HARRY LIME : from war hero to infamous cinematic villain

Just one of HARRY LIME's "dots"

(See note below added, Dec 4 2012)

It is easy to imagine our Harry (Lime) in July 1943, just back from Hamburg as an Allied bomber pilot dropping fire bombs on Axis children, mere "dots", thousands of feet below him : a war hero, in other words.

Just as easy as imagining our Harry in 1949 Vienna, still a member of an Allied nation and still killing Axis children, only this time with watered-down penicillin.

But something has clearly changed : because now he is regarded as a a villain, in fact one of cinema's all time worst villains.


The difference, I argue, is all down to the fact that Dr Martin Henry Dawson's foolish 1940 war aim had , by 1949, become our war aim too.

In September 1940, Dawson felt that the best way for 'the coalition of the willing few' to win over the hearts and minds of the neutral vast majority of the world's nations into joining in to defeat the Nazis ,was by treating the 'least of these' , those 'useless feeders' the Nazis were so busily killing off in Aktion T4 , with all dignity and worthiness we would want for ourselves.

The flux of Dawson's "parable of action" was to be his own "imperfect but good enough" penicillin.

But instead penicillin had started off,  in the American version of WWII  at least, as something to be heavily censored and something (once leisurely polished by the medical world to a state of 110% perfection) to be reserved only for the blue-eyed and blond A1s of the armed forces.

Used as a "weapon of war" as the NAS (America's science elite) described it.

So penicillin was to be reserved for the young men overseas who had cheated on their girlfriends back home and got a dose of the non-fatal clap ( which had a variety of cures - some taking much longer than others).

Many men in the American combat arms, because of that nation's cruel policy of non-rotation of front line units, had deliberately contracted the clap while on leave, hoping to avoid the meat-grinder of un-ending combat service by a month or two of 'taking the cure'.

And who can blame them ?

Blame instead those rear echelon males who advocated penicillin for combat clap cases:

'Better they get scarce penicillin and hence a quick cure and quickly back into the deathtrap of the front lines than my number get called up  and I end up there,'

was the self-centred attitude of the non-combat majority of Allied males.

Meanwhile, back home, the girlfriends of the boys overseas, faithful onto death, were themselves dying of disease like SBE that were invariably fatal.

And there was only one possible cure : penicillin.

Dawson wanted the government, right from the beginning, to make  his 'good-enough' penicillin a national priority, so there was no false dichotomy between saving civilians versus saving soldiers.

He felt the penicillin scarcity was artificial ---- and deliberate , a pushback at ideas of Social Medicine (the idea that all, poor or rich, had an absolute right of access to life-saving treatment).

The whine of 21st century Republican complaints against Obama medicare,  in old 1940s bottles.

Because SBE like its cause, Rheumatic Fever, was both a progressive re-occurring disease and a disease of the poor, few in the medical elite saw much economic return in saving the SBE's lives.

The disease would only come back and curing it again would consume yet more resources, while even the 'healthy' SBEs, because of their weak heart valves, were often too weak to do hard physical work ---- and too ill-educated to be worth much when they did work.

Best deny them penicillin ( by claiming the disease could not be cured) and let them die.

But Dawson said any nation, in the midst of an all-out Total War,  seen as willing to save even 'useless feeder' SBEs (the 4Fs of the 4Fs) sent a powerful message to all the rest of the world.

It reassured them that all of humanity - even the weakest and the most 'useless'  - would be treated fairly and kindly, under an Allied world.

In late 1943, the Allies started to slowly come around to Dawson's idea as they stopped censoring penicillin stories and started instead to turn it into an item of radio and leaflet propaganda , a symbol of better things to come for all, if only all the world joined the Allies and defeated the Nazis.

To make this promise tangible, they started sending still-scarce penicillin, in widely publicized flights, to dying children in neutral nations, to prove they meant what they claimed.

Monstrances of Hope : Monstrances of Slime

Penicillin, the foul byproduct of basement slime had been converted into the symbol of Goodness, those tiny vials of life-giving yellow held aloft like monstrances of hope.

