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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo

Martin Henry Dawson, the born subordinate.

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

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

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

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

@MOgoesPO

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

                  Martin Henry Dawson , on enlistment, 1915

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

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

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

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

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

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

@ArcadianRecord

This is my new blog for my MARTIN HENRY DAWSON project

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@mogoespo

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

Martin Henry Dawson 1942 - suffering from terminal Myastenia Gravis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But bacteria are mostly resistant to penicillin you say.

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

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

@arcadianrecord

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

MARTIN HENRY DAWSON 1896-1945

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

Who won't?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Its all a lot of hapstance.

Hardly your usual predators, right??

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@arcadianrecord

Martin Henry Dawson - the Commensal Doctor

Martin Henry Dawson 1896-1945

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@arcadianrecord

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

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

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

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

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

@arcadianrecord

Dr Harry Haiselden, "The Black Stork" doctor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instead, it was her doctor - Haiselden.

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

But I think I made an interesting mistake.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@ArcadianRecord

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

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

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

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

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

Totally,totally, totally wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@ArcadianRecord

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

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

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

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

A bit of a blank ?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@ArcadianRecord

This is the home of my NON-DEATHLESS prose

I originally published this in the ARCADIAN RECORDER on October 31 2009 but it got deleted when I transferred all of that blog's old entries to MO goes PO.

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

Arcadian-Recorder-the-blog ( and my Twitter and Facebook offerings) represents just one side of my divided personality: call it my pamphleteer side.

I sit down in front of my laptop and quickly write out whatever grabs my mind at that moment.

Write it, post it and get over it - deathless prose it is not.

I have no intentions of collecting it, revising it and putting it out in a book-of-essays format : ugh !

Its on the net, its worldwide and its free --- which probably accurately describes its current literary market value.

But when I hope to write a novella length narrative that will still be readable, long after I am gone, I turn to a good old fashioned analog paper book that I publish myself.

Call it a mook or a heftroman if you wish (a hybrid magazine-book), to me it is simply an issue of the Arcadian Recorder journal that looks and feels like a small book.

But an environmentally 'green' book with no wasted dead trees allocated to useless padding.

With nice book paper and a nice cover stock paper - and bound so it stays open and easy to read.

And I want to illustrate it, and have the fun of printing it and binding it myself.

Call it my creative side coming to the fore.

No, novella doesn't mean it is fictional - and don't call it non-fictional either.

Italians will remind you that novella - or novel for that matter - is just what it sounds like - novel,novelty,news - which sounds pretty 'fact-oriented' to me.

Today, novella should just mean a prose work that is too long for a newspaper, magazine or journal, but is too short to stand alone in a conventional book publishing offering.

I would say anything that is from 17,500 to 35,000 words in total, (unpadded).

Conventional book publishers may need at least 190 pages to get bookstores and readers to warm to it --- that can be less than 35,000 words --- but it must still be padded out some how to that length in pages to get a fair hearing.

Dead trees falling needlessly.

Myself, and a lot of others, think that these short-read/low weight/low priced books (80 pages in an A-6 size) have a lot of legs in the new book economy.

And a handful of them can be bundled and themed into a big fat book ,if the conventional book publishers and book sellers think they can sell big numbers in a few months - the route that they regard as the only viable book business model today.

Instead, my books will be printed on my home computer and home laser printer and be available forever, but only on "demand", as customer cash-in-hand orders come in.

No more pulping tons of unsold/returned for full credit books - sorry - I just don't think its the green thing to do to a green-oriented book series.

My Chebucto Community Net website, marshall.chebucto.net , will have paypal options on it, for customers world wide.

I can mail them world wide at the low cost 50 gram letter post rate - and make money - not much money, but I will make some on each and every sale.

Their price, before their very reasonable mailing costs, will be competitive with other serious literary factual narratives : at about 10 cents per 300 words.

Frugally, I plan to sell the originals of their full color cover art painting (as well as the originals of the black & white paintings that go on the pages inside) on the same website and shipped out the same way.

@ArcadianRecord

In a crisis, r-selected COPYRIGHT is better than K-selected

Here I go again, "Arguing From Nature!"

I am going to borrow the kernel of a very complicated and subtle theory from biology and apply it , as a metaphor, to a critical issue in human culture.

Metaphors have a habit of climbing away from their Doctors Frank-n-Steins and developing an independent existence of their own, so there is always a danger to this kind of activity.

None the less, let's try out r- and K- for size.

