STANDARDIZING WITH FLEXIBILITY
IT’S EASY TO MAKE one of anything.
In 1928, the British biologist Alexander Fleming had something strange happen in his lab. One of his petri dishes containing cultures of Staphylococcus was contaminated by fungal mold that had destroyed the infectious bacteria. Fleming named the mold penicillin.
He published a paper in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology in 1929 highlighting penicillin’s potential as an antibiotic. The initial reception was underwhelming. Why? No one knew how to chemically separate penicillin to make it useful in clinical settings. Fleming almost abandoned his research. Over the next decade, the Oxford researchers Ernst Chain and Howard Florey managed to isolate penicillin and report on its therapeutic benefits, but they couldn’t crack the code for producing large quantities. Several other research groups had also been trying without much luck.
The challenge grew more urgent after the Pearl Harbor bombing in late 1941. The Second World War necessitated an extraordinary amount of penicillin to protect the health of the Allied forces, but large quantities were nowhere to be found. In 1942, for example, drug manufacturer Merck & Co. used almost half of the total supply of penicillin in the United States to treat septicemia, a life-threatening infection, in just one patient. Further, each treatment required umpteen doses because penicillin has a very short life in the human body. To conserve the supply, some physicians even reused the penicillin excreted in patients’ urine.
Years later, Fleming was giving a lecture. “It was destiny which contaminated my culture plate in 1928,” he said, “it was destiny which led Chain and Florey in 1938 to investigate penicillin instead of the many other antibiotics which had then been described and it was destiny that timed their work to come to fruition in war-time when penicillin was most needed.”
Fleming used the word destiny three times. The first instance is in reference to his serendipitous finding. The second is in connection with Chain and Florey. The third is anonymous. It “timed their work to come to fruition in war-time when penicillin was most needed.” This destiny, as it will become evident to you, was arguably even more important than Fleming’s chance discovery.
A WOMAN JUMPED out of a seventh-floor window. She was twenty-seven, 5-foot-3, and weighed 120 pounds. She broke through a pine-board roof on her way down, landing on her head at 40 miles per hour and lacerating her scalp. “The victim suffered abrasions over the dorsal portion of the spine and an oblique intra-articular fracture of the sixth cervical vertebra,” noted a 1942 report. The woman survived, and recovered in a hospital later that day.
The report’s author, Hugh De Haven, was intrigued that the roof had sustained more damage than the woman. He went on to document seven other cases of attempted suicides or unplanned injuries in an effort to understand the physical limits and tolerance of the human body. De Haven’s curiosity stemmed from an accident in 1916 when he was twenty-two years old. He had studied engineering at Cornell and Columbia Universities, after which he applied for a position in the U.S. Army Air Corps. Following a rejection, De Haven volunteered for the Canadian Royal Flying Corps as a cadet pilot.
One day during flying practice, De Haven was in a midair collision with another training aircraft. A 500-foot free fall ruptured his liver, gallbladder, and pancreas. His legs were fractured. De Haven wondered how he had survived when the same accident killed the other airman. Why did the same crash result in different injuries? This question laid the groundwork for the field of crash and survivability analysis that underpins the safety features of modern transportation systems.
Over the following years, to help make automobiles crash-proof, De Haven considered the principles of commercial packaging. Boxes and containers are designed to withstand a variety of forces to protect their contents. As a basic principle, De Haven wrote, a “package should not open up and spill its contents and should not collapse under reasonable or expected conditions of force and thereby expose objects inside it to damage.” From there, he built on the concept of “interior packaging” that would help prevent damage to the contents “from impact against the inside of the package itself.” And to achieve an optimal level of safety, De Haven added, a packaging engineer “would not test a packing case by dropping it [only] a few inches.”
Using a modular thought process informed by structure, constraints, and trade-offs, De Haven segmented automobile systems according to their safety elements: container, restraint, energy management, environment, and postcrash factors. The first letter of each of these elements creates the acronym CREEP, which offered a framework for studies on crashworthiness. De Haven’s literal comparison of passengers in an automobile to “fragile, valuable objects loose inside a container” eventually led him to patent the design for the three-point seat belt—now a standard automobile feature in most countries.
The seat belt design needed to differ from a shoulder harness—which De Haven knew from his experiences was effective for fighter pilots but not for automobile passengers. While the harness had the advantage of securing the upper torso and limiting “extreme forward movement,” it was uncomfortable and overly restricting. De Haven’s belt could be comfortably adjusted across the lap and shoulder, minimizing potential head injuries during a crash. Seat belts help save tens of thousands of lives every year, substantially reducing deaths and injuries per mile traveled and thus enormously enhancing highway safety.
