In Wrath remember Mercy

On page 162 of Gladys Hobby's "Penicillin: Meeting the Challenge" (1985) , the most through account to date of the early days of penicillin, she speaks of a daily trip she made to the SBE wards of NYC's Presbyterian Columbia Hospital, between 1940 to 1944.

Holding aloft a flask filled with a musty-smelling slimy mold, she would demonstrate its new growth before each SBE (Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis) patient,intended, as she explains, to keep their courage up as they faced an almost certain imminent death.

And to remind them that their treatment with this early penicillin might save the lives of millions of potential SBE victims after them.

As it has come to do so.

I use the word 'demonstrate' deliberately and in its original, religious, sense.

The word Monstrance (aka monstral or monstre) comes from the same Latin root for 'demonstrate' and was the solar sunburst shaped metal holder for the Blessed Host, as the Body and Blood of the Living Christ was displayed (demonstrated) before the eyes of the Faithful.

Traditionally, a modification of this public rite was preformed in private, before the sick and dying, in the visitation to them with a Blessed Host inside an elaborate variation on the humble pyx, to keep their Faith and courage up in the face of death and pain.

Fair and good, but why was Gladys Hobby, of all people, carrying around and displaying a Monstrance of a circle of emerald green mold surrounding central drops of the purest gold?

Hobby was nothing if not a faithful Presbyterian and the very last Presbyterian to carry about a Monstrance , rather than melt it down for its gold and jewels, was probably Paul of Tarsus !

Green and emerald had a deep significance to the people of the Old and New Testament that almost any visitor to the Middle East can instantly appreciate as they try to escape the 'merciless heat' of the sun.

The rare shady cool green trees were literally merciful and so emerald green was easily given a deep religious significance -  representing one side of the Janus-like Jehovah.

Janus,Jehovah and Jesus.

God was often described via three colorful gemstones: jasper, sardius and emerald.

They meant high grade jasper obviously, because their jaspar was described as clear/transparent and bright and unflawed as crystal - "brighter than a thousand suns" - and represented the awesomeness of God.

But God, Janus-like ,was awesome in two directly opposing ways that yet were successfully combined in one being (a rather Marx-like thesis/antithesis/synthesis!)

Sardius was a fiery flame like red and represented Revelations' "Lake of Fire" - the fierce thirst for justice of the Jehovah of Wrath.

But God also had an equally fierce thirst for mercy - emerald green, soothing mercy, Jesus's color.

Revelations 4.3 has God on His throne on the Day of Judgement, all jasper bright and sardius angry ( cue the thunderbolts) but, thankfully,with a circle rainbow of emerald mercy surrounding him .

Thus fulfilling the key phrase of the book of Habbakuk (Hab 3.2): "In Wrath Remember Mercy".

The Manhattan Pilot did not focus on 1A patients during World War Two, as their government wanted them to.

Instead the tiny team turned 180 degrees away to focus on the lowest of the low - the 4Fs of the 4Fs (the SBEs),  considered nothing but an expensive and futile drain on scarce medical resources in a time of Total War.

So in this Time of Total Wrath, the Dawson team's Agape Science remembered 'the least of these' with a four year long Act of Mercy.

The blue-gray-green penicillium molds (the color changed day by day as they grew) was not the only green color running through the Manhattan Pilot story. Viridans Strep, the SBE killer, is the bacteria that makes unbrushed teeth look green. More accurately, it turns red blood greenish .

SBE wards were often informal known as The Green Rooms, as a result - better than calling them 'the terminal wards' , as many people thought of them back then.

Of course, in any hospital built during the Streamlined or Art Deco era, as Presbyterian Columbia was, all rooms were green - the famous 'hospital green' or 'institutional green', a shade that was literally invented during the Art Deco/Streamlined era and became one of its key characteristics.

This shade of pale green made the rooms and corridors soothingly cool and relaxing, and - it is said - made any blood splattered on them look less alarming.

It is called 'Green Chrome' paint, short for any green paint made from chromium oxide - it was tough and resisted the corrosive effects of various bodily fluids or hospital chemicals. (It also was not a favorite food of bacteria or fungi - so it was easy to maintain as sterile .)

Yellow or gold is often thought of as the color of the penicillin story - but this is only partly true ( pure penicillin is crystal clear and even today, the antibiotic starts off in bright green fungi growths).

In any case ,yellow was also the color of Yellowcake uranium and the Manhattan Project - the evil counterpart to the Manhattan Pilot - and the other big scientific venture coming out of Columbia University between 1940-1945.

More on the yellow connection later.

Right now, anyone of us who has had their life or that of someone in their family saved thanks to penicillin or other antibiotics should simply feel touched by this act of mercy during a horrible,horrible war.

And remember Gladys Hobby, the world's most unlikely Monstrance carrier....

MO goes PO: Death or Life: America picks death

"In the 'soldiers/guns/cities/Canada/we did not make this up' department, is this bizarre but true story from America."

After you read the above blog post, reflect upon this:

Wasn't it old Ronnie Reagan who said the scariest thing you could ever hear is someone saying:

"Hi,I am from the federal government and I am here to honor you" ???

Trust the fed bureaucrats to honor Columbia University for the totally wrong wartime project - and trust Columbia University to go along with the gag....

The truth was that wartime Columbia University and Manhattan island were a Janus-like combo - part killer/ part livesaver --- a pity that only the killer side has been honored to date....

tale of TWO firsts

If you read most accounts of the early days of penicillin, they will say:

"Yes, we must admit that it appears that Dr Martin Henry Dawson gave a needle of penicillin-the-antibiotic to Aaron Alston, an SBE sufferer, in New York City on October 16th 1940 and he died. And then Dr Dawson died."

That safely out of the way, they move onto their chosen hero of the penicillin saga.

For once, I am not jesting - I can point you to many influential examples that say basically just that.

Much later ,some accounts of the penicillin saga say :

 "Dr Dawson gave the first ever needle of systemic
 penicillin to Charlie Aronson , an SBE sufferer, on October 16th 1940 in New York City and Charlie survived not just one but two bouts of SBE thanks to
penicillin.

 Charlie was alive and well the last time he was checked up upon, in early 1946.
And we know most of this thanks to a article by Dr Dawson written in early 1945, so Dr Dawson didn't seem to die so quickly after all."

What gives?

 Is this glass half full or or half empty ?

 Or are Charlie and Aaron the one and the same patient ?

The answer is that few authors resort to guns to murder anyone these days when they can destroy someone so much quicker and safer by "editing".

The fact is both men were treated with penicillin within minutes of each other on that same date and their fates were just as these authors indicated.

But editing out/editing down an entire event "for brevity", allows a writer to paint Dawson as a winner or loser, depending on what part of the story they choose not to tell.

I intend to tell the whole story warts and all- so judge me accordingly.

Charlie and Aaron will both be in my account.

(However while I can't prove it, I do tend to think that Charlie got the first dose, if only a two minutes before Aaron.

I base this on how I think that detractors in science dispute work to weaken any triumph that is not their's.  And how Dawson, Meyer ,Hobby & Chaffee tried to forestall them.)

More on this point later...

Images of Martin Henry Dawson

There aren't any on the web.

At least not identified as such.

But he is there, buried inside a group shot.

Here are a few - quality varies from poor to acceptable, but "better than not"... so enjoy !

IMAGES OF MARTIN HENRY DAWSON

Healing the Heartless

Seventy Five Million people - at least - had their lives greatly shortened by the events of World War Two.

Died. Dead. If not during the war itself, then not long after.

Set against that toll (the worst ever disaster in human history) the act of extending, for a few years, the lives of about 25 civilians with a physical heart disease may not stack up for much.