A generation of disinterested Art and Commerce undergraduates have tried to slither through the exams in a scientific subject they didn't really like, by recording the following mnemonic :

K-selected/K-strategists = K-oncentrated

r-selected/r-strategists = r-adiated .

In stable,narrow, niches in ecology, K-selected species are competitively successful by doing only one thing (being rigid in their ways of surviving) but doing it better than anyone else.

They tend to be very large in size and few in number; producing relatively few offspring late in life, which they then tend carefully to maturity.

What energy they do collect they mostly devote to keeping themselves alive and growing bigger than other competitors and then, late in life, they K-oncentrate what little energy they can give to reproduction, towards producing a very few offspring which they nurture to maturity.

Humans are mostly K-selected in our biology - in our culture we are a mixture of K- and r- . We have a choice. More on this later.

Bell Aliant is an typical example of a K-strategy human institution - it has one successful strategy that has worked well for them in the stable niche-period of the Industrialized West during the last 150 years and they are almost biologically- reluctant to change.

Species that are r-selected tend to be extremely small - think of bacteria, other microbes and many rodents and insects.

They flourish best in unstable niches - unstable in conditions and in time. Regard them as Nature's weeds and opportunists. They do many many things, none of them very well -- jacks of all trades.

They are very numerous and reproduce early, releasing (r-adiating) thousands and millions of their offspring widely all over the environment.

In point of truth, they abandon their offspring when they are (a) very small & weak (b) and floating into mostly hostile territories.

It seems to be both cruel and an unsuccessful strategy, in our contemporary /western/ urban/ middle class/ eyes.

But we are the ultimate in K-orientation and we are living, moreover, on borrowed time and space.

Color us ignorant and arrogant.

We fail to realize that throughout most of human existence, let alone for the rest of Life's creatures' existence and and let alone the rest of earth history, the world, in sum, has been more unstable than stable.

Whether as human peasants or as bacteria, r-selected jack-of-all-trades fecundity tends to work better than the alternative, over the long haul and over the enlarged range.

In fact, while your professors of biology will rarely tell you this because their interest is almost always animals or plants, most of life on Earth has always been r-selected, not just in numbers, but in weight of living biomass and in 'space and time'.

By 'time' in the phrase, 'space and time' , I mean that over the roughly four billion years of Life on Earth, the r-selected have always been around while the k-selected have only appeared intermittently and then only stayed for a short time.

The blue green algae we see in every stagnant pool of water are actually bacteria and have been found, as massive fossil collections, in the oldest rocks on earth.

They may be even older - we simply haven't found any older rocks yet.

Found everywhere water pools and collects, around for almost four billion years - as a strategy, r-selection looks pretty good on our blue-green pals.

By 'space' in the phrase ' space and time' , I mean the fact that while K-selected creatures like blue whales,elephants and even humans can only exist (unaided by fossil fuels) in a few small corners of the world, r-selected microbes exist everywhere.

Inside us, for a start, their cells outnumbering ours many fold - though most of "them" are "us", as we would die and cease to be human without our helpful commensal bacteria and their services.

But bacteria exist miles underground, without any sun, living off the chemical energy in minerals - perhaps having unexpectedly profound consequences in the creation of petroleum and natural gas, among other semi-minerals.

They exist high into the atmosphere.

They can flourish on ice at the Poles, and in extremely hot and extremely harsh chemical-waters pouring out of volcanic structures.

Now this is biology, not culture, and may seem to be totally deterministic, beyond all interest to humans who can alter their cultural practices.

But the r-selected amongst us are deterministically flexible - and this seems almost an oxymoron, but is actually the key to their ongoing successful domination of Life on Earth throughout history.

While in stable times, the expert/specialist/professional earns the best incomes, in times of crisis, they flounder while the poor freely adapt and go on surviving.

We see this during every world war, in the worst affected countries.

The problem in a crisis, for the specialist and the K-selected, is that they have intellectual assets that cost them plenty to obtain and of which they are very proud.

The fact that those assets no longer work during the crisis is only half realized and this inertia in adapting is often fatal.

By contrast, bacteria and other small celled creatures have very good mechanisms for correcting errors in reproducing DNA - during stable conditions.

They are thus acting in a strictly K- fashion with regards to their precious intellectual property - in times of stability.

But when their world goes into an unstable crisis, they stop repressing their other built-in repair mechanisms that are extremely careless in reproducing their original DNA.

Strange and wonderful mutations emerge - most are useless or even worse, fatal.

