Penicillin Agape, with a macron over the "e" in Agape

I have had no end of possible titles and sub titles for my book about Manhattan doctor  Henry Dawson's selfless wartime penicillin project.

But most end up being delegated to chapter titles (I'm frugal !) because they are too obscure, too long winded or simply not melodious enough to be a main title.

Agape Penicillin sounds too harsh and too un-melodic to be a book title , as accurate as it is.

But Penicillin Agape does sound poetic enough for a main title.

And my sub-title (wartime Manhattan's other project) is easy-to-figure out yet fully accurate, while subtly implying itself as a peace-loving (agape, right ?) alternative to the better known war-making Manhattan (capital "P") Project.....

"Agape's Penicillin : Henry Dawson's Manhattan Project"

Only six words this time : title and sub-title.

I should remind readers that the cover image for all my various book title and sub-titles remains the same.

It is a painting of a stylized pair of unnaturally thin and curving arms and hands lifting up a glowing petri dish of radiated* penicillium mold as if it was a monstrance* , the whole effect at a casual glance looking exactly like a stylized atomic mushroom cloud.

(Hopefully !)

(*Penicillium mold is extremely variable genetically and will usually mutate a few variants, even during the course of growing for a only few days on the petri dish, even if grown from a single spore - these variants are visible as the slightly different pie shaped wedges radiating outwards from the centre of the penicillium mold.

*Monstrances are that glowing sun-like thingy that the priests hold the communion host aloft in, on certain joyous occasions.)

The visual connection to an artist's painting of an upheld monstrance is immediately apparent if one has seen both.

Gladys Hobby, of Dawson's team, records in her book that she daily held up the mold on petri dishes ,in just such a manner, to lift up the spirits of the dying SBE patients.

So it is non-negotiable for me -- I must see the words "Manhattan Project" somewhere in title or sub-title.

I want to play off the idea that this tiny life-oriented Manhattan project, occurring in the same university campus and at the same time as as the atomic Manhattan project, was in every way its antithesis.

But I don't really care if title becomes sub-title etc - its all of one piece in the end.

The idea of someone no one has ever heard of, Henry Dawson, having something equal in importance to the very ultimate in Big Science/Big Government/Big Money/Big War hopefully will intrigue the potential customer enough to look inside the book.

             "Agape's Penicillin" 
The Manhattan Project of Henry Dawson 

is a slightly more academic a sub-title - but longer-winded and windier too....

"Agape's Manhattan Project : Ten billion of us, better off , because a dying Manhattan doctor put saving ten lives above his own"

Or :

             "Agape's Manhattan Project" 
Ten billion of us, our lives improved ,because a dying doctor put the saving of ten others' lives above his own

"The other Manhattan Project : Penicillin for 'life unworthy of life'

Henry Dawson was in moral combat with the Allied medical-scientific elite and their handmaids, the wartime Allied governments.

He felt the best way to win over all the people worldwide who were neutral towards the conflict with Hitler and Tojo was to demonstrate - in actions, not just empty words - that morally the Allies were different from the Nazis, not just a weak 'me-too' echo.

He felt the "CODE SLOW" (denying life-saving penicillin)  imposed upon the SBE youths dying in Allied hospitals because their disease was judged to be  "not militarily important" was the moral equivalent of the Nazi Aktion T4 , the project to kill all Germans judged to be" life unworthy of life" .

Time says he was right - when Doctor Mom joined his battle, the Allies reluctantly had to give in and started a massive program - at least in America - to provide abundant cheap penicillin to all....

The OTHER Manhattan Project only made moral arguments rather than A-Bombs : but its impact has been immense

Moral conservatives such as today's American Republican Party frequently argue that morally medical care (such as expensive life saving drugs like Avastin) should only go to those who have worked hard enough to afford them.

They maintain this argument ( hello Obamacare !) even if this means that these drugs as a result of this limited market demand will remain in limited production forever and so be expensive forever.


The opposite moral argument (as made by Dr Martin Henry Dawson in his battle with the Allied governments in WWII) calls for the government to greatly expands the lifesaver's potential market by initially subsidizing the drug so that it available to all regardless of income, geography, race ,gender etc.

