If you like your heroes warts and all, you can hardly fault Hollywood or TV.
Today, unlike in the past, their heroes have, if anything, too many faults.
Fred Banting and Henry Dawson were world-shaking Canadian scientists who really didn’t invent or discover anything world-shaking.
But their atypical (for Canadians) can-do drive and mule-headed determination did bring forth medical miracles.
And like all bulldogged, pig-headed, mule-minded leaders, they came with much to admire and much to regret.
Canada (and its media) has long had a tendency to turn its ordinary heroes into extraordinary saints and the rest of the world, to the extent it even notices, permits Canadians to keep doing so.
Banting and Dawson may be media-imagined to be eternally floating up among the angelic white clouds, but a good historian’s job is to reveal that their feet, in fact, remained firmly rooted in the good old dirty clay....
Wednesday, September 25, 2019
The post-war power over life and death was supposed to lie in Anglo hands and be man-made, expensive and exclusive
Instead, thanks largely to Dr Martin Henry Dawson, penicillin remained in the public domain, nature-made and inclusive.
Wartime penicillin was supposed to be one of the signal triumphs of Alchemic Modernity.
Instead it ended up sounding its death knell and helped usher in our current age of Diverse Modernity.
None of this signal failure slash unexpected triumph is indicated in the Nobel Prize for the development of penicillin, because if there is one thing consistent about the Nobel organization, it is that every time they throw their bread in the air, it always landed butter side down...
Wartime penicillin was supposed to be one of the signal triumphs of Alchemic Modernity.
Instead it ended up sounding its death knell and helped usher in our current age of Diverse Modernity.
None of this signal failure slash unexpected triumph is indicated in the Nobel Prize for the development of penicillin, because if there is one thing consistent about the Nobel organization, it is that every time they throw their bread in the air, it always landed butter side down...
Monday, September 23, 2019
Translated into AMERICAN english, its 50 Gallons and a Mule
Nova Scotia having such a very small and weak economy while America has such a very big and strong economy, it comes as quite a shock when you go down there for the first time as a Nova Scotian, like Dr Dawson and I did, only to discover that American beer is weaker than Canadian beer and is sold in smaller gallons than the big Canadian ones !
Now science being very metric today, a credible ‘gas and liquid’ pilot plant effort would usually be assumed to be about 200 litres in nominal capacity.
But Dr Dawson and his colleagues had learned their fundamental weights and measures as children back in the Edwardian Age and so American scientists often converted 200 litres in 50 gallons mentally and in print & speech while Canadians and other Commonwealth scientists similarly converted it to 40 gallons.
Normally there are three or four levels of development between when a scientists dreams something up and when the resulting product hits the commercial shelves.
The bench or lab tryout might only consist of a litre of active medium. The final commercial plant might be a 100,000 litres nominal capacity. If the process is very new, a intermediate plant might be at 10,000 litre capacity.
But generally the next stage between university lab and commercial plant is a pilot plant - done by the company itself, not the university scientist, certainly not a hospital-based scientist !
It usually runs from about 10 litres to a 1000 litres but by far the most common size runs to 200 litres.
But after 12 years, not one drug company in the whole world had gone beyond producing a tiny test tube’s worth of penicillin medium.
Most other hospital-based medical scientists would have resigned themselves into making at best a few small beakers of penicillium growth, knowing full well that the smell alone would raise the ire of the rest of the hospital staff.
Can you begin to imagine the reaction today if the lawyers of the patients and hospital administration learned that a staff member was actually growing “mold” inside the hospital ?
But while Dr Dawson was generally reserved and deferential he was easily underestimated and like many raised in the Scottish Presbyterian tradition, inclined to set the bone in his teeth when he felt righteous justice demanded it.
In a phrase, he could be a stubborn old mule at times.
And September 1940, a month when the fate of not just Britain but seemingly all civilization hung by a thread, was one of those times.
Dawson determined he would shame the pharma bosses into pulling their fingers out and get moving : didn’t they know there was a war on ?
So Dawson’s pioneering Natural penicillin pilot plant back in 1940-1941 consisted of 700 2 litre Erlenmeyer broad bottomed flasks.
But that’s 1400 litres, you think, as you do the math : Marshall has got his facts wrong.
But penicillium fungi grow best when they are resting in a shallow (no more than about an inch and a half deep) pool of nutritious liquid with a good head of oxygen-bearing air above them.
(Pure Oxygen, on the other hand, would be fatal to them.)