But a few are the way forward to surviving under these troubling new conditions.

Waiiit ! There is more !

They don't hold onto this wonderful news, this Gospel, they radiate it far and wide as Open Source DNA, not demanding copyright royalties from other species and variants of bacteria that take it up.

As my good friend Dr Dawson demonstrated way back in 1930, bacteria, when hit by a crisis, "Unleash Chiang Kai-Shek" in the form of 'cassettes' of DNA encoding a new or underused function and send it out onto the bacterial Internet (the fluids surrounding them) for any species to take up and use.

Generally these different species bacteria not being (by definition) exactly the same as the original bacteria releasing these Open Source Genes, they have to mash up their own DNA to get the Gene to work.

What emerges - to the benefit of the whole of bacteria-dom - is two variants on that gene. One is the original gene, the other is the new mash-up version. Both work well - but under different conditions.

All bacteria-dom benefits under these loose copyright rules.

Lets look at a concrete example : the worldwide bacterial collective response to the billion-fold increase in antibiotic bactericides after 1945.

Antibiotics are natural bactericides, found in nature in terms of hundreds of millions of microgram-sized amounts annually worldwide - widely dispersed in tiny amounts all over, but only lethal to what bacteria had to be extremely close by.

We humans - by giving antibiotics freely to humans and farm animals - upped the annual outpouring into the waters of the world to levels of hundreds of millions of kilograms of antibiotics.

A billion-fold increase - now antibiotics were killing all sorts of bacteria under all sorts of situations.

Bacterial Antibiotic Resistance was how humans saw the resulting response.

Bacteria had worked out ways to ruin the effects of antibiotics eons ago, but they usually leaves the genes that encode for this ability way in the background - very few bacteria have these genes and even fewer among them are using them at any point in time.

It costs precious energy to create these gene products and bacteria are successful above all for being the most frugal creatures on Earth.

They travel lean - devoting all their free energy to reproducing and as little as possible to storing tools, "just in case it needs them".

But in their unstable and crisis-oriented world, they do need those tools - perhaps not minute by minute, but over periods as short as every few weeks.

Their solution is to create a worldwide library of Open Source Genes that aren't needed for basic daily life, but are life-saving on occasion.

A bacteria that daily faces and defeat antibiotics might also daily leak out into the environment the genes that can ruin antibiotics.

Other bacteria that have no need that gene's function, right now, have excellent systems for detecting unwanted DNA - they simply 'eat' the antibiotic-destroying gene rather than incorporating it into their chromosome.

But when antibiotics flood the area, for both types of bacteria, threatening all, the bacteria start up a collective response.

The antibiotic destroying bacteria starts producing more of their gene product and starts leaking more of the gene that produces it, into the environment.

The bacteria without the capability to destroy antibiotics suddenly throttle their foreign DNA check system and start taking up all sorts of foreign DNA into their chromosome, including the antibiotic-destroying gene.

At the micro level ,this process isn't pretty - billions and billions of bacteria die trying to get it right, but eventually some do and flourish and bacteria-dom, as a whole, survives.

Multi-antibiotic Resistance Killed Charles Darwin's

Evolution Theory Stone Dead

Well not all of it - his core idea of survival of the fittest still survives unchallenged within science.

But his ideas of slow and steady vertical inheritance of slow and steady change has been dealt its deathblow in recent years.

The sudden existence of multi-antibiotic resistant bacteria in populations as isolated as uphill tribes in New Guinea, only a few years after all these various antibiotics were first manufactured by Man, couldn't mathematically be explained by

accidental small mutations accumulating over millions of years.

Ask any math major the odds that a bacteria in a human in uphill New Guinea, could by a very slow (10 to the minus nine rate of random DNA coding error, so called point mutations) process, randomly create the dozen genes needed to destroy four antibiotics first manufactured only 6 years earlier in London !

Talk about monkeys typing up all the works of Shakespeare....

No ,what happens is that some bacteria collected up all the various antibiotic-destroying genes floating out in the waters around them and re-packaged them in larger cassettes of bacterial resistance software - and then returned them to the waters for other bacteria to take up as one unit, if they really needed them , say in hospital or farm settings.

Collectively, bacteria already have all the genes to destroy any known antibiotic - or they can quickly mash up a variant to deal with a new variety.

But all this takes up precious energy - so only a few individuals, at any one time, holds an active copy of any particular method of destroying antibiotics.

It is all rather like a single planet-wide huge, multi-billion volume, free public library that does not exist in big government-owned buildings but in the homes of all humans.

