Seemingly, educated white Allied males would prefer to lose to white educated Nazi males - rather than see war won thanks to darkies , women, the small and the weak

Britons - to this day - never tire of telling us that the British Empire troops couldn't contest German troops on German soil till January 1945 because the empire could never come close to matching the manpower of the Third Reich .

Particularly as a successful offensive effort usually needs to outnumber the defenders three to one.

And if you only count the white population of the British Empire that is true (but even there, only narrowly so.)

But India alone - despite feeling badly mistreated by Britain - raised a volunteer army of six million.

Memo to RAMZI YOUSEF : Wartime Manhattan gave the world's first penicillin shots --- as well as the world's first A-bomb

Manhattan's first ever penicillin shots (75 years ago next  October 16th 2015) were a deliberate act of provocation by Dr Martin Henry Dawson.

Penicillin shots across the bow against the Allied medical establishment for using the excuse of war medicine preparation to dismiss efforts of social medicine directed at the poor and minorities.

He felt that penicillin should be deliberately given a high enough wartime production priority to be able to give penicillin to all those in wartime dying from lack of it .

This would serve as a very public rebuttal to the Axis who felt only the 'fit' from the 'fittest' nations deserved medicine, food and indeed life itself.

Wartime penicillin for all the Allied armed forces and civilians , as well as for Allied and enemy POWs, and the people in Neutral lands ,  even via the Red Cross into the occupied lands and eventually used to save the lives of former enemies.

The aftershock from Manhattan's first penicillin shots radiated out in ever-widening circles.

The then modest biological firm of Pfizer , from Brooklyn , was quickly recruited by news of those historical first shots and began helping out Dawson.

But first Dawson had to demonstrate success against a hitherto invariable fatal disease (SBE) to really suggest what penicillin might do if it was mass produced.

 He did so, starting in November 1942, by 'going off the reservation' and used some OSRD controlled penicillin to save a group of women dying of SBE - something the OSRD strictly forbade - which meant abandoning them to a certain death.

But the astounding success he had with SBE was enough evidence for Dawson's former patient , industrialist Floyd Odlum , to suggest to his boss at the powerful (the New Deal-oriented) War Production Board (WPB) that it greatly up the original production proposed by its rival Vannevar Bush's OSRD .

But Big Pharma sat on its hands, convinced it could make much more money for a much smaller investment (and without a need to learn new skills) when it had synthetic (aka patentable) penicillin instead of this dangerous natural penicillin - which could be made by any competitor.

Such as Dawson - whose modest hospital pilot plant was for several months , the world's "biggest" penicillin producer !

Dawson had certainly convinced a fellow colleague and fellow WWI vet, Dr Rudolph (Rudy) N Schullinger in the Surgical Service of his hospital.

Rudy went overseas in mid 1942 with the CUMC's wartime Second General Hospital unit to Oxford England. Dawson had full-blown Myasthenia Gravis (MG) by that date or he would have been the Lab Chief for that military hospital.

Rudy Schullinger tried very hard to get some of the OSRD's penicillin sent into the European Theatre of War so he could both treat wounded American troops in wartime and contribute the results to the ongoing research pool.

Despite repeated entreaties the OSRD would have done of it !

Thankfully Schullinger's protests finally did pull some some penicillin out of the hands of stay-at-home civilian researchers and into the frontlines (before the war ended).

Though it was only to be used to treat american troops , he broke Regulations and used a good deal of it to save the life of a British soldier dying of the same disease Dawson was trying to cure - endocarditis !

(Dawson's "Acting Up" was infectious .)

Then another former patient , med resident Dr Dante Colitti , threw an emotional spanner in the works - suggesting to the parents of a dying two year old girl from Queens called Patty Malone that they call up Citizen Hearst's biggest paper and beg them to get penicillin the OSRD was denying her.

The Hearst media empire's emotional accounts of rushing the penicillin to the little girl with "just seven hours to spare" gripped first a nation and then a world.

It gripped - in particular - the hearts of Mr and Mrs John L Smith . They had lost a young girl to meningitis that mass produced penicillin - as Dr Dawson always insisted - could easily have cured.

The normally hyper-cautious Smith - the boss of Pfizer - now threw all caution to the wind - ordering his firm to build the world's first really big penicillin plant in as few months as a 24/7 schedule could produce.

