doctor Dawson fought back - not with guns - but Dawson did break the wartime laws and did steal scarce government controlled penicillin, all to keep SBE patients alive.
His "ACTING UP" finally provoked a national and then international public reaction against the Allies' Nazi-like attitude to SBE patients and penicillin.
The character of Allied penicillin also changed at that moment - from a secret weapon of war, to a public and universal life-saver.
Dawson himself was dying of an auto-immune disease from 1940-1945 and did not live to see the end of the Nazis, but Charlie did.
To the Polish government at the beginning of the war, Charlie was a Polish citizen living overseas.
No country in the world had a worse war than the Poland of the 1939 boundaries.
The Allies with great consistency treated it as badly in 1945 as they did in 1939, matching the Nazis stroke for stroke.
It is satisfying to know that at least one citizen of Poland was treated fairly during WWII, treated as fairly as every individual should be treated all the time, and that the result of his being treated with compassion, penicillin became about the only good news story that ever did come out of that bad news war ....
Consider the brave Jews of Nesvizh.
Ninety percent of the Jews of that small city, 60 miles south west of Minsk (today part of Belarus, then part of Poland), were killed by the Germans, in one day, in October 1941.
The remaining 600, locked in a tiny ghetto, resolved to try an armed breakout, rather than die quietly.
The forests were right next to the city and the ghetto and once the Jews were in the woods, filled with lethal partisans hidden behind dark trees, the Germans and their helpers quickly lost their dutch courage and gave up the chase.
On July 21 1942, hearing a police company of Nazi collaborators was coming to kill the remaining 600, the Jews started their break out.
Yes, most got killed in the process, but perhaps 10% of the 10% got away to try and survive the grim and short lives of forest partisans.
Maybe a handful of the original 6000 survived to the end of the war.
Nevertheless, this tiny ghetto was the first, or one of the very first, groups of Eastern European Jews to fight to the death in an effort to stay alive.... and is widely honored worldwide today for doing so.
Particularly by those children of Western Jews who know their own parents and grandparents, under far more safe circumstances, did basically nothing, certainly nothing so bold and courageous, during WWI to hinder the Nazi efforts to kill all of the world's Jews.
Most of the Jewish people of Nesvizh survive today as the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of the people of that shtetl who emigrated to places like New York in the brief window of opportunity between the 1890s and the start of WWI.
Charlie Aronson
We still know very little about this man, the very first person to receive lifesaving penicillin-the-antibiotic (systemic penicillin) and who did so on October 16 1940 in New York.
We do know a fair bit of his medical history, but as to Charles Aronson himself, we only know he was born about 1913.
We are very lucky that in 1944 much of his complicated medical history was abstracted by his doctor in a published article because today's America would let us know nothing of this man born a 100 years ago.
America is a country where it is much easier to buy an assault rifle then it is for a historian to get any personal information about historical figures.
But importantly we do know a fair bit of the career of his doctor (Dr Henry Dawson) , particularly with regard to the disease that Charlie Aronson was being treated for (subacute bacterial endocarditis) (SBE).
Prior to Charlie, Dawson had never treated SBE and obviously , at that point, no one had treated anyone anywhere with systemic penicillin.
From these few scant facts, we can make a few educated , aka statistical, guesses about the identity of Charlie.
Because some academics have studied the matter thoroughly, we have a pretty good idea of how ordinary (non well-to-do) New Yorkers picked the solutions to their medical problems in 1940.
The densely populated centre of New York City is also home to one of the world's largest arrays of hospitals and doctors in the world.
A short bus ride in any direction in the three mile circle around your home threw up lots of possible healers.
Even the poorest weren't short of choices - many NYC hospitals and doctors were also research oriented and if you submitted to their new therapy trials, you got (hopefully) cutting edge treatment for little or no cost.
Generally, distance was a big factor : since so many good hospitals lay close at hand in every direction, so why go further only to find your family and friends can't easily visit you daily ?
The exception was if a doctor or hospital was very famous for its special advanced treatment of a particular fatal disease : then people would come from all over the continent or the world, desperate for a possible lifeline.
Dr Henry Dawson ,and systemic penicillin, in October 1940, were the furthest possible from that sort of fame in the case of SBE.
In October 1940, nobody had a cure for SBE : when you got very sick with it, you went to any old hospital and patiently waited to die from this 99% invariable fatal disease.
So in looking for a patient named Charles Aronson, born around 1913, who attended Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in upper Manhattan in October 1940, the first place to look is in the recent release of the 1940 federal US census, seeking a man of that name and age living pretty close to the hospital.
As it happens, the only man having that name and age in the 1940 census living within a few miles of Columbia- Presbyterian lived very close indeed: two miles away at 1202 Vyse Avenue in the (South) Bronx.
(The handwritten census indication of the street is often misread as Nyse Avenue (sic!).
Most - but not all - of the people in New York City in 1940 named Aronson were recent Jewish immigrant families from The Pale of Russia , places like today's Poland, Ukraine and Belarus.
Places like Nesvizh.
The Charles Aronson born around 1913 living at 1202 Vyse Avenue, has a brother Samuel, a sister Lillian, a mother Olga and a father Alex.
Vyse Avenue, in 1940, was home to a closely knit community from the Minsk and Nesvizh areas and so when we see an Alex Aronson from the Bronx on two lists of members of a Nesvizh landsmanshaften, we may well have something.
(Landsmanshafts were Jewish fraternal organizations based on all members being former residents of a very small part of the Old World. Think of it as a big neighbourhood emigrating en masse and re-constituting itself in another country. It functioned as a hometown collective self-help, burial and social organization.)
The 1940 census says that Alex and Olga were born in the former Russian Empire in the late 1880s (and Minsk/Nesvizh was certainly part of that Empire back then.)
Charlie and his siblings were all born in New York and I feel we can safely speculate that Olga and Alex migrated to New York as twenty year olds just before WWI and started their family there.
The 1940 census tells us not just ages and birthplaces and current residence, it tells us of the education, occupations and incomes of all on the census.
Luckily the youngest Aronson of this family , Samuel, was asked a few more questions - in particular he said his childhood home language was Jewish (Yiddish), indicating this family was in fact Jewish.
Alex had 3 years of school, worked as a machine operator making ladies cloaks, earning $1400 a year ( a typical skilled working class wage in that year.) Olga had no formal education and worked at home as a homemaker.
Samuel had one year of college and was looking for work as a machine operator making ladies belts.
Lillian had 4 years of High School and made $900 a year as a machine operator making ladies belts.
Charles also had 4 years of High School and was making $950 a year working as a teletype operator at a newspaper.
Perhaps at a gentile newspaper but far more likely at a Jewish newspaper.
If this Charles Aronson was the same one who received history's first ever shot of antibiotic and went on to recover from invariable fatal SBE not just once but twice, it was remarkable he had so much education and had a skilled job.
Because the SBE Charlie had had many close calls with death and permanent disability.
When he was eight,in the early 1920s, Charlie had gotten Rheumatic Fever (RF) , which until 1960, the leading case of death in school age children.
His was an unusually severe version, as it hit the cells of his joints, the cells of his heart and the cells of his nerves.
He was lucky not to die - most poor kids at that time did die outright from this severe an attack.
Then he went right on to get a severe attack of the post WWI worldwide epidemic of a mysterious sleeping sickness, encephalitis lethargica, not at all to be confused with the disease caused by the tropical tsetse fly.
Today the evidence points away from what was originally seen as the cause, flu, and towards an auto immune response to particular strains of strep bacteria causing a case of strep throat weeks or months before the onset of this particular disease.
Rheumatic Fever is another in a whole series of auto-immune diseases caused by some people's particular gene set over-reacting to certain strains of strep throat bacteria.
Thanks to Oliver Sacks, most people today know far more about sleeping sickness than do they of Rheumatic Fever, and most know that while many died of the initial attack, others survived it only to become victims of permanent post-infection parkinsonism.
Such was SBE Charlie's unlucky fate.
Still he survived two should-be fatal attacks by strep before 1940 and remarkably he would survive two more should-be fatal attacks by different strep bacteria between 1940 and 1944.
And a life-threatening stroke : a cat of more than just nine lives !
These latter strep were the normally harmless mouth strep bacteria than can invade damaged heart valves caused by Rheumatic Fever and almost always (before systemic penicillin) kill the patient : the dreaded SBE.
Attacks to your nerve cells such as hit Charlie twice, can give a person temporary or semi-permanent mental, emotional and behavioral issues.
The Nazis in particular feared those with this form of sleeping sickness and their Aktion T4 murder teams usually sought out and killed such people, even when the person generally functioned as a hard working tax paying citizen.
Such as poor Martin Bader, who was murdered by German doctors in late June 1940.
This was the very same time as two American doctors, Dawson along with Dr Karl Meyer, were first learning of penicillin's unknown systemic potential from unpublished verbal reports from an American student forced to leave Oxford University after the Fall of France.
Already the two were thinking of it for a new use as a life-saving therapy.
Dawson was a humanitarian doctor but in addition his particular private research interest was oral strep diseases.
Charlie may have been a last minute attention to the initial SBE penicillin trial (despite Dawson not having enough penicillin for one, let alone two SBE patients) because he had survived both RF and sleeping sickness and now was under attack from strep bacteria for a third time.
Charlie never faced direct assault from Nazis as did his remaining relatives in Nesvizh, if that is where indeed his dad came from.
But Charlie's life was threatened by Nazi-like thinking by the American medical elite, who felt, like Himmler and Hitler, that SBE patients, particularly if they also suffering from parkinsonism, were just useless mouths to feed in an all-out total war, and so should be left to die---- in this case, by deliberate neglect.
They ordered doctors not to waste penicillin on SBE patients.
Charlie and Doctor Dawson fought back - not with guns - but Dawson did break the wartime laws and did steal scarce government controlled penicillin, all to keep SBE patients alive.
