The Mold in Dr. Florey's Coat by Eric Lax

The Mold in Dr. Florey's Coat by Eric Lax

Author:Eric Lax
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781627796446
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.


9

“WILL THESE PLANS COME TO GRIEF?”

The damage wrought on Britain as it stood alone from the summer of 1940 to the summer of 1941 staggered the country but somehow did not bring it to its knees. Thousands of civilians were killed each month in the attacks on London and all the largest cities—Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester. The nation’s merchant shipping was steadily decimated; in March 1941 alone, five hundred thousand tons out of a prewar fleet of 20 million tons was sunk. Food was so scarce that each citizen was limited to one egg and a few ounces of meat each week. New clothing was almost nonexistent; heating fuel and gasoline were tightly rationed; alcohol a pipe dream. Perhaps the difference between perseverance and defeat for the British people was as simple yet as powerful as their prime minister’s exhortations; Edward R. Murrow said that Churchill “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.”

By April 1941, the demands of war and the bureaucracy of defense had combined to complicate the manufacturing of anything in England. Permits were needed for raw materials, and replacement parts of machinery (when they were available) required the processing of a sheaf of forms that moved slowly through one government office to another. This, coupled with only a small amount of clinical data on penicillin’s effectiveness in humans, led to the inescapable conclusion that no English pharmaceutical company would be able to help develop a more effective method of producing it.

Heaven knows Florey did all he could to find a partner. On February 6, Fleming returned to the Dunn School and brought with him scientists from the Royal Postgraduate Medical School and the Lister Institute so that they could see the extraction process. Neither was impressed enough to take on penicillin development. Then in March, Sir Henry Dale, the president of the Royal Society, brought the director of the Wellcome Research Laboratories. Florey was not optimistic about getting Wellcome involved because Wellcome’s visit nine months earlier had not yielded positive results. Wellcome scientists not only had been unable to make penicillin in useful amounts, they could scarcely assay what they did produce. This visit did not encourage them to keep trying.

There was one other hope, but it, too, came to nothing, at least for the present. Dale seems to have been the go-between for Florey and Kemball, Bishop, a small chemical company in London’s East End that specialized in fermentation. Dale hoped that Kemball, Bishop might quickly produce at least ten thousand gallons of mold filtrate but, between their own war work and the heavy devastation from bombs in their neighborhood, they were unable to help at that point; in September 1942, they would begin to produce large quantities of filtrate that were processed in Oxford.

Florey and Chain were disappointed by these rejections, but they were not completely discouraged because Florey still had one friend to whom they could turn. The Rockefeller Foundation had provided critical support at the start of their penicillin research, and Florey and Chain were hopeful that the foundation would help them again.



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