Our monoculture of "BIG" is killing us and our only home - Earth

As was the case (on both sides) during WWII, we live in a (human) monoculture that worships the BIG and dismisses the small , despite the fact that Nature itself hardly reflects this scenario, in fact, much the reverse.

We do so because our powerful and elderly (the two conditions are often related) still support the values of their teenage to young adult formative years under the Late and not so Great era of Modernity.

Modernity's proponents felt it was inevitable that the "fit" ( ie the BIG and the ponderous) would inevitably have all the innings ,all the time, against the small and the nimble.

Today more and more of us younger folk are leaning into the values of post-Modernity, which shows an increased receptiveness to diversity , variety , the local and the small.

But will death take out the Modernists in our midst ( those deniers of any limits on the abilities of the BIG to laugh in the face of Nature's worst), before they take us all out ?

It is a grim race against time  --- which is why I think it is worth re-examining the last time Modernity and the BIG really got sand kicked in their face : WWII ....

Modernity's K-selected eugenic monoculture

If we limit our understanding of K-selection to an old high school biology class, of eugenics to what the Nazis did (75 years ago) and of monoculture to what North American farmers are doing today , we will miss this trio's intimate connection to that old old old peasant's adage : 'never put all your eggs in one basket' .....

Restoring the small , to a monoculture of the Big, 1939-1945

As a moral argument it was very old , with lots of powerful support still.

Maybe not an argument as old as Methuselah, but surely as old as Jesus.

But as a scientific argument it was quite new, without any influential scientific supporters.

It argued that there was no hierarchy of worth in biology based on bigger size or greater physical complexity : big and small were but equal variations on Life, each cast to better fit particular niches.

And it said that that, strictly speaking, the small were much more successful than the big in terms of sheer survival --- the only criteria that biology, rather than ethics or theology , could legitimately measure .

They been around  much, much longer, had vastly greater numbers of individual members, inhabited more niches and had survived all the worst disasters that Nature had thrown life on Earth, unlike the Big.

The biological sense of the survival of the fittest for each particular niche had morphed , by the 1930s, into the belief that it was the survival of the fit ( one size to fit all niches), with fit being code for big and powerful.

The small, human and non human , were becoming seen as losers and a waste of space  - life unworthy of life.

Henry Dawson joined many many others in opposing this idea on moral grounds.

But he was basically all alone in contesting it scientifically, based on what he had discovered in his small lab.

He was far too cautious a personality to be successful contesting the opposing vision by mere words.

But his is a biography of deeds --- against all odds, he succeeded in fatally shattering that vision.

He did so by simply embarking on an attempt to save the lives of just ten people, over the opposition of his own colleagues, his own wartime Allied government and his own failing body.

But thanks to the quixotic effort that Dawson began in 1940, ten billion of us, so far, have had our lives immensely improved : Bread cast Upon Waters, indeed !

WWII : an EUGENIC war , on both sides - nay, all sides

A truly moral Nuremberg Trial would have considered the war conduct of the Allied and Neutrals, as well as that of the Axis...

Now it is well known that Germany spent its second world war preoccupied, not with winning the military war itself, but with eugenically killing all the 4Fs it could find and then tossing them in open pit graves or into furnaces.

(Cite here the Holocaust, Aktion T4 and the Hunger Plan.)

Eugenic Triages from all sides of WWII

Less well known is the fact that the Allies and the Neutrals were also preoccupied with matters eugenic in the midst of an all-out military war : in this case, a steely determination to avoid killing any of their 1As if they could at all help it.

Naval blockades, aerial bombings and denying the spreading of information about new life-saving medicines and pesticides were the ways the Allied hoped to avoid engaging their 1A young males in hand to hand combat with 1A males from Germany, Japan and Italy.

The British scientists and the military had been united as one with British politicians is disclaiming any need for British troops to invade Germany to fight German troops there.

Britain declared war on Germany at the beginning of  September 1939, but it was not until the sixth year of the war and during the last months of the
European part of that war, that British 1A males finally engaged in deadly combat with 1A German males on German soil.

(The whole war might have ended in months not years, if only the vastly larger manpower pool of the French and English empires had been conscripted into a ground army intent on invading western Germany while the bulk of her army was in the East , invading Poland.)

Instead, they said, naval blockades and aerial bombings and denying new lifesaving medicine would kill enough women, children and elderly in Occupied Europe and Germany to make the young male German 1As want to voluntarily surrender, far in advance of any British invasion with ground troops upon German soil.

Of course, the Neutrals did the best eugenic job of the lot in preserving their own 1As and not diluting them with any 4F gene pools.

They did so by (A) not joining the effort to defend the weak and the small and the innocent and by (b) not letting any of the weak/small/innocent into their countries as hapless refugees.

The dysgenic myth of WWI

It was claimed by avid eugenists during WWI (and by most educated people after the war ) that only the best had died in the Great War while back home the cripples and mentally deficient had breed like rabbits.

No evidence was put forth to support either of these claims - it seemed so common sensical.

In fact by the end of it,  the Great War had killed millions of men who either had been or would have been rejected as 4F material at the start of the war - a war this big cut a wide swath through all men with two legs, from 18 to 45 , in most combat nations.

And the evidence shows in fact that the physically and mentally challenged people around the world and through all the ages marry less frequently and have kids less frequently than the average population.

It is pretty hard to marry and raise a family without first having a steady well paying job  - as most of us who are physically and mentally fit already know first hand.

How much harder for those with mental or physical challenges ?

So, absorbing this false lesson , all the post WWI world's elites sought to avoid wars where their 'best' took on the 'best' from a nation of equal or greater demographic and military power.

This didn't mean no more war - it just meant that post WWI nations tended to attack nations smaller than themselves or to invade countries bigger than themselves that they thought were divided internally or were inept as warriors.

So Germany and Japan invaded Russia and China under reason one, while Japan attacked America under reason two.

And in any and all cases, nations tried to first win wars by killing or terrifying or starving/freezing the civilians of an opposing nation of a size similar to their own, rather than in engaging in direct combat with that nation's armed forces.

But because eugenics was invented in the victorious Allies's nations and only later taken up by the Axis and Neutrals, anything vaguely universally eugenic about the whole war was strictly excluded from consideration at Nuremberg - only crimes unique to the Axis were considered crimes against humanity.

Trust me on this one, every school child one hundred years from now will know WWII to be an eugenic war from push to finish - and on all sides ....

Henry Dawson as the Margaret Atwood of medicine : heterogeneous survival

Margaret Atwood made famous the old quip that  Americans want to leave the wilderness a success, while Canadians are merely grateful to leave it a survivor.

Henry Dawson, a Canadian doctor, encountered this for real when he went to New York to work among American medical scientists who expected him to focus on virulence in bacteria.

These are incredibly tiny , often immobile, beings who yet are successful in attacking their human hosts and frequently even kill them , despite the army of human medical opponents ranged against them.

In the alpha male world of medicine circa 1940 , virulence = success.