His "ACTING UP" finally provoked a national and then international public reaction against the Allies' Nazi-like attitude to SBE patients and penicillin.
The character of Allied penicillin also changed at that moment - from a secret weapon of war, to a public and universal life-saver.
Dawson himself was dying of an auto-immune disease from 1940-1945 and did not live to see the end of the Nazis, but Charlie did.
To the Polish government at the beginning of the war, Charlie was a Polish citizen living overseas.
No country in the world had a worse war than the Poland of the 1939 boundaries.
The Allies with great consistency treated it as badly in 1945 as they did in 1939, matching the Nazis stroke for stroke.
It is satisfying to know that at least one citizen of Poland was treated fairly during WWII, treated as fairly as every individual should be treated all the time, and that the result of his being treated with compassion, penicillin became about the only good news story that ever did come out of that bad news war ....
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Atheistic Nature's inordinate fondness for beetles...
The genetically-minded Moderns of the 1930s felt they were facing a grave demographic crisis : why where there so few Ubermensch and so many undermensch: why so few Cedars and so much hyssop ?
In other words, why on earth were there so many beetles, defectives and useless mouths ?
Not believing in a Supreme Being, at least not believing in any Being Superior to themselves, they had to blame the Iron Laws of Nature and Evolution for this un-natural natural fondness for things weak and foolish.
If in ancient times , the Cedars of Lebanon were the biggest, tallest living beings known, the hyssop growing through the cracks in Beth Nielsen Chapman's concrete were 'the lowest of the low', the plant kingdom's equivalent of being the 4Fs of the 4Fs.
Seemingly the useless hyssop's only purpose for being put on this earth was to form a home for an equally purposeless mold.
But then, of course, when Fleming found that mold stopped bacteria cold and Dawson stuck it into a patient's arm to save a life, the lowly hyssop was revealed to have had a supreme purpose after all ....
In other words, why on earth were there so many beetles, defectives and useless mouths ?
Not believing in a Supreme Being, at least not believing in any Being Superior to themselves, they had to blame the Iron Laws of Nature and Evolution for this un-natural natural fondness for things weak and foolish.
If in ancient times , the Cedars of Lebanon were the biggest, tallest living beings known, the hyssop growing through the cracks in Beth Nielsen Chapman's concrete were 'the lowest of the low', the plant kingdom's equivalent of being the 4Fs of the 4Fs.
Seemingly the useless hyssop's only purpose for being put on this earth was to form a home for an equally purposeless mold.
But then, of course, when Fleming found that mold stopped bacteria cold and Dawson stuck it into a patient's arm to save a life, the lowly hyssop was revealed to have had a supreme purpose after all ....
Thursday, March 28, 2013
WWII's sins of uncaring omission as War Crimes
Even animals would be discomforted at the audible and visual pain as millions of Indians starved to death during the Bengali Famine of 1943.
It is a pity that so many of us,supposedly more sophisticated, humans have been less discomforted about the event ever since.
Most of us - at least in the Allied West - would strongly reject the idea that this totally unnecessary mass famine was a war crime and and a sin of uncaring omission.
To ease our own consciences, we much prefer to limit our definition of war crimes to sins of commission, done by obvious evil-doers : the direct shooting, gassing or bayoneting of civilians as at Nanking, the Katyn Forest or at Auschwitz.
But it is not enough to save "oops -sorry !" when bombs we intend for rail yards or oil refineries happen to fall upon 250,000 soon-to-be dead civilians in occupied countries - not if we also clearly know that most of our bombs always fall widely off target.
Claiming that anything and everything is justified if our intent (to defeat Hitler) is good is not a moral claim with legs.
It puts one to mind of the claims of George W Bush that he just had to suspend civil liberties in America ----- in order to bring them instead to the oppressed of the Middle East !
We must always demonstrate extremely due care when we kill some in an effort to save others : clearly seeking to see if there are not other ways to defeat evil without killing so many of the innocent.
Famine , fortunately, was not general throughout the Allied and Neutral world, between 1939-1945.
But many (powerless) people needlessly went more hungry than they had to , in many of the Allied-controlled colonies.
But if Allied famine had been widespread and prolonged - caused perhaps by normally reoccurring weather disasters adding to uncaring imperial government mis-management - would it have been moral to continue to treat DDT as a war secret and deny its use to civilians, to reduce additional loss of food to insect pests ?
The militarizing of wartime DDT thus escaped - just - being another war crime of uncaring omission.
But there are more uncaring crimes of omission in the Allied closet.
In 1940-1941, several years into WWII, the new class of sulfa drugs which had emerged only 5 years earlier, seemed a gift that just kept on giving.
Today when the doctor comes in with the test results and says "I'm very afraid it appears that the cancer has metastasized" , the room gets very still as patient, family and nursing personnel absorb the grim news.
In the years before sulfa and antibiotics, people rarely lived to an age where they could learn that their original primary (localized) cancer tumour had spread throughout their body and that their chances of survival were now slim.
Instead what they feared was something not un-similiar happening with an infection that had originally been localized to one lesion , something most bodies, and good nursing care, could eventually fight off on its own.
Now in came the doctor with the blood tests (indicating colonies of bacteria were thick throughout the entire blood supply) and the room would go similarly silent.
Septicemia (Sepsis) was what the doctor would call it, but laypeople would whisper to friends "blood-poisoning" , just we tend today to whisper "the doctor says the cancer is all through the body".
While we are correct to say that cancer spreading throughout the body (ie a systemic cancer rather than a localized tumour) is deadly and will directly kill us, our concept of what blood poisoning actually means is only half accurate at best.
It is correct that a bacteria infection flourishing in the blood will spread through out the body (is now a systemic disease) but the bacteria will not directly kill us - not by their "poisons" or their physical actions.
Rather it is that our body overreacts to any massive (systemic) assault upon it - not just to systemic bacterial infections - and it is the body's immune defenses' overreaction that kills us in sepsis.
The 1930s - modernist - mindset thought everything humans did - including our immune system - was marvellous beyond words and simply much preferred to blame those nasty little devils, the bacteria.
Until Sulfa drugs came along, nothing but God's will and dumb luck could prevent sepsis from ending in death.
The arrival of the sulfa drugs had meant all sides in WWII went to war a bit more confident that infection deaths would be much reduced on and off the battlefield.
So, despite the war between them, both the Allies and the Axis went on investigating tens of thousands of sulfa drugs, publicly* patented thousands of them and seriously trying hundreds of them on animals and humans.
*Yes, even in wartime - on both sides ! A notable contrast with the Allied secrecy on DDT and penicillin.
The new sulfa drugs of 1940-1941 tended to be less toxic and more effective than the slightly older ones - some even treated diseases originally thought beyond the reach of sulfa.
How could life ever get much better than this ?
But a year is a very long time in infectious disease treatment when practised massively and on a global basis.
By late1942, the sulfas were in a dire crisis.
Two American chemists, Roblin and Bell- who had helped invent the latest in the sulfa wonder drugs - had just published a convincing chemical explanation for their claim that the sulfa molecule (whatever its other medical uses) would no longer produce any new antibacterial drugs.
Seventy five years on, their claim has stood the test of time.
Typically the popular media (Newsweek, September 21st 1942, for example) played Roblin and Bell's research as a good news story - saying that now chemists could tell if a drug would work, before actually assembling it in the test tube.
But frontline chemists in the sulfa-synthesizing business could not help but hear it as a death knell.
The sulfas had other problems.
A few strains of bacteria had always and instantly shown a resistance to their bacterial action. But now the numbers of strains so displaying resistance had exploded in numbers and their resistance was more potent.
The first human response was to up the dosages to overcome the resistance.
The sulfa drugs had always been moderately toxic even at low dosages and required attention to detail in monitoring their use.
But now heavy dosages and careless doctor and nursing care was leading to needless deaths from the drug itself.
More thoughtful doctors faced a horrible choice : too big and too long a sulfa treatment might kill or permanently damage the patient, but without it , the patient was almost certain to die from sepsis.
They jungled frantically, trying different sulfas as well as backing them off for a while and then returning to them.
This disaster in the sulfa treatment of systemic infections was effecting military hospitals as least as hard as civilian hospitals.
The dirty little secret of war wound medicine is that soldiers rarely die from localized infections, anymore than they do in civilian life.
Soldiers die all the time from massive wounds - as do civilians - but rarely is the fact that the wound is also locally infected the critical factor in their death.
But if any sized wound permits the infection to spread to the blood - then soldiers do die from the indirect result of a wound that was originally just locally infected.
Just as well then that the local curing of local wounds was largely irrelevant to life survival.
Because the sulfas were proving to be totally useless in curing local wound infections. In 1940, two British researchers, Fildes and Woods, had offered up an explanation for how sulfa works (that it is mistaken for a vital food bacteria needs) that has also stood the test of time for 75 years.
Their research also explained why sulfa sometimes didn't work even if the bacterial strain wasn't resistant to it.
If bacterial lesion had lots of the real food around, enough bacteria ate it, instead of the useless sulfa lookalike, to keep the infection going.
Wounds - badly tended war wounds in particular - had lots of that food provided by dead and dying flesh.
So no new sulfas on the way - ever , the ones now in use were proving to be either useless, toxic or increasingly resisted by more and more bacteria.
Today,at any one time, we prefer to use about a dozen different drugs to fight serious infections.
But also we have about one hundred we could use - including the sulfas - if the current dozen all suddenly proved useless.
More importantly, these one hundred represent many different classes of drugs - never is any one bacteria infection resistant to all of them.
These discarded drugs are both more toxic or less effective than those in preferred use, but if death by sepsis is the alternative, even a highly toxic drug is the better - more moral - choice.
