Patient ONE of the Antibiotics Era : how the saving of Charlie Aronson changed our world

During his lifetime, Dr Henry Dawson only gave penicillin to several dozen endocarditis patients, Charlie Aronson first among them ; only saved several dozen lives, Charlie among them.

Dawson's pioneering effort to inject Charlie with penicillin on October 16th and 17th 1940 (Dies Miribilis) certainly didn't directly save many lives.

But the moral fact that Dawson cared enough in the first place about Charlie-the-person, to pioneer in making and to giving him penicillin, has certainly saved tens and tens of millions of lives ever since Dawson's premature death in 1945.

If  only the greater cultural milieu surrounding Dawson and Charlie had been as willing - nay as eager - to save Charlie 'the 4F of the 4Fs' as Dawson was, it might also have been as willing - nay eager - to save the Jews of Europe as well.

Immaterial that Charlie was almost certainly Jewish as well : the point to Dawson was that Charlie was a fellow human being, end of story.

Social medicine, Dawson's domain, says that medicine is not just the narrow manipulating of bio-chemical activities to save lives.

It holds instead the view that most people die prematurely, not because their bodies failed or because medicines failed, but because the world around them see them as not worth much, so not worthy of much effort, time and expense to try to save them.

Doctors who challenge these utilitarian views by their voices and their actions indirectly save far more lives than do their equally competent colleagues who may directly save more lives, but who are content to only save the lives their culture deems worthy of saving.

The Allies (rather like the Axis, differing only in degree not in kind) divided the world of World War Two into three parts, like Gaul.

There were the enemy-oriented people and the allies-oriented people : themselves further divided into 1A allies and 4F allies.

Until June 1943, only enough American resources were going to be devoted to penicillin to ensure that the needs of the 1A allies would be met.

Then the American WPB (Wartime Production Board) made its most surprising decision ever : that a considerable portion of America's bomb and bullet making potential would be diverted instead to making lifesavers - penicillin lifesavers enough to save soldier and civilian alike.

This was not a decision followed by Britain , Canada and Australia.

They decided to divert only enough of their country's resources to penicillin-making to fill the needs of their armed forces at a minimal level.

Winston Churchill and his Tory-dominant government took the lead on this decision, by their broad hints and inaction (if nothing else), and the other Commonwealth nations chose to follow his lead rather than that of the WPB.

A single additional Lancaster bomber squadron is about three million pounds in 1943 money,(about a million pounds in planes , plus two million pound  more for the 500 members of the squadron , hangers, armaments, fuel etc).

This amount would have paid for enough new penicillin production facilities such that by early 1944 , Britain's could have supplied its civilians as well as its soldiers.

Ie, match the Americans' penicillin output, despite using a lower level of technology.

We know well enough the costs of a Lancaster squadron and  the costs of Glaxo's low tech but highly efficiently run bottle-penicillin factories , to be able to make this claim with a great deal of certainty.

Churchill, however, chose 'LANCs over PEN' and paid for it in the surprising election results of June 1945 ; the inequalities of  wartime health care provision being the number one reason most people chose the egalitarian Labour Party over the war-winning Tories.

America's super abundance of wartime penicillin allowed it to use penicillin as a tool of diplomacy , replacing British influence with that of the Americans at every turn : replacing Pax Britannica with Pax Americana,  again causing Churchill to "win the war but lose the world".

Dawson did not force the WPB to make the decision it did, though certainly his uniquely civilian oriented approach to penicillin treatment, starting way back in September 1940, must have played a part.

But the WPB pledge was just that : a pledge - it was up to industry to carry it out.

Industry was willing - even eager - to build high tech buildings out of extremely scarce materials now suddenly obtainable thanks to top-of-the-drawer allocation quotas for would-be penicillin producers.

Postwar, those buildings would give them an early lead on their competitors.

But they weren't so willing to make biological penicillin in those shiny new buildings, not with rumours than synthetic penicillin was just months away.

Dante Colitti forced their hand.

In August 1943, the junior staffer, a surgical resident at a small hospital a mile from Henry Dawson's hospital,  was about to get married and go on a honeymoon. He didn't have to go poke his nose into the affairs of a patient in the non-surgical part of the hospital.

But he did.

He was moved by what he had heard about the dying Henry Dawson a mile away being willing to steal government penicillin to save the weak and the small.

 And perhaps because Colitti himself was a lifelong "cripple", suffering from TB of the spine.

Dante decided to risk his own career by intervening over the other more senior doctors' heads on a patient that wasn't even his --- urging the patient's parents to call the Hearst newspaper chain directly, to ask them to help obtain the tightly rationed penicillin needed to save the baby's life.