But Dawson was more interested in how these tiny beings persisted in surviving with, on and in us  , despite our bodies' best efforts to detect and kill them.

Because virulence is very much a two edged sword for bacteria : it may kill the host and then where do the successful bacteria live ? 

Or it might provoke a counterattack on the virulent bacteria that kills all of them but ignores their non-virulent kin.

Dawson seems to have been agnostic on the whole division between virulent and avirulent : merely seeing endless varieties of sub-strains among his chosen area of focus : oral commensal strep bacteria.

His team (as well as others) gave the different appearing sub strain bacteria colonies letter descriptions : R , S , L , M.

His team members later went on to study others that have been given names instead, such as vegetative/biofilm, dormants and persisters.

R were rough in colony appearance and didn't seem virulent in many species - unlike the smooth looking  S colonies, while the mucoid M were very virulent in some species.

R had normal bacterial walls, but S and M also had extra jelly-like capsules that made them harder to eat by our white blood cells, if they got in our blood system.

To over-simplify , R forms, because they lack a thick jelly cover , do much better at clinging to our throats and surviving long term by being low key and avoiding entering our blood streams.

L forms ,named after the Lister Foundation in London where they were first discovered, are wall-less. 

The strong but flexible wall of a bacteria (a wall beyond the sack like skin that all cells must have to be a cell ) is usually considered the secret to the bacteria world's successful survival as Life's oldest and most widespread form.

So a bacteria without a wall is a real curiosity - it seems to survive in places of calm where the water around it doesn't suddenly get very salty or very un-salty (to describe vital things osmotic as simple as possible ).

Its lack of bacterial wall even fools the human immune system into considering it not a harmful microbe but rather a part of us.

That film of bacteria we can easily feel on our unbrushed teeth is a biofilm .

When it lands on our previously slightly damaged heart valves, it becomes bigger and harder (literally heart valve calculus) often called a vegetative form and in both cases, provides a safe home for various types of bacteria and their sub strains.

We could call them B or V type bacteria.

Dawson started studying them when he started his pioneering use of penicillin to cure vegetative type endocarditis.

Some sub strains, his team members were the very first to discover in 1942, are naturally slow growing and survive antibiotics because they normally only hit bacteria that are actively growing.

These P types are called now called persisters and they make both teeth bacteria type endocarditis and TB truly awful diseases to fully conquer.

Others deep inside the biofilms don't grow at all normally and are called dormant (D type).

They will happily grow when the normal bacteria population closer to the surface of the biofilm have all been killed by antibiotics , leaving more food for the dormants to eat.

Wow : R,S,M.L,V,P,D forms --- where will it all end ?

Who knows?

The point Dawson was trying to make was that bacteria weren't really invaders, seeking only to enter Man to kill him, but extremely tiny creatures to whom a human adult body was literally the same size to them that the Earth is to us.

They saw us merely as home - just as we regard the Earth .

Yes a sometimes comfortable and sometimes hostile home - just as Earth often is to us - and seemingly they survived life's ups and downs by being 'careless' in their eugenic practises, as least as seen by eugenically-minded humans in the 1930s.

There were, in fact, no perfect pure bacteria clones ---- nothing an Aryan superman would recognize as perfection --- instead they shockingly seemed to tolerate all kinds of cripples and defectives in their population.

Because as the environment varied, what was a defect one day (slow growing or no growing, no capsule, no wall) was a means of survival the next day as the formerly virulent fell like ten pins all around them.

Dawson didn't dismiss the 4Fs of the bacteria world as "useless mouths and life unworthy of life" anymore than he later didn't dismiss the 4Fs of the human world either.

Dawson's close examination of how messily but effectively Reality really works proved much more accurate than all the armchair theories of the purist scientists, like Hitler or Einstein....

Dawson's Follies...

... have improved the lives of ten billion of us , so far.

Dateline Manhattan : Something green and life-nurturing is brewing down the mean corridors of wartime science...

In the stereotyped description of  the biggest teaching hospitals of the mid twentieth century, there is always a strict hierarchy cum pecking order of prestige, power and authority.

At the top were the surgeons, particularly those who had combine high technical skill with the cool ability to save lives under very rushed emergency conditions ; brain surgeons operating on newly discovered operable brain tumours probably being at the top.

At the bottom were the staff in the hospital's day or outpatient clinics, dealing with chronic non-life-threatening conditions - aging-related (osteo) arthritis patients being the classic example.

Henry Dawson was the director of one such arthritis day clinic, at New York's world famous CUMC (Columbia University Medical Centre).

But this clinic work was not the reason why his bemused colleagues referred to his 'Follies' , far from it.

His was a pioneering clinic and he was a nationally and even internationally respected expert in arthritis, well regarded for his common sense caution over the possibility of  quick cures.

Not much for a prior hypothesises, he preferred the naturalist's method of gathering all sorts of data from hundreds of cases, to see if any common 'tendencies' emerged.

No, it was Dawson's private (non-day job, non-grant approved) scientific interests that bemused or angered his fellow medical scientists.

A traditional boon granted to the staff of hospital labs was the right to work on their own private research projects on equipment and in lab corners not in current use.

A boon usually available to the staffer in his off-work hours : evenings, weekends and holidays (hence the term EWH Research).

His day job bosses didn't directly oversee this research if the staffer had something like tenure and nor did senior members of the discipline ride shotgun on it by controlling the issuing of grant money, as is done today.

Nevertheless , the hope was that while this private research might be on the fringes of conventional science, its aim was ultimately to be useful.

And here Dawson seemed to have crossed some sort of line.

He was seen as being too interested in both avirulent commensal bacteria and in avirile 4F patients.

An applied scientist if there ever was any, a medical researcher was expected to be only concerned with virulent pathogens , ones that actually could kill or harm patients.

'Best leave the study of avirulent bacteria to the basic scientists in university biology departments'.

And so between the Spring of 1939 and the Winter of 1941 , the medical elite in America steadily moved staff and money away from the New Deal's emphasis on social medicine - helping to heal the avirile 4Fs in society - towards medical research directed towards helping 'our soon to be fighting boys' (the virile by definition 1As from the draft boards) .

This elite, being mostly Republicans sympathetic to popular eugenics and thus privately and publicly hostile to FDR's social medicine, they eagerly welcomed using the excuse of preparing for the upcoming war to shift emphasis away from this silly 'socialized medicine' stuff .

And they even had FDR's backing , as he publicly said he was no longer Doctor New Deal but now Doctor Win the War.

But Dawson's comeback was that using the excuse of 'war necessity' to throw the weak under the bus was exactly what Hitler did (in his notorious Aktion T4 program) and weren't we supposed to be opposed to his values ?

So his bosses grumbled and restrained but his not stop the work of this respected tenured polite member of their staff.

In the end he was forced to use the corridors of his hospital to house the five gallon bottles of agape penicillium he had brewed up.

But he still could extract enough under these conditions so hostile to the production of penicillin , to treat his pioneering series of  '4Fs of the 4Fs'.

