Martin Henry Dawson and Howard Walter Florey represented the weft and the warp of the wartime penicillin saga : selfless penicillin over selfish penicillin.
Florey's team agreed enough with George W Merck's team to want wartime penicillin only made in quantities enough to give the Allies a surprise military advantage over the Axis.
No penicillin for Neutral nations, for Axis and Occupied civilians or Allied POWs , very little for Allied civilians or for Allied wounded considered to be unfit to return to battle or war munitions work.
Florey wanted the commercial success and scientific prestige of penicillin to go to Oxford University and England and probably the ICL chemical firm ; Merck to America and the Merck drug company and the American OSRD agency.
Both wanted penicillin to be like the earliest success of Florey's mentor's Mellanby and Merck's own firm : fooling the public into believing that patented synthetic Vitamin C made by chemists with PhDs was better and safer than eating a raw impure - grown by peasants - orange.
So they strongly strongly opposed Dawson teaching ordinary doctors to grow raw - crude - natural penicillin in their hospitals and curing patients with it.
They wanted penicillin's fame and money to go to one person, one university, one country, one firm, one side in the war, to the scientific elite only , to men chemists only over women natural penicillin growers - on and on and on.
Selfish - consistently- and on so many levels.
Dawson wanted all in the wartime world to know how to grow natural Public Domain penicillin and to do so - now ! - to save all sorts of lives all over the world - particularly saving the lives of the so called "handicapped" that the Allies and Axis were equally determined to throw under the bus during the war.
Florey's team agreed enough with George W Merck's team to want wartime penicillin only made in quantities enough to give the Allies a surprise military advantage over the Axis.
No penicillin for Neutral nations, for Axis and Occupied civilians or Allied POWs , very little for Allied civilians or for Allied wounded considered to be unfit to return to battle or war munitions work.
Florey wanted the commercial success and scientific prestige of penicillin to go to Oxford University and England and probably the ICL chemical firm ; Merck to America and the Merck drug company and the American OSRD agency.
Both wanted penicillin to be like the earliest success of Florey's mentor's Mellanby and Merck's own firm : fooling the public into believing that patented synthetic Vitamin C made by chemists with PhDs was better and safer than eating a raw impure - grown by peasants - orange.
So they strongly strongly opposed Dawson teaching ordinary doctors to grow raw - crude - natural penicillin in their hospitals and curing patients with it.
They wanted penicillin's fame and money to go to one person, one university, one country, one firm, one side in the war, to the scientific elite only , to men chemists only over women natural penicillin growers - on and on and on.
Selfish - consistently- and on so many levels.
Dawson wanted all in the wartime world to know how to grow natural Public Domain penicillin and to do so - now ! - to save all sorts of lives all over the world - particularly saving the lives of the so called "handicapped" that the Allies and Axis were equally determined to throw under the bus during the war.
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