Let’s go back to De Haven’s studies for a minute. His subjects were voluntarily jumping out of windows and landing on their heads. So you might ask whether his studies were really “scientific,” and some people did call him a crackpot. Acceptable science relies on repeatable results. Purists may argue that De Haven’s subjects were anomalous and not representative of a “normal” population. Some of them were, in fact, trying to commit suicide but failed. I doubt if De Haven’s study protocols would ever be approved by an ethics committee under current laws. This wasn’t science in its pure form, but practice leading to evidence.
It’s difficult to “fully appreciate the fact that the head weighs as much as a ten-pound sledge hammer and packs the same terrific energy when it strikes a dangerous object at 40–50 mph,” De Haven wrote. “If the head hits a solid structure which will not dent or yield at such speeds, the head itself must yield, and crushing injuries of the skull and brain cannot be avoided. But if the head hits a light, ductile surface at such speeds, even a fairly strong metal surface will dent and bend and absorb the energy of the blow, thereby modifying the danger of skull fracture and concussion.” In 1946, De Haven went on to demonstrate in a famous experiment that a 1½-inch-thick cushion would save eggs from breaking even when dropped from 150 feet.
De Haven’s observations show how trial-and-error engineering preceded organized science in giving rise to a new system of knowledge. He reconfigured not only how we think about public safety, but also how we think about public health writ large. De Haven’s work effectively helped change the practice of seat manufacturers, airplane builders, and automobile designers in making seat belts an integral part of the safety systems in their products. Seat belts have been heralded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as one of the ten greatest public health achievements.
MARGARET HUTCHINSON was born in Texas. Following her father, she became an engineer, graduating from Rice University. Later, in 1937, she defended her thesis—The Effect of Solute on the Liquid Film Resistance in Gas Absorption—and became the first woman to receive a PhD in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Hutchinson was also a caring wife and mother. “Heating, cooling, washing, drying—these are all household tasks. But when they are to be done on an immense scale, thought and planning must be made—and this is chemical engineering,” she told a reporter once. “Fractional distillation, with closely controlled heat for just the correct separation of hydrocarbons in a chemical plant, is quite comparable to baking a cake,” she explained. “And making ice cream at home is much like controlled crystallization in industry.”
As a precocious engineer, Hutchinson designed a production process for synthetic rubber and worked on a system to distill high-octane fuel for fighter jets. In addition, she led a petrochemical installation in the Persian Gulf. Recognition of these achievements is what roped Hutchinson into the penicillin mass-manufacturing project.
Extracting penicillin from the mold was no child’s play. “The mold is as temperamental as an opera singer, the yields are low, the isolation is difficult, the extraction is murder, the purification invites disaster, and the assay is unsatisfactory,” a Pfizer executive complained. This was the task assigned to Hutchinson.
Instead of designing and building a reactor vessel for the chemical reactions from scratch—which meant more time, money, and uncertainty—Hutchinson opted for something that was already functional. Some researchers had found that mold from cantaloupe could be an effective source for penicillin, so she started there. Her team then revised a fermentation process that Pfizer was using to produce food additives like citric acid and gluconic acid from sugars, with the help of microbes. Hutchinson swiftly helped convert a run-down Brooklyn ice factory into a production facility. The deep-tank fermentation process produced great quantities of mold by mixing sugar, salt, milk, minerals, and fodder through a chemical separation process that Hutchinson knew very well from the refinery business.
Hutchinson stoked penicillin production to substantially higher velocity. The interbreeding of two disparate entities—fermentation research and petrochemical process engineering—led to high-quantity production of one of the most important antibiotics ever. The process protocols were improved and standardized along the way. Hutchinson collaborated with mycologists, bacteriologists, chemists, and pharmacists to understand the specific needs of the production system and its outputs. Areas beyond the boundaries of one’s narrow expertise are what systems engineers call adjacencies.
Once the outcomes were stable and reliable, other pharmaceutical companies adapted Hutchinson’s approach to mass-produce penicillin under the direction of the War Production Board. In the first five months of 1943, deep-tank fermentation processes yielded four hundred million units of penicillin. Later that year, in the weeks before the Normandy invasion, the outputs were prodigiously multiplied five-hundred-fold. By August 1945, 650 billion units of penicillin were available for military and civil use. After the war, Pfizer and other pharmaceutical companies took the improved fermentation process “far beyond the art of brewing” to produce other trade chemicals and medicinal products.
