"Publication Bias" is a common problem in Science.
It can take many forms and is generated by many people : so the guilt can be nicely spread about.
Peer Review is such an honored precept in Science, it must come as a shock to many laypeople to learn that almost nobody likes a scientist who actually re-runs the protocol reported in one lab's published paper, to see it the results stand up in their own lab - the supposed point of peer review.
In fact, a paper that merely confirms the earlier results is not welcomed by journal editors, journal readers or your fellow scientists on things like tenure committees.
"Perhaps.... if you could confirm it with some new additional research... it might be acceptable."
But, on the other hand, if you are well known and the lead author of the original lab is also well known and you fail to confirm their results and even become so bold as to hint it because their hypothesis is all wrong to begin with, you will likely get published.
Because in Science as elsewhere in life, controversy sells newspapers - and journals.
Even worse is for a scientist to come up with a hypothesis and then cheerfully report that it didn't pan out - don't expect a rush of editors eager to publish you.
You might think Science would welcome your honesty - no point in issuing grant money and wasting six months of ten people's lives, merely to re-discover what you already found out - "the idea is going no where - at least in the form my lab put upon it."
This changing a bit when it comes to drug trial results.
If false, and allowed to stand, they could cause many to die.
Editors are even more wary these days if the study is funded by drug companies.
Now medical journals want all results (good ,bad or inconclusive) placed in a public database created the moment the project is started - even if only the highlights are published.
No more cherry picking the best results for your hypothesis.
'TEACHING FOR EXAMS' BIAS
Now a similar sort of bias emerges whenever scientists must teach students (or politicians/generals/executives).
The paymasters (parents, taxpayers, prime ministers) want definite simple answers - results, in other words --- not real world scientific caution.
Scientists want to eat.
So one can just imagine Newton cheerfuly telling these various paymasters in his day that "my new theory can predict the path of the nearby planets highly accurately."
Wow, they say.
No point in telling the paymasters that high accuracy with regard to the paths of planets is a totally unnecessary luxury - the planets are not about to sneak up on us and crash into Earth.
And also no sense in admitting that your new laws won't do much for calculating the paths of asteroids, which have in the past and will against someday, crash into us with terrible results.
(They are too many,too small, too dark and too easily affected by larger objects passing through, to be easily tamed by the level of technology we had for the effort in Newton's day - or even today.)
This sort of thinking results in students from junior high to undergraduate level only being thoroughly taught those parts of Reality that science has managed to tame/explain/predict in nice simple clearcut patterns.
Useless it may be to predict the paths of planets, but Science can do it and so science teachers will teach it and expect students to replicate it.
Predict the weather can't be done reliably and so it its rushed through, ignored, push aside.
Teachers always claim - but I don't believe them - that they only teach experiments that work because it is too hard to evaluate results from students working on experiments that we know will produce inconclusive ,rather than clearcut, results.
The pattern proceeds over hundreds of fronts over dozens of years - the average middle class person with a degree is subtly indoctrinated in the the idea that Science has ,or is soon about to, discover and explain just about everything.
In others words, they become imbibed with the tenets of Modernity from schoolteachers who would otherwise claim they couldn't ID Modernity in a lineup of cons.
But when that callow young science undergraduate is placed in the gunnery room of some World War II battleship (for whatever navy) during a real exchange of broadsides, he is likely to realize, far far too late, that Newton and Science never did solve the multi-body mechanics equations that govern most of the real world.
Imagine trying to fire a one ton shell at a 40,000 ton ship, a fifth of a mile long, that is twenty miles away in the dark, zigzagging through rough seas at 20 knots- and randomly pitching up and down as well as deliberately zigzagging from side to side.
Your ship is doing all this as well - trying just to avoid being hit.
Your only job is to aim that shell so when it arrives a minute or two later, it hits the other ship - and hits in a place where the armour isn't too thick .
