Bottom feeders versus the Chemist in the Age of Progress

When we humans really want to verbally wound another human being, we call them 'bottom feeders' or 'slime' but it is not at all clear, at least at first glance, why these should be so abusive a term.


It is true that some lifeforms, much like the esteemed chemists who practise total synthesis, are greatly admired for making food out of the most basic of small molecules.

Others - like humans - are mere parasites who kill other animals and plants to obtain food (in the case of oysters scooped off the shell, we even eat our prey alive !)

We say we admire this behavior, but only, I suspect, because we feel compelled to publicly love everything about our species.

In fact, most of us would dearly love one day to make all of our food out of rocks, water and air --- and then eat it in the form of little white synthetic pills.

But still other lifeforms, the subject of today's post, are the bottom feeders of life.

They are Nature's bone and rag men, the garbage collectors of the ecosystem, cleaning up our collective mess by consuming dead beings and their excrement.

This feeding activity - saprotrophic nutrition - is absolutely vital to the re-cycling of the strictly limited resources of this Earth and thus the continuation of Life.

(Only daily sunshine and a light dusting of space dust is ever added to this world's resource base. Against this, every day lots of matter and energy successfully leaves this planet's gravity hold.)

It is dirty work but someone has to do, if we are all to go on living in our shiny clean suburban homes.

Nevertheless, because these detritus-eating creatures are often slimy in form and tend to live on dark, dank basement walls or in the dark dank soil, we hold them in particularly low regard : bottom feeders - slime.

Why ?

Go ask the writers of Gothic novels why - I really don't know why for certain.

Perhaps it is partly nothing more than the fact that some adults retain a childhood fear of the dark unknown.

That fear, and another dislike/fear, among those of a conservative mind,anyway, for the 'indecisive in-between liquidness and solidness and uncertainty' of things like mud and slime.

Perhaps though, in all of us, the unpleasant truth that the lifework of fungus slime presents an all too visible indication of the fact that all life ultimately dies.

And that all beauty does not just fade away and dies away but then also rots away.

We seen this Lovecraftian vum Gothic horror on the faces of the film and TV detective and the victim's families every time the loved one's body is exhumed from their grave.

The coffin top opened, the once beautiful child is nothing but an oozing mess of bones and slimy mold.

Maybe that film and TV image alone accounts why most of us so hate the fungus ---- for simply reminding us thus.

Small, weak, stupid, simple and despised ---- why in God's Name, did He allow them - and not the chemist made in His Image - to bring for the divine boon of penicillin ?

Why would He ever make the last first and the first last ????

Jesus Christ Almighty and Matthew 20 --- who knows ?! 

Native penicillin versus Modern penicillin in the run up to Indian Independence

The mere thought of putting native penicillin (basically mold slime excrement) into the human bloodstream just to save a life was anathema to most European and North American doctors in the years between 1928 and 1943.

They preferred to wait, wait until (or if) modern synthetic European-made penicillin was available.

Too bad about your mother, though.

And any European or American doctor that dared to inject native penicillin into white veins, was seen as letting down the side ------ going native.

Losing face.


They couldn't be publicly seen as de facto admitting that the smartest, whitest, most European chemists in the universe can't do what the simple little fungus tossed off so nonchalantly - make this new miracle life saver, penicillin.

Not in front of the women, or the darkies, or the dock labourers.

Won't do, old boy, just won't do.

You'd be blackballed down at the Club.

So native penicillin was not allowed to be made in 1944 era India, from its abundant agricultural waste and very cheap hand labour.

Perhaps that is why today native penicillin is mostly made by the darkies, in places like newly independent India - and then sold at a good profit to the white European and American chemists, all who make none of their own.

Native revenge is sweet - or if not sweet, at least a slightly off-white, slightly bitter, naturally-grown powder....

No one who ever sold VCRs believes scientists who insist complexity equals progress

Confession time : for ten years (1980-1990), the early pioneering years, I hand sold thousands of consumer VCRs.

Our little camera shop (Reid Sweet) also repaired them as well- I never actually did so but I sometimes watched.

A very painful experience is was then, looking inside the guts of early VCRs -- rather like watching sausages being made.

Early VCRs were fabulously big and fabulously heavy and fabulously expensive and filled with many (just barely) moving mechanical parts - a right some pain to operation successfully or repair quickly and economically.

By the end - just before electronic companies switched their efforts to the new DVD players - the VCR was small, light, dirt cheap, almost trouble free --- and had very few moving mechanical parts.

In mid twentieth century comics, incredibly complex machines to do the simplest of things, dreamed up by artists Heath Robinson and Rube Goldberg, mercilessly satirized the Age of Progress's inane belief that greater complexity always spelt greater progress.

Living through the VCR evolution from big complex and stupid backwards to small simple and smart just confirmed for me that while zoologists may have big degrees based on complex research, in their Ladd-ite belief that biologically size matters, they are just as dumb as a sack of bricks.

Maybe dumber.....

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

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

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

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

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

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

So even the deadly elements could be safely left alone.

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

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

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

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

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

The second was another scientific delusion called Biological Progress.

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

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

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

Confounded Progress : a book about "Penicillins, Ancient and Modern"

A book about WWII's warring penicillins, Ancient and Modern

The genes that make penicillin reside today inside members of the comparatively recent fungus family, but these genes actually began their existence inside bacteria, those tiny creatures ancient beyond all time.

Ancient they might well be and simple too, but these microbes somehow do a very, very, very efficient job as chemists.

Again and again they are found to be very rapidly making complicated molecules, in the correct stereo image, and without impurities, at normal temperatures and pressures, without need for heavily built reactor vessels or expensive reagents.

All this not unnaturally makes human chemists jealous and resentful - never more than in the late unlamented Era of Progress, when human chemists were at the very top of the food chain and small stupid microbes were supposed to foot the very bottom.

Together, top chemists and bottom microbes were to support the whole Progressive Era 'scientific/natural' hierarchy that allowed whites to repress blacks, adults children, men women, the healthy the cripples.

All predicated on the claim that Life formed one seamless and vertical 'Great Ladder of Progress'.

A ladder stretching from the stupidest,oldest and smallest to the newest, biggest, smartest white human civilizations at the very top.

So the news that such a very great boon to humanity like penicillin could only be made by the stupidest and couldn't be made at all by the very smartest, threatened this whole tissue of lies.

Which is why that for twenty years (1928-1948) the 'smartest chemists in the universe' sought, in war as in peace, to make an improved modern version of the fungus's ancient penicillin.

They even placed their psychological need to shore up the idea of Progress before the medical needs of millions of dying patients, crying out in vain for any sort of penicillin --- be it ancient or modern .

So much so that when the last projects to try and produce man-made synthetic penicillin finally failed, so, to a large extent, did the very idea of Progress...

Penicillin, as from the Old Testament : capricious to the greedy and the hubristic ; malleable to the righteous

Psalm 51:7 -----  Purge me with Hyssop

To the large (government and industry supported) research teams privately committed to turning natural penicillin into a highly profitable patented MAN-MADE drug with a long shelf life, crude penicillin was a capricious, labile substance with a habit of disappearing as soon as it was produced.

As both their contemporary scientific articles and their later memoirs and biographies made abundantly clear.
Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey, for example, were for once fully in agreement on this accord.

But to the small unofficial clinically-oriented teams solely concerned with saving lives in the here and now, penicillin's reputation for instability was vastly overrated .

One even gets hints that they wondered if this well-publicized reputation of instability was a deliberate lie fostered by people like Florey, Fleming, Merck and the OSRD to keep later competing teams from seriously investigating the wonder drug.

The clinically-oriented teams' contemporary articles found first that the varying PH requirements of the rapidly growing and then hard starving penicillium fungus had to be well regulated, if the penicillin was not to be accidentally destroyed by the fungus itself, as fast as it was produced.

And then if the resulting crude penicillin liquid was kept very cold in a refrigerator, at the appropriate PH for penicillin, it would easily last the few days or weeks needed for it to be used externally or injected via IV/IM drip, on site at their hospital.

Any competent lab tech could handle the whole affair, is how one Australian team described what they felt was the largely routine growing, extraction and storing process.

Amazingly, both accounts of crude penicillin behavior are actually fully correct.

For example, by at least keeping their impure penicillin free of any external chemical reagents, the clinically oriented teams ensured their patients didn't suffer from the many man-made chemical impurities so commonly found in the supposedly purer commercial penicillin !

And they certainly didn't routinely lose most of the crude penicillin - and consume much scarce people-power - trying to extracting all of the harmless water in crude penicillin, merely to later add it all back in again as part of the injection process.

Because one can't inject dry penicillin ----- or dry anything.

Injections need plenty of fluids - basically water dressed up in a fancy name.

And in particular, penicillin works best if very very slowly dripped into a person's blood stream --- that means that crude penicillin is itself already at the right proportions of medicine and water to work well as a slow drip IV or IM.

Impure penicillin is a lot like the impure orange juice that traditionally supplied us with our Vitamin C needs - that tasty fruit juice works at least as well as today's little white synthetic Vitamin C pills do --- and has done so for millions of years.