These were young men with subacute bacterial endocarditis (the invariably fatal SBE that tended to befall the survivors of the then endemic Rheumatic Fever) that wartime medicine had directed should be 'code slowed' into an early grave.

Himself dying from an autoimmune disease, Dawson kept at it, in the face of the overt hostility of his colleagues.

Eventually, ordinary GPs, patients' families and ordinary journalists all "ACTED UP" on behalf of his project to see  that wartime penicilin  was made available to all those dying who could benefit from it.

Dawson died as the European part of the war was ending but not before knowing his tiny EWH project had changed world history.

Ten billion of us, to date, can only agree ....

The purist science...this side of Heaven : fabricating the scientific canopy

As a Christian may I quickly say that I prefer my atheists to lose all of their religion, not just some of it.
Replacing a transcendental God with human gods cum masters of the universe cum lords of the human kind , is to combine the worst aspects of religion and atheism, with all the good bits of both left out.

When scientific discoveries (made out in the field by dirt-on-the-hands science) destroyed what Peter Berger calls the sacred canopy for most people in the western world , theoretically oriented scientists (natural philosophy indoor types rather than the dirt-on-hands natural history types) set about erecting a scientific canopy in its place.

This immediately set up an internecine war within science.

Because, after all , hands-on science had just discovered about how complex, dynamic and intermingled Reality really was, and this was the direct and immediate reason for the decline in the public belief in a simple, predictable, stable cosmos set up by a clockmaker God.

So to immediately claim, without proof , that a few fundamental laws in fundamental physics had been more than enough to create our simple, predictable, stable cosmos together with all human culture, might be thought to take a great deal of chutzpah on the part of the theory boys.

But such is the basic human need to believe that Life and Reality are simple and orderly and purpose-driven , it must be said that the theory boys had all the initial innings.

That is , until 1945 or thereabouts....

WWII : pure science collides with impure reality

If anyone learned the key science lesson of WWII, it wasn't the adults of the day.

Rather that science lesson was partially absorbed by children born in 1938 and afterwards , children too young to share the glow most in the Allied world felt about the supposed leading role science played in defeating the Axis.

I say partially because wartime science was generally blamed by these young people only for deliberately  promising and then succeeding in killing as many people as it possibly could possible , particularly killing as many civilians as possible.

When its actual biggest scientific and moral failures were for what it promised both sides during the war but then didn't deliver.

Sins of omission rather than sins of commission.

So bad efficient science merely replaces good efficient science in the baby-boomer academics' eyes, when a more accurate and devastating charge is to say pure science was, and is always, overwhelming inefficient.

As it must be, as long as it continues to deny that reality is inevitably and invariably dirty , mixed , intermingled and impure.....

1939-1945, as a cure for overweening science ...

"The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly." - Abraham Lincoln 

In the end, it turned out that the only way to clip modernist science's wings were to let it fly : WWII was modernist science's first and thankfully, only, world war it fully commanded.

If  'commanded' is the right word for what actually transpired.

What an unholy, immoral, mess it was, too.

Six years later, even the partisans of modernist science cum scientism must have felt a bit more humble (though they never really recanted, not even on their deathbeds).

But fortunately, even they must eventually all die out and the generation after them, born 1940 or later, never really bought into modernist science's hubris-filled visions.

The period 1945 - 2015 marks a period of transition : the men of scientism gradually aging and gradually tiring of the game while the new generation gets bolder and bolder in denouncing the earlier generation's utopian visions.

What comes after , Heaven alone only knows....

People born between 1930 -1938 probably rare as PMs or Presidents

Try out my thesis in the case of your nation's PMs or Presidents - you'll probably find lots of national leaders  born before 1929 or after 1939 but the decade in between seems to have gotten skipped.

Look at two of Britain's more recent Labour PMs : Callaghan born in 1913 followed by Blair born in 1953  --- a 40 year spread !

No wonder then that the socialist Callaghan supported the maintenance of the British empire while the centrist Blair (and his conservative opponent John Major) did not.

They were simply generations apart.

I think the reason for the absence of those born in the 1930s is because they were either too young to convincingly support WWII's values from personal experience and too old to convincingly oppose WWII's values from lack of any personal experience with it.

And I think the key date in the changeover was 1990 : a date by which virtually all WWII veterans had to have retired from powerful positions at the top of the workforce because they had reached 65 .

Also a year when baby-boomers too young to share the war hype finally were old enough to be taken seriously as the national leader.

A baby-boomer, in my definition, is someone who is more exercised by why the Allies did so little to prevent the Holocaust (a story revealed post 1945) than they are emotionally stirred by stories of the Battle of Britain and Dunkirk of 1940.

I think you'd have to be born in 1929 or earlier to really get caught up in the emotional high of 1940's Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain --- only a few children in 1940 who were younger than ten would really understand what all the fuss was about.

A person born in 1935 (a tweener) was simply both too young for the Dunkirk spirit and too old for the Woodstock spirit...

1943 : Africa's poorest get penicillin BEFORE well-to-do in America and England

Not, admittedly , a headline you're ever likely to see soon above mainstream (ie , American and British) penicillin histories , but that doesn't make it any less true.

George Marshall Findlay (1893-1952) , together with Kenneth R Hill and A MacPherson, brewed up his own crude penicillin in 1943 to apply upon the open ulcers of the dreaded disease Yaws on West African sufferers and got great results.

He had to do it all himself because Britain and America were too busy fighting over how to divided the world into two big markets after they had synthesized penicillin to actually make any serious amounts of (natural) penicillin to save lives in the here and now*.

*here and now : aka WWII.

America ,as is well known, has a pathological resistance to ever signing international treaties but there it was , in the middle of an all out war, negotiating a international treaty with Britain on the post war market division for their shared patented synthetic penicillin.

The two planned an exclusive on the lifesaver even tighter than they planned to have on the A-bomb.

That meant no encouragement of natural penicillin plants in Africa, South America, India and East Asia .

The Anglo-American fear was that in these places ready access to very cheap labour and even readier access to cheap sugar cane waste (as a carbon source feedstock) would permit the local crude penicillin to undercut the price of profit-inflated synthetic penicillin shipped in from thousands of miles away.

But penicillium spores are like the A-bomb's radioactive fallout clouds : no respecter of national borders and international commercial treaties.

They drifted in and out of Britain and its distant colonies alike and that meant crude penicillin could be made everywhere under cottage industry conditions.

(Even at the battlefront in Italy by barely trained Canadian medics using potato washings as a feedstock !)

"All Life is Family" Pt 1. (1939-1945: a cure for science) , will detail all the world-wide WWII efforts to make crude penicillin that it can find.

All this in an effort to combat the Whig history of wartime penicillin that strongly suggests that the actual end result - cheap abundant natural penicillin - was what the Anglo-American governments and their medical cum scientific cum commercial elites wanted all along.

It intends to bring the dreaded "C" word into science talk : conflict , as in conflict between scientists working on the same wartime "side".

