A mobile gene that creates an enzyme that destroys almost all known antibiotics have been reported in NATURE this week, leading the news around the world.
Bacteria (and microbes generally), kick dust in the face of Charles Darwin and his theories of genetic inheritance.
They can send their 'seed' sideways - not just vertically down to their offspring like humans with PhDs - but also to other species or even towards other forms of life.
It is called HGT ( for Horizontal Gene Transfer) (aka Transformation) and Martin Henry Dawson from Truro,Nova Scotia (the doctor whose biography I am writing) was the first person to try to make HGT a big issue in the science world.
That happened between 1928 to 1943 but unfortunately few scientists back then cared to face his unpleasant message ---- "simple creatures are anything but."
(And its corollary, that scientists are less brillant than they think they are.)
If we start dying en masse from these new superbugs, maybe more of us will start listening to Dawson's still-pertinent message
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Why stop at THREE mold samples...
...when four would feel oh so good?
In 1970,Lennard Bickel, using information from Gladys Hobby, says that Martin Henry Dawson and Karl Meyer used a sample of Alexander Fleming's penicillin-producing strain received from Roger Reid in Baltimore to deliver History's first jab of antibiotics October 16 1940, before a sample of Ernest Chain's strain of penicillin-producing mold arrived from England via the wartime postal service.
Chain's sample - if it even was penicillium notatum - turned red and gave off no penicillin.
This story was repeated by Hobby in her 1985 definitive book on the wartime development of penicillin ---- and by most penicillin authors ever since.
Reid had originally got his penicillin strain in November 1930 from Charles Thom, the world expert on penicillium strains.
Who had gotten his sample from Harold Raistrick who got his from Fleming who got it as a contaminant in the air drifting upwards from the lab of LaTouche who scrapped it off a basement wall of somebody very rich in Belgravia.
(Finally !
The idle rich do something useful.....)
On July 9th 1941, Howard Florey visited Charles Thom who says that HM Dawson ( ie MH Dawson) contacted him directly to get a sample of Fleming's strain, after Chain's strains arrived in late October 1941.
So Dawson contacted at least three people that Fall of 1940 for a good penicillin-producung strain of the mold : Chain, Reid, Thom.
Why not then Alexander Fleming ???
Why not go to the Source, the Mother Load ?
This might account for Fleming's boss (Dr Wright) knowing all about penicillin-making at New York's Columbia University in March 1941, as referenced in Dr John Hedley-Whyte's account.
Dawson had meet Fleming at least twice, for sure -- in 1936 and 1939 when both were high poo-pahs in International Microbiology Congresses.
Anyone got any opinions on this ??
In 1970,Lennard Bickel, using information from Gladys Hobby, says that Martin Henry Dawson and Karl Meyer used a sample of Alexander Fleming's penicillin-producing strain received from Roger Reid in Baltimore to deliver History's first jab of antibiotics October 16 1940, before a sample of Ernest Chain's strain of penicillin-producing mold arrived from England via the wartime postal service.
Chain's sample - if it even was penicillium notatum - turned red and gave off no penicillin.
This story was repeated by Hobby in her 1985 definitive book on the wartime development of penicillin ---- and by most penicillin authors ever since.
Reid had originally got his penicillin strain in November 1930 from Charles Thom, the world expert on penicillium strains.
Who had gotten his sample from Harold Raistrick who got his from Fleming who got it as a contaminant in the air drifting upwards from the lab of LaTouche who scrapped it off a basement wall of somebody very rich in Belgravia.
(Finally !
The idle rich do something useful.....)
On July 9th 1941, Howard Florey visited Charles Thom who says that HM Dawson ( ie MH Dawson) contacted him directly to get a sample of Fleming's strain, after Chain's strains arrived in late October 1941.
So Dawson contacted at least three people that Fall of 1940 for a good penicillin-producung strain of the mold : Chain, Reid, Thom.
Why not then Alexander Fleming ???
Why not go to the Source, the Mother Load ?
This might account for Fleming's boss (Dr Wright) knowing all about penicillin-making at New York's Columbia University in March 1941, as referenced in Dr John Hedley-Whyte's account.
Dawson had meet Fleming at least twice, for sure -- in 1936 and 1939 when both were high poo-pahs in International Microbiology Congresses.
Anyone got any opinions on this ??
The Crude and the Dignified, ...
