I have blogged before about my small child confusion ,when viewing my first ever telethon over just who was alive, who was ghost and who was a ghost brought back to life for just one night to assist this charity telethon.
As an adult, I still think this memory makes the basis for a really great pop oratorio.
The setup :
Somewhere on Manhattan in the late 1950s, a TV studio is ready to go for the annual rheumatic heart disease telethon, but the cast and crew is offstage taking a break before showtime, with the auditorium seats slowly filling up with the in-studio audience.
To entertain and cue the incoming audience, silent, low quality, 1940s-era 16mm film footage of rheumatic heart disease patients and their medical staff in hospital scenes, all dressed in ghostly white, are looping away on the big screen high up in the back of the set.
Suddenly the rear doors to the auditorium fling open up dramatically --- but silently.
Then slowly some eerily silent figures, dressed head to shoes in white, (ditto their assistants) --- identical to the ones up on the film screen, are wheeled in with wheelchairs or assisted with canes, crutches or oxygen assist, down the centre aisle and up onto the stage.
They all of them take off their white hospital clothes to reveal ordinary street clothes , circa 1940, and then they pick a variety of color-coded hospital tops and start to silently mime away in their temporarily assumed roles as patients, doctors, administrators, visitors etc for the opening scene.
The house lights go down as the offset pit music and sfx goes up .
A colored spotlight lights up, at front and centre and a figure goes under it to first talk then talk sing and sing their way into the opening number.
I intend the props and mimed action, taken together together with the action on the film screen, to give enough dates, words and images for readers of volume I of my book to understand the context of each particular scene and song.
And the end of the last scene, the stage figures put on their white hospital garb and again wheeled silently down and out the rear of the auditorium : THE END ....
Friday, March 6, 2015
Streamlining Plentitude : 1939-1940 World's Fair's ominous legacy for postwar generation
For years now, I have been cheered when recalling how eagerly so many in my generation (the postwar boomers) marched in the streets to promote human diversity and variety.
But for just as many years, I have been mystified why they then remain so silent - like bystanders at a schoolyard bully beating - as Nature's diversity and variety faces mass extinction by human actions ... and inactions.
It is not that they don't regret the lessening of diversity and variety as human actions result in the loss of species and habitats - they do ; but it is a shoulder shrugging ,'what can one do ?!' sort of regret.
It is as if they have all internalized the visual motif of the 1939-1940 new York World's Fair : Eugenic Progress consists of evermore streamlining of human artifacts (skyscrapers, airliners, cars) , humans and Nature itself.
Less is more : plenticide is good.
But for just as many years, I have been mystified why they then remain so silent - like bystanders at a schoolyard bully beating - as Nature's diversity and variety faces mass extinction by human actions ... and inactions.
It is not that they don't regret the lessening of diversity and variety as human actions result in the loss of species and habitats - they do ; but it is a shoulder shrugging ,'what can one do ?!' sort of regret.
It is as if they have all internalized the visual motif of the 1939-1940 new York World's Fair : Eugenic Progress consists of evermore streamlining of human artifacts (skyscrapers, airliners, cars) , humans and Nature itself.
Less is more : plenticide is good.
Streamlining moderne medicine for war : jettisoning Alston and Aronson September 1940
Whatever strength the movement for Social Medicine (medical care for the small and the weak, even when they can't pay much) might ever had have had in the Anglo Saxon democracies, pretty well died with the Fall of France in June 1940.
By September 1940, medical isolationists, who had earlier so disagreed with medical interventionists over whether it was morally essential to go to the aid of small and weak nations under attack by big aggressors, had come around to at least agreeing that their own nations might be next.
The isolationist doctors even saw this this crisis as the perfect wedge to separate their interventionist colleagues's concerns for weak and small nations from their concern over weak and small patients.
"We simply can't afford to expand Social Medicine for 4Fs in a time of Total War, not when we need ever more resources devoted to maintaining our frontline A1 troops from sickness and injuries."
Dr Martin Henry Dawson was one such colleague isolationists might well have had in mind --- a decorated war hero who wanted medical America to both intervene to protect the small and the weak at home as well as abroad.
Partially for the 4Fs' own sake ----- and partially to show the neutral world the much touted moral gap between the Nazis and the Allies actually had real meaning.
The medical isolationists wanted - by contrast - to abandon the weak and small of America as readily has they had already abandoned the weak and the small of Europe and Asia.
They visualized an eugenically sleek streamlined moderne medicine, as being co-currently promoted at the New York World's Fair, has having no room for the chronically sick poor and minorities : ugly protrusions on their sleek 'average citizen'..
And poor minority patients with invariably fatal SBE, like Aaron Leroy Alston and Charles Aronson , fitted that bill to a T.
When Dawson choose, on October 16th 1940, to buck his colleagues' consensus with the first ever injections of penicillin in history for this pair he ushered in our Era of Antibiotics .
It, in turn, has done more for achieving the goals of Social Medicine than anything else besides the raising of real wages for the poor and minorities.
An unexpected result from the moral ferment thrown up by the World's Fair streamlined new World of Tomorrow....
By September 1940, medical isolationists, who had earlier so disagreed with medical interventionists over whether it was morally essential to go to the aid of small and weak nations under attack by big aggressors, had come around to at least agreeing that their own nations might be next.
The isolationist doctors even saw this this crisis as the perfect wedge to separate their interventionist colleagues's concerns for weak and small nations from their concern over weak and small patients.
"We simply can't afford to expand Social Medicine for 4Fs in a time of Total War, not when we need ever more resources devoted to maintaining our frontline A1 troops from sickness and injuries."
Dr Martin Henry Dawson was one such colleague isolationists might well have had in mind --- a decorated war hero who wanted medical America to both intervene to protect the small and the weak at home as well as abroad.
Partially for the 4Fs' own sake ----- and partially to show the neutral world the much touted moral gap between the Nazis and the Allies actually had real meaning.
The medical isolationists wanted - by contrast - to abandon the weak and small of America as readily has they had already abandoned the weak and the small of Europe and Asia.
They visualized an eugenically sleek streamlined moderne medicine, as being co-currently promoted at the New York World's Fair, has having no room for the chronically sick poor and minorities : ugly protrusions on their sleek 'average citizen'..
And poor minority patients with invariably fatal SBE, like Aaron Leroy Alston and Charles Aronson , fitted that bill to a T.
When Dawson choose, on October 16th 1940, to buck his colleagues' consensus with the first ever injections of penicillin in history for this pair he ushered in our Era of Antibiotics .
It, in turn, has done more for achieving the goals of Social Medicine than anything else besides the raising of real wages for the poor and minorities.
An unexpected result from the moral ferment thrown up by the World's Fair streamlined new World of Tomorrow....
Wednesday, March 4, 2015
Wartime Manhattan's "Double V" triumphs
Synthetic plutonium ( in the world's biggest killing machine) and non-synthetic penicillin (in the world's smallest lifesaver) were the twin - and Janus-like - triumphs of wartime's two Manhattan Projects.
A "Double V" triumph indeed : one a victory by humanity against Nature and the other a victory of humanity with Nature.
And they were victories by the Allied world alone - unlike radar and jets, scientific and technological breakthroughs that the Allies shared with the Nazi war machine.
As a school kid of the postwar era (and in tandem with every other schoolchild of my generation), I was educated to illogically savour that conflicted Double V triumph.
To share both in the victory of the big and powerful against the small and weak atom ----- and in the victory of the big and the powerful together with the small and weak microbe.
But the illogic of that yoked Double V couldn't hold together forever and by the time of my young adult years , it had begun to give way.
For what academics call the eras of Modernity or of Postmodernity can be better - more succinctly - described as synthetic autarky against Nature or non-synthetic commensality with Nature.
The inconsistent character of the Double V triumph over the last global disaster (WWII) explains the inconsistent response of my generation , the counterculture generation, as it leads the world and faces the current global disaster , The Sixth Extinction.
A generation convinced it should never trust anyone over thirty , never trust "The Man", is itself well over thirty and is itself "The Man".
Because the children born between 1941 and 1966 are now the ones within the dominant voting years - those citizens most likely to vote, the voters between the ages of 50 and 75.
This age group will now determine elections all over the world by dominating the numbers of the relatively few voters who consistently bother to get out and vote.
And we simply don't know how this generation of voters and leaders - my generation - will react on the question of preventing The Sixth Extinction.
For the generation that marched for civil rights for minorities, gays, women, the handicapped and marched against nuclear war has - by and large - not marched to defend the Earth against the rapacity of advanced human civilization.
Over the years, as a political and environmental activist, I have puzzled , read and researched over this inconsistent failure within my generation.
I was eventually driven back to my earliest school years and beyond, in seeking an answer.
For I am fully a child of wartime Janus Manhattan.
Someone who grew up totally in awe of the synthetic atomic power from massive power plants that would soon power my future but also totally in awe of the life-saving antibiotics derived form Nature's smallest and weakest, medicines that had repeatedly saved the Strep-afflicted lives of my family and I .
Janus Manhattan's Children, the book and the blog , thus is as much a private memoir as a public history .
The first volume will take in the years 1940 to 1946 and will be a history of wartime's Janus-headed Manhattan Projects--- a period of time when I wasn't even born to be an eye witness but one that shaped decisively my postwar upbringing.
The second volume will cover from July 1957, when my first childhood memories of public events began to September 1961 when I began reading adult-oriented news magazines and adult-oriented books, becoming rather adult-like, virtually overnight.
It will centre around a simply fabulous B&W* telethon for Rheumatic Heart Disease I saw one night in those years and never forgot.
(In both senses of that term !)
And don't ask me exactly where or when - I can't remember with any certainty but the fact that I thought, at the time, that the filmed people might be dead ghosts suggests Victoria BC ,between 1957 and 1959,when I was very little - only between the ages of five to eight.
My family just caught the telethon one evening when the weather was iffy but just right --- so we could get American TV from across the border loud and clear.
It was a new-to-me mix.
First, working class - minority - teenage rheumatic heart victims cum musical singers, very much alive and lively, testifying emotionally at the front of the stage.
In between singing a heady mix of gospel or blues or rock and rock or country.
As a middle class kid living in a middle class neighbourhood, these were not (yet) 'my kind of people'.
Awkwardly 'assisting' them were some upper middle class doctors and head nurses.
Directly behind and above them was ghostly-silent historic film footage of when they were very sick teenagers in hospital, dressed all in scary white garments like their doctors and nurses.
Figures I have said that the small me wasn't certain were not actual dead ghosts with the people up front these ghosts brought back one night to assist this charity telethon.
Meanwhile the on-stage band nosily riffed away, like a congregation at a Pentecostal church, commenting on both the silent film action and the emoting singers.
Altogether, it simply blew me away -- I was never a big fan of music as a small kid but this oratorio like blend of fact-based talk and emotional singing and playing was much more my cuppa.
The first early - miracle years - of antibiotics, kiddies, wartime suddenly stopped being something remote and distant that my parents and teachers had often talked about without ever exciting me - to something very real, very close, very scary and yet very hopeful.
In a sense the telethon simply retold the events of Volume I, but from a child's mind view rather than from the viewpoint of an adult author.
Volume two will thus be more of a personal - childhood - memoir, reflecting upon the impact public events had on the awaking of my pro-commensality conscience.
Both are works that I am driven to research and write.
Driven as much by my own private attempts to understand my own generation's upbringing as by shared public concerns over our fate - concerns held by many before and after my own generation ...
A "Double V" triumph indeed : one a victory by humanity against Nature and the other a victory of humanity with Nature.
And they were victories by the Allied world alone - unlike radar and jets, scientific and technological breakthroughs that the Allies shared with the Nazi war machine.
a Janus-headed Victory
As a school kid of the postwar era (and in tandem with every other schoolchild of my generation), I was educated to illogically savour that conflicted Double V triumph.
To share both in the victory of the big and powerful against the small and weak atom ----- and in the victory of the big and the powerful together with the small and weak microbe.
But the illogic of that yoked Double V couldn't hold together forever and by the time of my young adult years , it had begun to give way.
For what academics call the eras of Modernity or of Postmodernity can be better - more succinctly - described as synthetic autarky against Nature or non-synthetic commensality with Nature.
The inconsistent character of the Double V triumph over the last global disaster (WWII) explains the inconsistent response of my generation , the counterculture generation, as it leads the world and faces the current global disaster , The Sixth Extinction.
A counter culture well over thirty and that has become "The Man"
A generation convinced it should never trust anyone over thirty , never trust "The Man", is itself well over thirty and is itself "The Man".
Because the children born between 1941 and 1966 are now the ones within the dominant voting years - those citizens most likely to vote, the voters between the ages of 50 and 75.
This age group will now determine elections all over the world by dominating the numbers of the relatively few voters who consistently bother to get out and vote.
And we simply don't know how this generation of voters and leaders - my generation - will react on the question of preventing The Sixth Extinction.
For the generation that marched for civil rights for minorities, gays, women, the handicapped and marched against nuclear war has - by and large - not marched to defend the Earth against the rapacity of advanced human civilization.
The personal is political, is public
Over the years, as a political and environmental activist, I have puzzled , read and researched over this inconsistent failure within my generation.
I was eventually driven back to my earliest school years and beyond, in seeking an answer.
For I am fully a child of wartime Janus Manhattan.
Someone who grew up totally in awe of the synthetic atomic power from massive power plants that would soon power my future but also totally in awe of the life-saving antibiotics derived form Nature's smallest and weakest, medicines that had repeatedly saved the Strep-afflicted lives of my family and I .
Janus Manhattan's Children, the book and the blog , thus is as much a private memoir as a public history .
The first volume will take in the years 1940 to 1946 and will be a history of wartime's Janus-headed Manhattan Projects--- a period of time when I wasn't even born to be an eye witness but one that shaped decisively my postwar upbringing.
