"last of Polio & Arsenic under lock and key in Atlanta" - headline

A headline we will never see is some news release from the science folks in Atlanta proudly announcing that some dangerous element (arsenic and plutonium come to mind) have been newly almost totally eliminated.

(Or liquidated with extreme prejudice, in double speak.)

Because actually other life forms are the only possible competitors to humanity.

Even the smallest and weakest are possible 'competitors' in ways that no deadliest element ever could be.

Everything outside of life (reductionist scientists in the Era of Progress believed) could be easily reduced down to the basic slave-like atoms of the hundred of so elements and then turned to what ever task civilized humanity had at hand.

So even the deadly elements could be safely left alone.

Instead, by means of pesticides, herbicides, insecticides,germicides, genocides we have sought to eliminate any and all living rivals, no matter how small or how weak.

Polio is one example of a near total 'success' in this effort.

The Nazis obviously hoped that they could also totally eliminate the 'bacillum' of the Jew, as they bizarrely (but probably genuinely) regarded this religious and ethnic grouping of their fellow human beings.

The moral underpinnings of this wholesale plenticide of all other lifeforms were two fold.

The first was the scientific delusion called Chemical Reductionism - the warped belief that thanks to progress in chemical synthesis we no longer need the valuable-to-humanity products produced by other beings ( with synthetic chemical food pills replacing bread from wheat plants for example.)

The second was another scientific delusion called Biological Progress.

This was the idea that we could phase out all other rival lifeforms (including the unfit versions of humanity itself) in a logical yet humane manner - by speeding the gradual elimination of the least useful-to-humanity first, as obviously being more 'unfit' in the eternal struggle for life.

(So if Germany could successfully invade and conquer Poland, then ipso facto, the Poles were manifestly unfit.)

This was the moral background then to a battle royal at the height of another war (WWII), between proponents for two possible forms of penicillin : Ancient natural or Modern synthetic ...