Connecting the two - vast military forces raging overseas with a small quiet medical affair that could have just as easily happened in peacetime - may seem impossible.

But I think there is a strong connector and it is that the curing those physical heart cases was dependent on first healing some Home Front civilians of a metaphorical heart disease far more deadly than Endocarditis : Scientific Heartlessness/ Scientific SansCoeur.

Calling upon Science and Nature to justify a lack of compassion for those not among your own kind was Modernity's abiding moral failing.

It was displayed not just during modern warfare or in everything that Hitler ever did - it was habitual, in varying degrees, among most all of us back then.

Only Time will tell us what abiding moral failings of this postmodernist/quantum/commensal age will engender - I am sure that Heartlessness will be chief among them.

But hopefully we will no longer boast about our heartlessness as being based on the best scientific discoveries from Nature.

The decline of Modernity came not from any external assaults, rather it rotted from within, from among its strongest supporters, the Scientist.

This happened when a few, then some, and finally many,  saw that Nature did not favour heartlessness at all but rather the opposite, and translated that new knowledge into concrete human behavior : they changed their day-to-day ethics accordingly.

It wasn't a rapid or smooth process nor has it ended yet but it had to start somewhere and Dawson's story is as close to the beginnings as I have been able to find  AND  it had consequences that we have all felt personally - so it it is an excellent place to start recalling when Mo went Po, if only because the first person cured of the metaphorical heart disease was Dr Dawson himself. 


Not that he was heartless by any means anytime in his life, but he was a proud member of a relatively new profession, that of the Clinical Investigator, which had the potential for exposing all the ambiguities of Modernity's reforming spirit.


Only when Dawson started questioning the disinterested objectivity he always had upheld so strongly, was he himself on the road away from Mo and heading for Po.....

Skyscraper Genetics;Sidewalker Genetics

The age old story of the world , the insiders trying to keep the outsiders out, is brought to a permanent boil in New York City.


The verticality of the skyscraper is a truly fitting and 'deep' metaphor for Modernity : it represents Modernity's need to categorize everyone and everything into a vertical hierarchy of increasing (imagined) 'fitness' and worth.


The assumption is that your worth depends on your inherited genetics which are fixed and change only at the place of glaciers - genetics you inherit strictly from your parents - no miscegenation between species or races here !


By contrast the H in HGT (Horizontal Genetic Transfer), is a fitting symbol for this new, Quantum-Postmodern- Commensal Age.


It merely institutionalizes the reality of global commensality that since we have to exist together cheek to jowl on this Planet,diners at a common table, we might as well resolve to make the best of it and make use of the best of each other's ideas.


In fact, our lives probably depend on us doing so.


So the horizontality of a modern library with its branches stocks of books shared all over the city and all of it part of a continent or world wide system of inter-library loans best represents in human terms what HGT is to the microbe world.

Once named by very early explorers as a natural Arcadia, New York under Dewitt Clinton became the ultimate Synthetic Arcadia, with his rigid and orderly grid system of streets and avenues and buildings demanding that Nature yield to the Will of Man.


But the dirty, noisy,vibrant,disorderly, messy immigrant-burdened sidewalks -where two strangers' eyes can meet and romance bloom; those sidewalks,and those unruly sidewalkers, they,they are Nature's Revenge !

What's the worst possible heart disease?

Most would probably have an opinion as to the worst possible heart disease. 


Maybe only a theologian would spontaneously say it was SANSCOEUR.


But that is what Mo goes Po suggests as the world's most potent heart condition....


(The image underneath the title in that blog by the way is of Martin Henry Dawson.... circa about 1938)

That lowdown achin' old heart disease

This is the story of a heart disease, a metaphorical heart disease, the worst disease our world has ever seen and - hopefully - will ever see ; but one where the nominal 'patients' ended up healing the doctors.


It is also part of the perennial story of New York City , the battle between the Skyscrapers and the Sidewalkers, as old as the city itself.


It is the story of a medical pariah, a promising doctor who to most of his colleagues seemed to have gone off the rails somewhere and done about the worst thing a medical scientist could ever do, which is to 'go native'.


 A doctor who started thinking and acting less like a Disinterested Scientist and more like he was at one with his erstwhile 'clinicial material'...


Much of the climax of this story takes place in north western Harlem, over a small area of about eighty acres.


And like all the best eighty acres, it also had a mule.  His name : Martin Henry Dawson.

Modernity: Last page in Long Book

Modernity was usually felt to be the first page in a book not yet fully written , the gateway to "The World of Tomorrow".

But it could be argued it better represents the very last page of a very, very long book more than 3000 years old.

Definition time: I consider Modernity to be a mode of thought, not a time period.

Yes, it predominated in the period 1880-1980, but it had strength before (1840-1880) and after (1980 - 2020 ??).

It shared the hundred years between 1880-1980 with Pre-Modernity and Post-Modernity but towered well over them in its undisputed hegemony.

It held, along with the ancient Greek scientists (& Newton) the idea that both macro and micro reality consisted of a solid, resilient material that acted and felt rather like metal or rock or wood or a living body.

In objects like the human body, it consisted of a constantly and smoothly curving unbroken structure - made up (perhaps) of tiny granular objects ( atoms) that were as solid and as resilient as the entire body itself and were packed so closely together as to appear and act as if they were all one big solid object.

Hardened cement, solid but yet visibly made of tiny grains all stuck together is as good a visual representative of this vision of ultimate reality as any we commonly see.

There was no "inside detailing" to these atoms and their outer edges were clearcut and definite.

Simple and unchanging (by no coincidence,rather like the definition Modernists held of bacteria), these micro objects were complied into sub-assemblies which became assemblies and then systems - from atoms to molecules to all the way up to human beings
or planets.

Macro Reality - when they thought it was working - was a vast Lego or Meccano Set, an additive form of complexity, in strict hierarchical order.

When it wasn't working, Macro Reality was disordered and "dirt" resulted : atoms out of place.

If you were born in 1880 and completed your education before Queen Victoria died you would only have read, later in life, in the newspapers about changes proposed by some scientists to this way of looking at the world but you won't have and couldn't have accepted those changes, deep down in your bones.

You were simply too old but unfortunately, not quite old enough:
you would have been 53 when Hitler came to power, 60 in 1940, 65 in 1945.

In whatever you did (as long as you were a professional class male) you would have been at the top of your profession  (the boss) and would have run the world, along with other men roughly your same age and with roughly the same kind of scientific education, throughout World War Two and the ten year lead-up to it.

Quantum science was happening during the Modern Era but was not a part of it, in its day to day workings.

Newton still ruled all through the Modern Era.

Don't believe me?

Millions of parents and their kids believed in this view of ultimate Reality:
check out when the sales of Meccano sets,Erector kits,Tinkertoy and their ilk first became popular and when those sales suddenly died, and you can mark the timeline of Modernity at its peak and at its decline...

"Teachable" doesn't always mean "Realistic"

"Publication Bias" is a common problem in Science.

It can take many forms and is generated by many people : so the guilt can be nicely spread about.

Peer Review is such an honored  precept in Science, it must come as a shock to many laypeople to learn that almost nobody likes a scientist who actually re-runs the protocol reported in one lab's published paper, to see it the results stand up in their own lab - the supposed point of peer review.

In fact, a paper that merely confirms the earlier results is not welcomed by journal editors, journal readers or your fellow scientists on things like tenure committees.

"Perhaps.... if you could confirm it with some new additional research... it might be acceptable."