The telethon that changed my life
The second volume will cover from July 1957, when my first childhood memories of public events began to September 1961 when I began reading adult-oriented news magazines and adult-oriented books, becoming rather adult-like, virtually overnight.
It will centre around a simply fabulous B&W* telethon for Rheumatic Heart Disease I saw one night in those years and never forgot.
(In both senses of that term !)
And don't ask me exactly where or when - I can't remember with any certainty but the fact that I thought, at the time, that the filmed people might be dead ghosts suggests Victoria BC ,between 1957 and 1959,when I was very little - only between the ages of five to eight.
My family just caught the telethon one evening when the weather was iffy but just right --- so we could get American TV from across the border loud and clear.
It was a new-to-me mix.
First, working class - minority - teenage rheumatic heart victims cum musical singers, very much alive and lively, testifying emotionally at the front of the stage.
In between singing a heady mix of gospel or blues or rock and rock or country.
As a middle class kid living in a middle class neighbourhood, these were not (yet) 'my kind of people'.
Awkwardly 'assisting' them were some upper middle class doctors and head nurses.
Directly behind and above them was ghostly-silent historic film footage of when they were very sick teenagers in hospital, dressed all in scary white garments like their doctors and nurses.
Figures I have said that the small me wasn't certain were not actual dead ghosts with the people up front these ghosts brought back one night to assist this charity telethon.
Meanwhile the on-stage band nosily riffed away, like a congregation at a Pentecostal church, commenting on both the silent film action and the emoting singers.
Altogether, it simply blew me away -- I was never a big fan of music as a small kid but this oratorio like blend of fact-based talk and emotional singing and playing was much more my cuppa.
The first early - miracle years - of antibiotics, kiddies, wartime suddenly stopped being something remote and distant that my parents and teachers had often talked about without ever exciting me - to something very real, very close, very scary and yet very hopeful.
In a sense the telethon simply retold the events of Volume I, but from a child's mind view rather than from the viewpoint of an adult author.
Volume two will thus be more of a personal - childhood - memoir, reflecting upon the impact public events had on the awaking of my pro-commensality conscience.
Both are works that I am driven to research and write.
Driven as much by my own private attempts to understand my own generation's upbringing as by shared public concerns over our fate - concerns held by many before and after my own generation ...
Tuesday, March 3, 2015
Laplacian Skygods versus the penicillin groundlings
Pierre-Simon LaPlace won eternal fame - or is that infernal infamy ?- for his claim that if one could but climb up high enough to survey all the atoms in the Universe, then one could perfectly predict all the future as well as perfectly explain all of the past.
Keep that thought in mind as one reads how Adnan Morshed, in surveying the leading edge of the optimistic Thirties in his book "Impossible Heights : Skyscrapers, Flight and the Master Builder", sees everywhere the conjunction of the sleek and oh so eugenically ideal airplane & skyscraper.
They are both symbols and enablers of Man's new ability to survey - and hence control and change - all of the world he sees below him : Man as the Master Builder of "The World of Tomorrow".
Even Carl Norden could be fitted into this system -- for his Norden bombsight operated from 5 miles up could also re-build the world below : first breaking many eggs before making some new omelettes.
Hum, didn't the 1930s also have some guys in tights and capes flying about high above us, also re-working the morals of the world for the better ?
So Morshed also throws into the epic brew the figure of the Super Hero as a sort of Super Builder.
One can well imagine that Pierre-Simon himself is back, among the undead - inhabiting all these dreams.
The Master building plan ultimately consisted of replacing the drag of having to co-exist with and beg off of imperfect Nature with the freedom of 100% perfect synthetic autarky.
And what better place than to perform this new alchemy than from the top floors of these sleek shining metal, glass and concrete skyscrapers?
Bit hard ,though, to fit that other wonder of that age into this schema - because penicillin was first scraped off the slimy below-ground basement walls of some big buildings in central London.
Far from Olympian Heights indeed - in fact nearer Hades than Heaven.
More groundlings than Skygods .
Janus is normal thought of looking both to the right and to the left.
But maybe it is better in the case of wartime Manhattan to think of Janus as looking both skywards and away with the atomic bomb's 'go it alone ' synthetic autarky and also downwards, to the soil, with penicillin's open commensality with Nature...
Keep that thought in mind as one reads how Adnan Morshed, in surveying the leading edge of the optimistic Thirties in his book "Impossible Heights : Skyscrapers, Flight and the Master Builder", sees everywhere the conjunction of the sleek and oh so eugenically ideal airplane & skyscraper.
They are both symbols and enablers of Man's new ability to survey - and hence control and change - all of the world he sees below him : Man as the Master Builder of "The World of Tomorrow".
Even Carl Norden could be fitted into this system -- for his Norden bombsight operated from 5 miles up could also re-build the world below : first breaking many eggs before making some new omelettes.
Hum, didn't the 1930s also have some guys in tights and capes flying about high above us, also re-working the morals of the world for the better ?
So Morshed also throws into the epic brew the figure of the Super Hero as a sort of Super Builder.
One can well imagine that Pierre-Simon himself is back, among the undead - inhabiting all these dreams.
The Master building plan ultimately consisted of replacing the drag of having to co-exist with and beg off of imperfect Nature with the freedom of 100% perfect synthetic autarky.
And what better place than to perform this new alchemy than from the top floors of these sleek shining metal, glass and concrete skyscrapers?
Bit hard ,though, to fit that other wonder of that age into this schema - because penicillin was first scraped off the slimy below-ground basement walls of some big buildings in central London.
Far from Olympian Heights indeed - in fact nearer Hades than Heaven.
More groundlings than Skygods .
Janus is normal thought of looking both to the right and to the left.
But maybe it is better in the case of wartime Manhattan to think of Janus as looking both skywards and away with the atomic bomb's 'go it alone ' synthetic autarky and also downwards, to the soil, with penicillin's open commensality with Nature...
Monday, March 2, 2015
As a bullied kid I cheered the small & the weak that gave us antibiotics - but I also cheered on 'abundant safe Atomic Energy too cheap to meter'
Okay, so I couldn't sense the total conflict between being in open commensality with Nature and supporting the closed-in synthetic autarky of atom-smashing research until much later in life.
But I don't think I was alone in my postwar generation of children - not by a long shot.
In the late summer of '65 I was newly in Grade Nine in a school system that seemed unchanged from the 1930s while the NY World's Fair was still celebrating the 1930s synthetic autarky of living better chemically, atomically and as far away from Nature as possible.
But by June '67, while I was still in Grade Ten, the Monterey Pop Festival with its musicians , hair styles and above all its colourful offbeat clothing were the talk of my High School, a long 3000 cultural miles from the counter culture Bay area.
For this was what had become of the buttoned down shirt of 1965, now on the lam and back to the land : the famous summer of (open commensal) love.
Still, it was only as an adult that I seriously wondered how on earth I and my generation got that way---- going from modernity to postmodernity in what seemed at the time (and still does) a historical mere blink of the eye : MO goes PO.
That lead, ultimately, to the researching of my book on the very Janus-headed legacy left to us postwar kids by two wildly different groups of grey-haired fathers and grandfathers of 1940 Manhattan ...
But I don't think I was alone in my postwar generation of children - not by a long shot.
In the late summer of '65 I was newly in Grade Nine in a school system that seemed unchanged from the 1930s while the NY World's Fair was still celebrating the 1930s synthetic autarky of living better chemically, atomically and as far away from Nature as possible.
But by June '67, while I was still in Grade Ten, the Monterey Pop Festival with its musicians , hair styles and above all its colourful offbeat clothing were the talk of my High School, a long 3000 cultural miles from the counter culture Bay area.
For this was what had become of the buttoned down shirt of 1965, now on the lam and back to the land : the famous summer of (open commensal) love.
Still, it was only as an adult that I seriously wondered how on earth I and my generation got that way---- going from modernity to postmodernity in what seemed at the time (and still does) a historical mere blink of the eye : MO goes PO.
That lead, ultimately, to the researching of my book on the very Janus-headed legacy left to us postwar kids by two wildly different groups of grey-haired fathers and grandfathers of 1940 Manhattan ...
Anne Fulcher Hunter passes -- one of the last adult eyewitnesses to birth of penicillin
Mrs Hunter was born in Wisconsin in 1916 and died in Virginia in 2014, aged 98.
After she had raised her five children she resumed her career as a doctor, now in psychiatry rather than in pediatrics.
She is in my blog today because while a medical resident at Columbia Presbyterian she learned first hand of Drs Dawson, Hobby and Meyer's pioneering work in saving SBE patients with their own hospital-brewed penicillin.
She learned much more about them when she met and married Dr Thomas H Hunter, also a resident there, who from 1943-1946 became Dawson's lead co-worker in this work.
Hunter also became Dawson's personal doctor in Dawson's final months just before VE Day 1945.
Dawson had held off his case of (then almost always fatal) MG (Myasthenia Gravis) for four and a half years, until he had completed his penicillin-for-all project successfully and the Nazis had been defeated.
Mrs Hunter thus had a ringside seat in the most dramatic years of the entire wartime penicillin saga.
But the time I knew more about her, she was in her late nineties and I was not eager to try and get her permission to interview her.
The only other adult eyewitness to wartime penicillin that I know of that who is still alive is Dr H Boyd Woodruff of Watchung NJ, who is 97 and still actively writing scholarly articles !
Perhaps Anne Hunter and her husband told their children a little of those early penicillin days - I sort of hope so.
If not, maybe my book will tell the Hunter grandkids and kids just what their grand/parents and great/uncle were up to during the war years....
After she had raised her five children she resumed her career as a doctor, now in psychiatry rather than in pediatrics.
She is in my blog today because while a medical resident at Columbia Presbyterian she learned first hand of Drs Dawson, Hobby and Meyer's pioneering work in saving SBE patients with their own hospital-brewed penicillin.
She learned much more about them when she met and married Dr Thomas H Hunter, also a resident there, who from 1943-1946 became Dawson's lead co-worker in this work.
Hunter also became Dawson's personal doctor in Dawson's final months just before VE Day 1945.
Dawson had held off his case of (then almost always fatal) MG (Myasthenia Gravis) for four and a half years, until he had completed his penicillin-for-all project successfully and the Nazis had been defeated.
Mrs Hunter thus had a ringside seat in the most dramatic years of the entire wartime penicillin saga.
But the time I knew more about her, she was in her late nineties and I was not eager to try and get her permission to interview her.
The only other adult eyewitness to wartime penicillin that I know of that who is still alive is Dr H Boyd Woodruff of Watchung NJ, who is 97 and still actively writing scholarly articles !
Perhaps Anne Hunter and her husband told their children a little of those early penicillin days - I sort of hope so.
If not, maybe my book will tell the Hunter grandkids and kids just what their grand/parents and great/uncle were up to during the war years....
Sunday, March 1, 2015
First injection of penicillin into patients : October 16th 1940 New York
The first penicillin needle into a patient, ushering in our present Era of Antibiotics, was one of the most signal events in all medical history and it happened exactly 75 years ago this Fall.
Yet, until this present article, even the barest of its bare facts have never been publicly reported accurately - not even by the three key team leaders that first performed them !
Here is how it went, based on cross-checking the various published report by the three team leaders against public records and newspaper accounts:
On October 15th 1940, after a hectic six weeks learning from scratch just where to find the right strain of penicillium and then how to coax the temperamental fungus to produce raw penicillin juice, the three key members of the tiny team at New York's Columbia Presbyterian Medical Centre were finally ready.
The team leader (Nova Scotia born and raised Dr Martin Henry Dawson) would inject the penicillin into himself, a healthy volunteer, to test whether the never-before injected drug was dangerous to human life once in the bloodstream.
If he survived unharmed, the team planned to use the free time provided the next day by the university's registration of students and young staff in America's very first peacetime Draft to inject some penicillin into two young male patients dying of then invariably fatal SBE.
More formally known as subacute bacterial endocarditis, SBE was the then common disease that made Rheumatic Fever the leading killer of the young.
So only October 16th (in between the two dying boys being registered for the Draft) and once again on October 17th 1940, Dr Dawson injected some of the team's hospital brewed penicillin into the two young men.
One was a young black star athlete , Aaron Leroy Alston born 1910 and residing on St Nicholas Avenue in Harlem and the other was a deathly-sick-all-his-life young Jewish man, Charles Aronson, born 1913 and residing on Vyse Avenue in the Bronx.
Next, the two young men got a much longer and and a much larger regime of oral Sulfa drugs.
Unexpectedly, the Sulfa worked on the sickly Aronson and he went home apparently cured, on a maintenance dose of Sulfa, in late December.
His cure held and he survived alright for three and a half years until another bout of SBE brought him back to Dawson.
This time Dawson had plenty of penicillin to cure SBE reliably and he did so again with Aronson.
Unfortunately, star athlete Alston did not respond to Sulfa drugs (more accurately his particular strain of SBE-causing Viridans Strep didn't respond) and Dawson started him again on a larger and longer regime of stronger injected penicillin on December 31st 1940.
He died mid-treatment in mid January 1941 and his tragically short sports career was celebrated and mourned by many sports fans across the city.
The penicillin brewed for him but not used was given to a third patient, a young middle class salesman in his thirties from upstate New York - Middletown to be precise ; his name George Milton Conant.
He got at least one course of Dawson's penicillin in late January.
He died on May 31st 1941 -nearly a month after Dawson gave a cautious report May 5th on his treatment of four SBE patients with penicillin , delivered before a huge convention of medical researchers at Atlantic City and given extraordinary wide coverage in the news media.
I (and even the team itself) know nothing of the fourth patient - but Dawson's May 5th report specifically says four were treated ( thus treated between between October 16th 1940 and late April 1941).
(It is is worth remarking, given the canonical status and wide circulation of this newspaper, that The New York Times' science correspondent William L Laurence (who wrote the famous eye-witness account of the first atomic explosion ,"Dawn Over Zero") reported the next day that he had heard Dawson saying that he had treated 4 patients suffering from SBE with his penicillin.)