For Harry then to seize and pervert this heavenly symbol of life for heartless profit, while children - even children of the hated Axis - died horrible deaths, was  now regarded as unspeakably evil - seen almost literally as the work of The Devil himself....

Dec 4th 2012 : I have just read Philip Kerr's essay "Seeing Greene" , partly of the print booklet in the Criterion Collection re-issue of The Third Man on DVD, which makes pretty much the same points as I have about Harry Lime's post war behavior to Axis kids and bomber pilots behavior towards them, from 10,000 feet up, during the war.....

Meet the DOCTOR MOM who brought us wartime penicillin when it could do us some good, not 5 years after the war ended

MAE SMITH

Her name is Mary Louise (Pelliter Becker) Smith,  but she was much better know as Mrs Mae Smith or Mrs John L Smith.


That was because Mary Louise Smith was what her eldest daughter, born 1918 in New Jersey, was called by all.

Or rather, had been called by all.

Mary Louise junior was at the family summer home in Stonington Connecticut sometime in the 1930s when she contracted spinal meningitis and quickly died in theNew London Connecticut hospital.

There was effective treatments for some of the various forms of meningitis in the 1930s that reduced the death total from 100% down to still very high levels from between 50% to 25% .

Serum worked on two forms of the disease but required repeated highly skilled injections into the spinal cord area - sulfa which came along in the late 1930s, had a similar success rate.

But if the root cause was the pneumonia bacteria, the death rate remained at 100%.

Penicillin reduced that to between 50% to 30% and penicillin had been found to be extremely effective on pneumonia bacteria as far  back as the Fall of 1928, by Alexander Fleming.

But he didn't believe it would work by injection - despite never having tried to see if what he believed was actually factual.

His laziness was needlessly fatal for millions - in particular for his own brother and for Mary Louise Smith.

Dawson's passion got to Doctor Mom

Dr Martin Henry Dawson always was plain spoken - he believed from the start that natural penicillin at the state of development it was in the Fall of 1928 (or the Fall of 1940 or 1943) was more than good enough ready to save lives .

If we only had enough penicillin from the drug companies, he'd say, we could start saving these children dying needlessly of diseases like spinal meningitis and endocarditis.

Now Mary Louise junior's father , John L Smith, was a charitable man but an exceedingly cautious man --- but  he was also senior enough at the 'fine chemicals' firm where he worked, to it do his bidding if he wished.

I firmly believe that once his wife, Mae, picked up the essence of Dawson's sermonette, she never let up on her husband to move forward as fast as morally possible on making lots of penicillin.

'Our daughter is dead but there is no need for us to sit back and watch our frinds' daughters die needlessly'.

Mae was John L's moral compass and she was like a bloodhound on this issue.

Eventually her pleadings and the sight of enough dying baby girls, moved even the cautious John L.

And when he did decide to move, he moved fast and he moved hard.

In five short months his firm was producing almost more natural penicillin than the world knew what to do with it : penicillin and Pfizer never looked back.

All thanks to a tragedy, an impassioned doctor and Doctor Mom.....

Florey's first IMPURE penicillin injections were definitely forced upon him, as a PLAN B sop

When Howard Florey at Oxford University had decided in early 1938 that he would investigate the theoretical aspects of  antibiotic antagonisms, he said he would not inject them to test for their therapeutic possibilities until they were pure : crystalline pure.


Crystal substances being then regarded as 100% pure.

But after he learned - probably sometime in November 1940 - that he had definitely upstaged in October 1940 by Martin Henry Dawson injecting patients after only 5 weeks of work on penicillin, Florey definitely had to lower his standards .

Dawson pushed Florey (and the NAS/OSRD/MRC triad) into PLAN B to try and catchup

So in early 1941, three years after he began work on penicillin, Florey also began, reluctantly, injected patients with impure penicillin of about the same strength as Dawson's penicillin, which is to say not very pure.

Pure penicillin has 1670 units of strength per mg : Florey's was between 20 and 50 units per ml , ie about 2% pure and 98% impurities.

Dawson hadn't worried much about purity, regarding food as perfectly safe even though it is often only a few percent pure protein by weight : as the hungry man once said, as long as impurities were relatively harmless, bring 'em on, pizza boy ....