But, on the other hand, if you are well known and the lead author of the original lab is also well known and you fail to confirm their results and even become so bold as to hint it because their hypothesis is all wrong to begin with, you will likely get published.

 Because in Science as elsewhere in life, controversy sells newspapers - and journals.

Even worse is for a scientist to come up with a hypothesis and then cheerfully report that it didn't pan out - don't expect a rush of editors eager to publish you.

You might think Science would welcome your honesty - no point in issuing grant money and wasting six months of ten people's lives, merely to re-discover what you already found out - "the idea is going no where - at least in the form my lab put upon it."

This changing a bit when it comes to drug trial results.

 If false, and allowed to stand, they could cause many to die.

 Editors are even more wary these days if the study is funded by drug companies.

Now medical journals want all results (good ,bad or inconclusive) placed in a public database created the moment the project is started - even if only the highlights are published.

No more cherry picking the best results for your hypothesis.

     'TEACHING FOR EXAMS' BIAS

Now a similar sort of bias emerges whenever scientists must teach students (or politicians/generals/executives).

The paymasters (parents, taxpayers, prime ministers) want  definite simple answers - results, in other words --- not real world scientific caution.

Scientists want to eat.

So one can just imagine Newton cheerfuly telling these various paymasters in his day that "my new theory can predict the path of the nearby planets highly accurately."

Wow, they say.

No point in telling the paymasters that high accuracy with regard to the paths of planets is a totally unnecessary luxury - the planets are not about to sneak up on us and crash into Earth.

And also no sense in admitting that your new laws won't do much for calculating the paths of asteroids, which have in the past and will against someday, crash into us with terrible results.

(They are too many,too small, too dark and too easily affected by larger objects passing through, to be easily tamed by the level of technology we had for the effort in Newton's day - or even today.)

This sort of thinking results in students from junior high to undergraduate level only being thoroughly taught those parts of Reality that science has managed to tame/explain/predict in nice simple clearcut patterns.

Useless it may be to predict the paths of planets, but Science can do it and so science teachers will teach it and expect students to replicate it.

Predict the weather can't be done reliably and so it its rushed through, ignored, push aside.

Teachers always claim - but I don't believe them - that they only teach experiments that work because it is too hard to evaluate results from students working on experiments that we know will produce inconclusive ,rather than clearcut, results.

The pattern proceeds over hundreds of fronts over dozens of years - the average middle class person with a degree is subtly indoctrinated in the the idea that Science has ,or is soon about to, discover and explain just about everything.

In others words, they become imbibed with the tenets of Modernity from schoolteachers who would otherwise claim they couldn't ID Modernity in a lineup of cons.

But when that callow young science undergraduate is placed in the gunnery room of some World War II battleship (for whatever navy) during a real exchange of broadsides, he is likely to realize, far far too late, that Newton and Science never did solve the multi-body mechanics equations that govern most of the real world.

Imagine trying to fire a one ton shell at a 40,000 ton ship, a fifth of a mile long, that is twenty miles away in the dark, zigzagging through rough seas at 20 knots- and randomly pitching up and down as well as deliberately zigzagging from side to side.

Your ship is doing all this as well - trying just to avoid being hit.

Your only job is to aim that shell so when it arrives a minute or two later, it hits the other ship - and hits in a place where the armour isn't too thick .

The waves can't push the ship about so that its sides are too sharply angled at the moment of impact so the shell slides off it harmlessly - nor can the ship be so low in the water because of wave action that your  shell sails harmlessly through the ship's crowsnest.

But you have no idea of what the wave action is twenty miles away and two minutes into the future.

You are too busy discovering that each shell is polished slightly differently and each propellant bag load has slightly different energy output.

The big gun barrel fires slightly different as it warms up and wears out gradually.

The rangefinder gives different results in cold versus hot weather as metal expands or contacts.

Each shell will have a different path as a result of all these variables.

And don't get me started on the effects on the shell's path caused by the varying wind and air temperature over a path through the atmosphere twenty miles long.

On and on and on it goes.

The highest tech aspect of World War Two was not the bombsights in bombers, code-breaking, nuclear fission - it was in the range-finding units of big battleships.

Despite all this scientific effort, training of crew, expensive state of the art computers, a ship's safest course when it came under fire was to deliberately steer towards the last shell splash - so inaccurate was long range gunnery, it was a given no shell fell in the same place twice, even when that was the gun crew's intention !

Day to day Newtonian/slide rule mechanics, the science that most people are still comfortably with, gives approximately accurate results under favourable conditions.

This comes as no surprise to scientists as experimenters , but as teachers, they lulled generations of citizens into thinking science could work as well with real world problems as it appeared to do in the undergraduate lab.

Science sang for its supper - and sang a false tune.

So be very suspicious of any school course where  you come out of it  'knowing more' than you did coming in - for a good instructor teaches you humility, not hubris...

World War Two: a global referendum on Modernity

If WWII was a Civil War among earthlings, a global referendum on the value of Modernity taken to its logical extreme, how did the vote go ?

I think an overwhelming majority of the world voted for Modernity.

But many had started having a few small doubts and wanted a few correctives and adjustments.

A victory then, for Modernity.

But DOUBT is the ultimate solvent, 'The Seven Year Itch' of human thought and over time, those tiny doubts grew and grew and are growing still.

Call it a PyrrhicVictory for Modernity...

World War Two : a CIVIL war among Earth's humans

I have said that 75 years on, World War Two and its lead up is looking more and more like an internal family fight between the most modern nations in the world.

 They were united in believing that there were far too many Jewish undergraduates in university but differed over the solution: while many countries supported the idea of informal hidden quotas, only a few nations felt that all current Jewish students should be expelled and even fewer felt that Jewish undergraduates should be taken out and gassed to death.

Substitute Negroes, homosexuals, defective newborns ,morons in mental homes, Polacks and other immigrants and you get a similar pattern.

But I don't really mean it.

I do not really think WWII was basically a war between nations over just how far  to take the logic of Modernity with regards to those judged less worthy of civilized modern life.

Instead, I have found that history reveals that in almost every nation on the planet World War Two generated strong disagreements within its domestic population over how to react to the varing propositions that Hitler,Tojo,Stalin, FDR and Churchill were making as to the reasons for joining their side of the fight.

Many people back then had far more in common with various peoples in many other nations than they did with their own fellow nationals .

WWII created transnational collections of individual consciences (& individual responses) that spanned the globe - from 100% pro-Hitler to 100% anti-Hitler and everything in between.

Today's (and certainly tomorrow's) historians are going to have to start studying the individual responses to the rise of Hitler and let the crude blunt instrument of a nation's overall response to Hitler to languish for a while...

"Triumph of the Wild: World War Two"

World War Two is usually described as the triumph of one kind of human will over another kind of human will .

Victory is said to have come to the Allies because the minds/rationality/willpower of the free scientists of the democracies were much smarter than the fanatically-willed minds of the soldiers and scientists of Germany and Japan.

This despite the fact that almost everyone agrees that the Axis were the far tougher soldiers: scientific willpower trumped military willpower.

But the military staff of all the combatant nations found that their war plans rarely worked anywhere near as well as they were expected  ----the fog of war had never seemed thicker.

Unexpectedly, their plans' biggest failings were usually against the forces of nature rather than against the forces of man:

The constant ability of unexpected bad weather to delay offensives and the power of national harvest failures to push leaders into new, ever more foolish, invasions schemes.

The overwhelming consequences of rugged geography ,and vast distances in general, on logistical efforts.

The perpetual shortages of natural materials and energy (including- unexpectedly for modernists - shortages in human energy !)

The failures of man-made/synthetic substitutes to remedy Nature's shortfalls.