The resulting day by day heart-rendering accounts and photos of the life-saving efforts for little Patty Malone finally - albeit 15 years late - put a human face on penicillin.

Suddenly the population woke up to the fact that they wanted/  needed  penicillin -right now ! - and what was their Congressman doing to see that it happened ?

Doctor Mom, in high dudgeon , can provoke fear even in generals, industrialists and Presidents and soon John L Smith, boss of the biggest potential penicillin producer (Pfizer) got the moral message as well.

The chain reaction : Dawson + Charlie : Dante Colitti and Patty Malone:  John L and Mae Smith and memories of their own dead daughter  + Pfizer : tons of and tons of penicillin by April 1944,  is clear enough .

Also clear enough is an ageless message : one person, even if they are dying, can indeed make a world-quaking difference .....

Hyssop (In a Time of Cedar) : GOOD NEWS , from The Bad News War

The other Manhattan Project (1940-1945) was Henry Dawson's ultimately successful effort to "Defend the small, in a Time of the Big".

"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.

Penicillin Baby Patricia Malone survives !

In earlier posts I had mentioned that "The Penicillin Baby", little two year old Patty Malone, whose fight against a fatal staph disease had gripped all of North America for six weeks between August 12th and September 22nd 1943, had finally died of her disease in mid September 1943.

But perhaps it isn't true.

It's Milton's AGAPE not the Greek AGAPE...

I have been going backwards and forwards in my mind - and in my heart - about the exact spelling (and pronunciation)  of my book title.

A war story for women : the story of the OTHER Manhattan Project

I fully expect many more women than men will read my book "Heart and Mind Agape - a Good News story from the bad news war".

Men already have tens of thousands of books  and films written about WWII, detailing all its violence, death and pain.

Do we really need to read yet another book about a baby being vaporized in the war's concluding big bang ?

Why not a war-ending true story that has a newborn baby nosily whimpering at her mother's breast after that mother was saved from death, just in time,  by salvation dropping from the skies like Manna ?

The world in September '39 : as divided as it had ever been, as divided as it had always been, as divided as it always would be

Seventy five years on, we still can see the differing value systems that divided modern liberal and conservative capitalist from modern communist and socialist from modern fascist and nazi.

But we now see something that they themselves could not see : just how united ,in so many ways, that these variants of High Modernity actually all were with each other.

Francis W Peabody : agape starts in the mind and moves to the heart

In the mid-1920s a busy dean of medicine, among many other things, briefly addressed a student body.

And then a year or two later he died, the early victim of fatal sarcoma.

Normally a dean of medicine from 80 years ago is remembered, if at all, only as one name among many underneath the long lines of dusty portraits in the hallway leading up to the office of the current med school dean.

But in fact Francis W Peabody lives on, bigger than he ever was in real life, because of a very short phrase he spoke to that student assembly, just one of the many things he did in the course of a short but very busy, productive life.

A Low Dishonest War

Auden's phrase "a low dishonest decade" is - rightly - taken to mean The Dirty Thirties, but he first used that phrase in a poem written during the opening days of WWII , which he correctly saw as a direct consequence from the debased (lack of) ideals of the 1930s.

Indeed 'a low dishonest war' did follow the low dishonest decade,  because most of humanity fails to rise to the challenge and change its spots.

Aktion 4F : something done to 4Fs, rather than something done for 4Fs ?

For years, I have thought and written of Dr Henry Dawson's efforts to try and save the lives of young SBE patients ,"The 4Fs of the 4Fs" , as if it was a sort of counterpoint to Nazi Germany's efforts to kill similar chronically ill people, the infamous Aktion T4 campaign.

His own Aktion 4F as a sort of counterblast to their Aktion T4.

But Dawson wasn't actually directly opposing the German Nazis' murderously utilitarian disposal of humans judged useless consumers of badly needed resources in a Total War.

He was combating similar notions held by the powerful in the Anglo-American medical establishment.

Group love and Group think --- formula for a disaster : or WWII

It is well accepted that an excessive group love, for the so called Aryan Race, led Germany on endless wars of conquest and that excessive groupthink by Hitler's inner circle defeated an hope of permanent success in those conquests.

I want to suggest that group-love and group-think are intimately related and equally doomed and that by contrast, an expansive openness to others, all others - as individuals and as collectivity, in need or not in need - is the best way for humanity to survive in a dynamic uncertain world.

I plan to contrast the WWII career of little known doctor Henry Dawson, with his manhattan project to save SBE patients by de-weaponizing penicillin, with the mistakes made by those WWII excessive lovers of their own groups and their groupthink, in both the Axis and Allied camps ....

