The course of WWII : from fungophobia to fungomania ?

Hitler's Nazis described all the Jews as being a fungoid growth, a poisoned mushroom, and said the next war would see either the death of all the Jews or the death of all human civilization.

And Zyklon B was to be their fungicide of choice.

The Nazi's use of metaphors about fungoid growths spreading their invisible threads through national bodies, of slimy smelly molds found only in dark dank decaying places, and evil and deadly 'devil's fruit' mushrooming up everywhere overnight was not at all unusual for that inter-war era.

HP Lovecraft, as well as a host of otherwise ordinary writers, easily outdid the Nazis in their vivid descriptions of the ultimate evil as being fungoid in character.

And in 1945, when atomic bomb explosion clouds first emerged looking at least as much like cauliflowers as mushrooms - guess what species got overwhelmingly picked to describe this horrible new weapon of war ?

There was no doubt that fungophobia was the in-house mental illness for of all western civilization, be it Allied, Axis or Neutral.

All the more paradoxical then --- in the full G K Chesterton sense of that term --- that WWII also ended with much of the world in the throes of fungomania.

All over a small, smelly, slimy, blue green smear, a common household pest, that gave suffering humanity its best ever lifesaver : penicillin.

Ironic, isn't it ?

Way out of his comfort zone

I was not truly 'surprised' that the normally highly diffident Dr Martin Henry Dawson broke his own team protocol and became the first person in history to inject an antibiotic (dirty natural penicillin) into a patient, 75 years ago this October 16th.

For the diffident Dawson had done something similar at least once before, pushing on with his equally pioneering research into the horizontal transfer of DNA between microbes, against the express orders of his boss at NYC's Rockefeller Institute.

That totally ruined his career prospects at the world's most attractive centre for doing medical research --- so this new decision to merely jump his own tiny team's protocol would have far less dire career consequences.

But what did surprise me - and did so for a very long time (years and years and years in fact) - was his twin decisions made the month earlier.

Penicillium mold upends our notions of Science and Progress says 1952 medical editorial

Is there a stranger chapter than this in the
whole history of scientific progress?
Ten years ago, "mold" was a faintly repulsive fungoid growth which sometimes caused the spoilage of food products.
The very word "moldy” implies something “musty,
fusty, and stale.”
Today, the blue mold is recognized
as a synthetic chemist of the first order— a
friend and benefactor of the human race.

    — Editorial , American Journal of Public Health, March, 1952.

I just discovered this editorial in an old copy of a county medical society journal but it said then what I have always thought about the wartime penicillin drama....

October 1940 : purifying or preserving the Gene Pool of 'useless' penicillium & SBE genes

Is the world safer by minimizing or maximizing the Gene Pool ? 

In the Fall of 1940, American Science renewed its century long efforts at triaging and then discarding much of the world's gene pool; this time under the new guise of a sudden need for "American Military Medicine Preparedness".

It was a movement, ironically enough, that was mostly led by conservative Isolationists among the scientists, men who had long opposed military intervention to help the little peoples of Europe from the evil axis of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin.

These conservative Isolationists had long opposed intervening to help the little peoples of America as well (opposing Social Medicine for example) so they could not be accused of inconsistency, merely of heartlessness.

That Fall, they gave off plenty of indications that the stripping down for military preparedness meant the final death of Social Medicine.

No good news for the young patients suffering from then invariably fatal SBE.

The conservative isolationists considered that even if the SBEs survived one bout, eventually another would certainly kill them.

Meanwhile the SBEs just consumed lots of scarce medical resources without any prospects they would recover enough to become useful servicemen or do productive work in war industries.

With many conservative doctors believing that SBE, along with most diseases afflicting the poor and minorities, were highly genetically based, it could even be asked why even bother keeping them alive long enough for them to breed and pass on their defective genes to another generation of the collective human gene pool ?

Weren't the SBEs' genes something rather to purify and discard out of the human gene pool ,by a strict policy of deliberate government neglect, and wasn't the excuse of a planning for a Total War the best time to start doing so ?

Even lower on the conservatives' scale of genes worth retaining than those of the SBEs were the genes of that common household pest, the blue green penicillium mold.

If obtaining adequate amounts of lifesaving penicillin meant keeping the genes alive of the slimey mold that originally made penicillin, many were against it.

Better that human chemists, the smartest in the universe, quickly bested the slimey little chemists and made better penicillin cheaper and faster and far more predictably.

Synthetic man-made penicillin in this war or no penicillin, said Howard Florey, while Alexander Fleming and the Allied medical establishment cheered assent.

