preserving History : its not the size of the vial, its the size of the Hope : Pfizer Penicillin March 1942, Pfizer Covid vaccine December 2020

 

Today, in December 2020, museums all over the world are rushing to preserve the tiny precious vial of Pfizer’s Covid vaccine that was first deployed in their area, keenly aware of the historical significance of those first shots.

Yes, seven shots and seven people vaccinated against Covid, like a single swallow, do not a summer make : not with seven billion of us left to jab.

So those museum-preserved vials does not represent a large dose of the vaccine, rather instead a huge dose of Hope, as Laura Bennett, director of the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History so rightly observed.

Just as the Nova Scotian doctor who gave the first needles of penicillin on October 16th 1940 to usher in our current Age-Of-Antibiotics definitely knew.

They were a huge dose of hope mixed with an incredibly small amount of penicillin. 

But how did he know that? For penicillin, like insulin, is measured by its biological activity, not is chemical activity so that early researchers had a devil of a time determining their product’s potency.

It was rather simple, really.

Consult any lavishly illustrated book on common drugs, as found in any good pharmacy school library and you can’t help but notice that the drug samples shown all look boringly alike : like table salt or table sugar.

Table salt and table sugar are typically the only pure as pure compounds we ever see in daily life - if we did see others, we’d see that they too are crystal clear.

It is in fact the mere sight of transparent regular crystals of a compound that tells us it is indeed finally 100% pure.

So our Nova Scotian doctor, Martin Henry Dawson, knew by looking at the first penicillin powder he dissolved and then injected into Charles Aronson and Aaron Leroy Alston, that this thick rusty sticky mess had to be miles away from being pure.

In fact his team later estimated that first injection was about 8 units of penicillin per gram, instead of pure penicillin’s 1.6 million units per gram.

So what he was injecting into those two dying young men was .0005% pure penicillin - and 99.9995% pure HOPE.

His tiny team had home brewed that historical first penicillin - not a good sign that the rest of the world’s seriously ill would get any doses.

So it was another historical Red Letter Day when the world’s first pharmaceutically-produced clinical penicillin was injected into another of Dr Dawson’s dying patients.

It too was not pure - at best, it offered up just 1% penicillin and 99% Hope - but hope it did indeed offer up, not just for that patient but for our whole world.

 For on D-Day’s beaches and for most of 1944, 80% of all the world’s clinical penicillin came from just one company and just one site alone : Pfizer and its Marcy Avenue plant.

Go ahead - misname it Mercy Avenue - I won’t scold you.

Now that historic Pfizer vial, first used on March 6th 1942, unfortunately was not preserved for the museum record.

But it looks like a second time around, Pfizer is having better luck...