Dawson rebukes the "bystanders" of the Allied "coalition of the UN-willing"

In 1939, the British and French empires were initially unwilling to honour even the letter of their solemn pledge to come to the aid of Poland if it was attacked.

And they remained in no mood to truly honour the spirit of that pledge and provide serious help to the Poles.

But - pushed by some bold MPs in the British Parliament - they at least (and at last) declared war on Hitler and thus began the formation of the coalition of people that finally stopped him.

And these two empires did so without themselves being attacked by Hitler's forces.

Let us always honour them for at least that.

For all the other nations in the ultimately victorious Allied "Coalition of the Unwilling" only took up arms against Hitler when his forces attacked their own nation.

And then they defended their homeland against him with a fiery determination.

Militarily impressive but morally indefensible.

Because until then, the sight of Hitler (and Mussolini and Tojo) attacking neighbour after neighbour the previous ten years had left the bulk of these people strangely unmoved.

They loved their own collectivity (group-love) oh fully well , but not their neighbours (no agape self-less love for them).

Often their narrow group-love went beyond the indifference of bystanders to an active dislike of neighbours as a collectivity and as individuals.

So the battle between ultimate good and ultimate evil would have had very few participants, if Hitler and his Axis trio had only restrained themselves.

Just a few aggressors, a few victims and a few defenders ----- along with a whole bunch of "bystanders" , as such conduct is referred to in books on the (Jewish) Holocaust.

Maybe it is past due time that we extend the use of this term "bystander" to cover the conduct of most people on most aspects of WWII - in particular their global inaction during the long ,slow buildup to the formal declaration of war.

We bystanders stood back and did nothing while Manchuria, Ethiopia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania ,Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, Netherlands, Greece and Yugoslavia got gobbled up by bigger bully neighbours.

It took two Axis mistakes to finally get the American people into the ultimate fight of good versus evil .

One was the stupid Japanese decision to attack Pearl Harbour along with the British and Dutch eastern empires , and the other was the even stupider personal decision of Hitler to declare war on America.

So there never was any internal moral impulse that moved the bulk of Americans to 'do the right thing'.

But individual Americans did try to do the right thing : I intend to focus on the largely unknown agape efforts of Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson.

Conventionally, Agape, the English word, means openness in general, including openness to new experiences and ideas ; Agape, the Greek word, means openness to others' needs .

My sense of Dawson's efforts was that his agape-ness showed a very broad 'openness to others' ,  open both to their individual needs and to their individual experiences and ideas.

His WWI efforts to help those wounded in combat extended to his 1930s and 1940s concern for the forgotten institutionalized chronically ill.

He was clearly open to others in need ; this is why he started to grow his own penicillin to try and save the dying SBE patients.

They had been abandoned to die by an American wartime medical establishment seeking to emulate how the wartime Nazis would treat their own SBE patients.

But Dawson was open to the pioneering idea of using natural penicillin made by the lowly penicillium mold .

All the other doctors expected penicillin could only be made by man-made efforts.

I think he did so because his studies on commensal oral bacteria had opened his eyes to the versatility of the humblest types of lifeforms.

Because when we approach others in a spirit of Dawson-like agape-ness, we not only seek to help them when they are in trouble, we also cherish them when they are not - because they have interesting ideas and experiences that we do not have and we are never smug that our group has all the answers.

Agape-ness gives us clarity as well as charity....

God Only Knows why Henry Dawson did what he did - because no one else does ...

Next year will be ten years that I have been at it, trying to figure out why Henry Dawson did what he did and I am still no further ahead.
Consider this :

In late December 1940, Dawson got both some very good news and some very bad news from the doctors.

At age 45, he would be a father for the third time : Hurray !

Albeit his wife was in her forties , was physically handicapped and earns only a small salary.

This matters, because Henry had also just been told he has Myasthenia Gravis, a very serious auto immune disease that in the early 1940s generally killed within four and half years.

However, if he kept shorter hours, cut back on his stressful activities, stopped working around strong chemicals and ate and slept healthier, he might eke it out until better treatments came along.

Instead, Dr Dawson chose to plunge in ever harder into his self-chosen war task: bad chemicals, lots of stress and all.

He was trying desperately to save the lives of "The 4Fs of the 4Fs" : young people needlessly dying of the disease SBE,  because they were judged by the powerful to be only a burden in a time of Allied Total War.

Dying because the medicine that could save them (penicillin) was being reserved instead to use as a weapon of war.

If this sounds eerily like a more subtle version of Hitler's infamous T4 Aktion, you won't be far off.