And it will detail scientific winners and losers , again both working on the same wartime side.

A welcome change from the zillions of WWII science stories that always seem to show Allied scientists beating Axis scientists in a dramatic race against time - when in fact, the evidence is much more mixed as to who did what first -- and whether coming first ever really mattered.

Yes, the Axis lost the war, but no , it wasn't at all due to their low quality of science.

Seventy five years after the war, can't we stop re-fighting WWII based on propaganda lies ...

1945 : annus mirabilis or annus horribilis for Scientism ?

I have always been fascinated by the Janus-like nature of the year 1945 in its relationship to Science and the undue worship thereof.

1945 was the year that it was widely admitted that it was only the Allies' mild-mannered/white-coated men of modern science who had bested the superior combat skills of the jackbooted henchmen of the Axis and so won the war for humanity.

A good year for Scientism.

But 1945 was also the year that we now conventionally mark the start of post-modern science... and hence marks the end of modern science.

Surely then a bad year for Scientism.

Clearly we have two views on the alleged success of modern science in 1945 - one made at the time and still held firmly by elderly academics and citizens and another made forty years later and just as firmly held by young academics.

One credits it for ending the war on behalf of the morally right side and the other blames it for starting the war and behaving so beastly during it.

All Life is Family , part one and two, explores why it was possible for most of the modernist audience of 1945 not to see the many failings of wartime science on both sides, technical as well as moral, running from 1939 through to war's end.

And why historians ever since have repeated this initial error.

The war is simply never broken out of its narrative mode to present the predictions that each and every participant had made at a particular point in time together with an assessment of whether those predictions came to pass.

Who, for example, predicted that Hitler won't conquer Moscow within four months after June 1941 ?

No one that I am aware of, as Stalin himself soon had his doubts about this capitol's survival - some military 'experts' even publicly ventured that Moscow would fall in mere weeks not months !

Predictions proved about as inaccurate during WWII as they had all throughout history - only this time they were pressed forward with the strong claim that they were backed by the best science.

If so, the best science was wrong, over and over and over for six long years.

And if "All Life is Family" is the first to say so, so be it .....

All life is family : science at War (1939-1945) with reality

During the era of modernity, 1870s- 1960s , politics was science and science was politics , both united around the idea that ultimately physical reality was really quite simple and so should human reality be.

Simple, pure, few/big,slow to change, predictable.

Modernity and its science had never had a war where it could show its stuff, earlier wars being run by the old men who grew up before scienticism replaced religion.

Now there were old men running this war who were teenagers when scienticism was in its fullest flower.

Let the games begin !

But their best laid plans were soon burnt out shells and nobody survived WWII with their predictions intact, as the actual complexity of reality confounded the mightiest and wisest over and over.

Supposedly 1945 marked the apogee of modernist science, winning the war for the Allies etc ( insert A bomb and penicillin here).

In fact it was its nadir , the birthdate of post-modernity , post-modern science ...

"You can't divorce Family" : the failure of eugenic autarky

There are many theories why the world's species all either use "sex between two different but related genomes" or "cloning combined with highly unstable individual genetics" , to reproduce themselves.

This, rather than merely reproducing pure clones of each species' best individual samples , forever and forever.

 But most of those theories boil down to the fact that a highly diverse (dirty) (mixed) population presents less of a static target to incoming diseases and parasites , compared to a select and unendingly stable clone line.

Eugenic scientists everywhere knew all of this, even in the 1940s, but they thought of themselves as the smartest men and women in the universe and just assumed we humans could beat the odds.

But even as Germany tried to institute eugenic autarky during WWII, the worm of romantic love and the attraction between opposites , bit its way into their Aryan apple.

Many an enslaved foreigner and a German woman or a German male occupying troop and an enslaved female from the occupied population ended up falling in love and making babies : mixed babies.

Just as blood studies of Aryan and non-Aryan blood suggested has always happened in times of war, invasion and conquest.

(And no, I am not forgetting children born of war rape .

But remember despite German eugenicists hating this activity and making it among their 'crime of all crimes', it still went on regardless.

As did the equally hated 'true love matches'.)

Yes, the Nazis talked much of blood politics but were in the event forced to keep the results of their own Nazi-directed blood typing studies well out of their public rhetoric.

Because as Rachel Boaz has discovered, those studies totally failed to find pure populations of anyone - friend and foe  - to back up their soil and blood rhetoric.

Interestingly, occupied populations hated the sight of teenage Germans and their own teenagers falling in love and treated these girls and their children worse than they tended to treat the powerful adults who profited so well off collaboration.

We all recall the news reels of girls with shaved heads - they were actually the lucky ones .

Many others were shot outright in the local non-judicial killings that happened just after Liberation in every country.

Purity obsessions don't wear well on German or Frenchman - they should instead admit that opposites attracting does more to keep our species fit than any amount of positive or negative eugenic measures....

Did WII begin when first small nation was attacked or when first big empire was attacked ?

The peoples of the world's last big empires (whether wartime winners or losers) still produce the most books on everything - unfortunately including those on WWII.

They all insist that the war began on the evening of September 2nd 1939, when the British parliament indicated strongly to the wavering British cabinet that the British and French empires should declare war on the German empire unless it retreated completely from its Polish invasion.

But the peoples of smaller nations (and perhaps some of their bolder historians) insist equally strongly that the war actually started eight years earlier.

That war began on September 19th 1931 when the Japanese empire invaded smaller Manchuria unopposed.

Japan and other empires then proceeded to gobble other small nations, unopposed militarily, until September 3rd 1939 when British and French bombers began to hit Germany.

All this matters because it forces us to 'fess up as to what WWII was actually about when it began : not really about big empires attacking small nations (1931 et al) but about big empires attacking other big empires (1939 et al).

So now we know the intentionality of WWII , but we should not correct one error merely to espouse another : that the end results of WWII for any party were anything like what was intended at the beginning by that party.

Most all histories of WWII are literally 'one damn thing after another' with no attempt to contrast what each party in the conflict proposed should happen, week by week and year by year, against what actually did happen.

And by party, I mean to cast my net as widely as possible to include any individual or organization with opinions on the course of the war.

If we see WWII as some sort of multi-party SIX YEAR PLAN and judge its results accordingly, we find that everyone's (utopian cum scientific) plans for the war never ever touched reality even fleetingly throughout its long course....

Science's internecine war : simplifying production science vs complicating impact science

A production scientist, indoctrinated by parents to keep things neat and tidy and to see things as neat-able and tidy-able , grows up seeing his or her job as a very simple one.

"Dig up uranium as cheaply and quickly as physically possible, full stop".

(And what happens afterwards is not any of their business.)

An impact scientist, raised differently, says wait a doggone minute, that uranium was lying beneath the earth's surface for millenniums, not disturbing the endless generations of humans living above it.

It wasn't lying there as a metal either - but bound together to some highly reactive (chemically reactive) compound.

Now the millions of tonnes of rock above the ore body has been disturbed, along with many underground water flows.

