more HOBBY more PEARLS

GLADYS HOBBY in 1971, chairing the editorial board of the scientific journal she founded

Of course, people wanted more pictures of Gladys Hobby.

Well there is one color one, Hobby with Fleming, but it is all too common on the web already for me to add another copy.

But here are a few more, with pearls, natch.

I haven't put out any photos of  Meyer or Hunter or Odlum as they are well represented on the web.

But women always get short shrift, in photographs as well as in life in general.

I would really like to see a photograph of Eleanor Hahnel (of GAF industries in the 1960s) aka Eleanor Chaffee, (grad of the University of Connecticut 1937).

Or a photo of Miriam Olmstead (girlfriend of Robert Goddard of rocket fame), aka Miriam Lipman, spouse of artist Michael Lipman, aka a woman who did much to make Rheumatoid Arthritis and all auto immune diseases more understandable, if not yet much more treatable.

If you can help, leave me a comment below.

Until then, enjoy a few more pictures of Gladys Hobby:

Hobby in a formal pose , age about 75

From a picture taken of Hobby with Dr Ethel Florey, the clinician-wife who rode around on her bike in the rain collecting penicillin from patients' urine while her husband ,Howard Florey, played 'find the salami' with his mistress back in his apartment-like office at the DUNN ---- and then got most of the credit for Ethel's clinical penicillin work...ain't it always the way ?

"Patricia Malone","Anne Shirley Carter", "Marie Barker" : penicillin heroines, but only for two months and long long ago ...

Marie Barker, dying, refused penicillin 1943

For two months during a six year long war, North America (at least its parental and grandparental half) temporarily turned away from looking at the front page pictures of healthy young sons and grandsons in uniform in their local newspaper.

Instead, from mid August 1943 till mid October 1943, their eyes were caught by the unlikely front page pictures (unlikely for newspapers at peace as well as at war ) of very sick young females, ranging from ages of two to their early twenties.

Fleming never saved Churchill, but Gladys Hobby saved Florey's sister when his own penicillin couldn't !

Howard Florey was never more sleazy than in his dealings with Henry Dawson's team, as he desperately fought to restore the family name that his father dis-honored, by trying to remain the sole "hero" of wartime penicillin.

Just try to imagine what an university ethics committee today might say about a professor using his main rival's unpublished paper, sent to him in secret by his close friend (the same government official who censored his rival's paper and forbade its release) to improve his own work that is about to be allowed to be freely published !

That is what full Professor Howard Florey and university vice president and full Professor A N Richards actually did to associate professor chemist Professor Karl Meyer of Dawson's team , in mid 1942.

(As they say, tenure is 'red in tooth and claw'.)

The multi-hatted Professor A Newton Richards was a Vice President of the University of Pennsylvania, head of the medical wing of the OSRD , chief consultant to Merck and one of Howard Florey's best friends.

Like Mayor Rob Ford, he also never met a conflict of interest he could resist.

(By contrast, when Norman Heatley met Meyer in January 1942, Heatley recorded that Meyer was willing to send his data to Florey, but Heatley boldly told his boss (Florey) he (Heatley) won't because it didn't seem right, not if Florey was about to publish and Meyer was forbidden to.)

However, Professor Richards was of a very different moral character and saw nothing wrong in sending Professor Meyer's embargoed chemical work on the structure of penicillin to his main academic rival, Professor Florey.

By contrast, Dawson bent over backwards to try and find a source of penicillin for Florey (even at places like Pfizer - a place Florey determinedly didn't want to visit), totally unaware of Florey's well known reputation in the UK for being an academic bush whacker and a magpie of other people's hard work.

Florey's real (if totally private) reason to come to America in 1941, was mainly to establish that he and Merck, not Dawson and Pfizer, was the real leader in the hunt for viable penicillin.

By late 1942, Florey felt sure that the dying Dawson and Pfizer (having joined Merck's cartel) was out of the race.