Bolder yet - he decided to use the penicillin allocated to his firm to do synthetic studies (to secure a share of the future patents) to save the lives of people in New York  with SBE that his government was refusing to save.

A mysterious woman (probably the otherwise very upright Gladys Hobby) would arriving offering bottles of penicillin without labels to doctors like Ward J MacNeal and Leo Loewe with the oblique suggestion it might just help their SBE patients - and then disappear.

At the time it seemed clear to people inside Big Pharma that Smith had recklessly threw away a certainty of big future profits for Pfizer, just to help save the lives of a few worthless nobodies.

But his - and our - salvation lay in the most unlikeliest of all places : the former eugenic laboratories at Cold Spring Harbour in Long Island , once one of the intellectual godfathers to the Nazi holocausts agains Jews, Slavs and the 'unfit'.

For several years, its new (non-eugenically oriented) director Milislav Demerec had pleaded in vain with Vannevar Bush's OSRD to let him help develop more productive natural strains of penicillin-producing penicillium.

But the OSRD - like Florey and Fleming in England - had its heart set on a man-made synthetic triumph with penicillin - they had no intention to share the glory with anyone small and weak  - let alone microbes.

Once again , the WPB saved the day. Its Office for Production Research and Development (OPRD) had about one hundredth the budget and influence of Vannevar Bush's better known Office for Scientific Research and Development (OSRD).

But the OPRD had street smarts in spades and it wisely gave a tiny amount of money and a lot of morale-boosting support to Demerec's and the spectacular results has repaid that debt a million fold and more ever since.

Demerec gave the penicillium spores a nasty sunburn under an ordinary tanning lamp - most died from the radiation.

But a few survived and were soon producing ten - then one hundred and today 50,000 times as much penicillin from the same amount of feedstock as Fleming's original strain (and Fleming's was an extraordinarily good natural producer !)

Yet Demerec remains the most unsung among all the unsung true heroes of the wartime penicillin story : a case once again where the moral scum - not the moral cream - rises to the top of the fame charts.

Now Dawson's team wasn't the only team in New York thumbing their nose at Big Pharma and Big Medicine by starting a penicillin grow-op.

A doubting doctor John Mahoney out on Staten Island Marine Hospital questioned the OSRD's claim that penicillin couldn't cure syphilis .

With unofficial help from Dawson's team they started growing their own and tested their theory on "Easter" Bunnies (as they told their innocent children) that they kept in their home garages over the Easter holidays !

The public clamour from Doctor Mom for "more penicillin now !" that had started with the story of Patty Malone really took off with the thought that with penicillin families need no longer be threatened with VD from errant husbands.

We can't negate the atomic Manhattan Project and Hiroshima.

But Manhattan Penicillin ,the other Manhattan Project , can point with pride to the fact that 80% of the penicillin landed on D-Day (in its first ever mass clinical trial) came from Pfizer's Marcy Avenue Brooklyn plant and that plant went on to supply the biggest chunk of the world's penicillin for the rest of the war.

So much penicillin that America - not the Britain of Nobel prize winners Florey and Fleming ( who were still chasing the decade old chimera of synthetic penicillin and only then mass production) - supplying most of the penicillin for the Allied, Neutral, occupied and Enemy lands.

And that in turn ushered in a Pax Americana based on diplomatic gifting of abundant New York penicillin.

Dawson's dream of abundant - non-patented - penicillin cheap enough to help all has come true - it is life-saving too cheap to meter, lifesaving far cheaper than bottled water.

It has beaten back age old diseases kept endemic by residing among remote and poor people not reached by clean water, adequate food and proper health care.

As a result a sort of herd immunity has occurred as ten billion of us since 1940 have indirectly had better health from seeing diseases like Rheumatic Fever fade from sight.

No, the 250,000 lives lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki can never be re-gained by actions in other areas - but I think I have offered up evidence to terrorists like Ramzi Yousef and others that wartime Manhattan was at least as much from Venus as it was from Mars.

And if Manhattan citizens are too modest to blow their own horn about its decisive role in making cheap abundant penicillin available to ALL in a world tired, huddled and wretched - then the rest of us should do it for them.

