In 1937, the world's most honoured cultural hero was invariably some sort of a medical researcher.
Probably someone with a German accent, gained from years of study at the world's best research universities ---- someone who researched on children's illnesses, someone invariably photographed giving candy to kiddies.
Someone rather like Dr Josef Mengele in fact.
In that same year, the world's scariest monster was usually a foul smelling shapeless giant blob of slime, terror on the the classic HP Lovecraft model.
A blob that was always less than a real object than rather a metaphor representing the horrific dissolving of Progress's reassuring certitudes ("science's terrible simplicities").
Certitudes that a huge number of us need to daily get through a messy actual world of instability, uncertainty and change.
(Insert here links to research on the 'conservative brain'.)
Yet by 1946 and The Doctors' Trial, Dr Mengele's medical research on children had become the last word in evil and horror.
And the child-saving albeit foul smelly penicillium slime was the surprise medical hero of the hour, the only truly Good News Story to ever come out of WWII's Bad News War.
HP himself had died back in 1937 and so never got to live long enough to see his expectations confounded.
And upended...
Showing posts with label penicillium. Show all posts
Showing posts with label penicillium. Show all posts
Sunday, August 9, 2015
Thursday, July 23, 2015
A 'second rate' doctor (Dawson) treating 'second rate' wartime patients (the SBEs) with medicine from a 'second rate' drug producer (the penicillium slime) and in the process, upending simplistic notions of linear Progress
When Jesus talked of "the first being last and the last being first", this sort of 'upending' talk was really one more of his famous hard sayings, designed usually to abruptly awake the intellectually smug and sleepy, rather than being offered as a serious description of His Father's world.
Equally, any idea that simply upending the current state of affairs in industry by replacing capitalist factory bosses with worker factory bosses would really improve things on the shop floor has been revealed to be, over and over, mere eyewash.
The hungriest of workers are just as capable of deceit and greed directed against others as the fattest of fat cats.
A more subtle and yet more probing claim is to insist that the smart aren't always smart and the dumb aren't always dump - that we all have qualities and weaknesses.
To accept all the assumptions of the usually smart without question is as dangerous as quickly dismissing all the qualities of the usually dumb as useless, without examining them all more carefully.
This was the implicit claim of a scientist from the second tier (Martin Henry Dawson) who lacked either the ability or the urge to talk scientific rhetoric about his insights - who preferred muchly to show, rather than to simply tell ...
Equally, any idea that simply upending the current state of affairs in industry by replacing capitalist factory bosses with worker factory bosses would really improve things on the shop floor has been revealed to be, over and over, mere eyewash.
The hungriest of workers are just as capable of deceit and greed directed against others as the fattest of fat cats.
A more subtle and yet more probing claim is to insist that the smart aren't always smart and the dumb aren't always dump - that we all have qualities and weaknesses.
To accept all the assumptions of the usually smart without question is as dangerous as quickly dismissing all the qualities of the usually dumb as useless, without examining them all more carefully.
This was the implicit claim of a scientist from the second tier (Martin Henry Dawson) who lacked either the ability or the urge to talk scientific rhetoric about his insights - who preferred muchly to show, rather than to simply tell ...
The means is part of the message : Henry Dawson was not a Clark Kent-like nebbish, revealed as really Superman, but rather a 'heroic nebbish'...
Dr Martin Henry Dawson had basically but one single message to the wartime world of 1940 -1944.
It was that that a well known third or fourth rater (the penicillium slime found on our dank basement walls) nevertheless had at least one incredibly valuable capability.
For the despised penicillium fungus could make life-saving penicillin far, far, far better than the all the best human chemists in the world put together.
The means by which this message was revealed to the world was itself a subtle form of that same message.
This was because Dawson was himself a third or fourth rater as far as conventional human heroes go --- being far too diffident and deferential to his bosses, for just one thing.
But while Dawson would too easily bend and retreat, he also never really gave up, feeling himself duty bound to push forward - however ineptly - the world-changing insights his far-seeing eyes revealed.
Yes, his manner was alway timid but his thesis were often bold, often bold beyond measure.
That fact, coupled with his stolid determination to do what he felt was right, gave this nebbish doctor truly heroic qualities.
Without, at the same time, ever stop him from being well and truly nebbish.
A case of 'Clark Kent the hero' - not 'Superman the hero'...
It was that that a well known third or fourth rater (the penicillium slime found on our dank basement walls) nevertheless had at least one incredibly valuable capability.
For the despised penicillium fungus could make life-saving penicillin far, far, far better than the all the best human chemists in the world put together.
The means by which this message was revealed to the world was itself a subtle form of that same message.
This was because Dawson was himself a third or fourth rater as far as conventional human heroes go --- being far too diffident and deferential to his bosses, for just one thing.
But while Dawson would too easily bend and retreat, he also never really gave up, feeling himself duty bound to push forward - however ineptly - the world-changing insights his far-seeing eyes revealed.