The inaccuracy of workmanlike Newtonian mechanics ,at distances longer than a Nelson broadside , the list goes on and on.

The world's biggest and most modern nations went into World War Two knowing it would be a very tough war - but were united, at least, in believing their only really tough opponents would be groups of other humans.

This is to say, they were all Modernists to the core and hence all students - perhaps unknowingly - of Sir Charles Lyell.

Nature was supposed to have been tamed within reasonable limits and only humans could hold up other humans in their goals.

But few Germans today are willing to rate Stalin's army as being a greater enemy than Russian winter and Russian mud and the sheer Russian expanse.

Even fewer of today's airforce staff officers still believe that German fighters and ack-ack
guns were the prime reason why massive numbers of Allied bombers failed to  permanently knock out any German power plants or oil refineries.

In a world war that ended up being as much being 'against the world' as being 'conducted all over the world', Modernity took a blow it never fully recovered from: "Wild Trumps Will, every time".

Nature bats last... but it bats long and it bats hard....

the coalition of the Un-willing

On the afternoon of September 2st 1939, it seemed as if the global coalition of those nations willing to face down Hitler numbered exactly "zero".

(Poland had no moral choice to make - it was simply invaded.)

But Britain and France still had sizable numbers of their elite willing to listen to Italy's plea for a conference to settle this dispute between neighbours 'honorably' - as was done at earlier ...at Munich.

So World War II was by no means a certainty that afternoon.

Only at 1130 pm that night, during a tremendous thunderstorm, when the British Cabinet voted to go to war with Germany next morning, unless it ceased its war against Poland, did the 'world war' portion of the localized German-Polish war really begin.

As the 'Greatest Generation ever' basks in the glow of praise for doing its bit in 'the Best War ever'/ 'the last Good war' , it is worth recalling the long,long timeline of just when (or even if) each nation on earth decided to join the coalition of the willing against Hitler  - and whether or not they followed these bold words up, by actually sending their citizens into combat.

Some waited the full twelve years from 1933 to 1945 to oppose Herr Hitler (and only verbally at that) and some never did.

The very first combatant nation was Germany , on August 31 1939. The last new combatant was the USSR, going to war against Japan on August 8th 1945.

In between those six years, the world's nations shifted their feet from side to side to side, going from neutrality to supporting one side but remaining neutral, to joining them formally as an ally to changing sides or back again to neutrality and just about everything in between.

Many only joined the war against Hitler in the Spring of 1945, with Germany defeated and in fear they would be denied a seat in the proposed postwar United Nations organization, unless they at least declared war on Hitler before Berlin surrendered.

At any one time, a nation's formal decision about wartime status and its more informal 'leanings' to one side or other (or the intensity of its commitment to its allies) were usually opposed by a good sum of its citizens as 'going too far' or 'not far enough'.

Really 'the coalition of those willing to oppose Hitler' was in the end made of of individuals, not nations.

They joined it one at a time and varied day by day in the intensity of their commitment against Hitler's ideals.

Looking for the opponents to Hitlerism at the level of 'the nation' reveals that all nations on earth were immorally slow to take him on and is a crude measure of the long road to defeating the ideas of Hitler as well as just his military forces.

Individuals both did much,much better than the various nations - and much,much worse...

Does 'Mo goes Po' mean 'MOdernity goes POstal?'

A couple of friends, who know my sense of humour, asked me if "MO goes PO" stood for MOdernity goes POstal.

It does not, although I do think Modernity did go postal between 1939 and 1945 - its just that Modernity could have gone postal for a while and then made a complete recovery.

But it didn't.

So the bigger story is how Modernity plunged, over six years, from its Apogee at the New York World's Fair's visions of the World of Tomorrow all the way down to to its Nadir at Auschwitz.

It never recovered and it was forced to see its era very slowly and very quietly fade away.

(Significantly, the 1939-1940 NY World's Fair was also the time and place for the first ever fan convention for Sci Fi literature - at that time it was the literature that was the most unquestioningly Modern.

I doubt you could say that of most Sci Fi stories, post 1946.)

It is a lot to ask of the six short years from September 2nd 1939 to September 2nd 1945 ; can I make my case it actually happened in that a brief a time period?

I think so - the emotional change inside our hearts happened during the war, even if the actions that followed had to wait for peacetime conditions to be allowed to come forward.

If my project ever get produced as a play,film or musical, those six years will have to get packed into three hours - at the most - compressing the experience of the Mo-to-Po Revolution into an even tighter time experience.

Martin Henry Dawson

I think my 15 scenes plus one afterword will do a good job of compressing those six years into a fulfilling dramatical experience, at least as seen from the point of view of Martin Henry Dawson's tiny team in the lab on Floor G ....

Personal animosities at Columbia Eye Institute pushed Meyer into Dawson's arms on penicillin?

Blepharitis , a chronic inflammation of the eyelids, remains one of the world's most common eye problems.

Much of the time it is caused by staph bacteria and at the start of world war two, staph was one of the few common pathogen bacteria not killed by the various sulfa drugs - the 'antibiotics' of the day.

This was a big problem for the military of all the combatant nations of that war.

They regarded aviation as the alpha and the omega of modern warfare and so gave inordinate attention to the brand new field of "aviation medicine".

One only has to recall the moral panic the Allies fell into on mere rumours that the Germans had discovered the Viagra of aviation - a cortisone that let their pilots fly higher faster longer, well you get the picture.

Meyer had a consultancy with Schering Corp America - an German-owned company - involving ,among other things, attempts to create stable esters of penicillin.

Fears that Schering's work on cortisone was at the behest of the Nazis, ( it was not) rendered Schering totally suspect in the eyes of British and American intelligence circles.

Anyone connected with Schering - like Karl Meyer and his penicillin efforts - went into a little black book of "no-nos".

Aircrews and Blepharitis

An existing, generally intractable, case of blepharitis kept a lot of potential air crews out of the various air forces right at the recruiting office - that was problem A.

Problem B was that a lot of crews seemed to get blepharitis,  either after they had been through training or while out on active service .

This was perhaps due to the strain of operating in the air of five miles up, behind an oxygen mask for hours.

It doesn't directly worsen your vision but it gives you blurry eyes which comes much to the same thing.

It also needlessly worried aircrews, who feared it meant worse things than it did.

Not just pilots or gunners are hit by its effects - engineers, navigation officers and bomb setters all had to look at lots of crucial numbers on lots of dials in very dim light - one pair of blurred eyes at the wrong moment could be terminal for the entire plane and crew.

Karl Meyer ,as a German Jewish emigre, had an easier relationship with Dr Ludwig Von Sallmann, who also was in exile --- from his native Austria because his wive was Jewish.

But even Sallmann only seemed to want to put Meyer's semi-purified penicillin into animals and then didn't publish anything on the results till a few years later (in 1943 - at least 2 years after the first experiments).

Typically of many,many doctors, he published freely on his early work with penicillin only after Baby Patty Malone made penicillin world famous, safe and respectable.

At least Dr Phillips Thygeson did put the crude penicillin into the eyes of 8 patients with chronic blepharitis caused by (sulfa-resistant) staph bacteria, between the late Fall of 1940 and the early Spring of 1941, with some very good results.

But he refused to publish on this success (adding his name to Fleming and Paine et al in England who also refused to publish their spectacular early successes with crude penicillin and eye diseases.)

The history of penicillin might have been much different if these doctors had crowed just a little.

Thygeson finally published on bleparitis and penicillin - in 1945 - noting its key military importance !

I think an oral history interview with Thygeson late in life suggests what happened:
I don't think he could stand Meyer much.