We can't continue to let a terrorist like Ramzi Yousef be the last word on Manhattan's wartime role ....

Charlie and Miss "H" : these Lazruses of Manhattan defied the odds time and again to offer hope to a war-weary world

"Dead Men Waiting" or "Dead Women Waiting" is the way most staff in hospital regarded the the  patients in the Green Wards where earlier Rheumatic Fever sufferers with green strep in their heart valves waited out their turn to die.

Dr Martin Henry Dawson was determined that his hand-grown penicillin could help them to beat those odds and return these lazaruses to health , to give them a fair crack at enjoying their three score and ten here on Earth.

His struggle - partly against the disease , mostly against his own colleagues and wartime  government - cost him his own life , but in the end he succeeded against all measure of imagining , improving not just the future of the SBEs but of the entire world itself ....

Charlie and Miss "H" : The lazarus SBE patients of New York who beat the odds time and again to go on surviving

"Dead Men Waiting" or "Dead Women Waiting" is the way most staff in hospital regarded the the  patients in the Green Wards where earlier Rheumatic Fever sufferers with green strep in their heart valves waited out their turn to die.

Dr Martin Henry Dawson was determined that his hand-grown penicillin could help them to beat those odds and return these lazaruses to health , to give them a fair crack at enjoying their three score and ten here on Earth.

His struggle - partly against the disease , mostly against his own colleagues and wartime  government - cost him his own life , but in the end he succeeded against all measure of imagining , improving not just the future of the SBEs but of the entire world itself ....

Ramzi Yousef - and the British - mustn't be allowed to forge the last word on Manhattan's wartime role

Yes, a thousand times yes, many of the events that birthed the Atomic Bomb that killed 250,000 did in fact occur on Manhattan and in the surrounding Greater New York City area.

But there was another wartime Manhattan project which has saved far far far more lives than the A-Bomb ever took : a wartime project a lot more from Venus than from Mars, a project more Emma Lazarus than Gordon Gekko.

Manhattan began by birthing the first ever use of antibiotics on October 16th 1940.

Columbia University Medical Centre associate professor and medical doctor Martin Henry Dawson aimed to see the wartime development of "Penicillin-for-All" : for friend, enemy and neutral alike.

Yes, even in -- especially in -- a Total War against an opponent who thought only the 'fit' of the 'fittest races' deserved medicine , food and life.

The Anglo American scientific-medical establishment hotly opposed Dawson but his tiny team of misfits and unfits persisted.

Dawson told the world of his first ever use of penicillin as an antibiotic in February 1941 and again in May of that year.

The second one caught the attention of the American media and through a big story in the New York Times , the eye of a then small citric acid producer in Brooklyn called Pfizer who soon began a prolonged engagement with Dawson's project.

Then thanks to Dawson's former patient (and Manhattan resident) Floyd Odlum , one agency (the War Production Board (WPB) -- out of many for the Allies -- caught his vision too.

They ordered that enough American wartime penicillin to be be produced to save all those dying in the Allied civilian and military worlds , with enough left over to save many of those dying in the rest of the world as well.

But Big Pharma sat on its hands, hoping public domain natural penicillin might soon be replaced by high profit patented synthetic penicillin.

But when another former patient of Dr Dawson,  Dr Dante Colitti from the Bronx , broke the embargo on going to the popular press to plead for government penicillin for dying baby Patty Malone of Queens.

Soon a local Manhattan news story broke big - first going stateside (thanks to the newspaper chain of Citizen Hearst) and then going international , despite the war censorship.

(Good News travels fast --- never faster than in the middle of a Bad News War.)

Pfizer boss John L Smith was moved because the plight of the little Patty because it reminded him so much of the unhappy circumstances surrounding the un-necessary meningitis death of his daughter Mary Louise. (Penicillin usually quickly cures cases of frequently fatal meningitis.)

She had died basically because the (healthy) Alexander Fleming couldn't get off his fanny in the early 1930s to make penicillin in the same way that the (terminally ill) Dawson had done in the 1940s.

John L and his wife must have had a serious heart to heart pillow talk about this one night because soon the normally extremely cautious Smith had thrown off all traces.

'Damn the rest of Big Pharma, and damn petty government regulations forbidding Pfizer and Smith from giving away secret penicillin to keep people alive.'

