Sabine Hossenfelder's Capitalism Claims and Penicillin Misconceptions

Sabine Hossenfelder's pro-capitalism claims about penicillin's discovery are misleading and ignore the significant role of public interest and scientific curiosity.

### Debunking Capitalism's Role in Scientific Progress: A Critical Analysis of Sabine Hossenfelder's Claims
* 🔍 Recently, physicist YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder has stirred controversy with her **pro-capitalism stance** in a video discussing scientific progress, particularly around the **discovery of penicillin**.
* 📉 The author, who has previously critiqued Hossenfelder's work, found her latest video **poorly researched and filled with misrepresentations**, particularly regarding the **historical context of penicillin's development**.
* 🧪 Hossenfelder downplays Alexander Fleming's role in the discovery of penicillin, claiming that **capitalism was the driving force behind its mass production**, a point that is challenged by the **actual timeline of events and contributions from various researchers**.
* 🏥 The real breakthrough came not from capitalist motivations but from a team at the **University of Oxford**, who initially pursued penicillin out of **scientific curiosity** rather than profit, contradicting Hossenfelder's assertions.
* 💡 An economist from the channel Unlearning Economics highlighted that the historical context of penicillin's development shows that **capitalism did not directly facilitate scientific progress**; rather, it often required **persuasion to engage capitalist entities** in the process.
* 🌍 In contrast, countries like Australia, which lacked a strong private pharmaceutical industry, successfully produced penicillin through **government-funded initiatives**, showcasing an **alternative approach to scientific advancement**.
* 💰 Ultimately, the narrative suggests that scientific progress should be valued for its **own sake**, rather than being tied to capitalist interests, advocating for a system where advancements are **accessible to all** rather than controlled by wealthy corporations.
* 📚 The complexities of the penicillin story illustrate that while capitalism plays a role in modern science, it is **not the sole or even primary driver** of significant scientific breakthroughs.

a few weeks ago several of you let me know that there had once again been a great disturbance in the science communication Force as though millions of voices suddenly cried out "What the hell are you talking about? Please stop talking!" Once again, the person responsible is the popular

physicist YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder. I covered Hossenfelder once before back in May when she made a really flawed video about transgender care. I was a subscriber of hers at the time. I found her generally educational about physics and pretty entertaining, and so at the

time I was shocked to see her produce a video that was so poorly researched. Since I put out that video I've learned enough about her that I'm not surprised she's gone and done it again. Like, I had several physicist friends reach out and

suggest that I find a different person to learn physics from. Uh, so uh, this most recent video doesn't shock me. It's about capitalism and how it's actually good. Frequent watchers of this channel may already suspect that I'm not the biggest fan of capitalism. Uh, have I

benefited from it? Absolutely. Do I think that has led to most if not all of society's greatest ills, including but not limited to income inequality and runaway climate change? Yes, I do think that. Um, so I can see why many people thought

"Oh, Rebecca's going to go absolutely ape over Sabine's pro-capitalism video. Let's send it to her and pop some popcorn." But here's the thing, I watched her video and I did think that it was very poorly researched, but I just don't have the economics knowledge to

properly deconstruct what seemed like dozens of mistakes and misrepresentations, and but that's another story. Hand-waving, I'm not an economist, um obviously, but I also never took an economics class in college. I haven't read deeply on the subject. I'm just not

educated enough to be able to explain these points to other people, so I decided, you know what, I'm gonna give this one a skip. But last week, the YouTube algorithm blessed me with a little bit of gold in the form of a channel called Unlearning Economics. The

creator is an academic economist from the UK, and I think he does a really great job of reacting to Hasenfelder's video in real time on a live stream. I learned a lot watching it, so I very much recommend you go check it out if you

would like to know what Hasenfelder got wrong or just skipped entirely. As always, links to everything I discuss are in the transcript, which I linked below, available free to everyone on my Patreon. But there was one point in Unlearning Economics' live stream in which he wasn't

sure how to respond because the topic maybe wasn't really in his wheelhouse, and that was the history of penicillin. In her video, Hasenfelder argues that capitalism is the driver behind scientific progress, and she tries to illustrate this point with the story of

penicillin, but he pretty much left it at naming the stuff. It wasn't until 10 years later that a group at the University of Oxford set out to find a way to grow the fungus and extract penicillin in large quantities. They then conducted medical trials and

once they were sure penicillin was both safe and effective, their method was scaled up by the pharmaceutical industry. Two members of the Oxford Group later shared the Nobel Prize with Fleming. So what saved all those many lives wasn't just Fleming's observation in a Petri

dish. The game changer was producing the stuff in large quantities and bringing it where it was needed. Innovation and industrialization, ultimately going back to capitalism, that's what saved all those people. And here's what unlearning economics had to say about that. So well,