Yes, his manner was alway timid but his thesis were often bold, often bold beyond measure.
That fact, coupled with his stolid determination to do what he felt was right, gave this nebbish doctor truly heroic qualities.
Without, at the same time, ever stop him from being well and truly nebbish.
A case of 'Clark Kent the hero' - not 'Superman the hero'...
Making penicillin is not brain surgery or rocket science --- its harder !
Humans still can't make penicillin or most other beta lactam antibiotics.
At least, we can't make them anywhere as cheaply and as environmentally friendly as can the small, weak, under-rated (and frankly second or third rate) penicillium slime.
This is something worth remembering when we explore why Dr Martin Henry Dawson did not have a preferential option towards the poor, weak and small ---- all impressions garnered during WWII to the contrary.
At least, we can't make them anywhere as cheaply and as environmentally friendly as can the small, weak, under-rated (and frankly second or third rate) penicillium slime.
This is something worth remembering when we explore why Dr Martin Henry Dawson did not have a preferential option towards the poor, weak and small ---- all impressions garnered during WWII to the contrary.
Tuesday, July 21, 2015
'Divided Self' No More : uniting Dr Martin Henry Dawson's preferential option towards the overlooked, the under-estimated and the unappreciated in the human AND natural world
The beta lactam antibiotics, still the front line in our defence against bacterial infections, were hidden - for several billion years - In Plain Sight - literally right beneath our feet.
They come from soil mold - not mold in today's scientific sense of all being fungus - but mold as understood by today's laypeople and yesteryear's scientists (and maybe tomorrow's scientists too).
The soil molds that give us most of our beta lactam antibiotics are actually bacteria that so resemble the white thread-like fungus mold in appearance and habits that they seem kissing cousins.
And several hundred million years some of those kisses exchanged must have included enough initimate bodily fluids that at few fungus species picked up the DNA genes that make beta lactams.
The best known result is The Big Dog of all antibiotics : Penicillin itself.
The process is called HGT (horizontal gene transfer) - and it was Dr Martin Henry Dawson's hard slug effort in keeping this new concept before a bored and doubting scientific community that is Dawson's main claim to fame today.
No such fame for his equally hard slog to defend, before a hostile and doubting wartime scientific community, of the full worthiness of primitive penicillin made by the primitive penicillium.
His efforts, supported at crucial junctions by Dante Colitti and the Hearst media chain, by the WPB and by Pfizer, gave us all of our wartime penicillin and still provides us with almost all of our antibiotics, 75 years later.
But since Dawson's support for the overlooked, the under estimated, the unappreciated was life long affair, all of one piece, this perhaps appropriate.
In September 1940 ,Dawson's fifteen year interest in the under estimated survival abilities of avirulent microbes seemed totally unconnected to to his ten years commitment to the betterment of the unappreciated chronic ill poor in the big city holding tanks cum hospitals.
But on October 16th 1940, his 'Divided Self', to recall William James' famous phrase, finally fused.
For on that day, he injected primitive penicillin from those unappreciated microbe chemists the penicillium into humanity's lowest of the low, a black and a Jew dying from a disease judged of no military significance, the Polio of the Poor, SBE - subacute bacterial endocarditis.
And like that other diffident Henry from Nova Scotia (Henry Alline) he was now 'a man on a mission', for his few years left on Earth ....
They come from soil mold - not mold in today's scientific sense of all being fungus - but mold as understood by today's laypeople and yesteryear's scientists (and maybe tomorrow's scientists too).
The soil molds that give us most of our beta lactam antibiotics are actually bacteria that so resemble the white thread-like fungus mold in appearance and habits that they seem kissing cousins.
And several hundred million years some of those kisses exchanged must have included enough initimate bodily fluids that at few fungus species picked up the DNA genes that make beta lactams.
The best known result is The Big Dog of all antibiotics : Penicillin itself.
The process is called HGT (horizontal gene transfer) - and it was Dr Martin Henry Dawson's hard slug effort in keeping this new concept before a bored and doubting scientific community that is Dawson's main claim to fame today.
No such fame for his equally hard slog to defend, before a hostile and doubting wartime scientific community, of the full worthiness of primitive penicillin made by the primitive penicillium.
His efforts, supported at crucial junctions by Dante Colitti and the Hearst media chain, by the WPB and by Pfizer, gave us all of our wartime penicillin and still provides us with almost all of our antibiotics, 75 years later.
But since Dawson's support for the overlooked, the under estimated, the unappreciated was life long affair, all of one piece, this perhaps appropriate.
In September 1940 ,Dawson's fifteen year interest in the under estimated survival abilities of avirulent microbes seemed totally unconnected to to his ten years commitment to the betterment of the unappreciated chronic ill poor in the big city holding tanks cum hospitals.
But on October 16th 1940, his 'Divided Self', to recall William James' famous phrase, finally fused.
