All wealth created by Middle Class !?

Yesterday's lie: all wealth created by the rich ; today's lie: all created by the middle class.

The truth is, at least in today's ideological culture, it takes big people's wealth and decisions, the middle people's managing the carrying out of these decisions and the back breaking labour of the smallest people, all to create new wealth.

(And I say all this as a left-leaning Green.)

The fact is that successful wealth creation, like everything else truly successful on Earth, requires a 'coalition of all talents' to come about, has always been true.

But today, all but the very richest and the very poorest claim to be middle class and as such, to be 'creating' all the wealth.

But when everybody is middle, nobody is middle - for what we would actually have then would be a single "uni-class", rather than a three class system.

Part of today's problem is a great reluctance to define the middle more accurately than a bit of vague hand waving, a la Mr Trudeau and his Liberal candidates, as I recently witnessed myself at a Halifax all-candidates debate.

One way, I suggest, to nail down the elusive jello that is the definition of "the middle class" would be to take a nation's median income (the income that one half of all tax-reporters earns more than and the other half earns less than) and combine the bottom 16.7% of those earning more that that median with the top 16.7% of those earning less than the median.

We would, I believe, then have the middle class defined simply as the middle third of all family income earners --- not whether they went to university and held a white collar job.

This doesn't deny the fact that well to do young black men in fancy cars will still be stopped and hassled by policemen in a way that extremely poor old white women riding the bus never would be.

Or deal with the reality that few women will ever end up being invited onto the boards of the Big Banks, even if they are extremely rich.

But income and such seemingly non-income related issues are truly united.

For possessing high income is a very good place to see the financial advantages of being part or all of a country's majority race, ethnicity, religion, marital status and political ideology groupings.

Just as low income usually reveals the disadvantages of not being part of some or all of these popular 'tokens' for obtaining really good education, housing, health care, police protection and jobs.

"small" patients defined

Now you might understand that when I say that Henry Dawson's Manhattan Project was made up of "small" patients, I don't mean "small" as in terms of age or size, but rather as small in terms of income and social status : power basically.

As in being basically powerless because they lacked it all : wrong race and religion and education level and income level and physical fitness level.

In the "military preparedness" world of medical America in the Fall of 1940, to be working class and black or Jewish and to be a SBE patient was to be about as powerless and worthless as one could be.

Partly because of their lack of income and because they lacked the right skin tone and religious faith.

But mostly because SBE was seen an invariably fatal, re-occurring, expensively chronic illness. Even if one SBE hospital patient was cured of one bout of the disease, it kept coming back until the patient died.

But it was the faint hope clause of the very occasional cure that kept patients and their families to keep coming to the top research hospitals, filling expensive beds instead of dying quietly and cheaply at home.

Because no doctor really believed the hospital had anything to do with the cure, SBE cures were like terminal cancer cures, an Act of God even to the non-believer.

And while most SBEs died of a a stroke caused by an embolism in another part of the body than the heart, the infection also slowly but surely and permanently reduce the effectiveness of the already damaged heart valve.

So even if Dawson did cure the SBEs, even permanently, the valve damage wouldn't allow them to fight as infantry.

This is why many in the medical elite were for denying any penicillin to the SBEs, even though it was the only thing that could cure this fatal disease, reserving scarce penicillin instead to errant husbands and boyfriends who had picked up a non-fatal dose of the clap overseas.

But Dawson felt that in a total war, virtually all work was useful war work and even those with damaged valves can still do lots of useful work.

Besides, if only wartime penicillin was as mass produced as Dawson had long argued for, it could be given in advance, in small amounts, to prevent those with damaged valves from every getting a serious bout of SBE (which usually ended requiring more penicillin than even a lifetime of preventive shots).

Then the SBEs, a plurality who were draft age young men as it happens, could go from being the most worthless in society, the 4Fs of the 4Fs, to potentially becoming prime 1A cannon fodder.

(A mixed blessing for sure !)

One wonders what would have happened if penicillin had turned out to be a cure for Polio, a disease particularly of the white middle class suburbs, rather than a cure for SBE and Rheumatic Fever, diseases of the inner city poor , minorities and immigrants ?

I doubt then it would have been denied the Polio sufferers, war or no war and I think Dawson figured this to be so as well.

SBE was medical Universes away from Dawson's area of medical expertise, but he decided to cure the SBEs because he wanted to make a moral and scientific case for widening 1940's narrow concepts of just who could be inside the human portfolio.

The trend was to reduce the portfolio only down to only the financially, socially and physically fit, but Dawson wanted the portfolio to be widely diverse as possible.

Just as he thought the small in the biological world - like the penicillin-producing penicillium, had much to offer Humanity, if we only but let them.

These ideas were seen as absurd then but are commonplace today.

We changed obviously and totally.

And it all had to start somewhere, sometime, with someone ....

Capital Punishment was Modernity just as its abolition was Post-Modernity

A new take on why 'abolition' and 'postmodernity' arrived together in the same taxi, back in 1965...

If Modernity was all about Grand Narratives, then there was no grander narrative than actually carrying out a capital punishment.

Modernity is best known now for its hubris over its total faith in its predictions about events in the near future.

But imposing capital punishment really is also about being totally certain, certainty about (often hidden) events in the near past.

Certain enough about your reading of them to kill a fellow being, with no chance to revive them, if you are subsequently proven wrong.

But Modernity simply couldn't conceive it might ever be wrong - not about the past and not about the future.

Postmodernity is really all about being less certain , about the past and the future.

Uncertain enough to never want to close all doors to doubt by executing people for crimes that we can't usually see on instant replay video and so remain always open to new evidence and motives.

Technological Man exalts the Big same time Science says Universe dominated by the small

In the 1930s peer-reviewed science increasingly revealed that solid (metal atom-oriented) planets like Earth actually represented a blindingly small slice of one percent of even the visible Universe, a visible universe that mostly consisted of tiny bits of  non-solid non metallic vapourware (plasma gas).

But at the exact same moment in time, popular science and technology media culture was at its apogee of exalting all the biggest, fastest, tallest etc examples of the (solid) (metallic) Man-made world.

And the public couldn't get enough of it.

Coincidence ?


As readers of this blog well know, I don't ever believe in coincidence.

All this sudden interest in building and then admiring the biggest, fastest, tallest, heaviest, most stiff and hard and solid objects that technological Man could produce probably represented an unconscious protest.

A protest by the Hubris of Man against all these recent highly inconvenient facts coming out of the scientific journals that exalted the significance of the small and the non-solid in a vast empty universe....

Dawson "exalting the small", in a universe that is 99.9% (or more) not even as big as a tiny atom

Most people in 1940 exalted the big with a positive mania for admiring the newest biggest hydro dam or heavy bomber and they considered an atom to be pretty tiny - in fact, probably the tiniest thing in the Universe.

But even in 1940, scientists and those who kept up with popular media reports of the latest scientific discoveries and theories knew that that rocky objects like the Earth, made up of atoms combined into compounds and mixtures, were a blindingly small part of the Universe.


For 99.9%, by mass, of the visible Universe is plasma - the fourth (common) state of matter, a swirling hot gas made up of ions rather than complete atoms.

While in terms of space, most of the visible universe is (nearly empty) vacuum.

And already by the early 1930s, thanks to visionary scientists like Zwicky, it was seen that the visible facts of the universe could only be explained by the impact of simply massive amounts of dark invisible matter and energy, far far bigger than the visible mass and energy.

So by now, atoms and rocky planets like Earth were down to maybe .00001% of the total mass/energy of the Universe.

And big objects on Earth - objects like Man and his buildings - represented a much smaller percentage of even that small percentage.

So when Dr Henry Dawson chose to exalt the small in his "small" penicillin Manhattan Project, he was actually backing a certain winner and voting with the crowd.

Only the unbounded hubris of Man at the very apogee of Modernity, could think that in exalting the big as the "norm", he was going with the flow of Nature.

Because, in fact, the tide of Nature was decidedly going the other way.....

The conservatives are so "Base"

Harper's Hollowed out House of Horrors : church on Sunday, dissing drowned refugees on Monday.

Recent polls on taking in refugees, in places like Canada, have confirmed what many of us non-church going Christians have always suspected.

Many of the most regular Christian church goers are among the biggest of all religious hypocrites ---- and I recall enough of my bible studying to note the special fate Jesus held for religious hypocrites.

Conservative parties - world wide and not just in Canada - are always revealed in political values surveys as having the greatest proportions of regular church attending activists and voters of any of the political parties.

Church ------ you know with all its Sunday talk of "doing something for Jesus every time you do something for the least of these".

But it turns out, Sunday's sermon didn't really take among many of the Conservative religious.

Because there they are on Monday eager to tell pollsters that they're against letting in any three year old terrorists, and frankly, the terrorists would all be better off if they drowned on some distant Turkish beach.

After all, they protest, how many three year olds drowned in swimming pools in Canada this summer with no one paying attention --- so why fuss over one more dead kid ?

Particularly a foreigner kid , a terrorist foreigner kid, a kid who is going to get better medical and social care - for free ! - than any of us hardworking conservative Canadians.

"Base" is the word to best describe hypocrites ...

So when top Conservative operators such as Canadian Jenni Byrne keep referring to their favourite conservative voters as being "base", just for once, let us all not disagree with them.

Base, indeed, is the word that best describes such hypocrisy.

