Shock of the Old hits british shibboleth that yankee deep tank stole all our penicillin profits

I have always been a great fan of David Edgerton’s “The Shock of the Old” .

Now nothing is more repeated  in the history of science circles (or is more untrue) than the claim that Britain developed penicillin but all the profits were stolen by the Americans when Whitehall won’t let British industry develop deep tank production methods.

(Actually the British academic establishment wanted to synthesize penicillin instead and dragged industry and government along. As did the American scientists on their side of the pond, except in America there was one remaining New Deal Agency and a normally very hard-nosed industrialist momentarily softened by the needless death of his beloved daughter, both who went all out for the superiority of natural penicillin jam today, during the war, rather than synthetic penicillin jam tomorrow, after the war.)

Pfizer felt sure deep tank  fermentation penicillin would be superior to semi-solid mass  fermentation grown in shallow trays because it had proven this to be so with citric acid two decades earlier.

Anglo-American historians have been united in this view of the eternal superiority of high tech deep tank for 75 years  —— but the Chinese and the Indians feel differently.

Quietly, too quietly for historians to notice, Pfizer finally bailed from its eternal money spinner high tech deep tank citrus acid when chinese low tech shallow tray Production proved way cheaper.

And Indians and Chinese are intent on fortifying their huge lead in the production of industrial ferments by looking again at the oldest possible fermentation process - as seen out in the wild, which almost always takes place on the surface of barely wet solid masses.

Because these scientists know that Deep Tank (submerged fermentation) actually uses an awful lot of energy and capital and needed careful expensive human controllers and cast off a lot of  terrible waste products....

‘Modernization is the unintended collective results of the process of individual humans seeing ever wider into the diversity of physical reality’

Modernists recoiled from the results, while Post-Modernists accepted them.

It was thus that Martin Henry Dawson’s modernizing efforts that made him a villain to Modernists but a hero to Post-Modernists.

In the Fall of 1940, Henry Dawson took from his fifteen years of pioneering microbial work (HGT/Quorum Sensing/Molecular Mimicry/Biofilm Persisters/the unlikely survival of ‘Weak-Sister’ R & L Forms) the strong sense that there was, in fact, no direct connection between size & strength & purity and survival intelligence.

Those species that accepted the small, the weak, and the ‘deficient’ seemed better equipped for Evolution’s bottom line, long term reproductive survival.

Henry then applied this insight to the high value he placed on small microbial penicillin factories, small human penicillin processing efforts and upon small weak ‘deficient’ human patients...

Mary Louise’s death from meningitis helped bring in Unpatented (penicillin) For All ; Baby Carl’s death from meningitis helped bring in Medicare For All

If you follow my penicillin blogs over the years you already know the story of Mary Louise Jr, daughter of John L Smith, the de facto boss of a small fine chemicals firm in Brooklyn during the critical wartime years of Penicillin.

Massive, non-toxic, doses of Penicillin, the original kind, Penicillin G, is still the best way to prevent deaths from rapidly acute bacterial meningitis.

This had been known for over ten years when Mary Louise died, but no doctor had yet had the nerve to inject raw penicillium juice into a human patient.

Like Dr Alexander Fleming, the world’s doctors were willing to let patients died needlessly, until the chemists synthesized pure penicillin, if they ever would.

They did not and have not.

If we had waited for the chemists, we’d still be waiting for the Antibiotics Revolution to begin.

That changed on October 16th 1940 when a Nova Scotian born and raised doctor, Martin Henry Dawson, put basically raw penicillium juice into two patients, hoping to save their lives from an invariably fatal disease he was sure penicillin could cure.

That disease was the once-dreaded SBE, subacute bacterial endocarditis, a frequent consequent of having rheumatic fever as a kid.

Once-dreaded because Dawson was right : penicillin does cure SBE and all kinds of other once fatal diseases.

 Dawson said that if only somebody - anybody - had bit the bullet in 1938 and made a little of impure natural penicillin - Mary Louise would still be alive.

As would (savage irony fully intended) Robert Fleming in that same year 1938,if only Alexander Fleming had got off his comfortable arse and made just a little impure natural penicillin, enough to save his favourite brother from easily-cured-with-pencillin-pneumonia.

John L listened intently to Dawson, no doubt remembered his daughter pointlessly dying that long ago summer day of dreadful meningitis, and ‘bit the bullet’.

The normally highly cautious manager put his company full in (and more) to make as much impure natural penicillin as quick as possible, bucking his industry, the big universities and the Allied governments’ firm conviction that only synthetic penicillin would do the trick.

