penicillin required for clinical trials, but the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 brought the United States into the war and infused a new urgency into penicillin production. Chain suggested applying for a patent on the penicillin process. His motivation was not potential profits, but the danger of it being patented elsewhere. Florey took up the issue with Mellanby and Sir Henry Dale, but they were adamantly opposed, as they considered the notion of researchers profiting from their work as unethical. The Americans had no such scruples, and took out patents on the deep submergence processes they developed. Clinical trials In addition to increased production at the Dunn School, commercial production from a pilot plant established by Imperial Chemical Industries became available in January 1942, and Kembel, Bishop and Company delivered its first batch of on 11 September 1942. Florey conducted a second series of clinical trials. Ethel was placed in charge, but while Florey was a consulting pathologist at Oxford hospitals and therefore entitled to use their wards and services, Ethel, to his annoyance, was accredited merely as his assistant. Doctors tended to refer patients to the trial who were in desperate circumstances rather than the most suitable, but when penicillin did succeed anyway, confidence in its efficacy rose. Harry Lambert, a friend of Fleming's dying from a meningococcal infection became case No. 12 on 5 August 1942. He survived, but someone at St. Mary's Hospital leaked the result to the press, resulting in an editorial in The Times on 27 August. Florey was appalled; this could only create a public demand when all available supplies were needed for the clinical trials. On 25 September, Florey met with Sir Cecil McAlpine Weir, the Director-General of Equipment and Stores at the Ministry of Supply, who promised overriding priority for the mass production of penicillin. Ethel and Howard Florey published the results of clinical trials of 187 cases of treatment with penicillin in The Lancet on 27 March 1943. North Africa The Medical Research Council decided that the time had come for field trials of penicillin. The location of centres to receive the drug was kept secret so as to not provoke demand for the drug when it was still in short supply. Florey was asked to go to North Africa, where the North African campaign was ongoing. He travelled to Algiers on the hospital ship in May. On