Dr Martin Henry Dawson strongly disagreed.

He felt the world would be better off, enriched even, if SBE patients like Bobby Darin was allowed to live, perhaps even to sing, dance and act, rather than to squalidly die from deliberate government neglect.

And his entire scientific career had been devoted to proving up his belief that the small and the weak and the useless 'gene carriers' all had something to bring to the commensal table of global Life.

Dawson had demonstrated more than enough examples showing that the microbe chemists were far far smarter than anyone had ever imagined.

He was not at all sure that the penicillium chemists hadn't polished the production of penicillin to a fine velvet sheen over hundreds of millions of years of trying -- and that the smartest chemists in the universe mightn't be able to beat them in a few frantic months of trying.

No matter how much money and labs and bombast was thrown at the problem.

So on October 16th 1940, a day the nation specifically set aside to triage all the 1A young men in America, Dr Dawson injected natural, freshly squeezed, orange colored penicillium juice into two 4Fs of the 4Fs patients, SBE sufferers Negro Aaron Leroy Alston and Jew Charles Aronson.

A product from rejected microbe genes injected to save some rejected human genes, as Dawson sought (against the grain of 1940s thinking on the topic) to preserve and protest the existing gene pool, not purify it and shrink it.

So began our present Age of Antibiotics - in a wartime scientific dispute over whether it was better to reduce or preserve the world's gene pool.

Dawson and Florey certainly weren't the only ones to dispute this issue : on the wider stage, Hitler certainly had his own take, as did Europe's Jews.

But, as is well known, the Dawson-Florey dispute was the only one that ended happily for humanity ....

Late night war movies and little children : a cautionary tale

My parents always liked to put us small ones to bed at an ungodly early hour, right up into High School age.

One exception, for no reason I could ever discern, was when I was a small child (between the age of six to almost ten) when our family was living in 1950s Victoria and Vancouver and owning a reliable TV.

I was the eldest child, but obviously still not very old, when my parents made me sit up late with them and watch late night TV, ie the TV movies presented between 9pm and midnight.

(Made me , I repeat, because as a life long scaredy cat, I was not begging to watch scary war movies, believe you me.)

My takeaway lesson, as a wee child, was that WWII consisted mostly of armed uniformed men strafing civilian refugees on the road, bombing civilian homes, torturing civilians in POW concentration camps, torpedoing without warning civilian liners or blockading and starving civilian cities.

That is when they weren't putting hapless civilian hostages up against walls to shoot as reprisals for civilian resistance action.

I wasn't just a tiny child, I was tiny even for a six year old child and as a constant newcomer to my schools was often the bullies' target.

I saw WWII as a lot like elementary school, but with guns; big guys beating up little people.

Natural penicillin, made by the sort of tiny slimey no counts you might see on dank basement walls, was the only hero this tiny child could see in these war movies, saving kids like me here there and anywhere from deadly infections, be they from bombing injuries or simply brought on by hunger and fatigue.

If my book on WWII (Upending) sounds more than a little familiar to this tale from almost sixty years ago, blame it on my parents....

Zyklon B and Penicillium C : as Auschwitz tries to eradicate one 'Fungoid Growth', Brooklyn's Pfizer bring another to worldwide prominence

Why 'Jewish Penicillin' in the world's largest Jewish city actually is penicillin !

Hitler fiercely believed the world's Jews were all evil agents bent on ceaseless cosmic dissolution, with their chief targets the world's most organic civilizations - above all the Aryan Race.

So when he hurtled the abusive term 'fungoid growths' at the Jews in one of the most famous passages from his autobiography, Mein Kampf, it had an almost literal rather than figurative meaning.

That is because it is indeed the fungus molds who are Nature's prime agents at dissolving organic material.

(Dissolving their tough chemical bonds and thus releasing their building blocks to rejoin the earth's greatest resource cycles involving elements like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur etc.)

The Nazis and their intellectual fellow travellers around the world were, above all, fixated on maintaining rigid social, ethnic, gender boundaries at a time of great social fluidity.

So it is not at all surprising that proto-Nazi HP Lovecraft saw the world's greatest evils as looking like shapeless, boundary-less, oozing fungal slime.

He (and the Nazis) all failed to see that their hoped-for world of total stability and non-decay/non-renewal would be lifeless in its lack of variety and so fragile that it would be likely to fail to surmount any sudden small change from outside.

So, in Nazi controlled Europe, synthetic Zyklon B gas was used to take the lives of over a million of the Jewish 'fungoid growths'.