He accused him of being a constant paranoid about his work--- and having a gutteral accent that no student could understand.He said nothing about Sallmann's accent - though Sallmann had arrived in America about 8 years after Meyer.

Now a young student had heard all of these stories, feared dealing with Meyer but found him soft spoken and kind and stuck with him throughout his career long enough to write his  affectionate obit - so opinions clearly differed on Meyer's manner and personality.

Dawson hung in with him for almost 10 years, so he couldn't have been impossible to work with.

In fact, Meyer gradually transferred himself from the eye clinic to the internal medicine department where Dawson worked.

Thygeson chose not to help out Meyer, Dawson or the fate of penicillin by publishing in an area sure to advance penicillin's importance in the eyes of the military-oriented OSRD of Vannevar Bush.

Instead he stuck to publishing on his results with sulfa drugs - these were totally pure, came via the highly conventional route of a commercial drug company - and didn't work and had potential toxic side effects.

But they didn't come from the home brew lab of Karl Meyer and that might have been a big point in their favour...

@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo

Pneumococcal capsule,Hyaluronan,Penicillin like electron, proton and neutron to Dawson

I have said that Martin Henry Dawson's roughly 20 year career as a medical scientist can be divided into three parts based on three types of streptococcus bacteria: s pneumococcus, s pyogenes and s viridans.

Another way to look at the three phases is to look at the key substance he was studying in each phase and contrast how our body felt about each of them.

The pneumococcus flourish in the blood stream and in our liquid-oriented parts of our body by wearing a sugar-coated capsule around themselves, to evade the non-adaptive part of our immune system.

But humans also have an adaptive immune system and it can learn to recognize the sugar capsule and kill the bacteria inside it.

To survive, the pneumococcus have learned, in their own counter defense, to make a 100 different capsules (or to wear no capsule at all !). When this in turn doesn't work, they trade the various capsules around by HGT - horizontal gene transfer - the only reason we humans could begin play around with DNA.

So Dawson's pioneering work on DNA is obviously still hot stuff.

In terms of the body's immune system, these sugar capsules are highly anti-genic : the body sees them as the enemy and goes into warp overdrive to deal with them.

Dawson then flipped 180 degrees and dealt with the capsule of the deadly GAS bacteria - a bug that can still kill humans in dozens of different ways.

Their trick is to have a capsule made out of something only animals make - this chemical hyaluronan is used all through the animal body in dozens of quite different applications.

We humans now use it ,in medicine, for dozens of additional uses.

Our body regards it as 100% gen, ie  "us" - the very us-ness of us.

Sometimes however the body in attacking the bacteria inside the hyaluronan capsule, thinks the capsule is also somehow non-human and then goes off attacking parts of the human body that look just like it.

This is called 'molecular mimicry' and it lies behind auto immune diseases like Rheumatic Fever that Dawson works so hard to cure.

Because so many of the diseases we are likely to get today are considered to be auto immune diseases, this also remains hot stuff in the area of medicine and science.

Finally Dawson flipped yet again ,180 degrees ,to take up the cause of penicillin in 1940 when it interested no one.

It is, at best, an okay killer of bacteria - when just viewed in its killing aspects. From the viewpoint of working doctors or pharma executives in 1940, its killing disadvantages far outweighed its moderate killing abilities.

Dawson saw beyond this, to grasp the one thing about penicillin which remains unique about it even today when there have been thousands and thousands of antibiotics tested
for their usefulness in fighting disease.

Some individuals are allergic to penicillin - very very few seriously.

But broadly speaking only some of us are allergic to something , while if it is toxic, it is toxic to all of us.

Penicillin isn't toxic to us - at all . The salt it is wrapped around, chemically speaking, can be toxic if we don't watch our fluid levels, but that is about it.

Our body regards this small molecule as basically invisible - it does not regard it as gen ( part of itself) or antigen (part of a pathogen) nor  even as a potential food - it passes quickly through our body, our liver above all, as invisible and as harmless as water.

Most doctors - Alexander Fleming above all - only saw the fact that penicillin passed quickly through the body as its prime disadvantage.

But Dawson had devoted just 15 years to substances that hung about the body only too well and his mind was 'prepared'  (in the Pasteurique sense of that word) to see the advantages of any substance that our body regarded as neither genic or antigenic or as food.

Penicillin was the neutron of the human immune system and Dawson put that neutron to work......

@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo

Dawson had been set to be the "invisible man", the Charles Fletcher of The Manhattan Pilot

I believe that for two critical weeks at the very beginning of the The Manhattan Project, Martin Henry Dawson was not set to be the team leader/senior investigator - in fact he was not expected to be involved at all.

The team was supposed to be led by the biochemist Karl Meyer, with someone (anyone) acting as the microbiologist to test the 'in vitro' activity of the penicillin produced , again with some doctor (anyone) from Columbia Presbyterian's eye clinic in the clinician's job  (the nominal job of Dawson on the final Pilot team) .

The penicillin pilot's aim, at that point, was simply (!) to purify and then synthesize penicillin - most of the small amounts of crude penicillin produced would have to be destroyed in crystallization (purification) experiments.

Only tiny, tiny amounts could be spared to show the resulting penicillin still retained the needed biological activity against bacteria on a glass slide or against bacteria on/in a human.

These were expected to be merely subordinate activities to the main show - "making penicillin".

Now any drug, not just penicillin, needs to be first proven safe for humans when taking internally and be available in huge amounts, before it can be injected into the body as a 'systemic' --- versus simply being dropping a bit of it into the restricted/external area around the eyeball as an 'antiseptic'.

Penicillin, in particular, quickly slips out of the body and so needs even larger amounts than most drugs to work successfully as a systemic.

This is why penicillin's first successes in Britain during the 1930 (but tragically for humanity never published), were in removing deadly bacteria from the area around the eyes.

Meyer ,working in an eye clinic ,knew these truths better than most. In fact, he did involve two doctors from his clinic to use some of his penicillin with their patients but both doctors (Von Sallmann and Thygeson) seemed dubious about its usefulness around and in the eyes (as well they should have been).

 The results were not spectacular and were published a few years later.

Eyes were saved in the early 1930s from a lifetime of blindness with treatments of diluted crude penicillin that in total must have consisted of only 1.6 Oxford units of biological activity (that is equal to one millionth of a gram of pure penicillin).

By contrast, Dawson's disease of choice to test penicillin upon, SBE, subacute bacterial endocarditis, may today require 1.6 billion units of penicillin to cure.

That is one kilogram of pure penicillin - one billion times as much penicillin.

It was known in 1940 that SBE would need an extraordinary large amount of whatever drug that could kill the bacteria in its vegetations because of the unique location of the lesions and the poor blood supply of the heart valves they rested upon- that is the problem in fact that still makes SBE the 'gold standard' of intractable infections.

All drugs to date, as of 1940, had to be used in such large amounts to kill the bacteria that they killed the patient first - because even a relatively "non-toxic" drug is deadly if used by the shovelful !

It was Dawson's genius to see that penicillin's strength was not what the popular books on it still proclaim - its ability to kill bacteria - but rather its ability not to kill the patients, even when used in extraordinarily high amounts for months at a time.

And SBE proved to be just the disease to demonstrate that fact....

@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo

Agape Science: thinking commensally : going Po

I have often said my Martin Henry Dawson project is "all about love" - all three variants of it.

Eros, romantic love, might seem a stretch.

However Dawson had seen too many fellow teenagers die in the trenches of WWI, without ever even having had a kiss or a girlfriend ,to fail to understand what a diagonsis of Rheumatic Fever meant to kids, back in those days.

