wartime penicillin saga was riddled with conflicts of interest

Chester Keefer, on the right, as was his wont : the bald guy on the left wasn’t Khrushchev, but Eisenhower : Keefer was Ike’s senior medical advisor in mid 1950s...

Coming across more as dutiful public stenographers than analytical dissectors, the work of professional historians on the fitful birth of wartime penicillin has not been one of that profession’s shining moments.

In particular, rather than skeptically tearing apart the roles of medical bureaucracies during the war, as they have all other wartime bureaucracies, they have tended to take the official penicillin accounts emanating from senior staffers of Committee of Medical Research ,Office of Scientific Research and Development (CMR, OSRD) at face value.

As they have those coming from the OSRD CMR’s main penicillin contractor, the National Academy of Science’s Committee on Chemical Therapeutics (NAS COC).

If you think the famous OSRD was WWII’s biggest and most powerful agency you are badly half wrong.

Firstly, you are definitely half right : the OSRD fully lives up its hype about being immensely powerful with no restraints (but once) on its actions and deep financial pockets from Congress or Press or even other Washington powerhouses during the entire war.

But you are badly wrong - beyond totally wrong - about it being a vast bureaucracy.

For the reason why not politician, journalist or jealous rival bureaucrat could lay a glove on it was because its head, Dr Vannevar Bush had accidentally aligned his deep personal beliefs with those of the two most powerful forces in Washington and in America.

One was rural farmer Democrats and the other was urban businessmen Republicans.

Together they both hated seeing all the economic power going to big government agencies in the big Eastern cities.

Bush promised and delivered, that his agency would remain tiny, dissolve instantly and permanently at the war’s end, and would disperse all its plentitudes of cash to scientific and engineering contractors all over the country, in universities and in companies.

So now that we know that OSRD’s main job was to act as a sort of hyper grant issuing agency, except without the traditional safeguards to make the process both public and fair.

Opportunities for conflicts of interest abounded.

Some historians have thus noted that the Head of the CMR, Dr Newton Richards was ALSO the chief medical advisor to Merck, throughout most of the war the key penicillin participant from the pharmaceutical industry from either side of the Atlantic.

It is child’s play to demonstrate that Richards favoured Merck over the other firms throughout the war - though I will add it was for reasons of a deeply shared belief with Merck that a synthetic chemical product was always the preferred solution to every medical problem.

I don’t mean Richards got a direct or indirect pay-off if and when penicillin was patented by Merck : I mean he and Merck’s owner George Merck shared a deep-seated belief both that private sector decision making over was always better than government proposals and that synthetic medicines were always preferable to natural medicines.

That latter only partially because synthetics could be profitably and privately patented.

But few have noted - none actually in my recollections - that Dr Richard’s deputy, Dr Chester Keefer, the medical administrative officer at CMR OSRD , the man charged with administrating the penicillin contracts was ALSO the chief penicillin contractor receiving those same contracts, as the all-powerful head of the NAS COC.

In this dual role : contractor and contractor granter, Keefer wasted a pile of the very rare penicillin on some very stupid medical avenues his team back in Boston was pursing : on non-life-threatening  non-infectious diseases.

 Meanwhile other patients were dying for lack of enough penicillin in the hands of other penicillin investigators : saving their lives would also have advanced knowledge in the one area of medicine that even pre-school children know penicillin is only good at : curing bacterial infections.

As head of the NAS COC, Keefer - unlike either Richards or Bush - briefly became world famous, even to ordinary newspaper readers - as America’s Penicillin Czar, the man who held power over whether you lived or died, depending whether your fatal inflection was worth studying by his investigators.

So no contemporary historian ever fails to bring this aspect of Keefer fully into the light.

But may I kindly suggest this is because these professional historians are simply the latest in a long chain of penicillin writers who spent more time reading the period’s press clippings than they did in the government archives ?

That is excusable for earlier writers : they were not professional historians and the documents weren’t in the archives yet, let alone public.

But, in fact, Keefer  in his duel role as the OSRD deputy medical chief was always known : the semi-official and official accounts of the wartime OSRD were released very quickly at war’s end, became huge big best sellers and were found on the shelves of even small city public libraries : hidden in plain sight !

James Phinney Baxter’s semi-official 1946 purple prose best selling history of the OSRD “Scientists Against Time” even had a group photo of the OSRD CMR with Keefer clearly labelled as its medical admin officer : and we know that historians love to look at a book’s photos and to read their cutlines as much as ordinary folks !

 Hard to miss, I’d say. But only if historians hadn’t all let their professional guard down on the wartime penicillin file.

I have written elsewhere why I feel the penicillin bureaucrats are still being lauded today when a good argument could be made that if the course of the war and of pandemic disease had turned out differently, they might have ended up against a wall being shoot.

They were extraordinarily lucky that no pandemic came along near the end of the war, as it had during WWI.

Because they knew that sulfa, the only bulwark against millions dead in a bacterial pandemic (and even virus pandemics like Covid 19 always end up killing via bacteria) was increasingly failing to cure, month by month.

Still they delayed and delayed , seeking a synthetic penicillin solution(that never came and has never come)  before being forced under extreme external pressure to finally reluctantly approve a mass scale up in production.

Only public pressure generated by the dying Dr Martin Henry Dawson - via a baby girl called Patricia - together with the success of his natural penicillin partner, a small adjunct to the soda pop industry called Pfizer - saved the OSRD/NAS/Allied bacon.

Typically, he died virtually unknown and his OSRD/NAS opponents picked up all the credit he deserved - as well as dissing him in the NAS COC’s semi official history as wartime Penicillin’s one villain !