It is claimed this will encourage new producers to come in and try and find ways to compete with the established producer by lowering their production costs and hence ultimately reduce the price of the drug to the consumer.

Penicillin G provides the best possible example of this argument, proving the validity of this economical argument beyond all measure.

But greatly expanding the universe of people with affordable access to lifesaving Penicillin G also had an unexpectedly profound impact on the entire world's health.

Unusually cheap abundant public domain Penicillin G saved the lives of many people who are ordinarily too poor or in two remote regions to be treated and who thus remained reserve pools of highly virulent - and contagious - strains of the bacterial diseases that were endemic or epidemic worldwide for millenniums.

In a form of quasi Herd Immunity, billions of us (I estimate ten billion of us so far) have indirectly benefited when tens of millions of us directly had their lives saved by penicillin G shots.

Dangerously contagious bacterial diseases that terrified our grandmothers, that hung like the Sword of Damocles over all households rich or poor, are no more.

Those of us under the age of fifty have never even heard of most of them and few doctors practising today have even seen a single case of them.

The Big Manhattan Project made the A Bomb and made a huge array of massive buildings - it was big in every concrete sense of the word.

By contrast, the other Manhattan Project, that of Dr Dawson, only made moral arguments (and a little home brew penicillin) rather than Bombs or Buildings.

But who can save that this project's impact  - 75 years on - is not way, way bigger than that of the project headed by Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves.... 

World's most effective lifesaver is also the most beloved AND the cheapest

That's not at all like Big Pharma, the world's least beloved industry.

Usually their effective lifesavers cost a big fortune and their ineffective ones merely cost a small fortune.

By contrast, our beloved inexpensive penicillin G has seen wide use among the world's poorest patients and as a result  billions of us have had a 'free ride' :  a quasi-herd immunity to millennium old contagious bacterial infections like Rheumatic Fever.

Diseases today most of us under the age of 50 have never even heard of and most doctors have never seen.

But it almost didn't happen ; we almost lost inexpensive- penicillin-for-all

At the height of WWII, when the only other anti-bacterial agent, the Sulfa drugs, were visibly failing, Big Pharma in Britain and America held off mass production of the only alternative (Penicillin) until they had synthesized it and patented it.

Meanwhile , in the middle of that desperate world war, American and British diplomats sat down to leisurely haggle over how to divide the massive world profits on synthetic penicillin ; visions of post-war sugar plums dancing through their heads.

Now you don't have to be a student of foreign affairs to suspect that America is very, very, very reluctant to sign international treaties --- so this alone suggests how profitable the two superpowers thought patented penicillin would be.

That could only mean sticker shock at the drugstore cash register for ordinary families, of course.

And the world's poor ? Forget it !

One doctor bucked the combined Anglo-American scientific-medical establishment ,and eventually when even Doctor Moms joined in,  the American politicos smelling electoral disaster backed off.

The British politicians did not and the election shock of 1945 was the price they paid.

The story of the smallest Manhattan Project and its battle for inexpensive-penicillin-for-all is fascinating  ---- and almost totally unknown even to penicillin historians....

The light of the littlest red lighthouse can light up the world better than that of the greatest grey bridge

I wonder if Marjorie and Henry Dawson ever read the tale of The Little Red Lighthouse to their youngest child before Henry died in mid-1945 ?

That small and seemingly powerless-feeling child, born in 1941, was of the right age to especially appreciate the special message of the classic children's book, which first came out in 1942.

Particularly considering his father worked daily right beside the real life great grey bridge and the real life little red lighthouse.

If not, I hope the Dawson child eventually absorbed the lesson of that little book more directly, by learning more of his late father's own little Manhattan Project between 1940 and 1945.

Both the example of the book's story and the story of Henry Dawson's tiny Manhattan Project demonstrate to small children the reminder that a determined few, no matter how small in number or in power, can light up the whole world for the better .

And that little children shouldn't give up either, at the first hurdle...

Lifesaving 'too cheap to meter:' the legacy of the smallest Manhattan Project

Remember that solemn pledge from the biggest Manhattan Project ?