Primitive Penicillium's 'burning and shining light'
For on that day, he injected primitive penicillin from those unappreciated microbe chemists the penicillium into humanity's lowest of the low, a black and a Jew dying from a disease judged of no military significance, the Polio of the Poor, SBE - subacute bacterial endocarditis.
And like that other diffident Henry from Nova Scotia (Henry Alline) he was now 'a man on a mission', for his few years left on Earth ....
Monday, July 20, 2015
Did I really get it that far wrong ?
As a religiously devote child in the Fifties, I somehow got the impression that WWII only ended because the penicillium fungus (David) was saving more kids than Civilization (Goliath) was capable of gassing or bombing.
As an adult, I realize now that I was not far wrong.
From opposing moral positions, Dr Henry Dawson's primitive penicillium and the advanced Auschwitz doctors, together, put the fatal 'post' into modernity.
And so, gradually, we collectively changed our minds. No longer did we believe biological progress to be linear --- and exclusively directed towards human 'civilization'. Instead it involved all creatures and proceeded in all directions.
But it seems that not everyone got the memo. Old guard believers in "man-centred" Progress are still around and still destroying this planet.
I believe my book about the Dawsonian revolution, about the 'other' Manhattan Project, is that true rarity : a page-turning Good News Story from that Bad News War.
And if re-telling it helps in any small way to forestall the rush to destroy this planet in the Sixth Extinction, so much the better...
As an adult, I realize now that I was not far wrong.
From opposing moral positions, Dr Henry Dawson's primitive penicillium and the advanced Auschwitz doctors, together, put the fatal 'post' into modernity.
And so, gradually, we collectively changed our minds. No longer did we believe biological progress to be linear --- and exclusively directed towards human 'civilization'. Instead it involved all creatures and proceeded in all directions.
But it seems that not everyone got the memo. Old guard believers in "man-centred" Progress are still around and still destroying this planet.
I believe my book about the Dawsonian revolution, about the 'other' Manhattan Project, is that true rarity : a page-turning Good News Story from that Bad News War.
And if re-telling it helps in any small way to forestall the rush to destroy this planet in the Sixth Extinction, so much the better...
Tuesday, July 7, 2015
Auschwitz and Penicillin put the fatal post into Modernity
Who stuck the fatal post into Modernity ?
Was the doctors of Auschwitz alone, with their horrific experiments on living human guinea pigs, with all their fatal injections and monitoring of mass gassings ?
Not on the evidence.
The agreed Allied lie in 1945 was that the Nazis were an outlier, dedicated to destroying civilization and science and returning us all to a savage and more primitive age.
It sounded good - at least it sounded good to the people so far up the top of the Allied world that they had lost touch with the greater reality below.
No, Auschwitz helped a lot - as did Naking, Hiroshima and the Katyn Forest killings.
But they altogether still weren't enough - all dismissed as either horrors done by non-civilized evil-doers or regrettable actions done in the course of winning a great moral crusade.
What really put the fatal post into Modernity was the contrast provided by the fact that while the best of human civilization's chemists had totally failed to produce a lick of life-saving penicillin throughout the whole war, the much despised primitive basement slime produced scads of it - effortlessly.
Advanced German medicine - the best in the civilized world - gave us Auschwitz while the despised Lovecraftian slime gave us a priceless lifesaver.
Where on Earth was real Progress then to be found ?
Where on Earth was real Progress then to be found ?
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
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:
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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 ...
Thursday, March 19, 2015
savior of wartime Lazarus was born in a BASEMENT, not a barn
Since there are all kinds of perfectly rational explanations as to why the 'miracle' (as even admittedly atheistic scientists described life-saving natural penicillin) emerged in the times of the darkest depths of Hitler and Stalin's terror, we know that God couldn't possibly be involved, because He is irrational, right ?
Thus, as we are all agreed that the pairing of life-granting Lovecraftian penicillium slime, the lowest of the low, and mass-death-dealing war efforts of humanity's highest civilizations was just mere, sheer, pure coincidence, let us all least enjoy what a symbolic gift to narrative non fiction that coincidence really was.
For we all know that the view from the executive suite at the top of a gleaming white skyscraper was the favoured place of complacent Laplacian omniscience during Modernity, as countless art historian Powerpoint lectures have demonstrated.
So surely the mere thought of all that Lovecraftian fungal slime mysteriously oozing up on the dark dank basement walls of those same skyscrapers had to awake cosmic terrors (of which depths we can't never fully know... and still remain sane) in all those modernist minds.
For an entire secular - scientism - religion had arisen world wide, whose entire intellectual edifice rested upon the claim that the latest big and the complex at the top was always the source of all good and that the simple, small, stupid and ancient at the bottom was always the source of all evil and pestilence.
This religion - this claim - had already suffered existential doubts as the evidence of all the evils the top civilizations were capable of piled like bodies at a death camp.
Now, in addition, to discover that the only good that had ever come out of this bad news war was coming from the lowest of the low - every sense .
It was all too much : the horror, the horror !!