So what was the reason for the endless mantra (cum lame excuse) of the Allied medical world needing pure penicillin and needing dry penicillin before it could begin to save the dying ?

G R E E D  &  H U B R I S   ---- impure and un-simple.

The only reason why 'pure' penicillin was needed was that pure penicillin is the only form of penicillin that can then be successfully broken down into its constituent parts - and only its constituent parts.

With all - and only all - of its parts known, chemists then thought they could quickly make a patented highly profitable analogue of natural penicillin, much much cheaper than the fungus could.

Americans and the English would hold those patents and then hold the rest of the world to ransom after the war.

But vast amounts of crude penicillin were accidentally destroyed in the processing along the way to yield up a gram or two of nearly 100% pure penicillin.

Then the chemists deliberately destroyed all that pure penicillin, to then look at the resulting constituent sub-parts.

Every one of their many experiments, from start in processing to finishing in destruction, wasted much clinically useful penicillin that could have saved many many precious lives.

Again, for example, briefly in the Spring of 1943 Glaxo was the world's leading penicillin producer - but almost all of that penicillin was then deliberately destroyed in the chemists' fruitless efforts to do something better than stupid little fungus.

Because, yes, old men in white lab coats and sporting PhDs from the best universities, in the middle of a deadly war, are just as capable of indulging in a useless pissing contest as a bunch of teenage louts.

All because they were determined not to let 'stupid' 'simple' fungus (their words) best 'the smartest chemists in the universe'.

Rather than simply buckling down to work with the fungus, as chemists, in an all out effort to make as much natural penicillin as possible - right now ! - to save all the war's dying.

For twenty long wasted years (1928-1948) the world of chemists tried to do something better that the tiny penicillium was already doing perfectly well, before finally publicly admitting defeat.

And the obsession with dry penicillin ?

Well, perfectly dry and hence perfectly stable penicillin was essential if a few huge drug factories were to supply all the vast world's continuing penicillin needs.

Most of the world's penicillin would have to remain viable for months or even years, as it waited to be transported around the world and then sit on warehouse shelfs until needed.

The same reason why most of our food is stuffed with preservative chemicals and shipped in, using much fossil
fuel, from warehouses a world away ----- the greed for seeing all the profits of the food business sit in fewer and fewer hands.

As a Christian, I like to think God took an early private revenge on all these greedy and hubris souls, before a second and more final round at Judgement Day.

Because Man has never been able to commercially best the humble fungus in making penicillin and crude penicillin is still the substrate for 90% of all of today's antibiotics .....

"Stopping the Panzers" - a review of Marc Milner's thesis

As gathered together in large groups called 'nations', none of us humans would win any medals in the eyes of future historians and ethicists for our moral behavior during WWII.

But as WWII individuals and small groups, some of us would definitely win their approval -- but that is a post for another day.

I tend to think of 'bad faith', as opposed to outright bad and evil behavior (bullies like Hitler, Mussolina, Tojo and Stalin spring to mind), as something not done.

Above all, not done by bystanders, as they witness these bullies descending upon the hapless small and the weak.

To take but one example, the whole Allied world generally approved of their forces merely starving and bombing the women, children and elderly of Germany and all its occupied nations.

They clung to the faint hope that this would make the well fed male troops/leaders of Germany quietly give up and surrender without a fight.

About the only Allied civilians fervently demanding that the Allies open up a Second Front in occupied Europe (Right Now ! ) were post June 1941 communist sympathizers.

And morally, they were more concerned about helping the Russian communists than in stopping the long slow bleeding death of most of the urban civilian population of western Europe.

I personally believe a Second Front landing in France in the Summer of 1942 would have been at the French-German border by the end of the Fall of 1942.

But that would have required a wholesale Allied shift in military spending and in conscription practises.

Away from slowly killing Europe's civilians from the air and by sea blockade with a few large expensive machines and relatively few men in uniform, turning instead to a much larger infantry-and-artillery-oriented army, with lots of the best anti-tank guns and shells that money and science could arrange.

A landing in Europe in strength, with plenty of artillery pieces clearly the superior of the German 88mm as antitank weapons (the British 17 pounder instantly springs to mind) and occupying a relatively tight perimeter, would be the anvil to destroy all of Germany's mobile panzer divisions.

One only has to look at the role assigned to Canada's 'gunned-up' Third Division at Normandy, as Canadian military Marc Milner did in his recent book "Stopping the Panzers" to see how this works so successfully two years later.

This obscure Canadian division was given all the American's new self propelled artillery while the Americans were left with slower, less mobile towed guns. And the Third was given far more corp and army level artillery support than normal, together with plenty of big navy gun support as well.

All this long gun power was designed to form an artillery anvil against which the well known propensity of the Germans to launch instant, constant but piecemeal counterattacks by mobile forces was to be the hammer.

It worked like a charm --- the piecemeal Panzers counterattacks totally fail to break open the invasion perimeter.

And when the Allies did break out, there were no longer any big enough German armoured forces left to stop them - the way to the Rhine was wide open !

A war ending in early 1943 in Europe would have greatly reduced the total death WWII count - among Allied as much as Axis and Occupied - and perhaps saved half of Europe's Jews from the gas chambers.

An early invasion was the proper world moral response when it was clear that Germany was killing Jews and Slavs about as fast as it could.

Milner deserves much credit for showing how such an early invasion would have worked in practise : showing that destroying the enemy's capacity to fight, not merely in gaining miles of empty territory, is always and only, Job One in War.....

My current blog is "Upending Progress"

There are 1500 older posts on this blog ("Janus Manhattan's Children") detailing my earlier research discoveries in the dramatic story of WWII's Social Penicillin, aka "Penicillin-for-All".

I am not discounting any of them - they all reflect useful stops along a ten year journey for a researcher and author.

But my current blog on Social Penicillin is now "Upending Progress" .

That is merely because I feel that this new title better sums up my current thinking on the continuing postwar importance of Martin Henry Dawson's efforts.

Yes, he did give up his life during WWII in his efforts to see non-patented inexpensive natural Penicillin made in quantity and made available to all, regardless of the lack of charity that total war produces on all sides.

But in doing so, he perhaps inadvertently helped deal the global hubris of the Age of Progress a truly mortal blow ...

So please feel free to join the discussion about Social Penicillin over at Upending Progress .

Dawson: I've treated pneumonia in the richest AND the poorest

Nothing made Dr Henry Dawson more angry than hearing his more 'progressive' colleagues pontificate on about how the poor were only kept alive because a misguidedly kindly society persisted in giving them the best possible medical care for their bloody pneumonias.

"Out there in Nature, the poor would all be dead".

The famed medical science research centre known as the Rockefeller Institute had a very tiny hospital attached and most of its patients were friends of the Rockefeller family, the equivalent of today's New York City billionaires.

It was Henry Dawson's job for his two years at the Rockefeller Institute hospital to treat the pneumonias of the city's rich and famous with the world's best medical care.

Now he was a clinical researcher at Columbia Presbyterian teaching hospital where many of the patients were among the city's poorest and he treated their pneumonias as well.

So Dawson well knew - contrary to Social Darwinism theories from the medical progressives - that the survival of the people regarded as humanity's 'fittest' was just as dependent on good medical care as were the lives of the poor.

"Out there in Nature, the rich would all be dead as well..."

Social Penicillin : the story of 'Penicillin-For-All'

Was October 16th 1940 the date of the world's first ever injections of social penicillin ?

Well, first, let us consider this question :

Can a hospital system actually make citizens feel sick or feel well, even if they never ever visit in their entire lives ?

On the surface, that seems a very ridiculous question - what earthly good are hospitals if they don't actively try to make sick people better?

But I argue to the contrary.

That, perhaps, over all people and over all their lifetimes, a hospital's greatest value or damage is the sort of moral values it radiates forth, on behalf of the society around it.

If it has a great reputation for serving all equally, regardless of their income, ethnicity, gender or age, if it says 'everyone is valued' - it raises everyone's self esteem.

And it is medical fact that high self esteem, all by itself, is a powerful, cheap and non-toxic preventive and curative medicine.

Or perhaps the hospital is best known for first testing your financial worth before it even tests your blood pressure and is also well known for ill-treating patients, even if they have sufficient income, if they are of the wrong ethnicity, gender or age group.

That sentiment is damaging to the self esteem of the people in those unfortunate groups.

Again, it is a medical fact that the stress of lifelong low self esteem acts to lower our immune response --- indirectly making us, if not actually 'sick', a whole lot 'sicker' whenever we do fall ill.

I believe that History's first ever injections of penicillin, ushering in the Age of Antibiotics, offered no drug-induced clinical value whatsoever to the patients receiving them and that the doctor giving those injections (Henry Dawson) well knew that.

These injections then were not of penicillin-the-chemical-drug but rather shots of 'social penicillin', a phrase I have coined in homage to 'social medicine' .

The very real clinical value these injections represented was in the uplift in spirits it gave to these two young patients and to all others suffering from their disease.

For SBE (heart valve endocarditis caused by Rheumatic Fever) - was a disease their families were always being told was invariably fatal.