Dawson's tiny little project was a sort of Aktion 4F, a moral counterblast at both the Allies and the Axis.

Now Dawson had a great moral right to do what he did with penicillin (including stealing scarce government-issued penicillin in a time of war !) because he was the first person in history to use it to try and save a life ( actually two : two SBE patients) - penicillin he had grown and processed himself.

This happened before America was at war, but at a time when the nation's medical and scientific leadership was hardening its heart in preparation to be as ruthless as Hitler, when and if Congress ever chose to fight him.

I believe Dawson reacted against this moral hardening of the arteries, seeing it as the absolutely worst way to win the "hearts and minds" battle against Hitler's ideas.

 Dawson was cautious, modest and retiring - his High School yearbook would have voted him "The Least Likely to Rebel".

His own field of expertise was miles and miles and miles away from SBE (Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis - a then invariably fatal heart disease).

He had never before ventured into making and purifying a brand new unknown drug.

He was regarded as a bit of a cracked pot by his colleagues with regard to his own personal research projects, which tended to limit his ability to draw in people into this Aktion 4F project.

This project of altruism literally killed him in the end - but he was not a religious believer so the basis for his extreme act of alturism is hard to find.

So why did he do it ?

I don't know.

But I do know he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

SBE became one of the most curable of fatal diseases, thanks to Dawson's pioneering efforts.

But he did far more than that.

His project forced the Allies to change their War Aims - to stop treating penicillin as a weapon, kept in short supply only for curable Allied frontline troops.

Instead he forced them to seriously mass produce it and to start treating it as something that should be available for all, regardless of race, color or war status.

By late 1944, penicillin had become the ultimate symbol of that highly elusive "good" the Allies had been promising would surely come about , if only all the neutrals of the world got off the fence and helped defeat Hitler.

One explanation on why Dawson did it and how he did it, is  that God sometimes picks cracked pots and non-believers ,together with the weak and the foolish, to do big things and confound the Mighty and the Wise.

Dawson seems to fit all four categories.

And certainly the Age of Modernity, the Age of WWII, was the most hubris-bound age ever ; if any age ever needed confounding it was that one.

Dawson and God and penicillin and 4Fs : it just sounds like a Match made in Heaven to me ....

WWII's Opium Wars : Britain's efforts to weaponize life-saving penicillin

The shabby ways in which the Churchill Conservatives, coupled loosely with Republican friends in the American OSRD, conspired to weaponize life-saving wartime penicillin should not surprise anyone with any historical knowledge.

Britain was a past-master at using life-strangling blockades of someone else's civilian population to substitute for the possible combat deaths of the officer sons of the British elite.

Napoleon had been defeated by just such a blockade policy and the Opium Wars against China had shown just how effective covert drug warfare can be in de-stabilizing a nation's populace.

(A lesson hardly lost on the OSRD's successors in the CIA et al.)

But Churchill and Britain were playing with fire when they attempted to severely limit the production of penicillin and restrict its use to only those frontline Allied sick combatants deemed recoverable for further combat.

Because in the 1940s we did not have the arsenal of about 100 viable antibiotics that we have today.

We had only a half dozen members of the Sulfa drug family and they were all rapidly failing --- due to overuse bringing on rapid bacterial resistance.

Wars bring on sudden pandemics - like WWI's horrific Spanish Flu.

One wonders what would the world response had been to Sir Winston Churchill (the Harry Lime of British politics) if tens of millions of people had needlessly died, before penicillin production was brought up to speed ?

The world was very lucky indeed that Henry Dawson was not so callous as Churchill and the Allied scientific establishment on the turning a precious lifesaver into a weapon of war...

Allied war crimes of attrition vs Axis war crimes of aggression

Let us first always remember that it was the Germans, together with the Italians and the Japanese, who started WWII and created its spiral of ever increasing tit for tat violence.

Without the aggressive invasions of this Axis trio, the western Allies would never have done to Europe .... what they routinely did to the dark people of smaller, hotter nations and colonies.

That is to say, imposing total blockades of food, fuel and life-saving medicine upon the civilians of occupied Europe---- and then bombing and shelling them as well, killing many and "de-housing" many others.

The Allies committed these war crimes of attrition reluctantly and carefully, but they did it from 1939 to 1945: causing the premature deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians from occupied lands in the process.

And it was all legal, strictly legal, at least under the international law in place during WWII.

But perhaps partly as result of the brave wartime disobedience of William Douglas Home (brother of the later British (Tory) Prime Minister) at the siege of Le Havre, postwar conferences made the starving of civilians in siege situations illegal.