They don’t do well when the air space above them is open to the elements because then other microbes would come along and chump down on all that good nutrition.
So they and the air are sealed in place for their seven day growing period.
A broad bottomed Erlenmeyer flask allows more liquid surface area for more penicillium fungi production while still allowing enough sealed in air above for seven days of hearty respiration as the invisibly small fungi spores grow into a big tangled blue green mass.
Only about 15% of the nominal capacity of a broad bottomed 2 litre flask was actually available for the liquid medium that would ultimately contain the active ingredient of penicillin to be extracted.
So in the end, Dawson’s 700 2 litre flasks did indeed yield the 200 litres (or 40 Canadian gallons) of Natural penicillin containing medium he knew he needed to have to be credible to hard-ended drug company executives.
Pfizer boss John L Smith, known to be harder than nails, certainly bought into Dawson’s claims and Pfizer ended up producing 80% of the penicillin that landed on the D-Day beaches.
And just as Dawson hoped, Smith and Pfizer did so Naturally....
Now science being very metric today, a credible ‘gas and liquid’ pilot plant effort would usually be assumed to be about 200 litres in nominal capacity.
But Dr Dawson and his colleagues had learned their fundamental weights and measures as children back in the Edwardian Age and so American scientists often converted 200 litres in 50 gallons mentally and in print & speech while Canadians and other Commonwealth scientists similarly converted it to 40 gallons.
Normally there are three or four levels of development between when a scientists dreams something up and when the resulting product hits the commercial shelves.
The bench or lab tryout might only consist of a litre of active medium. The final commercial plant might be a 100,000 litres nominal capacity. If the process is very new, a intermediate plant might be at 10,000 litre capacity.
But generally the next stage between university lab and commercial plant is a pilot plant - done by the company itself, not the university scientist, certainly not a hospital-based scientist !
It usually runs from about 10 litres to a 1000 litres but by far the most common size runs to 200 litres.
But after 12 years, not one drug company in the whole world had gone beyond producing a tiny test tube’s worth of penicillin medium.
Most other hospital-based medical scientists would have resigned themselves into making at best a few small beakers of penicillium growth, knowing full well that the smell alone would raise the ire of the rest of the hospital staff.
Can you begin to imagine the reaction today if the lawyers of the patients and hospital administration learned that a staff member was actually growing “mold” inside the hospital ?
But while Dr Dawson was generally reserved and deferential he was easily underestimated and like many raised in the Scottish Presbyterian tradition, inclined to set the bone in his teeth when he felt righteous justice demanded it.
In a phrase, he could be a stubborn old mule at times.
And September 1940, a month when the fate of not just Britain but seemingly all civilization hung by a thread, was one of those times.
Dawson determined he would shame the pharma bosses into pulling their fingers out and get moving : didn’t they know there was a war on ?
So Dawson’s pioneering Natural penicillin pilot plant back in 1940-1941 consisted of 700 2 litre Erlenmeyer broad bottomed flasks.
But that’s 1400 litres, you think, as you do the math : Marshall has got his facts wrong.
But penicillium fungi grow best when they are resting in a shallow (no more than about an inch and a half deep) pool of nutritious liquid with a good head of oxygen-bearing air above them.
(Pure Oxygen, on the other hand, would be fatal to them.)
They don’t do well when the air space above them is open to the elements because then other microbes would come along and chump down on all that good nutrition.
So they and the air are sealed in place for their seven day growing period.
A broad bottomed Erlenmeyer flask allows more liquid surface area for more penicillium fungi production while still allowing enough sealed in air above for seven days of hearty respiration as the invisibly small fungi spores grow into a big tangled blue green mass.
Only about 15% of the nominal capacity of a broad bottomed 2 litre flask was actually available for the liquid medium that would ultimately contain the active ingredient of penicillin to be extracted.
So in the end, Dawson’s 700 2 litre flasks did indeed yield the 200 litres (or 40 Canadian gallons) of Natural penicillin containing medium he knew he needed to have to be credible to hard-ended drug company executives.
Pfizer boss John L Smith, known to be harder than nails, certainly bought into Dawson’s claims and Pfizer ended up producing 80% of the penicillin that landed on the D-Day beaches.
And just as Dawson hoped, Smith and Pfizer did so Naturally....
The intellectual roots of today’s environmental movement lie in the events of 1945 - not in pre-war environmental thought
Many of the thoughts and actions of pre-war environmental icons tend to leave us feeling very uncomfortable today.
Heroes - with feet of clay.