And totally resistant to all known treatments, in fact the very Mount Everest or Gold Standard of resistant infectious disease.

Abandon hope, all ye that enter here.

But Dr Dawson believed that three combined characteristics of penicillin ( with only the last being totally unique) would beat the unique set of difficulties presented by this dreaded disease and finally conquer infection's Mount Everest.

That is he knew that (a) penicillin killed strep bacteria readily(b) was small & highly diffusible and (c) was totally non-toxic, even if given in enormous amounts.

Only a recently acquired medical community revulsion against injected crude fungus slime into the human bloodstream had denied this lifesaver to tens of millions of dying patients over the previous twelve years.

Dawson resolved to break that medical taboo, a taboo perhaps even held by the other members in the tiny four person team working with penicillin at his hospital.

Dawson, as a busy ward clinician, was actually the junior member of the team, at least in the beginning.

Karl Meyer, gifted biochemist, together with his chemist assistant Evelyn Chaffee, would destructively analyze the fungus penicillin grown mostly by microbiologist Gladys Hobby and then chemically synthesize artificial penicillin.

Hobby would confirm that both the natural and artificial penicillin indeed had biological activity - testing it on killing microbes.

In the beginning, Dawson would mostly run interference with the hospital authorities, above all in securing rare permission to deliberately grow gallons of fungus, with all their highly mobile spores, in a normally highly antiseptic hospital setting.

Only a planned four months after the beginnings of the project would Dawson take centre stage, when he injected synthetic penicillin into actual patients assigned to 'his' ward.

Now Dawson knew that chemically either natural or synthetic penicillin were equally good at defeating SBE.

But defeating SBE required more than just an effective bug-killing medication ---- SBE uniquely needed simply enormous amounts of medicine, particularly to kill such relatively small amounts of a very fragile bacteria.

SBE bacteria live on the heart's Rheumatic Fever damaged valves, sheltered behind a tough but semi-porous barrier of biofilm (then known as vegetation).

Normally medications diffuse gently and slowly into and around the individual cells of an organ via the incredibly tiny blood capillaries.

And like a lobster trap, once in around the cells it is not that easy for the medication to leave, and the molecules of the drug have a long time to work their magic.

But like ear lobes, the valves of the heart have virtually no capillaries. Yes, they are literally bathed in blood all the time, but the blood surges by them at an incredibly fast pace, as measured in terms of the motion of molecules.

The chances of a molecule successfully diffusing (aka moving via random thermal motion) its way over to the biofilm and finding its way in by the rare small opening in the biofilm, in the millisecond it pulses over the valve surfaces, is near zero.

About as likely as U235 separating from U238 simply by their varying rate of diffusion through tiny holes.

And we all know the trillions it has cost the world to make that diffusion technology work !

But in both cases, brute force technology will indeed slowly win through.

For penicillin, that meant about a thousand steady hours of the constant pulsings of trillions of tiny penicillin molecules a second bouncing their way past the biofilm surface.

The laws of probability would eventually ensure enough made their way into the biofilm's rare tiny holes to kill the bacteria within and end the infection.

In plain english, while a single unit of penicillin might cure an infant from lifelong blindness caused by a meningitis eye infection, easily over a billion units of penicillin today might be needed to cure a particularly stubborn case of SBE.

That a seriously ill patient can receive that much of any medication without any ill effects is why doctors still call penicillin magic.

In October 1940, Dawson could only guess at the ultimate amount of the SBE medication needed for a permanent cure.

But he did know the small amount of penicillin the team had grown in the five weeks since they started the project and its relative strength, by weight, against number of bacteria per a unit of mouse body weight.

He could even compare his figures against similar calculations performed by Howard Florey's team in Oxford a few months earlier.

And as a very experienced bacteriologist and clinician, Dawson was particularly good at converting lab mouse cures rates per weight of medicine into their effective impact on adult sick humans weighing two thousand times as much.

But that was actually for infections by highly virulent bacteria, but in readily accessible organs.

SBE involved very weak bacteria but in very inaccessible locations - perhaps the two conditions could thus be crudely equated.

Still no matter how he sliced it, the penicillin at hand was far far too small an amount and far too weak in strength to really combat SBE.

But on this day, it wasn't really the SBE bugs that Dawson was seeking to combat - but rather it was the moral values of the society around him.

He didn't like the values his hospital and his society was radiating to a world at war - and he sought to change it.....

Dr Henry Dawson goes 'off the reservation' --- and Thank God too !

About ten billion of us, in the seventy years since October 16th 1940, have had good reason to be undyingly grateful for their decision, but there can be little doubt that some of Henry Dawson's senior colleagues went to their graves regretting the day they let this particular Indian off the reservation.

For ten years they had delayed - no 'fast track' for our Henry - content to let him paddle about in the gentle hospital backwaters of studying avirulent bacteria and running a day clinic for people with arthritis.

But finally judging him as harmless as the obscure bacteria he choose to study, they made Dawson an associate attending physician - the equivalent in the biggest elite teaching hospitals of being granted tenure in a university.

They all knew there was still some risk.

No one ever died from mistakes made by physicians studying harmless bugs or dealing with the aches and pains of the elderly arthritic - but now Dawson was to be ultimately responsible for all the fast-paced decisions made on a busy acute care ward.

However the intellectually stubborn but personally very diffident Dr Dawson was not really expected to do anything out of character.

Unfortunately 'character', like so many things in life and pace Stephen Jay Gould, is something best studied as a totality.

Because his oldest acquaintances could have warned them that while indeed Henry Dawson was usually a quiet study, it was also equally true that about once every decade, he tended to quietly throw off the traces and just go for it.

'Sneaky' some said - and he was sneaky on these rare occasions, but sneaky in a cautious, lawyerly sort of way - doing nothing so obviously wrong that you could pin him down for it.

Take today as an example.

To better facilitate America's first ever peacetime draft registration, Columbia University and its allied teaching institutions, among them its flagship Presbyterian Hospital, had declared a day off for teaching and all non-essential medical procedures.

Very few of Dawson's senior bosses were even in the hospital this morning, let alone roaming the wards, performing their normal overseeing of the mid-level associate and assistant physicians, along with the bottom feeding residents and interns.

Later, he insisted to his seniors with the straightest of faces, that the only reason he initiated this undiscussed injection of an untested drug on this day was because it was a very rare day off from teaching and the arthritis clinic and so he could spend a little more time on 'his' ward.

Dawson's mask-like stolid face was always frustratingly hard to read but few of his colleagues doubted that inside, he was secretly grinning from ear to ear.

But in truth, Dawson had even told his three colleagues on this drug project why his sudden decision to break their agreed upon protocol to only inject the new drug four months hence when it undoubtedly would be synthetic, pure and abundant.

For to Henry, October 16th was a date so heavily freighted in personal emotion, he couldn't begin to break his austere Scottish Presbyterian reticence, even to open up to these three close friends and colleagues.

For on that date in 1915, the world's newspaper readers in the overseas world beyond Europe all learned about the execution by the Germans of yet another Belgian, Phillippe Baucq - one of hundreds of hundreds since the dastardly Germans invaded the neutrality of poor bleeding little Belgium.

It was the Germans' betrayal of their own signed agreement not to invade neutral Belgium that had led the British Empire into war against Germany and her allies.

That and the horrors - endless murders, rapes, burnings and sackings - that Germany had dealt tiny Belgium but hadn't dared to do on the much larger French nation it also invaded.

A bully and a coward.

Now Baucq had been executed --- and along with him a gentle middle aged British nurse.

In the context of its time, Edith Cavell's execution is best understood then as the final straw in a long litany for many in the world - particularly throughout the English speaking world.

Hard recruiting statistics confirm that tens of thousands around the world decided moments after they first opened their newspapers that October morning to join up to fight the Germans - many (like Henry) joining the medical corp in open emulation of Miss Cavell.

October 16th 1940 thus marked the twenty fifth anniversary of Dr Dawson's medical career, the day a promising law student threw it all in to become a buck private and medical orderly in a frontline military hospital.

He signed up to help the helpless - originally the poor bleeding little Belgians.

And all through his medical career, he had sought to help the small, helpless and overlooked - in between the wars this was the chronically ill poor, always a very low priority on the big elite teaching hospitals.

The largely right wing American medical community had been generally opposed to America going to war to help the bleeding poor little nations of Europe.

That had been painful enough for Henry Dawson.

But now these chicken hawk hypocrites had suddenly discovered new virtues in the cause of "War Medicine".

This was medicine designed to keeping American's frontline fighting men healthy and 1A, just in case American ever had to go to war to defend itself.

In reality, the conservative medical elites were just barefacedly using the need to divert resources towards war medicine preparation as an excuse to kill the left wing medical community's ongoing efforts to promote "Social Medicine".

These were claims that morally all medical efforts should be directed at everyone, even to the poor and sick (Life's 4Fs), even if they couldn't pay for all of it.

Think of it as what Obamacare should have been, but arriving seventy five years earlier.

October 16th back in 1915 was a date devoted to defending Life's 4Fs - in this case the poor Belgians.

But this October 16th in 1940 was to be a day devoted to registering and honoring all of Life's 1As ---- and towards throwing aside Life's 4Fs.