Now let us pivot back seventy five years, to the year 1940, when the small and the helpless - this time nations as well as individuals - were being invaded the cruelest invaders ever.

While the rest of the world (much more church going then than now) again sat on their prayer books.... and did nothing.

It was perhaps to them, people like all the religious hypocrites that the much-churched Henry Dawson had grown up with in small town Truro Nova Scotia, that Dr Dawson directed his "small" penicillin Manhattan Project.

Back in the same formative years for young Henry when Canadian satirist Stephen Leacock wrote his famous "Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich", a book that neatly skewered Canada's very wealthy and very religious for their "base" hypocrisy....

The man who watered the babies' "P"

The Third Man is a very well made, very well cast and very well acted movie.

But that alone is not enough to put it into everybody's top ten movies of all time.

For it also has gravitas, in spades.

It deals, quite seriously, with possibly the ultimate form of evil in our post-Auschwitz world : cold-bloodedly killing innocent little children.

In the movie, character Harry Lime deliberately waters down his already highly profitable black market penicillin ("P" in hospital shorthand) that he is peddling under the table to civilian hospitals in postwar joint powers occupied Vienna.

Even when he knows that watering down the penicillin ensures that babies will die painful deaths from meningitis, when that is actually the easiest of all diseases for penicillin to cure.

That the elusive Harry is so suave and charming, in his few on-camera appearances, only makes the viewers' horror more morally acute.

That 'fungoid growths' could go from the epitome of absolute evil (here reference Hitler,A and Lovecraft,HP) to the epitome of absolute good in only a few short years would certainly make the ghost of Henry Dawson astonished, proud and very happy...

Defeating WWII

By September 1945, the Axis had been decisively defeated.

End of story --- or was it?

Because defeating WWII itself, defeating the morally abysmal type of war it was (on all sides) took much longer and in fact is still ongoing.

Unsophisticated opinion in 1940 tended to emphasize how very different the western democracies, the axis and the communists were from each other.

Seventy five years on, we are likely to notice how much all groups back then held in common.

In particularly, they all held a quiet confidence that reducing human and biological diversity down to just "the winners" while "the losers" got binned was scientifically justified and hence morally justified.

Today, of course, we increasingly believe that the widest possible range in biological and human diversity is scientifically justified and hence once again morally justified.

"Biodiversity is a good thing" has become a politician's cliche.

There is ever growing support for the idea that the widest possible diversity in human types (signalled by support for civil rights for colored race individuals, Jews, aboriginals, women, gays, the handicapped,etc) is also best.

We have turned 180 degrees on this issue and it is the best single indicator of the difference between WWII's modern world and our present post-modern world.

How did it happen ?

How and when and where did scientific and popular opinion change on the virtues of including the small as well as the great into our charmed circle of life-worthy-of-life ?

I argue, in my book "the OTHER manhattan project", that it all began when wartime and postwar popular opinion ignored elite scientific opinion and focused on the ironic fact that it was a humble little household pest, the green blue slime, that had been busy saving their children during the war and afterwards.

While it as the best and the brightest in the biggest of human civilizations that were busy strafing, shooting, bombing and burning their kids during and after the war...

The crucial Moral wars versus unimportant Morale & Military wars

We are all so used to wars fought between nations, where it is expected that every citizen in each nation at war will not work to defeat their country's war effort, that we forget about the situation in other forms of armed conflict.

For example civil wars and violent revolutions.

These are fought inside individual nations and we fully expect that these same national populations to be sharply divided among various ideological positions - indeed that is partly how we define civil wars and violent revolutions, as opposed to say widespread incidents of armed banditry.


Similarly, during elections inside individual nations, we fully expect the national populations to again to be sharply divided along various ideological lines .

And again, this is partly how we can define non-violent elections as differing from other non-violent contests like volleyball games.

It is a fact of life that if a family of only three people can hold four wildly different opinions on questions of ideology, it is hopeless to expect any nation of three or thirty or three hundred million people to ever have all its population holding the same ideological position on any question.

So when historians say (and most do say) that WWII did not become an ideological war between nations, they are both right (for it did not happen that way) and incredibly wrong (for it could not have happened that way).

Which is not to say that WWII was not our most ideological war ever - just that the ideological battle didn't take place between national governments but rather took place across all national populations and inside all individual minds and consciences.

Morale Wars

Governments at war always employ immense resources towards winning the Morale War and if that means at times appearing to be moral, all right, but if improving morale means lying or even worst crimes, they are up for that too.

It was the same for entire private institutions as it was for entire nations--- they could never expect to achieve such perfect internal harmony as to be able to speak with one united "moral" voice on any pointed ideological question.

For example, one can doubt that everybody inside the Canadian Communist Party, filled as it was with Finnish-Canadians, was really truly and privately united around the leadership's official position on the Russian-Finnish War as they appeared to be in public situations.

Moral Wars

No, WWII's crucial Moral War, as opposed to its much better known but much less important Morale War, was fought out among individuals and most importantly, inside individual consciences.

Wave of the Future, circa September 1940

Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Fall 1940 book, Wave of the Future, was correct in claiming that it was the new ideologies of the anti-democracies (various local flavours of Fascism, Nazism, Communism) that were currently the far more fashionable ones around the educated world.

Far more fashionable among the various elites than were the old ideologies and old religions that promoted small "d" democratic solutions, reached at by involving all in decisions that affected all.

What made this ideological battle "moral", by anyone's definition, was that often the anti-democrats' proposed solutions to societal or economic issues often involved ensuring that various unwanted groups of people died by deliberate neglect or by being killed outright.

I don't think many military planners would disagree with me that if a nation has already lost its internal (and external) moral and morale wars, its military war is probably also doomed.

History records even nations with large armies and high tech weaponry but with severe moral cum morale problems can lose wars (or at least, 'not win them cheaply'), if up against fired up opponents, even if they only have a small population equipped with only low tech weapons.

Axis's moral certainty high in Fall of '40, Allied was low

The crucial issue about the Germans and Japanese in the Fall of 1940 was that not only was their morale high, but so was their belief that their cause was moral.

Most of their population felt their government was in the right, was being up to date scientific and since science since equalled morality, that they both acting morally and were part of the winning wave of the future.

By contrast, many of the western elites semi-secretly agreed with many of the viewpoints of the Nazis and Fascists against trade unionists, Jews, coloreds and uppitty women.

They had to publicly mouth the Christian-originated pieties of the West, all about charity and empathy to the weak and the poor and the small, but they didn't really believe them anymore.

Much the same mood dominated the educated populations in all the Neutral nations (and remember that in the Fall of 1940 and for most of the war, most independent nations remained Neutral in whole or in part).

Dawson's quixotic pilot project

On the face of it, Dawson's claim - in the darkest month of the entire war, as the world waited for the invading of Britain - that the very best way to win the military war against the Axis was to very publicly sweat to save the lives of a mere handful of militarily useless SBE youths, the very 4Fs of the 4Fs, was totally absurd.

But he was of course right, and late in the war the Allied tacitly agreed .

They very publicly began diverting heavy bombers away from their usual rounds of dropping of 8000 pounds of high explosives and incendiary bombs to burn and kill little children, to flying half way around the world to deliver 8 grams of Dawson's primitive penicillin, to save little children.

What cause would you rather die for ?

(A) a cause that used projectiles to kill kids or (B) a cause that used penicillin to save kids.....

Surviving on Lifeboat Earth

Surviving on Lifeboat Earth requires a coalition of all talents, small as well as great.

Similarly, in the fall of 1940, winning the military and moral war against the Axis nations and their fellow travellers among the world's Neutral nations (remember, at that time, they formed the majority of the world's nations !) would also take a 'coalition of all talents', or so thought an obscure doctor in a New York hospital.

Dr Henry Dawson's resulting "small" penicillin Manhattan Project was intended to serve as both as a rebuke to the Allied leadership for editing out most of the world's beings from their coalition plans and as a pilot project example of all the good things that happen when a coalition of all talents is really set to work.

Dawson's 1940 vision of "abundant patent-free natural penicillin for all even during a total war" has benefitted ten billion of us in the seventy five years since, mostly through a form of herd immunity.

Certainly Dawson also made many great pioneering scientific breakthroughs in all kinds of areas, such as DNA, HGT, Quorum sensing, curing the incurable SBE etc.

However, I believe that his greatest contribution to humanity during his tragically short life was actually his project's putting real flesh on the then highly controversial claim that the world was better off with more, not less, human and biological diversity in its portfolio.

Putting the fatal "post" into 1945 Modernity

By 1945, Dawson's project (together with projects from people like Dr Mengele, operating from the totally opposite end of the moral spectrum) helped upend the certitudes of man-centred Progress and together put the fatal "post" in Modernity...

The why of Dawson's "small" penicillin

Life, if we but let it, is a 'Coalition of All Talents', containing not just Plan A but also all other Plans right up to Plan Z, and is never more useful then in a crisis situation.

If, instead, one instantly consigning all the small to the category of 'useless' and then start doing the same to all women and to all non-WASP populations etc, that is rather like sending more than half of your army home ---- on indefinite leave.

Not a smart move in any war --- particularly not in a war that you are already losing.

In the dark days of late 1940, Dr Henry Dawson thought the Allied cause certainly needed the talents of all, rather than discarding more than half of humanity on the spot.

To both rebuke the Allies and to set an alternative example, Dawson's Manhattan-based "small" penicillin project deliberately used the talents of the neglected small penicillium to try and bring the neglected small SBE patients back to happy productive lives....