But in the largest Jewish city of New York, in those same years, other nature-made fungoid growths were blessing the world with the life-giving gift of penicillin.

Now that's something that is almost poetic in this symmetry .....

Bakhtin's Carnivalesque : 'Slime Piss' still saving more kiddies annually than Advanced Civilization ever killed

Without today's antibiotics, the dangerous bacterial infections that currently afflict only a child here and a child there would rage freely as epidemics or pandemics, killing millions upon millions of kids.

And when we say 'antibiotics' we basically mean the beta lactams antibiotics - the huge and highly effective family of the penicillin-like antibiotics.

The human use of penicillin (Penicillin G) to save lives is almost ninety years old and yet it is still in every hospital's pharmacy, albeit relatively rarely used.

However, as the starting base to make most all of our other antibiotics, penicillin g is still produced in the tens of thousands of tons.

And still made as it always was - made in incredibly tiny ---natural--- fungus factories invisible to the naked eye.

It is a mere 'secondary' metabolite of the penicillium slime - and for long time the secondary metabolites were considered to be just 'metabolic waste', a fancy grown-up's word for poo and pee.

Considering its liquid nature and its bright yellow color (leaving aside its strong acrid smell for a moment) , the scientists of yesteryear considered it to be nothing more than 'slime piss'.

It took a brave doctor indeed (Martin Henry Dawson) to first inject that foul stuff - raw - into a the bloodstream of a young male, in an attempt to save his life.

But the patient (Charles Aronson) lived and so our Age of Antibiotics began, on Ward G-East, at NYC's Columbia Presbyterian Medical Centre ----- seventy five years ago this October 16th 2015.

In WWII's brutal war of high tech science, this was low tech life saving at its very finest.

A stinging rebuke then, to Scientism at its very apogee of hubris, delivered by the lowest of the low, delivered by slime piss.

So be sure to tell Mikhail Bakhtin (wherever he might be) that it just can't get anymore carnivalesque than that...

October 16 1940 : upending the team's protocol

To put it bluntly, twice-wounded Lieutenant Dr Martin Henry Dawson (MC with citation for bravery) was very far from being given to routinely performing bold, brave and lonely gestures.

This despite the fact that he performed some very brave actions indeed on at least a half dozen times during his shortened life.

Beside his wartime actions, those brave acts include his June 1928 sacrificing of the start of a wonderful research career at the then citadel of medical research - the Rockefeller Institute.

All to stand up for what this very junior pro tem researcher believed in scientifically, against his all powerful and very senior lab chief (and fellow Nova Scotian) Oswald Avery on the matter of the importance of bacteria transformed with DNA.

Or consider his December 1940 decision to sacrifice his own life, if need be, (against the wishes of his wife and doctors) to try and save the lives of others (the world's patients with deadly SBE) with his pioneering penicillin.

And his well known November 1942 decision to 'steal' (according to his hostile opponents) scarce government penicillin - during wartime ! - all to further his success in finally saving SBEs with penicillin, set against deliberate government 'indifference' to their dire fate - success with penicillin or not.

But my vote for his bravest, his boldest, his most lonely gesture was that which occurred on October 16th 1940.

Ending the Enlightenment Project with deeds, not words

There are two academic puzzles in dating the ending of the Enlightenment Project precisely to 1945.

One was that 1945 was supposed to be year of the Enlightenment's greatest success, not failure --- you remember, beating back the Nazi forces of darkness and barbarism etc.

The other was that 1945 had no great book and no great thinker proclaiming the end of one intellectual age and the birth of another.

No opus from no new Hume, Kant, Hegel or Newton, Galileo and Darwin.

Instead we had doctors Mengele and Dawson, operating from the opposite ends of the moral spectrum, putting the post into modernity.

Both men of deeds, not of words.

Doers - not thinkers - doing in the thinkers' Enlightenment Project : I kinda like that....

Why was Marie Barker's actual death sentence praised while Harry Lime's fictional murders so condemned : a story of two Teddy Bears ...

The 1943 real life Allied decision to deny penicillin to Marie Barker (the only medicine that could save the life of this young teenager and SBE patient) on the (unstated) grounds that her disease was 'not a military priority', has generally been praised by historians of science - then and now.

It was also acquiesced in - at the very least - by most lay people back then.

Even when that public saw newspaper photos of still just a teenager Marie breaking into a smile of delight at the sight of one of her 'stuffies' (a teddy bear) that her Canadian-born mother Hermance had brought to her bedside.