But the sulfas were the one and only class of drugs in use in 1942 against systemic life threatening infection ; they all shared the same good and bad features, all shared the same fate.
So it appeared that inevitable death by blood poisoning , for both military personnel and civilians, was on its way back.
Unless .......penicillin was put into serious mass production.
But in 1942, both the British and American medical elites had already decided that penicillin was to be kept as secret as possible and used only as a weapon of war - used only to cure our side's wounded on the QT, so no one else would pick up on it.
Letting civilians have it and above all letting civilian newspapers chatter on about miracle cures would only alter the enemy into making their own penicillin and the Allied military advantage would be gone.
Powerful figures in Britain and America decided that wasn't about to happen.
But in the Fall of 1942, one man realized that if penicillin was now the only thing between blood poisoning death and a nice long life, he would have to up his own ante in this relentless game of chicken.
So that Fall, Dr Henry Dawson stole his first supply of government-issued penicillin and put it to work saving lives from systemic SBE disease , again against strict government orders to let the SBE patients die.
By his reckoning, if the Allies could militarize penicillin, there seemed no reason why one - dying - doctor couldn't un-militarize it back again......
It is a pity that so many of us,supposedly more sophisticated, humans have been less discomforted about the event ever since.
Most of us - at least in the Allied West - would strongly reject the idea that this totally unnecessary mass famine was a war crime and and a sin of uncaring omission.
To ease our own consciences, we much prefer to limit our definition of war crimes to sins of commission, done by obvious evil-doers : the direct shooting, gassing or bayoneting of civilians as at Nanking, the Katyn Forest or at Auschwitz.
But it is not enough to save "oops -sorry !" when bombs we intend for rail yards or oil refineries happen to fall upon 250,000 soon-to-be dead civilians in occupied countries - not if we also clearly know that most of our bombs always fall widely off target.
Claiming that anything and everything is justified if our intent (to defeat Hitler) is good is not a moral claim with legs.
It puts one to mind of the claims of George W Bush that he just had to suspend civil liberties in America ----- in order to bring them instead to the oppressed of the Middle East !
We must always demonstrate extremely due care when we kill some in an effort to save others : clearly seeking to see if there are not other ways to defeat evil without killing so many of the innocent.
Famine , fortunately, was not general throughout the Allied and Neutral world, between 1939-1945.
But many (powerless) people needlessly went more hungry than they had to , in many of the Allied-controlled colonies.
But if Allied famine had been widespread and prolonged - caused perhaps by normally reoccurring weather disasters adding to uncaring imperial government mis-management - would it have been moral to continue to treat DDT as a war secret and deny its use to civilians, to reduce additional loss of food to insect pests ?
The militarizing of wartime DDT thus escaped - just - being another war crime of uncaring omission.
But there are more uncaring crimes of omission in the Allied closet.
In 1940-1941, several years into WWII, the new class of sulfa drugs which had emerged only 5 years earlier, seemed a gift that just kept on giving.
Today when the doctor comes in with the test results and says "I'm very afraid it appears that the cancer has metastasized" , the room gets very still as patient, family and nursing personnel absorb the grim news.
In the years before sulfa and antibiotics, people rarely lived to an age where they could learn that their original primary (localized) cancer tumour had spread throughout their body and that their chances of survival were now slim.
Instead what they feared was something not un-similiar happening with an infection that had originally been localized to one lesion , something most bodies, and good nursing care, could eventually fight off on its own.
Now in came the doctor with the blood tests (indicating colonies of bacteria were thick throughout the entire blood supply) and the room would go similarly silent.
Septicemia (Sepsis) was what the doctor would call it, but laypeople would whisper to friends "blood-poisoning" , just we tend today to whisper "the doctor says the cancer is all through the body".
While we are correct to say that cancer spreading throughout the body (ie a systemic cancer rather than a localized tumour) is deadly and will directly kill us, our concept of what blood poisoning actually means is only half accurate at best.
It is correct that a bacteria infection flourishing in the blood will spread through out the body (is now a systemic disease) but the bacteria will not directly kill us - not by their "poisons" or their physical actions.
Rather it is that our body overreacts to any massive (systemic) assault upon it - not just to systemic bacterial infections - and it is the body's immune defenses' overreaction that kills us in sepsis.
The 1930s - modernist - mindset thought everything humans did - including our immune system - was marvellous beyond words and simply much preferred to blame those nasty little devils, the bacteria.
Until Sulfa drugs came along, nothing but God's will and dumb luck could prevent sepsis from ending in death.
The arrival of the sulfa drugs had meant all sides in WWII went to war a bit more confident that infection deaths would be much reduced on and off the battlefield.
So, despite the war between them, both the Allies and the Axis went on investigating tens of thousands of sulfa drugs, publicly* patented thousands of them and seriously trying hundreds of them on animals and humans.
*Yes, even in wartime - on both sides ! A notable contrast with the Allied secrecy on DDT and penicillin.
The new sulfa drugs of 1940-1941 tended to be less toxic and more effective than the slightly older ones - some even treated diseases originally thought beyond the reach of sulfa.
How could life ever get much better than this ?
But a year is a very long time in infectious disease treatment when practised massively and on a global basis.
By late1942, the sulfas were in a dire crisis.
Two American chemists, Roblin and Bell- who had helped invent the latest in the sulfa wonder drugs - had just published a convincing chemical explanation for their claim that the sulfa molecule (whatever its other medical uses) would no longer produce any new antibacterial drugs.
Seventy five years on, their claim has stood the test of time.
Typically the popular media (Newsweek, September 21st 1942, for example) played Roblin and Bell's research as a good news story - saying that now chemists could tell if a drug would work, before actually assembling it in the test tube.
But frontline chemists in the sulfa-synthesizing business could not help but hear it as a death knell.
The sulfas had other problems.
A few strains of bacteria had always and instantly shown a resistance to their bacterial action. But now the numbers of strains so displaying resistance had exploded in numbers and their resistance was more potent.
The first human response was to up the dosages to overcome the resistance.
The sulfa drugs had always been moderately toxic even at low dosages and required attention to detail in monitoring their use.
But now heavy dosages and careless doctor and nursing care was leading to needless deaths from the drug itself.
More thoughtful doctors faced a horrible choice : too big and too long a sulfa treatment might kill or permanently damage the patient, but without it , the patient was almost certain to die from sepsis.
They jungled frantically, trying different sulfas as well as backing them off for a while and then returning to them.
This disaster in the sulfa treatment of systemic infections was effecting military hospitals as least as hard as civilian hospitals.
The dirty little secret of war wound medicine is that soldiers rarely die from localized infections, anymore than they do in civilian life.
Soldiers die all the time from massive wounds - as do civilians - but rarely is the fact that the wound is also locally infected the critical factor in their death.
But if any sized wound permits the infection to spread to the blood - then soldiers do die from the indirect result of a wound that was originally just locally infected.
Just as well then that the local curing of local wounds was largely irrelevant to life survival.
Because the sulfas were proving to be totally useless in curing local wound infections. In 1940, two British researchers, Fildes and Woods, had offered up an explanation for how sulfa works (that it is mistaken for a vital food bacteria needs) that has also stood the test of time for 75 years.
Their research also explained why sulfa sometimes didn't work even if the bacterial strain wasn't resistant to it.
If bacterial lesion had lots of the real food around, enough bacteria ate it, instead of the useless sulfa lookalike, to keep the infection going.
Wounds - badly tended war wounds in particular - had lots of that food provided by dead and dying flesh.
So no new sulfas on the way - ever , the ones now in use were proving to be either useless, toxic or increasingly resisted by more and more bacteria.
Today,at any one time, we prefer to use about a dozen different drugs to fight serious infections.
But also we have about one hundred we could use - including the sulfas - if the current dozen all suddenly proved useless.
More importantly, these one hundred represent many different classes of drugs - never is any one bacteria infection resistant to all of them.
These discarded drugs are both more toxic or less effective than those in preferred use, but if death by sepsis is the alternative, even a highly toxic drug is the better - more moral - choice.
But the sulfas were the one and only class of drugs in use in 1942 against systemic life threatening infection ; they all shared the same good and bad features, all shared the same fate.
So it appeared that inevitable death by blood poisoning , for both military personnel and civilians, was on its way back.
Unless .......penicillin was put into serious mass production.
But in 1942, both the British and American medical elites had already decided that penicillin was to be kept as secret as possible and used only as a weapon of war - used only to cure our side's wounded on the QT, so no one else would pick up on it.
Letting civilians have it and above all letting civilian newspapers chatter on about miracle cures would only alter the enemy into making their own penicillin and the Allied military advantage would be gone.
Powerful figures in Britain and America decided that wasn't about to happen.
But in the Fall of 1942, one man realized that if penicillin was now the only thing between blood poisoning death and a nice long life, he would have to up his own ante in this relentless game of chicken.
So that Fall, Dr Henry Dawson stole his first supply of government-issued penicillin and put it to work saving lives from systemic SBE disease , again against strict government orders to let the SBE patients die.
By his reckoning, if the Allies could militarize penicillin, there seemed no reason why one - dying - doctor couldn't un-militarize it back again......
Monday, March 25, 2013
1940 Penicillin : localized Gas Gangrene or systemic SBE ?
Within days of reading war-dodger Howard Florey's published conclusion that the as-yet-unproven penicillin was particularly suited to the military's most feared infection, gas gangrene, war-hero Henry Dawson defiantly decided - by pointed contrast - that penicillin was particularly well suited to defeat the ultimate in non-military infections, deadly subacute bacterial endocarditis, SBE.
The timing of Dawson's decision - during the most critical days of the expected Invasion of Britain - only heighten this highly unusual contrast between how we expect war-heroes and war-dodgers to behave and how these two examples actually did behave.
Florey had declined to serve his country when he was young but now was very eager to aid it (as a draft-proof middle ager) by steering the new penicillin towards use as as a local antiseptic for gas gangrene infections in frontline casualty tents.