I don't think this conclusion follows from her example, right? Because she says, look, scientific discovery is often uncertain. You know, attributing it to one person, Fleming, whoever, is usually a mug's game. Right? You've got you've got to appreciate that there are usually

teams of researchers and long lapses of time between different inventions. But what she said is that a team at the University of Oxford picked it up. Now, I don't understand what that has to do directly with capitalism, right? You might make an indirect argument about about

capitalism and how it enabled the University of Oxford to exist, even though it predates capitalism, actually. But but they they're the ones that picked it up, right, and developed it. And then she says they developed it into a form where it could be taken and spread by by

um, by the pharmaceutical industry. Uh, but I I mean I I don't know. Essentially, he's a little understandably confused about what her point is and how it supports her thesis that capitalism is good. Now, this is more Science History than economics, and I actually do feel

like I maybe have the knowledge and the ability to explain what I think her point was supposed to be and also why she's still completely wrong. Hasenfelder starts this part of her video by first downplaying Fleming's role in the discovery, development, and

production of penicillin, which is something that I definitely would have done as well. Um, in an essay for my ninth grade biology class when I was 13 and I thought it was super cool to like debunk the history we learned in fifth grade. There was a period of time when one

could argue that Fleming took more of the spotlight than he deserved, just as you could argue the same for literally any famous scientific advancement of the past 100 years. Yes, of course, prior research had shown that fungi and bacteria kill each other. Hasenfelder starts in 1871 with John Scott Burton

Sanderson, but ancient cultures around the world have used fungi to stop infections for thousands of years. The difference is that with time and effort scientists were able to get more and more specific as to which fungi worked and then which illnesses it could and could not help with, and then what actual

substance the fungi was producing to do the job and so on and so forth. It's the exact same thing that we see over and over again with most of Science History. Ancient cultures know that this, you know, something works somehow and they incorporate it, and then over time as the

scientific method begins to be employed we narrow down exactly what is happening and everybody is happier for it. So yes, Hasenfelder is correct that Fleming discovered the substance penicillin, but she says that he left it at just naming it, which is not true. You know, he was not

a chemist so unlike Hasenfelder, he acknowledged his lack of education on the topic and he found someone in the correct department to try to get things right. Unfortunately, the chemists he hired were unable to isolate the chemical compound, so with nowhere else

to go, Fleming published his paper in the hopes that someone would pick it up in the future. And luckily, that is exactly what happened as Hasenfelder correctly states, 10 years later a chemist at the University of Oxford, Ernst Chain, found Fleming's paper and used an

interdisciplinary team of researchers to explore the idea of penicillin's antibacterial properties. And by the way, Fleming was all too excited about this and happy, happy to help in whatever way he could. This team discovered that it was extremely effective at killing certain

bacteria that infect and kill people, and so they quickly realized that they needed to find a way to produce this substance in large enough quantities to save millions of lives. I'll pause here to stress that Hasenfelder uses this story to argue that capitalism is why

science took off. Capitalism is a system that distributes these resources without anyone needing to have an overview, just by interactions between traders. It's pure genius if you think about it, and that's why science took off, not the other way around. Thus far, in the way

that both I and Hasenfelder have described it, capitalism has played no real part in the story. For instance, the University of Oxford predates capitalism. Ernst Chain and company were not working for a for-profit pharmaceutical company, but in actual reality, the story is

really the story of how a pure capitalist society would have prevented the discovery of penicillin you know where not for certain things capitalism would have gotten in the way for instance Fleming was only working as a doctor because he had been working in a

shipping office uh just to get you know just to make ends meet but then his uncle died and left him a bunch of money and he was finally encouraged to go to medical school also Ernst Chain the main guy in charge of that Oxford lab published a remembrance of his time at