By contrast the needless, painful but fictional deaths caused by Harry Lime denying penicillin to children in 1949 Vienna only six years later has been strongly condemned by most of those same academics and by the public generally.

Okay ---- perhaps the professors did not condemn it in actual peer reviewed articles, but almost certainly, like the public, they did so in casual water cooler talk and during post-movie-watching 'pillow talk' between spouses.

I can claim this with some certainty because it is known that countless audience members discussing the moral issues raised by Harry Lime's unspeakable actions around helpless children and penicillin was what helped lift THE THIRD MAN from being just another run of the mill B&W 'quota flick' to among the top films of all time.

How the casual upending of a child's teddy bear helped change us for good

In just six short years, we went from praising the decision to cold bloodedly and publicly kill Marie Barker & her teddy bear by baneful neglect ------- to blanching at the mere fleeting sight of a nurse silently putting the teddy bear of of one of Harry Lime's victims upside down on a waste basin.

I hold that to be a hugely momentous moral upending, as dramatic in its own way as was the totally unexpected upending of the best in civilized technology by primitive penicillin...

Dawson was, in fact, the THIRD (reluctant but duty bound) leader of the tiny Manhattan penicillin Project

In September 1940, fearing the internment of German Jewish refugee scientists - even possibly those with recent American citizenship - was bound to follow the panicky British Empire decision to most of its German refugees from Hitler, biochemist Dr Karl Meyer became the first leader of what was to become the four year long Manhattan penicillin Project.

Dr Meyer was determined to find some sort of way to prove to the American war machine that he was too valuable to intern.

And finally purifying a drug that could kill the few militarily important pathogen bacteria that the hot new Sulfa drugs could not, would do just that.

Purifying a natural substance is sometimes by far the most difficult step on the road to then synthetizing and patenting it.

Any clinical testing could wait until the substance was safely purified.

For now, what Meyer and his assistant Eleanor Chaffee needed most from their two microbiologists (doctors Dawson and Hobby) was their highly practised skills in growing microbes.

And then later, their other well honed skill in measuring the bacteria-killing powers of any substances Meyer's chemical skills threw up.

But all that changed in early October 1940, when new patient A. (Leroy) Alston heard of the project and in a very real sense, hijacked the leadership of the project.

Postwar science as TV High School : a-bomb 'jocks' vs penicillium slime 'losers'

When I was very little (and very little for my age) I was always the new kid kid in town.

'Cause we moved around a lot, back then in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Bullied a bit.

For perhaps these reasons, I found the science talk of that time always left me very puzzled.

I don't just mean science talk in school, I mean science talk everywhere --- ads, news, literally everywhere - including science fiction books and sci fi movies as well.

Mostly science talk was was all about the big and about Man - big science run by big important men in big governments and big armies and big factories in big important countries.

Science as the topdog and Science as the TV high school jock set among nations, institutions and individuals.

But when it came to life-saving antibiotics for disease-prone little kids (a subject obviously hitting close to home for me) science was always about digging up dark jungle mud, scrapping smelly slime off basement walls or dipping into the effluent laden water at the mouth of sewer outfalls.

Antibiotics, we were told, were not man-made, not synthetic, but made by tiny invisible little microbes.

And judging by where these microbes hung out, I could clearly see even then that these marvellous lifesavers were from the TV high schools' loser side of the tracks - greasers and trailer trash.

There was one more puzzling thing about these antibiotics - they all came out of the Second World War and as far as I could see, were about the old good thing to ever come out of the awful war.

We didn't talk much back then - none of us - about the advanced civilization that produced the Auschwitz medical experiments, but we had all heard and seen - in TV sci fi serials and movies, if nowhere else - what the A-bomb could do to the human body.

And we all much preferred antibiotics like penicillin, big needle and all, to the A-bomb.

And we found it hard to marry together just how any civilization could produce both such a killer bomb and such a lifesaver pill, all out of the same horrible war ....

Dawson's opponents, not Dawson, had special concern about SBE patients in September 1940

Pity the poor historian ( like me !) trying to recover the substance of the visual glances,the brief shoulder shrugs,  the sotto voce verbal hints and half finished sentences, all very typical of conversation within small cliques in a small staff room, when the group is divided up into various opposing factions of colleagues, who must still at least pretend to get along at work.

I believe that in September 1940, upon his return to medical school and hospital, Dr Martin Henry Dawson half overheard some conversations between members of a group of his colleagues who not well disposed to social medicine, even in peacetime.