They, after all, were creature of their era as we are of ours.
That era, Alchemic Modernity, was at its very apogee in August 1945.
Baldly put, the consensus of thought for about 500 years was that beneath the chaotic seeming surface of Nature, deep Nature was actually pretty simple & regular and totally controllable by humanity, once a handful of keys had been unlocked.
But ironically Alchemic Modernity’s greatest successes were also the cause of its eventual downfall, as many around the world began a long, slow, deep soul-searching reassessment of their era’s presumed values.
1945, most of it anyway, was then seen as the the triumph of ‘Big and Strong’ Science.
The number one centuries-old dream of alchemists and their latter day acolytes, the chemists and physicists, was for humanity to be able to control the conversion of small amounts of worthless matter into endless amounts of pure powerful energy.
Another, younger, dream was for humanity to be able to speedily rocket to untold numbers of barren planets after they had plundered and destroyed Earth, to start afresh again, over and over.
After so successfully controlling matter and distance, another dream was for humanity to control humanity itself, rather like entries in a business ledger.
All three dreams had come true, in the form of the Atomic Bomb, the V2 rocket and in the detailed record-keeping behind Auschwitz.
Dreams coming depressingly true.
The riposte came from a small remote corner of biology, a science then better known for offering intellectual support for social darwinism and eugenics than for taking on the towering titans of Chemistry and Physics.
It lay in the unexpected - and unremarked upon - triumph of Natural penicillin.
If penicillin had arrived in synthetic form it would have improved the world, on this we all can agree.
But only Natural, microbe-made, penicillin could have save our world from the era - and its errors - that was consuming it.
This was science microscopically small and weak and yet it had bested the best of big and strong science.
Bested, in fact, an international all out government-backed effort to harness the free world’s smartest chemists into synthesizing penicillin that was purer, cheaper, better than what the slimy penicillium factories could come up with.
It failed - we still have tiny microbes making our penicillin and bulk natural penicillin forms the starting material for most all of the many antibiotics we use today.
Such was the triumph of Nature over Man scientifically that today on university campuses the pre-war Queen of the Sciences, Chemistry, has been surmounted by today’s Queen, Micro-Biology.
I often wonder if Natural penicillin hadn’t come along at the same time as Auschwitz, Atomic Bombs and V2 rockets, how humanity would have responded ?
It is one thing to be unhappy with the logical conclusions of your own collectivity world-view, but it is another thing to see the glimmers of another thesis offering up an alternative way of viewing the world.
The outre Romantic Period idea that humanity should work with and learn from Nature, rather than to simply conquer. destroy and replace it, was suddenly salient.
Moreover, the idea that even the smallest and weakest can be smarter than the biggest and strongest was a meme with real legs : for it could be applied to humanity’s relationships with humanity.
Perhaps people of color, women, jews, the handicapped, gays, aboriginals, children, the poor also deserve to be looked in a new, post- natural penicillin, light.
And gradually , they were —- and are.
Popular Eugenics, the intellectual backstop for the middle class around the globe before the war, in its search for an ever more purer and refined race, was not just part of Alchemic Modernity : it was its very essence refined.
And it is not for nothing that two of purity-seeking Popular Eugenics’ most notable figures, Adolf Hitler and HP Lovecraft, saw the ‘half solid/ half-liquid’ fungal slime as the most horrific image of all they objected to and sought to replace.
Natural-penicillin-making fungal slime.
But popular Eugenics could only remain aloft if Scientists and scientists backed it up : pre and post 1945, the middle class still takes its cues on reality from science, that hasnt changed.
But scientists have.
So while the Alchemic Modernists are still around they are diminished.
Because if before the war they dominated 60:40, today they are in a rearguard action at 40:60.
Today’s shakily dominant post-war, post-natural penicillin, Modernity in pointed contrast to pre-war eugenics, positively seeks out and welcomes diversity of all sorts.
So : an world-wide turn towards the small, in Nature and in Humanity, and appropriately enough, starting from the smallest of efforts.
Because, intellectually, today’s “Turn to the Small and the Weak” all began with nothing more than ‘40 Gallons and a Mule’.....
Heroes - with feet of clay.
They, after all, were creature of their era as we are of ours.
That era, Alchemic Modernity, was at its very apogee in August 1945.
Baldly put, the consensus of thought for about 500 years was that beneath the chaotic seeming surface of Nature, deep Nature was actually pretty simple & regular and totally controllable by humanity, once a handful of keys had been unlocked.
