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....