Making penicillin is not brain surgery or rocket science --- its harder !

Humans still can't make penicillin or most other beta lactam antibiotics.

At least, we can't make them anywhere as cheaply and as environmentally friendly as can the small, weak, under-rated (and frankly second or third rate) penicillium slime.

This is something worth remembering when we explore why Dr Martin Henry Dawson did not have a preferential option towards the poor, weak and small ---- all impressions garnered during WWII to the contrary.

Dawson's preferential option actually was for the special qualities hidden inside the supposed second and third raters

Dawson's point was rather along the lines that 'the mobility speed and grasping strength of the penicillium fungus (to re-use this familiar example) was indeed incredibly small and weak, third or fourth rate, at least when compared to that of humans or indeed of mice'.

But in 1940, Dawson felt the penicillium were being unfairly underrated totally, rather than selectively, by scientists and the public.

Because in some other areas, such as in making penicillin, the fungus were the world champions, far and away.

Each of us, no matter how 'advanced' or 'defective' we appear to be, has various weaknesses and strengths , together with some totally unique attributes.

In a total world of global commensality - as in a never yet seen Total War - there is always a need for a 'ministry of all the talents'.

A need for a world with all of us being valued for what we have and cherished for what we hold uniquely -- rather than being dismissed for what we have not have ......

'Divided Self' No More : uniting Dr Martin Henry Dawson's preferential option towards the overlooked, the under-estimated and the unappreciated in the human AND natural world

The beta lactam antibiotics, still the front line in our defence against bacterial infections, were hidden - for several billion years - In Plain Sight - literally right beneath our feet.

They come from soil mold - not mold in today's scientific sense of all being fungus - but mold as understood by today's laypeople and yesteryear's scientists (and maybe tomorrow's scientists too).

The soil molds that give us most of our beta lactam antibiotics are actually bacteria that so resemble the white thread-like fungus mold in appearance and habits that they seem kissing cousins.

And several hundred million years some of those kisses exchanged must have included enough initimate bodily fluids that at few fungus species picked up the DNA genes that make beta lactams.

The best known result is The Big Dog of all antibiotics : Penicillin itself.

The process is called HGT (horizontal gene transfer) - and it was Dr Martin Henry Dawson's hard slug effort in keeping this new concept before a bored and doubting scientific community that is Dawson's main claim to fame today.

No such fame for his equally hard slog to defend, before a hostile and doubting wartime scientific community, of the full worthiness of primitive penicillin made by the primitive penicillium.

His efforts, supported at crucial junctions by Dante Colitti and the Hearst media chain, by the WPB and by Pfizer, gave us all of our wartime penicillin and still provides us with almost all of our antibiotics, 75 years later.

But since Dawson's support for the overlooked, the under estimated, the unappreciated was life long affair, all of one piece, this perhaps appropriate.

In September 1940 ,Dawson's fifteen year interest in the under estimated survival abilities of avirulent microbes seemed totally unconnected to to his ten years commitment to the betterment of the unappreciated chronic ill poor in the big city holding tanks cum hospitals.

But on October 16th 1940, his 'Divided Self', to recall William James' famous phrase, finally fused.

Primitive Penicillium's 'burning and shining light'

For on that day, he injected primitive penicillin from those unappreciated microbe chemists the penicillium into humanity's lowest of the low, a black and a Jew dying from a disease judged of no military significance, the Polio of the Poor, SBE - subacute bacterial endocarditis.

And like that other diffident Henry from Nova Scotia (Henry Alline) he was now 'a man on a mission', for his few years left on Earth ....