Winning the ideological war against Hitler required a "coalition of all possible talents" believed Dawson

In the Fall of 1940, Dr Henry Dawson felt the Allies needed to enlist the widest possible diversity of humans and nature, if they were going to win the ideological and military war against the then very attractive* ideologies and very formidable armies of the Fascists + Nazis + Communists and their fellow travelling ilk.

(* See Anne Morrow Lindbergh's October 1940 bestseller, Wave of the Future, for proof of that claim.)

For in late 1940, the German-led coalition really included not just Germany itself together with Italy, Japan and Russia but also had silent supporters and fellow travellers in many nominally neutral fascist-leaning countries in Europe, South America and elsewhere.

(Yes Russia : for we must never forget (or forgive) the fact that if that country had acted to defend Poland in September 1939, instead of helping the Nazis invade and kill the Poles, there'd be no WWII.

Why Russia isn't paying war reparations to Europe and the Allied nations for this act , beats me.)

About all that this very diverse group had in common was that they were not just talking about killing off unwanted and unneeded groups in their societies but had a track record of actually doing so.

The western democracies also had a large body of elite opinion who favoured 'gassing the unfit' but so far that opinion had remained just that : talk.

That Fall, Dawson saw many of those in the American medical-scientific community who had been unwilling to intervene to help Europe's weakest now using the new talk of 'war preparation' as the excuse to do what they always had just talked about.

That is, abandoning the least fit in society, its 4Fs, to focus medical resources on its most fit, the 1As.

As it happens, (accurate) rumours were rife that Hitler had used the same 'war preparation' excuse to do the same thing.

Albeit, Hitler was actively killing the weakest in his society rather than just denying them proper medical care.

Dawson felt the Allies would never assemble a big enough coalition from the empathetic portions of world population that they needed to militarily win against Hitler's team, if they descended to his moral depths on issues like this.

And beyond moral issues, he felt a winning coalition couldn't be assembled if the Allies matched Hitler in draining the potential coalition gene pool down to only the pure and fit.

A coalition of all possible talents, fit and unfit, human and natural, would be needed to defeat Hitler.

That is why Dawson's Manhattan small penicillin Project wasn't really focused on penicillin per say.

walking up the rough side of the Penicillin mountain

With penicillin, Dawson always deliberately chose to walk up 'the rough side of the mountain'.

In 1940, the heavy money was betting it would be a lot easier to synthesize penicillin than try to grow masses of the tiny penicillium, but Dawson chose to focus upon them because he really wanted to make the wider point that even the weakest of beings could be pretty clever chemists.

(And how right he turned out to be !)

And if Dawson had merely wanted to make penicillin a quick public success, he would have focused on acutely ill pre-teen children for several reasons.

To begin with, these kids need far less penicillin than adults, weighting as they do about a fifth as much.

And if they have been generally healthy and then suddenly get acutely ill, they can look extremely terribly ill on photographs but ironically recover quickly within days or weeks, a bonus of their very healthy young immune systems, and then photograph the very picture of health.

Headlines like "Miracle of innocent child plucked from death's door ---- we have exclusive fore & after pictures as proof", are catnip to mass circulation newspapers, as Dawson well knew from earlier media sensations around children recovering thanks to insulin and the sulfa drugs.

Instead Dawson focused on the very unclimbable Mount Everest of all infections, young adults dying from then invariably fatal SBE (endocarditis of the heart valves), building a long lonely wall to bang his head against.

As well as visiting a part of medicine well beyond his demonstrated area of expertise.

But again he had another and wider point to make - he suspected (again amazingly correctly) that the SBEs would be the group of patients chosen to be abandoned to a certain death when the Allied death panels began to pick and choose who got heavily rationed lifesaving medicine.

Dawson wanted to make the point that a Nazi winning coalition needed to enlist all the talents, not cut down most of them, as the Axis were doing.

And he wanted to make the point that a Nazi-busting coalition had to be seen as being very different from Hitler's gang in their treatment of society's weakest.

Particularly in wartime, when this highly moral stance might extract heavy costs, visibly proving the sentiment was genuine and not just a 'cheap round'.

By 1945 and his early death, Dawson had won his secondary point, as the Allies rushed to supply small microbe made penicillin to the small infected as well as the big infected, all over the world.

But it was not till 1985-1995 that he won his main point, that this world is very unpredictable and for Humanity to survive in it, they need to build a coalition of all possible human and biological talents and to maintain the widest possible diversity in their biological portfolio ...

Young reader, responding badly : why my book is really about the 1950s, though set in the 1940s...

After the end of WWII, some Big People began to write a self-congratulatory and dishonest 'La historia oficial' of wartime penicillin.

Other Big People, in government, media and in universities, read it and got it, totally.

And why not ? It certainly reflected their take on Reality.

So they spread the official version ever outward, out to the very ordinary public and even out to little children.

But most of us know how any story we tell can get distorted in the understanding of some who hear it - no matter how short and simple the story.

Academics have developed some quite elaborate theories to account for this : reader response , they call it.

My book is about how the official version story of penicillin quickly got badly distorted among a key audience : the baby boomers.

The visual imagery of the story of wartime penicillin has never changed in the seventy years from 1945 till today.

Always the same steady progress from early photos of young women, dressed like nursemaids, tenderly attending small milk bottles of some foul green mess to the final photos of middle aged men in white coats pensively turning knobs while glancing at dials, before massive arrays of heavily built, gleaming stainless steel or white painted chemical towers.

Indeed the photos of the outside of some of the 1945 era penicillin plants are totally indistinguishable from the many small oil refineries of that era.

Visit me some time and I'll test you on whether or not you can tell a small capacity 1945 oil refinery photo from a large capacity 1945 penicillin plant.

My bet is you'll get it wrong.

In fact, the inconvenient truth all those photos of massive man-made opaque production towers was designed to deny, was that the actual production of penicillin remained - unexpectedly - the same from start to finish.

Despite a multi-nation effort almost as big as the Manhattan atomic project, the smartest chemists in the Universe failed to produce any commercial penicillin and so inside 1945's big steel tanks were the same small microbes making penicillin just as they had inside 1940's small flasks and milk bottles.

And somehow we little people got it.

Despite the official story.

We got that creatures as small and as powerless as us, the bog common ordinary kitchen molds, were making the stuff that was saving so many of us baby baby boomers from the premature deaths our parents and grandparents had faced.

And that WWII wasn't just about Big Bombs from Big Civilizations but also about small lifesavers from small nature.

Even at age seven and eight, we were buying into the nascent idea that diversifying humanity's portfolio to include as much human and biological diversity from the small and powerless side of the world as possible was a very good thing indeed...

Dawson's "small penicillin", a cure for a disease forty years in search of a name

Until the very end of WWII, Sir Charles Lyell ruled the intellectuals' world unchallenged.

The 19th century victory of his claim about the uniformity of the past, present and future geological worlds, over other scientists who said the world had faced past global catastrophes, laid the groundwork for Modern Science's hubristic confidence about a predictable future much like the present and the past.

But the technological development of unstoppable V2 rockets and of atomic bombs, together with evidence from Auschwitz of no limits to human evil, led a small number of people to begin to doubt the impossibility of planet wide catastrophes.

Because, rather like the Spanish Flu at the end of WWI and just as many earlier pandemics had done, it was clear that death could now reach quickly into even the most remote parts of the world.

That, at least, had to be counted as some sort of global - rather than national or continental - catastrophe.

There are no "above the fray" Neutrals and Isolationist nations during global pandemics.

Fallout

But it was not until ten years later, when drifting "fallout" from a remote Pacific island's nuclear testing killed a distant Japanese fisherman and then drifted all over the world, putting poison in the milk of children worldwide, that the general population begin to believe in the possibilities of globe-wide total catastrophes.

I was only a tiny milk-drinking child back then and believe me, I instantly believed ------- and kept right on believing.

Adult scientists back then - 99% of them anyway, did not.

(Not to say they didn't fear the human urban impact of all-out nuclear war, but they felt its rural and biological impact would be relatively small and short term.)

But it was not until the mid 1980s, forty years after WWII's end, that adult scientists developed the wisdom of children.

(But only because most adult scientists of the mid Eighties were themselves the small children of the earlier poison-milk baby boom era.)

Global Catastrophe

Suddenly, any number of credible possible global catastrophes arrived in the scientific mind, seemingly all at once.

The possibility of a nuclear war caused global Winter. The disaster of imminent man-made runaway global warming.

Our current inability to detect or stop the arrival of another massive asteroid, just like the one that was now believed to have caused one of our biggest ever mass extinctions.

A credible scientific explanation (Dawson's HGT) for why microbe resistance to brand new antibiotics happened so fast around the world and why it wasn't ever going to stop, meaning that the possibility of global pandemics was back - and in an age of widespread jet travel, likely to spread very fast indeed.

Evidence we were drawing down essential reserves of underwater water far far faster than Nature was replacing them and that we were exploiting most species and bio-habitats well beyond the breaking point.

And from the world of geology, Lyell's speciality, much acceptance - finally - that the past was filled with as many catastrophes as the future now promised to deliver us.

Biodiversity

The new phrase "biodiversity" filled the airwaves.

A little late - because the fight for human diversity - civil rights for all kinds of non-white peoples, for women and for gays - had been going on for years.

Finally now some talk of civil rights for animals, plants, rocks and sky.