After killing a few hundred thousand civilians overseas, they promised to make up for it by offering us endless, abundant, safe electricity at prices 'too cheap to meter'.

They were joking, right ?!

By contrast, consider the legacy of the smallest Manhattan Project.

It has offered us decades of lifesaving at prices 'too cheap to meter'.

That is an amazing feat considering it was performed against the combined resistance from the biggest of the wartime Allied  governments and from many politically powerful firms in wartime's Big Pharma.

Penicillin, more than 85 years after its initial discovery, still can stop cold the toughest bacterial infections going, and do so at prices dirt cheap, offering us true life saving at prices too cheap to meter.

Contrast that to today's to cancer drugs,  averaging at costs between $100,000 to $350,000 a year, that can only promise to extent the average life by about four months.

This is because natural penicillin was born in the public domain, born the original genetic drug , and Man failed totally to synthesize it and expensively patent it.

Penicillin is often called the miracle drug and perhaps its biggest miracle was economic, not medical : it could be given the opportunity to save hundreds of millions worldwide because it wasn't priced like Avastin but rather was almost as cheap as water.

(A real miracle - and I repeat, it almost didn't happen, we almost lost inexpensive penicillin.)

That was because our busy wartime Allied bureaucrats and busy wartime drug executives spent zillions in scarce tax dollars to try to synthesize and patent penicillin rather than getting down to doing Job One with readily available natural penicillin.

Their Job One and Two and Three should have been saving lives in a worldwide war crisis.

Henry Dawson's 'Penicillin-for-all' did not just mean making it available to all at a steep price, like Avastin : it meant making it available to all patients, at a price even the poorest can afford...

The little Project that Could

Once upon a time there was a little yellow penicillin factory located very near that Great Grey Bridge that connects Fort Lee, New Jersey and Upper Manhattan.

It wasn't a very big operation - particularly not compared to the huge war-dealing projects located all over the world in all the combat nations in those years between 1940 and 1945.

But the long term impact it has had on all of us is far greater than any of its much bigger wartime rivals --- even the one that produced The Bomb and promised us safe perpetually renewable electricity at prices too cheap to meter.

It is only natural for our children and grandchildren, being very small themselves, to feel that a small person or group can never best those much bigger than themselves.

But I think my book on the story of the smallest Manhattan Project can be an object lesson  to our children and grandkids that size isn't everything in matters moral --- that a strong heart and a fierce determination to do right can indeed move mountains.

If I can even move a handful of kids to grow up determined to do the right thing by all the smallest and weakest among us, I will feel that my book efforts will have been worth it....
>

post Modern age ushered in by baby's whimper, not Bomb's bang

Two 'Booms' occurred in 1945 : which was more important ?

It was the year 1945, all historians seem to agree , that ushered out the Modern age and ushered in the post Modern age : and ushered it in with some sort of a bang.

But what sort of bang : was it the secretive Manhattan Project's Atom Bomb big Boom !!! ?

Or was it the smallest Manhattan Project's inclusive vision of penicillin priced and available for all , a vision that encouraged women all over the world to see a brighter future ahead and gave them reason to want to get pregnant ?

Was it then the penicillin-and-good-health fueled Baby Boom that really ushered in our current age ?

Was an old age ushered out by a newborn baby's contented whimper ?

That's sort of my take : yes, revulsion against yesterday's exclusionary values that gave us Auschwitz.

But also gratitude for today's inclusionary values that gave us  'cheap and abundant penicillin for all' , with its promise of a healthy childhood ahead for most newborn children.....

It was the smallest of the wartime Manhattan Projects, but it had the biggest impact on making our world a kinder gentler place

Has the Manhattan-based Atomic Bomb and nuclear reactors really made our world a kinder healthier place ?

Was the Manhattan-based Norden bombsight and its delusion of mass bombing of civilians as way to end all future wars really the way to a kinder gentler world ?

Was Manhattan-based Dr Foster Kennedy's wartime project to propose the gassing of all the retarded children ,in emulation of Hitler's Aktion T4 project, really going to make us a better people ?