As of the May 5th date, we know for sure that only one patient had definitely died but Dawson refused to crow about his small successes ---- or give specifics of just when the first injections were given and to how many patients.
Dawson later referred , in his 1944 JAMA article, to treating five SBE patients with early hospital brewed penicillin, of a potency not stated.
This allows us to assume that the fifth patient was probably treated very early in the Fall of 1941.
Because that was before Dawson had been introduced, after a visit from Norman Heatley, to the idea of calibrating the biological activity of penicillin by using Oxford units - as we still do to this day.
(The team seems to have stopped making penicillin during the high summer months because the temperature in the hospital, anywhere than in a bottom basement room, was far too high to successfully grow penicillium that would give off penicillin juice.)
Later he and his fellow team mates bacteriologist Dr Gladys Hobby and chemist Dr Karl Meyer would all give partially accurate and incomplete public accounts of those early (clearly non-dramatic) days - so who could blame the lay press or science historians for repeating their errors and adding some of their own ?
Yet, until this present article, even the barest of its bare facts have never been publicly reported accurately - not even by the three key team leaders that first performed them !
Here is how it went, based on cross-checking the various published report by the three team leaders against public records and newspaper accounts:
On October 15th 1940, after a hectic six weeks learning from scratch just where to find the right strain of penicillium and then how to coax the temperamental fungus to produce raw penicillin juice, the three key members of the tiny team at New York's Columbia Presbyterian Medical Centre were finally ready.
The team leader (Nova Scotia born and raised Dr Martin Henry Dawson) would inject the penicillin into himself, a healthy volunteer, to test whether the never-before injected drug was dangerous to human life once in the bloodstream.
If he survived unharmed, the team planned to use the free time provided the next day by the university's registration of students and young staff in America's very first peacetime Draft to inject some penicillin into two young male patients dying of then invariably fatal SBE.
More formally known as subacute bacterial endocarditis, SBE was the then common disease that made Rheumatic Fever the leading killer of the young.
So only October 16th (in between the two dying boys being registered for the Draft) and once again on October 17th 1940, Dr Dawson injected some of the team's hospital brewed penicillin into the two young men.
One was a young black star athlete , Aaron Leroy Alston born 1910 and residing on St Nicholas Avenue in Harlem and the other was a deathly-sick-all-his-life young Jewish man, Charles Aronson, born 1913 and residing on Vyse Avenue in the Bronx.
Next, the two young men got a much longer and and a much larger regime of oral Sulfa drugs.
Unexpectedly, the Sulfa worked on the sickly Aronson and he went home apparently cured, on a maintenance dose of Sulfa, in late December.
His cure held and he survived alright for three and a half years until another bout of SBE brought him back to Dawson.
This time Dawson had plenty of penicillin to cure SBE reliably and he did so again with Aronson.
Unfortunately, star athlete Alston did not respond to Sulfa drugs (more accurately his particular strain of SBE-causing Viridans Strep didn't respond) and Dawson started him again on a larger and longer regime of stronger injected penicillin on December 31st 1940.
He died mid-treatment in mid January 1941 and his tragically short sports career was celebrated and mourned by many sports fans across the city.
The penicillin brewed for him but not used was given to a third patient, a young middle class salesman in his thirties from upstate New York - Middletown to be precise ; his name George Milton Conant.
He got at least one course of Dawson's penicillin in late January.
He died on May 31st 1941 -nearly a month after Dawson gave a cautious report May 5th on his treatment of four SBE patients with penicillin , delivered before a huge convention of medical researchers at Atlantic City and given extraordinary wide coverage in the news media.
I (and even the team itself) know nothing of the fourth patient - but Dawson's May 5th report specifically says four were treated ( thus treated between between October 16th 1940 and late April 1941).
(It is is worth remarking, given the canonical status and wide circulation of this newspaper, that The New York Times' science correspondent William L Laurence (who wrote the famous eye-witness account of the first atomic explosion ,"Dawn Over Zero") reported the next day that he had heard Dawson saying that he had treated 4 patients suffering from SBE with his penicillin.)
As of the May 5th date, we know for sure that only one patient had definitely died but Dawson refused to crow about his small successes ---- or give specifics of just when the first injections were given and to how many patients.
Dawson later referred , in his 1944 JAMA article, to treating five SBE patients with early hospital brewed penicillin, of a potency not stated.
This allows us to assume that the fifth patient was probably treated very early in the Fall of 1941.
Because that was before Dawson had been introduced, after a visit from Norman Heatley, to the idea of calibrating the biological activity of penicillin by using Oxford units - as we still do to this day.
(The team seems to have stopped making penicillin during the high summer months because the temperature in the hospital, anywhere than in a bottom basement room, was far too high to successfully grow penicillium that would give off penicillin juice.)
Later he and his fellow team mates bacteriologist Dr Gladys Hobby and chemist Dr Karl Meyer would all give partially accurate and incomplete public accounts of those early (clearly non-dramatic) days - so who could blame the lay press or science historians for repeating their errors and adding some of their own ?
When historians won't read
Scientists believe scientific discoveries merely reveal physical processes that have been actually going everywhere and for all time, undetected by humans until now, working themselves out according the universal and timeless laws of nature.
So recording exactly when scientists first noticed such natural events is irrelevant.
The only date worth recording is when a credible (insert here : left undefined) scientific journal first publishes the discovery ---and even then merely for reasons of settling competing personal, institutional and national claims of priority.
Mrs Martin Henry Dawson's life story suggests she had a flair for creating favourable publicity.
Her husband's life story suggests that he was a typical conventional non-alpha male scientist of the Modernity era in many ways - such as his flair for avoiding attracting any favourable publicity to himself or his scientific efforts.
Too bad for millions of wartime patients dying for lack of penicillin.
Because underneath all of even the most folksy of top scientists are some very sharp elbows --- ambition counts at least as much in doing good work, good scientific work included , as talent, hard work and great luck do.
In May 1941, Dawson got real real lucky when his modest conference report on his team's modest efforts to make pilot plant amounts of natural penicillin to try and save the lives of young people dying of SBE (endocarditis) got extraordinary wide publicity in the national and even international press.
It could have been - it should have been if Dawson really wanted to successfully treat the SBEs - a even bigger success in the international media by the fall of 1941, if Dawson had bothered to mention in May the date when he had first done all this.
Because by September 1941, the world's science journalists could then have compared the date of Howard Florey's first treatment of a patient with injected penicillin (February 1941) with Dawson's first injected penicillin to a patient (October 1940) and proclaimed a major medical first for this Canadian born NYC doctor.
Florey did have very sharp elbows indeed and he did think to include his first injection date as part of his effort for staking his penicillin priority in his August 1941 article.
Indeed, in that same article, he avoided noting that Dawson had published his own claim earlier than Florey --- despite Florey knowing this from both colleagues reports and from wide press reports.
Technically he could get away with this, though morally skating very close to the wind, because Dawson had merely published his report by delivering it before a huge international conference of doctors and then had the hosting society include it in its published abstracts.
By the rules of scientific priority that doesn't count to be reported as an earlier scientific priority.
despite the fact that in 1940, most journals' peer review consisted merely of the editor and his friends' informal assessment - by contrast, a panel of senior scientists of the big scientific society holding the conference had to okay Dawson being able to present his paper in person.
Florey was determined to redeem his family's name and if he had to stab colleagues in the back to make penicillin his own personal claim to fame, so be it.
Dawson's published silence on the date of his first penicillin injection left people to infer that it had to come after that of Florey.
In March1944, in a major article in JAMA, Dawson finally said he had started work on penicillin in the Fall of 1940.
But he still refused to date his first penicillin injections into SBE patients, an event he mentions in his same article - even though he knows, by Florey's published word - that Dawson's own efforts were first by four months.
His co-author, Gladys Hobby, was as infuriatingly modest as himself.
Evidence suggests her memory wasn't great for historical dates anyway.
But in January 20 1945, another Dawson JAMA article ,this time on Dawson's SBE penicillin efforts alone , does open up - a little.
The new co-author , Thomas H Hunter, is the reason I am sure.
But talk about 'burying the lede' : the date of his historical first injections is buried 18 pages in, added as a last minute historical aside while discussing case number 16 of this SBE series !
Dawson correctly gives the dates as October 16th and 17th 1940 but he then intimates that there was only one, not two, patient - the patient being discussed as case #16 and he still insists, that in his opinion, this event was the first in America.
Neither of these latter claims were fully true - and he knew it !
I will never know why he said this --- and he died a month later.....
So recording exactly when scientists first noticed such natural events is irrelevant.
The only date worth recording is when a credible (insert here : left undefined) scientific journal first publishes the discovery ---and even then merely for reasons of settling competing personal, institutional and national claims of priority.
Mrs Martin Henry Dawson's life story suggests she had a flair for creating favourable publicity.
Her husband's life story suggests that he was a typical conventional non-alpha male scientist of the Modernity era in many ways - such as his flair for avoiding attracting any favourable publicity to himself or his scientific efforts.
Too bad for millions of wartime patients dying for lack of penicillin.
Because underneath all of even the most folksy of top scientists are some very sharp elbows --- ambition counts at least as much in doing good work, good scientific work included , as talent, hard work and great luck do.
In May 1941, Dawson got real real lucky when his modest conference report on his team's modest efforts to make pilot plant amounts of natural penicillin to try and save the lives of young people dying of SBE (endocarditis) got extraordinary wide publicity in the national and even international press.
It could have been - it should have been if Dawson really wanted to successfully treat the SBEs - a even bigger success in the international media by the fall of 1941, if Dawson had bothered to mention in May the date when he had first done all this.
Because by September 1941, the world's science journalists could then have compared the date of Howard Florey's first treatment of a patient with injected penicillin (February 1941) with Dawson's first injected penicillin to a patient (October 1940) and proclaimed a major medical first for this Canadian born NYC doctor.
Florey did have very sharp elbows indeed and he did think to include his first injection date as part of his effort for staking his penicillin priority in his August 1941 article.
Indeed, in that same article, he avoided noting that Dawson had published his own claim earlier than Florey --- despite Florey knowing this from both colleagues reports and from wide press reports.
Technically he could get away with this, though morally skating very close to the wind, because Dawson had merely published his report by delivering it before a huge international conference of doctors and then had the hosting society include it in its published abstracts.
By the rules of scientific priority that doesn't count to be reported as an earlier scientific priority.
despite the fact that in 1940, most journals' peer review consisted merely of the editor and his friends' informal assessment - by contrast, a panel of senior scientists of the big scientific society holding the conference had to okay Dawson being able to present his paper in person.
Florey was determined to redeem his family's name and if he had to stab colleagues in the back to make penicillin his own personal claim to fame, so be it.
Dawson's published silence on the date of his first penicillin injection left people to infer that it had to come after that of Florey.
In March1944, in a major article in JAMA, Dawson finally said he had started work on penicillin in the Fall of 1940.
But he still refused to date his first penicillin injections into SBE patients, an event he mentions in his same article - even though he knows, by Florey's published word - that Dawson's own efforts were first by four months.
His co-author, Gladys Hobby, was as infuriatingly modest as himself.
Evidence suggests her memory wasn't great for historical dates anyway.
But in January 20 1945, another Dawson JAMA article ,this time on Dawson's SBE penicillin efforts alone , does open up - a little.
The new co-author , Thomas H Hunter, is the reason I am sure.
But talk about 'burying the lede' : the date of his historical first injections is buried 18 pages in, added as a last minute historical aside while discussing case number 16 of this SBE series !
Dawson correctly gives the dates as October 16th and 17th 1940 but he then intimates that there was only one, not two, patient - the patient being discussed as case #16 and he still insists, that in his opinion, this event was the first in America.
Neither of these latter claims were fully true - and he knew it !
I will never know why he said this --- and he died a month later.....
Why Scientists can't read
As scholars, scientists are trained to read and trust primary documents first over secondary accounts.
(Rare special circumstances may alter that requirement: as when seemingly reliable oral history later indicates that the early primary documents were deliberately written with false data.)
Many studies have shown they don't.
Many scientists liberally sprinkle references to primary reports that they haven't seen or read in their scholarly articles .
The studies dramatically catch them out when a reference with a crucial spelling or numbers error is traced back to a single scholar who did read the primary document.
He or she then miss-spelled or misquoted some of the information.
The reference error was blindly repeated by a long chain of scholars who simply cut and pasted that reference into their hefty tome ---- for added vitamins and mineral count, no doubt.
Ouch ! Gotcha !
But scientists can at least plea that they do other useful things.
Not so historians who can't or won't read primary documents before reporting on them in their scholarly articles and books.
Because first getting dates and chronologies right is what society pays them the big buck for. More about this in a later post.
Science tends to exist in a sort of eternal and universal now.
A 'true' scientist is genuinely puzzled when someone asks them exactly when and where their historic experiment occurred .
For the scientist makes no mention of date or place in the first, announcing, article.
The scientist usually says this process that they discovered has being going on everywhere in the universe since time began because the laws of nature are eternal and universal.
( Spoken like a true devotee of Modernity ! )
If pushed further they say they first published their work in a peer reviewed journal on (say) January 10th 1928, a good week before the other scientists also claiming priority first published their article.
That then - bizarrely enough - becomes to scientists when something is first discovered - when it first happened.
So HGT (the horizontal gene transfer of DNA) , the biggest scientific event of the last quarter of the twentieth century is said to have been first discovered in January 1928 when Frederick Griffith published his accidental discovery of it.
I think that he actually discovered it five years earlier and won't never have published on it ever, if left alone .
But then a visiting German friend half-jokingly threatened that he would go home, repeat the experiment and then publish it.
A threat made mostly to smoke out the reluctant and disbelieving-of-his-own-eyes Griffith.
If the German had, it would have then gotten Griffith into serious trouble with his government employers for withholding an important scientific discovery, made on their dime !