Dawson, Smith and his firm were proved fully right and the others fully wrong.

His firm, Pfizer, never looked back.

Baby Carl’s needless tragic death from meningitis helped more than any other single event to make Medicare reality in Canada

Baby Carl’s story was once much better known than that of Mary Louise, which is known only to people who read deeply in specialist accounts of wartime penicillin.

Carl Derhousoff was nine months old on July 1 1962, a seemingly healthy child of Dokabour parents Mr and Mrs Peter Derhousoff, farming in rural southern Saskatchewan.

Suddenly, as is always the way with rapidly acute meningitis, the baby took deadly sick and his desperate parents set off to the nearest small town with a doctor.

In any other month, in any other province in Canada, or indeed almost anywhere else in the world in 1962, the doctor would have suspected meningitis and given the baby a big needleful of penicillin G and sent the baby on to the nearest town with a general hospital.

Bu in Saskatchewan on July 1 1962, almost all the provinces doctors had closed their doors, to protest the incoming medicare system.

The ever more despairing parents drove on and on, from pillar to post, being rejected everywhere until they arrived at the big hospital in Weyburn.

Too late, their desperate drive for life had all been for not.

As I recall their terrible drive, I am afraid I can only think of the world’s best known lieder, DER ERLKONIG, by Schubert and Goethe : it recalls a father’s desperate horse ride through the night, as he holds his very sick child by his side, en route to a doctor. Always the fevered boy hear the seductive voice of the Elf King calling the boy over to the peaceful calm of permanent death and the father’s equally pleading to the boy that it is only the wind, or the fog or the leaves rustling.

The ride ends as sadly as Mr and Mrs Derhousoff.

The story was big big news across Canada and indeed around the world and it probably did help to break the doctors’ strike a few weeks later.

Medicare in Canada never looked back and within a few years was stoutly defended by the very same doctors who had once let an innocent baby die rather than bend to the democratic will of the people.

I was just at my sister Tracy’s house and as it happens she is almost exactly the same age as Carl and I remember well looking at tiny Tracy when I learned about baby Carl, as I followed the news of the Doctors Strike closely on CBC radio, in Macleans and in the Canadian edition of Time Magazine.

Her health was good, but my mother’s was not after her birth and Mom came very close to dying around the time of the Doctors Strike.

Believed me, back then, many  many times I thanked God that we were living in Nova Scotia and not Saskatchewan....

Dawson’s only crime was his belief in “Unpatented-For-All”

But I am being rather redundant : because of course unpatented (penicillin) IS (penicillin) for-all.

Its so much more than the basic fact that firms around the world would not being paying any patent fees to make natural penicillin.

Because the real point is this : the supply of un-patented penicillin makers could not be artificially restricted by denying patent licenses to them, regardless of their ability and willingness to pay, with the intent to thus indirectly keeping the price artificially high for the lucky few, those few privileged to hold the patents on artificially synthesized penicillin.

For this was the real aim behind the largely unknown wartime treaty between America and the UK devised to aid in dividing the world market for life-saving penicillin between only the two of them.

May I note - again - that there was no such treaty between the world’s two leading superpowers to divide the world market for atomic energy.

Again, may I note that America was (and is) traditionally super reluctant to sign international treaties in general.

So historians would do well to take this treaty as a priceless prism into how the two superpowers actually saw the varying economic importance of atomic energy versa antibiotics, circa 1945.

Dawson’s opponents saw a few pure people making a little pure synthetic penicillin for  a select few patients : Dawson saw diverse people making copious amounts of natural penicillin for a diversity of patients.

Beginning as it did in September 1940, this then, was the FIRST Manhattan Project : Unpatented-For-All .

Note to historians :

Henry Dawson’s only real crime was promoting postmodern Diversity during a worldwide hegemony of eugenic Modernity...

Making YOU a healthier, safer, more effective soldier - so ME and MY KIDS don’t have to put on a uniform

So much of middle class elite efforts in WWII semi-consciously revolved around ways to ensure that ‘others‘ fought so effectively in a  brief high tech war that the middle class and their children would not end up inside a long drawn repeat of WWI’s bloody/muddy trench warfare.

Susan Lindee’s research into ‘experimental injury’ certainly shows how much war medicine was directed at keeping thse ‘others‘ alive and in effective combat.

There are many other examples.

Churchill signed off on a proposal that scarce penicillin in the Italy Campaign would not go to save dying soldiers — who would only end up discharged to Civvy Street anyway.

Rather it would go to heal elite combat forces who contracted (usually non-life threatening) VD , so as to return them to battle  in weeks not the usual months.