But ironically Alchemic Modernity’s greatest successes were also the cause of its eventual downfall, as many around the world began a long, slow, deep soul-searching reassessment of their era’s presumed values.
1945, most of it anyway, was then seen as the the triumph of ‘Big and Strong’ Science.
The number one centuries-old dream of alchemists and their latter day acolytes, the chemists and physicists, was for humanity to be able to control the conversion of small amounts of worthless matter into endless amounts of pure powerful energy.
Another, younger, dream was for humanity to be able to speedily rocket to untold numbers of barren planets after they had plundered and destroyed Earth, to start afresh again, over and over.
After so successfully controlling matter and distance, another dream was for humanity to control humanity itself, rather like entries in a business ledger.
All three dreams had come true, in the form of the Atomic Bomb, the V2 rocket and in the detailed record-keeping behind Auschwitz.
Dreams coming depressingly true.
The riposte came from a small remote corner of biology, a science then better known for offering intellectual support for social darwinism and eugenics than for taking on the towering titans of Chemistry and Physics.
It lay in the unexpected - and unremarked upon - triumph of Natural penicillin.
If penicillin had arrived in synthetic form it would have improved the world, on this we all can agree.
But only Natural, microbe-made, penicillin could have save our world from the era - and its errors - that was consuming it.
This was science microscopically small and weak and yet it had bested the best of big and strong science.
Bested, in fact, an international all out government-backed effort to harness the free world’s smartest chemists into synthesizing penicillin that was purer, cheaper, better than what the slimy penicillium factories could come up with.
It failed - we still have tiny microbes making our penicillin and bulk natural penicillin forms the starting material for most all of the many antibiotics we use today.
Such was the triumph of Nature over Man scientifically that today on university campuses the pre-war Queen of the Sciences, Chemistry, has been surmounted by today’s Queen, Micro-Biology.
I often wonder if Natural penicillin hadn’t come along at the same time as Auschwitz, Atomic Bombs and V2 rockets, how humanity would have responded ?
It is one thing to be unhappy with the logical conclusions of your own collectivity world-view, but it is another thing to see the glimmers of another thesis offering up an alternative way of viewing the world.
The outre Romantic Period idea that humanity should work with and learn from Nature, rather than to simply conquer. destroy and replace it, was suddenly salient.
Moreover, the idea that even the smallest and weakest can be smarter than the biggest and strongest was a meme with real legs : for it could be applied to humanity’s relationships with humanity.
Perhaps people of color, women, jews, the handicapped, gays, aboriginals, children, the poor also deserve to be looked in a new, post- natural penicillin, light.
And gradually , they were —- and are.
Popular Eugenics, the intellectual backstop for the middle class around the globe before the war, in its search for an ever more purer and refined race, was not just part of Alchemic Modernity : it was its very essence refined.
And it is not for nothing that two of purity-seeking Popular Eugenics’ most notable figures, Adolf Hitler and HP Lovecraft, saw the ‘half solid/ half-liquid’ fungal slime as the most horrific image of all they objected to and sought to replace.
Natural-penicillin-making fungal slime.
But popular Eugenics could only remain aloft if Scientists and scientists backed it up : pre and post 1945, the middle class still takes its cues on reality from science, that hasnt changed.
But scientists have.
So while the Alchemic Modernists are still around they are diminished.
Because if before the war they dominated 60:40, today they are in a rearguard action at 40:60.
Today’s shakily dominant post-war, post-natural penicillin, Modernity in pointed contrast to pre-war eugenics, positively seeks out and welcomes diversity of all sorts.
So : an world-wide turn towards the small, in Nature and in Humanity, and appropriately enough, starting from the smallest of efforts.
Because, intellectually, today’s “Turn to the Small and the Weak” all began with nothing more than ‘40 Gallons and a Mule’.....
Saturday, September 21, 2019
Humans’ resistance to change but high regard for saving their own neck is why this blog has a new title
Originally, this blog was called “Never too small to change the world” and truthfully, I had no idea that child climate activist Greta Thunberg had made a phrase very much like it quite famous quite recently.
But I quickly realized that title was wrong, totally, wrong, wrong, wrong.
Its aim, for one, is far too modest, far too laidback.
We are not trying to change the world gradual step by gradual step, ever upwards into the future in true limousine liberal fashion (shout out to Justin Trudeau) ,we are trying to save the whole world, right now ! — if not sooner.
But even more importantly, humans - adult as well as small children - hate to be directed towards change, much preferring to do it all ourselves.