The waves can't push the ship about so that its sides are too sharply angled at the moment of impact so the shell slides off it harmlessly - nor can the ship be so low in the water because of wave action that your shell sails harmlessly through the ship's crowsnest.
But you have no idea of what the wave action is twenty miles away and two minutes into the future.
You are too busy discovering that each shell is polished slightly differently and each propellant bag load has slightly different energy output.
The big gun barrel fires slightly different as it warms up and wears out gradually.
The rangefinder gives different results in cold versus hot weather as metal expands or contacts.
Each shell will have a different path as a result of all these variables.
And don't get me started on the effects on the shell's path caused by the varying wind and air temperature over a path through the atmosphere twenty miles long.
On and on and on it goes.
The highest tech aspect of World War Two was not the bombsights in bombers, code-breaking, nuclear fission - it was in the range-finding units of big battleships.
Despite all this scientific effort, training of crew, expensive state of the art computers, a ship's safest course when it came under fire was to deliberately steer towards the last shell splash - so inaccurate was long range gunnery, it was a given no shell fell in the same place twice, even when that was the gun crew's intention !
Day to day Newtonian/slide rule mechanics, the science that most people are still comfortably with, gives approximately accurate results under favourable conditions.
This comes as no surprise to scientists as experimenters , but as teachers, they lulled generations of citizens into thinking science could work as well with real world problems as it appeared to do in the undergraduate lab.
Science sang for its supper - and sang a false tune.
So be very suspicious of any school course where you come out of it 'knowing more' than you did coming in - for a good instructor teaches you humility, not hubris...
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
World War Two: a global referendum on Modernity
If WWII was a Civil War among earthlings, a global referendum on the value of Modernity taken to its logical extreme, how did the vote go ?
I think an overwhelming majority of the world voted for Modernity.
But many had started having a few small doubts and wanted a few correctives and adjustments.
A victory then, for Modernity.
But DOUBT is the ultimate solvent, 'The Seven Year Itch' of human thought and over time, those tiny doubts grew and grew and are growing still.
Call it a PyrrhicVictory for Modernity...
I think an overwhelming majority of the world voted for Modernity.
But many had started having a few small doubts and wanted a few correctives and adjustments.
A victory then, for Modernity.
But DOUBT is the ultimate solvent, 'The Seven Year Itch' of human thought and over time, those tiny doubts grew and grew and are growing still.
Call it a PyrrhicVictory for Modernity...
World War Two : a CIVIL war among Earth's humans
I have said that 75 years on, World War Two and its lead up is looking more and more like an internal family fight between the most modern nations in the world.
They were united in believing that there were far too many Jewish undergraduates in university but differed over the solution: while many countries supported the idea of informal hidden quotas, only a few nations felt that all current Jewish students should be expelled and even fewer felt that Jewish undergraduates should be taken out and gassed to death.
Substitute Negroes, homosexuals, defective newborns ,morons in mental homes, Polacks and other immigrants and you get a similar pattern.
But I don't really mean it.
I do not really think WWII was basically a war between nations over just how far to take the logic of Modernity with regards to those judged less worthy of civilized modern life.
Instead, I have found that history reveals that in almost every nation on the planet World War Two generated strong disagreements within its domestic population over how to react to the varing propositions that Hitler,Tojo,Stalin, FDR and Churchill were making as to the reasons for joining their side of the fight.
Many people back then had far more in common with various peoples in many other nations than they did with their own fellow nationals .
WWII created transnational collections of individual consciences (& individual responses) that spanned the globe - from 100% pro-Hitler to 100% anti-Hitler and everything in between.
Today's (and certainly tomorrow's) historians are going to have to start studying the individual responses to the rise of Hitler and let the crude blunt instrument of a nation's overall response to Hitler to languish for a while...
They were united in believing that there were far too many Jewish undergraduates in university but differed over the solution: while many countries supported the idea of informal hidden quotas, only a few nations felt that all current Jewish students should be expelled and even fewer felt that Jewish undergraduates should be taken out and gassed to death.