One classic example of Allied war crimes of attrition were the mass starvation of newly-occupied Greece in 1940-1941 --- a starvation deliberately not relieved by Churchill , against the wishes of most of his Allies and of American elite public opinion.

Another was the extensive aerial and naval bombing of factories and transport facilities in occupied cities from 1940 to 1945 , despite the widely known knowledge that it was always wildly inaccurate - killing outright hundreds of thousands of occupied civilians.

I have already mentioned the siege of German-occupied Le Havre in 1944, where the British refused the German request to evacuate the civilians : the British hoped the slow starvation of the French civilians beside them might convince the hardened SS troops to surrender quicker !

But denying the knowledge of new life-saving medications and disease-reducing insecticides to the civilians of occupied lands is a entirely unknown example of Allied war crimes of attrition, but that doesn't make it any less true.

It is why I consistently refer to the high level Allied efforts to keep penicillin and DDT secret and restricted to frontline Allied troop use as their weaponizing , despite my listening audience's doubting stares.

Out of their homes thanks to Allied bombing, denied food and fuel by the Allied blockade, stressed by Nazi atrocities and oppression ,many Europeans were increasingly vulnerable to classic war diseases like typhus, which alone killed more than combat did, through all the big wars up to WWII.

The traditional insecticides used to try and stop typhus were much less effective a method than the new DDT and while the Sulfa family have worked well to prevent most killer infections between 1937-1942, there were to be no new Sulfa drugs coming along, and this at a time when bacteria was becoming rapidly resistant to Sulfa.

Thus a potential medical catastrophe was looming , bigger even than the double whammy of the Western Spanish Flu and Eastern Typhus that killed more at the end of WWI than did war combat itself.

Denying knowledge of the possible cure to occupied Europe would only make the catastrophe worse.

The wartime weaponizing of atomic fission to make bombs rather than electricity was opposed by a large number of very prominent scientists , yet failed totally.

The wartime weaponizing of penicillin was opposed by one - dying - middle rank medical scientist and yet was successful beyond his wildest dreams.

How successful ?

Take the example of 1949's THE THIRD MAN, recently voted the best British movie of all time.

In it, 'cheap, safe, abundant penicillin for all' is regarded  as the mark of every civilized society and "the man who dared water the workers' penicillin" becomes the epitome of ultimate evil.

And thus we get an explanation as to why war hero Winston Churchill (the Harry Lime of wartime penicillin) so badly lost the 1945 British General Election.

For Churchill, the architect of the Allied war of attrition, simply could never understand the public's objection to his weaponizing of penicillin.

Why did the dying, modest Dr Henry Dawson succeed in confounding the weaponizing of penicillin when the very energetic Leo Szilard and others failed to do the same with atomic fission ?

I suggest the reason was not in their differing moral values, though this is part of the answer.

Instead, I argue that it was Dawson's greater scientific conviction of the rightness of his actions, based upon his theory of "the eternal commensality of the big and the small", that made his opposition much earlier, much more consistent and and much more unyielding.....

If you could only pick one Manhattan Project ...

One Manhattan Project, procuring the weaponization of atomic fission, was the biggest project of the War. The other Manhattan Project,confounding the weaponization of penicillin, was the smallest. But if you had to choose just one , which one would it be ?

If we seek hints from High Culture, it is noteworthy there have been no highly regarded movies,plays or novels about the project to divert the originally planned use of uranium fission , as a sort of superboiler, into becoming a super weapon instead.

But many non-fiction books have been written about the atomic project's supposedly 'dramatic' events.

All evade the awkward truth that without a genuine moral dilemma experienced by any key actors, there can be no real drama.

By contrast, immediately after the war, a very good movie came out about an effort to 'maximum profitize'  penicillin, probably the closest peacetime and civilian equivalent of the Allied wartime effort to weaponize penicillin.

Clearly this 'crime' was regarded by the filmmakers (and more crucially by viewing audiences world wide as well) as almost the post war equivalent of the Holocaust and as the very symbol of the maximum evil possible.

For THE THIRD MAN was universally regarded as a classic on the day of its release and has stood the test of time, recently being voted the best British movie of all time - not bad for a black and white movie old enough to receive its Old Age Pension.

So its claim that any attempt to de-sanctifying 'the sacred penicillin' is the ultimate in evilness still seems to hold up as credible to modern audiences.

Just imagine then how that public would feel if they knew that the original narrow Allied plans for penicillin (and DDT), if unaltered, could have resulted in a greater loss of human life than even the Holocaust ?

Course unaltered, the far longer and far bigger and far more savage WWII should have seen even deaths due to misery,hunger and disease at war's end than even WWI.