Florey & Dawson's argument over wartime penicillin : Analogue or Parable?

Sharp eyed grammar experts will quickly argue that there is no real difference between analogue and parable :  they are both forms of analogy and denote the same basic things. But even they will admit, their connotations are quite different.

When it comes to drugs like penicillin, an analogue (aka the so called "me too" drugs) are knockoffs of another drug, often one produced by nature and hence in the public domain. They differ just enough from the original to be deemed patentable : profitably patentable. All easily understood.

But penicillin as a parable - like Jesus's parables, for Christ's Sake ! - how on Earth is that possible ?



Analogue penicillin is exactly what Howard Florey, Merck, the MRC, the NAS and the OSRD all spent many years and millions of tax dollars to achieve : but they totally failed to create a synthetic analogue to natural penicillin.

Instead, all the penicillin that actually saved lives during the war was Henry Dawson's natural "parable" penicillin ---- and natural production is still the basis of all our life-saving penicillins to this day.

But I am dodging your original question : how on Earth was Dawson's penicillin a parable ?

How Dawson's 1940 war aims became the Allied war aims, by 1944

On September 9th 1940, the movement for WAR medicine had definitely won out over the movement for SOCIAL medicine in America  (and all around the world wherever nations were at war or preparing for war).

Social medicine was an effort to be as ready to find cures for the diseases that afflict the poor as to find cures for the diseases of the rich ----  even if the poor couldn't fund the research or pay much for the treatments once they were developed.

Dawson was an advocate of Social Medicine.

War Medicine was a bit of an euphemism, because it really meant a focus on drugs and treatments that would be profitable because they were oriented at the diseases of the well off.

During the war, the War medicine movement was guised as claiming we simply must downplay all work on diseases for the "useless eater" 4F poor, whose cure won't help the war effort much.

Instead, limited money and resources meant we must focus on curing the diseases and injuries of the 1A men in the military, who are needed to end the war successfully.

But Dawson felt the Allied cause would only be militarily successful when it first won the world's hearts and minds, by showing that the Allies cared for all : white and colored, rich and poor, sick and healthy.

He saw this new "war medicine" approach as an example of sinking to the level of the Axis Nazis, all in an effort to defeat them.

For Dawson, that would be a pyrrhic victory indeed !

In his own day job,(arthritis research), he saw a declining amount of upper class interest in charity to those (mostly poor) who had Rheumatic Fever and SBE and an increasing amount of attention to self-interested "self help groups" of upper class women trying to prevent diseases like polio that mostly hit people like themselves.

In terms of the war itself, Dawson who had won medals for bravery in WWI in the Canadian Army, had had to watch and listen helplessly as all-mighty America stood idle as the Nazis gobbled up one small nation after another : the Czechs, Poles, Danes, Norwegians, Dutch and Belgians.

Now Britain was expected to be invaded by the Nazi war machine that very week ---- and still America did nothing.

Dawson had been raised in a very religious family but claimed to no longer believe himself, but something in the 25 years of religious instruction still clung to him, even if only at the sub conscious level.

The wisest and the most powerful people in American Science :  the self-anointing Academy of American Science, the NAS, were strongly pro War medicine and they controlled almost all the resources.

They were seen as both wise and mighty.

Very well, Dawson would do the total reverse: he would act 'foolish' and work with the weak.

Now we do not know what Dawson felt, on the conscious level let alone on his sub conscious level, but we do see definite patterns in his actual behavior in those five early weeks of his penicillin effort - patterns inconsistent with most of his life until then.

He had never been involved in drug development before now - a process that is vastly elaborate and expensive and extends many years, over many organizations, before the drug is deemed ready to be injected.

It is a process that positively reeks of professional dignity and decorum taking its good old time, slowly grinding on and on, like the mills of the gods.

So he set out to do it as foolishly and as undignified as possible : and did up the entire job from start to finish, in less than 5 weeks !

And he did it with a very small team, (4 people in total) using tiny scraps of unused space all over the hospital : corridors, fire escapes, under seats in auditoriums ,to create a full sized pilot plant to grow and process natural penicillin.

He did not seek out the institutional money and support from drug companies and America's all powerful Foundations.