Substitute Negroes, homosexuals, defective newborns ,morons in mental homes, Polacks and other immigrants and you get a similar pattern.
But I don't really mean it.
I do not really think WWII was basically a war between nations over just how far to take the logic of Modernity with regards to those judged less worthy of civilized modern life.
Instead, I have found that history reveals that in almost every nation on the planet World War Two generated strong disagreements within its domestic population over how to react to the varing propositions that Hitler,Tojo,Stalin, FDR and Churchill were making as to the reasons for joining their side of the fight.
Many people back then had far more in common with various peoples in many other nations than they did with their own fellow nationals .
WWII created transnational collections of individual consciences (& individual responses) that spanned the globe - from 100% pro-Hitler to 100% anti-Hitler and everything in between.
Today's (and certainly tomorrow's) historians are going to have to start studying the individual responses to the rise of Hitler and let the crude blunt instrument of a nation's overall response to Hitler to languish for a while...
"Triumph of the Wild: World War Two"
World War Two is usually described as the triumph of one kind of human will over another kind of human will .
Victory is said to have come to the Allies because the minds/rationality/willpower of the free scientists of the democracies were much smarter than the fanatically-willed minds of the soldiers and scientists of Germany and Japan.
This despite the fact that almost everyone agrees that the Axis were the far tougher soldiers: scientific willpower trumped military willpower.
But the military staff of all the combatant nations found that their war plans rarely worked anywhere near as well as they were expected ----the fog of war had never seemed thicker.
Unexpectedly, their plans' biggest failings were usually against the forces of nature rather than against the forces of man:
The constant ability of unexpected bad weather to delay offensives and the power of national harvest failures to push leaders into new, ever more foolish, invasions schemes.
The overwhelming consequences of rugged geography ,and vast distances in general, on logistical efforts.
The perpetual shortages of natural materials and energy (including- unexpectedly for modernists - shortages in human energy !)
The failures of man-made/synthetic substitutes to remedy Nature's shortfalls.
The inaccuracy of workmanlike Newtonian mechanics ,at distances longer than a Nelson broadside , the list goes on and on.
The world's biggest and most modern nations went into World War Two knowing it would be a very tough war - but were united, at least, in believing their only really tough opponents would be groups of other humans.
This is to say, they were all Modernists to the core and hence all students - perhaps unknowingly - of Sir Charles Lyell.
Nature was supposed to have been tamed within reasonable limits and only humans could hold up other humans in their goals.
But few Germans today are willing to rate Stalin's army as being a greater enemy than Russian winter and Russian mud and the sheer Russian expanse.
Even fewer of today's airforce staff officers still believe that German fighters and ack-ack
guns were the prime reason why massive numbers of Allied bombers failed to permanently knock out any German power plants or oil refineries.
In a world war that ended up being as much being 'against the world' as being 'conducted all over the world', Modernity took a blow it never fully recovered from: "Wild Trumps Will, every time".
Nature bats last... but it bats long and it bats hard....
Victory is said to have come to the Allies because the minds/rationality/willpower of the free scientists of the democracies were much smarter than the fanatically-willed minds of the soldiers and scientists of Germany and Japan.
This despite the fact that almost everyone agrees that the Axis were the far tougher soldiers: scientific willpower trumped military willpower.
But the military staff of all the combatant nations found that their war plans rarely worked anywhere near as well as they were expected ----the fog of war had never seemed thicker.
Unexpectedly, their plans' biggest failings were usually against the forces of nature rather than against the forces of man:
The constant ability of unexpected bad weather to delay offensives and the power of national harvest failures to push leaders into new, ever more foolish, invasions schemes.
The overwhelming consequences of rugged geography ,and vast distances in general, on logistical efforts.
The perpetual shortages of natural materials and energy (including- unexpectedly for modernists - shortages in human energy !)
The failures of man-made/synthetic substitutes to remedy Nature's shortfalls.