But Henry Dawson's tiny project was completely different : it was to see that abundant cheap natural penicillin was made available to all, without exception, at the height of a total war.

 Even those judged medically in the Allied nations as being ' life unworthy of wartime medical care' .

Dawson wanted them saved not in spite of it being wartime, but rather precisely because it was wartime, because morally this was the best single way to combat Hitler's deadly yet globally popular eugenic ideology .

The legacy of the belief in life's 100% inclusivity, born from his tiny Manhattan-based project , lives on more than a half century after he's been gone.....

Irony : the smallest Manhattan Project has had the biggest impact in making our world better

If size truly mattered (the bigger the better), then the smallest of the wartime Manhattan projects wouldn't matter.

But it doesn't and so it did (matter).

The inclusive delivery of cheap, safe, non-patented natural penicillin was the biggest single improvement that the world saw in the 20th century.

Not primarily because of penicillin's life-saving abilities, awesome as they were and remain.

It is more from the fact that wartime penicillin was so successfully and so surprisingly converted from its intended use as a scarce, patented, expensive, exclusive-to-the-Allied-troops-only medicine by a tiny ragtag group of "acting-up" civilians and doctors.

Wartime penicillin was turned into something that was mass produced cheaply from non-patented natural penicillin for all the wartime world to benefit from : friend and foe, civilian and soldier, those judged 'worthy' and those judge  'unworthy' of life alike.

The 'inclusively of all life' was the finest legacy that the smallest Manhattan Project left for us.

Henry Dawson had intended it to combat wartime medical eugenics at home and in Germany.

But later his example was used time and again to combat any future possible attempts  to go down the deadly eugenic medical route.

The biggest Manhattan Project was all about exclusivity and secrecy - even claiming that mere unspoken thoughts about nuclear energy were born secret and were the exclusive property of the American government.

But what main stream politician today dares aim for majority government by running on a platform of race, gender, class and eugenic exclusivity ?

This then is Henry Dawson's true legacy and the tiny size of his project matters not a jot or tittle .....

In one of those ironies of history, the smallest Manhattan Project has turned out to have had the biggest impact ...

The historian is always being assailed by new generations of social scientists and new generations of wannabe social scientists (utopians) both who claim that we can safely predict the future from our study of the repeating patterns of the past.

But the poor naive historian only sees that the past repeats itself so imperfectly each new time around as to require everyone to be cautious in predicting the future, merely from the events of the distant past and the events of the recent present.

Case in point : who in 1940 (besides perhaps Adorno) would have predicted that our present age's moral cum cultural views would look more like the moral cum cultural values of the smallest Manhattan Project rather than those of the biggest Manhattan Project ?

But as we approach 2015, that fact seems increasingly obvious......

The smallest Manhattan project had the BIGGEST impact : the irony of 75 years on ...

With the hindsight of 75 years on, for the Modern Age 1945 turned out to be "the best of times and the worst of times" , its apogee and  its nadir.

The triumph of the biggest Manhattan Project : America's exclusive patent on the ability to synthesize and destroy the atomic building blocks of reality, seemed to demonstrate how potentially profitable the total control of Nature could be.

By contrast, the smallest Manhattan Project seemed a throwback to an earlier age.

It went back to Nature and to the penicillium mold to provide a medical miracle and then compounded this affront to the modern ethos by inclusively and cheaply offering it to all :  to the poor, to the tired and to the huddled.

But if exclusivity and the synthetic were the hallmark of the Modern Age, our present age always seeks the greatest possible inclusivity and much prefers the natural over the artificial.

Perhaps then, in one of history's frequent ironies, 1945's smallest Manhattan Project turned out to have had the biggest impact after all......

I propose to a (book) editor.... in an elevator

Clutching my manuscript to my heaving chest (insert bodice here) I got down on one knee and said to her , "This Manhattan Project is from Venus ---- and so are most of your customers."

"So enough already on any more books about Manhattan Projects that kill. This wartime Manhattan P. saved lives : its all about life and love and the whole nine months."

"Listen to your mother, she says you won't even be here if it wasn't for penicillin : cheap, abundant, natural, non-patented penicillin."

