Wartime penicillin : Patented for some or PD for all ?

For the young Black and Jewish men receiving those historical first needles (October 1940) of Dr Henry Dawson's "Impure Manhattan" brew. it is very important to note that this impure naturally grown penicillin were not at all dangerous, medically speaking.

As any 1940 era medical scientist or doctor, literate enough to read past medical journal articles on penicillin, knew well.
The supposed dangers of impure natural penicillin was just a 'Big Lie' generated from deep within the Anglo-American establishment, given out for media and laity consumption.

For Dawson's taboo-breaking needles were indeed highly dangerous, to that establishment and their ideology of Anglo-American racial superiority in all things intellectual and commercial.

Because the invisibly small and light spores of penicillin-producing penicillium were inherently PD (public domain) as they drifted everywhere throughout the world, in particular constantly drifting over and through the highest of tariff barriers like, well, like spores.

That meant any nation on Earth could make their own monopoly-breaking public domain natural penicillin and soon, all could consider making this wonderful (and wonderfully inexpensive) life-saving boon for humanity.

No chance then to add penicillin to the arsenal intended to promote the Anglo-American's postwar vision of "Soft Imperialism", wherein their exclusive control over items like atomic bombs, food, technology and life-saving medicines would allow them to create a whole slew of new "informal" colonies abroad.

The establishments in America and Britain were totally determined to patent and thus control highly expensive synthetic penicillin (meanwhile undercutting the much cheaper and equally effective natural PD penicillin by proclaiming over and over that the artificial stuff, like sarin gas, was 100% pure --- and hence, ipso facto, 100% safe).

So much so that they were committed to delaying, by all means fair and foul, the use of any penicillin to save wartime lives, until one of their cartel of organizations had patented a synthetic penicillin.

Dr Dawson was dying through the war and was often under emergency care, but his courage and his vision inspired a handful of equally determined colleagues, friends and associates to take up his cause and ultimately forcing the Allies to shift their position 180 degrees.

There was his Columbia University colleague Dr Rudy Schulinger, now in uniform in Europe, trying to get his superiors to demand penicillin from a reluctant Washington scientific bureaucracy to save American boys overseas.

Eventually the Army's commitment to getting penicillin, if necessary by making it themselves - such as Army doctor Frank B Queen in Utah had proposed - scared even the Washington wartime Beltway into giving way.

Dawson's patient, American super industrialist Floyd B Odlum, advisor to the head of the only remaining New Deal oriented Washington bureaucratic organization, the powerful WPB (War Production Board).

The WPB's bold decision to seek incredibly huge amounts of wartime penicillin, enough to deal with those dying for lack of it worldwide, tore open the cartel's tight control over limited production runs of penicillin.

A former patient of Dawson, Dr Dante Colitti, broke the story locally in New York City on the dire effects of the withholding of penicillin for a dying baby girl, Patty Malone.

One of the oldest saying in the American media is "if a New York story is breaking wide, its breaking stateside !" and this local story certainly did so, ultimately breaking worldwide as well.

In turn, it inspired Mrs John L Smith, mother of a girl who also had died through lack of penicillin and wife of industrialist who had been earlier working together with Dawson on penicillin.

Now her husband pushed his relatively small firm to buck the industry consensus on betting everything on synthetic penicillin, whenever and if ever it proved commercially viable (it still hasn't).

Instead his firm went down the natural PD penicillin route, ending up making most of the war's penicillin all by itself - while 'breaking' the law on giving penicillin to those dying who were deemed eugenically 'unworthy' of it.

FDR's personal physician Dr L W Gorham, was just one of a number of prominent doctors, men too powerful to easily bring to heal, also 'broke' the law on the making and use of wartime penicillin, inspired by Dawson's continuing lawbreaking example.

The wide availability of cheap abundant natural penicillin soon had a sort of herd immunity effect.

For it, unusually, reached those people ordinarily either too poor or too remote to receive cutting edge medicine and in helping cure them, also knocked back long endemic pools of infectious pathogens that had affected all the world's population.

Since October 1940, ten billion of us have led happier lives because of this herd immunity, all thanks to Dr Dawson....