The inaccuracy of workmanlike Newtonian mechanics ,at distances longer than a Nelson broadside , the list goes on and on.
The world's biggest and most modern nations went into World War Two knowing it would be a very tough war - but were united, at least, in believing their only really tough opponents would be groups of other humans.
This is to say, they were all Modernists to the core and hence all students - perhaps unknowingly - of Sir Charles Lyell.
Nature was supposed to have been tamed within reasonable limits and only humans could hold up other humans in their goals.
But few Germans today are willing to rate Stalin's army as being a greater enemy than Russian winter and Russian mud and the sheer Russian expanse.
Even fewer of today's airforce staff officers still believe that German fighters and ack-ack
guns were the prime reason why massive numbers of Allied bombers failed to permanently knock out any German power plants or oil refineries.
In a world war that ended up being as much being 'against the world' as being 'conducted all over the world', Modernity took a blow it never fully recovered from: "Wild Trumps Will, every time".
Nature bats last... but it bats long and it bats hard....
the coalition of the Un-willing
On the afternoon of September 2st 1939, it seemed as if the global coalition of those nations willing to face down Hitler numbered exactly "zero".
(Poland had no moral choice to make - it was simply invaded.)
But Britain and France still had sizable numbers of their elite willing to listen to Italy's plea for a conference to settle this dispute between neighbours 'honorably' - as was done at earlier ...at Munich.
So World War II was by no means a certainty that afternoon.
Only at 1130 pm that night, during a tremendous thunderstorm, when the British Cabinet voted to go to war with Germany next morning, unless it ceased its war against Poland, did the 'world war' portion of the localized German-Polish war really begin.
As the 'Greatest Generation ever' basks in the glow of praise for doing its bit in 'the Best War ever'/ 'the last Good war' , it is worth recalling the long,long timeline of just when (or even if) each nation on earth decided to join the coalition of the willing against Hitler - and whether or not they followed these bold words up, by actually sending their citizens into combat.
Some waited the full twelve years from 1933 to 1945 to oppose Herr Hitler (and only verbally at that) and some never did.
The very first combatant nation was Germany , on August 31 1939. The last new combatant was the USSR, going to war against Japan on August 8th 1945.
In between those six years, the world's nations shifted their feet from side to side to side, going from neutrality to supporting one side but remaining neutral, to joining them formally as an ally to changing sides or back again to neutrality and just about everything in between.
Many only joined the war against Hitler in the Spring of 1945, with Germany defeated and in fear they would be denied a seat in the proposed postwar United Nations organization, unless they at least declared war on Hitler before Berlin surrendered.
At any one time, a nation's formal decision about wartime status and its more informal 'leanings' to one side or other (or the intensity of its commitment to its allies) were usually opposed by a good sum of its citizens as 'going too far' or 'not far enough'.
Really 'the coalition of those willing to oppose Hitler' was in the end made of of individuals, not nations.
They joined it one at a time and varied day by day in the intensity of their commitment against Hitler's ideals.
Looking for the opponents to Hitlerism at the level of 'the nation' reveals that all nations on earth were immorally slow to take him on and is a crude measure of the long road to defeating the ideas of Hitler as well as just his military forces.
Individuals both did much,much better than the various nations - and much,much worse...
(Poland had no moral choice to make - it was simply invaded.)
But Britain and France still had sizable numbers of their elite willing to listen to Italy's plea for a conference to settle this dispute between neighbours 'honorably' - as was done at earlier ...at Munich.
So World War II was by no means a certainty that afternoon.
Only at 1130 pm that night, during a tremendous thunderstorm, when the British Cabinet voted to go to war with Germany next morning, unless it ceased its war against Poland, did the 'world war' portion of the localized German-Polish war really begin.