Sweet indeed then, when in August 1944, a sullen Howard Florey had to stand politely beside Dawson team member Gladys Hobby as she showed him the natural penicillin poring off the Pfizer lines, while Merck and Florey's team at Oxford had totally failed to produce any synthetic penicillin for the D Day beaches.

Florey had spurned both Pfizer and Glaxo, yet it was they who delivered most of the penicillin that landed on the Normandy beaches that day  --- "the stone the builders rejected" indeed.

Gladys Hobby saves Howard Florey's own sister  -- when he couldn't

Asa series of letters in the Royal Society Archive reveal, in  December 1952, Florey had to eat yet more humble pie, first begging and then thanking Hobby for sending her own latest antibiotic off to save the life of his sister (Hilda Gardner) in Australia when his own penicillin wouldn't work....

For female pioneers of wartime penicillin, 1910 was a very good year ...

Dorothy Crowfoot , Gladys Hobby and Nancy Atkinson were about the only women who played an independent role in the development of wartime penicillin.

Many, many, other women were involved in the production of penicillin : in fact biological (natural) penicillin production and testing was often seen as women's work par excellent : but none played an important independent scientific role that I am aware of, beyond these three women.

(I do however believe that Eleanor Chaffee, Patty Malone, Anne Shirley Carter, Marie Barker, Eleanor Roosevelt and above all Mae Smith played crucial roles in turning "penicillin the war weapon" into "the penicillin of hope.")

1910 : annus mirabilis 

Interestingly, all members of our tiny trio shared another thing in common : all three were born in the same year, 1910.....

Dawson long been obsessed with SBE ? Show me ! 'Cause I'm from Missouri ...

Dawson & SBE ?! well I'm from MISSOURI

Even Gladys Hobby says so.

And God Knows, she should know almost better than anyone but Dawson himself.


In her book on penicillin, "Meeting the Challenge", she claims that Dawson had become "especially interested in subacute bacterial endocarditis" (SBE , a heart valve disease).

But no dates when and no specifics. All other writers repeat her claim and again offer no specifics.

I have always been skeptical.

Dawson's day job was running an outpatient clinic in chronic arthritis .

This , at a pre-war large research hospital where discipline borders were heavily policed and where there was a distinct pecking order , from live-saving surgery at the top and outpatient clinics at the bottom.

It still remains true today that dentists don't do open heart surgery and outpatient clinic directors don't handle heart valve diseases.

It is admitably true that in his course of Dawson's job, which consisted in handling the arthritis ( joint inflammation) aspects of every single sort of disease that offers it (and virtually every disease imaginable can offer arthritis pain, if only in a few patients and only transiently) , he would on occasion come across patients with a potential for endocarditis.

But normally a patient who actually had endocarditis in the 1930s was someone with a 99% certainty of a quick death and their arthritis issues were hardly a priority.

In his subsection of his overall department (Internal Medicine) there were people who did work on Rheumatic Fever (RF) and RF frequently ends in SBE, but they specifically tasked not to share RF research with Dawson's clinic.

(They surely exchanged insights and gossips, but only informally.)

During the hospital Grand Rounds, Dawson would definitely come across SBE patients as it was a heart-breakingly common disease to be seen at big hospitals in those days.

But so would every doctor in every big hospital on Earth in 1940 --- so why didn't  hundreds of other doctors  also take up the chance to try the new penicillin on SBE ?

Instead of SBE, Dawson had many other diseases to interest himself in that were closer to the nominal limits of his clinic.

To give but one example of alternate diseases Dawson could have branched into, Dawson did frequently work with patients who had gonorrhea (VD/the clap) because a very common aspect of their disease was arthritis problems.

So, for example, he was one of the first to use the new sulfa diseases on patients with gonorrheal arthritis, starting in March 1937.

But he did not, as a result of this frequent and work-related contact with patients with venereal disease, decide to try Meyer's experimental penicillin on syphilis --- that bold experiment was left to others years later.