He used tiny, unpopular, penicillin producers - the smelly slime found on basement walls - and then dared to inject the result - impure and dirty - into human veins.

Even his patients were from the poor and the weak : American's 4Fs of the 4Fs : young male SBE patients.

Part of the special terror of Rheumatic Fever (RF) is that it is not a one time disease.

Even if you beat it once, it now finds it easier to come back a second and third time, because each incident leaves you more vulnerable to the next attack.

Similarly for SBE , subacute bacterial endocarditis : when Rheumatic Fever damages your heart valves, this sets them up to become the new home of normally harmless teeth bacteria ,who slowly but surely killed 96 out of every 100 patients on the first go round.

Like RF, SBE comes back time and again, as each attack leaves your valves more and more damaged and open to the bacteria's return.

So even if penicillin could cure SBE - and no one on earth but Dawson believed it could - another attack would come and require yet more hospital treatments and probably kill the weakened heart for sure this time.

No rational army general or factory owner wanted SBE youths : they were simply an expensive death sentence waiting to happen.

SBE had to be seen, most doctors felt, as the lowest priority fatal disease we have, during a total war situation : sorry, about your dead son or daughter , deal with it.

It didn't help - to be brutally frank - that RF and SBE mostly inflicted the working class ethnic minorities , far beneath the average American doctor's social standing in the 1940s : those who were about to die as a result of this decision were no one they knew.

But it was two members of this group, a Negro and a Jew in fact , that Dawson chose to be the first in the world to receive the life-saving antibiotic.

Some how, I can't help feeling that the thumb of his injecting hand was raised in a silent gesture to the NAS : up yours !

I believe that Dawson deliberately sought to rescue the least of the these , with help from the least of these, to make a point ( a parable in actions) : any Cause that would choose to save the least of these ----during a total global war --- was a Cause worth joining and worth dying for.

By early 1944 he had convinced the Allied governments.

The Allies were now making big press out of flying penicillin into neutral nations to saving dying children.

This was all to make Dawson's original point to the half of the world's nations still sitting out the so called "The Good War"/ " The Ultimate Battle between Good and Evil" .

Wartime penicillin, made by humble mold and given to the smallest and the poorest, was the best possible proof that the Allied Cause was just and humanitarian oriented and well worth joining and dying for.....

Wartime penicillin : patient-oriented or patent-oriented ?

MH Dawson

Martin Henry Dawson was Systemic Penicillin's earliest and biggest true believer. He ardently and publicly advocated producing 'second rate' penicillin for 'second rate' patients.

He didn't want to wait till systemic penicillin had been perfected, purified, synthesized, analyzed, patented, censored and marketed. Dr Dawson didn't want to wait till the war was long over before lives - on the battlefield and off - could start being saved. His only invention was moral : giving up his own life to fight for  patient-oriented, humanitarian, wartime penicillin.


He wanted penicillin , as it was at it point of development in September 1940, to go work right now, 24/7/365 saving patients.

He wanted penicillin's profit levels to be low enough so as to be cheap enough for all to afford and he wanted "second rate" penicillin to be abundant enough so that everyone, everywhere , from 1A soldier to 4F civilian, could have it.

To put it in terms from American organized medicine's internal political battle of the 1930s and early 1940s, Dawson promoted Social penicillin over War penicillin : humanitarian penicillin over penicillin as a weapon of war.

There has been much rubbish about penicillin patents written by historians , when really all there is to say is in that old saying " all roads lead to Rome" .

Just as there are many, many roads to Rome (but only one Rome), there are many alternative ways to grow, purify, test and apply natural penicillin - probably even alternatives ways to synthesize natural penicillin economically (when - and if - Man does that as well as Mold,  we will let you know.)

Almost anybody involved in the long drawn out saga of wartime penicillin who wanted to, could have had a patent on something or other.

Not particularly unique patents though --  hence not particularly valuable patents.

The big, unique, truly valuable patent - the 'Rome' patent - evaded its key searchers : Oxford University, Merck Pharmaceuticals and the American OSRD.

You couldn't patent natural penicillin, as it was in the Public Domain because the pencilliums' patent on it had run out hundreds of millions of years earlier.