....are two wildly different versions of the Saga of Penicillin Development during World War Two.
You know only too well the Dignified version, as propagated by the OSRD of Vannevar Bush and by just about every academic writer on penicillin (I think it is a requirement for them to retain tenure or something) - I call it the dignified rendition of "The Revenge of the Nerds".
Martin Henry Dawson's efforts to grow, purify and apply his own homegrown penicillin to
save patients dying from invariable fatal SBE - all the while fighting off his own hospital, his own government and his own (dying) body - is the most tasteless, the most over the top and the most crude Hollywood medical bio-pic imaginable ,since the days of the dying Marie Curie laboring long into the night over her radium ores ,in a tin shed with a leaky roof.
A Forties three hankie melodrama full bore, for sure.
Enough to make any modernist scientist recoil in distaste.
Fair enough - stone-heartedness is a disease -and they are more to be pitied than blamed, etc etc.
But the patients, the punters, the bums on the seat love it.
They like - nay - love and worship - the idea of doctors who care about them enough to be willing to die for them.
I'm telling the tale for them ---- and in hopes that a few modernist scientists and academics might re-think how they deal with the real people affected by their lab efforts....
You know only too well the Dignified version, as propagated by the OSRD of Vannevar Bush and by just about every academic writer on penicillin (I think it is a requirement for them to retain tenure or something) - I call it the dignified rendition of "The Revenge of the Nerds".
Martin Henry Dawson's efforts to grow, purify and apply his own homegrown penicillin to
save patients dying from invariable fatal SBE - all the while fighting off his own hospital, his own government and his own (dying) body - is the most tasteless, the most over the top and the most crude Hollywood medical bio-pic imaginable ,since the days of the dying Marie Curie laboring long into the night over her radium ores ,in a tin shed with a leaky roof.
A Forties three hankie melodrama full bore, for sure.
Enough to make any modernist scientist recoil in distaste.
Fair enough - stone-heartedness is a disease -and they are more to be pitied than blamed, etc etc.
But the patients, the punters, the bums on the seat love it.
They like - nay - love and worship - the idea of doctors who care about them enough to be willing to die for them.
I'm telling the tale for them ---- and in hopes that a few modernist scientists and academics might re-think how they deal with the real people affected by their lab efforts....
Australians give away British Store
Mark Oliphant flew to America in a bomber to beg them to make the Atomic Bomb after British scientists had pushed its development while the American government held back.
Howard Florey flew to America in a Clipper plane to do ditto with Penicillin, a British development that the American government had also put on the back burner.
For both Australians, they did this out of strong personal conviction that it was the right thing to do.
It is true that both also did it with approval from some mid to upper level bureaucrats within the British government.
But there hadn't been anything like a full debate at the top of the British government about the matter, before the Australians were allowed to give away the store.
If there had been, it might have led to very different decisions on what was to become so portentous to Britain's dismal post-war fate.
Try to imagine our world post-1945 if the British , not the Americans , held the whip hand in atomic bombs and penicillin.....
Howard Florey flew to America in a Clipper plane to do ditto with Penicillin, a British development that the American government had also put on the back burner.
For both Australians, they did this out of strong personal conviction that it was the right thing to do.
It is true that both also did it with approval from some mid to upper level bureaucrats within the British government.
But there hadn't been anything like a full debate at the top of the British government about the matter, before the Australians were allowed to give away the store.
If there had been, it might have led to very different decisions on what was to become so portentous to Britain's dismal post-war fate.
Try to imagine our world post-1945 if the British , not the Americans , held the whip hand in atomic bombs and penicillin.....
Monday, August 9, 2010
The NEEDLE that wasn't there....
.... changed History.
In the early 1940s ,a parent was bemoaning to a doctor that by the time he got his sick child to the New London hospital from his summer home in Stonington Connecticut a few miles away, the doctors told him it was too late and his sixteen year old daughter Mary Louise was dead from spinal meningitis.
The doctor lectured him, as was his want, that if every GP carried a needle and some penicillin G in their black bag and gave it to every suspected case of meningitis, without waiting to get the patient to hospital to have their spinal fluid tapped and typed, no child ever need die from meningitis.
But unfortunately, the doctor went on to say, drug company executives are still too slow off the mark and GPs have no penicillin to put into their bags, 15 years after its discovery....shooting a meaningful glance at the parent.