He ordered in Klieg Lights and put the firm on a 24/7 mad rush to complete the world's first really big penicillin plant.

He was moved as well by all the successes Dawson was having in curing endless kinds of diseases with penicillin - and by the unexpected discovery made in a Staten Island hospital that penicillin quickly and safely cured the age old scourge of syphilis.

John L was big Dodgers fan - he owned part of the club - and in the early summer of 1944 the baseball team stiffed.

Despite this , Brooklyn still scored big on an extended road trip : Omaha, Utah, Juno , Gold and Silver.

For 80% of the penicillin that landed on D-Day came from Pfizer's converted ice-cube plant on Marcy Avenue in "The-Borough-That-Builds" -- and for the rest of the war Pfizer supplied by far the biggest portion of the world's penicillin.

Obviously more than just a tree grew green in Brooklyn that summer.

Britain had discovered penicillin and done almost all the work on it until Dawson's first ever injections of penicillin-the-antibiotic on October 16th 1940.

But the attitude of the leading British researcher, Oxford's Dr Howard Florey , was directly opposed to Dawson's humanitarian values.

He wanted penicillin kept secret and used only as a weaponized medicine , something that would give Allied troops a surprise advantage over the Germans.

Allied civilians and POWs , along with the dying in the occupied countries, the neutrals and the enemy would just have to wait at the back of the bus.

In addition, Florey (and Fleming) banked all his hopes on the chimera of cheap synthetic penicillin - something still not achieved - or ever likely to be!

So as American natural penicillin (and not British synthetic penicillin) flew by plane all over the the world, very highly publicized in the global media, to save dying children in Allied and Neutral countries (some like Australia a former close ally of Britain and ironically , the home of Florey !) , something very important for our post-war world happened.

Pax Britannica , sustained up to now by collective memories the British bravery under the Blitz, faded and was replaced by the new Pax Americana.

Or perhaps Pax Penicillia ? Pax Manhattana ? Pax New York ?

When Dawson died of his terminal disease in the spring of 1945 , just after the death of FDR and just before those of Mussolini and Hitler, his passing got a moment of respectful recognition for all he wrought.

But Dawson safely dead, Fleming and Florey got all the credit ever since though they had signally failed to produce any synthetic penicillin for either the war effort or for the world's dying.

The were aided by Britons , all of them - from top to bottom , unconsciously determined to recover something from a costly war they supposedly won.

Ever since then, the British have rivalled the Russians in the number of important wartime inventions and discoveries that only they supposed did the fundamental work in --- even though the hard evidence says many people in many nations made important contributions over many decades.

Penicillin , along with radar and the jet , occupies the very Parthenon of this false-memory syndrome.

If left to British science - and left to Churchill's Conservative British government - the war or the postwar would never have seen cheap abundant penicillin produced all over the planet.

Endless endemic diseases would not have been knocked back - millions would have died - with billions suffering ill health.

Come on up Manhattan and New York - on October 16th 2015 take a deep bow for your role in wartime's humanitarian "Penicillin-for-All" - you fully deserve it !

And Ramzi Yousef and all your terrorist ilk - Manhattan penicillin has saved far more of your kinfolk than your bombs will ever kill - at least try and show a hint of respect.

Don't be like the ungrateful British....

Specialist - in depth - beat reporters - or just cheerleaders, captured by their sources ?

In August 1941, Howard Florey published a gripping human interest drama in the pages of the world's leading medical journal, THE LANCET, complete with dramatic before and after photos of little kiddies rescued from certain death.

Yet no reporter in Great Britain's highly competitive newspaper world ever published a single word about it !

Why not ?

I think it is because the general reporters who would have published such a gripping human interest story in a shot never heard of it from their "filtering" colleagues, the beat specialists.

Otherwise, general reporters only write such stories if they had had a personal approach - say by the parents of one of the boys in question.

But general reporters do not generally scan endless numbers of highly specialist publications like THE LANCET looking for likely stories and exclusives - that "filtering" job is the role of their papers' specialist or beat reporters.

These beat specialists cover only Parliament, or only The City.

 (Or perhaps only the labour scene, or medicine and science , or the police courts, sports etc.)