(Let us not forget that the Nazis only began their killing of the unfit on the very day they declared war in September 1939 - being neither the first nor the last nation to use 'the war' as a feeble excuse to kick the poor and the weak to the curb.)

That registration would even include Dawson's two injection-receiving patients, living under a sentence of almost certain death from invariably fatal SBE endocarditis caused by Rheumatic Fever.

Despite this , the government figured they might just recover - that one chance in one hundred faint hope clause - and hence become suitable cannon fodder.

Dawson knew from his WWI military hospital experience that no army would ever willingly accept a recruit who had had SBE.

These were Life's 4Fs of the 4Fs and extensive care for them, in an atmosphere of preparing for war, was discounted by most of the medical world - they'd be too weak to do useful war factory work even if they did survive.

More likely these SBEs would just consume enormous amounts of scarce medical care and then die anyway --- best then a policy of benign neglect and let Nature take her course.

This was America's variant on the Aktion T4.

Which is why that Dawson so deliberately picked these two 4Fs of the 4Fs - two poor, working class youths, one Black, one Jewish, to usher in the Age of Antibiotics - the two he choose to give history's very first penicillin injections to.

And why he so deliberately choose a day devoted to honoring the 1A to honor the 4F as well.

For twelve long years, doctors around the world had agreed not to inject live-saving but fungi-made yellow slime into human veins, at least not until it was man-made, patented, pure, synthetic.

Now Dawson had let the genie out of the bottle and there was no putting it back - to this very day, penicillin antibiotics are still Dawson's fungi-made sort, not man-made.

With two quiet small injections, mere 'noises off' in a day of high drama centred around America's first ever peacetime draft registration, Dawson fired a moral shot across the bow of a world hellbent on attending to the whims of the mighty and ignoring the cries of the weak.

His shot is still echoing ...

Highly successful scientists are many things --- but being a scientist often isn't one of them

How scientific are scientists-as-a-collective - are they ever scientific ?

I mean on the really really big scientific issues - not as individual scientists dotting "i"s and crossing "t"s along the day to day edges - they do that job perfectly well.

I mean why do they collectively so often badly mis-interpret widely known and widely accepted evidence - or when the evidence isn't known, why do they so often ignore the more probable answer for one much less probable ?

argue this is because the most successful scientists are not those were are good scientists or even good accountants but rather those who are truly great poets ; those with a real gift for crafting metaphors that describes existing scientific data in such a way that best flatters their paymasters.

The most successful scientists are those who are best as singing for their supper, best at singing whatever tune is currently most popular in the society that funds them and fames them.

For my example, let us look back at the scientific claims for evolution displaying a steady linear progress to ever greater complexity.

There never was any real evidence to support this audacious claim, usually submitted as a simple 'fact' during the Era of Progress, or that civilized white European males were its current glorious culmination.

They generally began by positing what they felt was the exact opposite of both "Today" and "Man" ---- bacteria who first saw life 3 billion years ago.

These microbes were and are incredibly tiny compared to Man, incredibly simple physically compared to Man, incredibly slow compared to Man --- so collectively scientists seemed to feel confident in claiming they came from the 'childhood of life'*.

(*Just as the aboriginal peoples of Australia were said, by the same scientists, to be from the 'childhood of Man'. This meant that they represented an older way of life than European civilization.

All this was an insightful twisting of the scientists' own normal use of 'age' logic.

Because they had otherwise tended to call people old in years "elders" ; as people who represented the collective gathered wisdom of society, not representing the behavior of infants.

In fact, this same normal age logic was why the heads of university science departments were more likely to be nearer the age of sixty than the age of twenty.)

But on the physical evidence available during the Age of Progress, were not the many legged octopus and centipede more complex physically than Man ?

Was not the whale bigger, the tortoise capable of living longer, the elephant heavier, the cheetah faster ?

Did not fishes swim faster, badgers burrow faster, bird fly ?

Could not scorpions live in hotter drier climates, penguins in colder climates ?

Did beavers and termites not build fabulous homes too, did not wasps make paper (and made it first ?)

On and on ---- oh yes Man did dream like dogs and made tools like apes but did so with much greater complexity.

But then Man made use of these cognitive skills to write beautiful music (at least we humans thought it was beautiful - but that is hardly a scientifically objective test !) and to wage horribly brutal war.

Call that a draw then, in terms of evidence of greater 'progress'.

And even at the turn of the last century there was plenty of hard evidence that microbes were often better chemists than Man - breaking open and reassembling complex molecules very rapidly, at normal temperature and normal pressure - feats Man couldn't duplicate in huge and hugely expensive refractory vessels.

In successfully filling their own peculiar niche, all living things seemed to have possessed peculiar and unique skills - so scientists were really reduced to comparing between diverse skills by seeking some overarching criteria to better judge winners and losers in biology.

Interestingly, Darwin had said Evolution was all about (and only about) success ---- success as defined as the numbers of viable offspring over time.

When one new lifeform became a thousand species, filling niches all over the world, in huge numbers and for long periods of time, they are an evolutionary success.

One such lifeform (the dinosaurs), as big and physically complex as Man, was so successful --- for a long time.

But then they disappeared. This suggests that the length of time of a lifeform's existence was at least as important as the number of viable offspring, both as sheer individuals and numbers of different but related species.

Enter the bacteria : a lifeform that seems physically simple but chemically complex, that has been around for 3.8 billion years, filled every possible niche with hundreds of thousands of different species and trillions upon trillions of individual members.

Scientists in 1900 knew all this - and this is the very reason they chose to call their era the Age of Progress, not an Age of Success --- this despite living in a success-obsessed period !

Telling your white european upper class male paymasters that they were far less biologically successful than the tiny, immobile, simple, ancient, microbes (here feel free to substitute Negro, Jew, Oriental, female or working class) was no way to secure well paid endowed university chairs or become knighted and feted.

Like authors and book reviewers seeking to be paid, scientists who speak for pay, sing for their supper - consciously and unconsciously flattering their expected customers.

Which why I deliberately choose to be a blockheaded pamphleteer in pjs....

The inevitable dislike of science theorists for naturalists

A compelling scientific theory cum law is simple and consistent : all carbon atoms throughout the universe have six - and six only, no more or less - protons.

But in reality, there are very few science theories or laws that are that simple and consistent.

Exceptions always abound and become a nightmare for science theorists - their brain structure is not set up to easily handle uncertainties and probable possibilities and unknowabilities.

(I include experimentalists among the theorists because experiments are specifically designed to greatly simplify the reality found outside the laboratory --- many sciences have fierce internal conflicts between those big on lab work versus those pro field work.)

Theorists' brain = Conservatives' brain is a good rule of thumb (again, only a probability, not a dead certainty.)

If theorists make a living, win fame and fortune, by creating laws that simplify reality, naturalists do the exact reverse.

They win special fame and fortune by discovering the single one species in a vast genus that does not reproduce sexually.

Exceptions to the rule are their coin of fortune -- they seek out and see things that most of the rest of us either don't see or don't want to see.

Henry Dawson was a naturalist ---- but the kings of the science world, back in 1940 as today, were the theorists , the terrible simplifiers.

Wartime Penicillin, the conflict-driven drama between naturalists and progress-oriented theorists, was thus born to happen.....

Galton, unlike God, was inordinately fond of Man ...

By contrast, God, as Galton's friend Thomas Huxley drily noted, was inordinately fond of beetles.

More accurately God seems to have an inordinate fondness for microbes - he introduced them at the very beginnings of life, created millions of species and gazillions of individuals and they remain in those numbers today, almost four billion years later.

Humanoids, by pointed contrast, came very late in God's scheme, almost as an afterthought, with only a few humble species that today have dwindled down to one only species with an unique approach to extinction.

Instead of external events (say a big asteroid smashing into the Earth) leading to our species' extinction, we're going to kill ourselves off - Evolution's first ever example of collective suicide.

Rather than gas, pills or rope we are currently deciding between nuclear bombs or human-created global warming as our way to end it all.

Is evolutionary success to be measured by a genetic urge to collective self-immolation, as the Progressives believe ---- or is it how many viable offspring that are produced and for how long ?

Is Man or bacteria to be the current benchmark for evolutionary success ?

Galton and God still seem divided on this point ....

Progress = Plenticide

In our grandparents' time (the Era of Progress), believe it or not, 'increasing biodiversity' was seen as the problem not the solution!

And their solution to this 'problem' was wholesale plenticide of all this unneeded and hence unwanted biological plentitude ------ via the chemists' synthetic autarky.

Man-made food pills would replace all the plants and animals we used to eat but now would no longer would need.

They'd all become "useless mouths" and "life unworthy of life".

And artificial wool and other synthetic fibres (remember artificial leather shoes ?!) would replace all those now useless sheep and cotton plants etc that we used to need hanging around.

Fossil fuels - and ultimately atomic fuels - would replace our need to burn trees and crop residue.

No longer would we need wind, water and sun to make mill wheels turn or to dry hay (what was hay mommy ?) - we could all move permanently indoors under plastic domes - atomic energy would split water held in rocks to provide us with oxygen and hydrogen fuel.