Each human only has a few, but unique, selection of books, but because they freely share them without demanding copyright fees, collectively humans have access to a far bigger library than if they were selfish and didn't share their books.

Oh, and another thing - each human is both an author and a book reader - reading a lot of books before writing their own variant on the vast body of already existing thought.

What does this mean for us humans in crisis?

The habitually poor human being, having few assets to protect or to lose, are promiscuous in taking up new ideas and tools and adapting them in unexpectedly creative ways.

They 'mash-up' a variety of unrelated technologies, careless of the fact that their owners or creators don't want them mashed up that way.

In doing so, they come up with new takes on old ideas - some, a few,very few, turn out to be strokes of sheer unfettered genius - and help point the way ahead for a society in crisis.

And we are a definitely a society and a world community in profound crisis.

The depletion of natural resources, from the end of Cod to the beginnings of the downhill slope of Peak Oil, threatens both our cozy way of life and the fate of all Life on this Planet, through Global warming and habitat destruction.

Expressed in terms of economic 'business models' , this crisis can be described as 'the old business models are no longer working.'

The most K-selected amongst us - Conservative Parties , the Telcos and the record & movie labels - have responded in true K- fashion: they have drawn up their intellectual wagons in a circle and are decided to defend what they already have, rather than venture out into scary un-charted waters.

In copyright law terms, that means the K amongst us, the wise and the mighty, have sought and won longer and longer terms for the copyrights they already own, and also won the right to greatly restrict the creative mis-use of those copyrights by others.

And it is no surprise that it is the poor (the weak and the foolish r-selected) around the world who have led the way in mash-up copyright, from scratching, sampling to today's video mash-ups

We humans face a similar serious crisis to what bacteria face frequently and we need the same sort of solution - we need to loosen, not tighten, our copyright/patent/building code rules.

Unleash the Chiang Kai-Shek amongst the poor and small and remote parts of the world where the inhabitants are flexible and versatile by necessity.

My own region, the Maritimes, is small, poor and remote and are famous (infamous) for its rural citizens being masters-of-no-trades .

Maritimes are not paragons of 4-H agriculture , but rather of 4-F agriculture: farmin',fishin',forestin', and factoryin' .

They get by, they improvise.

When the crisis hits ,they'll get by.

But why wait till a crisis hits, with all its suffering, wars and misery ?

Loosen up our rules on house-building, on copyright and patents - let's see what emerges - it will benefit the 'suits' in Toronto as much as the fisherman down in Cape Sable.....

Janet Browne, Darwin's mega-volume biographer, to speak at Dal

While everyone is ignoring the 300th anniversary of Copyright (sigh !) we are all supposed to be guyed up to mark the 200th B-day of C. Darwin.

Yawn - I just don't like the guy.

Ironically, the reason why I do not like Charles is because of the tireless efforts of Janet Browne, who went way down deep in the dusty archives and came up with biographic gold on Mr Darwin.

Ironically, because I believe Professor Browne was and remains a big fan of Darwin, warts and all.

Her two volume mega-kilogram bookstops ( "Voyaging" and "Power of Place") reveal that Darwin thought nothing of stealing valuable documents from grieving widows or of slandering opponents, through the use of surrogates ,so Darwin could keep his reputation of high moral character.

Worse of all, in his brief autobiography, Darwin denied any credit to his doting father for helping Charles to claw his way to the top of the world of science.

Doted upon ? Spoiled is a better word.

Charles Darwin was given extremely expensive scientific equipment for his hobbies as a child - such as a microscope that would cost the annual income of a half dozen farm labourers for example.

Without all the support that his mega-millionaire father and wife (mega-millionaire in in 2010 dollars) gave him, Darwin would never had been credited with discovering evolution.

Then he goes and denies that his unique access to these and other scientific aids gave him any leg up over his poorer scientific competitors.

Ingrate ! Spoil your child and he'll bite your hand in thanks, I always say.

Anyway , Janet Browne speaks at Dal's Ondaatje Hall October 15th 8pm --- and I will be there.....

Oswald Avery's connection to Haldeman-Julius

It seems an unlikely connection, but there does exist a tenuous connection between two of our favorites here at the online edition of the Arcadian Recorder.

Oswald Avery's grandfather was publicly credited as having helped perfect the successful printing of tiny, light, complete, readable bibles on India Paper and thus helping to secure the fortunes of the hitherto hapless Oxford University Press.

