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....