For centuries, gas gangrene infections were the most dreaded and also the most uniquely wartime forms of death (rarely causing death in peacetime).
Any talk of the possibility of finally ending gas gangrene's terrors was acutely pitched to catch the ears of war's political, military and medical leadership.
By contrast, when on the day of America's first peacetime Draft Registration, a day dedicated to locating all of America's 1A youth, Dawson choose to instead try and save the lives of two SBE sufferers, one Black and one Jewish, he was focused on the most 4F imaginable of the unwanted 4Fs.
For no nation's military , no matter how hard pressed for manpower, was likely to regard SBEs as more than just a particularly costly burden for a wartime economy to bear.
It usually hit young adults , the prime category for draft boards and munition factories, but no matter what modern medicine threw at it, it always ended after months of expensive effort with the inevitable death of the patient.
In that Fall of 1940, the Medical School at Columbia University, which employed Dawson, had moved to reduce its offerings in Social medicine and up its offerings in War medicine, in response to the battle for civilization not taking place over the skies of Britain.
It certainly had no cause to expect any complaints from professor Dawson, he of all its employees.
He was, after all, from a Canadian family of five brothers, all who volunteered to fight in WWI, all who were wounded in the front lines - one who had paid the ultimate price and others who got medals for bravery and leadership under fire.
Dawson likely had more front line experience - in the medical corp, the infantry and in artillery - than any one else in the Medical School.
When he wasn't serving in hospitals dealing with wounded soldiers, he was in military hospitals himself as a patient - fighting off life-threatening infected war wounds he himself received.
Surely such a patriot and such a veteran of battlefront infections saw the sense on Howard Florey's proposal to focus penicillin research on battlefront wound infections and to agree with his university's decision to focus on war related medical research ?
But clearly he did not - and the mystery is to account for why he did not - but instead, precisely and perversely, did exactly the opposite.
Penicillin did not, in the end, reduce deaths due to gas gangrene - in fact penicillin pioneer ( and WWI veteran) RJV Pulvertaft found that the evidence suggested that the percentage of gas gangrene sufferers who died actually went up in WWII , compared to the results obtained in the last years of the previous war !
By contrast, in the end, penicillin proved to be the best medicine ever seen to stop deadly systemic (body-wide) infections like SBE and blood-poisoning.
Based on just the evidence, part of the mystery might therefore seemed to solve itself: the modest Dawson was simply a far better scientist than the very pushy and ambitious, but ultimately plodding, Florey.
But Dawson was also extremely patriotic in ways that Florey couldn't begin to imagine and we still must explain why he felt that his best way to personally aid the war effort was to come to the aid of Life's weakest members.
Saint Peter had only denied Christ's pleas three times, but between 1931 and 1941, America had denied pleas for help from smaller, weaker countries under attack over two dozen times, only deciding
to put the Greatest Generation Ever to work fighting the only Good War, after it itself was attacked.
Helping Life's weakest members is all very nice in theory said America - but what in the hell does it have to do with fighting WWII - which was all about one's own naked self interest ?
Perhaps Dawson was merely confused - was still fighting WWI - was still fighting for poor bleeding little Belgium.
Perhaps....
The timing of Dawson's decision - during the most critical days of the expected Invasion of Britain - only heighten this highly unusual contrast between how we expect war-heroes and war-dodgers to behave and how these two examples actually did behave.
Florey had declined to serve his country when he was young but now was very eager to aid it (as a draft-proof middle ager) by steering the new penicillin towards use as as a local antiseptic for gas gangrene infections in frontline casualty tents.
For centuries, gas gangrene infections were the most dreaded and also the most uniquely wartime forms of death (rarely causing death in peacetime).
Any talk of the possibility of finally ending gas gangrene's terrors was acutely pitched to catch the ears of war's political, military and medical leadership.
By contrast, when on the day of America's first peacetime Draft Registration, a day dedicated to locating all of America's 1A youth, Dawson choose to instead try and save the lives of two SBE sufferers, one Black and one Jewish, he was focused on the most 4F imaginable of the unwanted 4Fs.
The most 4F of all the 4Fs : the SBEs
For no nation's military , no matter how hard pressed for manpower, was likely to regard SBEs as more than just a particularly costly burden for a wartime economy to bear.
It usually hit young adults , the prime category for draft boards and munition factories, but no matter what modern medicine threw at it, it always ended after months of expensive effort with the inevitable death of the patient.
In that Fall of 1940, the Medical School at Columbia University, which employed Dawson, had moved to reduce its offerings in Social medicine and up its offerings in War medicine, in response to the battle for civilization not taking place over the skies of Britain.
It certainly had no cause to expect any complaints from professor Dawson, he of all its employees.
He was, after all, from a Canadian family of five brothers, all who volunteered to fight in WWI, all who were wounded in the front lines - one who had paid the ultimate price and others who got medals for bravery and leadership under fire.
Dawson likely had more front line experience - in the medical corp, the infantry and in artillery - than any one else in the Medical School.
When he wasn't serving in hospitals dealing with wounded soldiers, he was in military hospitals himself as a patient - fighting off life-threatening infected war wounds he himself received.
Surely such a patriot and such a veteran of battlefront infections saw the sense on Howard Florey's proposal to focus penicillin research on battlefront wound infections and to agree with his university's decision to focus on war related medical research ?
But clearly he did not - and the mystery is to account for why he did not - but instead, precisely and perversely, did exactly the opposite.
Penicillin did not, in the end, reduce deaths due to gas gangrene - in fact penicillin pioneer ( and WWI veteran) RJV Pulvertaft found that the evidence suggested that the percentage of gas gangrene sufferers who died actually went up in WWII , compared to the results obtained in the last years of the previous war !
By contrast, in the end, penicillin proved to be the best medicine ever seen to stop deadly systemic (body-wide) infections like SBE and blood-poisoning.
Explaining the mystery and the paradox
Based on just the evidence, part of the mystery might therefore seemed to solve itself: the modest Dawson was simply a far better scientist than the very pushy and ambitious, but ultimately plodding, Florey.
But Dawson was also extremely patriotic in ways that Florey couldn't begin to imagine and we still must explain why he felt that his best way to personally aid the war effort was to come to the aid of Life's weakest members.
Saint Peter had only denied Christ's pleas three times, but between 1931 and 1941, America had denied pleas for help from smaller, weaker countries under attack over two dozen times, only deciding
to put the Greatest Generation Ever to work fighting the only Good War, after it itself was attacked.
Helping Life's weakest members is all very nice in theory said America - but what in the hell does it have to do with fighting WWII - which was all about one's own naked self interest ?
Perhaps Dawson was merely confused - was still fighting WWI - was still fighting for poor bleeding little Belgium.
Perhaps....
Friday, March 15, 2013
the "THEATRE" of war : 1939-1945
WWII started out on a note of uplift in 1939, with its three actors (Scientific Racism, Scientific Capitalism and Scientific Socialism) all united in eating the scenery but ended in farce in 1945, as the scenery proceeded to eat the three actors.
These actors can't be said to lack ambition.
Japan and Germany agreed to divide the world between them, planning over the course of a few years to double their size every three months until they had grown from roughly 100,000 square miles in size into giants 100 million square miles in size.
These were to be formal empires, ruled directly from Berlin and Tokyo.
Washington and Moscow planned, instead, just informal empires , ruling indirectly, but also saw no reason to stop at sharing the globe with anyone : an entirely capitalist or communist world would do nicely.
But in all these variegated planned empires , their shared gods would at least be a constant : all praise Newton, Dalton and Darwin !
In Physics, Newtonian ballatics still held total sway : for Nordenized bombs , neither snow,rain,heat nor the gloom of night would stay these couriers of death from their anointed round : enemy barrels would soon be in right some pickle.
In Chemistry, Dalton's simple adding together of elemental atoms had been shown, mostly by German chemists, as able to create anything and everything.
Hitler, among others, was reassured that no more would hunger be a restraint on war, with all the resulting disease and government-toppling food riots. "No bread ? Why don't they just eat food pills ?"
In Biology, all three actors believed in negative and positive eugenics, with characteristic national differences in its actual application.
In Germany, quoting from the Old Testament of Darwin, the matter was strictly genetic, nature not nuture.
Certain races, bound by blood, were irredeemable and to be terminated negatively.
Other races were more plastic and could be molded positively into becoming the new Aryan superman.
Stalin much preferred the New Testament of Darwin , the Lamarck side of the old man , with certain classes , bound by their wealth and education, as irredeemable and to be terminated.
But the workers were more plastic and could made into the new socialist supermen.
America and most of the rest of the modern nations took a bit from both of these extreme positions and saw it was individuals within their nations that were irredeemable , mostly of one class admitably but in that class because of their genetic nature.
Flash forward to the summer of 1945, six long year later.
The actual course of the war hadn't gone exactly to any of the three actors' plans but instead had rather meandered , with Norden-like precision, widely and wildly all over the map.
The Norden bombsight, that apogee of Newtonian ballistic precision, had been proven so inaccurate thanks to recalcitrant Nature, that the war only truly ended in August when a massive fire bomb was dropped, out of a bomber named after someone's mother, and burned thousands of babies to death.
Now as long as your bombsight was accurate enough to be sure of hitting the right country, (something that bomber pilots from all combatant nations failed to get right at times), it was good enough : the A-bomb became Physics' reluctant Plan B.
And that summer all over the world, from Vietnam to the Netherlands, people were still looking up to the skies still hoping to see the long promised food pills drop out of the butterfly bombers like modern day manna.
Most dead people in this war, like most wars, still ended up dying of hunger and its diseases : Nature never bites back more violently that in the human stomach.
But no food pills. In fact, a few thousand chemists with PhDs and endless pots of money had even failed to assemble a few of Dalton's atoms into tiny molecules only 300 daltons in size.