*Anything to avoid having to draft people in the rear echelons into combat roles.*

The elite combat units were known to be particularly prone to contract VD - supposedly this confirmed  their virility and virulence.

I think it was an honourable way to avoid death on the front lines for a few months. IE  a way that untidy reality stomped on middle class plans for a rational war —- deliberately getting VD being a variant on traditional enlisted men’s gold-bricking !

Equally, the fierce stateside white male resistance to having women and blacks in the war factories was based, above all, on the certain knowledge that the men freed up by this effort would only go on towards making General Marshall’s planned original size for the Army a reality. (Big as the eventual WWII US Army seemed to be, the Battle of the Bulge showed how short-handed Marshall and his staff long feared it would be, once into heavy combat.)

The trials of Henry Dawson...

..went on long after his death.

In the end, historians proved a far more potent foe than all the gathered forces of the American OSRD, NAS and British CMC: prosecutor, judge, jury, executioner.

Henry might have come from a Liberal family but all his critics were Whigs.

Henry’s penicillin efforts were thus an unsightly complication in their re-telling of a smooth spores-to-riches/ government-academia-industry-hands-across-the-water triumph....

In the WWII battle over Penicillin-For-All, few had the WWI combat experience that Martin Henry Dawson had

Mostly this because so few people on all sides survived warfare for very long !

For a start, as a soldier from a relatively wealthy nation, Dawson was very lucky not to have died from the many camp infections that killed more soldiers than bullets did and killed almost as many as artillery shells ever did.

Yes, he was seriously wounded twice - but luckily both were enough to take him out of battle during the times of the very heaviest casualty rates - but not so serious to kill him outright or cause him to die of a wound infection.

So, as a result :

Dawson was in the Medical Corp for about a year - in a large hospital near enough to the front to be possibly subjected to aerial bombing and gassing - but not really at serious risk from combat.

Martin Henry Dawson, Canadian Medical Corps 1916, note RED CROSS badge on arm

Then he was a junior Infantry officer  for about a year - a career path with super high death rates and  finally a junior Artillery officer for another year, out at the front scouting targets for his units mortars - almost as dangerous as leading an infantry charge.

But in three and a half years in the military, he probably was in serious combat for three and a half days.

But intense combat periods for an individual battalion and its soldiers were usually very short as well as very deadly.

But we mustn’t forget that merely going to and from the front lines and enduring a few weeks up at the front itself, in a trench, killed almost as many as did intense combat out in No Man’s Land - the daily death toll was much lower but the periods were much longer, so it all balanced out.

So Dawson was at serious risk of dying up at the front for between three and a half weeks and three and a half months in his career.

Not to mention this very little known fact : that probably the first ever people to die in an aerial bombing raid were Canadian soldiers supposedly safely at ease in a training camp in good ole Blighty - a camp that Dawson passed through.

Even the mere process of being transported from Canada to the UK to France meant off-duty soldiers were subject to  death by sinking by sub or warship or plane.

Dawson saw war upfront and personal in a way his opponents on the Penicillin-For-All front had not : some had skipped the war entirely, while others had cushy high end jobs back in civvyland, or in France well back from the front.

It is notable that his strongest friends and supporters tend to have had front line combat experience , on both sides of the war —- while his fiercest opponents, all nominally from the Allied side, had not.

I will put it bluntly : if you believe in Penicillin-For-All then you tend to help others selflessly, whenever they are in need - like when your nation is in dire need.

If you don’t believe in Penicillin-For-All, you tend to avoid helping others selflessly and instead always look out for Number One ....

Majority of Americans opposed 1940 Penicillin For All, just as they oppose 2020 Medicare For All

Take this with your ‘Freedom Fries’ : ‘the more things change in America, the more they remain the same’.

The majority of Americans, of all races, all religions, all classes and in all regions have always opposed the idea that they, like Canadians and most of the rest of the world, should be FORCED to pay to keep other fellow Americans alive.

Their view is that if these patients can’t earn enough to pay their own damn hospital bills, than they should die  —-and the world would be better off for it.

In what is touted to be The Most Christian Nation On Earth, Christ’s demand that we all be Our  Brothers’ Keeper died stillborn.

Instead it is The Survival of the Financially Fittest over any preserving of American Lives Unworthy of Life.

Henry Dawson faced this in the Fall of 1940 (as did all of Occupied Europe), just as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Saunders will face this in the Fall of 2020, eighty years later.

The core values of Anglo-American eugenics are not really dead nor are they hiding out in some secret cave in Argentina : they are ‘hiding in plain sight’ .....