So we circle around the issue again : why SBE, a disease so far away from his job definition that him getting involved could only rankle all-powerful senior doctors across the entire hospital?

And if Dawson had a long interest in endocarditis ,where was the proof ?

I am not aware of any published articles by Dawson*, between 1926 -1940,  that even mentioned SBE .

His many recorded comments at conferences in those years also fail to include words involving SBE.

In that same period, Dawson wrote various chapters in medical handbooks (Nelson's Loose Leaf and Cecil's) that involved many aspects of oral strep bacteria , an area where he was considered a world expert, but again nothing on endocarditis, even though SBE originates with the actions of two varieties of oral strep bacteria.

He could have waxed widely here, without raising too many hackles - but again nothing. (By contrast, his young co-worker Thomas H Hunter did write the chapter on SBE in both these textbooks, after Dawson's premature death.)

No specifically medical or scientific explanation for Dawson's sudden and overwhelming interest in SBE

The strong possibility remains - in my studied view - that his sudden and permanent interest in curing SBE with penicillin even at the cost of his own life, has to be set, instead,  against Fall 1940's political and military background in still-neutral America.

We might have to look at why and how Dawson finally got involved in a tremendous effort in WWI , to suggest why and how Dawson choose to get involved in a parallel tremendous effort in WWII.

Substitute WWII Belgium for SBE and Dawson's actions start to become clearer....

* I am unable to find any articles by his three co-workers on the SBE-penicillin project that reference endocarditis, even in passing.

I may be wrong on all this : but show me !

Penicillin, from EROS to AGAPE : synthetic crystals to the natural mold

Anders Nygren,1890-1978, Swedish theologian and pharmacologist ?!

Why not ?

His seminal text of 1932, "Eros and Agape", does offer an unique way to compress the long wartime penicillin saga into something vividly digestible.

On one side, we have Professor Florey.

He basically ignores that:

 (a) there is a war on and people are dying daily from infected wounds from the Blitz
 (b) that natural impure penicillin had no toxic effects from its impurities and is available - now - to help those Blitz victims.

Despite this,Florey and his wartime coterie of Platonists and New Alchemists wasted their time and ours seeking after the chimera of a 100% pure --- all white---- crystalline penicillin for their Scientific monstrance, to hold aloft before the adoring Faithful.

Its just the sort of New Age nonsense we've come to expect from the hardheaded science departments of Oxford University.

And I really do think that its a 'guy thing' ,this growing of crystals.

Women prefer to grow living things: plants, pets and above all their own children.

But crystals are about the only non-living object that grows before your very eyes.

They don't lay you up for nine or more months,change your shape, never wake you at night, never have to have their diapers changed.

What is there not for men to like ?

And if your vision of BEAUTY sees it as a pure, austere, hard-edged sort of mechanical regularity, you will find it best displayed in crystals.

In Nygren's definition of human EROS love, EROS is found whenever humans seek to ascend to a 'god-like' status , by demonstrating their love for (and ability to grow) beautiful (literally beauty-filled) objects - in this case crystals.

They take in/ draw down some of that beauty
and by loving beauty,add some of its value to their own worthfulness.

But Nygren contrasts this to AGAPE love - a spontaneous, undignified, excessively operatic, self-denying,heart-on-our-sleeve love of the unloveable - with our enemies being the best possible objects of our agape out-flowing.

We don't draw down some of BEAUTY's perfection and purity to give us additional value and to help us ascend upwards.

Instead we give away love -and our life if necessary - down to the 'ugly' and the evil and they gain BEAUTY by our doing so.

We become "like God" by descending to the level of the ugly, flawed and evil and giving them all our love nevertheless -- just as Jesus did.

In 1940 ( as it is in 2010) people tended to see that gooey smelly mold ruining their basement walls and fixtures as something almost evil and definitely ugly and unloveable.

It took a special sort of person to see the worthfulness of the penicillium mold - that person being Doctor Dawson.