Thus, as we are all agreed that the pairing of life-granting Lovecraftian penicillium slime, the lowest of the low, and mass-death-dealing war efforts of humanity's highest civilizations was just mere, sheer, pure coincidence, let us all least enjoy what a symbolic gift to narrative non fiction that coincidence really was.
Gleaming white skyscrapers and ... Lovecraftian slime
For we all know that the view from the executive suite at the top of a gleaming white skyscraper was the favoured place of complacent Laplacian omniscience during Modernity, as countless art historian Powerpoint lectures have demonstrated.
So surely the mere thought of all that Lovecraftian fungal slime mysteriously oozing up on the dark dank basement walls of those same skyscrapers had to awake cosmic terrors (of which depths we can't never fully know... and still remain sane) in all those modernist minds.
For an entire secular - scientism - religion had arisen world wide, whose entire intellectual edifice rested upon the claim that the latest big and the complex at the top was always the source of all good and that the simple, small, stupid and ancient at the bottom was always the source of all evil and pestilence.
This religion - this claim - had already suffered existential doubts as the evidence of all the evils the top civilizations were capable of piled like bodies at a death camp.
Now, in addition, to discover that the only good that had ever come out of this bad news war was coming from the lowest of the low - every sense .
It was all too much : the horror, the horror !!
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Salon des Refuses, NYC 1940 : Columbia Presbyterian Medical provides home for fungal slime, unwanted inside the World's Fair's synthetic autarky
Mother Nature was not wanted, more accurately, not needed , inside the 'World of the Future' so rhapsodized by the infamous 1939-1940 New York World's Fair.
The Fair planners had seen the future and the future , in 'just one word', was plastics : "get into nylon, Ben."
Nylon- through the alchemy of modern scientism - was made solely out of air, water and a carbon source.
Almost as in in response, a few kind souls (Dawson, Meyer, Hobby & Chaffee) arranged for M. Nature to have a sort of Salon des Refuses.
It happened - very sotto voce - in two small labs on Floor G of the Columbia Presbyterian Medical, about eleven mile to the north west of the Fair site at Flushing Meadows , Queens.
There trillions of tiny, primitive, ancient penicillium cells were set to work at the bottom of two litre Erlenmeyer flasks , happily spinning out the life-saving molecules of penicillin (penicillin G) from nothing more than ...air, water and a carbon source !
It was a pioneering example of postmodern commensal science at its best - and it all happened 75 years ago this Fall....
The Fair planners had seen the future and the future , in 'just one word', was plastics : "get into nylon, Ben."
Nylon- through the alchemy of modern scientism - was made solely out of air, water and a carbon source.
Almost as in in response, a few kind souls (Dawson, Meyer, Hobby & Chaffee) arranged for M. Nature to have a sort of Salon des Refuses.
It happened - very sotto voce - in two small labs on Floor G of the Columbia Presbyterian Medical, about eleven mile to the north west of the Fair site at Flushing Meadows , Queens.
There trillions of tiny, primitive, ancient penicillium cells were set to work at the bottom of two litre Erlenmeyer flasks , happily spinning out the life-saving molecules of penicillin (penicillin G) from nothing more than ...air, water and a carbon source !
It was a pioneering example of postmodern commensal science at its best - and it all happened 75 years ago this Fall....
1945: 380 years of the Synthetic Autarky Project vs 3.8 billion years of the microbial synthesis project...
In 1945, Modern Scientism (1875-1965 , long may it rest in peace) was always convinced it was the smartest bunch of guys in the universe : it could do anything and everything Mother Nature could do, only better, faster, cheaper, cleaner.
After all, it had 380 years of experience behind it in the science of chemical synthesis - and almost 50 years experience in atomic synthesis.
It was certain it could make wartime penicillin purer, cheaper, quicker, above all cleaner than the tiny, primitive, slimy basement molds making it now.
But it couldn't----- and it still hasn't.
It has only had 380 years at the task ---- but the tiny, primitive and above all ancient microbes had had 3.8 billion years at their craft.
If my hasty arithmetic is accurate (I'm being called to stop blogging and take baby Samantha to daycare) that's a billion percent longer...
After all, it had 380 years of experience behind it in the science of chemical synthesis - and almost 50 years experience in atomic synthesis.
It was certain it could make wartime penicillin purer, cheaper, quicker, above all cleaner than the tiny, primitive, slimy basement molds making it now.
But it couldn't----- and it still hasn't.
It has only had 380 years at the task ---- but the tiny, primitive and above all ancient microbes had had 3.8 billion years at their craft.
If my hasty arithmetic is accurate (I'm being called to stop blogging and take baby Samantha to daycare) that's a billion percent longer...
Monday, September 29, 2014
The pure penicillin acid in 1930's crude penicillium juice vs impure penicillin salts in 2010 penicillin pills
In crude penicillium juice, as exuded (pooped) straight from the mold, penicillin exists as the 100% free pure acid, swimming about in a lot of murky water.
An old rural uneducated woman living alone (the sort we used to burn as witches) can make this stuff.
