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Saturday, June 28, 2014

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 ....

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