Blog's background tiled image is of the oppressive walls of CUMC circa 1928

I am trying to think of visual ways to convey the sheer unexpectedness of the wartime triumph of Manhattan natural penicillin.

What tab-dropping novelist would ever dare suggest that the attempts to create artificial penicillin blossomed in Oxford University's leafy green setting while the successful effort to bring naturally grown penicillin to the world's dying would emerge from Gotham's concrete jungle ?

Even Superman and Spider Man might be taken back to think something as green as natural penicillin would actually bloom among Gotham City's concrete skyscrapers.

When we think of NYC 's biggest private sector employers we probably  think first of finance's Wall Street, advertising's Madison Avenue, fashion's Seventh Avenue, or of broadway theatres, publishing and media headquarters.

But actually NYC's largest private sector employer is a hospital : the world famous CUMC (Columbia University Medical Center) with its thousands of high tech beds and its tens of thousands of daily outpatient visitors.

And so it was that one of 1940 Manhattan's most impressive concrete skylines wasn't set in Midtown at all.

Instead that vista was the sight of CUMC's massed hospital windows set into concrete, endlessly repeating row on row on row.

It certainly helped that Columbia Presbyterian  had an inherently dramatic location (by design) -- boldly sited high on top of a hill of sheer rock in uppermost Manhattan.

In this unlikely setting, this high tech concrete jungle , this modernist temple to reductionist chemistry , Dr Henry Dawson's tiny team tried to set up 700 two litre flasks of natural penicillium spores - all in the face of passive resistance from CUMC's ever-forward-thinking administrators.

About the best way to kill penicillium is to jostle it from room to room to room and that is exactly what the administrators ensured would happen.

Every other professor seemed to have a higher priority than Dawson on the dean's list of potential labs , so that every vacant room he secured as a nursery for his green friends had to be quickly given up.

Finally , he got use of the tiny space beneath each student's seat in the hospital's big two storey teaching amphitheatre.

The warmth from the butt of each slumbering early morning male med student became like a brood hen to the delicate charges below.

(I am not making this stuff up !)

In typical New York City fashion, even the fire escapes were put to good use - used to let the arid pungent smell of penicillium juice waft out onto Broadway crowds rather than to offend the sensitive noses of the hospital's bosses.

A decidedly concrete jungle setting for an early post-modern attempt to return to a new relationship with Mother Nature.

To help convey the overwhelmingly oppressive sight of CUMC's walls , where even a top surgeon - let alone a humble patient or penicillium spore - is but a mere cog , I  made a tile out of a tiny fragment from an old 1928 era photograph of CUMC.

That tile is now the oppressive concrete jungle backdrop to this blog.

I know I can do much better - possibly by smearing a spot of green penicillium in the center of each window ?

We'll see...