The Fall of France had happened and many Americans believed the Fall of Britain was soon to follow.

The American medical elite, made up mostly of  conservatives not in favour of medical intervention towards the weak at home or abroad, were now all claiming to be preparing for a possible war.

Maybe they were - in part.

But for many of them, talk of war preparation allowed them to reduce the alarming amount of social medicine (treating the poor dying like the rich dying) being practised.

They insisted they were only seeking to reduce medical intervention among the domestic weak and small because all existing resources (and more) were needed for possible future medical intervention in support of Europe's weak and small nations.

Reducing domestic comfort and aid because of possible foreign intervention ---- which they were still strongly opposed to !

I call that classic 'Bad Faith' and template Orwellian Double Talk.

I think it was these colleagues who mentioned the SBE patients as the classic sort of 'bed waster' that a war medicine hospital could no longer afford.

We know there was already some existing consensus on ignoring the SBEs under war conditions because there was almost no resistance from doctors in America in the Fall of 1942, when the disease was declared by the NAS 'death panels' to be of no military value and so denied penicillin - the only medicine that could save its patients' lives.

This censenus was also found among doctors in Canada, the Uk and Australia as the NAS ban on the use of wartime penicillin for dying SBE patients was extended by the medical establishment in those countries again without almost any controversy.

But Dawson himself had never before spoken or written or researched on SBE and its patients.

His sudden concern in September 1940 to make the 4F SBEs the focus of his wartime natural penicillin crusade, I believe, came from him half overhearing his conservative colleagues dismissing them as worthy of equal treatment to the war wounded 1As.

Dawson's empathy for the unjustly neglected simply kicked in ....

WWII's civilized Penicillin bat first, but natural bat last....

Rather like the war itself, actually.

In the beginning, German armoured battle groups, Japanese naval task forces and Allied heavy bomber raids were all supposed to speedily defeat time and space (& weather, etc).

Stride the globe effortlessly with mechanical feet, night and day, the year around --- modern middle class men commanding modern middle class (killing) machines.

No more need for millions of old fashioned cannon fodder recruits from the peasant and working class, limping about on shank's mare, dragging along bolt action rifles.

Didn't work out though, did it ?

(Insert here : Schweinfurt, Stalingrad, Guadalcanal.)

Far too much land and water to hold and re-supply, too much weather, too much snow and cold, too much heat and thirst.

Never enough food.

Logistics - the big bugbear of modern progressive advanced war - is just a complicated way to say "Mother Nature always bats last"....

Was WWII's battle over Penicillin a microcosm or a macrocosm of that horrific war ?

WWII was far too big for one mind to encompass and far too horrific for one stomach to handle.

The even longer but much smaller battle over penicillin production and delivery seems easier to handle and to stomach.

But just like the war itself, many, many people died because of decisions taken over the course of the twenty year long battle over just how penicillin should be made and to whom it should be given to.

True : all these people were deadly ill, by definition.

So possibly many would died anyway, with or without penicillin, though probability suggests that in fact most would have lived, if given enough penicillin early enough.

Unfair premature death is still unfair premature death, but their slow deaths from disease, caused by not so benign neglect, lacks the visceral horror of thinking about mothers and babies being murdered in a field with a bullet to the face, Einsatzgruppen style.

Preventable death due to lack of should-have-been-readily-available penicillin was still death on a massive scale.

But it remains deniable because it is only viewable, faintly and through the softest of gauze*.

Guilty

So yes, I plead guilty - I want to have it both ways.

I want to discuss the biggest, most horrific, issues of the war but also to sugar coat them.

To reduce them to closeups of the lives of a mere handful of individuals, most who don't die and even of those few who did die, didn't die violently.

But I also want readers to think back, back behind these few representatives.

To think of the literally tens of millions of people, unnamed and un-described, who died needlessly throughout the world because cheap abundant penicillin-for-all was delayed so long.

(Delayed for up to fifteen years for a few lucky ones and up to twenty five years for many, depending on your class, race, gender and where you lived.)

That is a death toll that approaches that of WWII itself.

So it really should never have been so casually dismissed, as it has been, all these years....

* I know of only one death among those tens of millions - that of Marie Barker of Chicago in September 1943 - that happened with enough detail provided day by relentless day to the reading public as to still bruise our collective conscience.

Two billion penicillin molecules equal weight of one bacteria

Bacteria, individually, are incredibly tiny, (about 1 picogram - one trillionth of a gram) (or 600 billion daltons in molecule talk).

Tiny, even when compared to a typical human red blood cell (which are about 30 times heavier).