Persisters are the secret to the bacteria’s long life

If you ‘Google Scholar’ MH Dawson (and yes I say its a verb !) you might start noticing an underlying pattern to his universe-ranging array of research areas of interest.

Dawson had a unfashionable fascination with the various forms that bacteria can take.

Un-fashionable because popular eugenics infected all scientific thought, often unconsciously, in the years before 1945 (and for what has turned out to be a very long time afterwards as well.)

Eugenics basically is the un-tested belief that reality would be better if every object and being was found in only one - perfect - form of itself.

In bacteria, the conventional scientific view was thus that only the “S” form was the normal form : mobile, virile and virulent (their words not mine). Only the “S” form was fully 100% red-bloodedly male.

Dawson took the unconventional path, revealing an ‘unnatural’ interest in all sorts of weird variants.

R forms and M forms and L forms.

But also P forms and even Q forms and the V or B forms.

L Forms had no cell walls, that tough yet flexible wall usually seen as bacteria’s most unique and vital feature, enabling it to survive in ever-changing liquid environments from ultra pure water to highly salted water.

But since bacteria walls are also the signal to alert the immune defences to attack bacteria, their absence helped these weirdly misshaped variants to survive where their stronger S relatives failed.

R forms were clingers, non-mobile, domesticated, non-virile, non-virulent : female in other words. Second Rate.

They live for our normal lifetime , for instance, as pneumococcus R in the throats of many of us ——-while their flashy virulent S cousins either are killed attempting to create a lung filled with pneumonia, or if they do succeed, die along with the patient !

M forms had a lot of gooey Mucus (M) around them that made them less vulnerable to being gobbled  up by the body’s defenders. Less mobile but also less dead....

P forms were those pesky 1% of a bacterial population who survived whatever weapons humanity hurled at them, Persisters, who creep out weeks later unharmed ready to resume war after the doctors had already held their Victory parade.

Q forms were bacteria engaged in Quorum Sensing, acting collectively based on the exchange of chemical signals, usually to enhance their collective chances of survival in dire times.

V vegetative forms survive by making a massive assembly of bric a brac attached to a lot of hardening mucus that in turn is attached to something firm, like a heart valve. They then hide inside while water passage bring in food and take out waste.

They were a leading cause of death by causing , to use the then feared and dreaded term, ‘invariably fatal endocarditis’.

Ironically, death usually came from the non-virulent form of strep bacteria, not the virulent forms !

Today we call them B forms, B for biofilm : same thing, different name.

Bacteria are the smallest weakest stupidest forms of life in the Universe, yet they have survived for at least 4 billion years while the bigger and smarter have long gone extinct.

How to explain this paradox ?

Well humanity has always practised eugenics, in an unconscious way, and still does.

As do many other larger species.

If don’t actually execute or abandon those among us who are born physically or mentally formed different from the ideal, we still tend not to marry them or give them the good jobs.

In evolutionary terms, they are likely to die off, in reproductive successful terms, over the long run.

Bacteria don't choose sexual partners and so their weird variants survive, or not, on a more basic environment-oriented basis.

Weird form bacteria often die off before reproducing or reproduce much more slowly than the more currently common forms.

But bacteria are so small and reproduce so fast that there are always lots of weird variants about.

And when circumstances change in a wink of an eye and the normal die off and the weird survives, (“PERSISTS”), even a single survivor can become a million strong colony in a few days.

Dawson saw that bacteria survived against all odds because, unlike humans, they had a constantly wide wide wide gene pool, and were not always trying to limit and purify their gene pool.

He didn’t actually directly fight Hitler in WWII, but Dawson did intellectually fight Hitler’s hundreds of millions of fellow travellers among the middle and upper classes of the world.

For being opposed to Hitler’s particularly virulent form of eugenics should never blind us to the fact that popular eugenics was a commonplace in educated thought in those years.

It survives today in the fact that a majority of Americans believe that if you can’t financially provide for your own health care, you shouldn’t look to other taxpayers to pick up the slack : literally, Survival of the Financially Fittest....

Science works by CONVINCING not by DISCOVERING

Charles Darwin’s ideas were less radical to Victorians than has been generally claimed.

His theory, {{in their eyes}}, while scientifically and theologically unsettling, was at least  ***morally*** kosher.

In effect, Darwin said that everything about you, was ‘inherited’ from your parents’parents’parents back to the primeval slime by strictly vertical descent.

And if you have ever read much in Victorian literature, you know how often the books revolved around ‘inheritance’ issues.