So, in the end, penicillin and quinine still had to be made by dumb nature : and Oxford University's most refined, dying, were saved by Pfizer's Brooklyn Crude, Chemistry's reluctant Plan B.
In fact, Oxford's most refined and least refined were both saved indifferently by Pfizer's and Glaxo's medicine, a sort of chemical Beveridge Report in action.
In July, the voters of Britain, having had a chance to look over what Buchenwald and Beveridge had offered as a solution to the problem of the weak and the poor , had voted overwhelmingly for Beveridge, Biology's reluctant Plan B.
Because even in race-above-all Germany, irredeemable races were soon found to be redeemable after all, as farming and mining slaves , to keep Germans from starving and freezing to death.
Tens of millions of non-Germans filled every corner of nation that had started a war in an effort to purify itself all foreigners and all useless mouths.
Have I proven that irony and war are made for each other....
These actors can't be said to lack ambition.
Japan and Germany agreed to divide the world between them, planning over the course of a few years to double their size every three months until they had grown from roughly 100,000 square miles in size into giants 100 million square miles in size.
(!!!!!!)
These were to be formal empires, ruled directly from Berlin and Tokyo.
Washington and Moscow planned, instead, just informal empires , ruling indirectly, but also saw no reason to stop at sharing the globe with anyone : an entirely capitalist or communist world would do nicely.
But in all these variegated planned empires , their shared gods would at least be a constant : all praise Newton, Dalton and Darwin !
In Physics, Newtonian ballatics still held total sway : for Nordenized bombs , neither snow,rain,heat nor the gloom of night would stay these couriers of death from their anointed round : enemy barrels would soon be in right some pickle.
In Chemistry, Dalton's simple adding together of elemental atoms had been shown, mostly by German chemists, as able to create anything and everything.
Hitler, among others, was reassured that no more would hunger be a restraint on war, with all the resulting disease and government-toppling food riots. "No bread ? Why don't they just eat food pills ?"
In Biology, all three actors believed in negative and positive eugenics, with characteristic national differences in its actual application.
In Germany, quoting from the Old Testament of Darwin, the matter was strictly genetic, nature not nuture.
Certain races, bound by blood, were irredeemable and to be terminated negatively.
Other races were more plastic and could be molded positively into becoming the new Aryan superman.
Stalin much preferred the New Testament of Darwin , the Lamarck side of the old man , with certain classes , bound by their wealth and education, as irredeemable and to be terminated.
But the workers were more plastic and could made into the new socialist supermen.
America and most of the rest of the modern nations took a bit from both of these extreme positions and saw it was individuals within their nations that were irredeemable , mostly of one class admitably but in that class because of their genetic nature.
Flash forward to the summer of 1945, six long year later.
The actual course of the war hadn't gone exactly to any of the three actors' plans but instead had rather meandered , with Norden-like precision, widely and wildly all over the map.
The Norden bombsight, that apogee of Newtonian ballistic precision, had been proven so inaccurate thanks to recalcitrant Nature, that the war only truly ended in August when a massive fire bomb was dropped, out of a bomber named after someone's mother, and burned thousands of babies to death.
Now as long as your bombsight was accurate enough to be sure of hitting the right country, (something that bomber pilots from all combatant nations failed to get right at times), it was good enough : the A-bomb became Physics' reluctant Plan B.
And that summer all over the world, from Vietnam to the Netherlands, people were still looking up to the skies still hoping to see the long promised food pills drop out of the butterfly bombers like modern day manna.
Most dead people in this war, like most wars, still ended up dying of hunger and its diseases : Nature never bites back more violently that in the human stomach.
But no food pills. In fact, a few thousand chemists with PhDs and endless pots of money had even failed to assemble a few of Dalton's atoms into tiny molecules only 300 daltons in size.
So, in the end, penicillin and quinine still had to be made by dumb nature : and Oxford University's most refined, dying, were saved by Pfizer's Brooklyn Crude, Chemistry's reluctant Plan B.
In fact, Oxford's most refined and least refined were both saved indifferently by Pfizer's and Glaxo's medicine, a sort of chemical Beveridge Report in action.
In July, the voters of Britain, having had a chance to look over what Buchenwald and Beveridge had offered as a solution to the problem of the weak and the poor , had voted overwhelmingly for Beveridge, Biology's reluctant Plan B.
Because even in race-above-all Germany, irredeemable races were soon found to be redeemable after all, as farming and mining slaves , to keep Germans from starving and freezing to death.
Tens of millions of non-Germans filled every corner of nation that had started a war in an effort to purify itself all foreigners and all useless mouths.
Have I proven that irony and war are made for each other....
Saturday, March 9, 2013
MODERNITY as just one vast marketing ploy
At its very base base, Modernity consists of convincing other people (call 'em customers or colonies, tis the same) that you are smart (progressive/a professional scientist) and they are stupid (backward/laypeople).
Modernity and Imperialism after all grew up together and declined together: post-modernity and de-colonization being pretty much one and the same thing.
The 1920s trend to replace mom's homemade bread with industrialized white bread and Britain's attempt to create imperialized/militarized penicillin during WWII are two shades of the same big lie.
In most rural Nova Scotia farmhouses until recently, the biggest and cosiest room in the house was the kitchen where the big wood stove was the entire house's only form of heat.
There the kids would gather after school - by necessity in winter - to keep warm and watch mom prepare and then cook biscuits ,made from flour and water, that the kids immediately consumed. Artificial chemical preservatives need hardly enter such an immediate process.
But starting in the 1920s, bread manufacturers and their clever Goebbels of Madison Avenue successfully convince a new generation of Moms - and kids - that mom's homemade bread was unsafe and unhygenic.
Scientists in white gowns in white factories could put the right sort of chemicals in bread to kill all germs - and not so incidentially - allow factory bread to be shipped a thousand miles across a nation, sit about for weeks and still not grow mold before being consumed.
Germs were destroyed - as were local bakeries.
All the moms in the Nova Scotia rural hinterland became an internal colony, as she no longer baked bread to compete with Ben's , the huge breadmaker in the imperial metropolitan centre of Halifax.
Instead she focused on cutting fish at the local fishplant and with her earnings now bought Ben's fluffy white stuff.
When I was a kid, the local children were embarrassed to have to bring delicious homemade bread and baked-beans sandwiches to school and would trade it for sandwiches of Ben's bread and Kraft sandwich spread.
Howard Florey was the son of an industrialist and knew all there was to know about how modernity cum industrialization cum imperialism worked.
He was always most reluctant to ever give anyone some of his penicillium spores (usually sending rubbishy mutant spores unlikely to produce penicillin, if he was pushed to respond conventionally as one scientist to another scientist's request for some of the material mentioned in his published article.)
By contrast, he was almost willing to be seen forcing some of his Oxford Standard dried penicillin powder upon you , so as to prove he had made dry penicillin first and had set down the standard for others to follow.
He was actually doing nothing that Britain's political and industrial elite hadn't already worked out for themselves long before.
Give a colonist a vial of British-made penicillin and he could save a life for a day but then he'd need to trade cheap Indian cotton for expensive British penicillin, forever, if he hoped to go on saving Indian lives.
"Give a man a fish" et al, in a new guise.
By contrast, Robert Pulvertaft and Nancy Atkinson had different plans.
Howard Florey visited both and publicly - reluctantly - praised both, but was really was privately furious at both.
Pulvertaft in Cairo, Egypt had used Florey-made and British industry-made dry penicillin powder but they often arrived in pretty bad shape - unlike a fungi spore they didn't really survive travel well.
But Pulvertaft had also secretly got a sample of Fleming's penicillium spores mailed to him from a pal at Wellcome Labs in London - and as spores do - they traveled perfectly well indeed and started into making penicillin right away.
He was, like a rural Nova Scotian mom, making homemade penicillin in front of the patients to be consumed on the spot - and so like mom, didn't really need a whole lot of fancy high tech chemistry to render his penicillin safe.
His patients were wounded soldiers in his large base hospital and the liquid penicillin was barely produced by the penicillium spores in the hospital lab than it was coursing through the veins of the grateful soldiers : drying and chemical preservatives hardly entered into this cosy setup.
And he freely began to teach the local natives and other military units how to make their own penicillin with spores of his.
His efforts made Florey and Whitehall very angry indeed --- Britain hoped, once it had synthesized penicillin , to see a huge trade in penicillin in exchange for Egyptian cotton etc.
Nancy Atkinson because she was located in Adelaide Australia, Florey's home town, had his number and knew of his peculiar - grasping - personality.
She avoided approaching Florey, got her penicillin from Fleming himself and soon got a local Adelaide firm to make local penicillin and gave some spores to Duhig in Brisbane so he too could goose up the tardy government approach to providing enough penicillin for civilian as well as soldier.
Florey was very angry that he - as the long time away "local boy" - hadn't been invited in to help in Australia. Maybe his selfish and secretive attitude had something to do with it ?
I have said that the biggest reason for the long delay in providing wartime penicillin to those dying for lack of it was Florey, Flemings and AN Richards' obsession with weaponizing it.
By this I meant they rejected Pulvertaft and Duhig's implicit argument that penicillin was best used systemically (injected into the entire body) for life-threatening blood poisoning because - technically, as a drug - that is where it worked best.
And that this being the case, life-threatening blood poisoning cases were almost always sent to the big hospitals with a big enough lab and staff to make the penicillin,on the spot, for the steady stream of blood poisoning cases coming in.
There was no need to waste time making penicillin a stable enough material to send from a central factory to store in regional warehouses until traveling detail salesmen had sold it in small amounts to individual GPs.
Disagreeing strenuously, Florey, Fleming, Richards et al felt the greatest war need was for a local antiseptic to be poured or sprinkled inside wounds on the battlefield , soon as a soldier was wounded.