"Now does that sound like how Big Pharma normally operates ?

Yeah, exactly --- this time, despite America being at war, Doctor Mom was in charge and she saw to it that it was done up right."

"If this book proposal has legs - and I think it does , try to think of those legs as being shapely, shaved and belong to an avid reader of character-driven narratives ."

"Besides, market-wise, isn't it long overdue for a Good News Story to come out of WWII's Bad News War ?"

"Give it a read and then get back to me before the bidding war gets heavy -----  'cause, baby, this here book project is all about peace, love and understanding...."

Wartime Manhattan's Projects : big Little Boy versus the tiny ampoule that saved little Patty Malone

The Little Boy atomic bomb that dropped on Hiroshima was a very Big Bomb indeed : 5000 kilograms , 300 cm long, by 70 cm wide and 70 cm deep.

Long and thin : hence Little Boy.

 Big Science needed tens of thousands of workers to build it.

By contrast, the tiny ampoule of natural penicillin that saved the life of  little baby Patty Malone was only 5 grams in weight, .7cm by .7 cm by 3 cm in size.

It was thus 100 times shorter in length and width and thickness, though it too was long and thin in appearance.

 And since its density was also surprisingly similar to that of Little Boy, it appropriately weighed 5 grams : a million times less (100 x 100 x 100 = 1 million).

Small science indeed.

Particularly when we recall that natural penicillin is actually made in a fungus factory that weighs about 70 pico grams (pico : one trillionth of a gram !) .

That is about a billion trillion times less the weight of what it would require for humanity to  make the basic machinery and basic chemicals for chemists to synthesize penicillin.

The fungus only requires a bit of dirty water and a bit of decaying organic debris.

America's big bombers carried both the Little Boy bomb and the ampoules of penicillin : one went off to Hiroshima, the other also went all over the world  to save lives.

 However its first mercy run was from Brooklyn New York to Macon Georgia, to save Anne Shirley Carter.

A mighty big plane and a mighty long journey for such a small little ampoule but if any taxpayer complained, they were very careful not to do it publicly.

Could any two projects - anywhere - anytime - have been more different ?

In moral terms, WWII boils down to one simple - scientific - question : are the small a part of the future, or just of the past ?

 G F Hegel, the 19th century's most influential philosopher, was famous for claiming that history wasn't an endless cycles of birth, maturity and death laced with infinite variations , as people had always observed.

Instead, he ventured that history has a single purpose and a single goal  - together with a linear unbreakable path upwards to that goal  - linear, unidirectional "Progress" with a capital "P".

Herbert Spencer and a thousand others said that , scientifically, Progress of this sort actually existed, wasn't just an intellectual debating point, and that Darwin's Evolution showed not just why it happened but why it had to happen.

Species and cultures and societies and businesses and empires started out young as small ,weak and foolish and just mightier and mightier and wiser and wider as they got older and older.

The small were useful - yesterday - but now they were just speed bumps in the way of Progress.

Tomorrow had no place for them.

This was the general tenor of the Modern Age between the 1870s and the 1960s.

Many people made moral arguments against this claim - but morality carried far less weight in this age than did science.

Henry Dawson also made moral arguments against this scientific central dogma , but where he seemed downright foolish to his colleagues was that he also said that he had scientific evidence - proof - that this dogma wasn't actually confirmed out there,  in the real world.

A man of deeds ,not words, his scientific articles cut little ice : that had to wait for someone like Stephen Jay Gould a half century later.

By then  ,of course, Gould was writing to the half converted.

But what had made the world change its mind ?

Blame on the events of that momentous year 1945.

1945 was both the apogee and nadir of the Modern Age.

Apogee with one project from Manhattan that assembled a scientific team almost as big and strong as The Bomb's explosion itself.

Nadir with another project from Manhattan that had a scientific team almost as small and as weak as those that manufactured the cure and almost as small and as weak as the intended patients.

Robert Oppenheimer led one team ; Henry Dawson the other.