His co-worker Gladys Hobby writes of his tiny band of followers creating their own Monstrance of the furry, blue-green, smelly, mold with its clear urine-like drops of yellow penicillin, holding it aloft daily before the unlovable SBE patients, to give them courage and comfort in this world - and in the Next.

And because of Dawson's AGAPE love of this humble mold, millions of other beings - human beings - had their chance to live out their three score and ten.....

Yet more SMART women scientists in pearls -Agnes Warbasse II

Thanks to Mo goes Po devotees, I am offering up more photos of SMART women scientists in pearls.

I have to dash off to work to fill in for a sick employee ,( remember what I said about not forgetting the impact of ordinary 'day job' demands on all the wartime penicillin participants?), so this will be very brief and I will expand it in a later blog.

Agnes Warbasse ,(Junior? or Second,/II ?- we seem to have no convention for mothers and daughters who share the same first name and who both become prominent), was the co-author on what I claim was Martin Henry Dawson's most important paper.

That it is among his least known and least cited doesn't change my argument - in fact I claim it was and isn't cited because of its revolutionary nature.

Agnes Warbasse married in the early 1930s ------and as most married women did then and frequently do today, changed her job to suit her husband's career path - so she left Dawson's lab.

But for two years, between late 1929 and mid 1931, she was Dawson's first research assistant.

Here is a photo of her from around that time period:

AGNES WARBASSE II

Here is a photo of Dawson's last female research associate, Gladys Hobby :

Gladys Hobby


I think it is the eyes that grab you in both shots - the two women seem to be to be intelligent and yet guarded or self-contained. Quietly self confident.

Now I must be off to work ...

Hobby finally gets her due

Today the best known member, at least among the general public, of the tiny Columbia University team that did the most to bring penicillin to the public as soon as possible (and did so over Columbia's dead body) is Gladys Hobby.

GLADYS LOUNSBURY HOBBY          Nov 19 1910 -July 4 1993

It is a fame she never enjoyed while still active in antibiotics.

The terminally ill Henry Dawson gets most of the credit for providing the moral energy and drive to the Columbia penicillin effort - something that Hobby and Meyer were always forthright in reminding people.

Karl Meyer lived the longest of the main foursome and lived long enough to see his lifelong scientific interest, hyaluronic acid, become a virtual growth industry.

The fourth member ,Eleanor Evelyn Chaffee (aka Mrs Eleanor Hahnel?), will emerge from the shadows, if it is the very last thing I do.

Thomas Hunter first saw fame for finishing Dawson's proof that penicillin could cure the incurable - SBE. Then he became a medical school dean best known for promoting medical education in the third world.

The fairy godfather of the team, Floyd Odlum, is probably best known today for displacing Howard Hughes at RKO.

Miriam Olmstead is today best known as a former girlfriend of the Rocket man, not Elton John, but rather Robert Goddard.

There were a few others, not as invisible as Chaffee ,but rarely connected today to this pioneering penicillin effort.

Hobby after penicillin went on to discover and prove up other big antibiotics and then take leadership roles in science organizations when few women were permitted to do so.

As a result we get many bare bones bios of her - celebrating what she did but not why.

The best - by far - of these is Elizabeth Moot O'Hern's "WOMEN SCIENTISTS" .

It is based on a 1977 interview with Hobby and includes some rare photos of Hobby - most other accounts re-cycle the photograph of Hobby shepherding Fleming about on his tour of South America.

{{What I really want is a photo of Hobby without her pearls - she always wore them - particularly at work in the lab - she was someone that people of my mother's generation would call a 'looker' because of her sharp dress and make-up.

Note the pearls ....

Perhaps this was a survival technique for daring to work above her station  in a very male-dominated world.

But those pearls ----I bet the woman wore them in the bath and to bed !

Perhaps not to church though - a true 'old skool' Presbyterian...}}

But O'Hern's admirable account fails to explain the 'why' in Hobby's four year struggle to bring penicillin to the public, over the opposition of many powerful forces.