Let me say that more careful research,after the war,( including some by Pulvertaft himself) concluded this was an artificial problem - and that into this square artificial hole both the round sulfa and round wartime penicillin were reluctantly pushed - both failing , but for different reasons.
But sulfa and penicillin did save many lives, but not on the battlefield, but rather back in the base hospital, doing what they did best - reach into every part of the body and killing bacteria out in the open.
Killing bacteria in hard to get to places remained (and remains) hard to do - but if these bacteria did not get into the blood stream, they were almost never fatal in and of themselves.
But let us now combine weaponized penicillin with imperialized penicillin : because a dry , stable, complicatedly mass produced penicillin also suited the post war aims of Britain : to profitably sell high tech medicine to nations less advanced than European ones.
Convincing the lesser breeds that homemade (really made by skilled microbiologists in big hospital labs) penicillin, like homemade bread, was so un-civilizied , was at least half the battle.....
Modernity and Imperialism after all grew up together and declined together: post-modernity and de-colonization being pretty much one and the same thing.
The 1920s trend to replace mom's homemade bread with industrialized white bread and Britain's attempt to create imperialized/militarized penicillin during WWII are two shades of the same big lie.
In most rural Nova Scotia farmhouses until recently, the biggest and cosiest room in the house was the kitchen where the big wood stove was the entire house's only form of heat.
There the kids would gather after school - by necessity in winter - to keep warm and watch mom prepare and then cook biscuits ,made from flour and water, that the kids immediately consumed. Artificial chemical preservatives need hardly enter such an immediate process.
But starting in the 1920s, bread manufacturers and their clever Goebbels of Madison Avenue successfully convince a new generation of Moms - and kids - that mom's homemade bread was unsafe and unhygenic.
Scientists in white gowns in white factories could put the right sort of chemicals in bread to kill all germs - and not so incidentially - allow factory bread to be shipped a thousand miles across a nation, sit about for weeks and still not grow mold before being consumed.
Germs were destroyed - as were local bakeries.
Re-casting Mom as a lesser breed
All the moms in the Nova Scotia rural hinterland became an internal colony, as she no longer baked bread to compete with Ben's , the huge breadmaker in the imperial metropolitan centre of Halifax.
Instead she focused on cutting fish at the local fishplant and with her earnings now bought Ben's fluffy white stuff.
When I was a kid, the local children were embarrassed to have to bring delicious homemade bread and baked-beans sandwiches to school and would trade it for sandwiches of Ben's bread and Kraft sandwich spread.
Howard Florey was the son of an industrialist and knew all there was to know about how modernity cum industrialization cum imperialism worked.
He was always most reluctant to ever give anyone some of his penicillium spores (usually sending rubbishy mutant spores unlikely to produce penicillin, if he was pushed to respond conventionally as one scientist to another scientist's request for some of the material mentioned in his published article.)
By contrast, he was almost willing to be seen forcing some of his Oxford Standard dried penicillin powder upon you , so as to prove he had made dry penicillin first and had set down the standard for others to follow.
He was actually doing nothing that Britain's political and industrial elite hadn't already worked out for themselves long before.
Give a colonist a vial of British-made penicillin and he could save a life for a day but then he'd need to trade cheap Indian cotton for expensive British penicillin, forever, if he hoped to go on saving Indian lives.
"Give a man a fish" et al, in a new guise.
Enter Pulvertaft, Atkinson and Duhig
Howard Florey visited both and publicly - reluctantly - praised both, but was really was privately furious at both.
Pulvertaft in Cairo, Egypt had used Florey-made and British industry-made dry penicillin powder but they often arrived in pretty bad shape - unlike a fungi spore they didn't really survive travel well.
But Pulvertaft had also secretly got a sample of Fleming's penicillium spores mailed to him from a pal at Wellcome Labs in London - and as spores do - they traveled perfectly well indeed and started into making penicillin right away.
He was, like a rural Nova Scotian mom, making homemade penicillin in front of the patients to be consumed on the spot - and so like mom, didn't really need a whole lot of fancy high tech chemistry to render his penicillin safe.
His patients were wounded soldiers in his large base hospital and the liquid penicillin was barely produced by the penicillium spores in the hospital lab than it was coursing through the veins of the grateful soldiers : drying and chemical preservatives hardly entered into this cosy setup.
And he freely began to teach the local natives and other military units how to make their own penicillin with spores of his.
His efforts made Florey and Whitehall very angry indeed --- Britain hoped, once it had synthesized penicillin , to see a huge trade in penicillin in exchange for Egyptian cotton etc.
Nancy Atkinson because she was located in Adelaide Australia, Florey's home town, had his number and knew of his peculiar - grasping - personality.
She avoided approaching Florey, got her penicillin from Fleming himself and soon got a local Adelaide firm to make local penicillin and gave some spores to Duhig in Brisbane so he too could goose up the tardy government approach to providing enough penicillin for civilian as well as soldier.
Florey was very angry that he - as the long time away "local boy" - hadn't been invited in to help in Australia. Maybe his selfish and secretive attitude had something to do with it ?
I have said that the biggest reason for the long delay in providing wartime penicillin to those dying for lack of it was Florey, Flemings and AN Richards' obsession with weaponizing it.
By this I meant they rejected Pulvertaft and Duhig's implicit argument that penicillin was best used systemically (injected into the entire body) for life-threatening blood poisoning because - technically, as a drug - that is where it worked best.
And that this being the case, life-threatening blood poisoning cases were almost always sent to the big hospitals with a big enough lab and staff to make the penicillin,on the spot, for the steady stream of blood poisoning cases coming in.
There was no need to waste time making penicillin a stable enough material to send from a central factory to store in regional warehouses until traveling detail salesmen had sold it in small amounts to individual GPs.
Disagreeing strenuously, Florey, Fleming, Richards et al felt the greatest war need was for a local antiseptic to be poured or sprinkled inside wounds on the battlefield , soon as a soldier was wounded.
Let me say that more careful research,after the war,( including some by Pulvertaft himself) concluded this was an artificial problem - and that into this square artificial hole both the round sulfa and round wartime penicillin were reluctantly pushed - both failing , but for different reasons.
But sulfa and penicillin did save many lives, but not on the battlefield, but rather back in the base hospital, doing what they did best - reach into every part of the body and killing bacteria out in the open.
Killing bacteria in hard to get to places remained (and remains) hard to do - but if these bacteria did not get into the blood stream, they were almost never fatal in and of themselves.
Weaponized penicillin was imperialized penicillin
But let us now combine weaponized penicillin with imperialized penicillin : because a dry , stable, complicatedly mass produced penicillin also suited the post war aims of Britain : to profitably sell high tech medicine to nations less advanced than European ones.
Convincing the lesser breeds that homemade (really made by skilled microbiologists in big hospital labs) penicillin, like homemade bread, was so un-civilizied , was at least half the battle.....
Thursday, March 7, 2013
Needed: a political - not Technological/Whig - history of wartime penicillin
Almost all histories of penicillin have but one plot : the dramatic, last minute come-from-behind victory of the little guy, HIGH TECH MAN, over the vast evil forces of Nature and fungi spores.
In pointed fact, the technical problems of producing life-saving penicillin was solved very quickly, basically done by one or two individuals with remarkably low level technology, by the Fall of 1941.
But even the most affluent members of the world could not reliably access life-saving penicillin for another five years and it still remains important to discover why.
And most of the world's poor couldn't access it for many more years after that ---- and in fact millions still die worldwide every year because properly prescribed antibiotics are beyond their economic reach.
The delays in delivering life-saving medicine were not technological in nature (the technological difficulties dog ate my penicillin homework) but rather political --- and ultimately moral.
It is not a coincidence that the only one of the four English speaking countries ( the four that produced 99% of WWII's penicillin) that was dominated by a Conservative Party also did by far the worst wartime job in getting penicillin to their dying civilians --- for whom penicillin was their only hope of survival.
I refer to Winston Churchill's UK government.
Penicillin rationing from 1942 onward, in all the Allied nations, was a deliberate choice made by government bureaucrats and politicians and company CEOs - not something imposed upon them from without by sheer technological necessity.
To still deny that - 75 years after the events and in light of all our archival knowledge - is to exhibit academic bad faith.
In 1943 that cosy consensus, about rationing penicillin and news about penicillin cures, broke up as some bureaucrats, politicians and CEOs in some countries decided to go all out to produce enough penicillin for everyone - in their own nation and beyond.
Others still much preferred that any spare national cash go to extra weapons and not into building extra penicillin plants.
They did not want to admit the absolute need for a medicine to save the lives of their own civilians , now needlessly dying of infections that the sulfa drugs had once cured.
Today, we have dozens and dozens of alternative antibiotics to suit almost any imaginable life-threatening infection.
But each of the half dozen successful sulfa drugs were best over a different narrow array of diseases - so if a patient had a strain resistant to the sulfa drug best suited to their disease, they generally had nothing left between them and death.
Except penicillin - effective against most all gram positive bacteria and much slower to gain strains resistance to it.
Simply put, diverting money that could have gone to building more penicillin bottle plants into building yet more military weapons instead, meant that Allied civilians died needlessly so more Axis civilians could die from Allied bombs.
Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, but thanks to a deliberate decision made by Winston Churchill, British soldiers were not fighting German soldiers on German soil till 1945 - and if he had had his way, British troops would never have set foot on German soil till after the German surrender.
The lives of Axis and Allied soldiers were spared, the lives of Axis and Allied citizens condemned, by this Churchillian decision.
However, his bomber-led vision for winning the war was probably not the main reason his government rejected building enough bottle penicillin plants in 1943 to supply soldier and citizen alike.
After the release of Beveridge Report in the Fall of 1942 - a report he didn't want his government to publicly release - the idea of his government facilitating the means to give life-saving penicillin to all that needed it seemed to smack of approving of the Beveridge Report.