Time is starting to tell as to who ultimately had the greater impact.....

to RAMZI YOUSEF : a loving rebuttal

When asked why he hoped his 1993 bomb inside Manhattan's World Trade Center would kill all of the 50,000 people at the complex, the chief planner of the attack, Ramzi Yousef, said the planned massive carnage was partly to avenge the 250,000 Japanese killed by the bombs of the Manhattan Project.

It is true that the current wartime image of Manhattan does present a particularly Mars like character.
Pre-1945 Manhattan was not just the birth place of the technology that fuelled the Cold War atomic arsenals, it was also the financial and intellectual home of Eugenics - which culminated in The Holocaust.

But Manhattan is Janus-like as we all are, as the whole world is.

Within it are found big and small, good and bad, Eugenics and Emma Lazarus : indeed Venus, as well as Mars.

Venus even in, particularly in, times of war - seemingly the natural home of Mars.

Martin Henry Dawson's Manhattan Project , to liberate natural penicillin from corporate greed and eugenic medicine so that it could bring succour to the poor, the tired and the huddled in a war-torn world, saved far more lives than The Bomb ever lost.

If  Ramzi Yousef had only known the full (in the round /the 360 degree) story of Manhattan, he might have thought twice about planning that 1993 bomb.

Much the same goes for those who planned 9/11 and those planning future assaults on Manhattan.

I am not a Manhattanite and reluctant to blow someone other city's horn unasked : but I simply feel that the world - and that included Manhattanites - must know more of the long ago wartime days when 'Manhattan was from Venus' , as well as from Mars....

Now I am become Hope, Healer of the Nations

Thanks to John Gray I can say, in a sideways allusion to his famous book, that wartime Manhattan displayed both a Mars and a Venus side to its Janus-like character and everyone instantly knows what I mean.

This is a lot easier than saying Manhattan have a Social medicine and War medicine side to its character and then have to spend a few thousand words and a long history lesson, to explain what I really mean.

Similarly the made-up quotation that titles this blog post is another sideways allusion --- this time to a very well known quote about Manhattan's best known wartime Project : the death-dealing Atomic Bomb.

Robert Oppenheimer, a Manhattan born and raised boy himself, defined the Bomb's nature (and America's newfound military and diplomatic power) by intoning a famous quotation from Hindu scripture :

"Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds"

Manhattan never itself intoned those words or the words at the top of this post - it can't .

But poetically, we can at least imagine that between 1943 and 1945 it did intone both....

Remembering when Manhattan was from Venus

"Now I am become Hope, Healer of Nations."

Why Manhattan choses to only remember its death-dealing activities during WWII is quite beyond me.

Just because that is all that the 9/11 bombers chose to recall , is no reason to emulate their example.

(Ie, the 911 planners chose only to focus upon the Mars side of Manhattan's Janus-like face.)

Yes , Columbia University in Manhattan ( along with a dozen other sites in greater NYC) was a key part of the best known wartime Manhattan Project, the militarization of the death-dealing atom.

In fact, the key part : because Columbia perfected gaseous diffusion, the method used on all sides to produce all the megadeath weapons of the Cold War.

Native Manhattanite, Robert Oppenheimer, seemingly sealed that image of Manhattan for all time, when he intoned after the first atomic blast, "Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds."

But Columbia University in wartime was also home to the other - the unknown - Manhattan Project :  ensuring that the life-sustaining properties of natural penicillin were freely available to all , at a low price, and during the war years when it was so badly needed.

Henry Dawson did not discover natural penicillin, but he was key in insisting it be widely produced during WWII, rather than a half dozen lacklustre years later.

Far more fundamentally, he was key in de-militarizing wartime penicillin, making it not just a secret medicine available only to the Allied front line, but something than people of all nations, races, creeds and genders felt they had a right to obtain when they were dying, without the cost bankrupting their families.

It remains to this day, seventy five years later, that rarity : an inexpensive safe lifesaver that has never been patented and over-priced.

The dying Dawson did all this because in an era when Bigger was Better and the small were just impediments to Progress, he so strongly believed in their right to existence and happiness.

From his tiny lab in upper Manhattan he radiated a message of hope to a troubled world.

Like Lady Liberty herself, he reminded the world of the Venus side to Janus Manhattan....