Probably the most widely available Allied scientific journal around the world during WWII was THE LANCET.
The fear of death being common to dictator and democrat, socialist and fascist alike, all leaders and elites welcomed the hints for prolonging life that the world's leading medical journal might provide even (or particularly) in wartime.
So in April or May 1943, a Nazi or Japanese diplomat in any neutral country could easily get a look at the March 27th 1943 copy of THE LANCET from some friendly doctor and see in it a lead editorial article all about the great progress made in the chemical synthesis of the natural antibiotic penicillin.
The Oxford workers (under the command of the soon to be Nobel prize winning and knighted Howard Florey) have crystallized natural molecule, after years of efforts to get it in nearly pure form.
This allowed them to extract a nitrogen containing molecule named penicillamine by the hydrolysis of penicillin. It appears to be an amino acid but an unusual one - closer to amino sugar and ascorbic acid.
Another crystalline product (penillic acid) has been produced by the acidic inactivation of the penicillin crystal and seems to be an even larger portion of the penicillin molecule.
This might sound like gibberish to the layperson but to a mid 1940s biochemist it was like a key to the Holy Grail.
In theory , and in post-war official explanations for years of clinical inaction, this was all Top Secret.
But in fact, while it is less than two years before the Nazis collapse, we are still babbling to them in public about one of our supposedly greatest wartime secrets.
Remember ? The reason's the Official version gives us to account in the 15 to 20 year delay in getting the world's best lifesaving into your dying daughter's bloodstream : its chemistry had to be kept from the Nazis ?
In fact, about the only thing that was consistently kept back from the Nazis was the fact that time and time again it pulled dying kiddies back from the grave.
Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini mightn't be able to follow chemistry mumbo jumbo any better than you or I, but they could read a heart-rendering newspaper story about a sobbing mother bringing her healthy little one back home instead of preparing her funeral and figure out this was one hell of a lifesaver - for baby or wounded soldier.
In fact it was similar heart-warming newspaper stories about kiddies pulled back from the jaws of death (published well before being reported in the scientific media) that made SULFA drugs instantly world famous in the mid 1930s ---- and put it in the medical kits of all the combat nations of WWII.
It was penicillin's ability to save your dying baby that the Allied medical-economical-military elite was so fearful of telling their own publics about (and hence via neutral countries reprinting the good news, informing the Axis as well.)
In July 1942 alone , there were three dramatic "kiddie plucked from the grave" stories not reported in either the scientific media or the newspapers at the time.
It was a condition of gaining access to OSRD/NAS/NRRL controlled penicillin that no news of it must go out.
You could still make your own penicillin and create your own cures but all the big medical and scientific journals agreed to censor out these stories by first running them first by the OSRD/NAS/NRRL triad for approval.
One happened in Toronto involving Dr Nelles Silverthorne , another involved Dr Wesley Spinks in St Louis and third one involved Dr WE Herrell at the Mayo Clinic .
And these stories won't just bring tears to joy to newspaper readers - I think that even today, most doctors learning of the presenting histories of these three cases would say to themselves "this kid is a goner".
Any and every doctor when they finally got to read the details of their cure can only shake their heads in admiration and say "wow ! - heroic medicine at its very best !"
The Canadian Medical Association Journal being pretty easy to access worldwide, let me give the page and date of Silverthorne's case ,when it was finally allowed to be reported ,a year and half later : page 516, December 1943 , volume 49.
It was allowed to be reported because in August 1943 Dr Dante Colitti had finally let 'the penicillin and kiddies' story out of the bag (worldwide and overnight).
He had learned of the story of Dr Martin Henry Dawson, who had already broken the OSRD/NAS/NRRL's "law" to successfully treat the dying with penicillin ---- and gotten away with it.
Dawson's hospital was just a few hundred metres from Colitti, and besides he already well knew of Dawson as a world arthritis expert living and working a few hundred metres from Colitti's home and work.
(Colitti's own chronic lifelong affliction was TB-caused arthritis of the spine that left him permanently a hunchback.)
So Colitti bypassed trying to report his success to the censoring scientific journals and went straight to the King of Yellow Journalism, Citizen Hearst, and got his huge chain of newspapers and magazines behind The Yellow Magic.
And just as the Allied scientific elite had feared, soon all the world was busy making natural penicillin , destroying any hopes for a post-war financial bonanza for the USA and the UK, dividing up the world wide market for Merck and Oxford's patented synthetic penicillin.
