Nothing can stop an idea that even tiny children can understand : sometimes, the Last May Be First

I argue that nobody really understood (or understands) the world of sub-atomic particles as it emerged, in ever growing complexity, from the 1890s to the 1940s and that as a result, it failed to change the childlike faith people still held in Hard Reductionism and Determinism.

But even as a tiny kid, I got the point of the story of microbe-made antibiotics - particularly as a tiny , powerless, kid.

Postmodern science was born in early postwar childhoods

Tiny weak beings, just like me, found in the ordinary and despised basement slime, in jungle dirt and in the filthy sewer water of Sardinia all were besting the smartest chemists in the universe ("big people" in kidspeak) and producing all the medicines that were saving the lives of tiny kids like me.

It was a grownups' science story that even I could rock and roll !

Otherwise we only learned in science of the effort of thousands of important big people, working in vast clean white labs  with billions of times our weekly allowance, making atomic energy for us - and for world-ending bombs....

As Peaceful Atom fades, Penicillin steps in

At the promise of Atomic Energy "too cheap to meter "fades away, journalists have refocused on penicillin as proof that the Allied cause was just and worth all the deaths.

Penicillin has become proof that nations can work together to develop a common savior for all humanity - and that Big Science, like Big Media (where most journalists work), succeeds when freelancers like Alexander Fleming can only take things so far.

But I have said, viv vis 1940,'broad spectrum' Natural Penicillin and Atomic Bombs were definitely Plan B to the expected war-winners : tightly targeted Sulfa drugs and precision Norden Bomb Sights --- Pen and A-Bombs were the low tech solutions to  problems created when hi tech science failed big time...