Penicillin for all civilians needing it seemed the thin edge of a socialist edge.
America's equivalent of the Beveridge Report happened in the mid 1930s under the rubric of calls for more Social Medicine.
That report's main thrust was calling upon governments to actively commit to freeing citizens from freedom of want , particular freedom from want of life-saving medical care.
To Churchill's Conservatives, a government seeing to it that all dying citizens got penicillin would have been as repugnant in peacetime as it was in wartime.
It couldn't politically survive publicly advocating the denial of needed medicine to poorer dying civilians in peacetime, but under the spurious blanket claim of 'military necessity', a government could get away with it in wartime - as the American Republicans and Hitler both found out.
(Hitler only nerved himself to start killing Germany's 'useless mouths' after the war was underway and even appeared to back off as news got out and citizens protested.)
(During WWII, the dominant Republic core of the American medical establishment long denied life-saving penicillin to the mostly poor (aka Democrats) citizens dying of subacute bacterial endocarditis.)
I happen to think that telling the story of the ultimate abundance of wartime penicillin not as a victory over technological challenges but as a battle between different political ideologies is not only truer, but it is almost much more dramatic : a page-turner and good history.....
In pointed fact, the technical problems of producing life-saving penicillin was solved very quickly, basically done by one or two individuals with remarkably low level technology, by the Fall of 1941.
But even the most affluent members of the world could not reliably access life-saving penicillin for another five years and it still remains important to discover why.
And most of the world's poor couldn't access it for many more years after that ---- and in fact millions still die worldwide every year because properly prescribed antibiotics are beyond their economic reach.
The delays in delivering life-saving medicine were not technological in nature (the technological difficulties dog ate my penicillin homework) but rather political --- and ultimately moral.
Conservatives, Republicans & Nazis - and penicillin
It is not a coincidence that the only one of the four English speaking countries ( the four that produced 99% of WWII's penicillin) that was dominated by a Conservative Party also did by far the worst wartime job in getting penicillin to their dying civilians --- for whom penicillin was their only hope of survival.
I refer to Winston Churchill's UK government.
Penicillin rationing from 1942 onward, in all the Allied nations, was a deliberate choice made by government bureaucrats and politicians and company CEOs - not something imposed upon them from without by sheer technological necessity.
Academic 'Bad Faith'
To still deny that - 75 years after the events and in light of all our archival knowledge - is to exhibit academic bad faith.
In 1943 that cosy consensus, about rationing penicillin and news about penicillin cures, broke up as some bureaucrats, politicians and CEOs in some countries decided to go all out to produce enough penicillin for everyone - in their own nation and beyond.
Others still much preferred that any spare national cash go to extra weapons and not into building extra penicillin plants.
They did not want to admit the absolute need for a medicine to save the lives of their own civilians , now needlessly dying of infections that the sulfa drugs had once cured.
Today, we have dozens and dozens of alternative antibiotics to suit almost any imaginable life-threatening infection.
Unheard amid the din of war , the Sulfas started failing bad
But each of the half dozen successful sulfa drugs were best over a different narrow array of diseases - so if a patient had a strain resistant to the sulfa drug best suited to their disease, they generally had nothing left between them and death.
Except penicillin - effective against most all gram positive bacteria and much slower to gain strains resistance to it.
Simply put, diverting money that could have gone to building more penicillin bottle plants into building yet more military weapons instead, meant that Allied civilians died needlessly so more Axis civilians could die from Allied bombs.
Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, but thanks to a deliberate decision made by Winston Churchill, British soldiers were not fighting German soldiers on German soil till 1945 - and if he had had his way, British troops would never have set foot on German soil till after the German surrender.
The lives of Axis and Allied soldiers were spared, the lives of Axis and Allied citizens condemned, by this Churchillian decision.
However, his bomber-led vision for winning the war was probably not the main reason his government rejected building enough bottle penicillin plants in 1943 to supply soldier and citizen alike.
The Beveridge Report and Penicillin
After the release of Beveridge Report in the Fall of 1942 - a report he didn't want his government to publicly release - the idea of his government facilitating the means to give life-saving penicillin to all that needed it seemed to smack of approving of the Beveridge Report.
Penicillin for all civilians needing it seemed the thin edge of a socialist edge.
America's equivalent of the Beveridge Report happened in the mid 1930s under the rubric of calls for more Social Medicine.
That report's main thrust was calling upon governments to actively commit to freeing citizens from freedom of want , particular freedom from want of life-saving medical care.
To Churchill's Conservatives, a government seeing to it that all dying citizens got penicillin would have been as repugnant in peacetime as it was in wartime.
It couldn't politically survive publicly advocating the denial of needed medicine to poorer dying civilians in peacetime, but under the spurious blanket claim of 'military necessity', a government could get away with it in wartime - as the American Republicans and Hitler both found out.
(Hitler only nerved himself to start killing Germany's 'useless mouths' after the war was underway and even appeared to back off as news got out and citizens protested.)
(During WWII, the dominant Republic core of the American medical establishment long denied life-saving penicillin to the mostly poor (aka Democrats) citizens dying of subacute bacterial endocarditis.)
I happen to think that telling the story of the ultimate abundance of wartime penicillin not as a victory over technological challenges but as a battle between different political ideologies is not only truer, but it is almost much more dramatic : a page-turner and good history.....
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
"The Blitz dog ate my homework" and other tired penicillin-related excuses from UK historians
David Edgerton excepted of course -- he hasn't really written on Britain's deliberately pathetic production of penicillin during the war years but he is unlikely to blame it on the Warfare State's "abject poverty" and "The Blitz".
Let's look at "The Blitz" first.
The German bombing of Britain went on for six years, went on all over Britain, killed 60,000, wounded hundreds of thousands, damaged or destroyed hundreds of thousands of buildings but in all this, actually varied greatly in its specific intensity in time, geography and effort.
The actual Blitz, from September 1940 to May 1941, was in all three senses, intense : it went on steadily for nine months and involved the bulk of the German Air Force, and ranged widely over all of Great Britain.
But until the V-1 and V-2 attacks over south east England from June 1944 till the end of the war in May 1945, subsequent raids (ie from May 1941 till June 1944, also the critical period for developing wartime penicillin) were very much smaller in intensity by number of bombers and tons of bombs.
Most consisted of 'tip and run' raids made by single fighter bombers coming in under the radar and bombing ports on the south coast of England.
A commenter on a blog said it perhaps best when he frankly admitted,that while yes he was a kid in Glasgow during the war, he actually didn't really remember the Glasgow Blitz , because it only happened once and it happened many miles away in a working class/industrial part of that large city.
A child in Belfast might have had the same reaction - it had one big heavy raid on one part of the city, albeit with an extraordinary number of casualties because no one really expected the Germans to bother Northern Ireland.
And Oxford was never bombed.
Though it was basically an outer suburb of metropolitan London (and so very close to German airbases in France), with a large car industry and so surely should have been a suitable target on two counts.
Bombing Britain into defeat was really going to be virtually impossible - like Germany and America it simply had too many alternative metropolitan industrial centres, many with large port facilities, and all well connected to each other by an extensive road and rail network.
Thus the very determined effort to squash the huge port of Liverpool into dust was a wasted German effort : Greenock, Cardiff and Belfast , to name but a few west coast ports in Britain , would have quickly taken up the slack in the receiving of vital convoys from North America.
A pre-war decision to build a number of duplicate shadow assembly plants a maximum distance of about a half hour rail, canal or truck trip from the original centre of a critical war industry helped a lot to reduce the impact of even a direct hit on that vital British 'choke point'.
The Germans knew precisely where all the pre-1939 vital factories were and often hit and badly damaged them - but the shadow plants near by were unknown to them and took up the slack.
In addition , ensuring that sub contractors were neither right next to the original plant nor 500 kilometres away but within that convenient half hour circle of travel led to a virtually bomb-proof but economical dispersal of vital war industries.
The chances of anything, anything but a twenty megaton thermo-nuclear bomb, destroying such a sprawling industrial metropolitan area a hundred kilometres by a hundred kilometres square rendered such British efforts Blitz-proof.
The Germans duplicated these dispersement efforts equally successfully, if much too late in the game --- by pointed contrast the Russians and Americans kept with single huge production 'n' assembly plants : but at inland sites they felt safe from WWII's longest ranging bombers.
ICBMs and nuclear bombs rendered all that moot : goodbye Kansas City as a safe place to build bombers in WWIII.
True, the massive size and complexity of shipyards capable of building battleships and aircraft carriers are not so easily moved about and in addition were so expensive that they could only be a few in number --- even for super-rich nations like America.
But when the non-shipbuilding nation of Canada decided to quickly build a whole lot of ships and yet be safe from any bombing raid, it did so by going down-market in technological complexity.
It beat the Germans (and any possible bombing raids) by focusing instead on building very large numbers of a few very simple merchant ship and escort vessel types.
Thus they could be built at any of about five dozen new shipyards all over Canada --- even in Thunder Bay, a few thousand kilometres from the open sea: redundancy safety plus !
The Russians would understand that sort of thinking --- lots of simple weapons win wars just as well as a few ,very sophisticated, weapons do.
My point is that the Blitz, even if it had gotten much worse, could only be an moderate not fundamental restraint on British war efforts.
Britain during WII was a heavily industrialized nation with the vastest empire even seen to supply the raw resources and manpower to back up that industrial power.
If civilian paper was in short supply during the war (and it definitely was), it wasn't because Britain was poor -- it was because all of its pre-war paper supply was still coming in, but was now diverted to supplying all the bumpf an officious war nation's government could churn out !
Britain was a rich enough nation during WWII to divert the cost of building and maintaining of just one extra squadron of Lancaster bombers to the building instead of several more bottle penicillin plants in early 1943 --- but deliberately chose not to.