So the scam was to create a 99.9% similar but ever so slightly different synthetic 'analog' ,(a so called "me too" drug) that would hopefully lead to penicillin being made much cheaper and much easier made than Man-Harnessing-Microbes could do.

The unconscious assumption, as we see now with 75 years of 20/20 hindsight, is that Man could inevitably make things cheaper in big chemical factories, than Nature could do it in its tiny biological factories.

But I digress.

It was safe to assume that sympathetic 1940s era patent examiners and judges would find this "me too" analog a truly new and patentable marvel, Man's wondrous powers for all to behold.

Then all who wanted the cheapest, easiest, penicillin would have to pay your steep licensing fees because you had a truly unique invention.

Actually I don't think the parties involved were only looking at short term patent profits but rather on much bigger, long term, "moral capital" gains for their firm, institution or university.

Lilly pharmaceuticals set them an example with insulin.

Lilly didn't hold the key original patent as the University of Toronto and Connaught Labs held that, but all the elites in the Medical and Big Pharma worlds knew the key work was actually done by Lilly and that Lilly seemed to consistently produce the best, safest insulin.

This profitable 'lead' in insulin research Lilly still holds, more 90 years later.

By force of myths and lies ( including doctoring photos in the Stalinist manner) , Oxford University and the entire Thames Valley is regarded as a biological Silicon Valley.

It has become a extremely wealthy and important part of the British economy, despite the fact that during World War Two, Oxford actually bet the farm on synthetic chemical, not biological,  penicillin and had also earlier ignored the pioneering work done in Britain on recombinant DNA !

But the artful myth that Oxford has weaved by focusing on the early labours to produce biological penicillin and ignoring the later, longer and bigger attempts to produce synthetic penicillin , has given it the moral capital to claim it led in producing wartime biological penicillin.

And they have been dining out on the myth ever since, because lazy historians and journalists let them.

In America, the 'penicillin myth' is actually much truer.

Pfizer is correctly credited with betting its all on biological penicillin while everyone else focussed on synthetic penicillin.

It won : producing 80% of all the penicillin that landed on D-Day.

Merck, the lead firm on synthetic penicillin, is widely derided for betting all on repeated failed attempts to make synthetic penicillin and in so missing the boat entirely on biological penicillin.

Columbia University - via its professor Martin Henry Dawson - could have claimed some of the life-saving glory of biological penicillin, but chose to focus on killing and death instead : prouder by far of its role in the Manhattan Project's fire bombing of civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it ignored its role in the other Manhattan project .

The myth of wartime penicillin has been told many times but the real story - far more dramatic than the one hither to told to date - has never emerged......

"Dawson Does a Banting" : the impolite Canadian doctors who fought , and I do mean FOUGHT, to bring us life-saving penicillin and insulin

Canadians have a reputation for being excessive polite and for not being aggressive , pushing, forward, loud and emotional.

And the other hand.

There is the old joke about "going to a peaceful American boxing match and suddenly a Canadian hockey game broke out...."



Still it is quite well known that Banting never really discovered or invented anything new with insulin.

Instead, he "merely" pushed, yelled and screamed until the various threads of insulin research gathered, sometimes years before, by many better but less emotionally involved researchers the world over quickly became something you could inject into dying diabetic patients.

And he kept on kicking and screaming to ensure insulin was not just something only the rich and dying could afford.

He got not just the Nobel Prize, but almost all the permanent fame for insulin, over a half dozen more scientifically useful members of his own team, (let alone all the other worthy insulin scientists) because of his yelling and screaming , not because of his scientific skills.

Sometimes even the normally obtuse Nobel Committee knew enough to credit yelling and screaming over "science"  and this was one of those times.

Alexander Fleming  nearly killed penicillin in the first 14 years of its existence by telling all interested researchers that penicillin would never work as a life-saving injectable medication and might just work as a topical antiseptic cream, but only if it was synthesized by the chemists.

Florey did think that penicillin might save lives, but he was never one for any sort of clinical work , with real life human patients --- he preferred to polish penicillin research forever and ever, and felt real life saving with penicillin would only happen when it had been synthesized by the chemists.