That highly reactive compound is now free in the air and water to tightly bind to other materials (maybe human livers) and the uranium metal will have many many diverse effects upon the world it has now been loosened into.

God, the production scientist whines, those impact scientists can make things seems so complicated !

They can do so, because that's the way things actually are.

Just as messy and as impossible to divorce from your day-job, as your or my extended family are impossible to divorce from our home life....

science LOST world war two...

'What ?! Don't be foolish : if historians of all stripes agree on one thing, it is that 'science' won WWII - the freedom-loving Allies simply had better 'science' then did the dictators of the Axis.'

I doubt that all historians think that way.

 I am fairly sure that British historian David Edgerton hardly agrees that mere science , rather than an extraordinary advantage held by the Allies in terms of population, territory and resources, 'won the day' (albeit six long years after the war began).

What I think best describes WWII is that all sides constantly expected one thing to happen, based on their scientific beliefs, and over and over another unexpected thing actually happened.

Let us look at the mid term American elections for what I mean : if ,when asked 'who won' I said 'the politicians' , you'd think me very rude indeed.

'Yes, yes, but who won :  Republicans or Democrats ?'

We expect conflicts , with winners and losers , in almost every aspect of human life - but not in science.

Everything that happened scientifically in the war is simply credited to 'science' , with no sense of the possibility of scientific winners and losers or of scientific conflicts.

1940's Allied plans for precision bombing with the Norden bombsight and the 1945 Allied atomic fire bombing all of civilian Hiroshima merely to burn down its naval base are in 100% opposition to each other - scientifically - but they get rolled up together as just two of the many scientific triumphs of WWII.

Wartime penicillin was delayed for decades by the Allied scientific elites' determination to first make it as highly profitable patentable synthetic penicillin.

But when this failed and the underdog natural penicillin proved the real winner, the academic history of penicillin elided synthetic penicillin from our memory banks, like a Stalinist commissar vanished from a group photo.

Reading the published histories of penicillin, one might think that the OSRD proponents of synthetic penicillin (and the steadfast opponents of the OPRD's natural crude penicillin) had been ardent champions of the natural method all along.

Here are two rival Washington bureaucracies , competing. No surprise surely, but because they are scientific bureaucrats , conflict is denied by science-cheerleading historians and the great triumph of the tiny OPRD is transferred to the mighty OSRD, by implication.

So if the story of wartime penicillin's fierce internecine war is ever to be told, a political scientist, not a medical scientist, is the best person for the job....

WWII : Science at war against physical Reality...

Just because you come across the bodies of a lot of robbers over in the Sierra Madre part of town, this does not automatically mean it was the result of a fight between cops and robbers, good guys versus bad guys.

Sometimes it is nothing more than first a fight between robbers over spoils and then a fight between the surviving robbers and the physical reality of the Mexican desert, with reality biting last.

In terms of their approach to science, all the major combatant empires of WWII thought alike (reality was simpler than it appears)- but they differed wildly - militarily - on how best to divide up the global colonial pie.

However all their collective science efforts soon ran smack into the actual complexity of physical reality and ended up shattered upon it - though almost no one foresaw this ('this' being post-Modernity) at the time.

I think my thesis does a better job than the current historical consensus about WWII in explaining why, if the forces of modernity beat back the fascist forces of anti-modernity in 1945, does 1945 also mark the beginning of the end for the victorious modernity forces.

Pace Schnaiberg : simplifying science vs complicating science

Canadian-born sociologist of Science Allan Schnailberg , in a seminal article from more than 40 years ago, explained-in-advance today's Science Wars , with his proposed division of scientists into those oriented to production and those oriented to studying the impact of that production.

So some scientists are content to merely dig up millions of tons of tar sands to produce oil and never ask what for , while other scientists spend their lives exploring the impact on the world of all that additional air carbon and waste water.

I want to modify his suggestion when I look into 19th century science and technology's paradoxical effects upon modernization and its evil counterpart, modernity.

Because I want to suggest that the random working-out, in all directions, of the collective effect of individual science and technology efforts, was to do two wildly different things at the same time.

One was to greatly advance humanity's simple control over apparent reality.

The other was to greatly reduce humanity's simple control over actual (complex) reality.

Steam ships, lighthouses, radio, radar (works of technology basically : production science) all seemed to make our  predictive control over ocean weather conditions far more assured.

But further weather research (basic science research, impact science) revealed just how complex ocean weather actually was and how unlikely it was that we could ever 100% predict the ocean weather , even three days ahead. 

Nineteenth Century science claimed it was well on the way to finding the one 'Theory of Everything', and soon science would be able to show (reduce) all reality to the effects that a few basic forces have on a few basic particles.

But even if you don't give a tinker's damn about science, ask yourself if there has been a news headline that suggests that science has newly discovered less, rather than more ?

Never, never never : trust me.

The earth is older than thought, as is the universe - which is also much bigger than expected and rapidly expanding. More and more species are always being found, living in more and more extreme environs and Life's start is constantly is being pushed back.

More elements, more isotopes , more basic sub- atomic particles.

More interactions, more complexity, more chaos theory.

Very, very, rarely is ever revealed  that only one faulty gene can cause a disease - it always seems to be the interacting of thirty genes that may or may not give us a statistical greater chance of having that disease.

Ever better instrumentation and more serious research projects focussed on highly particular questions has revealed ,again and again ,that the surface simplicity of reality is false.

So our incomplete knowledge of reality is indeed a dangerous thing ---- as it always seems to feed our ready tendency to technological hubris.

Let us get concrete for a minute : and think about what 19th century fingerprinting was really doing for us.

Yes, it offered us simple control over reality by determining which criminal was actually at the crime scene (hurrah !) but only by suggesting this unexpected complexity about reality : that every human that ever existed has unique fingerprints.

In fact, like snowflakes, fingerprints should have reminded us that universal random thermal noise ensures that everything in reality - from living clones to pure mineral crystals  - is , and must be, subtly different ... if only we look close enough.

Linear and reality live on separate universes : because everything in our universe vibrates randomly and constantly and so zig-zags itself to every new chemical combination at its own unique pace.

Identical twins start off life with the exact same instructions of growth, but within seconds are subtly different as the carefully timed iterations when genes get turned off and on are subtly smeared by the random effects of thermal noise speeding or delaying each competing process.

May I suggest that the Enlightenment Project made a simple but fundamental error in thinking that knowing more about reality was the same as offering up more control over reality ?

Because what really had to be decided was this : was reality simpler than it looked or was it more complex than it looked?

A truly open mind, a mind agape - like that of Henry Dawson - would look to see what the evidence revealed before deciding.

But the utopian (unconsciously fearful of loss of control ?) minds of most Modernist scientists (I am thinking here particularly of the progressive scientist Einstein and fascist scientist Hitler) went into the question already convinced, in advance of any evidence, that reality was simpler than it looked.

Knowing that a person is utopian (ie, believes it is even possible to attempt to plan and micromanage social and economic reality) really tells us very little about their politics, but it tells us a great deal about their physics .