But equally, we have absolutely no objection, when dangling over a cliff, to being saved : suddenly the race, religion, gender, politics and income of our saviour matters not.
If we start to CHANGE the world by altering one hair on one chinny chin chin, all hell breaks loose.
But if we SAVE the world by turning all of it completely upside down, we will hear no objections.
For it is ever true that rationality and humanity are residents on different planets.....
But I quickly realized that title was wrong, totally, wrong, wrong, wrong.
Its aim, for one, is far too modest, far too laidback.
We are not trying to change the world gradual step by gradual step, ever upwards into the future in true limousine liberal fashion (shout out to Justin Trudeau) ,we are trying to save the whole world, right now ! — if not sooner.
But even more importantly, humans - adult as well as small children - hate to be directed towards change, much preferring to do it all ourselves.
But equally, we have absolutely no objection, when dangling over a cliff, to being saved : suddenly the race, religion, gender, politics and income of our saviour matters not.
If we start to CHANGE the world by altering one hair on one chinny chin chin, all hell breaks loose.
But if we SAVE the world by turning all of it completely upside down, we will hear no objections.
For it is ever true that rationality and humanity are residents on different planets.....
Saving our world —- from under an oxygen mask
Never too small to save the world” is a much overused inspirational theme among those of us in the environmental movement seeking to inspire children to take up our cause.
And a base lie.
What we really mean to say, in an unconscious patronizing tone complete with a verbal pat on the head, is that no one is too small to HELP save the world, together, collectively, and with us big people/adults in charge.
While admittedly generally true, it also isn’t something likely to lift kids out of their seats, determined to commit their life to saving this planet regardless of the cost.
But my blog and Youtube channel is about an actual someone very small and very weak who really did change our whole entire world, you and I and everyone else, for the better.
And did all this in the depths of the worst period in human history, did this from his literal death bed, while fighting off his own all-powerful wartime government ——and his own body —— just long enough to see it through.
In the process he inadvertently set in motion a process that shattered the then current historic epoch, which was about 500 years old in 1945.
(That epoch was a long period of very diverse human history, but united intellectually in agreeing how the Universe worked, a theory best called Alchemic Modernity.)
That break-up process led to our present day Post-Modernity world, which I prefer to call Diverse Modernity.
Sometimes truth is indeed stranger than anything Hollywood would dare put on the screen and this story of Martin Henry Dawson and the first Manhattan Project is one of those times.
I am old, like all of us in the first wave of the environmental movement, and we will not be around to see the battle won, if indeed it is won and not tragically lost.
That job must be done by the very young : not our children, but by our grandchildren.
So my intended audience for this blog and the Youtube channel is environmental-responsible grandparents and parents who want to stop giving children tired platitudes about being never too small and instead back it up with a concrete example of someone very small and very weak who took on virtually the world world and turned it around, literally from his death bed.
This then is the untold story of NATURAL penicillin : the penicillin of hope....
And a base lie.
What we really mean to say, in an unconscious patronizing tone complete with a verbal pat on the head, is that no one is too small to HELP save the world, together, collectively, and with us big people/adults in charge.
While admittedly generally true, it also isn’t something likely to lift kids out of their seats, determined to commit their life to saving this planet regardless of the cost.
But my blog and Youtube channel is about an actual someone very small and very weak who really did change our whole entire world, you and I and everyone else, for the better.
And did all this in the depths of the worst period in human history, did this from his literal death bed, while fighting off his own all-powerful wartime government ——and his own body —— just long enough to see it through.
In the process he inadvertently set in motion a process that shattered the then current historic epoch, which was about 500 years old in 1945.
(That epoch was a long period of very diverse human history, but united intellectually in agreeing how the Universe worked, a theory best called Alchemic Modernity.)
That break-up process led to our present day Post-Modernity world, which I prefer to call Diverse Modernity.
Sometimes truth is indeed stranger than anything Hollywood would dare put on the screen and this story of Martin Henry Dawson and the first Manhattan Project is one of those times.
I am old, like all of us in the first wave of the environmental movement, and we will not be around to see the battle won, if indeed it is won and not tragically lost.
That job must be done by the very young : not our children, but by our grandchildren.
So my intended audience for this blog and the Youtube channel is environmental-responsible grandparents and parents who want to stop giving children tired platitudes about being never too small and instead back it up with a concrete example of someone very small and very weak who took on virtually the world world and turned it around, literally from his death bed.
This then is the untold story of NATURAL penicillin : the penicillin of hope....
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