Just as penicillin molecules are tiny compared to average large biological molecules like human blood hemoglobin
(it would take about 200 penicillin molecules to weigh as much as one hemoglobin molecule.)

(And human titin molecules can weigh almost 4 million daltons !)

But perhaps the most useful index is to compare the size of the tiny penicillin (300 daltons) or sulfa molecule (250 daltons) to the tiny bacteria organism it is trying to kill.

At least a billion times smaller.

That makes them highly diffusible, in theory.

Because the danger is always that once inside a living body, they will be more attracted to other molecules than to their designated target molecule. A very common situation that remains one of the great uncertainties of drug discovery.

Still they are pretty diffusible, all in all - approaching the real tiny and hence very highly diffusible molecules like water (18 daltons).

And to chemists, trying in the interwar years to determine the molecular structure of big biological molecules like hemoglobin, the tiny sized penicillin seemed as easy to synthesize as the similarly sized synthetic sulfa drugs.

(Or their most recent biological synthesis success - man-made Vitamin C, weighing in at about 200 daltons.)

But quinine also weighs about the same as penicillin and the best chemists throughout history had failed to synthesize it commercially.

Size, it turned out was not the best indicator of the complexity of making penicillin molecules synthetically....

Bottom feeders versus the Chemist in the Age of Progress

When we humans really want to verbally wound another human being, we call them 'bottom feeders' or 'slime' but it is not at all clear, at least at first glance, why these should be so abusive a term.


It is true that some lifeforms, much like the esteemed chemists who practise total synthesis, are greatly admired for making food out of the most basic of small molecules.

Others - like humans - are mere parasites who kill other animals and plants to obtain food (in the case of oysters scooped off the shell, we even eat our prey alive !)

We say we admire this behavior, but only, I suspect, because we feel compelled to publicly love everything about our species.

In fact, most of us would dearly love one day to make all of our food out of rocks, water and air --- and then eat it in the form of little white synthetic pills.

But still other lifeforms, the subject of today's post, are the bottom feeders of life.

They are Nature's bone and rag men, the garbage collectors of the ecosystem, cleaning up our collective mess by consuming dead beings and their excrement.

This feeding activity - saprotrophic nutrition - is absolutely vital to the re-cycling of the strictly limited resources of this Earth and thus the continuation of Life.

(Only daily sunshine and a light dusting of space dust is ever added to this world's resource base. Against this, every day lots of matter and energy successfully leaves this planet's gravity hold.)

It is dirty work but someone has to do, if we are all to go on living in our shiny clean suburban homes.

Nevertheless, because these detritus-eating creatures are often slimy in form and tend to live on dark, dank basement walls or in the dark dank soil, we hold them in particularly low regard : bottom feeders - slime.

Why ?

Go ask the writers of Gothic novels why - I really don't know why for certain.

Perhaps it is partly nothing more than the fact that some adults retain a childhood fear of the dark unknown.

That fear, and another dislike/fear, among those of a conservative mind,anyway, for the 'indecisive in-between liquidness and solidness and uncertainty' of things like mud and slime.

Perhaps though, in all of us, the unpleasant truth that the lifework of fungus slime presents an all too visible indication of the fact that all life ultimately dies.

And that all beauty does not just fade away and dies away but then also rots away.

We seen this Lovecraftian vum Gothic horror on the faces of the film and TV detective and the victim's families every time the loved one's body is exhumed from their grave.

The coffin top opened, the once beautiful child is nothing but an oozing mess of bones and slimy mold.

Maybe that film and TV image alone accounts why most of us so hate the fungus ---- for simply reminding us thus.

Small, weak, stupid, simple and despised ---- why in God's Name, did He allow them - and not the chemist made in His Image - to bring for the divine boon of penicillin ?

Why would He ever make the last first and the first last ????

Jesus Christ Almighty and Matthew 20 --- who knows ?! 

Hearst Corporation & Penicillin Pulitzers : twice lucky ??

At the beginning of August 1943 (despite it being 15 years since it was first discovered) the word penicillin remained either unknown or a matter of total indifference to 99% of the world's newspaper reading public.

By the end of September 1943 (and despite heavy wartime censorship that kept news from freely circulating between the Allies, Axis and Neutrals) 99% of the world's newspaper reading public knew the word penicillin and wanted some of it.

Yesterday, if not sooner.

And suddenly inspired by an old fashioned newspaper crusade of the kind that only Citizen Hearst could sustain, Pfizer boss John L Smith was hell bent for leather on supplying that demand.