As the 'Greatest Generation ever' basks in the glow of praise for doing its bit in 'the Best War ever'/ 'the last Good war' , it is worth recalling the long,long timeline of just when (or even if) each nation on earth decided to join the coalition of the willing against Hitler - and whether or not they followed these bold words up, by actually sending their citizens into combat.
Some waited the full twelve years from 1933 to 1945 to oppose Herr Hitler (and only verbally at that) and some never did.
The very first combatant nation was Germany , on August 31 1939. The last new combatant was the USSR, going to war against Japan on August 8th 1945.
In between those six years, the world's nations shifted their feet from side to side to side, going from neutrality to supporting one side but remaining neutral, to joining them formally as an ally to changing sides or back again to neutrality and just about everything in between.
Many only joined the war against Hitler in the Spring of 1945, with Germany defeated and in fear they would be denied a seat in the proposed postwar United Nations organization, unless they at least declared war on Hitler before Berlin surrendered.
At any one time, a nation's formal decision about wartime status and its more informal 'leanings' to one side or other (or the intensity of its commitment to its allies) were usually opposed by a good sum of its citizens as 'going too far' or 'not far enough'.
Really 'the coalition of those willing to oppose Hitler' was in the end made of of individuals, not nations.
They joined it one at a time and varied day by day in the intensity of their commitment against Hitler's ideals.
Looking for the opponents to Hitlerism at the level of 'the nation' reveals that all nations on earth were immorally slow to take him on and is a crude measure of the long road to defeating the ideas of Hitler as well as just his military forces.
Individuals both did much,much better than the various nations - and much,much worse...
Friday, July 2, 2010
Does 'Mo goes Po' mean 'MOdernity goes POstal?'
A couple of friends, who know my sense of humour, asked me if "MO goes PO" stood for MOdernity goes POstal.
It does not, although I do think Modernity did go postal between 1939 and 1945 - its just that Modernity could have gone postal for a while and then made a complete recovery.
But it didn't.
So the bigger story is how Modernity plunged, over six years, from its Apogee at the New York World's Fair's visions of the World of Tomorrow all the way down to to its Nadir at Auschwitz.
It never recovered and it was forced to see its era very slowly and very quietly fade away.
(Significantly, the 1939-1940 NY World's Fair was also the time and place for the first ever fan convention for Sci Fi literature - at that time it was the literature that was the most unquestioningly Modern.
I doubt you could say that of most Sci Fi stories, post 1946.)
It is a lot to ask of the six short years from September 2nd 1939 to September 2nd 1945 ; can I make my case it actually happened in that a brief a time period?
I think so - the emotional change inside our hearts happened during the war, even if the actions that followed had to wait for peacetime conditions to be allowed to come forward.
If my project ever get produced as a play,film or musical, those six years will have to get packed into three hours - at the most - compressing the experience of the Mo-to-Po Revolution into an even tighter time experience.
It does not, although I do think Modernity did go postal between 1939 and 1945 - its just that Modernity could have gone postal for a while and then made a complete recovery.
But it didn't.
So the bigger story is how Modernity plunged, over six years, from its Apogee at the New York World's Fair's visions of the World of Tomorrow all the way down to to its Nadir at Auschwitz.
It never recovered and it was forced to see its era very slowly and very quietly fade away.
(Significantly, the 1939-1940 NY World's Fair was also the time and place for the first ever fan convention for Sci Fi literature - at that time it was the literature that was the most unquestioningly Modern.
I doubt you could say that of most Sci Fi stories, post 1946.)
It is a lot to ask of the six short years from September 2nd 1939 to September 2nd 1945 ; can I make my case it actually happened in that a brief a time period?
I think so - the emotional change inside our hearts happened during the war, even if the actions that followed had to wait for peacetime conditions to be allowed to come forward.
If my project ever get produced as a play,film or musical, those six years will have to get packed into three hours - at the most - compressing the experience of the Mo-to-Po Revolution into an even tighter time experience.
