Acting Up : even if you can't , sometimes you simply must

This story* is not a conventional adventure story --- where the hero and heroine are always handsome and physically fit.

Fit is important, because doing the right thing always seems to be both physically and emotionally arduous.

But in this story, the villains are villains precisely because they think of themselves as handsome and physically fit.

And based on that slender intellectual reed, they then go on to act like they regard anyone who isn't handsome and fit as having no right to be treated as a full member of the human family.

Why it took the efforts of seven "lives unworthy of full life" to finally bring penicillin to the rest of us ...

The selfless five of The Seven

Regard closely , if you will, the personal circumstances of Dr Martin Henry Dawson, his teacher wife Marjorie Dawson, doctors Dante Colitti and Thomas Hunter, industrialist Floyd Odlum.

For none of these five (out of the total of seven key - and handicapped - individuals who brought us all penicillin) actually needed penicillin in the early 1940s .

All would have had extra-privileged access to the scarce medication if they had needed it.

So their actions were purely of agape love for others, rather than as part of a patients' advocacy group.

So why were these few , a mere one out of five hundred million of all the people living on the planet in 1943 - so willing to "Act Up" to see that all those dying for lack of wartime penicillin should receive some of the new lifesaver ?

"Acting Up" : how we got wartime penicillin, despite the Allies ...

Wartime penicillin (discovered in 1928)  actually had two miracles.

The first miracle was how the Allies managed to keep new of penicillin's wondrous lifesaving abilities from their own wartime public for so long.

Manhattan's OTHER project : how seven lives 'unworthy of life' improved the lives of seven billion of us ...

WWII as a triumph of small science

Conventional accounts of the atomic Manhattan Project and of the development of wartime penicillin strongly emphasize that they were the first of what has come to be called Big Science  --- something that is taken as the norm for today's science.

But in fact much of the science of the atomic bomb and atomic energy was actually done by very small teams working with very little money and home made equipment - it was the engineering aspects that were the truly massive part of that particular project.

With regards to wartime penicillin it was much the same : small science ,  not Big Science.

One must remember that wartime penicillin's powerful impact came not merely from its unique scientific characteristics --- ie that it was first (and to some extent, the last) broad spectrum but non-toxic bacterial killer.

Its biggest impact really came from the fact that wartime penicillin G was unexpectedly inexpensive and and unexpectedly widely available for such a potent lifesaver.

This is because a very cheap and abundant (because it was non-patented) lifesaver could save far more lives than any very expensive patent-limited lifesaver could ever do.

And then we all benefit.

Because by a sort of a global herd immunity when even the poorest people living in the most remote places on Earth are cured of killer strains of disease, we in wealthier places tend also to never see those diseases again.

This is because such diseases have been around seemingly for ever as endemic diseases  --- all by surviving in geographic cum cultural pockets, among those considered too poor or too worthless to treat properly medically.

So the true miracle of wartime penicillin was more moral than scientific in nature.

Its miracle lay in the unexpected success of a small band of seven physically challenged individuals in convincing the American public that penicillin should be made available to all Americans who need it to survive.

Convincing them that their Allied leaders should not just producing a small amount of penicillin as secretively as possible, just so they could use it as a weapon of war to give D-Day's front line Allied commanders an advantage over their Nazi counterparts.

The Allies had - because of dysgenic fears - far too few infantrymen to really defeat the Nazis or the Japanese in a hard fight.

(And the few infantrymen they did have were more 4F than 1A, in comparison to the average military serviceman !)

The Allies instead hoped to quickly re-use most of their relatively small forces of infantry when they got moderately severely wounded - by employing advanced medical efforts - so their frontline rifleman could get a second and third crack at being killed in combat.

(As a member member of an reserve infantry unit, may I quickly say ---- "Oh joy !!")

If these medical efforts failed , it meant many more 'decent, middle class, white, Protestant men' would end up dying in the PBI (Poor Bloody Infantry) and this was seen as an eugenic mistake that the Allied cultural elite was not about to repeat from WWI.

If their scheme worked, they would keep the best of their breed safe from the trenches and still have a big advantage over the enemy.

Because , by contrast, they figured the average German infantry, when moderately severely wounded , was out for half a year - while the average Japanese under such circumstances simply died of their wounds.

Their thinking was that that much bigger Axis armies, with much of their troops in hospital beds, couldn't defeat assaults from much smaller Allied Corps , if the Corps had most of their troops in fighting trim.

Because the medically convincing details of the lifesaving results of penicillin were only known by the Allied medical establishment , the  hard pressed Nazis and Japanese hadn't given the development of penicillin (which they had read about in the public scientific literature) much of a priority.

If these lifesaving successes could continue to be kept out of the medical and public media until D-Day , only the Allies would have abundant patented (secret) penicillin to return their wounded to combat much quickly than had traditionally been the case.

D-Day would spill the beans soon enough , but long before the Germans and Japanese chemists had broken the penicillin patent and gone into mass production,  the war would be over.

The Seven Crips

The seven argued - by contrast - that the war to defeat Hitler was as much moral as military.

Germany was the moderately big schoolyard bully and Poland was the moderately small schoolyard victim.