The Mercky world of cartel drug thuggery indeed.....
The fear of death being common to dictator and democrat, socialist and fascist alike, all leaders and elites welcomed the hints for prolonging life that the world's leading medical journal might provide even (or particularly) in wartime.
So in April or May 1943, a Nazi or Japanese diplomat in any neutral country could easily get a look at the March 27th 1943 copy of THE LANCET from some friendly doctor and see in it a lead editorial article all about the great progress made in the chemical synthesis of the natural antibiotic penicillin.
The Oxford workers (under the command of the soon to be Nobel prize winning and knighted Howard Florey) have crystallized natural molecule, after years of efforts to get it in nearly pure form.
This allowed them to extract a nitrogen containing molecule named penicillamine by the hydrolysis of penicillin. It appears to be an amino acid but an unusual one - closer to amino sugar and ascorbic acid.
Another crystalline product (penillic acid) has been produced by the acidic inactivation of the penicillin crystal and seems to be an even larger portion of the penicillin molecule.
This might sound like gibberish to the layperson but to a mid 1940s biochemist it was like a key to the Holy Grail.
In theory , and in post-war official explanations for years of clinical inaction, this was all Top Secret.
But in fact, while it is less than two years before the Nazis collapse, we are still babbling to them in public about one of our supposedly greatest wartime secrets.
Remember ? The reason's the Official version gives us to account in the 15 to 20 year delay in getting the world's best lifesaving into your dying daughter's bloodstream : its chemistry had to be kept from the Nazis ?
In fact, about the only thing that was consistently kept back from the Nazis was the fact that time and time again it pulled dying kiddies back from the grave.
Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini mightn't be able to follow chemistry mumbo jumbo any better than you or I, but they could read a heart-rendering newspaper story about a sobbing mother bringing her healthy little one back home instead of preparing her funeral and figure out this was one hell of a lifesaver - for baby or wounded soldier.
In fact it was similar heart-warming newspaper stories about kiddies pulled back from the jaws of death (published well before being reported in the scientific media) that made SULFA drugs instantly world famous in the mid 1930s ---- and put it in the medical kits of all the combat nations of WWII.
It was penicillin's ability to save your dying baby that the Allied medical-economical-military elite was so fearful of telling their own publics about (and hence via neutral countries reprinting the good news, informing the Axis as well.)
In July 1942 alone , there were three dramatic "kiddie plucked from the grave" stories not reported in either the scientific media or the newspapers at the time.
It was a condition of gaining access to OSRD/NAS/NRRL controlled penicillin that no news of it must go out.
You could still make your own penicillin and create your own cures but all the big medical and scientific journals agreed to censor out these stories by first running them first by the OSRD/NAS/NRRL triad for approval.
One happened in Toronto involving Dr Nelles Silverthorne , another involved Dr Wesley Spinks in St Louis and third one involved Dr WE Herrell at the Mayo Clinic .
And these stories won't just bring tears to joy to newspaper readers - I think that even today, most doctors learning of the presenting histories of these three cases would say to themselves "this kid is a goner".
Any and every doctor when they finally got to read the details of their cure can only shake their heads in admiration and say "wow ! - heroic medicine at its very best !"
The Canadian Medical Association Journal being pretty easy to access worldwide, let me give the page and date of Silverthorne's case ,when it was finally allowed to be reported ,a year and half later : page 516, December 1943 , volume 49.
It was allowed to be reported because in August 1943 Dr Dante Colitti had finally let 'the penicillin and kiddies' story out of the bag (worldwide and overnight).
He had learned of the story of Dr Martin Henry Dawson, who had already broken the OSRD/NAS/NRRL's "law" to successfully treat the dying with penicillin ---- and gotten away with it.
Dawson's hospital was just a few hundred metres from Colitti, and besides he already well knew of Dawson as a world arthritis expert living and working a few hundred metres from Colitti's home and work.
(Colitti's own chronic lifelong affliction was TB-caused arthritis of the spine that left him permanently a hunchback.)
So Colitti bypassed trying to report his success to the censoring scientific journals and went straight to the King of Yellow Journalism, Citizen Hearst, and got his huge chain of newspapers and magazines behind The Yellow Magic.
And just as the Allied scientific elite had feared, soon all the world was busy making natural penicillin , destroying any hopes for a post-war financial bonanza for the USA and the UK, dividing up the world wide market for Merck and Oxford's patented synthetic penicillin.
The Mercky world of cartel drug thuggery indeed.....
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