So, unfortunately, we will ever never know when the 'DNA is the physical basis of genetics' saga actually began.
(Rare special circumstances may alter that requirement: as when seemingly reliable oral history later indicates that the early primary documents were deliberately written with false data.)
Many studies have shown they don't.
For doing this, scientists get Nobels --- high school kids just get expelled
Many scientists liberally sprinkle references to primary reports that they haven't seen or read in their scholarly articles .
The studies dramatically catch them out when a reference with a crucial spelling or numbers error is traced back to a single scholar who did read the primary document.
He or she then miss-spelled or misquoted some of the information.
The reference error was blindly repeated by a long chain of scholars who simply cut and pasted that reference into their hefty tome ---- for added vitamins and mineral count, no doubt.
Ouch ! Gotcha !
But scientists can at least plea that they do other useful things.
Not so historians who can't or won't read primary documents before reporting on them in their scholarly articles and books.
Because first getting dates and chronologies right is what society pays them the big buck for. More about this in a later post.
A universal and eternal now
Science tends to exist in a sort of eternal and universal now.
A 'true' scientist is genuinely puzzled when someone asks them exactly when and where their historic experiment occurred .
For the scientist makes no mention of date or place in the first, announcing, article.
The scientist usually says this process that they discovered has being going on everywhere in the universe since time began because the laws of nature are eternal and universal.
( Spoken like a true devotee of Modernity ! )
If pushed further they say they first published their work in a peer reviewed journal on (say) January 10th 1928, a good week before the other scientists also claiming priority first published their article.
That then - bizarrely enough - becomes to scientists when something is first discovered - when it first happened.
So HGT (the horizontal gene transfer of DNA) , the biggest scientific event of the last quarter of the twentieth century is said to have been first discovered in January 1928 when Frederick Griffith published his accidental discovery of it.
I think that he actually discovered it five years earlier and won't never have published on it ever, if left alone .
But then a visiting German friend half-jokingly threatened that he would go home, repeat the experiment and then publish it.
A threat made mostly to smoke out the reluctant and disbelieving-of-his-own-eyes Griffith.
If the German had, it would have then gotten Griffith into serious trouble with his government employers for withholding an important scientific discovery, made on their dime !
So, unfortunately, we will ever never know when the 'DNA is the physical basis of genetics' saga actually began.
When was penicillin first injected into a patient
Ask the taxpayer/consumer/patient/punter/ paying customer to give a one word description of what makes an antibiotic different from something like an aspirin and they will all say its a "lifesaver".
But to save lives, antibiotics must be injected or swallowed - not dabbed on the outside skin : antiseptics are useful preventives, but they don't save those already dying of infection.
So the historical beginning of the Age of Antibiotics - to the 99.9999999% of us who don't edit scientific journals and assign scientific priorities by whenever they decide to publish articles - began when the first needle of penicillin was injected into a sick patient with the intention of curing them.
I said patient and I meant it - I don't think the date when penicillin was first injected into healthy volunteers is anywhere near as important.
Some scientists and historians, perhaps not thinking very deeply, don't agree.
I can only say in defence of the general consensus on this subject that penicillin is famous for being discovered as a potent and totally safe lifesaver a good 12 years earlier but had then lain fallow without ever been injected into a dying patient.
Crossing that particular medical Rubicon clearly meant something to the world's doctors of that day.
First though - how do we ever know when something as happened ?
We might say that we had been there when it happened - but we might also be biased and re-assembled what actually happened into what we wanted to happen or feared had happened.
More objective ( for no one is ever totally objective) third parties eye witnesses can be rare.
False medical patient charts
In the case of the first penicillin injections, surely then we can trust hospital records.
But we can't.
Howard Florey's team, for example, never even recorded on her medical charts the penicillin injection they gave "volunteer" Mrs Elva Akers in January 1941 !
They similarly didn't record her name on their own team records - just the date and that the penicillin caused a sharp fever spike in the patient - facts they reported in their major penicillin article in Lancet in August 1941.
(Only a much later search through all the ward records for middle aged female patients in mid January 1941 led her doctors to the one lady (Akers) who had a sharp fever spike on her chart --- presumably in response to the remembered fever inducing impurities in the penicillin.)
Medical staff get into serious career ending trouble for changing patient charts - but many things happen during the course of treatment and are not recorded.
Florey et al might get away with such loosey goosey stuff by arguing that this test for human toxicity (which they then believed was the first in history !) wasn't important enough to record on Akers' chart.
But what if this toxicity test had resulted in her death - after all, for 12 long years this wonder drug had lain fallow for that very reason - what then ?
So establishing scientific firsts is very hard - first because scientists often don't record those discoveries very well and because other scientists don't even read (or get right) what little the first group of scientists chose to record and publish ...
Friday, February 27, 2015
Rawl's Disease ("Chartitis") kills thousands of patients
Unfortunately, it simply isn't true that today's nurses and doctors ignore the personality of their patients to focus on high tech instrumentation instead.
Many more patients would still be alive if only that was so.
Instead - as Professor Chloe Atkins' chilling memoir "My Imaginary Illness" (Cornell University Press) reveals, one can witness senior specialists and head nurses standing around a hospital bed yelling at a patient dying from a respiratory crisis to 'start breathing or get out of the hospital and stop wasting taxpayers' money!'
Even when the patient is visibly unable to breathe and her vital signs on the dials before them are crashing.
That is because they have all read (and re-read) her decade old charts and her old charts claimed she was simply faking her disease and presumably (for the senior doctors and nurses rarely say) controlling the bank of medical machines by, in her disabled state, by sheer telepathy.
We indeed have a serious medical problem here.
But it involves those oh so expensive experts we civilians are forced to trust in times of crisis , not the harried patient.
Rawl's Disease (rather better known as Chartitis) is named after famous liberal philosopher John Rawls - a rare and signal dishonor for his much ignored academic discipline.
Thanks in part to to the intellectual pair of Descartes and Freud , humanity still tend to separate the diseases of human beings into two kinds - organic (loosed based on the unconscious body) and functional (loosely based on the unconscious mind).
We could survive this splitting up the whole of being if only we didn't also have the long line of liberal thinkers like Rawl and Mills to contend with.
They push hard their claim that we should be self-controlling and freedom-loving individuals, as if it was an already established scientific fact.
Our whole world - starting in the West - increasingly tries to 'do life' by Mills and Rawl's precepts and this can't but help influence our nurses and doctors.
Intoxicated with the fumes of the hard liquor of scientism, nurses and doctors 'lose it' whenever they come across medical cases where the list of visible and technical signs can't be assembled into a diagnosis and hence a treatment plan.
One of the joys of their business is never having to say you're sorry .
Never to say 'I am sorry but I am as baffled as you the patient, your family and friends ---- only paid a great deal more to be so baffled'.
Telling the truth simply won't cut it - pocketbook wise - so you reach into your handy dandy DSM bible, a tool for mental health professionals that ensures no matter how vague, fleeting and inconsistent the complaints a patient presents the health community with, a scientism-sound diagnosis can be made.
In the case of a patient presenting an inconsistent collection of physical symptoms with no apparent physical "organic" cause (say a leg paralyzed without the usual physical clues for organic paralysis) the DSM suggests a functional disease : its a psychosomatic condition.
That is to say her ( and it usually is a her, unless he is a foreigner or gay) unconscious mind has frozen her leg - probably as the result of an unnatural childhood affection for her long legged Barbie doll etc , etc.
Male doctors used to be able to label any female patient they were baffled by and disliked as a 'hysteric' but today they have learned to guise their old contempt in new babble talk.
Last week the term was 'conversion reaction' --- I do not know what this week's term is.
We can't - and we shouldn't - blame patients for the unconscious reactions of their mind.
But thanks to Mills and Rawls and patient self help groups and made for chat TV
cancer recovery memoirs, we do.
Just as clinician Dr Leni Reifenstahl opined all those years ago at Nuremberg, (with Mills and Rawls in sotto voce agreement) any right-living, right-thinking, right-gened patient should be able to control and beat her cancer, by a sheer triumph of the will over mere physical or mental weakness.
Those unable to do so were labelled - by Bomber Harris and the DSM - as LMF (lacking in moral fibre) and malingerers.
Malingerers is the word modern nurses and doctors still call patients they morally judge this way - it is the verbal term they used to describe Chloe Atkins for a dozen years amongst themselves.
But in print, in formal documents, they couldn't use such five cent words known by everyone who has ever watched a war movie.
So they pull out the kind of convoluted terms that lets a body pull down the big bucks -- terms like "Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy".
Thanks to centralized digital chart keeping , the early unsupported claims of Chloe's mother, doctors and nurses were kept on the charts sent to each new hospital her MG crisis put her in, no matter what province or state.
She tells a much repeated tale : of arriving at emergency dying from a failure to breathe, the doctors and nurses correctly reading her visible signs and the values presented by the hooked up machines and giving the right drastic actions to save her life by getting her breathing again.
A stirring made for TV medical drama with a happy ending - a life saved by medical staff who like and care about this patient as an individual.
Three days later, her chart arrives and as the staff read and gossip about it and her, they start to act cold, distant and hostile towards her.
They soon withdraw her breathing equipment so she will go home and stop wasting hospital beds and money.
They dismiss the machine readings and visible signs from the emergency ward only days earlier as a long series of errors and mis-readings.
They simply refuse to explain how drastic measures designed to save a person unable to breath got her breathing again and didn't simply kill her as it would most people simply 'faking it'.
Chartitis : trust the original diagnosis, not the current disease --- this woman simply willed her lungs to stop breathing because she wanted to have sex with her father or smally furry animals, as a wee small child.
Now I am writing a book about a doctor (Martin Henry Dawson) who was diagnosed with the autoimmune disease Myastenia Gravis (MG) but who fought off his own body, his own colleagues and his own wartime government just long enough to bring us cheap available-to-all natural penicillin.
It struck me early on in Chloe Atkins' account that her drooping eyes and come and go symptoms of physical weakness should have alerted someone (in the literally hundreds of the world's smartest doctors and nurses who carefully examined or treated her) to the possibility she had an atypical case of MG.
In autoimmune disease, some unknown external stress causes the immune system of some of us to start attacking the body. Which part(s) that is attacked gives us the type of auto immune disease we have.
In MG, stress and over-activating our muscles attracts unneeded immunity agents to the chemical pathway that connects signals from our nerves to our muscles and they disrupt that pathway.
If we rest our muscles, relax (maybe even take counteracting medications) the immune system relaxes and stops sending out this agents (or likely, merely less of these agents) and we can more or less resume our carefully subdued activities.
This is not a degenerative autoimmune disase - one doesn't get worse and worse.
So many of us have had milder cases MG for years that we somehow cope with
and never had it properly diagnosed.
But if the muscles most affected involve breathing and swallowing we will certainly get diagnosed if we survive long enough - because this can induce a minutes-count class 1 medical emergency - the patient breaths so poorly as to suffocate to death over a half hour period, if not given big hospital-level life-saving intervention right away.
I mention all this because I believe the MG crisis shares something in common today with the equally rare Meningitis crisis : yes today both are quite rare but both will cause certain death in minutes or hours if nurses and doctors have been well trained to respond instantly and correctly to a condition they might see only a handful of times in a career.
This is why I am so surprised and frankly scared to death , not that non specialists couldn't diagnose a complicated and atypical case of MG, but that they couldn't recognize a patent MG crisis when presented with one.
MG crisis kill two ways.
One is outright, in minutes.
The other is over a few years, because despite repeatedly surviving each MG crisis, the patient's lungs gets a little more permanently damaged each time.
I feel this is what finally killed Dr Dawson.
Now one might feel the arrival of Germ Theory might reduce the need for medical staff and society to blame the victim but it didn't - not anymore than blaming the Devil for illness reduced this near constant need to blame the patient for their illness.
Yes the Devil gave you this fever, but He wants to give all of us fevers - why then you not me ?
Because your wanton acts invited Him and His fever in.
Yes, tiny foreign germs gave you Strep Throat - but didn't you go out to an all night rave in early April, dressed in your short skimpy dress, talking too much and too long over the loud music - stressing your throat in the cold damp night air ?
As a young male about Cloe's age when her disease first hit her, I did get Strep Throat that went to my kidneys, was barely able to walk, and then recovered from chemical imbalances so bad that they were literally feet off the machine-inked charts.
But I went on to suffer lifelong bladder cum prostate difficulties (basically a mildly painfully constant need to pee) that are always there but merely annoying and manageable .
This not something that happens when Strep germs lead the body to attack the kidneys (and this unlike MG is a relatively common disease) and I had no normal physical evidence to back my claim : no signs of bladder surface scarring etc.
A few doctors have suggested some form of mind relaxing pills but most say try not to try liquids after supper.
I have always been well treated by the medical system over my condition.
Perhaps because I was a male, and because unlike Chloe, my parents always warmly supported me.
I am a decade or so older than Chloe and moved around a bit as a child, so all my doctor's records and the hospital records seem to have been lost for the first 30 years of my life - including this key medical event.
So if any early doctor thought I was a malingerer, it failed to get conveyed to today's chart-trusting, instrumentation-distrusting 'evidence-based' medical personnel.
Back to Dawson to conclude our sorry tale : for Dawson shares his fame over two signal medical discoveries he championed.
He was the first in history to give injections of penicillin-the-antibiotic, ushering in our Age of Antibiotics.
But a dozen years earlier he had been the first to promote DNA HGT (he called it 'bacterial transformation') and Quorum Sensing and did much to promote attention to things like molecular mimicry and bacterial survival by variation.
He was cold shouldered by the medical and scientific establishment of the day - they feared even to raise his cause by denying it - it suggested to them a personal financial future dire beyond belief.
It was an age where the top medical people - then as now - get the big bucks and the prestige not from curing your disease but by telling junior doctors what your disease was.
The juniors were then left with the minor mopping up work - actually curing you.