During WWII , effective if informal censorship existed for all the Allies' scientific and technical publications.

A word to the wise to a few key technical-scientific editors about subjects to be low-balled generally worked better than a legal (and hence highly public) censorship notice detailing all the subjects these publications could not talk about.

For that method had the paradoxical effect that it only alerted everybody on the specific scientific areas the military was most concerned about !

I think that almost* all the beat reporters covering medicine and science for the general media during WWII got too close to their sources and too far away from the readers who paid their wages .

They thus failed - for but one example - to ask why such a good news story - already published globally, during a world war, in THE LANCET - couldn't also be read by the millions of downmarket readers of the UK's DAILY MIRROR ?

William L Laurence - the New York Times  science reporter who shilled under the table for the Manhattan Project - is the best known example of this process of being morally captured by the sources you are supposed to cover objectively for readers outside that field.

But surely , he can't be the only one....

* One key exception : James McKeen Cattell , publisher of the giant scientific journal SCIENCE, who went to bat with great courage in the darkest days of early 1942 , against censoring Dawson and his Penicillin-for-All proposal.

Why Charlie ? Why Miss "H" ?

Between September 1940 and April 1945, pioneering penicillin doctor Martin Henry Dawson treated about three dozen patients with subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) or acute bacterial endocarditis (ABE).

So out of those three dozen patients , why on earth did I decide to focus on just two - one young man (Charles Aronson) and one young woman (Miss H H) ?

One reason was to simply add continuity and coherence to my narrative, particularly my libretto narrative.

Charlie was there, on-site, in Dawson's ward at the very beginning and at the very end of the narrative arc - something you just invent in a work of fiction but something you rarely find in real life.

(Charlie had the extremely rare good luck to survive his first bout of SBE and the extremely bad luck to get a second bout of SBE and then to survive a severe stroke while recovering from that second bout .)

The arrival of Miss "H" provoked the crucial turning point in the narrative arc and her prolonged recovery from the side effects of her SBE ensured she was in many scenes - including the climatic one , along with Charlie.

Again a real life boon rarely granted the author of narrative non-fiction !

But my main reason for including these two in Dawson's team of seven key 'unfits' is because I sense these two , out of all the three dozen patients, were more 'actors' than 'acted upon' (which is the normal role for patients in such doctor-oriented stories).

The first period of extensive penicillium growing and penicillin extraction was originally planned to occur at the end of the first term (December) at Dawson and co-team leader Meyer's medical school.

But Dawson suddenly decided to give the first (tiny) historic injections of penicillin just 5 weeks into the 16 week process - seemingly right after Charlie unexpectedly joined the team's first SBE patient, Aaron Alston.

Dawson did write Ernst Chain at that time that he had a patient of whom he was unusually interested in - and admittedly that could have been either Aaron or Charlie.

But Charlie, he later noted, had an unusually complicated medical history - all revolving around surviving repeated brushes of death with oral commensal strep.

And nothing in life - nothing - interested Dawson more than oral commensal strep .

And Charlie was a repeated 'survivor' , probably with the characteristic survivor's buoyancy.

This alone might have inspired Dawson onward to also do his very best.

Much the same for Miss "H" - after all, for her, the very honest and modest Dawson 'stole' incredibly scarce government-controlled penicillin in the middle of an all-out Total War  !

Her earlier medical history indicated she had survived a life-threatening bout of Rheumatic Fever with 'endocarditis' involvement (probably actually severe pancarditis) .

 She went on to survive her SBE thanks to Dawson's penicillin (the first case in history ever cured by penicillin) and then to endure years of serious infections caused by infected matter from her damaged heart valve infecting other parts of her body - she lost one eye and her womb in the process.

But like Charlie, she survived them all - she was a born survivor , probably with a similar characteristic buoyancy.

So : two real-life 'larger-than-life' characters just crying out to be portrayed on stage by first class actors yearning to stretch their craft .

What's there not to like ???!!!!

Morally and metaphorically, my book is about the 97 pound weakling who sticks a needle into the guy who once kicked sand in his face - saving his life !

In every book I have ever read about WWII , the small (4F)(unfit) (weak) get deadly sand kicked in their face by big bullies --- at home* as well as abroad --- for six long years.