Smith ultimately would do so in spades - his own firm alone providing 85 % of all the penicillin landing on D-Day.

It all began when a crippled Italian-American surgical resident called Dr Dante Colitti conspired with a Jewish-American journalist (Hearst's New York Journal American city editor Paul Schoenstein) to bring the story of a baby girl dying for lack of penicillin before the general public.

All in a successful attempt to embarrass the nation's wartime scientific elite (non-Italian/non-Jewish) into getting serious with penicillin.

Because didn't they know there was a war on ---- and people were dying from infections by the zillions ?

The story of innocent little Patty Malone touched the heart of a world at war and did indeed embarrass the Allied governments.

They abandoned their intention to keep penicillin a secret war weapon for as long as possible by withholding civilian supplies and by withholding news of its medical miracles.

Quite right then that the New York Journal American and Paul Schoenstein got the 1944 Pulitzer prize for general reporting.

Still this recognition was a stunner to all journalists with long memories.

No one could ever remember a desk-bound city editor ever receiving any sort of award for shoe-leather reporting - let alone the top prize in journalism.

And no one expected the Pulitzer Committee (set up deliberately to promote quality journalism over Yellow Journalism) would reward its top prize to the very font of the evil yellowness itself - William Randolph Hearst's flagship, the Journal-American.

Hearst's second chance at a Penicillin Pulitzer ?

This October 16th 2015 will mark the seventy fifth anniversary of history's first ever injection of penicillin - an event that ushered in our current age of antibiotics.

Since 1940, ten billion of us have directly benefitted from this age of (cheap) (abundant) penicillin-based antibiotics which has given all of us a form of herd immunity from once endemic infectious diseases.

A big deal indeed.

And here, well into this article, is where I "bury the lede" , if you happen to be a editor at anyone of today's Hearst media.

Because one of that historical pair, a teletype operator named Charles Aronson, was employed at Hearst's very same New York Journal-American !

In fact, one of Charles' jobs in August-September 1943 was keeping up with requests for variants on the the original Penicillin-Patty Malone series coming in over the wire from the various papers and magazines in the Hearst chain and from subscribers to Hearst's wire service, the International News Service or INS.

Aronson couldn't help but recall how Dr Martin Henry Dawson's homemade penicillin in 1940 had saved him from then invariably fatal SBE (the form of endocarditis that kills people inflicted with serious Rheumatic Fever).

Or that Patty Malone's hospital, the Lutheran Hospital in upper Harlem, was but a mile from Dawson's own hospital, Columbia-Presbyterian.

That simply couldn't be a coincidence.

And it wasn't.

The Lutheran and Columbia shared the same small pool of nearby patients and GPs, which allowed the censored word of Dawson's successes with penicillin to spread by wartime censorship's eternal foe (face-to-face gossip).

In addition, Colitti ,who had severe arthritis of the spine since childhood and lived very near Columbia Presbyterian, had earlier been a patient at Dawson's arthritis clinic.

What goes around, comes around and soon Hearst teletype operator Charles Aronson was once again back at Columbia Presbyterian; once again under Dawson's care and being treated with massive amounts of Pfizer-made* penicillin to arrest a second bout of SBE.

(*Dawson had originally got soda pop supplier Pfizer into the penicillin business.)

And once again, Aronson failed to die as expected.

He had survived at least four previous brushes with death and this time not only survived the SBE but also a potentially lethal stroke.

His brave body - basically battered from birth with all variety of life-threatening disease - hung on until he died at around age 40, in 1951.

Since so many of those diseases affected his motor skills, it is a minor miracle in itself that he had the speed and control to be a teletype operator at America's largest and busiest daily newspaper.

So what sort of latterday Hearst journalist is going to give the Hearst empire a second shot at a 'Penicillin Pulitzer' by writing a series on the amazing life of one the media chain's own employees ?

Modernity failed (and eventually faded) when synthetic penicillin failed

Forget what books and movies, your teachers, professors, parents and grandparents all tell you about WWII's "hands across the water" holy war against the utterly evil Nazi values:

because no nation in WWII ever went to war against the Axis unless and until they were first directly attacked by the Axis : on the factual evidence, they warred against the Axis solely in self defence.

Except, of course, for the empires of England and France --but :

if the peoples of these two superpowers still claim that they went to war solely on behalf of the small victims of the Axis, their subsequent actions would hardly prove that assertion -- as generations of Polish (and Jewish) academics are rightly eager to point out.