The parent went home and thought about it a while ---- God he hated that guy - always wanting more and always giving you a lecture instead of thanks for whatever you could give him ------- but he did think about it and probably even talked it over with his wife.
Who knows what happened that night. Did he tell his wife," I'd like to help Henry but you know me, I don't like to move quickly."
And perhaps his wife said softly, "I know" and then immediately wished she had never said it.
Perhaps they always agreed to never again talk about that awful night so long ago.
Who knows ?
What we do know, is that something totally unexpected happened, thanks to that parent.
True he was notoriously known as a very frugal and cautious man, but now that he actually decided to ' do something about it' , he worked like a whirling dervish.
His name was John Lawrence Smith and if you know his name at all, you know him as one of the owners of the famed Brooklyn Dodgers.
During June 1944, the Brooklyn Dodgers had one terrible road trip after another.
But John L's other Brooklyn team scored one knockout after another that June in 1944, in places like Omaha ............ Utah ...... Juno ...... Silver........ and Gold.
This is the true story of " How Omaha Got Its 'P' " - and the doctor's advice is still good today - doctors are still advised to carry and use a needleful of Pen G on every suspected case of meningitis, ASAP, if they want to save a life.
If your child's life has been saved by a prompt needleful of Penicillin G, aka benzylpenicillin , offer up thanks to that parent.
(John L Smith ,the head of Pfizer, when it produced most of the penicillin that landed on the D-Day beaches - British and Canadian beaches as well as the American ones.)
And of course to that ever nagging doctor ,Martin Henry Dawson...
In the early 1940s ,a parent was bemoaning to a doctor that by the time he got his sick child to the New London hospital from his summer home in Stonington Connecticut a few miles away, the doctors told him it was too late and his sixteen year old daughter Mary Louise was dead from spinal meningitis.
The doctor lectured him, as was his want, that if every GP carried a needle and some penicillin G in their black bag and gave it to every suspected case of meningitis, without waiting to get the patient to hospital to have their spinal fluid tapped and typed, no child ever need die from meningitis.
But unfortunately, the doctor went on to say, drug company executives are still too slow off the mark and GPs have no penicillin to put into their bags, 15 years after its discovery....shooting a meaningful glance at the parent.
The parent went home and thought about it a while ---- God he hated that guy - always wanting more and always giving you a lecture instead of thanks for whatever you could give him ------- but he did think about it and probably even talked it over with his wife.
Who knows what happened that night. Did he tell his wife," I'd like to help Henry but you know me, I don't like to move quickly."
And perhaps his wife said softly, "I know" and then immediately wished she had never said it.
Perhaps they always agreed to never again talk about that awful night so long ago.
Who knows ?
What we do know, is that something totally unexpected happened, thanks to that parent.
True he was notoriously known as a very frugal and cautious man, but now that he actually decided to ' do something about it' , he worked like a whirling dervish.
His name was John Lawrence Smith and if you know his name at all, you know him as one of the owners of the famed Brooklyn Dodgers.
During June 1944, the Brooklyn Dodgers had one terrible road trip after another.
But John L's other Brooklyn team scored one knockout after another that June in 1944, in places like Omaha ............ Utah ...... Juno ...... Silver........ and Gold.
This is the true story of " How Omaha Got Its 'P' " - and the doctor's advice is still good today - doctors are still advised to carry and use a needleful of Pen G on every suspected case of meningitis, ASAP, if they want to save a life.
If your child's life has been saved by a prompt needleful of Penicillin G, aka benzylpenicillin , offer up thanks to that parent.
(John L Smith ,the head of Pfizer, when it produced most of the penicillin that landed on the D-Day beaches - British and Canadian beaches as well as the American ones.)
And of course to that ever nagging doctor ,Martin Henry Dawson...
If you don't like NEEDLES....
.... here is the guy you don't like:
 |
| MARTIN HENRY DAWSON 1896-1945 On October 16th 1940, on the 8th floor male ward of New York's famous Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, Dr Dawson stuck the first ever needle of antibiotics (penicillin) into patient Charles Aronson, launching a billion needle jabs of antibiotics in the seventy years since. OUCH ! This Fall marks the 70th anniversary of the much feared/ much revered antibiotic needle - at New York City's CUMC. And if CUMC are true to form, they will totally ignore it: Plus ça change (plus c'est la même chose) |
Penicillin a sidebar to WWII
One of the major differences in my account of the development of penicillin from all the others, is that I don't plan to tell the 'exciting' story of penicillin, with World War Two merely as part of the backdrop.