Progress was taught to all of us in the form of a metaphor -- viewed as a sort of arrowhead, moving forward and upward through evolutionary time and space.

This arrowhead was very wide, back in the distant past when there were lots of species hanging about but as time moved forward, evolutionary progress ensured that were fewer and fewer, bigger and bigger species - ending at the pointy end of the arrowhead with just one big - dead clever - species remaining : us.

Evolution's progress all made it inevitable --- but still it never hurt for the fit among us to 'speed the plow' by tugging gently at the ankles of the 'unfit' at the end of their rope.

Here cue Eugenics, Euthanasia, Aktion T4, the Hunger Plan Est and the Holocaust.

Progress consisted in draining much of the gene pool as possible, as fast as possible, by dividing the world into normal and deviant or into successful 'progressive' species and living fossils.

Deviant homosexual Romas would be converted to normality - or jailed.

Other Romas - a sort of living fossil among humanity - would fade away in time, it was certain.

Though some, like the Nazis, very much wanted to 'gas up' the process .

It was a great tale, a Man-flattering tale, but was any of it true ?

Nope !

The fossil record instead showed that the arrowhead was totally the wrong scientific metaphor (and trust me - truly successful scientists don't need to be good accountants but they all need to be great poets.)

The more accurate metaphor to express the movement of Life through Time from its tiny beginnings was a radiation outwards.

Still the arrowhead shape, yes, but with the tiny pointy end now at the beginning of Life on Earth with one tiny microbe, The Mother of Us All, and the broad end of the arrowhead at our present day - with our millions of discovered and undiscovered separate unique species.

Within that broad width of Life, species constantly came and went and some new species were bigger and more complex than their forebears while others were smaller and less complex than their forebears.

Biodiversity was abundant in all directions but there was no trend to a linear progress in any direction forward or backwards.

Worse ---- the whole social value theory of evolutionary linear Progress actually hung on a fragile intellectual claim.

For it wasn't enough for the proponents of Progress to show the original many many small species gradually reducing over time to a few big species, not if they were very big but not really any smarter than their tiny forebears.

Ever upward evolutionary Progress had to be ever upward progress in intelligence, however difficult it was to define intelligence across the species.

Ever upward linear Progress required that the tiny, ancient, simple microbes to be very stupid in intelligence - just as it required the newest species at the pointy end of Progress (Civilized Man) to be very smart in intelligence.

In 1945, two Manhattan-based scientific events (science being seen as the top intellectual activity) hit this theory so hard that it never really recovered.

Progress then quietly died away, circa 1965.

In August 1945, a whole bunch of the good guys of science dropped a bomb that they had just invented, a bomb that was seen as capable of destroying all human life on Earth.

That alone made it awfully hard to square this sort of high scientific intelligence with the other meaning of intelligence that we are always lecturing our errant teenagers about - intelligence as the ability to recognize the right choice and then to do it.

The other Manhattan based scientific event was actually a non-event : the failure of the the smartest (human) chemists in the universe , centred at Cornell University's Manhattan medical campus, to make commercial synthetic penicillin.

Far too difficult a scientific feat for the smartest beings in the universe to pull off - but something tossed off easily by some of the oldest, simplest , stupidest beings around --- tiny penicillium cells.

Progress's solar plexus : meet the fatal punch ......

Hearst Corporation & Penicillin Pulitzers : twice lucky ??

At the beginning of August 1943 (despite it being 15 years since it was first discovered) the word penicillin remained either unknown or a matter of total indifference to 99% of the world's newspaper reading public.

By the end of September 1943 (and despite heavy wartime censorship that kept news from freely circulating between the Allies, Axis and Neutrals) 99% of the world's newspaper reading public knew the word penicillin and wanted some of it.

Yesterday, if not sooner.

And suddenly inspired by an old fashioned newspaper crusade of the kind that only Citizen Hearst could sustain, Pfizer boss John L Smith was hell bent for leather on supplying that demand.

Smith ultimately would do so in spades - his own firm alone providing 85 % of all the penicillin landing on D-Day.

It all began when a crippled Italian-American surgical resident called Dr Dante Colitti conspired with a Jewish-American journalist (Hearst's New York Journal American city editor Paul Schoenstein) to bring the story of a baby girl dying for lack of penicillin before the general public.

All in a successful attempt to embarrass the nation's wartime scientific elite (non-Italian/non-Jewish) into getting serious with penicillin.

Because didn't they know there was a war on ---- and people were dying from infections by the zillions ?

The story of innocent little Patty Malone touched the heart of a world at war and did indeed embarrass the Allied governments.

They abandoned their intention to keep penicillin a secret war weapon for as long as possible by withholding civilian supplies and by withholding news of its medical miracles.

Quite right then that the New York Journal American and Paul Schoenstein got the 1944 Pulitzer prize for general reporting.

Still this recognition was a stunner to all journalists with long memories.

No one could ever remember a desk-bound city editor ever receiving any sort of award for shoe-leather reporting - let alone the top prize in journalism.

And no one expected the Pulitzer Committee (set up deliberately to promote quality journalism over Yellow Journalism) would reward its top prize to the very font of the evil yellowness itself - William Randolph Hearst's flagship, the Journal-American.

Hearst's second chance at a Penicillin Pulitzer ?

This October 16th 2015 will mark the seventy fifth anniversary of history's first ever injection of penicillin - an event that ushered in our current age of antibiotics.

Since 1940, ten billion of us have directly benefitted from this age of (cheap) (abundant) penicillin-based antibiotics which has given all of us a form of herd immunity from once endemic infectious diseases.

A big deal indeed.

And here, well into this article, is where I "bury the lede" , if you happen to be a editor at anyone of today's Hearst media.

Because one of that historical pair, a teletype operator named Charles Aronson, was employed at Hearst's very same New York Journal-American !

In fact, one of Charles' jobs in August-September 1943 was keeping up with requests for variants on the the original Penicillin-Patty Malone series coming in over the wire from the various papers and magazines in the Hearst chain and from subscribers to Hearst's wire service, the International News Service or INS.

Aronson couldn't help but recall how Dr Martin Henry Dawson's homemade penicillin in 1940 had saved him from then invariably fatal SBE (the form of endocarditis that kills people inflicted with serious Rheumatic Fever).

Or that Patty Malone's hospital, the Lutheran Hospital in upper Harlem, was but a mile from Dawson's own hospital, Columbia-Presbyterian.

That simply couldn't be a coincidence.

And it wasn't.

The Lutheran and Columbia shared the same small pool of nearby patients and GPs, which allowed the censored word of Dawson's successes with penicillin to spread by wartime censorship's eternal foe (face-to-face gossip).

In addition, Colitti ,who had severe arthritis of the spine since childhood and lived very near Columbia Presbyterian, had earlier been a patient at Dawson's arthritis clinic.

What goes around, comes around and soon Hearst teletype operator Charles Aronson was once again back at Columbia Presbyterian; once again under Dawson's care and being treated with massive amounts of Pfizer-made* penicillin to arrest a second bout of SBE.

(*Dawson had originally got soda pop supplier Pfizer into the penicillin business.)

And once again, Aronson failed to die as expected.

He had survived at least four previous brushes with death and this time not only survived the SBE but also a potentially lethal stroke.

His brave body - basically battered from birth with all variety of life-threatening disease - hung on until he died at around age 40, in 1951.

Since so many of those diseases affected his motor skills, it is a minor miracle in itself that he had the speed and control to be a teletype operator at America's largest and busiest daily newspaper.

So what sort of latterday Hearst journalist is going to give the Hearst empire a second shot at a 'Penicillin Pulitzer' by writing a series on the amazing life of one the media chain's own employees ?

When a scientific consensus was proven wrong : DNA and Penicillium

Dr Martin Henry Dawson was widely considered a minor medical researcher, all because he had bet on two clearly losing horses.

In 2020, it might no longer be seen that way.

In the first case back in between the wars, the general scientific consensus was that large proteins had to be complicated and hence 'smart' and long chains of mere repeating acids had to be simple and hence 'stupid'.

So when Dawson's pioneering 1920s test tube research on the ability of some bacteria to take up the genes of other species (today known as HGT) led to one of these long simple repeating chains rather than to a protein, the scientific jungle telegraph dot dashed out a signal : "Dawson --- dead wrong, dead end !"

But of course, the telegraph signal is itself nothing but long chains of very simple repeating sub units, a mere dot and a dash, yet it has no problem transmitting the most complicated examples of human reasoning perfectly accurately.

And so to with the simple-appearing DNA .

For as it turns out, it (the tortoise not the hare) was the actual brains behind genetics, while the complicated protein was merely a (highly useful) spindle for the coil of DNA.

Bacteria, it seems, can smoothly nip and tuck DNA bits and bobs ( genes basically) and we humans still can't.

Oh, we appear to, but actually we let the bacteria take all the hard work while we take all the credit.

Round One, ultimately, to Dr Dawson.

Kitchen Mold

During WWII, many scientists again thought Dawson had backed the wrong horse.