Oxford and he wrote that penicillin could have practical use in clinical medicine did not enter our minds when we started our work on it a substance of the degree of instability that penicillin seemed to possess according to the published facts does not hold out

much promise for clinical application if my working hypothesis had been correct and penicillin had been a protein its practical use as a chemotherapeutic agent would have been out of the question because of anaphylactic phenomena that inevitably would have

followed its repeated use from the scientific point of view however the problem of purifying penicillin and isolating the substrate on which I thought it acted was of interest and hence well worth pursuing he goes on to say I started to work on penicillin in

1938 long before the outbreak of the war the frequently repeated statement that the work was started as a contribution to the war effort to find a chemotherapeutic agent suitable for the treatment of infected war wounds has no basis the only reason that motivated me

was scientific interest I very much doubt whether I would have been allowed to study this problem at that time in one of the so-called mission-oriented practically minded industrial laboratories the research on penicillin which was started as a problem of purely

scientific interests but had consequences of very great practical importance is a good example of how difficult it is to demarcate sharp limits between pure and applied research that that's right one of the guys who is most responsible for the production of penicillin during World War II directly

contradicts Hosenfelder's statements making it crystal clear that his team's hypothesis was that this substance had no practical medical use and therefore no interest to a capitalist who might buy or sell it they were working out of pure curiosity pure scientific interest

if they were working for a pharmaceutical company their research would have ended before it started because there simply is no reason for a company looking to turn a profit to spend time and money exploring ideas that are inherently unprofitable period end of story

okay it's actually not the end of the story because now we get to the part that I think is Hosenfelder's main argument for capitalism good though nothing she says supports her weird statement that capitalism leads to scientific progress she doesn't even try

to support that but the pharmaceutical industry is part of the reason why chains scientific progress was able to be mass produced in the United States and the United Kingdom at first creating more penicillin was wildly inefficient and required the team to gather every container they could find at Oxford from

coffee mugs to bed pans in order to farm the substance. In fact, Oxford's Farm employed six women that were known as the penicillin girls. Their entire job was to farm as much penicillin as they could. Every bit of penicillin they

collected wasn't even enough to save their first human patient from dying of his infection. They needed a lot more, but the British government wasn't convinced that it was worth investing in the necessary equipment when their industry was already fully focused on a now ongoing war effort. So the non-profit

Rockefeller Foundation gave the researchers enough money to fly to America to plead with the pharmaceutical companies there to start producing penicillin. From Hasenfelder's video, you might get the impression that the pharmaceutical companies rose to the challenge and saved millions of lives

in the end, but that's not what happened. The pharmaceutical companies were not convinced that this was worth their time. They were already making a lot of money producing other chemicals. Luckily, one Oxford researcher, Howard Flory, was old friends with Alfred Newton Richards, who

was at that time chair of the committee on medical research at the U.S. government's office of scientific research and development, which was specifically set up to direct funding towards research that might aid in the war effort. Richards was convinced by his old friend and so he lobbied the

head of the pharmaceutical companies telling them that not only was it their patriotic duty, but they would probably be rewarded with tax breaks and federal funding to help out. Pearl Harbor was bombed in the coming weeks, leading to the U.S. military to start demanding vast

quantities of penicillin in preparation for D-Day that combined with further scientific research suggesting easier ways of manufacturing penicillin finally convinced the pharmaceutical companies to get to work. They streamlined the process and were soon producing the necessary amounts of penicillin to save

millions of lives. As you can see, the real story is a bit more complicated than capitalists stepped in to produce medicine that scientists were otherwise unable to produce. At every step, capitalists had to be sidestepped or cajoled into helping, but still, you know,

you might argue that were it not for the capitalist pharmaceutical companies, regardless of how hard it was to convince them to participate, the US and UK would never have been able to produce the amount of penicillin they needed. Therefore, capitalism must be good for

something, right? How might history have changed if capitalism had never come into being? And usually, that's the place where I would have to throw my hands in the air and say, sorry, I'm not an economist and I don't know what the world would look like without capitalism

or what exactly a less destructive system would look like and how it would respond in a situation like this. So I can't answer the question, but I can answer that question sort of thanks to Australia. Despite the fact that I've only just mentioned Australia, they actually played a very important

role in the history of penicillin. That Oxford researcher I mentioned earlier, Howard Flory, the guy who used the power of friendship to convince pharmaceutical companies to step up, he was Australian and he did so much work that he was the third guy to share the Nobel Prize along

with Fleming and Chain, but Australia played another role in this story. Like the US and the UK, they also had soldiers in World War II, and they also needed a large amount of penicillin. But they did not have a strong private pharmaceutical industry to ask for help. What they did