I think Professor Jeremy Greene, from Harvard's History of Science Department, does a great job with the 'why' in his brief bio of Hobby in "NOTABLE AMERICAN WOMEN" edited by Susan Ware et al.

He focuses on her very first articles to explain how she came to hold a unique bridge role between the biological and chemical approaches to defeating bacterial infections.

Greene says she defends the validity of studying non-pathogenic bacteria .

(This was a real career-loser between 1870 and 1960 in medical science.)

Dawson's entire career - again opposed to his day job - was also devoted to exploring non- pathogens and pathogens as equally interesting and equally viable ways for commensal bacteria to survive in the human body.

This bonded Hobby to Dawson.

 A deep commitment to seeing new research put to work saving lives, even if it hadn't been all explained in scientific terms, was what bonded Meyer to Hobby.

Meyer was the rarest of 1930s biochemists - he was clinically oriented.... aka he was face to face people-oriented.

Dawson's team was very small and not well supported by his university --- but having two such unusual people to work with him (Hobby and Meyer) helped make up for this....

Dawson had been set to be the "invisible man", the Charles Fletcher of The Manhattan Pilot

I believe that for two critical weeks at the very beginning of the The Manhattan Project, Martin Henry Dawson was not set to be the team leader/senior investigator - in fact he was not expected to be involved at all.

The team was supposed to be led by the biochemist Karl Meyer, with someone (anyone) acting as the microbiologist to test the 'in vitro' activity of the penicillin produced , again with some doctor (anyone) from Columbia Presbyterian's eye clinic in the clinician's job  (the nominal job of Dawson on the final Pilot team) .

The penicillin pilot's aim, at that point, was simply (!) to purify and then synthesize penicillin - most of the small amounts of crude penicillin produced would have to be destroyed in crystallization (purification) experiments.

Only tiny, tiny amounts could be spared to show the resulting penicillin still retained the needed biological activity against bacteria on a glass slide or against bacteria on/in a human.

These were expected to be merely subordinate activities to the main show - "making penicillin".

Now any drug, not just penicillin, needs to be first proven safe for humans when taking internally and be available in huge amounts, before it can be injected into the body as a 'systemic' --- versus simply being dropping a bit of it into the restricted/external area around the eyeball as an 'antiseptic'.

Penicillin, in particular, quickly slips out of the body and so needs even larger amounts than most drugs to work successfully as a systemic.

This is why penicillin's first successes in Britain during the 1930 (but tragically for humanity never published), were in removing deadly bacteria from the area around the eyes.

Meyer ,working in an eye clinic ,knew these truths better than most. In fact, he did involve two doctors from his clinic to use some of his penicillin with their patients but both doctors (Von Sallmann and Thygeson) seemed dubious about its usefulness around and in the eyes (as well they should have been).

 The results were not spectacular and were published a few years later.

Eyes were saved in the early 1930s from a lifetime of blindness with treatments of diluted crude penicillin that in total must have consisted of only 1.6 Oxford units of biological activity (that is equal to one millionth of a gram of pure penicillin).

By contrast, Dawson's disease of choice to test penicillin upon, SBE, subacute bacterial endocarditis, may today require 1.6 billion units of penicillin to cure.

That is one kilogram of pure penicillin - one billion times as much penicillin.

It was known in 1940 that SBE would need an extraordinary large amount of whatever drug that could kill the bacteria in its vegetations because of the unique location of the lesions and the poor blood supply of the heart valves they rested upon- that is the problem in fact that still makes SBE the 'gold standard' of intractable infections.

All drugs to date, as of 1940, had to be used in such large amounts to kill the bacteria that they killed the patient first - because even a relatively "non-toxic" drug is deadly if used by the shovelful !

It was Dawson's genius to see that penicillin's strength was not what the popular books on it still proclaim - its ability to kill bacteria - but rather its ability not to kill the patients, even when used in extraordinarily high amounts for months at a time.

And SBE proved to be just the disease to demonstrate that fact....

@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo