Why Is There No Oppenheimer For The Story Of Penicillin?

There's another thrilling narrative about a top secret military operation during World War II, but for some reason, that's not the one that makes it to the theaters.

I finally got a chance to see Oppenheimer a few weeks ago, shortly before it swept up most of the main awards at the Oscars. You would have thought I’d be first in line to see a major blockbuster about scientific paradigm shifts, but the truth is I kept holding out to see it in 70mm IMAX, and every time I had a free window it was sold out, so I ended up committing the sacrilege of watching it at home on my TV. In the end, though, I was almost glad to have viewed it the first time in that format, because it gave me the opportunity to re-watch entire sections just to keep track of all the different characters and temporal jumps. There’s so much to say about that film—particularly Nolan’s decision to anchor so much of the story in the post-war investigation of Oppenheimer, and his decision to leave the actual detonations in Japan offscreen—but watching it also revived in me an old grievance that I’ve been harboring for several years now, ever since I wrote my book Extra Life. 

The grievance revolves around the fact that there is another story from the same period that shares almost all of the crucial dramatic elements that made the Manhattan Project such a fascinating narrative: an eclectic international team of brilliant scientists, assembled in the United States in the wake of a transformative scientific discovery, who embark on a top-secret military project central to the Allied efforts in World War II. Only the breakthrough that this group eventually produces is designed to save lives, not destroy them. In fact, their creation turned out to be the single biggest lifesaver of the second half of the twentieth century: antibiotics.

There are already a few excellent books that document the penicillin origin story that could readily be adapted for such a project, starting with William Rosen’s Miracle Cure. I devoted a chapter to antibiotics in Extra Life (and David Olusoga and I did our best to dramatize the story in documentary format in the PBS/BBC adaptation of that book.) Just to give you a quick sense of the cinematic possibilities, I loaded the antibiotics chapter from Extra Life into NotebookLM and asked for a pitch document for an Oppenheimer-style drama based on the events. This is what I got back:

If Nolan can create an IMAX blockbuster out of quantum mechanics and Atomic Energy Commission hearings, surely someone could make a compelling film out of this material. There’s even a crazy subplot—that I also wrote about in Extra Life—where Hitler’s life is saved by American penicillin after the 1944 Wolf’s Lair assassination attempt. And yet, for some reason, those films just don’t seem to get made. (There appears to be some kind of BBC series called Breaking The Mould that aired in 2009 starring Dominic West as Florey, but other than that I haven’t seen anything that tackled this material.) We get endless entertainment offerings about the Apollo missions, but nothing about the global triumph of eradicating smallpox. We get big-budget features following brilliant scientists as they figure out ever-more-effective means of conducting mass slaughter, and not films about brilliant scientists collaborating to keep soldiers and civilians from dying horrifying deaths from sepsis and other infections. Apparently, we like rockets and bombs more than pills and needles—or at least that’s what we’re told we like. 

The lack of a big screen version of the penicillin story is part of a larger trend that I’ve discussed here before: the general invisibility of medical and public health success stories. That was a major theme I first started exploring in the early chapters of Extra Life, when I was working on them in 2018 and 2019—the challenging fact that unlike other innovations, the success stories of medicine and public health were defined by events that didn’t happen: the minor scrape that didn’t kill you because antibiotics were invented; the glass of water that didn’t give you a deadly case of cholera because John Snow mapped the London epidemic back in 1854. When COVID emerged as I was finishing up the draft of Extra Life—and starting work on the TV series—it occurred to me for the first time that pandemics were one of those rare cases where that “invisible shield” of public health suddenly became visible, where all those first responders and data scientists and vaccine trials entered popular awareness. But in normal times, we return our focus to the flashier innovations and breakthroughs, and forget about all the ways that these critical institutions are keeping us healthy and extending our lives.

I am happy to report, though, that one attempt to correct this imbalance has just started airing on PBS (and streaming for free at PBS.org): a new four-part series called, appropriately enough, The Invisible Shield. Supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, and produced by Radical Media, the series “explores the hidden public health infrastructure that makes modern life possible, highlighting the thousands of unsung heroes — physicians, nurses, scientists, activists, reformers, engineers, and government officials — who work together to improve health outcomes.”

It’s a beautifully crafted show that expands on many of the ideas and narratives that I covered in Extra Life and The Ghost Map. (I show up every now and then as one of the interviewees.) I hope you’ll get a chance to check it out, and if you happen to be an educator, I hope you’ll try to find a way to bring it into the classroom. We need more stories that dramatize the heroism of public health, more narratives like the ones that are so expertly told in The Invisible Shield—and the best way to encourage the creation of those stories is to support the ones that do get produced. 

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One final note: Now that I’ve gotten off my soapbox about our culture’s obsession with bomb-based narratives, I wanted to share the latest news about my next book, The Infernal Machine, which happens to be all about the man who created the bombs that made modern terrorism possible, and the men and women who first set them off in the name of a political cause. (Do I contradict myself?) Just last week, Kirkus published Infernal’s first review, which I thought did a great job of summarizing the main threads of the book. 

The “infernal machine” was Alfred Nobel’s invention, dynamite, a favored tool of those who embraced “the propaganda of the deed” due to its destructive power and easy availability. The anarchists gained notoriety with violent assassinations of heads of state in Europe and the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, believing that only through destruction could a better world be born. Prolific popular historian Johnson begins with an international overview, then focuses on the U.S., where corrupt, inefficient local police forces were ill equipped to deal with any kind of crime. He traces the efforts of Joseph Faurot, a New York City police detective who introduced new methods of identification such as fingerprinting, and Arthur Woods, the NYPD commissioner who modernized and cleaned up the department from 1914 to 1917. Johnson’s protagonists on the other side are anarchists Alexander Berkman, attempted assassin of industrialist Henry Clay Frick and an unabashed proponent of violent political acts, and his partner Emma Goldman, who saw that violence damaged the cause but could not bring herself to disavow comrades who resorted to it. The author is sympathetic to the radicals’ outrage at modern capitalism’s brutality, noting that “for every death at the hand of a bomb-wielding anarchist, a hundred or more would die from factory accidents,” but he deems the anarchists’ association with violence “one of the most disastrous branding strategies in political history.” Woods’ use of data collection to identify the perpetrators of bombings and sometimes even prevent them rehabilitated the NYPD’s tarnished reputation, while random acts that killed civilians turned public opinion against the radicals. Drawing parallels with contemporary acts of terrorism and governmental abuses of power in monitoring citizens, Johnson makes history part of an ongoing story we all need to consider.

Smart, accessible, and highly readable.

I’ll have more news in the coming weeks about book tour events and other appearances that will be happening around the pub date of May 14, but for now you can always pre-order from your favorite bookstore. (Many options listed here.)