Since OUP, as it is usually known in the book trade, is today one of the most valuable trademarks in the world, this is a story worth recalling.

OUP gained this rise to world prominence based on its exclusive hold on the secret knowledge required to make India paper - a incredibly thin, flexible, strong and yet opaque & non-yellowing paper made out of old hemp ropes and lots of lime.

It allowed you to pack in a million readable words (like the Bible) in a small, light but permanently readable book - perfect for shipping in mass quantities across the world on a very tight budget.

For Christian evangelicals determined to 'evangelize the world in one generation' it was - literally - a God-sent paper.

OUP quickly sold millions of its lightweight bibles, dictionaries and reference books based on the use of this paper.

Haldeman-Julius couldn't afford the price of this paper and expect to keep selling his 'little blue books' at the price of an American nickel shipped post-paid worldwide.

But his mind moved along the same lines of constantly seeking ways to 'mass-evangelize the world' at a reasonable price.

His book-making frugality matched and even exceeded those of his competitors in the world of Christian bible and tract makers.

I say 'competitors' because of course the personal dogma of Haldeman-Julius that drove him to be equally frugal in his printing methods was simply this: " There is no Christian God" !

Top-Down Genetics versus Mashup Genetics

'Must confess.

We never did like the term 'Horizontal Gene Transfer' , aka HGT ( sometimes otherwise known as LGT ,for Lateral Gene

Transfer).

In particular we always hated that 'transfer' bit.

The denotation is accurate enough, but its connotations conjure up entirely the wrong impression.

We'd bow in the direction of Dawson and call it HGT , Horizontal Gene Transformation.

For in fact the incoming bits of DNA disrupt - creatively - the existing fat and comfortable set of genes in the organism being invaded and the end result isn't some tidy orderly transfer of assets from one bank account to another, but more in the order of a micro-scale catastrophe.

There said it.

Catastrophe, cat-as-tro-phe - not neo-catastrophism, because we don't think it ever really went away - not out there in the real world and not out there in the real minds of many.

Only scientists and their fellow travelers consigned the word to a sudden death.

They said catastrophes rarely happen and when they do they are only local and short term - and soon we will be able to predict and prevent even these rare local events.

Catastrophes at the level of cells and microbes simply never happened.

But they do - we multi-celled creatures are the result of one such genetic mashup - when one sort of bacteria survived inside another type of bacteria to the point where it became part of the bacteria, inside its own cell walls and created the first multi-celled being .

Nine months later,more or less, you and us emerged.

There is no intellectual crime lower than seeking support for some or other human theory by claiming it merely reflects the laws of nature.

But...

But it is interesting to tease out the parallels for human creativity in the current moves to mashup old boring top down controlled copyrights to see what crawls out of the shell and the tremendous effects HGT has had in the past in mashing up stale boring old top down Vertical genetics to see what happens.

Penicillin , after all, was the result when a bacteria and a yeast decided to mashup their quite different DNAs....

The 1940 Peace Bomb joins the 1800 Peace Mine...

In any other circumstances, pacifist Leo Szilard might have been best remembered as the inventor (along with fellow pacifist Albert Einstein) of the modern fridge.

Instead he joined some others (sometimes pacifist others) in working on a super weapon that would so frighten the planet's militarists that they would instantly sue for permanent world peace.

Unfortunately, it was agreed that the backward militarist mind would require a convincing demonstration project, before being convinced.

So in the end a few hundred thousand people ended up dead in radiation and fire, all for 'the greatest good of the greatest number' ---but universal peace still did not break out - far from it.

So poor Szilard is today primarily remembered for instigating the Manhattan Project rather than inventing the perfect fridge ....or the perfect peace.

By contrast, Robert Fulton, a fellow New York City area resident like Szilard, (albeit from a hundred and fifty years earlier ), is best known today for building the first commercial steam boat service in the world, between New York City and Albany.

But as H. Bruce Franklin points out in his ground-breaking book "War Stars" , Fulton had had his utopian pacifist weapon scheme as well.

This submarine and sea-mine system was designed to destroy the British navy, freeing the high seas for universal free trade and commerce and thus introducing an era of permanent world peace.

This was/is standard centuries-old Liberal dogma, still much spouted today.

Fulton's willingness to sink a few real ships (along with their real crews) is also right on par with all the many Liberal peace bomb efforts: in the utilitarianism-driven willingness to see a 'few' die (unwillingly and unasked) for the greater good of the greater number.

