A Hard Providence Mark 4:35-41
World War II brought unparalleled suffering and death to humankind. Experts estimate some fifty-five million people died, among them roughly six million Jews in concentration camps. Families and nations were shattered. Clearly this was a time of great, great evil.
But all was not evil. During the war, medical researchers intensified their efforts to fight disease and infection and as a result made great breakthroughs. Up until 1941, for example, doctors could not reverse the course of infection. “They could do little more than offer a consoling bedside manner as patients sank toward oblivion,” writes Stevenson Swanson.
But the war caused England and America to search for a way to mass-produce penicillin, the original wonder drug. Although penicillin had been discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1928, for nearly a decade the medical community had done little with it. “It was dismissed as little more than an interesting microbiological phenomenon.”
But as the probability of war increased in the late 1930s, all that changed. Research began in earnest in England for a way to mass-produce penicillin, which at that time could only be made in extremely small quantities.
In 1941 English researchers brought samples of penicillin to America, and a team of scientists began research into mass production in an agricultural lab in Peoria, Illinois. Within four months they found ways to increase the production of penicillin tenfold. The process was licensed to pharmaceutical companies, and production began in earnest.
“For all of 1943, penicillin production in the United States amounted to just 28 pounds,” writes Swanson. “The cost of manufacturing 100,000 units was $20, or about $200,000 a pound. In two years, it fell to less than $2 per 100,000 units, and the country produced 14,000 pounds.”
The discovery of the fermentation process for penicillin, the world’s first antibiotic, triggered a rush by pharmaceutical companies to develop other antibiotics. Selman Waksman of Rutgers University soon discovered streptomycin, which treated tuberculosis. One antibiotic followed another until in the mid-1990s, well over one hundred antibiotics were available.
“Probably more than any other discovery in the history of medicine, the discovery of antibiotics has done the most to improve the lives of humans,” said Dr. Gary Noskin, an infectious-disease specialist and professor of medicine at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago.
Millions of people died in World War II, but out of the war came the drugs that have saved millions of lives and will go on saving lives. Dr. Russell Maulitz, a medical historian and professor at the Medical College of Philadelphia and Hahnemann University, says, “War is the perverse handmaiden of medical progress.”
Just as good came from bad during World War II, so God is able to make great good come from the bad events of our lives.