Three individuals' beliefs in the superiority of human chemists over natural chemists drove the fifteen year effort to delay the use of life-saving penicillin until it had become a patented man-made synthetic analogue : Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey and George Merck.
Fleming and Florey got Nobel prizes for their unsuccessful efforts to delay the use of this wonderful lifesaver --- Merck had to be content with the cover of TIME.
Man-made penicillin was to be literally that : something manufactured by people of the male gender with no females nurturing penicillium flasks and no fungi to be charmed into giving off their natural penicillin.
It was a form of selfish hubristic autarky and completely typical of the I-can-go-it-alone era of Modernity.
It was selfish penicillin in many other senses as well.
For example, Merck staffers and the pair of Fleming & Florey agreed that it should be kept secret from Allied civilians and Allied POWs, Neutral nations and the Axis and their occupied peoples and preserved, initially, for lightly wounded frontline Allied soldiers.
(Often their light 'wounds' consisted of VD casually acquired in the hopes it would given them a few months treatment away from the bullets of the front.)
It was to be kept secret until it could be dropped like an unpleasant surprise on D-Day : that the Allies could return their wounded to the bullets of the front lines a lot quicker than the Axis could.
As unhappy that would make the unfortunate Allied wounded, it would at least allow the Allies to fight the war without calling up many middle class men to fight in the front lines -- unlike the Axis who were by now calling up every men with two feet.
Selfishly, the British secretly hoped they'd winning the patent war against the Americans and reap all the wartime glory and all the postwar patent profits -- the Americans hoped the reverse.
Merck-the-firm selfishly hoped it would win this war against the natural-penicillin oriented Pfizer, just as ICI felt the same against Glaxo.
Florey secretly and selfishly hoped his team would first synthesize penicillin and that as team leader he'd get most of the personal glory --- Merck-the-man felt ditto about his team efforts.
Both war-avoiders in WWI , they desperately needed some moral victory from this war.
Fleming needed synthetic penicillin as ground cover for his neglect in putting natural penicillin to work saving lives fifteen years earlier : his excuse had always been, in part, that it needed to be synthetic first.
Behind this triad was the medical-scientific establishment of Britain and America.
The triad felt sure the military and the government bureaucrats of both countries were also on side - and 90%were.
But 90% proved not good enough as some in the American military and government agencies broke ranks.
Secrecy was the hallmark of selfish penicillin so any breaking of the secrecy ranks could prove fatal.
But even the efforts of the rank-breakers wouldn't have been enough but for one man's independent efforts to beat the triad.
Against the triad was Martin Henry Dawson.
The hallmark of selflessness is sharing - as widely and as freely as possible.
So Dawson was, by pointed contrast, was in favour of selfless penicillin .
Penicillin made available to all the sick, even during Total War, and in all the nations.
Available as available NOW ! - not after the war, when the dead from infection had been allowed to pile up.
Available as in good enough natural crude penicillin ,available now.
Available in the economic sense - no triad efforts to create artificial storages and no artificial claims of complex manufacture to force prices up to the roof.
Dawson wanted it made available cheaply and abundantly for all through the simple timeless mechanism that it be widely produced by existing technology and by using public domain natural penicillium spores.
And by allowing and encouraging firms from many nations to manufacture it, all to keep prices down by force of free competition.
Dawson kept up his struggle to win through for selfless penicillin despite the fact it greatly shortened his life (he had terminal MG).
That too, was selfless....
Fleming and Florey got Nobel prizes for their unsuccessful efforts to delay the use of this wonderful lifesaver --- Merck had to be content with the cover of TIME.
Man-made penicillin was to be literally that : something manufactured by people of the male gender with no females nurturing penicillium flasks and no fungi to be charmed into giving off their natural penicillin.
It was a form of selfish hubristic autarky and completely typical of the I-can-go-it-alone era of Modernity.
It was selfish penicillin in many other senses as well.
For example, Merck staffers and the pair of Fleming & Florey agreed that it should be kept secret from Allied civilians and Allied POWs, Neutral nations and the Axis and their occupied peoples and preserved, initially, for lightly wounded frontline Allied soldiers.
(Often their light 'wounds' consisted of VD casually acquired in the hopes it would given them a few months treatment away from the bullets of the front.)
It was to be kept secret until it could be dropped like an unpleasant surprise on D-Day : that the Allies could return their wounded to the bullets of the front lines a lot quicker than the Axis could.
As unhappy that would make the unfortunate Allied wounded, it would at least allow the Allies to fight the war without calling up many middle class men to fight in the front lines -- unlike the Axis who were by now calling up every men with two feet.
The Anglo-American Patent War of 1939-1945
Selfishly, the British secretly hoped they'd winning the patent war against the Americans and reap all the wartime glory and all the postwar patent profits -- the Americans hoped the reverse.
Merck-the-firm selfishly hoped it would win this war against the natural-penicillin oriented Pfizer, just as ICI felt the same against Glaxo.
Florey secretly and selfishly hoped his team would first synthesize penicillin and that as team leader he'd get most of the personal glory --- Merck-the-man felt ditto about his team efforts.
Both war-avoiders in WWI , they desperately needed some moral victory from this war.
Fleming needed synthetic penicillin as ground cover for his neglect in putting natural penicillin to work saving lives fifteen years earlier : his excuse had always been, in part, that it needed to be synthetic first.
Behind this triad was the medical-scientific establishment of Britain and America.
The triad felt sure the military and the government bureaucrats of both countries were also on side - and 90%were.
But 90% proved not good enough as some in the American military and government agencies broke ranks.
Secrecy was the hallmark of selfish penicillin so any breaking of the secrecy ranks could prove fatal.
But even the efforts of the rank-breakers wouldn't have been enough but for one man's independent efforts to beat the triad.
Against the triad was Martin Henry Dawson.
The hallmark of selflessness is sharing - as widely and as freely as possible.
So Dawson was, by pointed contrast, was in favour of selfless penicillin .
Penicillin made available to all the sick, even during Total War, and in all the nations.
Available as available NOW ! - not after the war, when the dead from infection had been allowed to pile up.
Available as in good enough natural crude penicillin ,available now.
Available in the economic sense - no triad efforts to create artificial storages and no artificial claims of complex manufacture to force prices up to the roof.
Dawson wanted it made available cheaply and abundantly for all through the simple timeless mechanism that it be widely produced by existing technology and by using public domain natural penicillium spores.
And by allowing and encouraging firms from many nations to manufacture it, all to keep prices down by force of free competition.
Dawson kept up his struggle to win through for selfless penicillin despite the fact it greatly shortened his life (he had terminal MG).
That too, was selfless....
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