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| Michael Marshall |
Maybe I can be more succinct.
Spread over an eighty acre corridor in Harlem, two very different projects at Columbia University during the WWII period laid out wildly different visions for humanity and its future on this planet.
Heavy stuff !
One Columbia University project, the massive Manhattan Project, was a last minute patch or kluge to the centerpiece of the Allied war effort, which was that high altitude bombing with that NORDEN BOMBSIGHT could end the war quickly and cheaply.
Quickly and cheaply, yet with minimum deaths for Allied A1 military personnel and for enemy and occupied 4F civilians.
The NORDEN, out in the real world, proved a military and moral disaster, but the A-Bomb painted such broad strokes that it could destroy entire cities (and end the war) , even when the NORDEN used to aim it once again missed.
(The A-bomb together Nature actually did the job : for the winds blow the fallout from the Bomb all over the world, regardless of Humanity's best efforts to claim that this is entirely a man-made show. Fallout is so down-to-earth ,n'est-ce pas?)
But let us ignore such awkward truths and stick with the 'vision thing' : call the original Norden plan part of the SKY GOD vision of Modernity.
All life on Earth would be nicely invisible (but still controllable) from 25,000 feet up ; controlled by coolly rational objective men modeling themselves quite self consciously upon PIERRE SIMON LAPLACE.
(Lenin's Omelets could still be made but no one would have to see or hear or smell the human eggs being broken.)
Laplace's vision was that scientific man, with a lot of effort , and thanks to Newton's three laws of physics - could observe the Universe from a place far above it and perfectly predict its past, present and future right down to the level of the atom.
The NORDEN, the assumed crown jewel (and as it turned out the culmination) of 250 years of Newtonian physics, was just a start on this bold vision.
Modernist males (for this was a very male-centric vision) would become like the Sky Gods and Sky Fathers of ancient legend.
In another part of Columbia University - in the university but never really supported or encouraged by the university, unlike with the Manhattan Project - Martin Henry Dawson also had a vision.
Like him, the vision was unorthodox, humble and (literally) down-to-earth.
Down into the earth, actually.
This was an earthling Vision of Life : our only possible home was down here on earth, at the ground zero of reality, not building some castles in the sky.
So he formed a commensal partnership with some of life's smallest and weakest beings.
These were the earth fungi and bacteria whose presence
and 'earthy' smell was so familiar to him from his time in the WWI trenches.
All this so he could help the men and women and children in the figurative trenches of WWII - the 4F individuals overlooked or destroyed by a war that revolved very much around the 1As of intellectual and physical life.
But note first a further uncanny parallel with the much bigger, much badder, Manhattan Project.
His effort was seized upon, at the last minute after being either ignored or depreciated, by the Allied war effort in a determined effort to rescue another centerpiece of their war aims.
Dead soldiers were just that, dead ,said the Allied leadership.
But soldiers,sailors and airmen seriously wounded and infected could be saved back to useful lives in WWII, unlike WWI, because we have got that wonderful man-made synthetic miracle drug called SULFA.
But the entire family of sulfa drugs - an army themselves with America alone issuing 7000 patents on the sulfa drugs during the war - were not working as promised.
Never fear, said modernist Chemistry,we'll synthesize this new stuff, penicillin, only make it better, much cheaper and much much more plentiful.
A mini-Manhattan Project of money men and effort failed to produce any synthetic penicillin - or any synthetic quinine for that matter ----Nature did the job so much better, as it turned out.
Dawson's idea of a low tech factory of factories - trillions upon trillions of tiny fungi factories making penicillin inside low cost milk bottles in some underused milk plant - was working well , as GLAXO in England proved in spades.
It didn't use up scarce war-oriented resources or need highly skilled workers --- most of the workers growing and nurturing this precious life-giving crop were - surprise ! - women of child-bearing age.
Great !
Or was it ?
Not high tech enough for this science-run war of flash, glitz and Hollywood press agency.
Not male enough for testosteronic modernist science.
So the trillions of natural fungi penicillin makers were moved out of thousands of milk bottles and put into an extremely expensive milk bottle many stories high, made of scarce stainless steel and run by serious looking men in lab coats.
Now that seriously looked the business !
But it was in fact, just another kluge, a patch : like Newtonian Physics and the Norden , Chemistry had failed and Chemistry - the Queen of Science in the 1930s economy - never looked anywhere but downward from that point on.
(Just compare - if you will - the size of DuPont Chemicals versus the largest of the biotech companies in 1930 with DuPont and the largest of the biotech giants of today : no contest.)
So A-bombs and Penicillin: two last minute kluges to cover male egos or two of the many planned high tech successes that ultimately won us the war ?
And which way forward: become like SKY GODS or humble and limit our hubris and become more like earthlings ????
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