People frantically began to seek to maintain and to diversify our portfolio of human and biological choices, rather than always trying to drain the gene pool of all but the 'right' choices for a 'predictable' future.

Because with the future suddenly so catastrophically unpredictable, humanity decided it did need a Plan B - even a Plan C,D,E,F,G.

Dawson's project wasn't successful in '45 ?!

Dawson himself had died in 1945, forty years before his project was successful.

I know on one level this is impossible to accept - because his secondary claim that wartime microbe made penicillin should be made available to all in need was widely accepted before his death.

But I don't believe that was really what Dawson was trying to prove when he jumped his own team's protocol and suddenly started his quixotic manhattan project in October 1940.

A bit ironically, Dawson actually had a closer connection to Lyell than most scientists for Nova Scotia was important in the development of Lyell's work and Dawson's childhood next door neighbour had actually met (and very notably impressed) Lyell.

But the "show-me" Dawson was always more about concrete action than abstract theory and so he didn't use terms like biological diversity and gene pool though they were in (extremely limited) use in advanced circles in the early 1940s.

But the concepts of not putting all your eggs in one basket was ageless, as was the dictate to hold a diversified portfolio of investments.

Dawson merely thought the mainstream 1940s scientific emphasis on picking a few winners and binning the rest as losers was unfair to the losers who had a right to live as much as others and in any case, they had as many, albeit different, talents as the current winners.

His day job was getting more and better care for the truly forgotten small people among medicine's patients, the chronically ill poor, and his personal scientific interests were focused on the incredible but ignored abilities of life's smallest beings, the microbes.

In October 1940, Dawson combined his day job and his personal scientific interests, when he advanced two (much contested) claims that I encapsulate in the single phrase "small penicillin".

One was that the small microbes could make penicillin at least as good as the big human chemists might - and a heck of a lot faster in a war crisis and so they should be allowed to mass produce, now !

 The other was that wartime penicillin should go to everybody, the small people as well as the big people, IE not just to the Allies's lightly wounded front line troops.

Because (a) it was the right thing to do and (b) the Allies must be morally, not merely militarily, superior to the Nazis if they are truly win over the world and we mustn't use 'war' as an excuse to abandon the powerless who are ill , as the Nazis did when they went to war.

"Small Penicillin" &  Biodiversity

Small-made penicillin for small as well as big patients, hence "small penicillin".

In effect, Dawson said Humanity's global portfolio of life-worthy-of-life must make room for small microbes and small people, making a case for human and biological diversity long before it became fashionable.

In practise, when the Allies did give wartime microbe penicillin to 'the least of of us', they tacitly accepted Dawson's case for human and biological diversity, even if they couldn't make the leap to say so intellectually for another forty years ...

#HumanityWashesAshore ---- a threatening flood or a saving fountain ?

Aylan Kurdi : potentially harmful or potentially helpful ?

One can view this week's refugee crisis (just as one can view WWII and WWII Penicillin) as a conflict over varying ways to best control our fears of the future.

Because all humanity, all the time (sometimes consciously but often also unconsciously) worries about the unknown future.

It remains the sole most distinctive thing that we humans do that other lifeforms don't seem to do.

Controlling fears of Future by controlling everything... or nothing

Many of us humans feel that we can best control our fears of the future by controlling everything ---- after totally eliminating everything else that we judge potentially harmful. What remains is a knowable future we can control and direct.

Control freaks.

(Think Adolf Hitler, Howard Florey and their ilk.)

But others of us humans feel that we can best control our fears of the future by not controlling anything  ---- diversifying our biological portfolio to totally retain everything potentially helpful, giving humanity lots of Plan Bs, Cs,Ds, etc.

Portfolio diversifiers.

(Think Henry Dawson and his supporters.)

To many of a Vancouver newspaper's letter writers, a little three year old refugee boy seems a potential terrorist, best drowned at birth - overseas if possible.

If this was 1940, perhaps by drowning on a badly overcrowded boat, filled with Europe's Jews, on its way to exile in Madagascar.

If not drowned, then perhaps gassed and burned, just in case any little baby grows up as a Jewish terrorist.

But this is 2015, and their new phobia is Arabs not Jews, so a Turkish beach will have to do instead until new furnaces can be stoked up.

To other newspaper letter writers the little three year old boy was potentially a genius and savior who would grow up to solve our environmental crisis (or perhaps not), but in any case a child to be held and cherished, a fellow human being.

Potential terrorist or potential savior - or just little three year old -- now we will never know...

a Diversified biological Portfolio or placing all our genetic bets in one basket ?

Do you feel lucky Humanity, do ya ?

Do you think you can accurately predict now what genes, species, geniuses we will need in the future ?

Do ya, do ya ?

Accurately enough to pick the most productive corn variety in America and bin all the underproducing heirloom varieties ; enough to pick the most Aryan children in Europe and eliminate all the rest together with all the adult defectives and asocials ?

Da ya, do ya ?

Think then of the resulting 1970s Corn Blight ; think if mass murder has ever really brought mass happiness.

Do you still feel lucky punks and punkettes ?

If so, perhaps then you have a hubristic personality (aka being left brained or possessing the conservative mind) : you oppose the need for any wasteful precautionary principles and biodiversity, because you already know all the answers.

But us who are more cautious about the human ability to accurately predict the future, store up our treasures of human diversity and biodiversity.

The more the better.

Because, dear Mr Harper, inside all that messy diversity, inside all the flood of refugees, inside all that 'humanity washed ashore',  just could be Humanity's Plan B,C,D or X,Y,Z  ---- when the cosmic poop really hits the planetary fan...

Inventing "small" Penicillin

Martin Henry Dawson did not discover penicillin or Horizontal Gene Transfer or DNA as the location of the genes and all the other discoveries that his memory is usually associated with.

What he did invent (but not "discover") and what he should be remembered for and honored for, is "small" penicillin.

In a war of mass bombings and gassings and burnings led by the Bigs and fought over values exalting the Big, Dawson dared suggest that the small at all levels of Life are at least as worthy of life and dignity as the Big.

In 1940, he said that primitive penicillin produced by the small penicillium was good enough, particularly during a horrific global war of dead and dying, to start its mass production now and to start saving lives now.

And he acted upon his belief, on October 16th 1940, almost 75 years ago.

He worked to save the lives of everyone, not just the Big and the Best and most Fit and most A1.

Particularly because in a war against the Axis that was at least moral as it was material, he felt we must save the weak, the unfit, the 4Fs during the conflict itself not just after, lest we match the Nazis stroke by stroke as they rode a fast train down to Hell.

Primitive 'good enough' penicillin, produced by the small of the world for the small of the world, as well as the Big and the medium sized, now !

The assembled Big of the Anglo-American medical elite wanted wartime penicillin kept as a secret weapon of war, not as a medicine to save lives of all and sundry.

But the dying doctor Dawson (I did mention he was dying all through this unequal battle didn't I ?) won out, when the world's population outvoted their leadership with their voices.

Today wartime-produced penicillin is still regarded as history's best known and best loved medicine.

But Penicillin's moral dignity was a near run thing - it could just as easily be remembered today has being right up there with the world's collective refusal to help Europe's Jews escape Hitler as one of the great moral evils of the Allied side of WWII....

Aug '43 photo of 3 year old changes the whole world

Her name was Patty Malone, not Aylan Kurdi, but ultimately she also died way too young at age three.

But four months before her quiet death off stage, a single photograph of Patty in her hospital hugging her stuffie captured the hearts of most mothers (and some fathers) all around a war-weary world and literally changed the course of history.


Before Patty and the photograph, wartime penicillin was succeeding as a weapon crafted solely for war - a secret medicine, produced in strictly limited quantities - to be unleashed only when the Allies invaded Europe.

All to get the Allied lightly wounded back into the killing fields before the Axis wounded could, to provide a little manpower advantage to the Allies.

The dying civilians and soldiers of the world were not to get a look see until the war's end.

Canadian-born Dr Henry Dawson opposed that idea from the beginning.

With penicillin his tiny team had made themselves, he acted out his belief that, in a war that was as much moral as material, the Allies had to better the Nazis in the treatment of the weakest members of society at war, not match the Nazis morally on their slide down to Hell.

His ideas were shut out, censored in wartime's published media but even totalitarian regimes could not stop gossip - if fact war censorship makes it flourish all the more.

Dr Dawson was working in Manhattan and soon the entire tight-knit NYC metro area medical gossip mill was rife with talk of Dawson's miraculous success with penicillin in saving the un-saveable.

It quickly spread from doctor and nurse to patient and family - quickly reaching Dr Dante Colitti, an Italian Catholic New Yorker in a hospital only a mile away from Dawson's.

Dante had been viewed as almost un-saveable as a child himself and no New York hospital would hire after his graduation ---- until war staff shortages made it necessary.

So he had no love - to put it mildly ! - for the American medical elite's wartime dictates demanding public silence about penicillin's miracle cures.

He decided to phone America's biggest daily and Heart's flagship, The New York American Journal, begging them to get Washington to release penicillin for one of his hospital's tiny patients dying from a disease penicillin could cure.

Interestingly (and paralleling Dawson's decision to help save SBE patients) Colitti had no business what so ever involving himself with this type of patient - he was a surgeon (and a mere resident) and this was a matter for other types of doctors all together.

His was simply a heartfelt concern for a fellow being, made by a guy about to get married and start having three olds himself.

