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...

Happy Smiling Martin Henry Dawson

Why not ?

It a warm sunny day, he’s in a faraway land but with friends his own age from his home and he’s ALIVE !!!!!

The war is over.

Martin Henry Dawson in France at end of WWI : alive !

I know the photos I have of Henry usually show him as grim-faced, so its nice to find a smiling one.

Thanks to Dina Dawson  from  faraway Vancouver, who found it quite simply, under my very nose, here on the Nova Scotia Public Archives website, by simply typing in Henry Dawson Nova Scotia.

This is why researchers must constantly go back to Google with key words and download a image copy of anything good : because sites and documents go as frequently as they come ....

The Third Man’s teddy bear scene based on real life

Graham Greene’s screenplay/novella The Third Man is a much celebrated work of fiction but actually much of it was based on all-too-real life.

It is widely known among Third Man scholars that the watered-down penicillin racket at the heart of his tale was factually true and an event repeated time and again around the world in the early years of post-war penicillin.

Greene ripped right from the front pages of his daily papers.

And every film viewer remembers the very moral crux of the novella : the famous —-silent scene —- when the Canadian pulp writer Rollo Martins sees a discarded teddy tossed into a medical waste bin and realizes that yet another child has died from Harry Lime’s watered down penicillin and decides to lure him to his arrest.

But who realizes that this too was based on an actual news story that Greene had learned about during WWII itself ?

In August 1943 , Marie Barker was a young Chicago woman, one of thousands around the world summarily condemned to a certain death because modern medicine death panels deemed her invariably-fatal-if-untreated condition (SBE : subacute bacterial endocarditis) ‘a not a militarily important disease’.

Refused Penicillin Condemned to Death Marie Barker gets Teddy bear from Mom 

There is a famous and poignant newspaper photo of her French Canadian-born mom giving the grown-up twenty year old a child’s teddy bear, to cheer her up while her death sentence was being appealed.

But no penicillin ever came and Marie died a few weeks later.

In Marie’s case, I feel sure her medical staff was very much on her side and would have given her family the teddy bear after her death, but Greene certainly knew how to turn the emotional screws and he has his overworked medical staff at the Vienna hospital simply toss it in a bin of discarded medical waste.

Both scenes always get me —- maybe they will also get you too —- I sure hope so, as I plan to make that original teddy bear an important real-life symbol in my penicillin heroes & villains  book....

PS : In the two principal Allied superpower states, the USA and the UK, penicillin - by an undeserved twist of fate - was both cheap safe and abundant so the moral thrust of Harry Lime’s crime didn’t hit home like it did in the rest of the post-war world.

So a  52 part comic crime radio series on the pre-Vienna life of good old medical entrepreneur Harry Lime did  very well - particularly in the Us, where wheeler dealer huckster businessmen of all types were and are widely admired.

A view that easily TRUMPS any American evangelical-type concern about morality.

And why the Canadian-born Dr Dawson’s emphasis on life-saving medicine for all still falls on stony ground..

Those atypical can-do Canadians Banting & Dawson

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....