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| Michael Marshall |
(It is usually on somebody's top ten films of all time list.)
The villain HARRY LIME ,standing in for the Devil , takes the naive narrator HOLLY MARTINS to the top of Vienna's famous Ferris Wheel.
Lime tells Martins that from this height, all the people in the world look ant-sized and that's all they're worth - ants to be crushed.
'So Martins, why get all upset about a few kiddies dying from my adulterated penicillin --- just look the other way and go with the flow.'
(Harry Lime's diluted penicillin fails to save children with MENINGITIS whose lives could have been readily saved - but only if enough Penicillin "G" is injected into them right away.
The fact that Pfizer chief "John L" Smith's daughter had earlier died of meningitis that Martin Henry Dawson said his naturally grown penicillin could have cured, was probably the number one,two and three reasons we got WWII penicillin before D-Day ---- and not two years later.)
But in the movie, Martins, rather like Jesus, doesn't accept the 'high level' bribe and later on sets up Lime for his doom.
I often think of Harry Lime whenever I think of the men peering into the NORDEN BOMBSIGHT in some Allied bomber, coolly preparing to exact collective punishment on some enemy or occupied civilian population from 15,000 feet.
At that height, people aren't even ant-sized - they are bacteria or fungi sized - invisible.
Japanese microbes at Hiroshima.
When these people burn to death from your bombs, you don't hear their screams or smell their burning flesh.
Murder - Pierre-Simon Laplace style - from a remote outsider/ observer's position, coolly peering through the glass before pushing the button.
Like the way they did it as Auschwitz as well.
The overmen killing off the undermen , like ants under one's feet.
MARTIN HENRY DAWSON had his war too, but it was not a few hours spent at 15,000 feet above the ground --- he lived it from a position 5 feet below the ground, for months at a time - in a WWI trench.
Here the always present smell of the Earth was mixed with the smell of dead men and dead horses, feces and old mustard 'gas' .
You couldn't help hearing men from the raiding parties scream out their last on the barbed wire of No Man's Land or avoid seeing conrade's headless bodies still upright beside you - while their heads flew off to serve as a projectile to kill some other poor sod.
Here you saw Nature close up and raw - sunrise creeping up, sunset going down - rain, wind, midday heat - all the elements of the weather chilled your bones and soaked your clothes.
The most famous artwork from that war was a humble cartoon - it has two Tommies in a crude foxhole, trying to survive an intense bombardment.
One guy isn't happy about their chances in that particular hole - but the other says in effect, look around, shells exploding everywhere above ground - yes we're like rats in a hole in the earth, but its secure from all but a direct hit so, "if you know a better 'ole - go to it !"
We're like that today - we're stuck here on a crumbling Earth and some guy has the bright idea that life would be better if NASA flew all of us off to Mars or something.
I hope I speak for you when I say, "go ahead sonny - if you think you know a better 'ole, then go to it - I am staying here and muddling through".
I can smell the Earth and I like it - and its all we've got.
Commensality in the Trenches ????
It multiplied in the trenches - your mates - and the rats - were as close as girlfriends back home - and body lice were so plentiful that they literally changed the color of your skin by their massed presence there.
And above all you could smell your ever present commensal companions, the fungi and bacteria, in the soil all around you.
You know that smell of freshly turned soil we sometimes smell after a rain ?
We also can smell it on grapes/wine or in beets or in the flesh of catfish.
Some love it, call it 'earthy' ; others hate it and call it 'musty/moldy'.
But all humans can smell it - at levels as few as a few parts per trillion.
For some reason it is a critical smell to our survival.
Here is maybe one reason why:
When an infantryman hugs the earth, literally, trying to survive, he knows that of all his tools for survival it is his entrenching shovel and a few feet of soil around him that is a better protector of his personal safety than his side's tanks, artillery or bombers.
He loves the smell of the soil that his shovel has freshly turned over.
That smell is called GEOSMIN : think of it as geos min ,literally meaning 'earth smell'.
It is produced, mostly, by bacteria that live together with fungus in the soil.
They look and act a lot like fungus but aren't.
In fact the fungi probably copied them not the other way around.
We tend to lump both together and call them mold - and this is not too inaccurate - because they both do much the same thing from a lay person's point of view.
Those bacteria are the streptomyces - the soil lovers that directly produce much of the world's antibiotics - and produce most of the rest indirectly - by transferring the crucial genes to make penicillin to the penicillium fungus about 370 million years ago.
The soil fungus and the streptomyces bacteria grow by joining together as filamentous multi-celled super organisms.
Not exactly like a human multi-celled organism - these guys, particularly the bacteria, remain semi-independent in the sense that all continue to reproduce themselves by cloning.
So a trillion bacteria or fungus cells in a teaspoon each with potentially different DNA - because they are designed to be unstable genetically - producing many similar but slightly different offspring.
Even the fungus offspring don't always combine their DNA sexually like we do , instead they sometimes exchange some of their DNA with each other - horizontally - as well as with other non-fungus beings near by.
The filamentous (thread-like) nature of these soil creatures - dozens of feet of incredibly tiny threads of life in each tiny colony - allows them to find nutrients in every nook and cranny in a nutrient poor world .
The competing filamentous strands of bacteria and fungi mean they lie together in extensive,intimate, personal contact - allowing both to make the most of the very rare opportunities to exchange DNA between the seeming wide divide between the animal kingdom (fungus) and the bacteria kingdom.
(Wide if you believe Darwin and his fans - but I don't.)
Dawson worked hard at Bacterial Transformation (aka horizontal gene transfer) (aka recombinant DNA), from 1928 to 1933 at least, long before the rest of science ever did.
But I doubt that even he knew for sure that the penicillin he worked with from 1940 to 1945 was the result of some earlier Bacterial Transformation experiments ----done by the microbes themselves !
But he might have suspected something - he knew that Selman Waksman at nearby Rutgers University had already shown that these soil bacteria produced a lot of antibiotic materials while it was rare to see antibiotics from fungus in general - except for the fungi closest in lifestyle to the soil bacteria.
Commensality between fungus and bacteria in the soil gave us penicillin.
No, I stand corrected.
It was Dawson's openness to those moldy musty smells, from his World War One trench experiences 25 years earlier, that brought penicillin out of the trench and into the hospital ward.
I mean that not as a metaphor but as reality : penicillium and streptomyces are found in the earth, literally in the trenches.
And just as the earth once acted as a barrier to shell fragments and saved many an infantryman's life during WWI, now trench earth bacteria and fungus gave us antibiotics to again save the infantryman in WWII , if he was hit by a shell fragment.
Dawson saw the war and the world down at ground level, at the level of the MOS 745 - the bog ordinary Grunt,GI or Tommy, not from some Olympian Height of indifference.
And this is why he gave his life, so some bog ordinary 4F patients and 4F grunts could live....
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