The new sub-science of immunology suggested that that the human body - somehow - could find a way to defeat everyone of a hundred slightly different strep pneumonia bacteria strains, if only given enough time.
But if a consultant could quickly 'type' the germ causing this or that patient to be dying of pneumonia as being of Type 56 (and typing simply couldn't be rushed) , the serum from the blood of a healthy horse previously given a mild case of Type 56 pneumonia could be injected into the bloodstream of the patient, to fight off the Type 56 until the human body learned to do so itself.
Dawson dared to say that while a disease might start off with Type 56 in the lungs , the process of HGT (bacteria exchanging bits of their unique DNA) could quickly mean (quickly as in 24 hours) that the new bug killing the patient was Type 11 !
Serum 56 would be useless, the patient would die before Type 11 was slowly re-typed and the high repute of the medical fraternity in the 1930s would sink to the patient's grave.
Best ignore Dawson - ignore his instrumentation values and trust the chart of the old familiar theories.
Better to blame instead the pneumonia victim, if he died, for being a middle aged crazy fifty year old who drank too much one weekend away from home and then shouted himself silly at his old college's football match in the cold harsh Fall air.
(True, it often did happen precisely that way, at least among the few middle class patients able to afford expensive serum treatment but I'd hardly call what they did a mortal sin justifying an early death.)
We need to better balance our acceptance of complexity and that we are always treating anew highly individual sick patients (a la John Rawls) not just monolithic diseases.
We must accept that their illness is the unique sum of their conscious mind, unconscious mind, their unique phenotype and only then expect to see them confronted by a hopefully somewhat standard external inducer* .
*But even here, mind always Dawson's HGT lesson : that predictably nasty bacterial bug might be quite different today than it was last season....
Many more patients would still be alive if only that was so.
Chloe Atkins' Imaginary Illness
Instead - as Professor Chloe Atkins' chilling memoir "My Imaginary Illness" (Cornell University Press) reveals, one can witness senior specialists and head nurses standing around a hospital bed yelling at a patient dying from a respiratory crisis to 'start breathing or get out of the hospital and stop wasting taxpayers' money!'
Even when the patient is visibly unable to breathe and her vital signs on the dials before them are crashing.
That is because they have all read (and re-read) her decade old charts and her old charts claimed she was simply faking her disease and presumably (for the senior doctors and nurses rarely say) controlling the bank of medical machines by, in her disabled state, by sheer telepathy.
We indeed have a serious medical problem here.
But it involves those oh so expensive experts we civilians are forced to trust in times of crisis , not the harried patient.
Rawl's Disease : Chartitis
Rawl's Disease (rather better known as Chartitis) is named after famous liberal philosopher John Rawls - a rare and signal dishonor for his much ignored academic discipline.
Thanks in part to to the intellectual pair of Descartes and Freud , humanity still tend to separate the diseases of human beings into two kinds - organic (loosed based on the unconscious body) and functional (loosely based on the unconscious mind).
We could survive this splitting up the whole of being if only we didn't also have the long line of liberal thinkers like Rawl and Mills to contend with.
They push hard their claim that we should be self-controlling and freedom-loving individuals, as if it was an already established scientific fact.
Our whole world - starting in the West - increasingly tries to 'do life' by Mills and Rawl's precepts and this can't but help influence our nurses and doctors.
Intoxicated with the fumes of the hard liquor of scientism, nurses and doctors 'lose it' whenever they come across medical cases where the list of visible and technical signs can't be assembled into a diagnosis and hence a treatment plan.
One of the joys of their business is never having to say you're sorry .
Never to say 'I am sorry but I am as baffled as you the patient, your family and friends ---- only paid a great deal more to be so baffled'.
Bafflegab of DSM replaces Bible for medical solace
Telling the truth simply won't cut it - pocketbook wise - so you reach into your handy dandy DSM bible, a tool for mental health professionals that ensures no matter how vague, fleeting and inconsistent the complaints a patient presents the health community with, a scientism-sound diagnosis can be made.
In the case of a patient presenting an inconsistent collection of physical symptoms with no apparent physical "organic" cause (say a leg paralyzed without the usual physical clues for organic paralysis) the DSM suggests a functional disease : its a psychosomatic condition.
That is to say her ( and it usually is a her, unless he is a foreigner or gay) unconscious mind has frozen her leg - probably as the result of an unnatural childhood affection for her long legged Barbie doll etc , etc.
Male doctors used to be able to label any female patient they were baffled by and disliked as a 'hysteric' but today they have learned to guise their old contempt in new babble talk.
Last week the term was 'conversion reaction' --- I do not know what this week's term is.
We can't - and we shouldn't - blame patients for the unconscious reactions of their mind.
But thanks to Mills and Rawls and patient self help groups and made for chat TV
cancer recovery memoirs, we do.
Medical Consultant Leni Reifenstahl
Just as clinician Dr Leni Reifenstahl opined all those years ago at Nuremberg, (with Mills and Rawls in sotto voce agreement) any right-living, right-thinking, right-gened patient should be able to control and beat her cancer, by a sheer triumph of the will over mere physical or mental weakness.
Those unable to do so were labelled - by Bomber Harris and the DSM - as LMF (lacking in moral fibre) and malingerers.
Malingerers is the word modern nurses and doctors still call patients they morally judge this way - it is the verbal term they used to describe Chloe Atkins for a dozen years amongst themselves.
But in print, in formal documents, they couldn't use such five cent words known by everyone who has ever watched a war movie.
So they pull out the kind of convoluted terms that lets a body pull down the big bucks -- terms like "Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy".
Thanks to centralized digital chart keeping , the early unsupported claims of Chloe's mother, doctors and nurses were kept on the charts sent to each new hospital her MG crisis put her in, no matter what province or state.
She tells a much repeated tale : of arriving at emergency dying from a failure to breathe, the doctors and nurses correctly reading her visible signs and the values presented by the hooked up machines and giving the right drastic actions to save her life by getting her breathing again.
A made-for-TV medical drama with two wildly different endings - separated only by the arrival of old charts
A stirring made for TV medical drama with a happy ending - a life saved by medical staff who like and care about this patient as an individual.
Three days later, her chart arrives and as the staff read and gossip about it and her, they start to act cold, distant and hostile towards her.
They soon withdraw her breathing equipment so she will go home and stop wasting hospital beds and money.
They dismiss the machine readings and visible signs from the emergency ward only days earlier as a long series of errors and mis-readings.
They simply refuse to explain how drastic measures designed to save a person unable to breath got her breathing again and didn't simply kill her as it would most people simply 'faking it'.
Chartitis : trust the original diagnosis, not the current disease --- this woman simply willed her lungs to stop breathing because she wanted to have sex with her father or smally furry animals, as a wee small child.
MG (Myastenia Gravis) , Martin Henry Dawson and wartime penicillin
Now I am writing a book about a doctor (Martin Henry Dawson) who was diagnosed with the autoimmune disease Myastenia Gravis (MG) but who fought off his own body, his own colleagues and his own wartime government just long enough to bring us cheap available-to-all natural penicillin.
It struck me early on in Chloe Atkins' account that her drooping eyes and come and go symptoms of physical weakness should have alerted someone (in the literally hundreds of the world's smartest doctors and nurses who carefully examined or treated her) to the possibility she had an atypical case of MG.
In autoimmune disease, some unknown external stress causes the immune system of some of us to start attacking the body. Which part(s) that is attacked gives us the type of auto immune disease we have.
In MG, stress and over-activating our muscles attracts unneeded immunity agents to the chemical pathway that connects signals from our nerves to our muscles and they disrupt that pathway.
If we rest our muscles, relax (maybe even take counteracting medications) the immune system relaxes and stops sending out this agents (or likely, merely less of these agents) and we can more or less resume our carefully subdued activities.
This is not a degenerative autoimmune disase - one doesn't get worse and worse.
So many of us have had milder cases MG for years that we somehow cope with
and never had it properly diagnosed.
But if the muscles most affected involve breathing and swallowing we will certainly get diagnosed if we survive long enough - because this can induce a minutes-count class 1 medical emergency - the patient breaths so poorly as to suffocate to death over a half hour period, if not given big hospital-level life-saving intervention right away.
I mention all this because I believe the MG crisis shares something in common today with the equally rare Meningitis crisis : yes today both are quite rare but both will cause certain death in minutes or hours if nurses and doctors have been well trained to respond instantly and correctly to a condition they might see only a handful of times in a career.
This is why I am so surprised and frankly scared to death , not that non specialists couldn't diagnose a complicated and atypical case of MG, but that they couldn't recognize a patent MG crisis when presented with one.
MG crisis kill two ways.
One is outright, in minutes.
The other is over a few years, because despite repeatedly surviving each MG crisis, the patient's lungs gets a little more permanently damaged each time.
I feel this is what finally killed Dr Dawson.
Now one might feel the arrival of Germ Theory might reduce the need for medical staff and society to blame the victim but it didn't - not anymore than blaming the Devil for illness reduced this near constant need to blame the patient for their illness.
Yes the Devil gave you this fever, but He wants to give all of us fevers - why then you not me ?
Because your wanton acts invited Him and His fever in.
Yes, tiny foreign germs gave you Strep Throat - but didn't you go out to an all night rave in early April, dressed in your short skimpy dress, talking too much and too long over the loud music - stressing your throat in the cold damp night air ?
Weren't you simply 'asking for it' ?
As a young male about Cloe's age when her disease first hit her, I did get Strep Throat that went to my kidneys, was barely able to walk, and then recovered from chemical imbalances so bad that they were literally feet off the machine-inked charts.
But I went on to suffer lifelong bladder cum prostate difficulties (basically a mildly painfully constant need to pee) that are always there but merely annoying and manageable .
This not something that happens when Strep germs lead the body to attack the kidneys (and this unlike MG is a relatively common disease) and I had no normal physical evidence to back my claim : no signs of bladder surface scarring etc.
A few doctors have suggested some form of mind relaxing pills but most say try not to try liquids after supper.
I have always been well treated by the medical system over my condition.
Perhaps because I was a male, and because unlike Chloe, my parents always warmly supported me.
I am a decade or so older than Chloe and moved around a bit as a child, so all my doctor's records and the hospital records seem to have been lost for the first 30 years of my life - including this key medical event.
So if any early doctor thought I was a malingerer, it failed to get conveyed to today's chart-trusting, instrumentation-distrusting 'evidence-based' medical personnel.
Back to Dawson to conclude our sorry tale : for Dawson shares his fame over two signal medical discoveries he championed.
He was the first in history to give injections of penicillin-the-antibiotic, ushering in our Age of Antibiotics.
Dawson's HGT threatened profitable diagnoses into financial chaos
But a dozen years earlier he had been the first to promote DNA HGT (he called it 'bacterial transformation') and Quorum Sensing and did much to promote attention to things like molecular mimicry and bacterial survival by variation.
He was cold shouldered by the medical and scientific establishment of the day - they feared even to raise his cause by denying it - it suggested to them a personal financial future dire beyond belief.
It was an age where the top medical people - then as now - get the big bucks and the prestige not from curing your disease but by telling junior doctors what your disease was.
The juniors were then left with the minor mopping up work - actually curing you.
Dawson threatens the Type-Casting of pneumonia
The new sub-science of immunology suggested that that the human body - somehow - could find a way to defeat everyone of a hundred slightly different strep pneumonia bacteria strains, if only given enough time.
But if a consultant could quickly 'type' the germ causing this or that patient to be dying of pneumonia as being of Type 56 (and typing simply couldn't be rushed) , the serum from the blood of a healthy horse previously given a mild case of Type 56 pneumonia could be injected into the bloodstream of the patient, to fight off the Type 56 until the human body learned to do so itself.
Dawson dared to say that while a disease might start off with Type 56 in the lungs , the process of HGT (bacteria exchanging bits of their unique DNA) could quickly mean (quickly as in 24 hours) that the new bug killing the patient was Type 11 !
Serum 56 would be useless, the patient would die before Type 11 was slowly re-typed and the high repute of the medical fraternity in the 1930s would sink to the patient's grave.
Best ignore Dawson - ignore his instrumentation values and trust the chart of the old familiar theories.
Better to blame instead the pneumonia victim, if he died, for being a middle aged crazy fifty year old who drank too much one weekend away from home and then shouted himself silly at his old college's football match in the cold harsh Fall air.
(True, it often did happen precisely that way, at least among the few middle class patients able to afford expensive serum treatment but I'd hardly call what they did a mortal sin justifying an early death.)
Balance and Complexity
We need to better balance our acceptance of complexity and that we are always treating anew highly individual sick patients (a la John Rawls) not just monolithic diseases.
We must accept that their illness is the unique sum of their conscious mind, unconscious mind, their unique phenotype and only then expect to see them confronted by a hopefully somewhat standard external inducer* .
*But even here, mind always Dawson's HGT lesson : that predictably nasty bacterial bug might be quite different today than it was last season....
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Synthesize anything, perfectly
The goal of modern scientism era synthesists was not to synthesize everything : in their minds 'everything' already existed : way too much of 'everything' ---- and none of it perfect.
They hoped instead, for example, to synthesize just one - perfect - species of the beetle and then plenticide all of God's 150,000 (imperfect) beetle species, now rendered totally redundant.
The 1940s era synthesists simply could not conceive of a universe so physically diverse, so dynamic and so suddenly changeable that only a great variety of species and life forms would be ensure that the Earth's life-sustaining nutrient cycles could keep going.
For an atmosphere of a sort might survive if every single life form on Earth perished -- but it would eventually not contain enough oxygen to keep humans alive, assuming we suddenly decided to drift back here from our wonderful new underground homes on Mars.
Modern scientism's synthetic autarky was really a form of unconscious and collective human suicide.
We humans can only survive if we accept - like it or not - that we are bound together in involuntary but open commensality with all other lifeforms on Lifeboat Earth ...