As it was, the shorter, smaller WWI still lost millions at war's end to the Spanish Flu in the West and Typhus in the East.

Many millions did die at the end of WWII : but tens of millions of deaths could have been in the cards, if penicillin and DDT hadn't been available in sufficient amounts to serve all the world, not just Allied frontline troops as originally planned.

Thus Henry Dawson's lonely but ultimately successful effort  to keep penicillin de-weaponized did help to reduce the possible high death toll at the war's end.

And we all should be grateful for that....

Henry Dawson, Leo Durochers and The Virile Age

In 1939, the fiery new manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers set the tone for his famous tenure at the beleaguered team.

The Dodgers, Leo Durochers thought, were nice guys.

However, the Thirties were a Virile Age, with no time for tortoises or 97 pound weaklings.


Hares beat tortoises every time and Goliaths defeat Davids : yes, nice guys are nice and a joy to be around, but nevertheless they finish last every time.

If terminal diffidence is a form of niceness, then Henry Dawson was definitely nice.

Far far too nice nice to be a successful scientist in an age of virile men, what we would today probably call Type A personalities and Alpha Males.

Fortunately for humanity, Dawson combined his extreme diffidence with a stubborn intellectual courage.

Point of fact, most Alpha Males have never expressed an unconventional thought in their lives.

True they make a point of being offensive to nice people and 'ladies' , offensive to conventional niceness.

But alongside of conventional public niceness is an equally large body of semi-public locker room sentiments.

Alpha males merely express publicly what a lot of people say and think in private.

One thinks of General Secretary Henry Dawson's much better known counterpart at the Third International Congress on Microbiology, President Thomas "Tom" Rivers., a favorite among the media.

Old fashioned Southerner Tom was always brutally and colourfully frank about preferring his "boys" , those on his teams of researchers who were within his favoured circle, his "good ole boys".

This in pointed contrast to his other researchers on the team ,left outside looking in : the colored boys, the Jew boys and the gals.

Dawson kept his mouth politely shut about his critics  - not just in public but apparently in private as well.

But he was intellectually stubborn, literally onto death.

If he didn't have tenure, he'd give up his career to see his weekend and holiday research completed over the resistance of his boss (Avery).

When he did have tenure, he bucked his critics by not requesting grants and extra facilities.

He knew of the snares in the strings that would come attached to those grants and extra facilities .

He stayed small and on the cheap, but he stayed free.

And if you like semi-happy endings and tortoises, yes he finished first, well ahead of his hare competitors . And then he died.

Died of the disease that crippled him all the time he was proving up the immediate use of wartime life-saving natural penicillin.

If he hadn't remained stubbornly in the race, we'd probably would not have had abundant natural penicillin for WWII's wounded and all those rendered sick in the hunger and dislocation of the war's end.

It turns out that even in The Virile Age, nice guys and 97 pound weaklings finish first....

WWII's the Mighty and the Wise "confounded" by bacteria and bazooka Resistance Movements

It is clear now that WWII's twin defeats of Sulfa drugs and Armoured tanks by the bacterial and bazooka "Resistance Movements" spelt the beginning of the end for prewar Reductionist cum Constructionist Modernity.

(Martin) Henry Dawson could publish endless articles on the commensality of reality till the end of time ,but they cut no ice with the Mighty and the Wise compared to the short sharp lessons they learned at the great university of real life that was WWII.

Sir Edward Mellanby , mentor of Dawson's rival  Sir Howard Florey and head of Britain's agenda-setting MRC (Medical Research Council) from 1933 to 1949, famously claimed in the late 1930s that the synthesis of the sulfa drugs meant we could soon close all our infectious hospitals and kiss infection deaths goodbye.

But by 1943, Bacterial Resistance rendered the sulfa drugs almost useless and allowed penicillin's vast family of antibiotics to become the first port of call for the never ending new strains of bacterial death , though we are still racing very hard to produce new antibiotics to match ever new bacterial resistance.

And always will : that is the way of Commensality Modernity , the way of real reality.

The armoured tank, immune to mere infantry weapons and the indirect fire of artillery, was widely proclaimed as the major reason why the Great Powers would always quickly and easily overrun small powers, particularly those small powers without natural barriers to easy tank passage.

But by 1943 the Bazooka Resistance, today represented by the soviet-era RPG 7 anti-tank rocket propelled grenade seen in every revolution and insurrection, transformed that certitude.

The light, man-carriable , easily concealed bazooka-style anti-tank weapons ensures that an invading Great Power would now have a very tough time invading and successfully occupying a small power.

Tanks would now have a tough time evading the lethal bazooka --- particularly in rocky hilly mountain valley roads, in muddy swamps and while making their way along narrow forests and jungle trails.