The fact is that during the war penicillin was never more than a sidebar to the main story, even on both sides of September 1943 when it was a major news item for about eight weeks .
Events elsewhere in the war moved penicillin forwards or backwards in importance in the eyes of war planners and nothing anyone in the entire circumscribed world of penicillin development had anything like the impact upon penicillin development that changes on the war front did.
The Eisenhower-Marshall proposed dates for a major cross-channel invasion - in summer 1942 or March 1943 (Operation Sledgehammer and Operation Roundup) - meant the US Army accepted and indeed demanded mass quantities of so-so but available medical supplies now over the possibility of better medical supplies later.
Penicillin was put on the back burner - deliberately - even though its superior qualities to sulfa was sensed early on.
The decisions to take the British tack of delaying the cross-channel invasion till May 1944 (or later), allowed US Army planners, early in 1943, to admit that the sulfa drugs had always had a lot of problems and that they were increasing in intensity.
Sulfa faced growing and widespread bacterial resistance.
In addition, powdered sulfa had proven frequently deadly when used in 'real life' sun-baked combat areas where water is usually in short supply.
This, in my view, was the result of too many combat-shy senior doctors making assumptions about battlefield conditions, when they had actually avoided the battlefield as young men during World War One .
The existing Army Surgeon was sent into retirement in the Spring of 1943 and a less cautious general (Norman Kirk) replaced him --- this has not been recognized as one of the new key factor in penicillin's improved prospects in getting up to mass production in America in late 1943.
But above all, penicillin now gained the time it needed if it was to be to eased into the military medicine cabinet.
All because of the extra year of breathing room gained for war planners because of the revised dates for the cross channel invasion from 1943 to 1944.
Martin Henry Dawson's 'SBE and penicillin' work went on regardless of the war's ebb and flow and his first success with SBE patients in the Spring of 1943 had roused John L Smith of Pfizer and others and so we might have had abundant penicillin by early 1944 ,irregardless of the new military demand for it ---we will never know.
The two penicillin stories ran in parallel ,not in series, and their climax coming together during the Spring of 1943 was, in fact, a coincidence ....
The fact is that during the war penicillin was never more than a sidebar to the main story, even on both sides of September 1943 when it was a major news item for about eight weeks .
Events elsewhere in the war moved penicillin forwards or backwards in importance in the eyes of war planners and nothing anyone in the entire circumscribed world of penicillin development had anything like the impact upon penicillin development that changes on the war front did.
The Eisenhower-Marshall proposed dates for a major cross-channel invasion - in summer 1942 or March 1943 (Operation Sledgehammer and Operation Roundup) - meant the US Army accepted and indeed demanded mass quantities of so-so but available medical supplies now over the possibility of better medical supplies later.
Penicillin was put on the back burner - deliberately - even though its superior qualities to sulfa was sensed early on.
The decisions to take the British tack of delaying the cross-channel invasion till May 1944 (or later), allowed US Army planners, early in 1943, to admit that the sulfa drugs had always had a lot of problems and that they were increasing in intensity.
Sulfa faced growing and widespread bacterial resistance.
In addition, powdered sulfa had proven frequently deadly when used in 'real life' sun-baked combat areas where water is usually in short supply.
This, in my view, was the result of too many combat-shy senior doctors making assumptions about battlefield conditions, when they had actually avoided the battlefield as young men during World War One .
The existing Army Surgeon was sent into retirement in the Spring of 1943 and a less cautious general (Norman Kirk) replaced him --- this has not been recognized as one of the new key factor in penicillin's improved prospects in getting up to mass production in America in late 1943.
But above all, penicillin now gained the time it needed if it was to be to eased into the military medicine cabinet.
All because of the extra year of breathing room gained for war planners because of the revised dates for the cross channel invasion from 1943 to 1944.
Martin Henry Dawson's 'SBE and penicillin' work went on regardless of the war's ebb and flow and his first success with SBE patients in the Spring of 1943 had roused John L Smith of Pfizer and others and so we might have had abundant penicillin by early 1944 ,irregardless of the new military demand for it ---we will never know.
The two penicillin stories ran in parallel ,not in series, and their climax coming together during the Spring of 1943 was, in fact, a coincidence ....
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