Cumulatively, it makes for truly depressing reading.

(*Eileen Welsome's book The Plutonium Files describes just a few of the unspeakably evil medical experiments that American wartime researchers practised on their own unwitting "useless mouths" and "unfits".)

But I think there is one exception:

The unlikely triumph of a small group of American 'unfits' who defied both Allied and Axis Eugenicists  (and their own physical failings) to bring us the blessings of cheap, abundant Penicillin-for-All .

All : Alpha-Betas as well as Nerds.

It is that distinct rarity in WWII literature ------- an inspiring Good News Story from the bad news war .

Big Pharma -Kos : sacrificing WWII's bumpy SBE patients as scapegoats to restore a streamlined conscience

Pharmakos were those unfortunates in Ancient Greece who happened to be poor and crippled and without any local, prosperous, relatives to succour them, who were thus forced into slavery, begging or petty criminality.

When a crisis arose and the normally smoothly streamlined social sphere developed strains and cracks, the Pharmakos were scapegoated restored it.

Social 'bumps' (the Pharmakos) were beaten out - metaphorically as well as in actuality - to return streamlining and normalcy.

This was done by a sacred solemn ritual of executing, expelling or beating a physically, mentally or culturally deformed (misfitting) individual , preferably one without any powerful relatives close by to exact possible vengeance.

I have always wondered why the wartime American NAS felt it was so very very important to strenuously deny penicillin to the very small number of SBE patients asking for it between the summer of 1942 and the summer of 1943.

They were the only patients denied lifesaving penicillin for a condition where penicillin was not just a cure but the only cure.

(I have absolutely no qualms about denying penicillin (limited or not) to dying patients against which penicillin had no possible effect - viral diseases for one.)

One of the biggest social strains a war produces on the home front is the inequality of individual and family sacrifice - who goes to war and gets shot - who stays home and gets promoted ever upwards into the slots of those away fighting overseas.

I believe that the upwardly mobile chicken hawks on the NAS Death Panels turning down these SBE requests (and thus sentencing innocents to a quasi-judicial death) may have unconsciously felt they were thus 'dealing death' just like those of their age group who had been or were in combat zones - salving in a complex way their own internal social strain and bumpiness.

Who can tell ...?

"Unfit valour" : They defied Allied & Axis eugenics (and their own physical failings) to bring us "Penicillin-for-All"

What would penicillin look like today if Hitler, Stalin or Churchill had delivered it - instead of Dawson ?

In 1943 , Hitler, Stalin or Anglo-American Big Pharma could have delivered penicillin to us - delivered us penicillin either as expensive as Avastin or only to be given to the truly deserving Proletarian or Aryan.

But against the eugenic-mad world of 1943 , perhaps only a bunch of misfits and unfits could have delivered us inexpensive, abundant ,un-patented, un-encumbered Penicillin-for-All...

Misfittin' : despite the Allies, delivering Penicillin-for-All

Without unfits and misfits, what you end up with is a group or society that fits together only all too well and that produces nothing but 100% group think and 100% group agreement : led by alpha male bosses and seconded sotto voce by timid yes-men.

Which in turn leads to such well known dangers such as the lemming or bandwagon effect, herd behavior, mob or crowd rule , right down into mindless conformity , cults and dictatorships.

WWII's dying were unlikely to ever get penicillin in the quantities needed but for the efforts of The Seven (misfits), led by Dr Martin Henry Dawson.

Even more unlikely would we have ever got the world's best, safest lifesaver at prices too cheap to meter but for The Seven's sturdy principle of Penicillin-for-All , even in , particularly in ,a Total War supposedly fought to the death against the ultimate evil which had divided the world into a few people worthy and most people unworthy of life ....

Misfits : despite Allies, Penicillin-for-All

Elites physically and mentally fit but morally unfit ....

Morally, WWII was a truly sordid war where in all the world's nations (with just a few sturdy exceptions) only fought the Axis if the Axis attacked them first.

Certainly that was the case of the two biggest neutrals or non-interventionalists, the USSR and the USA ,but it applies to all but the British Commonwealth as well.

And even in the Commonwealth , in places like Eire, Quebec, Afrikaner South Africa, Congress India et al, hundreds of millions were unwilling to fight the Axis.