By no coincidence, most of us would describe this penicillin (inaccurately) as highly impure.
But when we take a penicillin pill , it consists of lots of buffers and fillers and a little of that free penicillin acid now chemically bound to a metal in the form of a salt.
It takes a village of highly educated men (and about a billion dollars in equipment) to raise this child.
Again by no coincidence, most of us would (inaccurately) call this pill 100% pure penicillin.
The terms of pure and impure are really nothing but scientific rhetoric , as devoid of any fixed precise meaning as every term is in scientific rhetoric...
An old rural uneducated woman living alone (the sort we used to burn as witches) can make this stuff.
By no coincidence, most of us would describe this penicillin (inaccurately) as highly impure.
But when we take a penicillin pill , it consists of lots of buffers and fillers and a little of that free penicillin acid now chemically bound to a metal in the form of a salt.
It takes a village of highly educated men (and about a billion dollars in equipment) to raise this child.
Again by no coincidence, most of us would (inaccurately) call this pill 100% pure penicillin.
The terms of pure and impure are really nothing but scientific rhetoric , as devoid of any fixed precise meaning as every term is in scientific rhetoric...
Citrus tree , Citrus juice , vitamin C , sCurvy : Penicillium mold , Penicillium juice , Penicillin , Pneumonia
When I was a schoolkid, a teacher taught me a little trick to correctly associate the juice from citrus trees with vitamin c and scurvy. (Think of their common link : "C".)
I have found it useful to do much the same with the juice from penicillium molds, penicillin and pneumonia. (Think of their common link : "P".)
Today we realize that a food consists mostly of water (needed for digestion itself as well as for the rest of our bodily activities) and non-toxic materials we can not digest ( bone and fibre) also needed for digestion.
Each food also tends to be valued for the large amount of a single essential food type it produces .
( Think fat for butter, milk for the mineral calcium , meat for protein, potato for starch carbohydrates, oranges for vitamin c) but each of course also produces some of most of the other food types.
We need great varieties of unpurified foods because we need trace (or bigger) amounts of not just vitamins and minerals but also of different types ( in chemical terms , different shapes) of the basic sugars, fats and proteins to survive and grow healthy.
Variety even trumps sheer volume.
Finally a food tends to produce small amounts of substances that while perhaps not originally designed by the plant or animal to be a poison, are toxic to humans.
We manage these poison issues by avoiding plants or animals filled with them, by avoiding plant parts filled with them, only picking plants at certain times of their growing cycle, or by treating the food before cooking - or by expecting cooking to de-nature the poison.
Finally we manage them by eating them quite deliberately but hopefully in small amounts : coffee or alcohol for example.
If we accept this new science, we can see why it is better to eat "impure" (so called - inaccurately) oranges than it is to take daily semi-synthetic vitamin c pills described (inaccurately) as pure.
Ditto, we could take our penicillin not in pure pills ( inaccurately so called) but as penicillium juice and done with care - the same sort of care we need to take while eating potatoes - it will not harm us and is certainly better than fighting a severe infection without any antibiotic.
This is one of the basic thesis of my book : wartime penicillin thought of a sort of vitamin ...
I have found it useful to do much the same with the juice from penicillium molds, penicillin and pneumonia. (Think of their common link : "P".)
Today we realize that a food consists mostly of water (needed for digestion itself as well as for the rest of our bodily activities) and non-toxic materials we can not digest ( bone and fibre) also needed for digestion.
Each food also tends to be valued for the large amount of a single essential food type it produces .
( Think fat for butter, milk for the mineral calcium , meat for protein, potato for starch carbohydrates, oranges for vitamin c) but each of course also produces some of most of the other food types.
We need great varieties of unpurified foods because we need trace (or bigger) amounts of not just vitamins and minerals but also of different types ( in chemical terms , different shapes) of the basic sugars, fats and proteins to survive and grow healthy.
Variety even trumps sheer volume.
Finally a food tends to produce small amounts of substances that while perhaps not originally designed by the plant or animal to be a poison, are toxic to humans.
We manage these poison issues by avoiding plants or animals filled with them, by avoiding plant parts filled with them, only picking plants at certain times of their growing cycle, or by treating the food before cooking - or by expecting cooking to de-nature the poison.
Finally we manage them by eating them quite deliberately but hopefully in small amounts : coffee or alcohol for example.
If we accept this new science, we can see why it is better to eat "impure" (so called - inaccurately) oranges than it is to take daily semi-synthetic vitamin c pills described (inaccurately) as pure.
Ditto, we could take our penicillin not in pure pills ( inaccurately so called) but as penicillium juice and done with care - the same sort of care we need to take while eating potatoes - it will not harm us and is certainly better than fighting a severe infection without any antibiotic.
This is one of the basic thesis of my book : wartime penicillin thought of a sort of vitamin ...
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
1928-1948 : 'normal' scientists and doctors loved penicillin but detested penicillium
What if Fleming's team , in early 1929, HAD easily purified penicillin and then synthesized and patented analogues of it ?