They hoped instead, for example, to synthesize just one - perfect - species of the beetle and then plenticide all of God's 150,000 (imperfect) beetle species, now rendered totally redundant.
The 1940s era synthesists simply could not conceive of a universe so physically diverse, so dynamic and so suddenly changeable that only a great variety of species and life forms would be ensure that the Earth's life-sustaining nutrient cycles could keep going.
For an atmosphere of a sort might survive if every single life form on Earth perished -- but it would eventually not contain enough oxygen to keep humans alive, assuming we suddenly decided to drift back here from our wonderful new underground homes on Mars.
Modern scientism's synthetic autarky was really a form of unconscious and collective human suicide.
We humans can only survive if we accept - like it or not - that we are bound together in involuntary but open commensality with all other lifeforms on Lifeboat Earth ...
The superhero World's Fair, 1939-1940 : the American monomyth personified
New York City has held only two World's Fairs, both very famous, one in 1939-1940 and one in 1964-1965.
Naturally both have been much dissected.
However I have never seen them exposed for displaying America's deeply ingrained 'go-it-alone' and 'we're above communal law and democracy' superhero-superpower attitude to a T.
After a convention signed in 1928, the world's states all agreed that a bureau based in Paris would ensure there weren't costly and competitive nationalistic train-wrecks in the planning and timing of highly expensive international World's Fairs.
All the world's nations belong to the bureau with a few exceptions : currently, for example, the Caliphate of ISIS and the Caliphates of Canada and the US are not members.
Among the rules all nations - or almost all - have agreed to adhere to : a maximum of one World's Fair per nation per ten years, fairs only to be held for six months, no rents to be charged to the exhibiters.
These rules are designed to protect smaller nations and smaller cities from the world class cities of the biggest nations dominating world fairs, thereby gaining all the hegemonic publicity and tourist dollars resulting .
New York City, America is the biggest world city in the biggest superpower nation.
And its behavior with world fairs shows the value and the limits to such world wide agreements : for NYC's elites didn't feel bound by any such petty rules, even if reached after a globally communal and democratic discussion.
Scholars Jewett and Lawrence have long suggested that American has refined itself a variant on Joseph Campbell's supposedly universal myth of the Hero with a Thousand Faces ; one they call the American Monomyth.
This hero does not, a la Campbell's thesis, venture out from our normal world into a supernatural world, win his spurs and return with a 'boon' for his community.
You've already seen their variant a billion or so times on American TV, in movies and in western novels and comic books etc.
In it, the formerly harmonious community is itself in grave danger - as much (in the superhero's mind) from its democratically minded willingness to publicly discuss and debate solutions while a crisis looms, as from the crisis itself.
Sometimes, he reasons, you must break the law to save the law - so he singlehandedly breaks the law and defeats the foe.
Then he quietly leaves the community to fight another loner's extralegal battle for truth and justice.
Superman fits this bill - as does George W Bush.
But so too, do the two NYC World's Fairs.
They rejected the Bureau rule that because America had just held a World's Fair in a one of its smaller cities that New York and America would have to wait its turn ten years away.
They rejected the limit of six month fairs designed to avoid the biggest cities sucking up all the tourist dollars - the two NYC fairs were each two years affairs.
They rejected the Bureau rule that no exhibiter was to be charged rent - designed to ensure the smallest nations could afford to send an exhibit.
They charged rent and this resulted in the most noted exhibits being not those of the big nations - let alone those of the tiny nations - but rather those of rich and powerful corporations.
The 1940 fair is often remembered because of the recent debut of Superman and of the first fan-driven Sci Fi convention, one held in the same place and time.
Ironic that the Fair itself was, in its own confidently arrogant way, as much a 'superhero', in the negative sense of the term, as anything the comicbook boys could dream up ...
Naturally both have been much dissected.
However I have never seen them exposed for displaying America's deeply ingrained 'go-it-alone' and 'we're above communal law and democracy' superhero-superpower attitude to a T.
After a convention signed in 1928, the world's states all agreed that a bureau based in Paris would ensure there weren't costly and competitive nationalistic train-wrecks in the planning and timing of highly expensive international World's Fairs.
All the world's nations belong to the bureau with a few exceptions : currently, for example, the Caliphate of ISIS and the Caliphates of Canada and the US are not members.
Among the rules all nations - or almost all - have agreed to adhere to : a maximum of one World's Fair per nation per ten years, fairs only to be held for six months, no rents to be charged to the exhibiters.
These rules are designed to protect smaller nations and smaller cities from the world class cities of the biggest nations dominating world fairs, thereby gaining all the hegemonic publicity and tourist dollars resulting .
New York City, America is the biggest world city in the biggest superpower nation.
And its behavior with world fairs shows the value and the limits to such world wide agreements : for NYC's elites didn't feel bound by any such petty rules, even if reached after a globally communal and democratic discussion.
Scholars Jewett and Lawrence have long suggested that American has refined itself a variant on Joseph Campbell's supposedly universal myth of the Hero with a Thousand Faces ; one they call the American Monomyth.
This hero does not, a la Campbell's thesis, venture out from our normal world into a supernatural world, win his spurs and return with a 'boon' for his community.
You've already seen their variant a billion or so times on American TV, in movies and in western novels and comic books etc.
In it, the formerly harmonious community is itself in grave danger - as much (in the superhero's mind) from its democratically minded willingness to publicly discuss and debate solutions while a crisis looms, as from the crisis itself.
Sometimes, he reasons, you must break the law to save the law - so he singlehandedly breaks the law and defeats the foe.
Then he quietly leaves the community to fight another loner's extralegal battle for truth and justice.
Superman fits this bill - as does George W Bush.
But so too, do the two NYC World's Fairs.
They rejected the Bureau rule that because America had just held a World's Fair in a one of its smaller cities that New York and America would have to wait its turn ten years away.
They rejected the limit of six month fairs designed to avoid the biggest cities sucking up all the tourist dollars - the two NYC fairs were each two years affairs.
They rejected the Bureau rule that no exhibiter was to be charged rent - designed to ensure the smallest nations could afford to send an exhibit.
They charged rent and this resulted in the most noted exhibits being not those of the big nations - let alone those of the tiny nations - but rather those of rich and powerful corporations.
The 1940 fair is often remembered because of the recent debut of Superman and of the first fan-driven Sci Fi convention, one held in the same place and time.
Ironic that the Fair itself was, in its own confidently arrogant way, as much a 'superhero', in the negative sense of the term, as anything the comicbook boys could dream up ...
Salon des Refuses, NYC 1940 : Columbia Presbyterian Medical provides home for fungal slime, unwanted inside the World's Fair's synthetic autarky
Mother Nature was not wanted, more accurately, not needed , inside the 'World of the Future' so rhapsodized by the infamous 1939-1940 New York World's Fair.
The Fair planners had seen the future and the future , in 'just one word', was plastics : "get into nylon, Ben."
Nylon- through the alchemy of modern scientism - was made solely out of air, water and a carbon source.
Almost as in in response, a few kind souls (Dawson, Meyer, Hobby & Chaffee) arranged for M. Nature to have a sort of Salon des Refuses.
It happened - very sotto voce - in two small labs on Floor G of the Columbia Presbyterian Medical, about eleven mile to the north west of the Fair site at Flushing Meadows , Queens.
There trillions of tiny, primitive, ancient penicillium cells were set to work at the bottom of two litre Erlenmeyer flasks , happily spinning out the life-saving molecules of penicillin (penicillin G) from nothing more than ...air, water and a carbon source !
It was a pioneering example of postmodern commensal science at its best - and it all happened 75 years ago this Fall....
The Fair planners had seen the future and the future , in 'just one word', was plastics : "get into nylon, Ben."
Nylon- through the alchemy of modern scientism - was made solely out of air, water and a carbon source.
Almost as in in response, a few kind souls (Dawson, Meyer, Hobby & Chaffee) arranged for M. Nature to have a sort of Salon des Refuses.
It happened - very sotto voce - in two small labs on Floor G of the Columbia Presbyterian Medical, about eleven mile to the north west of the Fair site at Flushing Meadows , Queens.
There trillions of tiny, primitive, ancient penicillium cells were set to work at the bottom of two litre Erlenmeyer flasks , happily spinning out the life-saving molecules of penicillin (penicillin G) from nothing more than ...air, water and a carbon source !
It was a pioneering example of postmodern commensal science at its best - and it all happened 75 years ago this Fall....
1945: 380 years of the Synthetic Autarky Project vs 3.8 billion years of the microbial synthesis project...
In 1945, Modern Scientism (1875-1965 , long may it rest in peace) was always convinced it was the smartest bunch of guys in the universe : it could do anything and everything Mother Nature could do, only better, faster, cheaper, cleaner.
After all, it had 380 years of experience behind it in the science of chemical synthesis - and almost 50 years experience in atomic synthesis.
It was certain it could make wartime penicillin purer, cheaper, quicker, above all cleaner than the tiny, primitive, slimy basement molds making it now.
But it couldn't----- and it still hasn't.
It has only had 380 years at the task ---- but the tiny, primitive and above all ancient microbes had had 3.8 billion years at their craft.
If my hasty arithmetic is accurate (I'm being called to stop blogging and take baby Samantha to daycare) that's a billion percent longer...
After all, it had 380 years of experience behind it in the science of chemical synthesis - and almost 50 years experience in atomic synthesis.
It was certain it could make wartime penicillin purer, cheaper, quicker, above all cleaner than the tiny, primitive, slimy basement molds making it now.
But it couldn't----- and it still hasn't.
It has only had 380 years at the task ---- but the tiny, primitive and above all ancient microbes had had 3.8 billion years at their craft.
If my hasty arithmetic is accurate (I'm being called to stop blogging and take baby Samantha to daycare) that's a billion percent longer...
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
At Columbia-Cornell Medicial, pre-war modernity ain't dead yet
The website for New York City's Columbia-Cornell medical centre is finally touting the two famous universities' involvement in the triumph of wartime's natural penicillin.
So of course, the collective minds at C-C Medical choose to emphasize the project that quietly failed at their institute, not the one that succeeded beyond all measure.
For what they are really marking is wartime Cornell's failure to produce synthetic penicillin at commercial prices and in commercial grade purity.
Oh yes, they did produce incredibly small amounts of real penicillin but the yield was so tiny one might almost think it was an unexpected impurity in another process altogether.
Which in a sense it was : in chemical terms their synthesis did indeed produce a molecule, but it was not the beta lactam molecule fragment that gives penicillin and all subsequent beta lactams (still 75 years on, our major antibiotics) their ability to destroy bacteria without harming humans.
A very mixed result then for this attempt at fulfilling prewar modernity's dream of synthetic autarky.
What Columbia-Cornell has not yet honoured and will never yet honour (not until we can proclaim for sure that modernity is fully dead and buried) is that at Columbia, a small team led by Martin Henry Dawson worked in commensality with the tiny penicillium spores to create the world's first natural penicillin pilot plant.
And that on October 16th 1940, they gave the very first needlefuls of penicillin-the-antibiotic to a black lad and a Jewish lad dying from then invariably fatal SBE.
Eventually their penicillin cured SBE and prevented the disease that caused it : Rheumatic heart Disease : the leading killer of school age minority, poor and immigrant kids until the 1960s.
(Clearly not a triumph any rich donor-seeking medical centre wants to tout, obviously.)
Further : that this then led a small soda pop supplier in Brooklyn to make most of the war's penicillin by natural means - the means we still use to start the production of all the beta lactams that still dominate the world we call antibiotics.
In fact, very first signal triumph for what was to become today's huge and postmodern microbiology and microtechnology !
Shameful really...
So of course, the collective minds at C-C Medical choose to emphasize the project that quietly failed at their institute, not the one that succeeded beyond all measure.
For what they are really marking is wartime Cornell's failure to produce synthetic penicillin at commercial prices and in commercial grade purity.
Oh yes, they did produce incredibly small amounts of real penicillin but the yield was so tiny one might almost think it was an unexpected impurity in another process altogether.
Which in a sense it was : in chemical terms their synthesis did indeed produce a molecule, but it was not the beta lactam molecule fragment that gives penicillin and all subsequent beta lactams (still 75 years on, our major antibiotics) their ability to destroy bacteria without harming humans.
A very mixed result then for this attempt at fulfilling prewar modernity's dream of synthetic autarky.
What Columbia-Cornell has not yet honoured and will never yet honour (not until we can proclaim for sure that modernity is fully dead and buried) is that at Columbia, a small team led by Martin Henry Dawson worked in commensality with the tiny penicillium spores to create the world's first natural penicillin pilot plant.
And that on October 16th 1940, they gave the very first needlefuls of penicillin-the-antibiotic to a black lad and a Jewish lad dying from then invariably fatal SBE.
Eventually their penicillin cured SBE and prevented the disease that caused it : Rheumatic heart Disease : the leading killer of school age minority, poor and immigrant kids until the 1960s.
(Clearly not a triumph any rich donor-seeking medical centre wants to tout, obviously.)
Further : that this then led a small soda pop supplier in Brooklyn to make most of the war's penicillin by natural means - the means we still use to start the production of all the beta lactams that still dominate the world we call antibiotics.
In fact, very first signal triumph for what was to become today's huge and postmodern microbiology and microtechnology !
Shameful really...
Tuesday, February 24, 2015
First antibiotic penicillin patient : when did we learn his name?
How do we know what we know ?
I am very confident that the very first patient of the Antibiotic Era was a young black man named Aaron (Leroy) Alston and that he lived on St Nicholas Avenue in Harlem, New York City.
But when I was asked recently by one of Aaron's relatives (journalist Claude Jay) to demonstrate my proof, I was momentarily nonplussed.
That was when because I initially came across the statement that Aaron was the first systemic penicillin (penicillin-the-antibiotic) patient in history in early 2005, it was in about a dozen different books, all read at the exactly the same time.