Doctors and friends told parents in total earnestness, that any extra stress on their child's heart after they had had Rheumatic Heart Disease could kill them.

That meant no dancing,  or sexual intercourse or pregnancies and childbirths - all the things that make a young person's life worth living !

Patria love or philia/filial love, love of one's own family and their country, was the reason why the 'greatest generation ever'  finally went off to fight.

But patriotism isn't that high on the scale of wrong or right, in the way Jesus reckons things.

He placed agape love, the willingness to die, if necessary, for someone else's country well above the willingness to die to save one's own country.

Here America fell down .

Twenty seven times, by my count, small groups of American citizens came before their congressmen to plea for Congress to intervene militarily when their ( or the family's) homeland was invaded.

Peter only refused 3 times - American did it it 27 times between 1931 and 1941.

(Not that my country - Canada - was all that much better.)

One wonders if Japan had gone into Russia instead of Pearl Harbour would America had gone to war at all in World War Two ?

Even on December 8th 1941, FDR and Congress only went to war against Japan - it took Hitler declaring war on America to bring it out fighting against the greatest evil our world has ever known.

Dawson had already taken up arms years earlier to defend a little country from a bully and been wounded twice for his efforts and gotten the Military Cross with citation for his bravery.

But in this war, he was dying and unfit for military service overseas.

Still he exhibited agape love and agape science when he sought to save the lives of people America's leaders in science and medicine said were unworthy of much medical attention in times of war....

@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo

"Going Po" /"Going Native"/"Letting Down the Side"

I have often wondered about why Martin Henry Dawson's legacy was so quickly - and quietly - 'disappeared' after his early death.

I mean Penicillin was very big news, Rheumatic Heart Disease remained the leading killer and crippler of school age kids (well above the numbers affected by polio), DNA was becoming big news.

I think one explanation was that many of his contemporary fellow doctors and scientists felt that he had 'let down the side' or 'gone native' when he 'went Po' and tried so hard to save the lives of people that many of them considered unworthy of much medical attention at the height of Total War.

I think Dawson would argue - but only if he was forced to argue, with a gun at his head ! - that the whole point of that Total War, the whole point of the quarrel with our Japanese and German cousins, really revolved around the question 'were all lives worth saving, or only some ?'

He was sure which side the Axis was on, he thought that the Allies were on the other.

Publicly, they were - they just didn't mean to see it carried out in practise.

When Dawson did so, he exposed their inconsistencies : talk versus walk.

No one ever honors someone who reveals them to be hypocrites.....

@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo

What a difference one little substitute word can make...

My partner Rebecca said some very nice things about this, my new blog.

But I am afraid I misled her a little in describing my take on Postmodernity.

I meant to say that Modernity was a particular and peculiar form of  'Aesthetics masquerading as Science' ---- and functioning as an entire worldview and ideology.

And that Postmodernity was more than 'just' the aesthetics of contemporary painting, pop music and architecture - it was another particular form of Aesthetics and also functioning as an entire worldview and ideology.

I think I have now found a succinct way to describe the difference between Modernity and Postmodernity and it is in the new subtitle of this blog .

Taking the widest view of the term Postmodernity : converting it - but only very slightly -  from my emphasis on ethics and morality to one of aesthetics - it can be phrased as a difference in  the sort of people we find aesthetically attractive.

Today we are far more willing to see attractiveness in many more body shapes,  skin colors and lifestyles - or at least to let other people see beauty in people we don't find  that particularly attractive.

It is typical of this Postmodernity era to learn of a recent poll saying that most of us find a person of mixed color ( the tawny or coffee colored flesh tone so common in places like Brazil) as the most attractive physical type.

(Just as it is a hangover from our grandparents' Modernity era to learn that most high fashion models continue to be the icy blue-eyed blonds of  1930s Aryan wet dreams.)

My take is that between 1939 and 1945 (and in the immediate postwar period), many - but by no means all - of the middle class educated people in the most modern countries in the world changed their minds.

They decided, albeit in a subdued and inchoate fashion, that  all  life was in some sense
worthy of life and dignity and worth.

When they repudiated Eugenics (and again not everybody did) they repudiated the core tenets of Modernity --- just as Professors Adorno and Horkheimer had insisted they had to do in 1944, in their famous little mimeo-book ( Dialetic of the Enlightenment), circulating throughout the campus of Columbia University in New York City.

Currently, there is no record of what Professor Martin Henry Dawson, also at the same university at the same time, thought about Adorno and Horkheimer's claim - or in fact about virtually anything - we have no personal papers.

But in his public 'biography of deeds', he certainly acted in a postmodern fashion - giving up his life to save the life of someone (Charlie Aronson) who many American doctors considered a prime example of the fact that only 'some life is worthy of life'.

In one of those improbable coincidences that make up reality,Dr Foster Kennedy advocated that only some lives are worthy of life and that all others should be killed (at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association) on the same day as Dawson first announced (at the annual meeting of the American Clinical Society) that he was trying to save the lives of the unfit, with some penicillin he had brewed up himself.

In a sense, to Kennedy's statement, Dawson merely substituted the little word "all" for "some" and then forcibly acted upon that statement, against the greatest of obstacles.

Mo only truly goes Po when somebody actually does something concrete.

 And it was Martin Henry Dawson putting PoMo thought into PoMo action that made all the difference - for Charlie and then ultimately, for all of us .....

@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo

Martin Henry Dawson, the born subordinate.

He had a number of life-changing ideas but he was too cautious and too polite to go all out in proclaiming them and his colleagues and opponents knew it.

In a metaphorical sense, he was the proverbial 'coward of the county' .

I don't think he disobeyed but one order in his entire life.

But when he did.... our whole world changed for the better, forever.

@MOgoesPO

We agree WHEN Mo started going PO, but not necessarily why

                  Martin Henry Dawson , on enlistment, 1915

My partner, Rebecca, has tried to explain the meaning behind the title of my latest blog "MO goes PO" .

All I can add is that there is overwhelming agreement that the Mo-to-Po revolution began fairly abruptly, in 1945.

You remember 1945, the end of 'double-u, double-u, two' , the so called last good war and the last good generation.

Few people have given a good account why PoMo began then, AND in the nations of the moral victors.

If the good guys are just won the war against the bad guys, why were the good guys leading the way in uneasily evaluating their own values ?

I hope "MO goes PO" succeeds in telling us why....

@ArcadianRecord

This is my new blog for my MARTIN HENRY DAWSON project

I will post the finished segments ( albeit not likely in their proper chronological sequence) here, one week after the 'final' version of each segment has had a chance to pass my 'wiggle test'.

That is to say, I will print out a reduced size, B&W 'final version' copy on my computer printer and see how it reads on paper, after it has been lying around my house a day or two.

For sometimes you catch things you didn't when the segment was on the computer screen, no matter how often you re-read and re-edited it.

In time, I will also put each of these segments in my 'MO goes PO'  public archives - my 16 GOOGLE SITES websites.

But this time, they will be in their intended chronological order, leaving blanks for the segments not yet published.

One GOOGLE SITES website for each of 15 Scenes (in three Acts)  --- plus one for the author's Afterword.

No more than 26 segments maximum per Scene - hopefully not that many ! - so I can label them from A to Z.

So their numbering will be labelled 3c and 16j etc , indicating that the first is the third segment of Act I, Scene 3, while the other is the tenth segment in the author's Afterword.

Think of it as a sort of Play or Musical covering six years (exactly - September 2nd 1939 to September 2 1945) in three hours...