Martin Henry Dawson
I think my 15 scenes plus one afterword will do a good job of compressing those six years into a fulfilling dramatical experience, at least as seen from the point of view of Martin Henry Dawson's tiny team in the lab on Floor G ....
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Personal animosities at Columbia Eye Institute pushed Meyer into Dawson's arms on penicillin?
Blepharitis , a chronic inflammation of the eyelids, remains one of the world's most common eye problems.
Much of the time it is caused by staph bacteria and at the start of world war two, staph was one of the few common pathogen bacteria not killed by the various sulfa drugs - the 'antibiotics' of the day.
This was a big problem for the military of all the combatant nations of that war.
They regarded aviation as the alpha and the omega of modern warfare and so gave inordinate attention to the brand new field of "aviation medicine".
One only has to recall the moral panic the Allies fell into on mere rumours that the Germans had discovered the Viagra of aviation - a cortisone that let their pilots fly higher faster longer, well you get the picture.
Meyer had a consultancy with Schering Corp America - an German-owned company - involving ,among other things, attempts to create stable esters of penicillin.
Fears that Schering's work on cortisone was at the behest of the Nazis, ( it was not) rendered Schering totally suspect in the eyes of British and American intelligence circles.
Anyone connected with Schering - like Karl Meyer and his penicillin efforts - went into a little black book of "no-nos".
Aircrews and Blepharitis
An existing, generally intractable, case of blepharitis kept a lot of potential air crews out of the various air forces right at the recruiting office - that was problem A.
Problem B was that a lot of crews seemed to get blepharitis, either after they had been through training or while out on active service .
This was perhaps due to the strain of operating in the air of five miles up, behind an oxygen mask for hours.
It doesn't directly worsen your vision but it gives you blurry eyes which comes much to the same thing.
It also needlessly worried aircrews, who feared it meant worse things than it did.
Not just pilots or gunners are hit by its effects - engineers, navigation officers and bomb setters all had to look at lots of crucial numbers on lots of dials in very dim light - one pair of blurred eyes at the wrong moment could be terminal for the entire plane and crew.
Karl Meyer ,as a German Jewish emigre, had an easier relationship with Dr Ludwig Von Sallmann, who also was in exile --- from his native Austria because his wive was Jewish.
But even Sallmann only seemed to want to put Meyer's semi-purified penicillin into animals and then didn't publish anything on the results till a few years later (in 1943 - at least 2 years after the first experiments).
Typically of many,many doctors, he published freely on his early work with penicillin only after Baby Patty Malone made penicillin world famous, safe and respectable.
At least Dr Phillips Thygeson did put the crude penicillin into the eyes of 8 patients with chronic blepharitis caused by (sulfa-resistant) staph bacteria, between the late Fall of 1940 and the early Spring of 1941, with some very good results.
But he refused to publish on this success (adding his name to Fleming and Paine et al in England who also refused to publish their spectacular early successes with crude penicillin and eye diseases.)
The history of penicillin might have been much different if these doctors had crowed just a little.
Thygeson finally published on bleparitis and penicillin - in 1945 - noting its key military importance !
I think an oral history interview with Thygeson late in life suggests what happened:
I don't think he could stand Meyer much.
He accused him of being a constant paranoid about his work--- and having a gutteral accent that no student could understand.He said nothing about Sallmann's accent - though Sallmann had arrived in America about 8 years after Meyer.
Now a young student had heard all of these stories, feared dealing with Meyer but found him soft spoken and kind and stuck with him throughout his career long enough to write his affectionate obit - so opinions clearly differed on Meyer's manner and personality.
Dawson hung in with him for almost 10 years, so he couldn't have been impossible to work with.
In fact, Meyer gradually transferred himself from the eye clinic to the internal medicine department where Dawson worked.
Thygeson chose not to help out Meyer, Dawson or the fate of penicillin by publishing in an area sure to advance penicillin's importance in the eyes of the military-oriented OSRD of Vannevar Bush.