Because they must believe that physical (and above it social) reality is so fundamentally simple and predictable that it is possible to set forth an economic Five Year Plan for an entire nation without worrying that we might fail to foresee a possible earthquake, volcano, hurricane or meter crash .

Let alone considering that a possible war, drought, epidemic or social revolution might make their five year planning goals unobtainable.

Most utopians in fact seek a 'one world government' so confident are they that a few skilled technicians can successfully micro-manage an entire world for years in advance.

So 'simplifying science' is fundamentally utopian while 'complicating science' is fundamentally anti-utopian : hard to avoid a 'science war' with those opposing world-views facing off.

This is why I propose to 'prism' the WWII Florey-Dawson conflict over wartime penicillin development as an early example of a battle in a 'science war' between simplifying and complicating views on ultimate reality.

An enormous 'science war' happening beneath the better known but much smaller military war...

Story-papers : a working definition

A thin, unbound periodical that issues extended prose and poetic works serially and economically.

Let's take apart this concise definition to see what it all means.

Firstly, note the word 'unbound' : almost all newspapers are unbound, while all books and virtually all magazines are bound ; in fact a book must be bound to meet the most commonly agreed definition of being a book.

So unboundness ties into the implied meaning of the word paper (really short for newspaper, rather than also implying a book, magazine or leaflet which are also made out of paper.)

Note the odd pairing of specifying that a story-paper must be 'thin' (many newspapers are quite thick and few aspire to actually remaining thin forever) and yet  also that its only objective is to issue 'extended works'.


A newspaper consisting of folded but unbound pages gets ungainly if it is too thick - most big newspapers are actually broken down into a half dozen sections each the size of an average (thin) small town daily.

So choosing to use a newspaper unbound/folded format rather than staple-bound like magazine format or the perfect bound book format implies a deliberate decision to make each issued portion of the extended work rather small and thus to issue it in stages, ie 'serially'.

This is because breaking a work , that would be very expensive if sold in one volume,  into many small portions is a great way to attract more readers because the price is so small initially and they can try it out before they buy the whole thing.

Hence the word 'economically' stuck in at the end of the definition.

The original story-paper publisher's objective was partly to make more money by this method  but also partly to further the democratization of literature and knowledge.

(Best known for their fiction/entertainment , story-papers also issued much of what we'd call non-fiction/knowledge ---- about the only thing these newspaper-looking objects didn't contain was news !)

All this because newspapers were and are the cheapest form of literature to produce physically.

No expensive binding material or labour costs, no cover at all ( their outer pages are their cover (a so called self cover or self mailer).

And no useless pages at front and back devoted to 'stuff'  that many readers rightly suspect are more meant to pad up a thin book to offer a thick enough spine to be visible , spine out, on a bookseller's shelves, than to aid the reader.

Today's newspaper crams all its publishing details into a tiny box somewhere and starts the main story right at the very top left of the front page in a big bold headline.

And despite the fact that a newspaper's (non) binding is by far the cheapest, it is actually very resilient and will last longer than any hardcover books when repeatedly dropped --- it only loses out in the ease in which a page spread can be removed.

One more thing : a multi-volume biography issued one volume a year on the same month each year for five years, is not a periodical.

Not in the librarian's sense of the word.

That is because the author and publisher intend to see it to have a finite end.

By contrast, a  tiny volunteer-run literary journal may issue its volumes very very irregularly, hardly periodically at all in fact , but because the publishing intent is to go on issuing volumes forever, it is considered a 'periodical'.

As is the story-paper - its publisher sees no end to the issues it intends to release.

21st century story-papers

Personally, I have added a few features to my own 21st century story-papers.

A nineteenth century story-paper was about 14 x 21 inches a page - roughly the size of today's tabloid newspaper.

It only averaged 8 pages in size, But its many narrow columns allowed the type size to be very small yet remain readable and it could easily handle the complete text of a good sized novel.

But it deliberately choose to publish parts of six to eight novels at a time, doling out chunks in each weekly edition, leaving the hero or heroine dangling above some mortal crisis at each weekly climax.

Few readers could resist wanting to buy next week's issue for five cents.

My story-papers will be 8 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches in size, one sixth as big, with my type much bigger (and in one column). So in spite of having 36 pages to their eight, I will only have portions of one extended work in each issue.

Now my size is not a newspaper format, not even in Europe, where some big circulation dailies are issued in roughly 8 x 11 sized formats. (Ie folded from a 11 x 17 printed sheet.)

But most work and consumer computer printers are designed to handle paper roughly 8 x 11 unfolded, which when folded makes up my story-paper's size.

Increasingly , many of those printers print most sides of the paper in one go - removing the need for occasional printer users to remember how to correct orient the second side to print right.

My story-papers will be downloadable PDFs, so the printer will print the work as I intended it to look, without any fussing by the end user/reader.

Most PDFs print out as one vertically oriented page per sheet of paper, from page one to the end.

A newspaper pages are printed sides , two to each side of the sheet and with the last page coming out seemingly as the first , until it is folded and it comes out magically right-reading.

Imposition makes that magic happen and very inexpensive imposing software - I use Cheap Imposter - does it all automatically.

Cheap Imposter not only instantly rearranges an ordinary PDF into any number of printable 'signatures" , it even corrects automatically for "creep" ,  a known minor problem of fold-bound publications.

My reader has only to download and press print on a nearby double-side-printable  computer printer (aka duplex-enabled printer) and presto an instant chapbook-sized (about 36 printed pages) 'book'.

I know that many organizations, from the religious to the poetry minded, already offer free downloadable chapbooks or pamphlets but all I have seen, so far, insist on you stapling them with a special long neck stapler and possibly also printing a separate cover on heavier paper.

I happen to think that all this is overkill that stops most potential readers from making the mini books - I hope my story-paper approach avoids these needless difficulties.

One more thing - the hardest one actually - I wanted economical, trouble free colored illustrations throughout.

Full coverage illustrations like a painting or a photo, use lots of ink - that is expensive, causes smears and paper jams and bleeds through to the other side of the typical thin copy paper.

In addition, typical cheap copy paper ,being soft and open surfaced, renders artwork soft and fuzzy.

So I designed my illustrations so they will all be very simple and all in one plane (think Matisse  - ie composed to spread the objects horizontally) to better suit the resolution limitations of soft cheap paper.

They will be simple thick contour line drawings with a very thin color wash underpainting and blackish pencil or charcoal crayon loosely detailing the shapes over that transparent wash.

I will then pump the contrast, exposure and sharpness in the computer to make picture that will subtly glow with grain and color yet are easily readable even when rendered in a small size on poor thin soft paper.

In addition they will not cost the reader printing them out any high ink costs or trouble with smears and paper jams.

Now my own story-papers are each quite short because of their generous amount of space devoted to their illustrations and large print font.

So they are basically short story like in length and totally free, ie released to the Public Domain.