I will reserve my right totally, to revise/ revise/ revise each 'final' segment - but you will at least be able to follow the revisions publicly.

@mogoespo

Three classic examples of HGT are a key motif in lifework of Martin Henry Dawson

Martin Henry Dawson 1942 - suffering from terminal Myastenia Gravis

From the 1920s till the 1950s, Martin Henry Dawson published more articles and made more public presentations on Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT) than any other scientist - in fact more than all of them combined -- quite simply 'No Dawson, No DNA'.

But he died, tragically young, in 1945, though not before seeing through three different projects that involved HGT - though he was probably only convinced that HGT was involved in the first.

Not to say he didn't have strong personal suspicions in the other two cases - but it seemed too wild to be prudent to talk about publicly.

S. pneumoniae are detected and eaten by our adaptive immune system based on the the more than 90 different goo capsules that surround each of the 90 different strains of s. pneumoniae bacteria.

One way to survive being eaten is to quickly and randomly change your 'cap' - or not wear one at all.

Dawson with Sia and Warbasse, between 1928 - 1933, showed this to be done by biofilm colonies (it can only happen in close-quartered biofilm colonies, not in widespread thin populations of planktonic bacteria) by the bacteria taking a vote by exchanging chemical emails (Quorum-sensing/ aka Q-sensing) and then agreeing to exchange the DNA genes needed to change capsules.

By 1934, Dawson had become interested in the capsules of s. pyrogenes, mostly because they were NOT of interest to our adaptive immune system !

He discovered this is because they were made up of something the human body needs to use like wampum - Hyaluronan - the same stuff injected into wrinkles to restore their cosmetic youthfulness !

Our immune cells see this stuff in use everywhere in the body in dozens of different situations - it screams "self" like nothing else - so they leave it alone.

But only 6 species of bacteria make this goo - it is an energy intensive process and if it didn't get used to protect our commensal bacteria from attack of the white blood cells whenever they venture into the blood stream, it would only become a fatal burden to make.

Evidence is strong that these few bacteria borrowed the basic technique & the genes to make it from some animal host a long time ago (HGT between animals and bacteria does occur) and adapted it to suit themselves.

Since the s. pyrogenes are our single deadliest killer bacteria and this capsule a crucial means for them being able to do their work inside us and survive, this shows again what HGT means to us, in highly practical terms - it can kill us.

Finally, Dawson successfully cured the deadliest common heart disease of his day - SBE, endocarditis caused by green strep , s. viridans - normally harmless long term residents of our mouth.

He did so, starting 70 years ago this October 16th, with penicillin.

Penicillin is merely the best known of a very large family of antibiotics that still are our major life-savers - the beta lactams.

Most are made by bacteria and effectively force other bacteria to give the producers a wide berth.

Because only a few fungi make beta lactams compared to many bacteria, because the fungi's penicillin gene cluster looks to be so close to all the bacteria beta lactam creating structures, and because bacteria were here well before fungi, most experts feel that HGT was the means for the penicillin-making genes going from bacteria to fungi and then into us as an life-saving medicine.

But bacteria are mostly resistant to penicillin you say.

HGT again - the cluster of genes of resistance to penicillin existed long before Dawson put penicillin to work as an antibiotic in 1940.

When it became needed for bacteria to survive, they rapidly spreading it about around the world - by HGT ....

@arcadianrecord

Martin Henry Dawson's lifework- Lobar Pneumonia,Rheumatic Fever,SBE : when hosts overreact

MARTIN HENRY DAWSON 1896-1945

When harmless tiny bacteria called S. pneumococcus living peacefully in your throat get blown the equivalent of 1000 miles deep into our lungs - they panic.

Who won't?

More fatally, so does our body's immune system.

Like a latter day 'Bomber Harris', the immune system 'area bombs' our lungs - too often the collateral damage is us.

S. pyrogenes bacteria is so used to surviving in us, its only home on Earth, that it begins to look like us - and when our immune system overreacts to a case of strep throat, it might start attacking our heart tissue instead of the long since defeated strep throat : the result is often- fatal acute Rheumatic fever.

Lucky you, you've survived a couple of attacks of Rheumatic fever - except for a scared

heart valve ---- a valve messed up by your own immune system.

Now you've neglected your teeth and gums a little and the gums tend to bleed when you do brush them.

This allows some harmless S. viridans (green strep - the bacteria that makes unbrushed teeth look ,well, sort of green - not actually the reason they are called green strep but a colorful coincidence !) to get into the blood stream and start whirling around your body much faster than the Space Shuttle does with us.

Naturally the green strep panic and start looking for a new safe home before giant white blood cells swallow them for dinner.

All these bacteria can't move - they are basically tiny blogs of jelly who can stick to particular types of human cells, if they have the right kind of adhesive on their surface for that kind of cell and they happen to bump into it and not the wrong sort of cell.

Its all a lot of hapstance.

Hardly your usual predators, right??

Usually, the green strep gets eaten before it makes that safe haven. But for people with scared heart valves, the scar tissue (produced by our immune system - remember ?) is

just the sort of thing that could be that safe haven.

If they make it into these scar areas' depths, while whirling past at space-travel-like speeds, they attach themselves to the scars.

The immune system reacts by creating more scar tissue, which inadvertently prevents white blood cells from getting in and at the green strep.

The green strep start re-creating dental plaque (and tartar) right on the heart valve - taking a biofilm meant for our mouth and teeth and replicating in not too dissimilar circumstances at the heart valve.

A normal biofilm colony eventually lets loose bits of itself in the liquid swirling over it to form mini colonies elsewhere - the green strep on the heart valve do the same.

We call those particular mini colonies 'embolus showers' and if and when they reach a heart/ lung or brain blood vessel with a restricted passage, they will block it and kill us.

Explaining and preventing or curing these three serious/common/fatal diseases was to be Martin Henry Dawson's lifework.

In a sense, he succeeded well beyond his expectations and changed our world , for the better, for ever.

All three dieases are the unexpected side effects of us and our fellow commensals scrambling to adjust to a micro change in our body's environment.

Just as global warming today is making all of the world's commensals scramble to adjust to a macro change in our environment.....

@arcadianrecord

Martin Henry Dawson - the Commensal Doctor

Martin Henry Dawson 1896-1945

S. Pyrogenes/GAS Strep/Hemolytic Strep - whatever you call it, this bacteria is usually regarded as the single deadliest pathogen we humans face over our lifetime.

This is because the list of fatal diseases it is implicated in runs into pages and can involve almost every part of the body,in any age group , in any part of the world.

Paradoxically, S. pyrogenes is only found in humans - it exists no where else - and usually lives peacefully - more or less - in our throats, as it has for millions of years.

It hoes a narrow row - but it hoes it deep and long - it can outwit anything our body or our mind's invention can put up to remove it, as it struggles to get by.

Martin Henry Dawson spent 20 years (all of his tragically short life as a scientific researcher) also hoeing a narrow row, deep and long.

He tried always to remain focussed on one area: the consequences for both of us, human and oral strep, of co-sharing one body so intimately all of our collective life.

A rarity in his day, he tried ,as a medical scientist, to see our body from its bacterial flora's point of view: to study how they wiggled and twirled -genetically- as they struggled to survive in our body's hostile environment.

Some bacteria is only 175 billionths of a metre "tall" - that means the body of an adult male is exactly as big to them as our Earth is to us - they aren't in any way aware they are 'invading' a body - they see us only as a vast hostile & lush world.

Early humans also didn't know they lived in a tiny part of a big sphere of rock that in turn only made up a tiny part of the entire universe - they saw no further than area immediately around them.