Above all the tank was now incredibly vulnerable to hand-held anti-tank weapons while threading their way through the built-up urban areas found in even the flattest, smallest and barest of small powers.

Reductionist/Constructionist Modernity held that effectively reality was binary, with Particle Physicists at one end and Plasma Particles at the other, and everything else in between being basically useless mouths or useless molecules.

But the medium sized stuff in between had proved unwilling to just go away and had gummed up the works of both the Axis and Allied great powers during WWII, again and again.

I rather doubt that commensal expert and infantry veteran Henry Dawson was truly surprised.....

WWII : Constructionists vs Commensalists

Reductionism, still the philosophy of today's Popular Science, has admittedly had a lot of glass-half-filled success in the last few centuries.

It has totally succeeded in burrowing down below the surface of reality to the tiny objects at the base of all energy and matter ; reducing big macro objects that we can directly see and touch down to zillions of incredibly tiny objects we can only assume exists by way of indirect evidence.

But while Reductionism can explain how these tiny objects interact, more or less, it has totally failed to fulfill the real purpose behind all of its efforts : to construct new , better-built, versions of macro reality based on what we have learned about the tiny building blocks that make it up.

It turns out, to use today's Net jargon, that the so called laws of physics do not actually 'scale up' ( or 'scale down') all that well.

What we know about tiny quarks does not help us at all to account for the unexpected behavior of slightly bigger objects like the atoms in various phases of condensed matter, such as in solids and liquids for example.

To use a life-sized example of another scientific failure to scale up, this one from WWII logistics, we need only to look at the total failure of the German fuel truck on the Russian Front, after doing so well in Poland and France.

A sturdy army truck like the famous American deuce and a half can go pretty well everywhere a railway can't and so is the best means to get fuel to a fast moving invading armoured army.

But it burns a whole lot of fuel itself to get its few tons of fuel to the front.

But over distances of about one hundred miles from end of rail, it still is the best single way to get fuel to tracked armoured vehicles well out ahead of the slower ,wider, line of rail-supported advance.

But move the distance required to be travelled up to 800 miles out (and remember 800 more miles back in to get more tank and truck fuel) and the truck is a flop and a disaster.

Any truck trying to move up behind an aggressively invading armoured army that has been fighting an equally determined enemy , one who leaves nothing but scorched earth behind, is sure to be travelling over miles of badly damaged, badly overcrowded, muddy or dusty potholed roads and bridges.

The truck's gas and oil consumption soars as its miles per hour slows to a crawl. It can expect major damages from bad roads at least a few times on its 800 mile trek out and back - requiring the services of equally gas-guzzling repair vehicles.

Effectively, the truck is soon consuming more petro products on its two way trek than it can deliver to the tanks. (Remember, it must haul all of its own fuel and oil on itself, for the trip out and back, leaving ever less room for tank fuel.)

This wouldn't happen in peacetime, where the roads between Berlin and Moscow would be in excellent, fuel efficient, shape and where fuel and oil can be picked up at filling stations on route as required.

Once the cargo was delivered to Moscow, a return cargo is picked up to take back, to cover costs.

But war trucks 'dead-head' back, unless they can be used to safely carry lightly wounded men back to rear base hospitals.

Hitler's gambit to take over the world failed in 1941 when his physics of truck transport failed to 'scale up' to the world of real life.

Similarly the fact that chemistry had constructed totally new molecules of dyes and plastics out of little atoms didn't mean human chemists could construct molecules of penicillin just because the fungi could do so naturally.

Penicillin's formula was not the formula for nylon, 'scaled up'.

In biology, the ham-fisted efforts of human-sized geneticists to construct genes they wanted by massive doses of x-rays failed to work as well as the elegant way the tiny bacteria transformed each other with tiny but efficient HGT (horizontal gene transfers).

I am not dismissing the value of human railways and human chemical plants nor do I expect to see skyscrapers made by bacteria : I just insist along with (Martin) Henry Dawson, that there is a niche for everyone and we all are best at activities scaled to our own size and niche.

Reality can not be reduced to tenured human particle physicists at the top and quarks at the bottom (Reality reduced to Professors and Plasma),  with all of the rest of the stuff in between just useless feeders, not wanted on the voyage, yesterday's booster stages, enroute in Man's journey to the stars.....

WWII Brooklyn to be home to war's biggest killing machine or war's smallest life-saver ?

In the end, the Borough of Brooklyn (NYC) became home to both : the Iowa class of battleships and the home of most of the war's penicillin.

But it had been a near run thing ; this battle over the moral soul of Brooklyn.