have was the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories, a government body founded in 1916. Over the years, they were responsible for producing insulin for Australian diabetics, as well as for developing vaccines for things like tetanus and whooping cough and polio and

other diseases. And so in 1943, the Australian government authorized the funds necessary to produce penicillin using their own factories, quickly ramping up to make enough for the entire military as well as an extra supply for Australian citizens to use. The Canadian

government also financed their own production facility. Howard Florey visited authorities there to try to argue for its necessity, but they weren't convinced until they saw ongoing clinical trial results that showed that this was kind of a miracle drug. At that point, the Canadian government spent the

equivalent of about 20 million dollars today to buy and refurbish a building at the University of Toronto and begin mass-producing penicillin for their own troops and citizens. Obviously, capitalism is still present in these stories because these are capitalist societies. Ultimately, even the decisions made by

governments are impacted by capitalism and by money. In that same recollection I mentioned earlier, Ernst Chain wrote about the difficulty of continuing to find new antibiotics into the 1950s and 60s, saying that it became a collective effort amongst many individual

organizations and companies that spread out their risks and that a single government would never have taken on such an effort. One could not imagine the civil servant who would have had the courage to spend such very large sums of money on a project that could not be

guaranteed to be successful. He wrote, but while it's hard to say how our world would look without capitalism, I hope that understanding the real history of this story in a more nuanced way helps you envision a world where scientific progress is valued in and of itself and

where the application of that science into technology that makes people's lives better is controlled by the people and not by a handful of impossibly wealthy and influential billionaires focused only on getting wealthier and growing their businesses to the point where they can do things like prevent

half of the planet from accessing life-saving vaccines that were developed with public money, just to name a random example. Okay, come on. [Applause] [Music] Hey everybody, thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a like. If you loved the video, please subscribe

and if you think the world could use more videos like this and you happen to have a few bucks laying around, head to patreon.com/Rebecca and join an awesome community of nerds like the people whose names you see on the screen right now. Thanks. [Music]

Sabine is Wrong Again: Capitalism Would've Killed Penicillin

Rebecca Watson (Skepchick)

Introduction and initial reaction to Hossenfelder's video on capitalism

The YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder released a video arguing that capitalism is good.

The author previously criticized Hossenfelder for a flawed video on transgender care.

The author expresses skepticism towards capitalism.

The author initially decided not to address Hossenfelder's video due to lack of economics expertise.

The author mentions a channel, "Unlearning Economics," that critiques Hossenfelder's video.

Analysis of Hossenfelder's penicillin example

Hossenfelder uses the history of penicillin to support her pro-capitalism argument.

"Unlearning Economics" questions the connection between Hossenfelder's penicillin example and her thesis.

The author analyzes Hossenfelder's downplaying of Fleming's role in penicillin's discovery.

The author points out that Fleming sought help from chemists and published his findings.

The author argues that capitalism played a minimal role in the initial stages of penicillin's development.

Counterarguments and the role of non-capitalist entities

The University of Oxford, where crucial penicillin research occurred, predates capitalism.

Fleming's path to becoming a doctor was influenced by factors unrelated to capitalism.

Ernst Chain's account emphasizes the purely scientific motivation behind the initial penicillin research.

Chain's statement contradicts Hossenfelder's claim about capitalist involvement.

The author transitions to Hossenfelder's main argument about capitalism's role in mass production.

The role of pharmaceutical companies and government intervention

Initial penicillin production was inefficient, requiring significant effort.

The British government was initially hesitant to invest in penicillin production.

Pharmaceutical companies were initially unconvinced about penicillin's potential.

Government lobbying and the threat of Pearl Harbor influenced pharmaceutical companies.

The author summarizes that capitalists had to be persuaded to participate in penicillin production.

Alternative models and the Australian example

The author acknowledges the difficulty of envisioning a world without capitalism.

Australia's Commonwealth Serum Laboratories played a key role in penicillin production.

Australia's government-funded approach contrasted with the US and UK's reliance on private companies.

Canada also financed its own penicillin production facility.

The author acknowledges the influence of capitalism even in government decisions.

Ernst Chain highlighted the collaborative effort needed for antibiotic research.

The author expresses hope for a system valuing scientific progress independently of profit.

The author calls for a system where scientific applications benefit all, not just the wealthy.

The author concludes with a call to like, subscribe, and support the channel.