It is always worth recalling that we are actually 90% them and 10% us, if you count the number of bacterial cells on us, versus all the cells of our internal organs.

Without any of us, they would quickly die in hours - without them, we would die in a few months.

We must co-exist together, diners at a common table - commensals as a biologist or theologian would say.

Dawson never used that term as far as I know ( he died, after all, in 1945, before the word came into common use in medical or religious circles), but he lived his life as if it was the central core of his being as a scientist.....

@arcadianrecord

If History is written by the Victor, then the history of World War Two has never been written...

... because the victor can neither read or write.

But histories can be written that reflect the point of view of the victor and these are now being written,albeit a bit late - sometimes more than 75 years after the events they describe.

I can recommend Allan Tooze (WAGES OF DESTRUCTION) and Mark Mazower (HITLER'S EMPIRE) as a good places to start.

I think - and I hope -that my account of The Manhattan Pilot will be one of those victor - oriented histories.

@arcadianrecord

Dr Harry Haiselden, "The Black Stork" doctor

About a dozen years ago, I read Professor Martin S Pernick's book, "The Black Stork", which I consider the best single account of the eugenics movement that I have yet found.

This, despite the fact that the book is ostensibly only about a small forgotten footnote to the overall story of Eugenics, which covered a century in time and and had powerful support in all continents.

I read it, as I said, a dozen years ago - before I had 'always on' high speed internet and before Google.

Now when I read, I constantly go to my laptop and onto Google to expand on points of interest.

This week I started re-reading The Black Stork and went to Google after quickly - too quickly ! - looking through the book's pictures and not seeing a single portrait of the subject of the book - Dr Harry Haiselden.

Google seemed to have none of Haiselden either - though his story is on many websites on eugenics, ethics, the disabled, etc .

I thought how hard it was to write a biography of someone long dead, who you never knew, without a lot of good photographs .

It helps you feel that you can see into your subject's soul through their eyes, I suppose.

I was thinking mostly of my own subject, Dr Martin Henry Dawson, but also of Professor Pernick and his subject, Dr Haiselden.

I dashed off a quick email to Dr Pernick on this point and settled in to re-read the book.

It is foolish to dash anything off - and these days emails leave no chance to correct things between writing them and popping them in a mail slot a day later, as old fashioned paper letters allowed.

Of course, in a half hour I had remembered enough of Haiselden's story to realize that he had played himself in his famous film , The Black Stork, cast as Dr Dickey, ( a name from his mother's side of the family).

He was unnaturally attached to his mom and hated his dad .... and possibly hated having to carry his dad's name as well.

So we actually had a dozen photographs of Haiselden -- as poor quality movie frames - in the book and on Google - just not labelled as such.

Just now, glancing through the book's photos more slowly, I realized I had made a further mess of it .

The famous newspaper 'two head' photo of the mother (Anna Bollinger) of Haiselden's first 'victim', did not include her spouse as the other person in the picture, as I had assumed.

Instead, it was her doctor - Haiselden.

I had glanced through the centre photos in the book far too quickly, before settling in to read Pernick's sophisticated arguments.

But I think I made an interesting mistake.

Conventionally, such a 'two head photo' in such a story would be of the two parents, with the doctor in a separate shot - perhaps with his patient.

I am thinking of the pictures of Baby Patricia with her two parents, filling newspaper pages all over America, in August and September 1943 and again in 1944.

In the case of the Bollinger baby being 'encouraged' to die at birth by Dr Haiselden, mom and doctor seem to be the only two people worth photographing, in the eyes of The Chicago Daily Tribune editors.

Clearly we might think that in 1915, society regarded the fate of children severely handicapped at birth as a matter for the mother mostly - with neither her spouse, family or priest/minister to help her make her decision - that was for a scientist cum doctor.

But this editorial decision on the part of the Chicago Daily Tribune may have simply reflected their industry's efforts to cement daily newspaper reading among women, the major buyer of the goods advertised in daily papers.

"Women's Pages" and Sob Sister stories were very much part of this effort - and we might so view this unusual decision to leave the dad out of the photo, in this light.

My point is we just don't know, from a position ninety five years later - either or both position are tenable.

So, at the top of this blog entry is a cropped photo of the very good looking (but never married) , bundle of contradictions, Dr Haiselden.

Then below, the original full photo of him along with Anna Bollinger....

I'm off to eat crow and apologize to Dr Pernick !

@ArcadianRecord

"By stubborn,Stars we steer" : much depends on a comma

The famous American poet , William Carlos Williams ("The Red Wheelbarrel"), never actually said "much depends on a comma", but he might have, had he seen my haiku-like poem (above).

Due to the technical requirements of URLs and of blog tags, I can't actually put the correctly written-out poem in my Dawson project's URLs or in an Arcadian Recorder blog tag.

Instead it comes out, uncapitalized and minus the all important comma, as "by stubborn stars we steer".

The implied sense is "by stubborn stars" "we steer" .

Totally,totally, totally wrong.

It all begins to sound like Nova Scotia poet Kenneth Leslie's most famous poem ----- "By Stubborn Stars" .

"I shall sail by stubborn stars". He is saying,' shoals look out, I won't be re-directed and if I must drown as a result so be it'.

Poetry yes, but not, to my mind, poetry with the subtle restraint of haiku, where the reader's mind must fill in the gaps.

But my poem is not a 'in-your-face' haiku either :

"By being stubborn, Stars we will steer" - slapping you on the shoulder, shouting 'get it ? get it ?'

I think it is a fitting poem to sum up the spirit that drove Dawson and his tiny Manhattan Pilot project team, from 1940 to 1945 and onward to the final widespread acceptance of his pioneering vision.

(Though that complete acceptance did not come until after Dawson's tragically early death in April '45).

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Black Day in June/July/August - the summer of '43

The Summer of 1943 was exactly* half way through 'The Good War' (if you were American); if you were European or part of the British Commonwealth, it was exactly 2/3 of the way through the not-so-good-war.

(And to the Chinese it was half way through a twenty year terrible war; to the Vietnamese, the beginnings of a 50 year endless war, etc etc - but I do digress....)

Take a moment and try and recall what you remember of that summer - either because you were there the first time - or from what you have read or watched on TV since then.

A bit of a blank ?

How about this : the military-led 'Zoot Suit' (anti-Latino) Riots in LA.

Strikes and riots over blacks being allowed to work in Mobile Alabama shipyards coupled with white riots against black soldiers stationed in Deep South or South Western Army camps.

The Detroit race riots in the Arsenal of Democracy/Arsehole of Democracy - with a death toll of 34 dead.

The embarassing Harlem riots (& resulting curfew) of August 1-5th in the city that was by far the best of bad bunch for civil liberties in 1940s America .

A riot that occurred exactly one week before the Baby Patricia media-puffed 'good news' story emerged from the same riot-damaged neighbourhoods.

The feel good emphasis on World War II as America's one good war has led most historians - popular or academic - to ignore the origins of the moral nadir of that most moral of all American wars .

Hiroshima 1945 was foretold in the way that mainstream America responded to the pressures Total War Mobilization efforts put on a society a few years earlier.

Like its opponents in Germany and Japan, America in the 1940s was organized around a culture determined not to let most of its citizens to participate fully in anything.

And like Hitler and Tojo, Mr WASP America wasn't prepared to change those rules , even at the cost of perhaps losing a Total War.

The clash came to a head in the summer of 1943 and it didn't really play out ( if in fact it yet has) until a child of miscegenation became the President of the United States early this year....

* If like many Americans, you date the start of WWII for your country from the September 1941 USS Greer incident - the first shots fired by Americans on the Axis forces.

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