Contrary to myth , there never was any 1928-1948 resistance, at all, by normal doctors and scientists to the injecting of penicillin to save lives - just provided it was the penicillins that we have today.
These penicillins are all made by someone else while someone else will gladly come and deliver them to any doctor's door.
Just as chemists have worked hard to ensure these modern penicillins have a long and profitable shelf life in doctors' offices.
Someone else, actually lots of 'somebody elses', have also worked very hard to ensure that all the safe dosages and bad side effects have been found and are made are clear to everyone - laity and GPs alike.
These modern penicillins cum beta lactams emerge as crystal pure white and are usually at least partially semi-synthesized.
They are made in gleaming porcelain-white factories in high tech stainless steel tanks - operated by men mostly.
Men who almost never even seen the yucky green slime hidden inside those opaque stainless tanks.
Nature and the natural has been removed as far as possible from the scene - Man instead, is everywhere.
It would still be best if Man had synthesized penicillin totally out of basic chemicals off the shelf but that can't be.
So while the slime still does all the actual hard work (actually makes the tasty steak), Man (medical and scientific PR) does its best to sell the sizzle instead.
The green slime is rendered as Man-made as possible before anyone has to see or touch the stuff.
Yes, normal doctors and scientists have always loved modern penicillin - it was just ancient natural penicillium molds that they (largely unconsciously) feared and detested.
Fleming in 1929 , Florey in 1940 and 1941, Dawson in 1941 and 1942 : no one responds to their Good News gospels
All three detailed to the entire world of doctors of the wide anti-bacterial potency, the extremely low toxicity and the ease of production of natural penicillin in any hospital lab .
Yet in the many published books on early penicillin there are almost no clear accounts of any - let alone many - doctors responding to all those articles with a request for some of the starter penicillium spores.
There were no shortage of patients dying of penicillin-treatable diseases in those days.
Just seemingly a shortage of doctors willing to use elbow grease to make the penicillin to save lives - a job a later doctor admitted could be easily done by 'any' hospital lab technician.
And I just don't buy that.
I remain convinced that in the medical world from 1928 to 1948, there were many, many hard working doctors willing to practise very heroic medicine and willing devote long hours to saving the dying.
So why the moral holdback in the sole case of penicillin - particularly when it will probably turn out to be the easiest to make, safest lifesaver to deliver that will ever be found ?
Its about the mold - not the medicine
The answer, I suggest, lies back beyond the medicine to the mold itself - our ancient (and ongoing) muddled relationship with yeasts, mushrooms and molds.
Generally we like yeasts and mushrooms but detest molds - though all are but different visible forms of the same basic being - the fungus.
To over-simplify terribly, we should think of mushrooms as the above-ground flowering heads of underground molds with the yeasts very much like the tiny spores those mushroom heads' periodically release.
Some yeast/spores are good - bread, beer - others spoil food and ruin whole crops.
Some mushrooms are among the tastiest of foods - while other ours are among our fastest fatal poisons.
Moreover by 1900 ,most of us olny saw yeast and mushrooms as divorced from nature - bought packaged in stores.
By contrast, we didn't really consciously buy mold - all by itself - in stores : though we did buy mold-infected cheeses instead.
Instead, in those largely pre-plastic polymer days - we did see mold in nature and in our homes almost daily ---- and hated doing so.
Mold spreading and spoiling our foods , ruining any clothing made of natural products stored in dark damp warm places, rotting wet wood fixtures, growing vigorously up dank dark basement walls.
Mold seemed associated with death and decay - who hadn't come across an animal body dug up by a dog and seen the mold threads running all through the shrunken corpse ?
It even smelt bad ( actually we simply associated its smell with negative situations !)
The fact that it was slimy, slippery, and jelly like was the worst.
Though we often like like materials and even food that is slippery and jelly-like.
But mold only grew by decaying something else : a black spot quickly became a furry and slimy jelly only by visibly dissolving what was once seemingly dry and solid with fixed boundaries into a watery gell with fluid boundaries.
Now humanity isn't that upset by violent death - not by the way we love war, murders and the slaughter of animals.
And the molds rarely kill what they consume - they usually feed on the those who have died naturally or at others' hands.
So it it isn't the deadness of death they evoke - only the decay of death - the breaching of definite boundaries between the fixedness of solid substances and the fluid state of liquids.
A mold (gell) is neither solid or liquid - or rather, worse, it is both.
The ever changing slimy mold is the very symbol of modernization or globalization - the mixing and intermingling of everything and anything in ever new unexpected ways.
By contrast, the 100% pure rationally-made chemical synthetic, built from the bottom up by chemists out of known consistent pure atoms, with consistent known repeatable results, is the very symbol of Modernity.
I buy Roger Griffin's thesis - even if he doesn't - that all Modernity (not just Fascist Modernity) was a reaction against Late Victorian modernization and globalization that progressive moderns both sought and feared.
