Thursday, November 20, 2014

un-superheroes nurturing life-saving GREEN from wartime Gotham's concrete

Oxford University is justly famous for its lovely green campus .

How ironic then, that its Nobel winning slash failed efforts to produce wartime penicillin was actually an attempt to produce a form of AstroTurf - organic (chemistry) penicillin , as synthetic as plastic greenery.

By contrast , wartime New York's Gotham - at least as revealed in Super Hero comic books - was  supposedly nothing but a concrete jungle.

Life-saving GREEN from Gotham concrete


But in fact, from New York's concrete, a handful of un-superheroes spurred the successful nurturing of trillions of units of natural penicillin's life-saving green .

The concrete jungle's vats and vats of fermenting greenery , before war's end, were producing more than enough natural penicillin to save all those in the world dying from infections only the life-giving mold could stop.

In the end, Oxford University's efforts only produced scientific papers , a Nobel prize and a big thick book from OUP : but no actual penicillin.

In a further irony, New York's successful efforts to produce tons of badly needed wartime penicillin did not receive any Nobel prize - or any significant historical attention at all.

But then received history is rarely as it seems , Captain - the historian's skim milk often successfully masquerades as Devon cream ....

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