(People who know what a bookworm I am, will not find that last statement at all incredible !)
I gradually assembled more information about that historic event and on Aaron himself , from scattered bits of evidence here and there - material I realized had never been assembled into a coherent and self-confirming whole.
My biggest breakthrough - discovering Aaron's death certificate - was quickly followed by my second biggest breakthrough , discovering Claude Jay himself.
That is because, outside of his medical records, Aaron was generally known to the world as Leroy, or more formally, as A. Leroy Alston.
Aaron Leroy Alston was a superb athlete -- not just someone who died to furnish a footnote to someone else's story
I had held a strong clue that could have led me/ should have led me to Leroy years earlier.
But I discounted the evidence : that an A. Alston had won some very big amateur races in the NYC area.
I mistakingly assumed that anyone who had had acute rheumatic fever leading to severe heart valve damage, as Leroy/Aaron had to have had, couldn't possibly go on to be a top runner.
Now that I knew Aaron was also a Leroy Alston or an A. Leroy Alston and a great athlete to boot, I quickly found a good deal more about Leroy from newspapers of the day.
So I spent last week trolling through my files and the books on penicillin and rheumatic heart disease at Dalhousie University's medical library, trying to establish a timeline as to when the world first knew that Aaron was Patient One of the penicillin-the-antibiotic era.
I found nothing that named Aaron in the books and medical reports and newspapers of the war years.
NY World-Telegram first to get it (partially) right
But on the premature death of Aaron's penicillin doctor Martin Henry Dawson in April 1945, one New York newspaper, the World-Telegram, did correctly mention that his first penicillin patient was a Negro, as well as claiming that Dawson was the first to treat a patient with penicillin in the USA.
But the story not only does not name that patient, it confuses his story with that of the other first penicillin patient of Dawson's, Charles Aronson !
(Yes, Aaron was the first patient selected to receive systemic penicillin, but as the fates would have it, on the day he first received it, a new fellow sufferer (Charles) also got it at the very same time.)
The story describes Aaron as being 27 and being cured - that age and fate correctly belongs to Charles because sadly Aaron died despite the penicillin.
Now Dawson and his closest fellow worker, his lab chief Dr Gladys Hobby, were modest to the point of giving me a stroke.
The pair knew, when they initially read Howard Florey's August 1941 article on his team's first clinical use of systemic penicillin in February 1941, that Dawson's team had beat him by four months in first using penicillin systemically.
But maddeningly, they still modestly claimed only to be the first to do so in North America , in any newspaper interviews or medical articles published during the war years.
Hobby, I sense, had no great memory.
This is because already by 1949 (only 8 years later) and after consulting her own personal records (!), Hobby writing in a report for her then employer, Pfizer, says the first injection only happened on January 11th in 1941 !
Reading her later - more accurate - accounting, I can only suggest that in 1949 she meant to say that January 11th marked the first day of intravenous injections.
This after a series, in the months earlier, of first intracutaneous injections, then sub -cutaneous and then intramuscular injections.
(As doctors will know, there are actually dozens of different forms of medical injections - varying by both site and method.)
Hobby went to her grave also convinced that Dawson gave the first penicillin shots on October 15th 1940 - a statement she repeatedly gave to fellow penicillin historians who dutifully spread it far and wide.
I don't believe it --- and neither should you.
For nowhere in her ultimately relatively detailed chronological account of the first days of penicillin-the-antibiotic does she indicate when the totally new drug was first tested on a healthy volunteer before being injected into the two severely ill patients for real.
Even in the relatively relaxed medical research atmosphere of the 1940s, that would never have happened.
Durack and Bentley provide more clues
Let us turn first to a little known medical paper by Dr David T Durack, who based his article in part on a personal conversation with the biochemist of Dawson's tiny four person team, a person moreover who started Columbia's pioneering penicillin effort even before Dawson joined it.
Around 1980, Durack contacted that biochemist Karl Meyer, a distinguished scientist then in his early fifties and in full control of his faculties and memory.
(Durack's article was published before Hobby published her definitive 1986 book on penicillin but was never mentioned by Hobby - signalling to me that Hobby and Meyer were hardly close after Dawson's death.)
Durack's article, "Review of Early Experience in treatment of bacterial Endocarditis, 1940-1955", I found in the book "Treatment of Infectious Endocarditis", edited by Alan L Bisno.
Meyer's story at first seemed incredible to me, but as I gathered up more information here and there, it was confirmed by an article by Ronald Bentley at various key points.
Meyer had gone to a Berlin medical school with his fellow (German) (Jewish) student Ernst Chain and I believe had taken a mild dislike to him, something very easy to do with the mercurial Chain.
Now in September 1940 he had learned (directly via Chain's former graduate student, Jewish American Leslie Epstein*) that Chain was taking credit for important work first done by Meyer on Lysozyme and that he was now trying to synthesize penicillin.
*Read Bentley's fascinating account of Leslie Epstein Falk struggling with Chain to grow a little penicillin in the Fall and Spring of 1939-1940 and when Epstein is ordered out of Oxford only months before finishing his PhD, how he completes it partly thanks to a stay with Meyer at Columbia.
For both Chain and Meyer, I believe an elbows- out attitude, even against fellow German Jewish emigre scientists, was morally right in 1940.
Both knew that if they didn't prove themselves quickly to be top scientists in some way, they would end up interned by the German-and-Jew-distrusting Anglo-Saxon government elites, stuck in miserable prison camps along side Nazi Germans.
Meyer and Chain both thought synthesizing a small (350 Dalton weight) molecule like penicillin would be a breeze.
Meyer simply involved Dawson to do the early biological activity tests and then to do the much later clinical trials, after the drug had been synthesized.
Dawson jumped Meyer's gun, insisting on testing the drug's efficacy inside the human body long before it was synthesized.
Why?
Partly to save the lives of two young men before him who he thought were being discarded by a medical establishment using the excuse that they were gearing up for total war.
Partly to secure Meyer's flank, because the biochemist was working after all in a hospital, a workplace oriented strongly to instantly applied science, not in a more leisurely basic research lab.
So Meyer tells Durack, on October 15th 1940, penicillin was indeed injected for the very first time, as Hobby (and all those after her) claimed.
But not injected into a patient.
Injected instead by Dawson into Dawson acting as the human guinea pig to test it for human toxicity - Dawson believing it was better that he the doctor died than the patient doing so.
(Entirely typical of the decorated war hero Dawson, as was entirely typical the decision of war shirker Sir Howard Florey not to risk his 'valuable' life testing his penicillin on himself !)
But Durack reports (indirectly - no names are used) that Dawson only injected Charles Alston, not on Charles and Aaron.
This could be because he also interviewed Dr Thomas T Hunter.
Hunter was a later member of Dawson's team, who never met Aaron but who did meet Charles many, many times.
He first met him in the Spring of 1944 when he came back with a second attack of endocarditis and was cured by Dawson yet again, this time by penicillin alone instead of with a little penicillin and a lot of sulfa drugs.
Hunter did further checkups on the health of Charles until early 1946 at least - so his story naturally stuck in Hunter's mind years later.
Hobby was not on the team - but still in close touch - when Charles returned in the Spring of 1944 - maybe why she remembered him much less.
This raises a significant point - why do almost all writers choose to mention just Aaron or just Charles instead mentioning both ?
Penicillin writers and their hidden agendas
Because most writers have a not so hidden agenda.
(Mine is that I think Dawson got a raw deal from history for his pioneering HGT and Penicillin work.)
To date, most others writing about wartime penicillin have sought, above all else, to exalt Howard Florey over the man who they feel wrongly gets the credit for penicillin-the-antibiotic, Sir Alexander Fleming.
They are equally worried that the real credit should not slip off of Fleming's mantle only to fall onto that of the colonial Henry Dawson.
Like Florey, and unlike Dawson and Hobby , they realize Dawson was the first to ever give a needle of penicillin-the-antibiotic and hence it was he who ushered in our Age of Antibiotics.
Further they know that Dawson championed natural penicillin (and it is worth noting that most of our current antibiotics are still based on the original natural penicillin), to be made by Pfizer and others.
Florey and Fleming, by pointed contrast, strongly championed synthetic penicillin, to be made by ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries) and others.
ICI never made a single commercial drop of the synthetic stuff - no one ever has - and 80% of all the penicillin landed on D-Day and there after came from Pfizer alone.
Seemingly hard then not give Dawson the lion's share of the wartime penicillin glory - but it can be done, if you work at it.
So these agenda-driven writers dutifully note, in almost footnote fashion, that Dawson indeed gave history' first (very small) penicillin injection.
They then decide to focus on just one of the two initial patients (Aaron), the one that died.
Next they note that Dawson quickly got Myasthenia Gravis and that he also died.
All half truths, but enough truth in them so they feel they needn't cover his four further years* of clinical penicillin activities between April 1941 and April 1945.
*Dawson had much, much longer period of clinical involvement with wartime penicillin than did either Florey or Fleming.
Hunter and Durack, by contrast, want to see Dawson's first medical glass as half full.
So they focus on Charles (the other one of the original pair, the one who lived) as the first patient to ever receive penicillin.
Someone, they imply, as a result went on to survive a hitherto invariably fatal disease.
The truth is that two low status young men - one a black and another a Jew - got history's first penicillin shots basically out of the agape concern of a doctor who wasn't even their lead doctor or a specialist in their disease.
One patient, Aaron, was extensively treated with penicillin but still died, while the other patient Charles was responsive to sulfa (unlike Aaron) and lived.
The little penicillin Charles got had almost no effect clinically but it sure boosted his morale and that might have helped save him as much as the massive sulfa doses.
Bickel to the rescue
Now we move ahead in time to about 1970, when Australian write Lennard Bickel decides to write a biography* of Australian born penicillin pioneer Sir Howard Florey, who had just died in 1968.
"Rise up to Life", first published in 1972.
He interviews anyone who he can find who was there at the time to talk about wartime penicillin, tracking down people in America, Britain and Australia.
Many buried names and stories only survive today because of his fine journalistic efforts.
Bickel wanted to exalt his fellow countryman of that there is no doubt, but he did not wish to bury Dawson - in fact he exhumed him from the grave of human forgetfulness.
I do not believe that Hobby would have even written her seminal account of wartime penicillin without Bickel .
His book and the reaction to it, finally convinced her, almost 25 years after the fact, that Dawson had indeed been the first in the world to inject systemic penicillin and hence held a story worth recalling.
Because we know she told Bickel in circa 1970 interviews for his book that she was still convinced that Dawson was merely the first to treat patients in the USA alone with penicillin.
And she - citing her notes - claimed he had treated only one patient on that historic day, which she said was October 15th 1940 - and that the patient died.
But at least and finally, she brought forth his name : Aaron Alston.
And she talks forthrightly about Dawson's fatal Myasthenia Gravis.
But she - and Bickel - make it clear that if he worked less as a result of this crippling disease, he still worked full out on penicillin till his death in the spring of 1945.
Since Bickel became the key - almost primary source level - "go to source" for most of the academic accounts of wartime penicillin, it is remarkable how this clear statement of his four more years of penicillin activities could be so twisted and ignored.
Flash forward to 1985, Hobby has retired after a modestly successful paid career working at at Pfizer on new antibiotics and a Veterans' hospital working on TB and a more successful volunteer career as a editor of various scientific society journals.
She has gotten to know everybody who was anybody in early penicillin in both North America and in Britain.
Yale University* Press, her publisher was admirably demanding and so Hobby trolled deep to firm up her claims - even consulting a Miss Louise Good for her lab records of the early use of Dawson's penicillin.
If only Yale was as demanding upon its own staff, who persist in claiming that their University was the first place to use penicillin in America.
Dawson was their first and was also the first to see cures with local (topical) use of penicillin to treat staph eye infections.
But Yale can rightfully claim a first, for inn March-April 1942, they successfully treated a case and saved a life with the systemic use of penicillin alone.
Charles Aronson's life was saved too, and much earlier - in December 1940 - but by lots of sulfa and perhaps a little contribution from pioneering penicillin.
Good's work
Good seems to be the sole source in Hobby's 1985 book "Penicillin : Meeting the Challenge" of Hobby's new information on Aaron and on who she calls Charles Aronson, his fellow needle pioneer on October 16th and 17th 1940.
Now I could reliably confirm the relatively detailed information on patient C.A. found in Dawson and Hunter's 1945 JAMA article on their clinically successful use of systemic penicillin in curing subacute bacterial endocarditis.
Dawson and Hunter's C.A. had to be Good and Hobby's Charles Aronson, born in 1913 and thus highly likely to be a young Jewish-American man with that name from the Bronx found in the 1940 US Census.
Similarly, it seemed clear from Good's information that Aaron had died in the Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, in the Borough of Manhattan, in the days around January 18th 1941.
So I could then overcome a problem unique to the New York City death certificate of that era.
They are easy to obtain and quite detailed - but do not give the cause of death, unlike those of most other jurisdictions - that information is given to the city government alone in another document.
So in a city that big, and when one seeks someone with an ethnically common name, one needs the borough the death was registered in and the exact day of death to safely match death certificate of a particular Aaron Alston with the unique penicillin/endocarditis Aaron Alston.
Thanks to Claude, I could now find newspaper accounts of Aaron Leroy Alston getting sick and then dying in the time periods that Hobby and Good address - both sets of data confirming each other.
So there you have it - Aaron Alston , the very first to receive penicillin-the-antibiotic is never directly named in any of a dozen or so clinical medical articles published during or just after the war years at the time that do reference him but indirectly.
His name and his connection to the first ever use of penicillin-the-antibiotic is mentioned in dozens of more recent medical history oriented academic articles, all dating after Bickel's pioneering book of 1972.
In addition, Aaron's story is mentioned in least one wire service story from Warren Leary, the AP science reporter.
In early October 1978, Leary reported that the longstanding belief that the British had been the first to inject penicillin into a patient was wrong.
