Differences in the British and United States penicillin efforts during WWII

HPSC2665 short essay (week 5), S2 2006

This essay will examine the British effort at penicillin manufacturing during WWII with respect to the following claims; a) that British pharmaceutical companies did the best they could; b) that British pharmaceutical companies displayed less cooperation than American companies and, compared to the Americans, were not willing or prepared to adopt fermentation, and; c) that the roles of the respective governments and their agencies were the critical difference. Given that Britain was not just at war but under direct attack, and lacking any evidence to the contrary, we can reasonably assume that the first statement is correct and that those involved in producing penicillin did the best they could as dictated by their expertise and resources. The remaining two claims are more contentious. Instead of assigning credit or blame, it would be more enlightening to examine these claims in light of the different circumstances the penicillin effort was conducted under in the United States and United Kingdom.

As far as cooperation is concerned, the organizations involved in the cooperative efforts in the US and UK were quite dissimilar. Antitrust laws in the US made self-organisation of an industrial cooperative group such as the British Therapeutic Research Corporation (TRC) impossible, even if they were willing to cooperate in the first place. Consequently, the penicillin effort in the US was organised by government agencies, who hand-picked the participating companies (Neushul, 1993). This meant that it was not just the leading pharmaceutical companies that were involved, but other firms such as Pfizer, who had experience in biological production using the fermentation process (Pfizer Inc, 2006). Moreover, the American effort was structured exclusively around penicillin, which was not the case with the TRC, whose purpose was to coordinate and distribute research more generally, mostly based around replacing existing German products. Whether British pharmaceutical companies were better or worse at cooperating than American companies is immaterial, because the legal conditions extant in each country largely determined the form the cooperative effort took – a government-led hierarchy in America and a self-selected group of peers in Britain. In turn, the network structures would have had an effect on the speed of information transfer throughout the network. The willingness to cooperate itself was probably not as influential on the final outcome as the organisational form the respective cooperative efforts took.

Similarly, the willingness and preparedness of firms to adopt fermentation methods was probably not significantly different between the US and UK and did not constitute a major influence on the final production outcomes. Both sides originally pinned their hopes on synthesising penicillin rather than producing it biologically by any method (Neushul, 1993; Liebenau, 1987). It was American government research that applied existing knowledge of fermentation processes to the production of penicillin and the War Production Board (WPB) that advocated the fermentation process and arranged incentives for firms to commit to it (Neushul, 1993). No such equivalent of the American government’s agricultural research laboratories existed in the UK (Liebenau, 1987) and the non-hierarchical TRC lacked anyone with the equivalent authority of the WPB to advocate and arrange the introduction of the fermentation process. With respect to biological production methods, both the UK and US firms, with the exception of Pfizer, were equally inexperienced. The key differences between the British and American commercial adoption of fermentation technologies had little to do with either party’s willingness or preparedness.

As already mentioned, the American government’s role in the penicillin effort was to some degree necessitated by the antitrust laws. In addition to this, research from the Peoria lab meant that the government had knowledge and expertise to share with the firms they were relying on to mass-produce penicillin for them. The British government was in no such position, having neither legal reason to intervene nor expertise to offer. The role that was appropriate for the government to play in the penicillin effort was therefore different in America compared to Britain and this underlying reason is, in my view, much more important than any action either government took or didn’t take.


References

Liebenau, J (1987) ‘The British success with penicillin’, Social Studies of Science. 17:69-86.

Neushul, P (1993) ‘Science, government and the mass production of penicillin”, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. 48:371-395.

Pfizer Inc (2006) ‘Exploring our history: 1900-1950’ http://www.pfizer.com/pfizer/history/1900_1950.jsp (accessed 25 August 2006).