Dawson was Life-Saving Penicillin's first and best champion 

Dawson loved Penicillin just as she was and five weeks after first meeting her, was trying to save lives with injected natural impure penicillin and kept doing so despite his own terminal disease , until his death five years later.

On six occasions over three years, he kick started the world's mass production of natural penicillin  by acting impolitely and unprofessionally (at least in the eyes of the ultra dignified medical establishment of the 1940s).

Dawson even 'stole' government issue penicillin and encouraged corporation leaders to bend  the rules, to ensure that cheap, abundant life-saving penicillin would be readily available during WWII , not finally made available for all, at high prices, sometime during the end of the Korean War ....

Duncan BC's forgotten wartime PENICILLIN pioneer, Donald MacRae

Duncan's Donald MacRae

The June 29th 1945 issue of the Canadian Army wartime newspaper, The Maple Leaf, records a Vancouver interview with a medic , Private Donald MacRae of Duncan BC , recounting his 1943 Italian experience making battlefield penicillin and saving lives.

It was just something humanitarians of all nations were required to do, in the decade and a half before Big Pharma was forced by Doctor Mom to finally start making commercial penicillin.

How KP duty helped save lives

What caught my eye in this little known story is that this particular group of penicillin-makers found the penicillium fungi grew penicillin best in the water into which potatoes had been left overnight. 

(MacRae's story rings true in all its other technical detils, right down to his group obtaining the penicillium spores from Egypt . Robert Pulvertaft's hospital-made penicillin operation in Cairo is very well documented and Pulvertaft gave his methods and his spores out freely, even to doctors from hostile neutral nations, if it would help save lives.)

Duncan honor Donald Macrae ?

Time, perhaps long overdue, for the City of  Duncan to thank Donald MacRae for this wartime life-saving.

I can add a little personal experience to the subject of Canadian Army issue potatoes, the peeling of, Sir !

 I spent a hot summer's day in a cool backroom once, doing Canadian Army KP duty, peeling potatoes and cleaning other vegetables and quite preferred it to running through the dusty sand of CFB Aldershot with a C2 light machine gun.

I was 5 foot ten and a half, 105 pounds ( with my clothes off I looked a bit like a Japanese POW) --- so naturally I always got put at the long end of a forced march arc, carrying a heavy C2 , while guys much more physically built than me got the short trip with a lighter C1 rifle.

Infantry intelligence (or lack of) -  you gotta got to love it !

I would be delighted to know if MacRae meant that the Canadian potatoes, probably from PEI and points East and shipped out in barrels, were first put in water overnight to remove remnants of Canadian dirt.

 Or was it the case that the Army's potatoes were generally peeled the night before the day of their cooking and that once peeled en masse, are quickly buried in buckets of water to prevent oxidation and discoloring until they were cooked ?

The water that peeled potatoes are held in are rich in a carbon source (starch) and are a well-known, well-used and welcome food to the fungi that make illicit beer. It would tend to retain trace amounts of minerals from the soil the potatoes were grown in.

 It would prove to be a 'complex medium'  (aka "we aren't sure what is in it") as the biologists call it and generally complex mediums did better growing penicillin than did the chemically pure "defined" growing formulas the chemists offered up.

But dirty potatoes left uncut in water overnight also leach out a little starch and other plant chemicals as well as giving lots of earth minerals. Filtered for solids, it too might be a good starting base for growing penicillin along with a bit of glucose sugar and milk sugar.

MacRae, who before the war had been a first aid man in remote logging camps, said it wasn't till March 1944 that the Canadian Army in Italy got enough commercial penicillin to cease making illicit life-saving penicillin (so it could now return to making illicit soul-saving beer instead ?)

March 1944 was the first month that then tiny soda pop supplier, Pfizer,  starting producing billions and billions of units of natural penicillin in a scaled up version of MacRae's effort  --- thanks to the advice and urgings of another Canadian penicillin pioneer , Nova Scotian born and raised Martin Henry Dawson.

Dawson was, in fact, the first person to ever inject penicillin into a patient, October 16th 1940 --- using penicillin his tiny team had grown themselves.

His team's secret ingredient ? A much loved local favourite, Jack Frost Dark (brown sugar) ....