So I see this twenty year battle (between using slime mold to save lives or waiting until it has a chemical synthetic before doing so) as a key battle between Modernity and modernization.
Perhaps even the key battle : the result being the end of Modernity and the birth of a post-Modernity far more willing to seek power-with-nature rather than only wanting power-over-nature....
Saturday, September 6, 2014
Natural penicillin the Strawberry Roan : there ain't no chemist here all alive that can stay with that mold when it makes that... high dive"
Chemists versus the fungal Strawberry Roan
To the Big Scientists of the Modern Age , natural penicillin from the penicillium mold was like an old moth-eaten cayuse , an old strawberry roan , a has been and a never was .
They saw it as a living being easily broken at the chemical wheel - requiring only a little heat and pressure to make it reveal all of its secrets.
Then the chemists could patent improved analogues of natural penicillin and thus corner the financial market on this precious lifesaver.
But as Montana Slim (Wilf Carter) might have sung it - "There ain't no chemist here all alive that can stay with that mold when it makes that... high dive."
Eighty seven years after chemists first set to work to break the penicillium mold , it still rides the range free and unpatented.
"A true micro bucking bronco that's never been rid, though there's many a chemist that claims that he did...."
Friday, June 6, 2014
Fungus cloud rises 35,000 ft over New Mexico desert as Oppenheimer intones "I am become death , destroyer of nations"
The Boys Own Manhattan Project
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| Trinity's famous FUNGUS cloud |
The seminal image of the other Manhattan Project, the Boys-Own version , is of a lethal fungus cloud radiating forth , roiling and boiling as it ascended to 35,000 feet above the New Mexico desert . Down below , Dr Robert Oppenheimer intoned portentously "I am become Death, destroyer of nations".
Doctor Mom's Manhattan project
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| Lifesaving MONSTRANCE of penicillium |
Dr Martin Henry Dawson's Manhattan Project ( the Doctor-Mom's version) also had its seminal image , also of a fungus radiating forth.
It was held aloft like some sort of Roman Catholic monstrance (albeit by devout Presbyterian layperson Dr Gladys Hobby in New York's Presbyterian hospital !) to offer hope and succour to SBE patients facing imminent death.
This lifesaving fungus radiated forth in all directions over a large Petri dish, with its golden droplets along the wedge lines in the green blue mold looking like the rays of the sun itself.
Two wildly different fungus , two wildly different faces of Janus Manhattan.
One Manhattan , the Manhattan of Gordon Gekko , cold and mean - the Manhattan of the Hiroshima bomb droppers that 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef raged so hard against.
The other Manhattan, the Manhattan of Emma Lazarus, offering the warm golden lamp of welcome to all the world's tired, hungry and huddled - the Manhattan that Yousef and his ilk never got to know.
If Manhattan is ever to stop the Yousefs of this world, it needs to show the Emma Lazarus side of its face.
I hope my books on Martin Henry Dawson's Manhattan Project (Agape penicillin) help start that process...
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Life-saving penicillin can be a little bit fermented but not a little bit synthetic
If a medicine will save lives when nothing else will do so - in war as in peace - then Henry Dawson's example reminds us that our first moral requirement is to make it as much as we can, anyway we can, save lives anyway we can..... and only then try to perfect it.
Fermentation penicillin ( aka natural, biological penicillin) worked (feebly) from day one (September 1928) but could be (and obviously was !) improved gradually.
By contrast, even after 15 years, synthetic penicillin in late 1943 still hadn't been gotten to work at all. (IE, biologically : all resulting attempts showed no medical activity at all.)
In a way , synthetic molecules are completely like pregnancy.
As with pregnancy, there is no half-way house : you are or you aren't ; a synthetic molecule either works, or it doesn't.
In addition, even if synthetic penicillin could be gotten to work biologically, there were still two possible huge problems ahead of breaking out the champagne.
The yield could be much lower than the already low yield of Fleming's original strain of penicillium, not many magnitudes higher.
And the number of steps required in the synthesis and subsequent purification/ separation might require more, not less, money, equipment, manpower, care and close attention to detail than even the worst version of the fermentation method ever called for.
These are not just theoretical objections : as bad luck happens they all came to pass with synthetic penicillin.
The pursuit of synthetic quinine , now a more than two hundred year long futile chasing of a tail by generation after generation of chemists , should have reminded the 1940s penicillin synthetic faithful of the possible pitfalls that could lie ahead......
Fermentation penicillin ( aka natural, biological penicillin) worked (feebly) from day one (September 1928) but could be (and obviously was !) improved gradually.
By contrast, even after 15 years, synthetic penicillin in late 1943 still hadn't been gotten to work at all. (IE, biologically : all resulting attempts showed no medical activity at all.)
In a way , synthetic molecules are completely like pregnancy.
As with pregnancy, there is no half-way house : you are or you aren't ; a synthetic molecule either works, or it doesn't.