So it would not at all be true to say that WWII was fought by national leadership elites (the fittest of their nations by definition) who saw before them a stark choice : life-saving penicillin for all ---- or penicillin only for those Aryan enough or rich enough to have a right to it.

Only a handful of misfits saw both sides in that war as being on the wrong side of that stark choice and who then fought all out - morally - to see that victory was re-defined as Penicillin-for-All.

Just four years after the war's end,  the Allied world - led by Britain and America - cheered to the rafters a film (THE THIRD MAN) that defined the ultimate villainy as being the Allies denying lifesaving penicillin to dying former Axis patients from the city of Hitler's youth.

I think Martin Henry Dawson would have quite liked that.....

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 ...

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.

I believe that Dr Martin Henry Dawson began his antibiotics crusade on that crucial date, October 16th 1940 , as a deliberate and provocative counterpoise.

A counterpoise to 1940s America's undue emphasis on only valuing its children to the extent that they are fit enough to kill other children.

He felt all children - as well as all people - are worthy of the best possible health care simply because they are our fellow human beings.....

* Dawson had the freedom to experiment with penicllin that October day only because the very pro-war President of Columbia university had suspended classes to ensure a perfect registration drive.

After football scholarship undergrad Jack Kerouac dutifully registered that day, he went forth to play his second football game for the university.

He broke his leg and his career in football was over - its loss and literature and the Beats' gain ....

"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.

Because, just as in the earlier miracle with Lazarus , people who get life-saving antibiotics still die - the miracle simply consists in moving the goalposts further along , to a point closer to Life's natural ending.

Before 1940, few large upper class families - let alone poorer families - did not know the terror of a healthy five year old child being here today and in an premature grave a few days later.

Those of us of a certain generation know well the difference between an antiseptic and an antibiotic.

Antiseptics were when we scrapped our knee falling off our tricycle - it was part of a ritual involving a cookie, "a kiss to make it better" and some orange liquid from a little bottle.

The orange stuff hurt like hell, hindered healing and promoted scarring but it was all part of the ritual back then.

But antibiotics !

You'll alway remember that fast as the ambulance was , your old family doctor (who usually moved with slow dignity) was much faster.

His car came around the corner on two wheels and he took the steps three at a time - no word of greeting - simply hauled a big needle out of his black bag and plunged it into your baby sister.

You were too young to know exactly why the room was so still and tense - a neighbour had whispered 'meningitis' but that tension suddenly broke with the doctor's next and unexpected act.

He cuddled up to your mother , put an arm familiarly around her shoulders and said "Marge , where's that cuppa ?"

Marge !?  Not even your father called her that.

She looked up startled and then happily bustled off , saying "oh , where my manners."

And your father - for the first and only time in your young life - starting crying - big sobs - but smiling to beat the band all the time.

Your little sister is now a grandmother as old as the doctor was then, with grandchildren of her own.

That's what an antibiotic is - and that is why it is so worth celebrating ...

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 ?

On October 16th 1940, registration day for America's first ever peacetime draft , all media eyes (along with the eyes of a good many diplomats from Germany and Britain)  were on the 1a students of  New York's Columbia University.

After all , three thousand of Columbia's students had famously voted to never again to go to war - would they now register , to fight a new possible war ?

No eyes were on another part of the near-deserted Columbia campus (all classes were cancelled to ease the registration process) as a new class of medication was about to undergo its first critical (systemic/internal) test on an actual human patient.

Columbia's medical school dean knew of this crucial test but deliberately chose not to release a press release about it - so how could any media have reported upon it ?

But would they have anyway ?

Because as America girded up for a possible war, 1A young men and their medical conditions - war medicine - was the new priority.

Lowest of the lowest priorities - for news media and medical researchers alike - was 4F medicine - social medicine.

For that was the news that had greeted all of Columbia's medical researchers as they returned to work in the Fall of 1940.

Even lower still in priority were any pioneering efforts to help the 4Fs of the 4Fs.

People like the young men with weakened heart valve conditions likely to die at some point of invariably fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis , because they were judged unfit not just for military life but even for work in the crucial war industries.

This instrumentalist view of humanity : viewing the worth of your fellow human being by only what they can contribute to the war effort - was really done best by Hitler and Stalin.