Instead he stuck to publishing on his results with sulfa drugs - these were totally pure, came via the highly conventional route of a commercial drug company - and didn't work and had potential toxic side effects.
But they didn't come from the home brew lab of Karl Meyer and that might have been a big point in their favour...
@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo
Much of the time it is caused by staph bacteria and at the start of world war two, staph was one of the few common pathogen bacteria not killed by the various sulfa drugs - the 'antibiotics' of the day.
This was a big problem for the military of all the combatant nations of that war.
They regarded aviation as the alpha and the omega of modern warfare and so gave inordinate attention to the brand new field of "aviation medicine".
One only has to recall the moral panic the Allies fell into on mere rumours that the Germans had discovered the Viagra of aviation - a cortisone that let their pilots fly higher faster longer, well you get the picture.
Meyer had a consultancy with Schering Corp America - an German-owned company - involving ,among other things, attempts to create stable esters of penicillin.
Fears that Schering's work on cortisone was at the behest of the Nazis, ( it was not) rendered Schering totally suspect in the eyes of British and American intelligence circles.
Anyone connected with Schering - like Karl Meyer and his penicillin efforts - went into a little black book of "no-nos".
Aircrews and Blepharitis
An existing, generally intractable, case of blepharitis kept a lot of potential air crews out of the various air forces right at the recruiting office - that was problem A.
Problem B was that a lot of crews seemed to get blepharitis, either after they had been through training or while out on active service .
This was perhaps due to the strain of operating in the air of five miles up, behind an oxygen mask for hours.
It doesn't directly worsen your vision but it gives you blurry eyes which comes much to the same thing.
It also needlessly worried aircrews, who feared it meant worse things than it did.
Not just pilots or gunners are hit by its effects - engineers, navigation officers and bomb setters all had to look at lots of crucial numbers on lots of dials in very dim light - one pair of blurred eyes at the wrong moment could be terminal for the entire plane and crew.
Karl Meyer ,as a German Jewish emigre, had an easier relationship with Dr Ludwig Von Sallmann, who also was in exile --- from his native Austria because his wive was Jewish.
But even Sallmann only seemed to want to put Meyer's semi-purified penicillin into animals and then didn't publish anything on the results till a few years later (in 1943 - at least 2 years after the first experiments).
Typically of many,many doctors, he published freely on his early work with penicillin only after Baby Patty Malone made penicillin world famous, safe and respectable.
At least Dr Phillips Thygeson did put the crude penicillin into the eyes of 8 patients with chronic blepharitis caused by (sulfa-resistant) staph bacteria, between the late Fall of 1940 and the early Spring of 1941, with some very good results.
But he refused to publish on this success (adding his name to Fleming and Paine et al in England who also refused to publish their spectacular early successes with crude penicillin and eye diseases.)
The history of penicillin might have been much different if these doctors had crowed just a little.
Thygeson finally published on bleparitis and penicillin - in 1945 - noting its key military importance !
I think an oral history interview with Thygeson late in life suggests what happened:
I don't think he could stand Meyer much.
He accused him of being a constant paranoid about his work--- and having a gutteral accent that no student could understand.He said nothing about Sallmann's accent - though Sallmann had arrived in America about 8 years after Meyer.
Now a young student had heard all of these stories, feared dealing with Meyer but found him soft spoken and kind and stuck with him throughout his career long enough to write his affectionate obit - so opinions clearly differed on Meyer's manner and personality.
In fact, Meyer gradually transferred himself from the eye clinic to the internal medicine department where Dawson worked.
Thygeson chose not to help out Meyer, Dawson or the fate of penicillin by publishing in an area sure to advance penicillin's importance in the eyes of the military-oriented OSRD of Vannevar Bush.
Instead he stuck to publishing on his results with sulfa drugs - these were totally pure, came via the highly conventional route of a commercial drug company - and didn't work and had potential toxic side effects.
But they didn't come from the home brew lab of Karl Meyer and that might have been a big point in their favour...
@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo
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