Yes, Darwin said, things do change - and that is unsettling. But they change in a strictly orderly & moral fashion (and even then, change very very very slowly), so there is really nothing to worry about.

Nothing you had came from ‘the milkman’ - Victorians cherished the thought that , at least in biology, there was never ever any hanky-panky in evolution.

But what Henry seized upon, in the spring of 1928, over the objections of his still Victorian-minded elders/bosses, was the evidence (dating from around 1920 but not published till 1928) that evolutionary descent could also come horizontally.

It could happen across species and maybe even across biological families and orders - and it could happen in minutes and not just over millenniums.

In effect, this was ‘miscegenation’ on a evolutionary scale - sheer horror to the eugenically minded upper classes of the 1920s.

Henry duly got fired from his first job - the best job in the world for a scientist back then - for sticking to his guns on this semi-privately within the institute and for trying to make it public as well.

The relatively new institute (Rockefeller) that Dawson and his boss, a fellow Nova Scotian named Avery, both worked at, thought Avery was up for the institute's first Nobel prize, for proving that bacteria remained fixed into their species.

Henry said no, actually they can morph into each other in minutes and do so over and over.

The institute badly needed Nobel prizes to give it credibility with both the scientific world and the Rockefeller family who were paying all the dosh. A really big deal in other words.

And a junior nobody, albeit a promising young junior nobody, was about to rain on their parade.

He was gently and quietly let go, by finding another post for him elsewhere, in a different field of science.

But eventually, after a lot of pushing, he got a little somewhere with his ideas.

Because, in my terminology, Henry was only able to make his claim *public*, in scientific terms, but not *popular*, in scientific terms.

He got his work published in various big journals and presented it at various big conferences.

No one could refute it.

They simply refused to accept it , in their private minds, and went on as if Darwin was the only path of evolution.

Still Henry kept the idea alive, when it might have died stillborn back in 1928.

So - for an example - his obit mentioned it among his accomplishments upon his death in 1945, just as it was finally being taken up by a young female researcher Harriet Ephrussi.

Ironically, upon the death of Dawson’s first boss Oswald Avery, no mention of HGT DNA was found in his obit, quite rightly as he had firmly opposed the very idea.

But today, Avery is given much of the credit for HGT DNA and Dawson is forgotten.

Because in the 1970s, the Rockefeller Institute got its long-delayed revenge on Dawson by touting Avery as the lead man on HGT DNA and most historians have dutifully trotted along behind ever since.

Now 100 years later, HGT (horizontal gene transfers) is generally well accepted within the relatively narrow microbiology field as a key determinate in what makes living things what they are.

Again the wider scientific world says it too accepts HGT but then hastens to say to itself, privately, that ‘it rarely happens - and when it does,  it isn’t very important’. 

This is simply untrue.

For three billion years life on earth was only bacteria and would have stayed that way forever, until a single big bacteria of one scientific family swallowed a single small bacteria of a very different scientific family and then failed to digest it.

The little bacteria hid behind a physical wall inside the bigger bacteria and the two tolerated the situation because each gave each other what the other needed but couldnt really provide itself very well.

That division of labour, behind cell walls, for a common good, is the basis of all multi-celled life - like us humans.

In effect, you and I didnt come from mom and dad alone, but also from the milkman.

We now know we all have viruses and bacteria inside us, regulating our activities, sometimes for our mutual benefit, sometimes not.

Just as we probably would only have moss and ferns for plant life, it wasn’t for the HGT interaction between plant roots and bacteria and fungus.

And every time we hear ‘DNA solved another murder, we must remember that it is the techniques of HGT DNA that makes this possible, not vertical evolution ‘DNA’.

And Henry’s natural penicillin —— it actually didnt originate from penicillium fungus, but from bacteria and spread to them via ( you got it !) HGT !!

No, Henry didnt discover HGT any more than he discovered natural penicillin - but he promoted both, against huge opposition - till both finally became used and cherished by the whole scientific world.

For like trees, scientific discoveries can fall in the forest unheard,  —— Henry’s moral courage and wide-ranging mind make natural penicillin and HGT into the big things they are today.

Because Henry didnt back any old kooky scientific idea - he unerringly picked out the really really big winners among seemingly zooky scientific ideas and ran with them.

Scientists, collectively flattering their all too human and often squalid behavior, act as if the hard work is discovering something and the rest is easy.

But in fact, historians of science report that many scientists discover something and fail to realize its importance , or if they do report it, fail to follow it up in the face of stiff scientific resistance.

If I do anything in this lifetime, I’d like to show - via Henry - that the ‘discovery-biased’ view of how science works is only a partial truth...