HUGH DE HAVEN’S studies on crashworthiness are examples of how a nonstandardized approach can end up creating a standardized system of passive safety. His tests were conducted during a period when accidents were “looked upon by a superstitious populace as being the result of ‘bad luck’ or acts of God,” safety expert Howard Hasbrook wrote. “This reliance on ‘luck’ apparently stifled any development of safety engineering or design for the protection of human life in accidents.” As automobile use began to increase along with the frequency of collisions, De Haven’s approaches to help prevent—instead of suffer—the effects of an accident were avant-garde.
The story of seat belts is a case of evolution, which means that, at one point, the technology was suboptimal. Continued improvements were needed before seat belts could be implemented on a national scale. Moreover, the effectiveness of seat belts would have been limited without political and public activism, as well as aggressive regulation of drunk drivers. But the technical improvements themselves needed to develop gradually. A perfect technology is never possible, and aiming for one is unrealistic—a bias sometimes called the nirvana fallacy. Often, great engineering designs are foes of reasonable suboptimal designs.
In addition to relying on evolution, technologies like seat belts support systems integration. On their own, the effectiveness of other independently evolving safety technologies, like roads, sirens, and traffic lights, would have been limited. Only by the resourceful convergence of these systems was a safety infrastructure made possible. This process is not unlike the biological process of recombination—one of nature’s oldest tricks to produce variation from existing systems. The resulting system may produce additional useful standards that were previously unimaginable.
The engineering practice of recombination has led to legions of compound technologies that have used or enabled standardized manufacturing platforms for a great variety of applications. Technologies are combined in different ways for different uses by services, agriculture, clothing, construction, mining, and transportation sectors, among others. How and when they’re grouped during the growth of these industries may explain why individual sectors peak in productivity at different times. Moreover, these sectors are also now more tightly coupled than ever.
Perhaps the best example of a general-purpose compound technology is the Internet. The Internet is not one thing, but multiple things pulled together as one. It’s an unprecedented recombination of systems like processors, storage solutions, algorithms, and communication technologies, to name a few. A search engine can produce millions of entries on a topic instantaneously. How is it practically possible to integrate all the information from around the world and present it digitally within a fraction of a second? Modern Internet content aggregators—or mash-ups—have become extremely dynamic in seamlessly combining information from various sources in various formats. Though impossible years ago, now this gathering of information is done through the integration of multiple systems, each on its own evolutionary path but crucially relying on a uniform set of standards.
The same analysis could be applied to the recombination of sirens and visual warning systems. Two completely different systems were united and continually refined to produce better results than each could have produced on its own. New developments in sirens, including variable tones and frequencies, merged with flashing lights in red, blue, and white, helped provide a genuine sense of emergency. This coalition of sounds and colors permanently changed the course of integrated public warning systems and also served as a true demonstration of how technology is linked to biology in the form of loudness and brightness. What made this recombination possible was not random convergence, but a deliberate system of standards.
THE NOTION OF standards relates to the principle of interpretive consistency. We label things of the world and put them in separate buckets. When you hear George Gershwin or Frank Sinatra or the Rolling Stones, you are able to instantly classify their different types of music because each type has attributes typical to a particular genre. We apply structure—from the cuisines of the world to fashion to SAT scores to medical diagnoses—to inform the syntax of our minds. Standards are for products what grammar is for language. People sometimes criticize standards for making life a matter of routine rather than inspiration. Some argue that standards hinder creativity and keep us slaves to the past. But try imagining a world without standards.
From tenderloin beef cuts to the geometric design of highways, standards may diminish variety and authenticity, but they improve efficiency. From street signs to nutrition labels, standards provide a common language of reason. From Internet protocols to MP3 audio formats, standards enable systems to work together. From paper sizes (8½ × 11 or A4, for example) to George Laurer’s Universal Product Code, standards offer the convenience of comparability.
India switched to the metric system in 1956, almost a decade after its independence, having never had uniformity in measurements. One account noted that the country had more than 150 “local systems of measures” with such dramatic differences that the “post office alone required 1.6 million” weights between 1 gram and 20 kilograms. New standards clearly came in handy. Until recently, lack of standardizing was probably the primary reason that cell phones didn’t work reliably across international borders, but the situation has improved a lot. An absence of standards is not a limitation of engineering capabilities, but a reality dictated by business incentives.
Implementation of better standards and tools of interoperability could help improve health care efficiency and reduce wasted expenditures, to take one example. “My pizza parlor is more thoroughly computerized than most of health care,” notes medical quality expert Donald Berwick. “To a large extent, health care systems were not designed with any scientific approaches in mind. Too often there are long waits, high levels of waste, frustration for patients and clinicians alike, and unsafe care. A bold effort to design health care scheduling systems, process flows, safety procedures, and even physical space will pay off in better, less expensive, safer experiences for patients and staff alike.”