The problem was that the values of the Axis were but an extreme form - but still fully recognizable - of the same values of Modernity espoused by the middle class of every 'modern' nation on earth in that era .

A world wide middle class culture as largely indifferent to the lynching of Blacks in Georgia USA as to the lynching of Jews in Georgia USSR.

Those values were somewhat under attack during the Great Depression period.

But recent research has revealed that the WWII years were unexpectedly a time when protest against such un-charitable values was actually muted - not heightened - by the military conflict against the nations applying those values in their most extreme forms.

WWII's ideological war that didn't parallel the military war

But I think there was still one all-out ideological battle during WWII, one that ended in the defeat of the Modernity values that fuelled the Axis and led in time to our open commensality led era of post-Modernity diversity and tolerance.

That battle was over who/what would provide the bulk of the Allies' D-Day penicillin.

Synthetic Penicillin to be the Poster Boy of WWII's Terrible Simplicities

On one side were hundreds of the smartest chemists in the universe , assembled by the Allied scientific establishment which believed that man-made synthetic penicillin simply had to be better and cheaper than anything stupid Nature could come up with.

On the other side, an invisibly small team in a backwater ward at Columbia Presbyterian hospital whose leader Martin Henry Dawson said 'don't count the old and the slow and small microbes out so quickly - they just might be able to do it better and cheaper and quicker'.

A lot was at stake : for all of the towering edifice of Modernity was actually sustained on a single slender stock of pure conjecture.

That conjecture was that the biggest, most swiftly advancing, most complex human civilizations at the cutting edge of Life had to inevitably be smarter that the oldest,slowest, smallest microbes that began Life three billion years earlier -in each and every area.

Reductionism was the ideology of Modernity.

It saw the basic bricks of life or reality as being simple and simple minded .

So complexity/intelligence had to grow out of these bricks being assembled into ever bigger entities in a single straight upward line : complexity growing steadily upwards from a single electron to the Hoover Dam, from a single penicillium 'yeast' cell to a tenured chemist with a PhD.

It was true that there was an infection-filled war on and any sort of life-saving penicillin was greatly needed - now !

But the Allied scientific elite would unconsciously rather lose the military war to their (fellow modernist) Nazi opponents than lose the much more important ideological war to the despised slime cells on the question as to who could better make the vital lifesaver : sophisticated Man or stupid microbe.

Feel free to substitute Negro, Jew, Oriental, aboriginal, woman, homosexual, cripple for microbe to better appreciate their deepest physic fears.

But in the end, by D-Day 1944 and beyond, all those genius-level chemists had totally failed - and have still failed, seventy five years on : a single yeast penicillium cell still makes penicillin cheaper and better than by any human synthetic method.

And from that same basic wartime penicillin G, still made in the tens and tens of thousands of tons today by those incredibly tiny yeast cells, we humans create almost all the infection fighting antibiotics we have today.

If the human small and the slow and the old and weak have more respect today than they did in 1940 - and they do, much much more - it won't hurt to thank the first ones who gained that reluctant respect : the penicillium yeasts cells ...

History's first ever antibiotics injections were expected to be of pure synthetic penicillin

Back at the start of the 1940s, two highly skilled biochemists (Karl Meyer and Ernst Chain) both confidently expected to quickly synthesize artificial penicillin, as they knew natural penicillin was a relatively small biological molecule of only about 350 Daltons.

After 100 weeks of hearing this reoccurring promise of quick results from Chain, his imperious boss, Howard Florey, reluctantly decided to inject his first human patients in February 12th 1941 with still-impure natural penicillin.

Henry Dawson, normally the most diffident of men, changed his mind about waiting till  co-worker Meyer's synthetic penicillin arrived in January 1941, and after only five weeks into their joint penicillin efforts and without so much as a backward glance, injected his first patients with impure natural penicillin on October 16th 1940.

Why did Dawson uncharacteristically proceed to Plan B so very much quicker than Florey?

Partially it was because Dawson was so angry on his return to his medicine school from his vacation in September 1940 to discover that all American medicine was using the excuse of preparing for war medicine to drop their feeble efforts at social medicine aimed at improving the health care of the poor and the weak.

But it also seems from Dawson's own words that it was a civil rights activist and dying SBE patient, Aaron Leroy Alston from Harlem, whose angry eloquence on this neglect of the poor and minorities that so moved Dawson.

Moved him to defiantly thumb his nose at an uncharitable world by deliberately treating two 4F SBE patients with this historical first ever injected antibiotics, on the very day when all of the rest of America was focused only upon its 1A population ...