Leary based his claim on a recent report in the Journal Chemistry from Dr George Kauffman that talked of Dawson's pioneering work.
One suspects Kauffman in turn had recently read Bickel's new book !
Aaron's story is still distorted
Gladys Hobby's penicillin book is probably found in every first class medical research library in the world and she gives the most detail about Aaron Alston - my blog aside.
Problems persist : author and wartime penicillin pioneer John C Sheehan, in a MIT Press* published book, "The Enchanted Ring" , confusingly thinks Aaron Alston is the doctor giving that very first needle to some unnamed patient.
He even regards Dawson's team, operating in the same hospital, as totally separate from 'Dr Alston' and his team !
*New Yorker magazine stories are throughly fact-checked, scientific journal articles a little, university press books by distinguished scholars from the same university as is publishing their book ? Not so much.
Okay, now for the biggest and serious problem : the near universal inclination for all sorts of researchers, even historians who really should know better, to read into Dawson's 1941 claim that he treated four SBE patients with penicillin all unsuccessfully, as meaning they all died.
Yes, SBE was then 99% fatal on its first presentation, but Charles Aronson was in that 1%, cured by sulfa, a little penicillin, God's grace and his own documented ability to survive more lives than a cat.
I know for certain the names of three of Dawson's first five SBE patients, that they were all five clinical failures re treatment with penicillin, that two Aaron Leroy Alston and George M Conant) died for sure, one lived for sure (Charles Aronson).
The other two I know nothing about, except that they were likely young men from the greater NYC area and that their likely months of admission were April 1941 and October 1941.
All the team members that treated them are dead and the hospital records from that time destroyed - we will likely never know more unless some family member remembers a relative dying of SBE around those dates at Columbia Presbyterian.
We have good information on the two dozen later SBEs that Dawson subsequently treated - but only have three full names provided by Hobby's book all which have so far produced dead ends.
What we need most for Aaaron is a picture of him.
I recall much of the fifty year mystery of blue singer Robert Johnson wasn't lack of reliable data about his life, but rather a lack of an ability to put a human face on a terribly interesting individual.
I feel the same about the fascinating Aaron Leroy Alston 1910-1941...
Monday, February 23, 2015
Bombs Away : Steinbeck's paean to the Norden Bombsight
For all of us who know of William L Laurence's famous paean to the first atomic bombs (Dawn over Zero), how many of us also know of Nobel winner John Steinbeck and his similar paean to the Norden Bombsight (Bombs Away) ?
None ?
It was never supposed to be that way.
1945's atomic bomb was classically a weapon of total imprecision .
Drop it somewhere over a city (anywhere) and it can be guaranteed to destroy all the city's war factories, whether they were targeted or not on that raid, along with a few hundred thousand people.
But at the celebratory and futuristic 1940 New York World's Fair, there was seemed to be no need for such a terribly crude weapon; one so certain to unnecessarily kill and destroy much else beyond a few deliberately targeted war factories.
Instead what was called for were daylight raids by small teams of high level B-17 bombers, equipped with the top secret Norden Bombsight, raids which would see them drop their bombs right on target : 'into a pickle barrel from 15,000 feet'.
America's war future was in precision aerial bombing that would win the war quickly, cleanly and cheaply -- and with the minimum of civilian casualties.
Air Force boss Hap Arnold picked famous novelist Steinbeck to pen his praise to precision bombing in light of these expectations.
But when precision bombing proved an abject failure by late 1942, the atomic meatgrinder simply moved up in priorities as Plan B and another book was prepared for the postwar presses.
Why not, because as long as there was a war on, the military totally controlled access and information and also had plenty of money to ease the work of any favoured author, editor and publisher.
Spin, spin, spin.
One way or the other, the post 1945 'war of words' would be won by Washington's military and scientific bureaucrats - regardless of the sorry realities on the ground overseas...
None ?
It was never supposed to be that way.
1945's atomic bomb was classically a weapon of total imprecision .
Drop it somewhere over a city (anywhere) and it can be guaranteed to destroy all the city's war factories, whether they were targeted or not on that raid, along with a few hundred thousand people.
But at the celebratory and futuristic 1940 New York World's Fair, there was seemed to be no need for such a terribly crude weapon; one so certain to unnecessarily kill and destroy much else beyond a few deliberately targeted war factories.
Instead what was called for were daylight raids by small teams of high level B-17 bombers, equipped with the top secret Norden Bombsight, raids which would see them drop their bombs right on target : 'into a pickle barrel from 15,000 feet'.
America's war future was in precision aerial bombing that would win the war quickly, cleanly and cheaply -- and with the minimum of civilian casualties.
Air Force boss Hap Arnold picked famous novelist Steinbeck to pen his praise to precision bombing in light of these expectations.
But when precision bombing proved an abject failure by late 1942, the atomic meatgrinder simply moved up in priorities as Plan B and another book was prepared for the postwar presses.
Why not, because as long as there was a war on, the military totally controlled access and information and also had plenty of money to ease the work of any favoured author, editor and publisher.
Spin, spin, spin.
One way or the other, the post 1945 'war of words' would be won by Washington's military and scientific bureaucrats - regardless of the sorry realities on the ground overseas...
Friday, February 20, 2015
Aristocracy loses link with Nature in move from land capital to intellectual capital
It's past well known that until the passage of the Reform Acts and the Corn Bills, all of Aristocracy's power was firmly based on its near exclusive ownership of land but how did the decline in such land-based power effect how the rest of us viewed Mother Nature versus Man ?
It is worth remembering that under this old system, only the younger sons of land-rich aristocracy got a nearly free pass into even such minor elites as the military, medicine, public service or the university-based church ministry.
But fairly quickly after the passage of these Acts, great and not-so-great families were giving their children their inheritance while they were young - and it wasn't a piece of Pa's farm.
Instead they got 25 years of highly expensive education : tutors, educational toys, books and Grand Tours, prep schools, the best in university education paid for right into post-doc status if need be.
Only the very smartest of the untutored geniuses among the poorer sorts could push their way against this phalanx of the tutored un-genius children of the older aristocracies who came to dominate all the new as well as old professions - particularly in the sciences and amongst the university teachers.
Paralleling this, I argue , we saw a massive lowering of the cultural and political worth of Natural Science , science done by amateurs delving in and living close to Nature.
Instead the professional tenured lab scientist cum Natural Philosopher became the esteemed one : doing mind experiments on a chalkboard or with a few flasks and beakers in a laboratory.
Once cut free of the initimate connection to the land, this aristocracy of the mind lapsed quickly into synthetic autarky, convinced that modern civilized Man no longer needed Mother Nature's bounty.
The atom smashers could make anything and everything out of bog-ordinary atoms of useless rock.
Plenticide the Plentitude of Nature and we'd all be better off.
We've already done the Dodo and the Passenger Pidgeon - why not start work on the Slav, the Roma and the Jew ....
It is worth remembering that under this old system, only the younger sons of land-rich aristocracy got a nearly free pass into even such minor elites as the military, medicine, public service or the university-based church ministry.
But fairly quickly after the passage of these Acts, great and not-so-great families were giving their children their inheritance while they were young - and it wasn't a piece of Pa's farm.
Instead they got 25 years of highly expensive education : tutors, educational toys, books and Grand Tours, prep schools, the best in university education paid for right into post-doc status if need be.
Only the very smartest of the untutored geniuses among the poorer sorts could push their way against this phalanx of the tutored un-genius children of the older aristocracies who came to dominate all the new as well as old professions - particularly in the sciences and amongst the university teachers.
Paralleling this, I argue , we saw a massive lowering of the cultural and political worth of Natural Science , science done by amateurs delving in and living close to Nature.
Instead the professional tenured lab scientist cum Natural Philosopher became the esteemed one : doing mind experiments on a chalkboard or with a few flasks and beakers in a laboratory.
Once cut free of the initimate connection to the land, this aristocracy of the mind lapsed quickly into synthetic autarky, convinced that modern civilized Man no longer needed Mother Nature's bounty.
The atom smashers could make anything and everything out of bog-ordinary atoms of useless rock.
Plenticide the Plentitude of Nature and we'd all be better off.
We've already done the Dodo and the Passenger Pidgeon - why not start work on the Slav, the Roma and the Jew ....
Pushing NATURE out of World's Fairs
Many excellent historical surveys exist about the century long* rise, apogee and decline of the concept of World's Fairs around the globe - more than enough to give proof to my claim.
(*Matching almost in lock step - by no mere coincidence - the century long rise, apogee and decline of the Era of Modernity, also roughly running between the late 1860s to the late 1960s.)
If you are at all green-minded, you will come away from reading such accounts - from it no matters which author or their mode of attack - with a strong sense of the gradual, persistent pushing out of Mother Nature and her wondrous products from these exhibitions.
Pushed far out to the dark Pale beyond the Fair's artificially illuminated gates - to be replaced by the ever more wondrous synthetic inventions of Man.
Sometimes in fact the wonders of Nature were still found inside the Fair gates, on full display, but the culture of the day (and future historians) totally ignored their presence.
The only reason any of us (under the age of eighty) even knows that Australia's pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair features the highly traditional natural fabric "wool" is because, by way of pointed contrast, the building itself was a latest word in 1930s Streamlined Moderne architecture .
That was a much commented upon first for the highly, highly, conservative official culture of Australia of 1939.
The 'fabric of the day 'at this Fair is very well known - well remembered ever since by even those of who were never there : totally Man-made synthetic nylon - nylons.
Rather like the ersatz tires and petro that the Nazi war machine literally ran upon, it was made - as DuPont ads were ever wont to say - entirely from bog-common air, water and coal.
No more American - and soon no more human - abject dependency on the Japanese and their tiny primitive (but oh so clever) silk worms.
Soon no more dependency on the Aussies, their sheep and their wool either.
For tasty, cheap, year around fresh artificial lamb chops were - as always, in what we touching like to call scientific journalism - on their way.
Oh, what a difference a mere 75 years (and perhaps the success of Dawson's natural penicillin and all the other natural antibiotics ?) can make upon the eternally tabula rasa of the scientific mind.
My amused eye caught a story yesterday out of the University of Portsmouth published in one of the Royal Societies journals : it announced the strongest material known was probably not the silk of the humble little spider but rather the teeth of limpet, the ones they use to scrap their microbial food off ocean rocks.
Study lead author, professor Asa Barber, found Nature is an endless source of inspiration for (human) mechanical structures that are strong and enduring because Nature's structures have evolved through century upon countless centuries of ceaseless trial and error advance.
So if World's Fairs still mattered - and currently they don't - perhaps limpet teeth might be the hot exhibit instead of the latest iteration of still tasteless Tang and the never-yet-seen artificial lamb chop ...
(*Matching almost in lock step - by no mere coincidence - the century long rise, apogee and decline of the Era of Modernity, also roughly running between the late 1860s to the late 1960s.)
If you are at all green-minded, you will come away from reading such accounts - from it no matters which author or their mode of attack - with a strong sense of the gradual, persistent pushing out of Mother Nature and her wondrous products from these exhibitions.
Pushed far out to the dark Pale beyond the Fair's artificially illuminated gates - to be replaced by the ever more wondrous synthetic inventions of Man.
Who on earth ever let her (M. Nature) in ???
Sometimes in fact the wonders of Nature were still found inside the Fair gates, on full display, but the culture of the day (and future historians) totally ignored their presence.
The only reason any of us (under the age of eighty) even knows that Australia's pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair features the highly traditional natural fabric "wool" is because, by way of pointed contrast, the building itself was a latest word in 1930s Streamlined Moderne architecture .
That was a much commented upon first for the highly, highly, conservative official culture of Australia of 1939.
Wool or Nylon, ma'am ?
The 'fabric of the day 'at this Fair is very well known - well remembered ever since by even those of who were never there : totally Man-made synthetic nylon - nylons.
Rather like the ersatz tires and petro that the Nazi war machine literally ran upon, it was made - as DuPont ads were ever wont to say - entirely from bog-common air, water and coal.
No more American - and soon no more human - abject dependency on the Japanese and their tiny primitive (but oh so clever) silk worms.
Soon no more dependency on the Aussies, their sheep and their wool either.
For tasty, cheap, year around fresh artificial lamb chops were - as always, in what we touching like to call scientific journalism - on their way.
Green amidst the concrete
But Mother Nature is herself a bit like her weeds - if she is banished in one place, she just springs up anew in another.
Banished from the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, she turns up in northern Manhattan's concrete upon primeval bedrock of the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Centre.
There in 700 two litre flasks, Dr Martin Henry Dawson and his tiny four person team nurtured the blue green penicillium to offer up some of its precious yellow drops of the life-granting penicillin juice , all to save the lives of two boys judged ( by other doctors) as 'lives unworthy of much medical care', as medical America prepared itself for Total War.
It was as if Gordon Gekko and Emma Lazarus had exchanged their normal roles.
For history celebrates only the artificial and the synthetic at 1940's Flushing Meadows' green acres while noting only the green growing at 1940's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Centre's mass of concrete and stone.
It was as if Gordon Gekko and Emma Lazarus had exchanged their normal roles.
For history celebrates only the artificial and the synthetic at 1940's Flushing Meadows' green acres while noting only the green growing at 1940's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Centre's mass of concrete and stone.
Limpet prose
My amused eye caught a story yesterday out of the University of Portsmouth published in one of the Royal Societies journals : it announced the strongest material known was probably not the silk of the humble little spider but rather the teeth of limpet, the ones they use to scrap their microbial food off ocean rocks.
Study lead author, professor Asa Barber, found Nature is an endless source of inspiration for (human) mechanical structures that are strong and enduring because Nature's structures have evolved through century upon countless centuries of ceaseless trial and error advance.
So if World's Fairs still mattered - and currently they don't - perhaps limpet teeth might be the hot exhibit instead of the latest iteration of still tasteless Tang and the never-yet-seen artificial lamb chop ...
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