After all, from the beginning of the war, the leaders of the Great Powers (Churchill, FDR,Tojo,Stalin and Hitler) were determined to show the world what the greatest entities on Earth could do, if they set their mind to it.

WWII is proof that they succeeded in spades .

Opposing them, Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson was also determined to show the world something too.

In this case, just what the world's smallest,weakest entities (cells of penicillium fungi) were also capable of.

So, as part of that Great Power display of massive size and killing force, the USA had commissioned the last series of battleships it ever built : heavily gunned, heavily armoured and extremely fast.

No war machine has ever been built that was better at going in, taking huge punishment, and still delivering lethal blows in return.

If the editors of machine-porn publications like Popular Mechanics are capable of having wet dreams, the Iowa class battleships were what they (and their mostly male readers) had wet dreams over.

The Iowa class was an extremely potent blend of what a battleship needs to shine and the design (now 75 years old) must have worked because WWII-built ships of that class remain to this day , still in reserve, ready to go back in action.

The Brooklyn Naval Yard built the two most famous, the USS Iowa itself and the USS Missouri ("Big Mo") --- they took 70,000 people in the huge yard several years to do so, working around the clock.

It was the war-related work that the Borough of Brooklyn liked best to be remembered for.

But in a small discarded ice-making plant in another less well known part of the Borough, another item of war was made and shipped all over the world - spreading the  good word about Brooklyn in places the USS Iowa class couldn't even think of going.

On a corner of Marcy Avenue was a improvised plant that the then tiny Charles Pfizer Company cobbled together to make naturally-made penicillin (penicillin made by Dawson's little fungi cells) as fast as Pfizer could, as hard as Pfizer could, starting in March 1944.

By June 6th of that same year, natural penicillin underwent its first mass clinical trials : a baptism literally of fire.

Because 80% of the penicillin that came ashore on the Normandy beaches that day was made in the Pfizer Marcy Avenue ice plant.

And Pfizer's naturally-made penicillin continued to be the largest single source of that life saving medicine, around the world, for the remainder of the war.

It doesn't take much natural penicillin to save a life in 1944 - a gram will do nicely - and a tiny glass ampoule, the world's smallest lifesaver, will easily hold it.

By contrast, a full loaded USS Iowa weighed 25 billion grams.

From his luxury apartment high above the exclusive Prospect Slopes area of Brooklyn, the manufacturing head of Pfizer, John L Smith, could easily see the building of the USS Iowa and USS Missouri .

Perhaps as a result he felt that Brooklyn was pulling more than its weight in the effort to stop Hitler and Tojo.

A cautious, frugal man, he wasn't about to bet the shop against the best brains in the world drug industry by producing massive amounts of natural penicillin when the smart money said cheaper synthetic penicillin was only another test tube away.

Sure Henry Dawson was always on his case, urging him to mass produce natural penicillin now, because a ampoule in the doctor's hand was worth a million in the mind of some drug company chemist.

"People are dying needlessly, daily, all over the world because the sulfa drugs are meeting more and more bacterial resistance and there will never be anymore new sulfas in the pipeline."

But John L long resisted (even if his wife was perhaps more open to Dawson's appeal) .

Maybe Smith was feeling that Pfizer had already done enough for the boys overseas, because didn't the firm's exclusive citric acid fuel the cold soda pops that all the overseas GIs, wounded or healthy, craved so avidly?

Soda pops hit the spot for sure, but to a GI dying of blood poisoning, only penicillin could really save their lives.

What if Smith's sole surviving daughter shipped out as a nurse and got seriously ill ?

Would she be grateful to her dad for providing the cold soda pop that eased her dying moments or would she have preferred the penicillin that could have saved her life, if only her father had been more decisive?

But nothing Dawson said seemed to have cut much ice with Smith.

Not until the plight of a dying two year old , saved by penicillin, touched Smith's heart, along with the rest of the world, in mid-August 1943.

Perhaps the crisis for the two parents of young Patty Malone reminded Mr and Mrs Smith all too vividly of the similar agony they went through a dozen years earlier with their first daughter, who died from a disease that penicillin could have saved her from.

Something must have clicked in the soul of John L, because despite strong reports that synthetic penicillin actually was 'just around the corner' this time, Smith suddenly committed Pfizer to an all out effort to mass produce natural penicillin both for the boys overseas by D-Day and for those dying back home for lack of it.

Smith's beloved Dodgers went on to chokedlike never before, during that summer of 1944, but Brooklyn (the Borough) scored big in its own extended road trip.

'Knocked them alive' in fact, in places like Omaha, Utah,  Juno,  Silver and Gold ....