Hitler had gotten away with his bullying because the rest of the world - which vastly out-numbered and out-gunned him, had not intervened against his bullying but instead talked up the virtues of non-intervention in European 'schoolyard squabbles'.

Not my words - rather the shameful words of endless newspaper editorials and 'statesmen' the world over in the early 1940s.

The seven said we must not just talk The Atlantic Charter talk (the Allied declaration that said all - even the smallest and weakest and most valueless - had an absolute right to life and security).

The seven said we must make sure our own Allied actions don't echo the Nazi's counterclaims.

(That the strongest are morally justified in denying the weakest and smallest the right of life and succour.)

But instead the Allies were actually and openly "Code Slowing" tens of thousands of mostly young, mostly poor and minority people.

People with the SBE version of endocarditis - SBE being the final - hitherto terminal - disease that made childhood Rheumatic Fever such a terror.

The SBEs were considered to be so useless that they couldn't even be recruited to work in the war industries , let alone be in the military.

So no wartime penicillin was to be wasted on them and they were to be left to die --- for two reasons.

The unimportant reason was that currently penicillin was still in limited supply and the SBE were below the lowest in priority, particularly as some cases of SBE did consume extremely large amounts of that limited penicillin.

The important reason was that SBE was regarded as the "Gold Standard" of intractable infections.

Any evidence that this new fangled 'penicillin' stuff could actually cure this famously most incurable of infectious diseases would tend to break the whole story of wartime penicillin wide open in the American news media.

And nothing (to paraphrase an old old adage of the pop music business) only 'breaks local' in America .

A big news story in America becomes a big news story worldwide - including in Japan and Germany, via friendly neutral diplomats in Washington.

The seven may have realized that while the Allied medical establishment won't easily bend on the issue of SBE and penicillin, it was also a hard position for the Allied elite to sustain publicly.

Letting young kids die needlessly merely on account of being judged 'life unworthy of life' would be a hard moral sell for the Allies warring against evil governments that basically did exactly the same thing.

Dr Dawson, the leader of the seven , decided to liberate ie 'steal' government controlled penicillin to successfully save five young women dying of SBE but his success was written out of the official report indicated penicillin test results.

And there it might of ended.

But for the fact that his successes and how this most unlikely of heroes was driven to steal to save lives had become the stuff of legend in New York's wartime-strengthened gossip grapevine among it tens of thousands of medical staffers.

A former patient of his, a fellow crip and fellow doctor named Dante Colitti , decided to emulate Dawson and saw to it that the fount of Yellow Journalism, Citizen Hearst's newspaper empire , covered his efforts from gavel to gavel.

The story - involving a terminally ill and terminally cute two year old toddler named Patty Malone - broke wide , broke stateside, broke worldwide.

Soon defeated in the court of public opinion by the formidable Doctor Mom, the Allies really opened the penicillin floodgates wide when Dawson's friend among Big Pharma , John L Smith of Pfizer , took up his cause and started producing it at levels a million times higher than Pfizer had done earlier.

Small science ?

Well the seven cripples had no government grants, had strong enemies rather than warm friends in high places and were - obviously - in poor physical vigour.

That they nevertheless brought the massed Allied governments - during a Total War - to their knees shows us all what sheer raw moral courage can do.

And that when we see those physically and mentally challenged as 'lives useless of life', they are anything but ....

Oct 16 '40 : Dies Mirabilis , marking 75 years of Antibiotics and Draft registration

I might just do an Erik Larson and interweave Jack Kerouac and Martin Henry Dawson's experiences of that Dies Mirabilis, October 16th 1940, together in one book - and not separately as two books ...

Oct 16 '40 : for Jack Kerouac, a 1A's first ever Draft registration day was eventful ...

October 16th 1940 : Dies Mirabilis

As a husky football player from a poor family ,  John "Jack" Kerouac was not earning his usual drinking money that day by being part of the team of Columbia U football players hauling about tins of graphite or uranium for Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi's forerunner to the Manhattan Project .

Yes this gridiron hero drank.

Lord he drank , drank mostly to drown out memories of the painful prolonged death of his saintly slightly older brother Gerald,  from Rheumatic Fever in 1926 when Jack was only four.

Rheumatic Fever - and not the rather more famous polio - was far-and-away the leading killer of school age children, but it tended to kill the poor mostly .

(And because New York book editors are themselves rarely poor,  we don't hear much about this Sword of Damocles that hung over America's families for almost a hundred years.)

So with no tins of uranium to muck about, our future Poster Boy of the Beat Generation was instead enthusiastically obeying his legal requirement to be part of the historic registration process for America's first ever peacetime draft .

Oct 16 '40 and the 4Fs : Draft rejects them , Antibiotics succours them

I will have two books in my 'Agape Penicillin' series out in early 2015 -- they will be published simultaneously and hopefully reviewed together...

"Oct 16 '40 -- 75 years of Draft Registration : rejecting the 4Fs"

"Oct 16 '40 -- 75 Years of Antibiotics : succouring the 4Fs"

Aaron Alston - Antibiotics pioneer on '40 draft count but not on '40 census ?