As we have come to rely on standards, it has become easy to engineer ultracomplicated systems. We see the complexity of systems increasing in all sorts of applications—from smart power grids to nuclear reactors to data clouds. A commercial jet has millions of parts, tools, and components produced by different manufacturers, assembled, perfected, and guaranteed to work during the first flight. This flexibility has removed the intimidation factor from building complicated systems. In fact, we’ve gotten so good at creating them that it’s harder and harder to understand what simplicity means anymore.
“MR. X. HAS a sore throat. He buys some penicillin and gives himself, not enough to kill the streptococci but enough to educate them to resist penicillin. He then infects his wife. Mrs. X gets pneumonia and is treated with penicillin. As the streptococci are now resistant to penicillin the treatment fails. Mrs. X dies. Who is primarily responsible for Mrs. X’s death? Why[,] Mr. X whose negligent use of penicillin changed the nature of the microbe,” said Alexander Fleming, speaking in December 1945 at a high-profile gathering in Sweden. “Moral: If you use penicillin, use enough.”
Fleming’s prescription came during his lecture for the Nobel Prize that he shared with Ernst Chain and Howard Florey. In the wake of penicillin’s success, Fleming, Chain, and Florey traveled around lecturing and amassing medals and honors. Several of their colleagues were knighted or elected as members of prestigious scientific academies. Margaret Hutchinson, however, was at home taking care of her toddler son. Billy “keeps us so busy we don’t have too much time for outside hobbies,” she told a local newspaper. In the amazing story of penicillin, Hutchinson and others who made penicillin available to the masses at a critical juncture are not even footnote personalities.
As a society we are good at celebrating the initiators. Why do we overlook the many ingenious adapters like Hutchinson, whose contributions are equally significant, if not more important than the original discoveries themselves? Adaptation is a preeminent form of creation, though it’s seldom recognized at the same level. As historian John Rae puts it, “ ‘Adapt, improve, and apply’ may have less glamour than original creativity, but the technique of application may in itself be more significantly creative than the original idea or invention.”
Rae’s core sentiment about adaptation can be extended to the Renaissance era. Johannes Gutenberg invented his printing press by repurposing a wine press for use with olive oil–based ink and block printing. This approach to mass production created a flexible world standard: books. Literacy levels rose and eventually stimulated new social orders.
Gutenberg may or may not have faced process pressures as acute as those that confronted Hutchinson, or Gribeauval in the French army, who deliberately and systematically adapted existing technologies for his version of cannons. Gribeauval’s approach to interchangeability resulted in a new technical construct for the army. But that was hardly novel, since clock makers had been actively using the concept of interchangeability for decades. The Toyota Production System refined the operational principles of Piggly Wiggly, John Shepherd-Barron reimagined a chocolate bar dispenser to create the ATM, and Hutchinson applied existing ideas from refineries to produce penicillin. These engineering approaches are not simply imitations, but novel creations guided by strategic inspiration and purpose.
Another metaphor in evolutionary biology that’s useful for thinking about creative adaptations is transduction. It relates to the process by which genetic elements of one organism are directly transferred into another to generate new features, just as viruses borrow and transfer their properties across hosts. Engineers routinely exploit this design approach. Henry Ford and his top engineer, Harold Willis, didn’t invent the automobile; they transduced it. “The way to make automobiles is to make one automobile like another, to make them all alike . . . just as one pin is like another when it comes from the pin factory,” Sir Harold Evans points out in his book They Made America. By integrating lightweight vanadium steel as the chief production material in their existing assembly line process, Ford and Willis helped unleash a new mass-production paradigm.
Thanks to the vintage concept of parameter variation—which Gribeauval, among others, championed—adaptable manufacturing techniques subsequently guided the standardized production of high-quality drugs, vaccines, soft drinks, and food products, thus demonstrating engineering’s central role in economic progress. Accidental discoveries like Fleming’s often have little to do with the structure, constraints, or trade-offs of the engineering processes that helped win a war while simultaneously creating jobs, protecting health, and maximizing productivity.
Fleming received a statesman’s funeral at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. For all the right reasons, England called him a “national hero.” Comparatively, with no fanfare Margaret Hutchinson died on a quiet winter day in her home in Massachusetts. “I actually received little encouragement when I said I thought I could be an effective engineer as well as a woman,” Hutchinson had said years before.
“I’d walk out on anybody who tried to talk me out of my ambition.”