But America was willing to give it the old school try - starting with the SBE sufferers.

However - and thankfully for all humanity - one Columbia medical professor, Dr Martin Henry Dawson , felt quite differently.

He began his own Manhattan Project - Agape penicillin - on that October morning.

A military hero of WWI,  he nevertheless felt that one of the best ways to combat Hitler was morally - by showing in practise how much we opposed the Nazis' instrumentalist view of humanity.

So on October 16th 1940, he felt America should show it cared at least as much about its unfit 4F youth as it did about their fit 1A companions.

A  Jew, Charles Aronson , firstly, and then a black man , Aaron Alston - in 1940 America they were practically 4F simply by ethnicity alone - were the two patients who got the first ever needles of penicillin-the-antibiotic that day.

Aaron eventually died but amazing, Charles survived : a hopeful start to the new Age of Antibiotics.

So on October 16th 2015, seventy years later, will the New York media mark the start of the American peacetime draft registration - still very much a part of American life ?

Or will the New York media mark the start of the Age of Antibiotics  , still very much part of everyone's life around the world ?

Or hopefully both - seeing how intimately the two events were intertwined,  way back in October 1940 .

But I doubt - if left to the men alone - it'll ever happen.

A 1999 Newsday-Newseum survey of 35,000 American men and women revealed a perhaps not so surprising difference of opinion as to the top news story of the 20th century.

The men thought it was the death-dealing Manhattan Project and its atomic bomb.

But the women thought it was the life-saving Manhattan Project and its wartime vision of cheap abundant penicillin for all humanity.

So women, particularly if you work in the media - its time to step up to the plate and make sure that , this time , the dawn of the Age of Antibiotics gets its due ...

Moral Courage --- this doctor tested on himself first - not on some helpless dying woman ...

First to receive penicillin needle : Henry Dawson, October 15 1940, Columbia Presbyterian medical center, New York

Despite this, Canadian-born (Martin) Henry Dawson wasn't actually a patient.

He was instead the lead investigator of this particular American penicillin research team.

He was merely following an old tradition that says a truly caring doctor doesn't first test a potentially dangerous new therapy upon his patients , but rather upon himself.

It is a tradition that Dawson's main penicillin rival, Australian Howard Florey - entirely in character with his self-serving nature - declined to follow.

Just one of many reasons why Hollywood producers find the idea of a penicillin drama featuring Florey as the lead to be box office poison for the women viewers who form the bulk of the audiences for medical dramas.

Dawson's other penicillin rival, Britain's Alex Fleming , like Florey was consistently unwilling to do anything that might risk his own neck - like fight in the Boer War - and he too never gave himself a needle of his own penicillin to test its safety.

Dawson, by contrast, was a decorated front line war hero and equally heroic in the front lines of peacetime medical laboratories.

The first patient to receive a penicillin needle in an effort to save their life was Charles Aronson, at the same hospital, one day after Dawson survived that very first needle of antibiotics....

Finally ---- a penicillin movie with a genuine hero - a North American hero to boot !

My book series will be the first books - ever - about the dramatic events of wartime penicillin that will feature a North American, Canadian-American Martin Henry Dawson, as its chief protagonist.

And it will thus be the first ever to feature a genuine hero as its chief protagonist.

Give credit to your typical cigar-chomping Hollywood producer - they have consistently seen what 75 years of academics have failed to see : that the proposed 'heroes' of an wartime penicillin film, Alec Fleming and Howard Florey, are in fact pure box office poison to the women who form the bulk of the audience for any medical drama.

By contrast, Henry Dawson looks like the self-less medical hero from classic Hollywood central casting -  but on steroids : this truth being stranger and stronger than any possible fiction....

WWII plenticide and agape penicillin were made for each other : chalk and cheese, matter and antimatter , oil and water

WWII saw an unusually high number of civilians and POWS die in a war supposedly fought between modern civilizations : why ?

Out of thousands of possible drug choices, penicillin , dramatically emerging late in WWII , remains our best loved and best known medicine : why ?

I think these two unusual events are in fact closely linked : (behavior on both sides in) WWII being the disease and Agape penicillin being the cure.

Agape penicillin's plenitude curing plenticide against life and of compassion....