Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/January 2023/Book reviews


 * By Hawkeye7





When I step out of the office, there are large buildings to the left and right. On the right is one named for Mark Oliphant (he also has a road bridge over nearby Sullivans Creek); on the left is one named for Howard Florey. I was not sure what to make of this book when I first picked it up. For a start, why write about two scientists instead of just one? That never seems to work out well. They did have many things in common: they were both born in Adelaide around the turn of the twentieth century, and attended the University of Adelaide. The author establishes that they did know each other back then, before pursuing research careers in the UK. Neither man is well known today, even in Australia, but they are associated with some of the most important developments of the Second World War. Oliphant spent most of the interwar period working under Lord Rutherford at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, where he discovered tritium, helium-3 and nuclear fusion, feats for which he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics (but did not win). During the war he headed a team at the University of Birmingham that included John Randall and Harry Boot, and developed the cavity magnetron, a device that made microwave radar possible. The short wavelength was necessary to make a radar small enough to fit inside a aircraft. It could then be used to hunt U-boats or enemy bombers.

At the same time, Oliphant had Rudolf Peierls and Otto Robert Frisch investigate the feasibility of nuclear weapons. Asking some critical questions that no one else thought to pose, they came up with an affirmative answer, which Oliphant had them write up in the Frisch-Peierls memorandum. It was Oliphant who took on the task of selling the concept to a sceptical scientific establishment, thereby starting the British Tube Alloys project. He then travelled across the Atlantic and managed to convince key American scientists, such as Ernest Lawrence. In turn, Lawrence managed to convince Vannevar Bush, the head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). It was through Oliphant's efforts that the American Manhattan Project got off the ground. Leo Szilard famously remarked that if the US had an award for meddling foreigners, Oliphant would certainly have been a recipient. (Alas, there are few things that annoy Americans more than meddling foreigners, especially those with America's best interests at heart.)

Howard Florey was a medical researcher who resolved to pursue the study of antibiotics. He put a team together that included Ernst Boris Chain, Norman Heatley and Edward Abraham, and obtained funding from backers. The team reviewed literature on substances with antibiotic properties, and selected a few including a penicillin mould based on a paper written by Alexander Fleming a decade before. The antibiotic properties of moulds were well known, although the reason why was still a mystery, and this paper suggested a candidate worthy of further investigation. The team cultivated the penicillium notatum mould, and developed techniques for extracting and purifying it. They tested it on mice for toxicity and efficacy. Mice were infected with streptococcus; those treated with penicillin thrived while the control groups died. They then began a series of human trials. A patient terminally ill with cancer agreed to provide a test subject to see if high doses were toxic. Treatment of severe cases showed encouraging results.

From this point, Florey's invention took a similar trajectory to that of Oliphant's cavity magnetron and atomic bomb. Florey turned to America to provide industrial capacity for the manufacture of his team's inventions. This took some effort; most scientists were sceptical of its feasibility. He managed to convince Alfred Newton Richards, the chairman of OSRD's medical committee. Richards became the project's patron, and he managed to persuade Bush and release OSRD funds for it. Florey found Charles Thom, the man who had identified the mould reported by Fleming as penicillium notatum, to be sceptical but useful. Thom introduced Florey to Orville May, the director the United States Department of Agriculture's Northern Regional Research Laboratory (NRRL) in Peoria, Illinois. The NRRL was larger, with better facilities than Florey's laboratory in the UK, and May took on the task of devising a means of producing penicillin on an industrial scale. Heatley collaborated with Andrew J. Moyer to develop new techniques (which Moyer patented). Moyer suggested using lactose to grow the mould instead of sucrose, and grew it in corn steep liquor, which was cheap and widely available in the American corn belt. The NRRL pioneered growing mould in large fermentation tanks similar to those used for brewing beer and Mary Hunt, a laboratory assistant at NRRL, found penicillium chrysogenum on a cantaloupe, which produced 200 times as much penicillin as penicillium notatum. Mass production of the drug met the needs of the campaigns in Europe in 1944–45. Some mould was taken to Australia, where the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories (CSL) began manufacturing penicillin for Australian and American servicemen in the South West Pacific Area in 1944. In May 1945, it began releasing the doses for civilian use.

Florey, Cain and Fleming (in that order of priority) were nominated for and awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1945; Heatley, Moyer and Hunt were also worthy. That Fleming, who had the least to do with it, was widely touted as the inventor of penicillin in the UK instead of Florey is typical of the place where, as Lucy Worsley puts it, most of what passes for history is "a mixture of fact, fantasy and fib".

The research on the book is first rate and, despite the popular science tone, it incorporates the latest scholarship.

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