But this idea could be taken up by other authors and publishers as a way to sell non-illustrated novella length complete works (about 20,000 to 30,000 words) in one go ---cheaply and yet profitably - at a reasonable price of 99 cents to the publisher and  about 99 cents for ink and paper .

We'll see how my idea takes off...

Modernization vs Modernity, made easy

Modernization (aka "Progress") was such things as fast safe comfortable steamships that made it easy for Englishman to migrate to becoming District Officers in northern India or for Indian students to travel to Oxford University.

Modernity was the counter-modernization ideology adopted by both Indians who objected to Englishmen becoming District officers in northern India and by Englishmen who objected to Indians students at Oxford University when they wanted to retain the parts of modernization that favoured them and attack the parts that did not...

So for example, Hitler that ultimate figure of Modernity, loved the fast armoured tanks that could let Germans travel quickly and safely from Berlin to Stalingrad, but objected strongly to the Russians used similar fast armoured tanks built at the Stalingrad tank factory to visit Hitler in his Berlin bunker.

Modernization is a highly inexact word to describe its effects : commensal globalization or global commensality is a much more accurate description because it adds emphasis to the willy-nilly-ness and two-way-street-ness of what was actually taking place....

You can't divorce your family and all life on earth is FAMILY : just get over it

Drug resistant commensal bacteria are just like your mother's kid brother : a pain-in-the-butt uncle but not someone you can really divorce.

Willy-nilly, he's FAMILY - and families are forever....

"Family" just means you can't divorce your mother or brother like you can your spouse or business partner...

I don't want to imply some lovey-dovey view of reality when I say all life is family.

After all, us humans and the lions both want to kill and eat baby lambies, not lie down together with them.

I mean instead, for example,  that we can't divorce the trillions of microbes that live in and on each of us and are in a very real sense, a muddled-up part of us.

Reductionism ,that shared intellectual bond between Hitler and Einstein, simply fails to work as a metaphor of how the world is built up ---- as opposed as to how it looks when we tear it down...

WWII : the dogma of pure simplicity confounded by reality's mixed complexity

Llewellyn Park Refined versus Brooklyn Crude ...

Llewellyn Park New Jersey, home to Merck's CEO, George W Merck, along with many other rich people, was democratic America's first gated community, designed pure and simple to keep Reality out.

Unsurprisingly then that six foot four George Merck spent all of WWII failing to make pure simple synthetic penicillin --- despite mounting scientific evidence suggested it couldn't be done even at a financial loss.

By contrast, John l Smith, the five foot nothing tall vice president of operations at Pfizer, lived in the polyglot capital of the world, Brooklyn NYC, and spent his war quietly accepting that the only penicillin landing on the D-Day beaches and filling grateful civilian and soldiers' veins would be his firm's complexly impure natural penicillin.

Just two of the world's two billion people in the early 1940s, all who had to decide for themselves what to do and what to think when the reality of the war situation conflicted with their pre-1939 dogma about the nature of reality......

A freely available book about one man's struggle to make wartime penicillin freely available

When I started thinking about this project, ten years ago in 2004, I sensed that any book recounting Henry Dawson's heroic efforts to make wartime penicillin freely available to all humanity would itself have be freely available,to be morally effective.

That is, it would have to be released fully into the PUBLIC DOMAIN, to drift about globally like a spore of penicillium, sprouting up on whatever favourable ground it found.

But I also knew that most book reviewers, ironically particularly if left wing or green-oriented,  distain reviewing newly published book that were both free and in the public domain.

(Prolific book reviewer George Orwell, as always, was the sturdy exception : he loved pamphleteers and tractarians, collected their work and did a massive book about them.)

And my chances for seeing the book's inspiring message spread by way of movie or musical or hard cover book also lessened if it was PD.

The producers of such expensive and lengthy productions need to be assured of an secure window for all their time and effort, via a copyrighted manuscript being exclusively optioned to them.

So I hemmed and hawed, back and forth.

But since 2004 the economics of book publishing and of web movies and musicals have greatly changed --- as have the life expectancies of general book review sections and their employees.

A web book or movie can be done far faster and cheaper and appeal to a potentially globe wide audience than its old school counterpart.

And when an item, like penicillin spore or a book text , is in the Public Domain and available for all to take up, the forces of competition can freely play themselves out.

Wealthy and well connected producers settling in to leisurely and extravagantly throw up an expensive product about a hot topic can find themselves outflanked by poorer but hungrier rivals who quickly and cheaply get their effort to market first.

(As when Pfizer's John and Mae's Smith public domain penicillin resoundingly beat George W Merck's wannabe-patented penicillin to the crucial D-Day beaches market ---- and Pfizer never looked back.)

Book reviewing hasn't really disappeared --- there are more scholar books than ever but also more scholarly journals than ever to review them.

Similarly every new author with their first self published romance novelette still finds reviews on the zillions of tiny and not so tiny romance genre review blogs .

Books like my "All Life is Family" always tend to do better anyway when general reporters talk  them up on the general news pages as newsworthy items in themselves.

In my book's case, a mention can be dropped in as "a new book casts a historical light onto the ongoing debate over Obamacare".

General book reviews sections have shrunk or disappeared altogether because they have become small ghettos in overall newspaper readership -- largely because non-genre "literary" novels , poetry, dramas and short stories have lost most of their intellectual cachet and in fact have been reduced to a high brow genre themselves.

No longer does the well educated citizen feel that if they can't read Don DeLillo 's latest Pulitzer prize winning novel ,that they should at least read a long enough review of it to be able discuss it intelligently at cocktail parties.

If the general book reviewer doesn't need me and this book, the feeling is almost mutual.

So, I have finally pulled the plug on the discussion - I have assigned all my rights in my book to the Public Domain and once that is done, there is no putting the genie back....

Repaying, with gratitude, Henry Dawson's selfless act of Agape

Thanks to her genes, my mother and her children never met a strep disease we didn't like and if it weren't for Henry Dawson's selfless act of Agape, it is possible that I won't even be here today.

Grateful ?! Of course, I'm bloody grateful !

Grateful enough to be glad to spend tedious years tracking down the missing history of the man who improved our lives and the lives of ten billion others since 1940.

My mother was born in October 1928, the same time Alex Fleming started messing about with penicillin and the same year Gerhard Domagk started on the path that led to the sulfa drugs.

She was about seven or eight, around 1936, when she got GN (glomerular nephritis) after a case of strep throat.

In children her age, this relatively common auto immune reaction of certain people to certain strains of  GAS strep, only damages their kidneys for a few months and recovery appears to be full.

Prompt treatment with sulfa, then very new on the market, would only have helped if given at the time of the strep throat - an event then very unlikely to happen with any child.

But sometimes with GN the damage left behind is permanent and in certain circumstances leads to a chronic form of this kidney disease.

In 1947-1948, my mother was in newly communist Hungary, studying under extremely impoverished circumstances.

She got sick with GN nephritis again (a condition much more serious in adults) and was given sulfa - and got a severe sulfa allergy reaction and so was taken off it.

