People whose personalities are fearful, distrusting and easily disgusted (and who thus tend to think, act and vote conservatively), held up the development of naturally-made penicillin for fifteen - wasted - years between 1928 and 1943.
Chief among them : Sir Alexander Fleming and Sir Howard Florey, both who thought the stuff was best left on the shelf, until it was 100% man-made artificial.
(It never was ---- and still isn't ----- . Almost all of our antibiotics still start off as naturally grown penicillin.)
Call it the H P Lovecraft Syndrome.
Author Lovecraft was famously reactionary and racist but above all he was almost pathologically disturbed by the sight of, or thought of slime.
Slime is neither liquid or solid and as this ambiguity of being is literally made physical in its distinctive slipperiness of texture, it powerfully evokes feelings of disgust and dread in the conservative mind.
One is not surprised to learn that four times as many Republican homes have mud rooms as do Democrats, all to help out keep Mary Douglas's infamous 'matter out of place' from invading the family sanctuary.
Or that twice as many Republican couples feel the need for separate his and her sinks in their bathrooms so neither spouse has to touch the dirt of the other.
(How conservatives can even bear (bare?) to exchange intimate body slime in the act of sex, one does not know.)
It simply wasn't on to inject the poop of slime molds into the sanctity of the human bloodstream.
Because remember this was an era (error ?) that fantasized that the essence of humanity was found in the blood itself.
Not until a more relaxed and liberal individual (Dr Martin Henry Dawson) came along was impure, crude penicillin finally injected for the first time: into himself and then into two of his patients....
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