Think of Dawson and Colitti as being the exact opposite to Canadian PM Stephen Harper, who would shove his own children under the campaign bus, if he calculated it would help him to win re-election.

The Hearst organization really knew how to run an all out newspaper crusade and with days of the photo of Patti in that hospital bed hitting newspaper readers in America, the governments of the whole world knew about the miracle of penicillin and wanted lots of it, yesterday.

Despite wartime censorship, Neutral countries' diplomats in Washington even quickly got the news out to all the Axis countries
as well.

As Dawson had always wanted, wartime penicillin suddenly was produced in mass quantities during the war, to help all the dying soldiers and civilians of Allied nations, the Neutral nations, the Liberated lands and finally the Axis countries as well.

Penicillin remains the best known, best loved medicine in the world.

All because of one photograph of one little three year old.

I hope and pray Aylan Kurdi does the same today for the refugee crisis .....

Explaining Darwin's unexpected 1860s success : rising populations of labourers same time as the rise of their cheaper, more mallible replacement, the hydrocarbon energy slave

Unexpectedly, during the the 1860s, the global modern elite - including Darwin himself - found a little something to applaud inside the vast concept forest that was his theory of 'Natural Evolution'.


He and they basically rejected his key idea that evolution was totally directionless and that the variants that selection acted upon were thrown up totally by chance.

But elites everywhere seized upon the idea that they and not Darwin had actually invented : that Life was not a linked chain of being with every species needed to keep all the other species alive, as supposed for centuries.

Instead they took up the new claim that life was actually an enormous one-time track meet, entitled the Survival of the Fittest ---- with all the losers destined to slowly starve away.

That simply wasn't so - or at the very least, Darwin never actually said that.

Admittedly, in a very long lifetime of words, he totally buried the lede, but ultimately Darwin did say that Life was actually about a million races a year, each and every year, from the beginnings of Life in the yesteryear on into eternity.

Darwin-the-scientist said that each tiny little niche held its own race and as the niche changed, so a new race was run within it.

But Darwin-the-Manchester-Liberal, like almost all modern elites in the 1860s, tended to deny these claims and instead to fall in with Herbert Spencer's views about the survival of the fit instead.

Why ?

Cruel Timing

I believe it can all, Auschwitz,Hunger Plan East and all, can be put down to an unfortunate coincidence in timing - or mis-timing.

Mid Victorian families, like all earlier families, had lots of pregnancies because most kids died before birth or before the age of five.

Ten pregnancies to get five kids to survive to youth, so their labour could add to the income of the family farm or other human labour oriented family business.

Now in the 1860s, more of the traditional ten pregnancies were surviving to birth and even beyond the age of five, because of fewer reoccurring national famines and purer drinking water,etc.

National populations were soaring.

But once families realized that (a) more kids were surviving to their teen years and (b) less and less labour, including child labour, was going to be needed, they would reduce their pregnancies way way down.

But connecting the dots would take time - introducing a critical "lag".

Overcoming that demographic lag in understanding changing circumstances could take decades - it took exactly 100 years  for birthrates to fall in rural Antigonish, for example, as my partner Rebecca can personally attest!

At the very same time, smart minds among the greedy and ambitious were realizing that with cheap abundant hydrocarbon energy about, machines (machine energy slaves) would be much cheaper, much more reliable, much less tireless, much less likely to demand unions or vote for anti-capitalist governments, than human slave labourers.

But the rising national human survival rates were producing much more human labourers at the exact time the elites were deciding they needed much less.

A much older, much less hypocritical age might have just led the surplus labourers out into a wintry howling wilderness to die out of sight, but modern mass media and modern photography made that solution, as marxist-latte-lapping-academics are wont to say, "problematic".

The optics - and there would always be optics ( Aylan Kurdi as a recent example) - would look as "bad", as morally bad as this effort really was.

So Evolution cum 'The Survival of the Fittest' emerged just at the right time.

Now Evolutionary failure and Mother Nature could be blamed for Man's evil doings --- basically his finding as many ways as possible to speed Nature's reduction in the number of human "useless mouths", without getting caught at it.

But of course, as Hitler, Stalin and Tojo discovered during WWI and as we are still re-discovering in 2015, humanity's replacement, the mechanized slaves, can't always do many things (usually downmarket manual things, ironically enough) as well as people paid minimum wage and kept on unpaid 'call' for all hours.

Human Labour Shortage Looming

In fact, I predict that by the 2060s, the world will  face a simply enormous human labour shortage.

Another mistimed coincidence, in fact the exact reverse side of the 1860s situation.

Only now we will be running out of (cheap) hydrocarbons to do our dirty hard work just at the very time as our world fills up with retired ancients like me, demanding to be maintained in the swell lifestyle to which cheap hydrocarbons have accustomed us ...

With smart bombs, the Allies are more accurately killing kids to make their father soldiers surrender, still to ensure our soldiers won't have to fight

Before the 1990s, much of the Allies's high tech/ high level bombing efforts went so astray that bombs meant for killing kids in cities actually fell among cows in farmers' open fields instead.

Supposedly we've improved our technology and morality since then, so bombs now tend to fall only on their military targets, aka buildings.

But we still can't really be sure what is inside those military 'targets' .

Sometimes they are indeed filled with bad men with guns ; but sometimes there are only kids with teddies inside.

All dead ------- either way.

(Here reference the recent release of secret documents detailing how Canadian planes recently dropped bombs that ended up killing ISIS kiddies instead of ISIS killers.)

And the Allied military brass, boys more in love with nice clean shiny new uniforms than even their shiny new high tech toys, has always lied about all the kiddies they have killed .

Lied in 1940 Europe right through to 2015 Syria and Iraq and Palestine.

Because admitting high tech "strategic bombing" wars don't really work, morally or militarily, would mean going on to Plan B - getting lots of men with rifles and shiny new uniforms to start crawling in the mud towards their targets.

And the military brass, the air force above all, hardly joined the military to get their clothes muddy and wet.

Or to die.

That's the job of the other daddies' kiddies...

We're trending #1 ! Canada's refugee drowning policy condemned in social (and mainstream) media all over the world

Remember when Canada only used to be on everyone's lips when it did something good ?

Aylan Kurdi : former Allies shamed by former Axis

A former Axis nation, the very crowded Germany still managed to take in almost 80,000 refugees last year.

By contrast, Canada, a former Allied nation, is both big and empty - 35 million people spread over 3.5 million square miles.

In 1956, with less than half as many people (only 16 million people) it still took in almost 40,000 Hungarian refugees.

In 2015, that would mean it would need to take in 80,000 Syrian refugees to match its 1956 effort.

So far, in total, over this entire multi-year refugee crisis, Canada has taken in just 1,000.

Admittedly, the Syrians are not white Anglo Saxon Protestants, so they're hardly Canadian PM Stephen Harper's personal choice as new Canadian neighbours.

But I doubt that an earlier Canadian (also a white Anglo Saxon Protestant), Martin Henry Dawson, would have just sat back and watched little kids drown trying to come into Canada.....

Eggs in a basket : too many or too few?

On a continuum of human personality types, there will always be those of us who uncomfortable about the numbers of eggs in the basket - even there are just two eggs, one black and one white, they'd still like them in separate, non touching, baskets.

And there will be others, like Martin Henry Dawson, who feel you can never have too many different eggs in the basket - never have too much diversity in your portfolio or too much biodiversity or too big a gene pool.


But what these varying opinions really reflect, in my opinion, is something that might come as a surprise to most of us.

They reflect different confidence levels in the human ability to safely predict and prepare for the future.

The first group is only comfortable if the complexity of the future is reduced to a few firm categories of 100% bad and 100% good.

It does not really matter if the future can be so reduced - it only matters if we can imagine that it can be so reduced.

Thanks to a bit of "pop" Reductionism, the problem is solved - at least in their own mind - they then relax.

They feel a few basic categories of good and bad can be easily controlled and that being so, we can face the future upbeat and optimistic.

(There might be baneful climate change in the future, but even if so, we can easily solve it with a few high tech schemes.)

The second group is cautious (think the Precautionary Principle) about most things - particularly human claims that smell of hubris.

They see a future so complex and unpredictable and the human capability to accurately predict and control as being so limited than they feel we need friends to get by.

Lots of friends.

So we need to retain all the species and varieties of species in the world, we need all the mis-shaped and disliked bits and bob of human society.

One can never have too many friends.

Or the unlikely but useful tools they might possess.

Think of that much loathed common household pest, penicillium slime all over our fruit and our basement walls.

And of the penicillin it produced....

What would Dawson do ? As babies drown because of an uncaring Harper government

#HarperDrownedThisBaby

In the Fall of 1940, pushed beyond the breaking point by years of observing a world unwilling to reach out to help a endless parade of small nations and small people brutalized by Hitler, Stalin and Tojo, Martin Henry Dawson broke all medical protocol and broke free of a lifetime of caution and deference to higher authorities.

So, on October 16th 1940 in NYC, Dawson injected his primitive penicillium juice into two dying patients, thus (incidentally) ushering in our present Age of Antibiotics  ----and all the hope it has given this world ever since.

As I look at the picture of this poor needlessly drowned child, who an uncaring Harper government won't let into Canada, I can't help what wonder "What would Dawson do ?" if he were around today....

biological High Flyer stock or Diversified Portfolio ?

If there was one creature that got more dismissive pats on the head over the years than any dog or cat, it was little old ladies with dogs and cats.