They felt that he had chosen, in effect, to endanger dying patients by delivering Vitamin C via old fashioned crude un-purified natural orange juice rather than via modern, progressive pure synthetic Vitamin C pills.

For in 1940, the scientific consensus was that German chemists were very very brilliant and the tiny microbes were very very stupid.

Dawson thought that if supposedly simple bacteria could do excellent gene engineering while Man could only fumble about, maybe other microbes might also be better at certain types of chemistry than even the smartest chemists in the universe.

So Dawson bet that the humble penicillium mold might just do the job of making massive amounts of (admittedly impure but totally safe) penicillin better and cheaper (and certainly quicker) than all that human chemists had produced, after a fifteen years of fruitless trying.

Dawson (along with his fellow believers at Pfizer and the OPRD) were proven spectacularly right and the synthetic-obsessed Nobel Prize winning pair of Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey (along with Merck and Vannevar Bush's feckless OSRD) were proven wrong, wrong, wrong.

We humans - 75 years later - still can't make economical Penicillin G by total synthesis and the little bugs still make it by the tens of thousands of tons, which we then modify to produce most of the antibiotics we use today.

And the wartime efforts of German chemists were even worse when it came to making penicillin (their wartime successes were mostly limited to producing the Zyklon B gas used in the Holocaust.)

If the doubly right Dawson remains unknown today, it is hardly surprising, because a scientist rarely wins fame by bucking a worldwide scientific consensus of their elders.

Now I fully believe the burning of fossil fuels is causing a highly dangerous greenhouse gas effect in our atmosphere -and my view is also the consensus of scientists worldwide.

But I hope that I am still historically-minded enough to recall that many similar scientific consensus in the past have proven to be totally wrong.

Totally, totally, totally wrong ....

Painting a picture of Reductionism

Reductionism, a theory of extreme simplicity that seeks to account for everything in the universe, is, as usual with such "terrible simplicities", itself a very complicated piece of philosophical and scientific reasoning.

Not the sort of thing, one might think, to easily or accurately summarize in a single big mural painted on the wall of some museum of natural science.

But not so.

All those museum murals of (drum roll please !) of The Marvelous Pageant of Life's Inevitable Progress, as made infamous by Stephen Jay Gould's withering critique, were - I argue - actually a portrait of the applied Theory of Reductionism.

Put another way, the fundamental reasoning behind the entire Era of Progress was actually "Reductionism-in-Action" in the sphere of Life ---- evolutionary progress towards inevitable ever greater complexity being an unconscious example of half-understood Reductionism.

So let us first review Reductionism.

Its most militant fans really believe (even if they don't publicly admit it) that one short sharp law about the motions of sub-sub-atomic articles (The Theory of Everything) will enable them to predict/control every activity in all the larger objects in the universe above the sub-sub-atomic level.

They will eventually know - far in advance and far far away (sitting in some multi-billion dollar taxpayer paid lab in Stanford) what I am about to say in the rest of this sentence (which is far more than I currently know).

Why hasn't aroused womanhood put all these men (and they are almost all men, rather like the Freemen on the Land movement) in a padded cell in Stanford, rather than in an expensive lab?

Beats me.

Here is how they say it all works.

Random (thermal) motion of various fundamental bits and bobs (fermions and bosons) eventually bangs themselves into bigger bits and these bigger bits in then bang themselves together into atoms and then these atoms bang together into bigger bits like CO2 and H20.

Sunlight energy then bangs these tiny molecules into simple sugars which link together to produce the beginnings of life and eventually lead to the bacteria.

Bang a few single celled bacteria together and you have a simple multi-celled beings and eventually you will have a multi-celled being called Einstein.

Much the same tale is used to account for the rise of entire massive galaxies from a few incredibly tiny fermions and bosons banging on (probably in some ancient physics lecture hall) back 14 billion years ago.

The alternative theory to Reductionism is that you will need to discover new laws to account for each new bigger grouping of the original fundamental particles.

Because, other physicists argue, at each new phase of matter, different and unexpected qualities have emerged that could not have been predicted by using the original theory of everything and simply multiplying everything up by a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion etc.

Now Reductionists don't deny that each new grouping together of smaller sub assemblies of matter and energy leads to a more complex bigger entity - far from it.

That is their basic claim ---- that bigger is inherently more complex : a granite boulder is the basic complexity of fermions and bosons multiplied by a trillion times a trillion and so collectively it can do more complex things.

But in explaining that complexity,they say we can de-construct it down to some very basic and simple motions multiplied trillions upon trillions of times.

And again another in their key claims ---- simply knowing the simple motions will let them predict/control the bigger more complex motions.

Still other scientists agree with the Reductionists that big objects are but the sum of trillions of tiny objects' basically simple motions but say that almost nothing useful can be predicted as a result of assuming this, at least in real time and with real world budgets, as a result.

(And this is putting aside the unexpected unpredictable complexities arising in each new phase of matter.)

But back a hundred years ago, this Reductionism was all heady stuff to the pre-naturally naive and the optimistic.

They believed that atoms' purpose was not to lead an independent existence long before and long after Man's 15 minutes of fame.

Instead, they were around simply to serve Man and to become Man - not existing as independent atoms - but bonding together into first small doublets and ultimately huge polymer molecules.

Similarly with all Life before Man.

Bacteria and all other life not Man were like skins discarded by individual snakes as they grew ever bigger.

So after two bacteria had banged together to produce the first multi-celled being, the rest weren't really needed on the voyage to the stars and should be killed off.

Ditto the monkeys and apes once they had spawned the beginnings of the human species - they were all now 'useless mouths'.

Not so atoms, elements, fermions and bosons - we would still need them to make humans and everything humans planned to synthesize the proper way, after God screwed it up so badly the first time.

Now not even the most extreme Reductionists in the physical sciences ever claimed CO2 and H2O had ceased to
physically exist after they had made the first simple sugars.

Or that they ceased to have a moral right to exist after having done so.

And no biologist ever really claimed that bacteria and apes had ceased to have an actual physical existence after they led to bigger more complex beings.

But these murals on museum walls clearly indicated their ( and our grandparents') Age of Progress belief that they ceased to have a moral right to exist.

These murals - taught as life lessons to generations of school kids - literally painted and justified the Holocaust, years before it actually happened.

These murals painted the reality of all Life as consisting of a series of panels left to right.

Bacteria on the lower left, small, inmobile, down in the bottom slime.

At centre left, a panel would show perhaps small reptiles.

Apes on higher ground, knuckles dragging on the ground, in the very middle panel, at middle height.

At centre right, a panel would show a buck naked coal black Aboriginal holding a crude spear and crouched down.

At the upper right panel, an upperclass rich white man in a smart suit, standing upright at the window of a skyscraper penthouse, gazing pensively out at his factory workers way down below.

In reality, in the very middle panel, we'd we'd still see apes, small reptiles and bacteria and in the rightmost panel, Man(civilized and"primitive"), ape, small reptile and bacteria.

Bacteria have always been around, are still around, and far outnumber anything bigger than themselves.

They are no mere long discarded skin in the evolution of a snake.

And in perhaps an even sharper blow to the preening of Progress and Reductionism, while the bacteria are indeed the oldest form of life, they are not the simplest possible form of life nor the most numerous.

The viruses are much simpler and much more numerous - every bacteria potentially harbours dozens or even hundreds of them.

Life and Evolution does not progress at all in any ordered march to greater and greater complexity, discarding everything simpler in turn.

It sprawls.

Truly successful life simply lives - it simply reproduces living viable offspring to carry on.

How it (collectively) meets that ever evolving challenge is totally up to it - it can grow smaller, go bigger, or remain the same size and evolve new genes and drop others.

Today's more accurate Pageant of Life would be a truly huge electronic pixel board, running in basic time from left to right, with each grouping of pixels presenting a different species by individual members' physical size and the total number of individuals in it.

Each second of real time would represent a hundred thousand years of time.

It would be a violently flickering screen, with all sizes and no sizes and complexities and non complexities of species going in and out of existence in every second we look upon it.

There would be no discernible hint of Progress ever upwards to civilized Man.

And no human smoke of six million Jews disposed of like discarded snake skins ....

Blockheaded Publishing : "OPEN ACCESS" in all senses

It is a telling example of our debased (and post-religious) moral culture that no reputable reviewer today would ever review a book that was made available free as a 'tract for our time'.

'Review a book offered up free by an author merely to contribute to the collective public debate on important issues, without any thought of personal gain or fame ?'

You're joking aren't you ---- even Thomas Paine charged for his pamphlets !

People who self consciously call themselves "Book Reviewers" - whether professional or amateur - pride themselves on considering all books written without thought of personal gain as likely to be the rambling rantings of almost lunatics, unworthy of serious attention.

(Add here, in defence of their response, the well known words of Samuel Johnson who said anyone who wrote not for money was a blockhead.)

No doubt these "Reviewers"  might even consider the actions of a doctor who freely gives his life to better others' lives, without any thought to personal gain or fame, as also bordering upon the lunatic.

So a serious book freely offered up to tell the tale of a doctor who willing offers up his life for general humanity is somewhat doubly cursed - if it seeks to be seriously reviewed by serious reviewers.