In the Spring of 1941 *, the US Census discovered a major embarrassment : it counted far fewer young black men in April 1940 than did the draft registration process in October of that same year, only five months later.

Three percent of draft age men were missed by the census overall, but a whooping 13% of blacks - an even higher difference in the correct count in inner city places like Harlem New York.

This (fiscally important) undercounting of the poor and minorities has never really stopped and probably never will --- not if Republican congressmen have any say in the matter.

But it might mean a little bit of information on Aaron Alston may still be found found on the (sealed) US draft registration card made out for Alston October 16 1940 at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center , the same day he was becoming one of history's first antibiotics patients.

Oct 16 '40 : marking 75 years of Antibiotics AND of Draft Registration !

The Draft (conscription) process tends to implicitly lay bare the utilitarian instrumentalism that form the true backbone of most civilizations - the values Christianity rose to oppose.

This is because how most ordinary people chose to interpret the results of draft board medicals.

They tend to regard only those people judged draft board 1As (as fit enough to fight for their country or to work in heavy war industries) are deemed worthy of full public praise and honour.

Draft Registration, October 16th 1940 : 75 years Young !

Due out in early 2015 is my book about the origins of America's 75 year old peacetime draft registration process.

It is another in my series of books on "Agape Penicillin".

If my book about the 'Dawning of Antibiotics' on October 16 1940 focuses on the 4Fs among America's youth, this book will focus instead on the 1As among her youth.

But I do not think it is odd or a coincidence that both events share the exact same 75th anniversary, right down to the day.

"Antibiotics, October 16th 1940 : 75 Years Young !"

My first book on "Agape Penicillin" ,  due out early in 2015 , is all about the brave Scottish Presbyterian doctor (Dawson) who first gave us penicillin the antibiotic.

It is not at all about the Scottish Presbyterian doctor (Fleming) who discovered penicillin --- but then only used it indolently, for twelve wasted years , as an useless antiseptic.

I have entitled it '75 years young' rather than '75 years old' to emphasize that the real miracle of antibiotics has mostly been for in its effects on younger rather than older patients.

I can confirm George M Conant of Middletown NY was third antibiotic patient in history !

A page one story in the Middletown Times Herald * of June 2nd 1941 recounts the details of flour mill salesman George M Conant's long and very dramatic  battle against subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE).

 That battle unfortunately ended in death, in New York City's Columbia-Presbyterian "Medical Center" on May 31st 1941.

Small town newspaper journalists everywhere , all take a bow : because this is the very first report, ever , detailing the fate of an individual patient receiving our now routine "antibiotics".

Aaron Alston , penicillin's first SBE patient but second to get the historical injection

The known published facts are few

All the contemporary (1945 era) newspaper and book accounts - written by (or coming second hand from) participant eyewitnesses to the events themselves - make it clear that Martin Henry Dawson's first SBE/penicillin patient was a "negro" "man".

And that his name was"Aaron Alston" and that he subsequently "died".

The available record of the amounts and dates that Aaron received Dawson's penicillin - as published by key Dawson team member Dr Gladys L Hobby in her 1985 book on penicillin , Penicillin : Meeting the Challenge , ceases near the end of January 1941.

And that is all the published accounts show.

But now for new research and reasoned suppositions...

Is the male-dominated media biased as to which historical events get commemorated ?

The answer - unfortunately - is yes : male-dominated news coverage is still very gender-biased.

When it comes to commemorating violent versus beneficial historical events , it usually proves that male journalists are from Mars and the women from Venus.

And since most executive editors and executive producers are still men , guess which kind of historical events are splashed about and which get merely 'noted' ?

Wartime New York had two Manhattan Projects - one pioneering death-dealing atomic bombs and the other pioneering life-saving penicillin.

Both will be celebrating their seventy five anniversaries next year but it is quite likely that you will only see news stories about one of them.

Agape's TRINITY : dawning the Age of Antibiotics , October 16th 1940 , New York City

To female members of the media reading this blog : 

Another 16th day , July 16th 1945 , is considered the dawn of the Atomic Age , our new age of possible instant global death , and it is a day well marked by (male) historians and (male) journalists alike.

But who marked then - who will mark now (because its seventy fifth anniversary is next October 2015)  - of the dawning of a more hope-filled and life-saving age, our current Age of Antibiotics ---- if not you ?

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

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 

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.

When the UVic Press was just a photocopier, stapler and a paper cutter...

Browsing in the stacks of one of my local university libraries a while back,  I discovered that the "academically-correct police" there had missed a few 'bad taste' errors from the past in their pogrom to get rid of unread books.

It was a massive three volume monograph from the University of Victoria (BC) Press -- about 200,000 words in total -- dating from the mid-1980s.

That is a big work by any standards - for an academic work or a commercial novel.

Interesting to me (and shocking to many) it was just three simple staple bound (aka saddle bound) volumes with soft paper 'selfcovers'.

Martin Henry Dawson (1896-1945) : died much too young , so billions won't

When ten billion of us - so far - have lived longer and healthier lives because of Dr Dawson's agape sacrifice, it would seem that some stone monument to mark his brief time on Earth is neither fully adequate -- or required.