Between Fulton and Szilard, New York has thrown up a number of Liberal pacifist and their peace weapons - perhaps most notably that shy pacifist Carl Norden.... and his precision WW II bombsight of the same name.

All these plans start off as efforts to design a totally new advance on weapon systems.

But these superweapons are not for profitably continuing sales in continuous wars.

Rather they are to 'demonstrate' their horrific effects just once and then usher in world peace forever.

All of them have a scope and gravitas and a vision about them that seems perfectly cut to fit Manhattan's taste in grandness-for-the-sake-of-grandness, thus becoming 'the Empire State Building of New York intellectual conceits'.....

Oswald Avery : unknown and famous for the wrong things...

It is the tragedy of Halifax Nova Scotia born Oswald Avery that he is famous for a study he didn't really believe in (and opposed for years) and he is unknown for his lifework, which today saves millions of childrens' lives around the world each year.

Oswald Avery is today known as 'The Father of Molecular Biology' , which should tip us off right from the start.

Scientists are never more manipulative and intellectually dishonest than when they are fabricating the history of the "Father" (never the "Mother" or "parents") of their particular branch of science.

Avery is no exception. In this case, we know this to be so, because the person who created the myth of Avery (Joshua Lederberg) said so: he intended to 'do a Mendel on Avery'.

Gregor Medel did wonderful pioneering work , but his credentials for being considered the father of any science are widely regarded today as spurious - and he would be the first to say so loudly if he came back today.

As would Avery regarding his alleged founding role in molecular biology - to his credit, he never claimed much for his work in this field while he was alive - and he lived for 10 years after his 'big' discovery.

But in the saving-the-lives-of-millions-of-innocent-baby-children world, the world of conjugate vaccines, Avery is a GIANT - or should be.

He certainly is to the researchers in that field.

But he is merely 'the key individual' in an effort that spanned a century and included every continent,thousands of researchers and hundreds of millions of dollars.

It is a story far too vast and far too complicated for popular science reporting to credit to any one medical super hero and one shining experimental result: no Pasteur or Jonas Salk here.

Instead Avery is praised for one 'seminal-paper-that-was-ignored-at-the-time' --- which rather implies an intellectual oxymoron and suggests the difficulty in crediting him as the Father of anything .

That paper was published in February 1944 but had its formal beginnings with experiments that began on October 22nd 1940 on Manhattan Island, that tiny island not far off the American coast.

Ah yes ! October 1940 : menses mirabilis indeed.

It is almost as if May 1940, certainly one of the most 'menses horribilis' in all of Western Civilization, (followed by the August to September 1940 aborted invasion of England : half horribilis half mirabilis), seemed to have drawn out extraordinary efforts from various North American scientists deeply emotionally affected by the events in Europe but too old to be called to actively take up a rifle.

Because one of the things those three extraordinary laboratory efforts in October 1940 have in common is their sheer physicality - scaled up to pilot plant size before table top work had even started; dirty, tiring, dangerous work.

Literally, not just figuratively, fighting for results in the trenches of science.

So, if in October 2010, we mark the 70th anniversary of the start of the financial recognition for (a) George Laurence's efforts to build an atomic pile, and (b) Henry Dawson's start in his efforts to cure SBE with natural penicillin injections, we might as well add (c) the formal start of Oswald Avery and Colin MacLeod's efforts to determine the chemical nature of Henry Dawson's Transforming Principle - proving it to be DNA.

Did we say 'North American scientists' ??

Let it stand.

We all know that we here at the Arcadian Recorder also mean 'Nova Scotian-born scientists', but let that remain our little secret.....

The Manhattan Pilot : Harlem Shuffled

What could seem more innocent than a project initiated by pacifists and an airplane named after someone's mother?

And what could seem more threatening than a project invigorated by a group of veterans of the frontline trenches and a heavy bomber ominously named 'The B-a-a-d Penny' ?

The cliches of innocence and harm align neatly enough in Hollywood movies but in the real world, events often show themselves to be a great deal more paradoxical.

In 1999, a survey by Newseum and USA Weekend of 36,000 American men and women revealed that they thought the top news story of the entire twentieth century involved a little boy and a baby girl and took place in an eighty acre area on a tiny island not far off the American coast.

In that tiny eighty acre area, the pacifists and the frontline vets worked on their projects almost within sight of each other, albeit while existing in totally different moral universes.

And as every good eighty acres should, this story involved a mule.

His name was Henry Dawson.

This is not his biography, but it is his story....