To dying patients in Columbia-Presbyterian's hospital , Gladys Hobby's arms daily held aloft a glowing green and gold petri dish of radiated Manhattan penicillin mold as a sort of monstrance of hope.
That image is a fitting and almost exact counterpoint to that other (rather more famous) Manhattan fungus .
We all know the atomic Manhattan Project's mushroom cloud -- also consisting of a glowing ball high on top of arms of roiling dust.
The Manhattan atom brought wartime death and suffering to Japan on a scale hitherto unimagined.
By contrast, Manhattan's natural penicillin offered all the world relative freedom from the deadly bacterial infections that had destroyed families in peace as well as in war.
Given this - the fact that Manhattan's natural penicillin has saved hundreds of times more lives than Manhattan's man-made Bomb ever took - why is it so uncelebrated ?
Why , as well , was the world morally and intellectually silent when Ramzi Yousef tried to justify his bombing of Manhattan's Twin Towers by claiming it was pay-back for the Manhattan Project killing 250,000 at Hiroshima and Nagasaki ?
We can't (and we shouldn't) deny wartime Manhattan's major role in all those atomic deaths.
But would it hurt someone to just once remind Ramzi Yousef and his ilk that wartime Manhattan also produced the safe, inexpensive, abundant natural antibiotic ?
The antibiotic that almost certainly saved the lives of someone in their families in the seventy five years since October 16th 1940 ?
I hope I am not speaking out of line to say that New Yorkers are hardly known for curbing their tongues when something really needs to be said.
But maybe the Big Apple doesn't like blowing its own horn - fair enough.
In which case, it is well past due time that the rest of us in the world should begin doing it for them instead ....
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