For centuries, male scientists ignored claims by LOLs (little old ladies) that cats and dogs had personalities and each dog and cat had distinct personalities.

Ignored almost as much as these male scientists had been ignoring their own children's personalities.

All our children are distinctly different, said their much more observant mothers.

(Ever wonder how so many men, who can't see beyond their own nose at home, ending up directing the whole world based on - wait for it ! - their deep observations into Nature ?)

Scientists today (maybe because more scientists are women and mothers, who knows ?) are much more willing to accede that animals have personalities and individual animals all have different ones.

So perhaps now, we humans are finally reduced to differing from our fellow beings only in that we seem to worry much more about the future than they do.

Worrying about futures, really.

What will happen to me, my parents, my grandchildren, my hometown, my religion, my ethnic group, my language group, my world.

We only get to sleep at night when we finally settle in on a plan that is very much like our own retirement investment plan - because both plans in the end reflect our basic personality, as found on a wide continuum of variety.

The financial advisor basically asks us to decide if we want our pension plan to focus on a few (high yielding) high flyer stocks or should we hedge our bets and diversify our holdings over a wide variety of (lower yielding) stocks.

Similar is our own internal mental choice in deciding how best we humans should plan for an uncertain future.

Hubristic Reductionism

Some of us may be so confident in the ability of the human will to overcome great physical odds that we even quibble about the future being seen as 'uncertain'.

We feel confident we can predict the future's winners and losers now, confident we can discard the losers, certain we know the winners best suited to our efforts to make the future as happy as possible.

We are from the old school, the school of Progress and Modernity, when great effort went into dividing the world world into two mutually exclusive boxes : the useful and the useless.

We are Penicillin's Howard Florey.

We eagerly gathered up the fastest growing plant types that gave us the sweetest fruit and binned all the smaller, slower maturing, less tasty "heirloom" species --- we want to 'reduce' biodiversity to a few certain winners.

We did similarly with humans, attempting to greatly 'reduce' the gene pool and focus on a few best human types, by both positive and negative eugenics.

Progress and Modernity were indeed the Era of Reductionism, in the widest possible meaning of that term.

The Precautionary Principle

Others of us were much more cautious and skeptic by nature. We took a jaundiced view of the abilities of the human will, as evidenced by history.

And we remained unconvinced that the past, present and future were as unchanging as Sir Charles Lyell and his fans among the scientific elite always claimed.

We were content merely to survive, not to fly high in success and possibly later crash and burn on the ground, to adapt the concepts of Margaret Atwood first used by her to contrast Canadians to Americans.

We could only sleep at night if we had not just a Plan B, but a Plan C,D,E,F and onward.

The more diversified our portfolio the better --- the more biodiversity in nature and human society, the better.

We didn't think we should discard heirloom varieties of tomatoes, or mentally and physically challenged humans, or aboriginals, Jews and Negroes, or bacteria and fungus.

We are Penicillin's Henry Dawson...

"Primitive Penicillin For Everyone, Now !"

By 1945, this was Henry Dawson's winning approach in the battle over what direction wartime penicillin should take.

Of course, that year the Swedes chose to give their Nobel Prize to the losing side in this debate over penicillin's course, rewarding it to losers Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey.

Label the losers' approach as "Synthetic Penicillin For Some, Someday."

On October 16th 1940, Dawson considered primitive penicillin (concentrated, semi-purified excretions from the tiny penicillium) fully ready for primetime.

Fully ready to inject - now ! - into dying patients, civilian or serviceman, of all races, genders and incomes, in an effort to save their life when nothing else worked.

Good enough to put into unlimited mass production - by government owned plants if need be.

By contrast, his opponents in the medical establishments of Britain and America - people like Fleming and Florey and their warm friends at Vannevar's OSRD and at Merck - didn't want penicillin to go into (limited) mass production until it had been synthesized  by big Pharma, if and when that ever came about.

(It never has been totally synthesized commercially and we still have Dawson's primitive penicillium making the base penicillin that lies behind all our best antibiotics to this day.)

Even if it was synthesized to produce a cheap and abundant pure penicillin, the drug was still to be held back, for use as a secret weapon of war, rather than to be used among the general soldier and civilian population, saving lives.

Penicillin was intended to finally be introduced only on D-Day, to the total surprise of the Germans.

All to return lightly wounded Allied combat troops back into the line of fire far faster than what the Germans could for their lightly wounded with only Sulfa drugs at their command, giving the Allies a little extra break at the odds.

If I was telling this tale to daycare kids like Sam, I say it was a argument between giving small penicillin to small people versus giving Big penicillin to Big people....

Strategic Bombing and Strategic Blockades really means killing small kids until their soldier dads surrender without a rifle shot being fired

It wasn't till January 1945, a few months before the war ended, that British Tommies were finally on German soil, going mano a mano with Jerry.

The British war cabinet never expected it to happen at all - from September 1939 to June 1944 and beyond they thought German fathers in uniform would eventually surrender, shots unfired, rather than see all their kiddies at home starve to death from a British sea blockade or burn to death in an Allied firebombing campaign.

America's war command also never expected to have to invade Japan's mainland - again a sea blockade and a firebombing effort would make the Japanese men in uniform surrender rather than see all their kids starve or be burned alive.

The Italians had pioneered this stuff in the Thirties, first in Ethiopia and then in Spain - bombing children in cities to get their soldier fathers to surrender out in the front lines.

The Germans had good success with burning kids to death to hasten the surrender of their soldier fathers in Warsaw, Belgrade and in Rotterdam, and with less success in London and Leningrad, despite me-too, me-too help from the Italian air forces.

The German efforts to starve British kids to death by a U-boat blockade of food shipments, until their soldier dads surrendered without a shot, almost succeeded. As did their land and air blockade of Leningrad.

Extensive combat to the death between enormous armies, to decide the fate of nations, was always a second choice Plan B in WWII

The Russians might have liked to have defeated the Germans by burning German kids to death, just as the Germans were trying to do to Russian kids with their medium bombers, but lacked the capability to produce enough reliable, big, long ranger bombers.

That mattered because they were the nation furthest from their opponent's civilian centres during most of the war.

So they were forced to put ultra huge ground forces into direct combat with equally massive German land forces for three solid years before they began to put Germans on the run.

China and Japan also lacked enough reliable big long range bombers to break the stalemate in their land war, though Japan certainly tried very hard with what medium bombers they had.

It is almost unknown, outside of their own countries, that the Chinese and Russians still suffered 350,000 to 500,000 civilian deaths from efforts by old technology medium bombers.

Those deaths match those of Germany and Japan from the prolonged, massive and very high tech heavy bomber efforts against their nations.

Is it just the cynic in me that thinks that if all the major combatant nations had gassed kids in extermination camps, almost nobody would be talking about it today ?

So we talk up the Germans' Holocaust and ignore the awkward fact that all sides attempted to starve and burn enough enemy kids to death that they might win the war without firing a shot....

unpredictable small atoms, small microbes... and small children

'Pop' reductionism was the real (underlying) ideology of the Era of Progress.

There was a confident expectation among almost all people in the West during that era - particularly among those with a little secondary school science under their belt - that the small were inherently 'simple', almost inert, and hence could be controlled, transformed and scaled infinitely upwards.


Simple meant stable and predictable, definitely either this or that.

Reductionism, the reducing of reality down to a few simple stable rules and categories, is a boon comfort, in any age, to a significant fraction of us.

All of us who are basically born with (or develop from early family circumstance) the psychological propensity to be very uncomfortable and frightful of any sort of significant ambiguity.

But reductionism was never more of a comfort historically then when the Era of Progress's process of modernization presented some unique mental conflicts to the people living in the western civilizations that created it.

If people in what we today call the Third World resented many many of the things that late nineteenth century modernization suddenly introduced into their culture and economy, they at least knew who to blame --- the West.

They had plenty of conflicts with the West but were untroubled by internal mental conflicts as to where to direct the blame and their anger.

But almost all the people in the West, while they loved much what modernization had brought them, were at least as overwhelmed by the plentitude of new objects, new experiences, new ideas, new people as were the peoples of the Third World.

But they couldn't dare directly blame Progress, their own fabulous creation.

Even though they feared the overwhelming amount of fluidity, change and transforming of traditional category barriers that their own efforts had thrown up.

Their response was to create a very manichean concept of modernity.

Within it, the whole world was divided into two simple small and absolute categories of worthiness.

In category A at the top was the modern, the normal and the civil.

In category B at the bottom was the primitive, the abnormal, and the savage.

This schema allowed Moderns to combat overwhelming feelings of too much ambiguity in day to day life, by finding powerless (aka 'small') scapegoats they could put in category B and then safely blame them for most everything.

Without fear the small could effectively fight back.

The Mods soon found plenty of scapegoats.

Were our kids different today ? Just blame it on Negro jungle music.

Were big chain stores replacing the stores of local small business elites ? Just re-conceive chain stores as the secret fungoid growth of cosmopolitan Jewish banksters plotting to sap the national economies of the civilizations.

Were taxes too high and incomes too low ? It was all because we were spending way too much taxpayers' hard earned money on useless mouths : way too much on adult mental (and physical) defectives with a mental age of about two.

Some medical scientists around the world openly advocated killing them at birth - many more said nothing publicly but quietly tried to kill them at birth if opportunities arose.

But when we look at actual small objects we don't necessarily find them to be at all simple, controllable inert and and reliably transformable by us.