If one of the Four Freedoms that Churchill's Conservative party was forced to pretend to publicly accept included the freedom from want of life-saving drugs , a point hit home in the Fall of 1942 by the Beveridge Report, his party chose to deny it in practise.
With existing sulfa drugs failing by the minute (due to bacterial resistance) and with a scientific consensus building by the Fall of 1942 that new anti-bacteria sulfas were unlikely to come along, penicillin was becoming the only , the only , hope for civilians or servicemen dying of blood poisoning.
Surely the most vital of all possible freedoms is the freedom from premature death, but the Churchill government cocked its nose at Beveridge and said 'only enough resources will be diverted from bombers to save just our servicemen with bottle penicillin'.
A-Ha, says the UK historian, says he : a-ha !
Bottle penicillin - we had that and the Yanks had deep tank penicillin - that is why we couldn't match the rich, Blitz-less Americans in penicillin production.
Awkward facts intrude - the British did build a pilot deep tank design very early on - with the Americans also willing to license their deep tank technology at firesale prices - but it was Churchill's Conservative minister in charge of the all-powerful MoS, the Ministry of Supply (to the army), that said no.
And deep tank efforts hardly explain the very much better penicillin records of both Canada and Australia - because these two nations, definitely not scientific or industrial powers in the early 1940s, also used only bottle plants and yet did far better in penicillin production than Britain, per capita.
(In population Britain was about 1/3 the GDP and population of America and about about 7x the GDP and population of Australia and 5x the population and GDP of Canada.)
True, that on one hand these Dominions weren't Blitzed like the British.
But on the other hand they had hardly gained their current wealth from homegrown science or industry, unlike Britain.
I count their wartime technical and financial difficulties in producing bottle penicillin as about equal to that of the UK.
What was really lacking in the whole penicillin shortfall crisis, was the moral will to correct it among the one nation in the four led by a Conservative party during WWII.
So, in mid 1945, the UK was producing 30 billion units of penicillin a month, Australia 10 billion, Canada 20 billion and America 600 billion.
To match the Australians per capita, the UK should of been producing 70 billion units a month, to match Canada a 100 billion units and America 200 billion units.
In addition, Britain had not permitted its many colonies to start their own penicillin plants, so the actual shortfall in its ability to save the lives of its civilians and soldiers from the UK and all its colonies was much much bigger than even this stark contrast in effort among the Allies.
By 1946, the penicillin shortfall crisis in Britain was over and it was producing more than enough penicillin for everyone at home and in the colonies and was eager to start exporting to foreign lands.
But that was way too late for Churchill's Conservative party who had been fragged-in-the-back by voter concern over unequal access to necessary medical care and voted for Labour in the July 1945 General Election.
Hitler couldn't defeat Churchill but penicillin (the unequal lack of access to it) had ...
Let's look at "The Blitz" first.
The German bombing of Britain went on for six years, went on all over Britain, killed 60,000, wounded hundreds of thousands, damaged or destroyed hundreds of thousands of buildings but in all this, actually varied greatly in its specific intensity in time, geography and effort.
The actual Blitz, from September 1940 to May 1941, was in all three senses, intense : it went on steadily for nine months and involved the bulk of the German Air Force, and ranged widely over all of Great Britain.
But until the V-1 and V-2 attacks over south east England from June 1944 till the end of the war in May 1945, subsequent raids (ie from May 1941 till June 1944, also the critical period for developing wartime penicillin) were very much smaller in intensity by number of bombers and tons of bombs.
Most consisted of 'tip and run' raids made by single fighter bombers coming in under the radar and bombing ports on the south coast of England.
A commenter on a blog said it perhaps best when he frankly admitted,that while yes he was a kid in Glasgow during the war, he actually didn't really remember the Glasgow Blitz , because it only happened once and it happened many miles away in a working class/industrial part of that large city.
A child in Belfast might have had the same reaction - it had one big heavy raid on one part of the city, albeit with an extraordinary number of casualties because no one really expected the Germans to bother Northern Ireland.
And Oxford was never bombed.
Though it was basically an outer suburb of metropolitan London (and so very close to German airbases in France), with a large car industry and so surely should have been a suitable target on two counts.
Bombing Britain into defeat was really going to be virtually impossible - like Germany and America it simply had too many alternative metropolitan industrial centres, many with large port facilities, and all well connected to each other by an extensive road and rail network.
Thus the very determined effort to squash the huge port of Liverpool into dust was a wasted German effort : Greenock, Cardiff and Belfast , to name but a few west coast ports in Britain , would have quickly taken up the slack in the receiving of vital convoys from North America.
A pre-war decision to build a number of duplicate shadow assembly plants a maximum distance of about a half hour rail, canal or truck trip from the original centre of a critical war industry helped a lot to reduce the impact of even a direct hit on that vital British 'choke point'.
The Germans knew precisely where all the pre-1939 vital factories were and often hit and badly damaged them - but the shadow plants near by were unknown to them and took up the slack.
In addition , ensuring that sub contractors were neither right next to the original plant nor 500 kilometres away but within that convenient half hour circle of travel led to a virtually bomb-proof but economical dispersal of vital war industries.
The chances of anything, anything but a twenty megaton thermo-nuclear bomb, destroying such a sprawling industrial metropolitan area a hundred kilometres by a hundred kilometres square rendered such British efforts Blitz-proof.
The Germans duplicated these dispersement efforts equally successfully, if much too late in the game --- by pointed contrast the Russians and Americans kept with single huge production 'n' assembly plants : but at inland sites they felt safe from WWII's longest ranging bombers.
ICBMs and nuclear bombs rendered all that moot : goodbye Kansas City as a safe place to build bombers in WWIII.
True, the massive size and complexity of shipyards capable of building battleships and aircraft carriers are not so easily moved about and in addition were so expensive that they could only be a few in number --- even for super-rich nations like America.
But when the non-shipbuilding nation of Canada decided to quickly build a whole lot of ships and yet be safe from any bombing raid, it did so by going down-market in technological complexity.
It beat the Germans (and any possible bombing raids) by focusing instead on building very large numbers of a few very simple merchant ship and escort vessel types.
Thus they could be built at any of about five dozen new shipyards all over Canada --- even in Thunder Bay, a few thousand kilometres from the open sea: redundancy safety plus !
The Russians would understand that sort of thinking --- lots of simple weapons win wars just as well as a few ,very sophisticated, weapons do.
My point is that the Blitz, even if it had gotten much worse, could only be an moderate not fundamental restraint on British war efforts.
Britain during WII was a heavily industrialized nation with the vastest empire even seen to supply the raw resources and manpower to back up that industrial power.
If civilian paper was in short supply during the war (and it definitely was), it wasn't because Britain was poor -- it was because all of its pre-war paper supply was still coming in, but was now diverted to supplying all the bumpf an officious war nation's government could churn out !
Britain was a rich enough nation during WWII to divert the cost of building and maintaining of just one extra squadron of Lancaster bombers to the building instead of several more bottle penicillin plants in early 1943 --- but deliberately chose not to.
If one of the Four Freedoms that Churchill's Conservative party was forced to pretend to publicly accept included the freedom from want of life-saving drugs , a point hit home in the Fall of 1942 by the Beveridge Report, his party chose to deny it in practise.
With existing sulfa drugs failing by the minute (due to bacterial resistance) and with a scientific consensus building by the Fall of 1942 that new anti-bacteria sulfas were unlikely to come along, penicillin was becoming the only , the only , hope for civilians or servicemen dying of blood poisoning.
Surely the most vital of all possible freedoms is the freedom from premature death, but the Churchill government cocked its nose at Beveridge and said 'only enough resources will be diverted from bombers to save just our servicemen with bottle penicillin'.
A-Ha, says the UK historian, says he : a-ha !
Bottle penicillin - we had that and the Yanks had deep tank penicillin - that is why we couldn't match the rich, Blitz-less Americans in penicillin production.
Awkward facts intrude - the British did build a pilot deep tank design very early on - with the Americans also willing to license their deep tank technology at firesale prices - but it was Churchill's Conservative minister in charge of the all-powerful MoS, the Ministry of Supply (to the army), that said no.
And deep tank efforts hardly explain the very much better penicillin records of both Canada and Australia - because these two nations, definitely not scientific or industrial powers in the early 1940s, also used only bottle plants and yet did far better in penicillin production than Britain, per capita.
(In population Britain was about 1/3 the GDP and population of America and about about 7x the GDP and population of Australia and 5x the population and GDP of Canada.)
True, that on one hand these Dominions weren't Blitzed like the British.
But on the other hand they had hardly gained their current wealth from homegrown science or industry, unlike Britain.
I count their wartime technical and financial difficulties in producing bottle penicillin as about equal to that of the UK.
What was really lacking in the whole penicillin shortfall crisis, was the moral will to correct it among the one nation in the four led by a Conservative party during WWII.
So, in mid 1945, the UK was producing 30 billion units of penicillin a month, Australia 10 billion, Canada 20 billion and America 600 billion.
To match the Australians per capita, the UK should of been producing 70 billion units a month, to match Canada a 100 billion units and America 200 billion units.
In addition, Britain had not permitted its many colonies to start their own penicillin plants, so the actual shortfall in its ability to save the lives of its civilians and soldiers from the UK and all its colonies was much much bigger than even this stark contrast in effort among the Allies.
By 1946, the penicillin shortfall crisis in Britain was over and it was producing more than enough penicillin for everyone at home and in the colonies and was eager to start exporting to foreign lands.
But that was way too late for Churchill's Conservative party who had been fragged-in-the-back by voter concern over unequal access to necessary medical care and voted for Labour in the July 1945 General Election.
Hitler couldn't defeat Churchill but penicillin (the unequal lack of access to it) had ...
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