In addition, even if synthetic penicillin could be gotten to work biologically, there were still two possible huge problems ahead of breaking out the champagne.
The yield could be much lower than the already low yield of Fleming's original strain of penicillium, not many magnitudes higher.
And the number of steps required in the synthesis and subsequent purification/ separation might require more, not less, money, equipment, manpower, care and close attention to detail than even the worst version of the fermentation method ever called for.
I have one word for you my boy. Rosebud ? No : quinine.
These are not just theoretical objections : as bad luck happens they all came to pass with synthetic penicillin.
The pursuit of synthetic quinine , now a more than two hundred year long futile chasing of a tail by generation after generation of chemists , should have reminded the 1940s penicillin synthetic faithful of the possible pitfalls that could lie ahead......
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
How Parke-Davis could have made a fortune in 1929 from the ultimate in generic drugs : natural penicillin
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| Parke-Davis, as seen from my folks' homes |
Penicillin - in theory - is one such 'ultimate generic drug' , but was it in fact, in 1929 ?
Many strains of various bacteria and molds make penicillin-like beta-lactam materials but most do so in such small quantities that it takes very sensitive testing to discover their existence.
As such, St Mary's hospital in 1929 had the only two known strains of microbes known to make sufficient penicillin to be useful to man.
The original mold had been gathered as part of John Freeman's pioneering studies in allergies.
(Freeman's researches were the only part of the entire Wright-Fleming money-making empire that had any longterm scientific validity - as evidenced by being the only part of the Institute that a drug company, Beecham, was actually willing to part good money for in the 1950s after Fleming and Wright were safely in their graves.)
Spores from Freeman's unique mold had drifted up to Fleming's lab and so the hospital now controlled two copies of the same unique strain of mold.
Parke-Davis lost its chance to remain the world's biggest drug company
The Institute had a close contractual relationship with what was then the world's biggest and best research-oriented drug company - Detroit's Parke-Davis.
(Their enormous ( for their day) research labs were/are clearly visible right across the river from both my parents' home in Windsor Ontario.)
Patents were impossible for natural drugs but hardly needed, for St Mary's/Parke-Davis controlled the only source of the vital reagent needed to make penicillin : their unique strain of penicillium.
Keep that strain in-house and they could have a profitable monopoly forever.
Think this wildly unlikely ?
How do you think today's real penicillin makers still act ?
They develop in-house strains of penicillium and never patent them or share them.
The down-stream techniques after the penicillium express the penicillin juice are/were patented and hence public, for a fee.
But they are useless without a stable, high producing penicillium strain : one can afford to be quite cavalier with one's chemical engineering efficiencies when your unique strain out-produces all your competitors by an order or two of magnitude !
Trade Secrets rather than patents remain the most profitably business method in the biological drug business - now in 2012 as in 1928 .
When Fleming, after he too-quickly dismissed penicillin for systemic use, started freely giving away penicillium spores as a low value lab clearing agent, he ruined any hopes that Parke-Davis and St Mary's might put heavy money in penicillin production and promotion.
Ironically when he thus destroyed the early commercial hopes for penicillin production, his spores out there in the wider medical world, successfully kept the MRC/NAS/OSRD triad from delaying wartime penicillin any longer than they already did....
Friday, July 13, 2012
Earthlings is not a doc I could watch - but you should
While we are on the subject of books or movies I did not name skygods vs earthlings after, I did not name it after the doc Earthlings.
I had never heard of it until fairly recently.
I have tried to watch it but since I fled half the scenes in Wizard of Oz as just too scary, I really couldn't handle much of it.
Most other people seem to feel they can watch it gradually, in bits, and ended up learning much from it to unsettle even the most animal-friendly human.
My actual earthling point of reference, in naming my blog, was the new earth smell that newly dug WWI trenches had - as well as smell that penicillium mold has.
This uniquely earthy smell united the two wars of Doctor Martin Henry Dawson : as a World War One infantryman and his unique World War Two effort to turn his hospital into a life-saving penicillin farm.
In both wars, airmen high in the air got the skygod glamour (and hubris) , but it was earthling guys embedded deep in the dirty,smelly,humble earth that actually did the heavy lifting that finally ended the bloodshed.....
I had never heard of it until fairly recently.
I have tried to watch it but since I fled half the scenes in Wizard of Oz as just too scary, I really couldn't handle much of it.
Most other people seem to feel they can watch it gradually, in bits, and ended up learning much from it to unsettle even the most animal-friendly human.
My actual earthling point of reference, in naming my blog, was the new earth smell that newly dug WWI trenches had - as well as smell that penicillium mold has.
This uniquely earthy smell united the two wars of Doctor Martin Henry Dawson : as a World War One infantryman and his unique World War Two effort to turn his hospital into a life-saving penicillin farm.
In both wars, airmen high in the air got the skygod glamour (and hubris) , but it was earthling guys embedded deep in the dirty,smelly,humble earth that actually did the heavy lifting that finally ended the bloodshed.....
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