For instance, the poster child of the small and the predictable, the atom, actually haa a habit of becoming naturally radioactive --- but we can't predict where or when.

Wait a minute, you say, what about the half lives of isotopes ? They're highly predictable.

They sure are - but the much quoted half life guesstimate is the product of the very antithesis of reductionism - they are predictable only thanks to reductionism's arch enemy holism.

So yes, over an entire holistic system of trillions upon trillions of atoms we can indeed reliably predict the average time of when half of them will have gone radioactive.

But each of those small supposed stable entities 'the atom' self transform at their own pace and in their own fashion.

This is one of the reasons why heavily overbuilt nuclear power plants must still be decommissioned after a relatively short time.

All because the free-willed atomic bits and bob fleeing the heart of the process eventually render the entire structure unsafely radioactive.

Similarly, those supposedly simplest possible bits of life, the microbes, amazingly turned out to be highly unpredictable in character and distinctly capable of doing sophisticated chemical and biological activities that human civilizations still can't do.

Microbes proved capable of unpredictably self-transforming themselves by way of HGT (horizontal gene transfer) and of self-transforming unwanted agricultural waste into the world's best antibiotics.

Finally any observant person should notice that two year olds can be surprisingly worldly and yet display such a innocent zest for life and exploring and learning that they quite wear their elders out !

Parents and grandparents of former two year olds often wish the kids could have remained that age forever.

And like the small atom and the small microbe, two year olds definitely have a mind of their own and a determination to do things at their own pace.

Parents of these little ones, and one can resume some of these medical scientists had to have been parents, know well that they are very far from being reduced to inert lumps that are easily malleable by adults.....

The course of WWII : from fungophobia to fungomania ?

Hitler's Nazis described all the Jews as being a fungoid growth, a poisoned mushroom, and said the next war would see either the death of all the Jews or the death of all human civilization.

And Zyklon B was to be their fungicide of choice.

The Nazi's use of metaphors about fungoid growths spreading their invisible threads through national bodies, of slimy smelly molds found only in dark dank decaying places, and evil and deadly 'devil's fruit' mushrooming up everywhere overnight was not at all unusual for that inter-war era.

HP Lovecraft, as well as a host of otherwise ordinary writers, easily outdid the Nazis in their vivid descriptions of the ultimate evil as being fungoid in character.

And in 1945, when atomic bomb explosion clouds first emerged looking at least as much like cauliflowers as mushrooms - guess what species got overwhelmingly picked to describe this horrible new weapon of war ?

There was no doubt that fungophobia was the in-house mental illness for of all western civilization, be it Allied, Axis or Neutral.

All the more paradoxical then --- in the full G K Chesterton sense of that term --- that WWII also ended with much of the world in the throes of fungomania.

All over a small, smelly, slimy, blue green smear, a common household pest, that gave suffering humanity its best ever lifesaver : penicillin.

Ironic, isn't it ?

The Age of Progress was inevitably also the Age of Big

Michael B Schiffer (The Portable Radio in America) is fighting an uphill battle and he knows it.

Schiffer is hoping to show the rich history of success by American engineers at making extremely small and portable radios (and hearing aids) before WWII and before the transistor and before the Japanese.

I think his book and all its documentation makes his case - in spades.

But Schiffer is frank is stating the postwar American customer generally wanted no part of anything small - not in cars and not in radios or TVs ----- or in hydro dams, bridges, aircraft, bombers or battleships.

In a an era of Progress and Manichean Modernity, the Bigger was very much the better.

Microbes were small and hopelessly primitive --- Man and his works were big and clever.

Ipso Facto.

The cult of the small and the miniature, seen most fully in our present world of electronics, only truly came to the fore when the phrase "this is the microbes' world and we humans are just visiting" became a commonplace.

It may be a coincidence but I don't think so.

Like the TV detective always says, "I don't believe in coincidences"....

Microbes can reproduce a million times as fast as humans - or a thousand times as slow

Wait, wait a minute - you ain't seen nothing yet folks - there's more, lots more !

They can live almost without water, live in salty brine or strong acid, resist radiation, survive extreme hot and cold, and the high pressures of the deep underground, live in the dark, live inside incredibly tiny holes in rock.

They can share all their billions of different genes through the process of horizontal gene transfer, HGT, a sort of loosey goosey world wide library system where everyone is both author and patron.

No globe wide catastrophe in four billion years has been able to kill them.

No wonder, if we recall they can remain in suspended animation for perhaps millions of years, without any food or water, inside extremely hot or extremely cold bare rock, just patiently waiting for Churchill's broad sunlit uplands to reemerge.

Of course, on October 15th 1940, almost no one would have believed any of this, even if it had been gathered in one popular account for all to read.

For "The Symmetry of Progress and Manichean Modernity", circa 1940, simply demanded that the brilliance of civilized Man is to be balanced and framed by the stupidity of the primitive Microbe.

Martin Henry Dawson's pioneering injections of mold-made penicillin into patients on October 16th 1940 began the slow drip drip drip that eventually ended that delusion.

Of course the many war time activities of Europe's biggest civilization also helped...

What if penicillin was a Paradox, rather than a miracle ?

Google penicillin + miracle together and you get over a third of a million references, in English alone.

So wartime penicillin was clearly one of God's miracles, n'est c'est pas ?

But what if it was one of God's paradoxes instead ?

We all recall how much GK Chesterton loved to talk about God's paradoxes and how freely he added many of his own.

Adolf Hitler love to 'talk' too - rants usually.

All too often about how Jews were fungoid growths and fungus ferments.

Adolf and German right wing culture of his era generally all had a real mania for seeing Jews as literally being cultural fungus pathogens bent dissolving the German organic society.

During WWII, the Nazis saw the entire war as being about a fungoid growth taking the world by storm ---- with the Aryan race resisting it all the way, in a case of it being either them or us.

That proved to be the case, because in 1945, the Nazi Aryan vision was totally defeated and penicillin did indeed take the entire world by storm....

"Isn't it ironic," sings Alanis M.....

Which would you rather have injected into your veins : fungus piss or piss from a guy with VD ?

Seemingly not an attractive choice is it but most people learned to take in all in stride as long as you weren't too blatant about it.

Most people during WWII had to make do with semi-purified fungus excrements (aka penicillin) injected into them.

An unlucky few got the penicillin extracted (sic) from the urine of men with VD at the Marine Hospital on Staten island who had just received penicillin.

From 40 to 60% of the original penicillin injected into us, leaves in our urine four hours later, completely unharmed.

The extraction was supposedly very simple, according to Dr LH Sophian, admittedly a very well regarded medical scientist.

(Basically making the urine even more acid by adding very strong HCL acid and then adding some acetone and chilling the mix in a fridge for 4 hours and then separating penicillin from acetone into water) and yielded up to 30% of the 40%-60% excreted.

That is 12% to 18% of the original penicillin.

But I doubt that the result could have been as pure as the original penicillin, itself already pretty impure.

Because if the result was at all pure, given such a supposedly easy extraction method, all the Allies' wartime drug industry would be busy extracting penicillin this way, on a commercial basis.

And very odd, when for 20 years the world's doctors and scientists were united in being repulsed by the mere thought of injecting natural fungus piss into humans, they said nothing about the idea of injecting VD filled "piss penicillin" into the same human veins...

The acorn becomes an oak : October 16th 1940

Adults of a certain age were all quite small when they first learned the acute difference between those two very similar sounding medical words that adults like to use : antiseptic and antibiotic.

For when we scratched our knee falling off our trike, Mom washed it, put an orange antiseptic that stung like heck and then gave us a kiss and a cookie.

We had long forgotten the spill before the orange washed off and the scratch healed.

But then one dread-filled summer's afternoon, the whole house was extremely tense as neighbours filed in. whispering low.

"Spinal Meningitis".

Suddenly old Dr Mattison, who never ever made housecalls, came speeding up the drive on two wheels and ran up the steps two at a time, dragging his black bag.

Without as much as even a curt hello, he drew a big needle out of his bag and plunged it deep into little sister and held his thumb full down until it emptied.

Then, after a profound release of pent up air, he casually tapped Mom on the shoulder and in an unnaturally loud voice said , "Marg, where's your manners, how about a cuppa ?"

No one but no one ever dared call Mom 'Marg' and she looked momentarily shocked,  but then she shook all over, gave off a relieved laugh and scurried off to the kitchen.

And for the first and only time in your life, you saw Dad burst into tears, balled like a baby, as Doctor Mattison patted baby sister's on the head repeatedly and said, "you'll be alright" until the ambulance arrived.

That is the difference an antibiotic makes.

But just as even a mighty oak started as a tiny acorn, so too the most famous of all antibiotics, penicillin, started out as a harmless antiseptic rather than a mighty life-saving antibiotic.

For the first twelve years of its existence as a medicine, its prolonged childhood of the soul, penicillin was only used occasionally, dabbed as an antiseptic on external infections, with usually modest results.

But seventy five years this Fall, on October 16th 1940, at NYC's famous Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Centre, Penicillin finally climbed out of short pants and into long pants as it was injected for the very first time in a dying patient with the intention of saving his life.

That patient, Charles Aronson, was a young man dying of then invariably fatal SBE, the form of heart valve disease caused by earlier bouts of Rheumatic Fever.

That pioneering dose of penicillin, ushering in our present Age of Antibiotics, must of helped because unexpectedly Charles lived and returned to a useful working life.

An in that instant, an acorn became an oak....