And a serious book, on serious issues, published in serial fashion - as a series of tracts or pamphlets -stands even further outside today's book trade.

For tracts and pamphlets are usually published by being shoved through someone's letter slot and reviewed, it at all, by the person behind that door.

But in George Orwell's day, pamphlets were the 'containers' for almost all the serious thought about the serious issues thrown up by the crisis of the Great Depression - which is why he collected them to stimulate his own writing.

But new young pamphleteers and tractarians are today probably all bloggers ; globally-minded digital pamphleteers no longer content to merely push a few paper pamphlets into mail slots along their own street.

I am not young, but I certainly am one such blogger.

Because I want my tracts read by everybody in the world, of every income group, any hour of the day, and in any language that Google Translator will handle.

I will make printable versions of longer blog posts available to suit those who still prefer print - just as I will do likewise for those who prefer to read longer E-Pub files offline.

But really I think the web browser-based book or pamphlet (aka "the Blog") is the true wave of the present ....

wartime penicillin's Progressives vs Naturalists

The Progressives (people such as Sir Howard Florey, the OSRD and Merck) literally intended to RE-FORM things, wholesale - the human body in particular.

They advocated a sort of 'synthetic autarky' with Man replacing everything that came from Mother Nature with a better and cheaper & quicker to make artificial form.

But such re-forming, in practise, often broke down the very old fashioned farming practise of culling out whatever was regarded as 'unfit' and selecting and favouring whatever was regarded as the 'fittest'.

(Here cue the word : Eugenics.)

But with eyes only for the future, no Progressive would ever publicly admit to using such old fashioned farming techniques.

Clinging to such vestiges of the past were supposed to be the preserves of their opponents, the Naturalists, people such as Florey's opponent, Dr Martin Henry Dawson, the OPRD and Pfizer.

But all efforts - by  hundreds of the smartest chemists in the universe with money to burn- to synthesize commercial penicillin failed.

Instead, a few Naturalists, with very little resources, patiently picked the best of the best of the best of the best penicillin producing penicillium molds to greatly up penicillin yields at the point of the cow's utter rather than in improving the machinery in the milk factory.

Only near the end of the war, did a scientist finally get the chance to set a $20 UV heat lamp (bog ordinary variety !) upon a sample of the naturally best penicillin producing molds.

All this to deliberate fry the poor penicillium's DNA with UV rays, in the hope that among the dead and living dead offspring, a few fully alive cells' DNA might be altered (re-formed) to produce even more penicillin.

He indeed found these winners by the old fashioned farmers' method of patiently picking the most likely big producers and putting them to it - the proof was in the penicillin they did produce.

Against the Progressives' 'terrible simplicities', my brief account shows the unexpected wartime success of natural penicillin was a bit more complicated than might be expected ----- as usual ....

Why zoologists vote Republican .... and microbiologists vote Green

Even today - even in the 21st century ! - many best selling zoologists continue to dismiss the tiny, immobile and ancient microbes as simply incredibly primitive, incredibly alike, incredibly boring.

Give them but a token line or two in their many big books devoted to the wonders of the bigger animals, only to just as quickly dismiss them.

We shouldn't really be surprised that in their private lives, these conservative-minded scientists also feel the same about smaller and weaker humanity as well.

One can almost surmise that unconsciously the children of the big, rich and powerful in our society, if they choose to become biologists, unconsciously gravitate to the big powerful animals, biological subjects rather like themselves.

(About as close to true empathy towards others as conservatives ever get.)

And that those science students born within the smaller, weaker parts of humanity, or with strong empathy for the weak and small, gravitate to biological subjects that are also - wrongly - viewed as small, weak and uninteresting ....

Synthetic Horses

We have not traditionally regarded 'horsepower' that has been provided by steam, gasoline or electrical motors rather than by actual horses as coming from objects that are man-made, artificial and synthetic.

This is unfortunate because it reduces our ability to understand the causes for WWII's atrocities.

We are all well aware that humanity in the Age of Progress had an unstoppable mania for replacing as much of inanimate Nature as possible with synthetic man-made equivalents ---with artificial food and artificial leather being among the many low points in the process.

But none of this synthetic autarky in inanimate objects can be said to lay a very direct trail to the WWII horrors of Aktion T4, the Hunger Plan or the Holocaust (with their planned killing of tens of millions of 'useless mouths') over on the bad guys' side of the Atlantic.

Or to the post-war planned killings of tens of millions of work horses for horsemeat, over here on the good guys' side of the Atlantic.

That is because if newlyweds ever decide to replace expensive imperfect natural diamonds with cheap perfect synthetic diamonds, natural diamonds will merely become "useless" but not "useless mouths".

They will now be be useless to humanity but they won't cost tightfisted humanity a dime if left lying there in the ground forever more.

Disposing of living ex-machines

Not so with formerly very valuable animal and human slaves gradually rendered useless and worthless in the Age of the Machine.

For short periods of time, humans and work horses can exhibit amazingly good pulling powers but for sustained work a good quality work horse can only provide 1 horsepower of work output and a healthy adult only about .1 of a horsepower.

It is true that mechanical pulling engines need fuel just as humans and animals need food, but mechanical engines can work full out for 24 hours, 365 days a week.

In practise, horses and humans eventually work at less than full sustained capacity, if not given sufficient hours of rest daily and days off weekly to rest up.

So over a week of 168 hours, an unceasing two horsepower engine (a very small engine even in 1800) could replace a team of maybe ten horses, each working as well as the mechanical engine for bursts of time and feed just as cheaply, but only able to work full out for about 35 hours a week.

Discarded as a consequence to save money and increase profits, these ex-machines still had to be feed and cared for.

At least as long as upper class humanity still retained vestiges of old fashioned charitable concerns towards the smaller, older, slower weaker beings among them.

Now cue --- not Charles Darwin, or even his 1859 theory ---but rather the popular elite response to his theory.

As if well known, Darwin developed his theory well before 1859 but planned not to release it until he felt elite opinion would accept it.

1859 was not that time he felt - he was probably right - but Wallace's plans to release his very similar version of the same theory forced Darwin's hand.

I am tempted to say that any time in the 1870s was the right time for Darwin's theory to win elite approval but I may be 110% wrong.

Instead it just could be that the 1870s were the epoch changing decade that they became only because of the impact that Darwin's earlier theory had had upon elite humanity.

For its talk of an universal and eternal battle for survival providing elites the intellectual justification for some long sought after changes settling the post-slavery fates of once valuable animate man and beast, replaced by mechanical machines.

The poor were no longer to be 'always with us' but rather, as losers in the evolutionary race, to be assisted off the coil of life with a 'gentle kindly tug at their ankles'.

(To describe a way of thinking that Moscow Show Trial defender George Bernard Shaw made infamous.)

Just as it was long believed that the decline and disappearance of Canada's natives was evolutionary inevitable, so it couldn't possibly be morally wrong to kindly haste Nature's cruel ways with a little man-made starvation and terrible housing.

Synthetic autarky - the belief that 'fit humanity' didn't need imperfect inanimate nature ultimately extended to not needing imperfect animate humanity either.

For Darwin's cousin Galton had quickly picked up Darwin's ball and invented Eugenics.

And it was his negative eugenics that made it possible for ordinarily decent people, during WWII, to solve the longstanding 'problem' of disposing of 'useless' living, breathing, eating machines once they had been replaced by new synthetic models, without losing any sleep.

'Evolution really did all the killing, not us', said Germany's population, in justification after the fact ...

The race to produce D-Day's penicillin was WWII's only real 'Clash of Cultures'

If Fred Bridgham had to survive off of writing about WWII's "Clash of Cultures", the poor bugger would quickly starve to death.

There simply wasn't any - not at the nation to nation level anyway.

And don't talk to me of Hitler and Stalin - the two admired each other as much as they hated each other - they understood each other.

Instead WWII's real ideological clash occurred almost as 'noises off' - buried within the little known race to produce D-Day's penicillin.

Would it be "The Smartest Chemists in the Universe", assembled in dozens of Allied labs and swaddled in money and resources, convinced that as a result synthetic penicillin would now be a piece of cake ?

Or would it be crude natural penicillin made by the despised basement Slime - old and slow and small and dumb ?

We did mention 'dumb', didn't we ?

If PROGRESS (all bow) meant anything at all, it certainly meant that university-educated Man could create better, cheaper, faster penicillin than the Slime ever could.

(For 'slime' , feel free to substitute Negro, Oriental, Homosexual, Woman, Unfit, etc.)

Except Man couldn't (and still hasn't !) - and from then on the Path of Progress, as the doctors say, took an irreversible downhill course......

Conservative Fears : drowned under Plentitude or abandoned after Plenticide

The 1990s were filled with books about one, two or ten humans left all alone on a vast empty Earth after a too-successful effort at human Plenticide (usually an all-out nuclear war).

Nominally about issues of abandonment, they were often secret conservative 'wet dreams' about all their liberal leftie neighbours all being wiped out so that  one  (American)  heterosexual family can re-create a Right-thinking, gun-touting, Right-voting paradise.