The Cold War meant Hungary didn't have much penicillin.

As a result, her kidneys and high blood pressure never seemed to have fully recovered and in fact got worse and worse.

Usually as a result of the extra strain put on her kidneys and blood pressure with each new pregnancy (she had seven).

It didn't help she literally had each pregnancy (except for the last two) several thousands of miles away from the last one, each time with different doctors and no back medical records to check.

In the Spring of 1962, she was dying of acute kidney infection and after throwing everything at her, the doctors tried a single course of streptomycin and saved her life .

She was permanently deaf in one ear as a result (a common side effect) but she never ever complained.

Many, many times she told me , "Why complain - that antibiotic saved my life - if I had died your father would have been left with four very young kids and a brand new baby - and him still a grad student."

I didn't then connect her adult disease with her childhood disease because she never told me - only telling of her childhood disease in girl talk with my partner Rebecca and I believe, my sister Margo or Tracy.

My only known childhood encounter with strep was tonsillitis acute enough that my swollen tonsils so affected my voice that I sounded like I was a midget on helium.

But after they were removed, that seemed to have ended me having childhood strep throat instead of ordinary colds, though it is hard to tell for sure.

But my sister Kathi got the once deadly strep disease SF (scarlet fever), a childhood disease that is very highly contagious.

So the authorities came and put a big black Q on a bright yellow back upon our door to indicate we were under legal quarantine and so no one could visit us and we kids had to stay in our yard for weeks.

Kathi got antibiotics at the time but continued to have severe chronic tonsillitis until her teen years.

She has had serious medical problems all her adult life -- they don't seem to be directly related to her love affair with strep bugs -- but there is still a lot we don't know about GAS bacteria.

Next to meet the streps was my brother Bruce. He too had tonsils big and bad enough to make the doctors want to take them out.

But more seriously, one day he suddenly dropped to the carpet in our Victoria BC living room complaining he didn't feel good.

Rushed to a doctor, it was quickly revealed that he had RF (rheumatic fever) because of his persistent heart murmur. Persistent as in he still has it 55 years later.

RF is still deadly today, still potentially fatal, but fortunately rare - at least in in the industrialized world. But until 1960, it was still the leading cause in the industrial world
of school age children having long hospital stays ,dying or facing a lifetime of potentially fatal heart worries.

Yes, RF not Polio!

 Severe Polio was relatively uncommon and inclined to be a middle class suburban disease, while RF traditional hit the urban and rural poor, minorities and immigrants (the so called "Polio of the Poor").

Just guess which disease got by far the bigger press when I was growing up in the 1950s ?

By the time my mother was born and growing up, dying of RF was less common for kids in urban settings, even if poor.

How it did kill them was the fact that the same permanently damaged heart valves that left their mark with their irregular murmur, also became the attractive home for the kind of strep bacteria that form that unattractive green film on unbrushed teeth.

This much different strep from deadly GAS strep was usually harmless.

But it grew as successfully on heart valves (normally impossible for bacteria) as it did on teeth and its little home on the valves would eventually kill all patients, in a great variety of ways, before Henry Dawson got involved.

It was called subacute bacterial endocarditis but not even doctors ever called it that : it was SBE and spoken of in a whisper or a sigh : as in 'invariably fatal SBE'.

SBE usually started killing former RF patients in their late teens and twenties but it could hit babies and the elderly.

RF and SBE packed quite a punch in both the death and terror department.

This is because unusually, both could come back again and again, each time leaving more damage which only made the next attack far more likely.

Because the deadliest strains of RF and SBE came and went intermittently while strep throats were an inevitable fact of life for child and adult, literally no one was potentially free of falling to this combo until they were safely in their forties.

If my mother had gotten severe RF instead of GN, she was statistically likely to get her first, and usually fatal, bout of SBE in her teen years, during WWII.

The Allied medical authorities around the world ignored the fact that Dawson was curing this hitherto invariably fatal disease with penicillin and proclaim that no one, (potentially including my mother) with SBE was to get penicillin and was to be pretend- treated with useless Sulfa doses and left to die (the notorious so called 'Code Slow').

If my mother had had SBE in Canada during WWII and left to die, I won't have even been born.

But she , thank God, didn't get RF or SBE and I was born, only to get her disease GN, was I was 18.

GN for adults is more serious than for children and my abnormal chemical readings, recorded by a brand new hospital machine on paper with a wet ink pen, were impressive indeed.

The technician told my family doctor that some of values recorded were so literally 'off the paper' that the tech had to shut off the machine for fear it would break.

But the kidney disease seemed to have cleared itself by the time I got to hospital six months later --- just as well , as in adults it can lead to renal failure deaths or permanent dialysis.

Only partly my fault for the unusual delay - but of course as a young teenage male I hadn't gone to my doctor until a month after I first got my sore throat, by which time the bacteria was gone but I had so much edema and high blood pressure that I walked like a very old and sick man.)

Characteristically, I was too cheap to consider a taxi and slowly, slowly,slowly walked the mile downhill to my doctor's office --- and back up the hill again afterwards !

Now, unfortunately, in some cases, GN is accompanied by acute haemorrhagic cystitis in a sort of syndrome - and that will be me !

Severe or mild, this bladder condition, if it is permanent, is a life-altering condition.

I will spare you all the embarrassing personal effects, but if you look it up online, I can assure you I have had them all as described here - though fortunately in relatively minor forms.

Now generally me and my family have survived this family tendency to form auto immune responses to GAS strep fairly well - this is mostly down to the fact that the most virulent strains of this bug were knocked back by the fact that unusually cheap penicillin g allowed people normally too poor to receive treatment to get the antibiotic.

So, finally, the reserve pools of virulent GAS found among poor and isolated populations that kept these diseases endemic or epidemic for millenniums ,were wiped out or severely cut down to a minimum.

So when we did get these diseases , we got a less frequent and less virulent strain and we got prompt antibiotics to wipe the diseases out in ourselves.

But this would never have happened without Henry Dawson's moral cry that wartime penicillin must be made available to ALL humanity.

When the general public bought into his radical un-Republican, un-Conservative notion, a vast potential market opened up and as profit-seeking firms flooded in, ways were found to cut the cost of penicillin G from the equivalent of today's Avastin ($100,000 a year) to a price cheaper than water, literally too cheap to meter.

When dealing with a medicine that cures a contagious disease, a cheap drug is also an effective drug - by curing even the poorest and thus wiping out the traditional reserve pools of virulency, this produces a quasi-herd immunity for all the rest of us ---- free !

Henry Dawson gave his life to save only ten from a heartless government, but ten billion have benefited since.

I think there is still a lesson here for all , 75 years on, for all of us involved in Obamacare-like disputes over why provide health care for those who can't pay.

I hope to offer my book for free, or if that is not possible, at least ensure I don't profit from any book sales.

Selfless ? Hardly - I merely intend to give up any book profits - by contrast Henry Dawson "GAVE ALL" ....