When both pigs and badly crippled birds fly, the only miracle we humans chose to notice involves the pigs

One definition of God's miracles is that they must defy gravity, as with pigs that fly, or involve defying some one or other of God's ten thousand or so commandments of science.

But what if God sometime choses to follow His own scientific commandments but merely gild their lilly a bit beyond normal expectations?

What we catholics like to call miracles in the third degree.

As in the crippled bird returning to nest, or when a crippled plane successfully returns to base.

Or when the penicillium arrived to usher in a kinder gentler post-modern era just at the very moment when Manichean Modernity was really going postal.

These unnoteworthy quiet 'miracles', in the human metaphorical sense, might turn out to have been God's miracles as well...

What if Penicillin really was a miracle ?

What if we never find the mis-laid personal account from Henry Dawson, finally explaining the reasons for the other Manhattan Project, because that document never actually existed.

Because perhaps Dawson could never explain, even to himself, just why he began the project.... and why he carried it through at the cost of his own life.

Because Dr Dawson perhaps sometimes felt propelled forward by forces beyond his ken, to do what he did, regardless of the cost.

I can and I will, give my best educated guesses as to why Dawson rationally and deliberately did what he did --- but I have no proof, no proof at all.

Another reason, a very celestial reason, makes just as much sense and has just as much proof.

Or maybe a bit more - because in 1943-1946, it was very common indeed, among the devout and among the atheists alike, to speak of the "miracle" of penicillin.

As a Roman Catholic doctor* once remarked to Margaret Jennings about the atheist Howard Florey and penicillin and miracles, wouldn't Florey have been surprised, if it really had been a miracle.

But won't we all have been surprised as well, the nominally devout at least as much as the militant doubter ?

What if God did choose to come back at the height of the horrible WWII, as a blob, like none of us, just a smear on a subway wall --- or on a tenement hall.

Once again, just to help Humanity find its way home....

*************

*recalled in Trevor Williams' biography of Howard Florey

Way out of his comfort zone

I was not truly 'surprised' that the normally highly diffident Dr Martin Henry Dawson broke his own team protocol and became the first person in history to inject an antibiotic (dirty natural penicillin) into a patient, 75 years ago this October 16th.

For the diffident Dawson had done something similar at least once before, pushing on with his equally pioneering research into the horizontal transfer of DNA between microbes, against the express orders of his boss at NYC's Rockefeller Institute.

That totally ruined his career prospects at the world's most attractive centre for doing medical research --- so this new decision to merely jump his own tiny team's protocol would have far less dire career consequences.

But what did surprise me - and did so for a very long time (years and years and years in fact) - was his twin decisions made the month earlier.

Fungus growing - and starving - on a massive scale

First was his decision to grow massive amounts of the fungus mold, penicillium n.

Massive as in obtaining 50 US gallons of penicillium liquid per run - the very size of a typical drug industry pilot plant project.

Like most ambitious bacteriologists, Dawson was extremely narrowly focused on learning all he could about just one tiny segment of the bacteria world and so he gave only a glance at all the other bacteria - and tried to ignore viruses and fungus, etc,etc completely.

In his case, he had focused on the then deadliest of all microbe families - the streps (which included the s. pneumococcus).

He had grown massive amounts of the various streps successfully and routinely but massive fungus growing for clinical not lab work would be much different.

Firstly, it would all have to be done with an eye to making penicillin economically on a long term basis, particularly when set against penicillin's cheap and abundant competitors, the sulfa drug family.

Occasionally growing small amounts of pathogens like pneumococcus for some personal science experiments is one thing - 'costs versus sale returns' don't really come into it.

It is far different when one grows de-natured pathogens to supply a huge public market demanding equal and cheap access to vaccines, as Alexander Fleming well knew, because he ran such a business in his London hospital.

His hard earned knowledge of costs versus profits may have lessened the willingness of Fleming and his huge drug company partner (Parke Davis) to grow large amounts of 'his' penicillium, considering how small the amounts of penicillin produced as a result.

Unlike his naturally made - and very profitable - vaccines, Fleming always insisted his penicillin would only come into clinical use when it was made artificially by chemists.

Secondly, Dawson would be growing massive amounts of penicillium fungus to an effort to scale up tiny amounts of an infrequently produced and highly fragile distinctly second rate secondary metabolite.

Why is that so noteworthy ?

Because all bacteriologists, like all farmers, work to make as much biomass as possible, as cheaply, quickly and easily as possible.

As many big viable bacteria/apples/pigs as quickly, cheaply and routinely as possible.

It was a piece of cake to get the penicillium n. to bulk up quickly and cheaply but when they did so, they produced no penicillin at all !

It seemed to everyone that penicillin was sort of like green poop in humans - a rare waste product produced when a body ate a food it didn't like and got very sick as a result .

Learning to grow penicillium n. so as to make lots of penicillin routinely and economically went on after the war as well as during it and it involved at least as much scientific manpower hours as did the entire nuclear Manhattan Project.

And - a distinct rarity - most scientists thought this might be the case, right from the start, and this is why Fleming and Howard Florey and almost all the others differed from Dawson and focused totally on man-made synthetic penicillin making efforts.

I can't really explain Dawson's decision to get involved in mass fungus making except to say that his career had been devoted to demonstrating how smart the supposedly stupid microbe really was.

He certainly thought the penicillium might be damed good at making penicillin, merely by dint of hundreds of millions of years of trying.

Perhaps then it was the overweening hubris of the 'synthetic penicillin' crowd that might have perversely pushed him much further into mass making of fungus than his own personal inclinations would have done.

SBE rather than septic arthritis

Dawson ran a day clinic for chronic arthritic patients, people who normally who returned to their home and daily work afterwards.

About as low on the totem pole in status at a world famous research-oriented teaching hospital as one can go.

SBE, sub-acute bacterial endocarditis, is today seen as a dire medical emergency disease, likely to be fatal even with the best and extremely extensive treatment, and something managed by the top heart specialists and heart surgeons.

A disease near the top of the status world of big hospitals.

Not to be handled by the guy in the basement running a day clinic for little old ladies with badly bent fingers.

If it was an impossibly long stretch for Dawson to focus on SBE we must ask why he did not focus on septic arthritis instead.

This (surgically oriented) disease of dangerously infected joints was still a bit of a stretch for a day clinic director but it was a form of arthritis, his speciality after all, and like SBE it also a disease likely to prove fatal and one that would only be cured by penicillin.

Now, Dawson certainly did deal with septic arthritis cases in his wartime penicillin work but he didn't really focus on them.

As a result of his wondering off his own arthritis estate onto the faraway property of the SBE experts, Dawson greatly aroused a lot of anger from his colleagues.

He may have intended just that.

I have found no indication that the efforts by medical conservatives to use "war preparation" as an excuse to roll back Social Medicine ever evoked septic arthritis as a disease and patient type to be abandoned and left to die.

But that definitely turned out to be the case with SBE - I suspect Dawson saw this plan coming early on and for this reason, and this reason alone, he focused on the SBE patient rather than the septic arthritic patients....

"Can you tell a rich guy's poo from a poor guy's poo -- or a civilized poop from a primitive's poop ?

Yeah, me neither.

And telling the difference between human poo and animal poo doesn't get any much easier.

We are all animals, all excrete, all age, all die, all decompose.

Yeah, we humans do think and dream (more accurately, we humans think and dream more than do other animals) but it doesn't seem to have increased our evolutionary luck.

No dumb critter ever came up with a way to mutually assure their species would all instantly die in a nuclear war.

Cleanliness and purity, elegance, beauty, symmetry, equilibrium are all just concepts the old religions and the new religion (Science) use to convince us that the religiously pure and the civilized don't really poop and don't stink, don't age, die and decompose.

The sight and smell of poop and fungoid growths always make that sort highly uneasy or even irrationally angry, because those sights and smells remind them that our mental defences are just that : mental --- totally unable to arrest the inevitable physical processes of our bodies.

And here is where our ability to think hurts and doesn't help : the animals simply poop and move on.

We humans agonize about it, deny it and even organize mass killings of "stinky" Jews, Gypsies, Blacks and Spics around it....

"a Nazi's work is never done"

I know, I know, the phrase is usually "a woman's work is never done".

It refers to the repetitious nature of traditional women's work done in the home .

Woman know well its endless cycle of cleaning house, shopping, cooking, cleaning up dishes, washing clothes, washing children and ironing hubbie's clothes ---- on and on.

And then start it all over again the next day ---- and for all the days, weeks, months, years and decades after that.

Futile --- like trying to sweep back the ocean.

But the Nazi men self-selected for themselves the sort of work normally reserved for women in a very real sense when they took on the task of keeping both 'the home' of Germans and the German Volk 'family' 100% pure and 100% clean --- free from any sort of human 'germs'.

And it would have been a task that would never ever have stopped, even if Nazis had won the war and they had killed off all the world's Jews.

A new bogeyman would have been invented, to blame, to fear and to seek out and kill.

Meanwhile even if the Aktion T4 had killed all the defectives and even if the concentration camp system had killed off the 'politicals' and the 'asocials', each new generation would just breed some more, to be once again hunted down and killed.

And smelling out all the mixed babies created by illicit sex in dark corners, between Germans and forbidden races and ethnicities - between dark haired pure Germans and impure blonde Poles - oh don't get me started on that one says Himmler.

As G&S once sang, a compulsive obsessive mass murderer's lot is not a happy one.....