Source: https://www.renegadetribune.com/jewish-invention-myths-penicillin/
By Karl Radl
It was recently brought up to me on X (formerly Twitter) that jews sometimes claim to have discovered penicillin; the first antibiotic to be used in modern medicine.
I haven’t been able to find specific examples of this but the Nobel Prize for Medicine awarded to Ernst Chain – who was indeed jewish – for his role in the discovery of penicillin is routinely cited by jews. (1)
However, for the sake of clarity let us be clear: jews did not discover penicillin which is the claim to fame of the Scottish doctor and biologist Sir Alexander Fleming.
As Lalchhandama writes:
‘Alexander Fleming, a Scottish physician at the St. Mary’s Hospital, London, made two epoch-making discoveries, lysozyme and penicillin. But contrary to popular fables, the events were not that serendipitous. He was already an established microbiologist and it took him dogged labours to vindicate his discoveries. He simply had the right mind. Penicillin was especially a hard nut to crack upon which he toiled for half a year with his associates just enough to make a convincing conclusion on the antibacterial property. He in fact utterly failed in understanding what it actually was. As he himself unpretentiously stated: “I did not invent penicillin. Nature did that. I only discovered it by accident.”’ (2)
Indeed, as Lalchhandama goes on to detail Fleming was deliberately researching penicillin and his discovery of it was not remotely accidental despite the popular myth that it was. (3)
Fleming was also the first to publish about penicillin as Lalchhandama handily explains:
‘As the experiment progressed, Fleming described the discovery on 13 February 1929 before the Medical Research Club. His topic “A medium for the isolation of Pfeiffer’s bacillus” utterly obscured the nature of the new antibacterial mould, so that no one paid any particular attention to it. Henry Dale, the then Director of National Institute for Medical Research and chair of the meeting, much later reminisced that he did not even sense any striking point of importance in Fleming’s speech. After a series of experiments Fleming must have conceded that isolation was the chemical substance was not going to happen. His data was more than enough, he ended the discovery experiments on 10 April 1929. It was time to let the world know. Fleming reported his discovery under the title “On the antibacterial action of cultures of a penicillium, with special reference to their use in the isolation of B. influenzae” to the British Journal of Experimental Pathology on 10 May 1929, and was published in the next month issue. Although it did not receive any special attraction at the time, it became one of the most important papers in the history of medicine.’ (4)
Penicillin was also first successfully used for medical treatment by the British doctor Cecil George Payne in 1930/1931 and was being widely – without understanding of the mechanism involved only that it worked – in British folk medicine as well as by the ancient Greeks. (5)
So where does the ‘jewish invention’ claim in relation to penicillin come from?
Well, it comes from the effort by Australian biologist Howard Florey and seven researchers under him – including Ernst Chain – in 1939 to find a way to isolate and replicate penicillin for medical use as well as understand how precisely it functioned.
Of that team of eight – Florey and seven researchers – only two – Ernst Chain and Edward Abraham – were jewish, but why did Chain get a share of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1945 along with Fleming and Florey?
Well, that is something of a mystery given that Chain’s contribution to the understanding of penicillin was to suggest freeze-drying it which turned out to be one way of isolating it in bulk. (6) Relatively speaking Chain’s contribution was small compared to – for example – that of Margaret Jennings – also a member of the team and also later Florey’s second wife – whose research on penicillin in 1944 corrected several fundamental errors by Fleming and gave rise to our modern understanding of penicillin and how it works. (7)
However, that mystery is brought more into sharp focus when we realise that only one of the sixteen nominations to the Nobel Committee mentioned Chain (8) and as a jew in 1945 just after the so-called ‘Holocaust’ one suspects that Chain was given an ‘equal share’ (originally the committee only wanted to give him a quarter of the credit [basically an honourable mention]) not because he massively contributed to the discovery of penicillin – Jennings deserved the award far more than Chain – but because he was in the team that made mass produced penicillin possible and he was jewish.
So no jews did not discover penicillin!
Thanks for reading Semitic Controversies! This post is public so feel free to share it.
References
(1) For example: https://www.jinfo.org/Nobels_Medicine.html
(2) K. Lalchhandama, 2020, ‘Reappraising Fleming’s Snot and Mould’, Science Vision, Vol. 20, No. 1, p. 29
(3) Ibid., p. 33
(4) Ibid., p. 37
(5) Milton Wainwright, 1989, ‘Moulds in Folk Medicine’, Folklore, Vol. 100, No. 2, pp. 162-166
(6) Gwyn MacFarlane, 1979, ‘Howard Florey: The Making of a Great Scientist’, 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York, pp. 305-308
(7) Ibid., pp. 191-192
(8) Eric Lax, 2004, ‘The Mold in Dr. Florey’s Coat: The Story of the Penicillin Miracle’, 1st Edition, Henry Holt: New York, pp. 245-246
No comments:
Post a Comment