But in the 1890s, a century earlier, the fear was all about Plenticide's opposite, Plentitude.


But if a physically empty Earth was the conservative fear of the 1990s, 1890s conservatives feared a mentally-filled , not an physically-filled, Earth.

Yes there were more people on Earth in 1890, if rather less plants and animals.

But that very real population increase went unnoticed, the human population still so small and resources-undemanding and the Earth still seeming so big.

What was much noted and more feared by conservatives were all the humans leaving rural areas (where they could be observed and contained) and heading for the overcrowded dark tenement areas of the world's biggest cities, where they live out of sight and beyond upper class control.

Worse, in those tenement areas, they were free to hear the ideas of the troublemakers of all the world's nations.

But this real Plentitude of humanity in the inner big cities wasn't the only thing noted at the time though it is all that we tend to remember of the 1890s.

But conservative observers back then were actually much more exercised about where all those new city poor had come from - and that was the newly depopulated and de-stabilized, declining farm areas : modernization had Plenticided the farm community.

All this, however, was a conscious conservative reaction to a localized (urban) form of physical Plentitude.

But I argue that the largest conservative reaction against 'drowning' under a flood of Plentitude was actually against a new virtual Plentitude of ideas and facts thrown up by modernization and this reaction was largely unconscious.

It soon emerged out the other end - quite self-consciously - as we know today as Modernity and what 1890s reformers would have called simply "Progress".

Progress would stop the parts of this plentitude the upper classes feared and channel the parts of the plentitude it wanted to encourage.

What do I mean by a "virtual", rather than a physical plentitude ?

When an educated person at the end of the 19th century looked up in the night sky, they saw no more stars than they did as children.

But Science had told them (and they fully trusted Science) that the number of stars in the sky had actually increased a billion fold and their age extended back from a few thousand or a few million years to a few billion years.

The same with the deep dark woods, deep dark seas and deep blue daylight skies : Science said that far far more plants, animals, microbes and minerals had been discovered to lurk in their depths than had been imagined, although they still looked as opaque as ever.

More human languages, more human societies, more human history than ever before imagined had been discovered by Science - though looking out your Manhattan brownstone on a bright May morning, they remained as invisible as ever to your eye or ear.

But to your mind - oh my !

How your brain ached with the fullness and the plentitude of all reality.

Progress's plenticide would drastically prune it back to an improved version of reality as you knew it as a child...

Pictou's Dawsons and Fungi

Medical scientist Martin Henry Dawson (his dad was from Pictou town) is today best known for being the first to inject an antibiotic (the fungus metabolite penicillin) into a patient.

But a century earlier, another famous scientific Dawson from Pictou town (and a possibly a relative of Henry's) Sir John William Dawson, also became famous for his work with fungi.

He was credited with discovering the giant 25 foot tall fungus (Prototaxites) that dominated the world before today's trees took over.

(Though Dawson admittedly thought it was a weird giant lichen - as did the rest of the scientific community until very recently.)

Again only recently, other scientists discovered that the largest living being on Earth is a single fungus individual occupying 4 square miles of Oregon forest soil.

Even more so than their tiny neighbours the bacteria, these biological Rodney Dangerfields don't get the respect they deserve....

Modernity failed (and eventually faded) when synthetic penicillin failed

Forget what books and movies, your teachers, professors, parents and grandparents all tell you about WWII's "hands across the water" holy war against the utterly evil Nazi values:

because no nation in WWII ever went to war against the Axis unless and until they were first directly attacked by the Axis : on the factual evidence, they warred against the Axis solely in self defence.

Except, of course, for the empires of England and France --but :

if the peoples of these two superpowers still claim that they went to war solely on behalf of the small victims of the Axis, their subsequent actions would hardly prove that assertion -- as generations of Polish (and Jewish) academics are rightly eager to point out.

The problem was that the values of the Axis were but an extreme form - but still fully recognizable - of the same values of Modernity espoused by the middle class of every 'modern' nation on earth in that era .

A world wide middle class culture as largely indifferent to the lynching of Blacks in Georgia USA as to the lynching of Jews in Georgia USSR.

Those values were somewhat under attack during the Great Depression period.

But recent research has revealed that the WWII years were unexpectedly a time when protest against such un-charitable values was actually muted - not heightened - by the military conflict against the nations applying those values in their most extreme forms.

WWII's ideological war that didn't parallel the military war

But I think there was still one all-out ideological battle during WWII, one that ended in the defeat of the Modernity values that fuelled the Axis and led in time to our open commensality led era of post-Modernity diversity and tolerance.

That battle was over who/what would provide the bulk of the Allies' D-Day penicillin.

Synthetic Penicillin to be the Poster Boy of WWII's Terrible Simplicities

On one side were hundreds of the smartest chemists in the universe , assembled by the Allied scientific establishment which believed that man-made synthetic penicillin simply had to be better and cheaper than anything stupid Nature could come up with.

On the other side, an invisibly small team in a backwater ward at Columbia Presbyterian hospital whose leader Martin Henry Dawson said 'don't count the old and the slow and small microbes out so quickly - they just might be able to do it better and cheaper and quicker'.

A lot was at stake : for all of the towering edifice of Modernity was actually sustained on a single slender stock of pure conjecture.

That conjecture was that the biggest, most swiftly advancing, most complex human civilizations at the cutting edge of Life had to inevitably be smarter that the oldest,slowest, smallest microbes that began Life three billion years earlier -in each and every area.

Reductionism was the ideology of Modernity.

It saw the basic bricks of life or reality as being simple and simple minded .

So complexity/intelligence had to grow out of these bricks being assembled into ever bigger entities in a single straight upward line : complexity growing steadily upwards from a single electron to the Hoover Dam, from a single penicillium 'yeast' cell to a tenured chemist with a PhD.

It was true that there was an infection-filled war on and any sort of life-saving penicillin was greatly needed - now !

But the Allied scientific elite would unconsciously rather lose the military war to their (fellow modernist) Nazi opponents than lose the much more important ideological war to the despised slime cells on the question as to who could better make the vital lifesaver : sophisticated Man or stupid microbe.

Feel free to substitute Negro, Jew, Oriental, aboriginal, woman, homosexual, cripple for microbe to better appreciate their deepest physic fears.

But in the end, by D-Day 1944 and beyond, all those genius-level chemists had totally failed - and have still failed, seventy five years on : a single yeast penicillium cell still makes penicillin cheaper and better than by any human synthetic method.

And from that same basic wartime penicillin G, still made in the tens and tens of thousands of tons today by those incredibly tiny yeast cells, we humans create almost all the infection fighting antibiotics we have today.

If the human small and the slow and the old and weak have more respect today than they did in 1940 - and they do, much much more - it won't hurt to thank the first ones who gained that reluctant respect : the penicillium yeasts cells ...

The UNWANTED plentitude of gas warfare

To many of us who see 'death as death', it has always been un-obvious why coughing to death from WWI gas clouds was so much different than being hit in the guts out in No Man's Land and coughing your life away for a half an hour while your comrades are helpless to intervene.

A similar phobia existed against openly conducting warfare with radiation clouds or clouds of fire or germs.

Germs I can at least understand - since they are self replicating, they don't fade away like even the worst gas, fire or radiation cloud eventually does, but can circle the world and kill the nation that unleashed them in some cosmic justice bite-you-in-the-rear pandemic.

So instead of cloud warfare, almost all of the military and civilian elites promoted "precision" warfare.

A few bullets, shells or bombs would be aimed directly and land directly upon the enemy military forces --- and nothing else.

It was supposedly the more moral and certainly much cheaper and quicker way to win a war.

But why it was so moral to kill a man who was conscripted against his secret wish, to fight for his government only because if he didn't he might be jailed or even shot and yet so immoral to kill his brother making rifles back home was never really explained.

Cheaper certainly was the claim of the 'precision boys' at the beginning of WWII - a few medium bombers would drop their relatively small bomb loads directly on their military targets, once, and wipe them out completely.

But in fact total imprecision was the real Bomber Command/AAF forte and the war ended with thousand bomber raids of heavy four engine planes still dropping thousands of tons of bombs over "factories" week after week, year after year - and still not wiping them out.

It was actually cloud warfare with hundred of thousands of tiny fire bomblets and not a few big HE bombs doing most of the real damage, with germ cloud and gas cloud bombs waiting in the wings, but the Allies would never admit it.

Just as they never admitted that Nagasaki's civilians died as much from fire clouds and radiation clouds as they did from the poorly-aimed Atomic Bomb's explosive force upon the naval base.

Reductionist ideology, the ideology of the Era of Modernity, touted selective precision as the only correct way to approach reality.

First one determined the one right and best solution to solve any particular problem (and plenticided all other possible solutions) and then one applied that solution accurately and consistently until it worked, even if that took decades.

Modernity tolerated no second thoughts, no Plan B, no re-assessments.

Modernity simply could not afford to admit that the imprecise plentitude of cloud warfare was sometimes much more effective than the selective precision of modern warfare.

Because they feared that others might feel that what was true of warfare might also be seen as true of all reality : that imprecision and contingency ruled and that Reductionism gave a seductive but erroneous explanation of Reality...