I didn't stumble on Henry Dawson's amazing story until December 2004, more than three years after 9/11 .
When I soon decided to write up Dawson's story, I did it mostly to reveal a more nuanced view of wartime Manhattan.
I was sick and tired of all those "guy-oriented" books on the deadly atomic gadgetry thrown up by the best known of the various wartime Manhattan Projects.
I wanted to show that not all the wartime Manhattan Projects came from Mars : some also came from Venus.
So I didn't initially plan to direct my book at the 1993 World Trade Centre bomber Ramzi Yousef, his 9/11 successors and any future wanna be imitators.
But then I came across a report indicating that Yousef hoped his bomb would kill all 50,000 inside the Word Trade Centre complex , as partial repayment for the 250,000 Japanese killed thanks to the Manhattan Project.
The Bomb is indeed the best known symbol of wartime Manhattan, unfortunately almost its only symbol.
And yes it was designed and engineered in many of Manhattan's skyscrapers, particularly one that for a time was the tallest in the world.
Just as the Norden bombsight was birthed in a skyscraper, to give substance to Strategic Bombing's big lie that one could bomb big city factories without killing mostly civilians located miles off target.
And not content with being the spiritual birthplace of the evils of strategic bombing, Manhattan was also the home to the big corporation owners (high up in those big skyscrapers) who funded the intellectual horrors of Eugenics : the other twin horror of WWII.
So Yousef is partially right : wartime Manhattan has a lot to answer for.
But only partially right, because Manhattan is as Janus-like as you and I and the world itself.
Because Manhattan is not just home to the world's biggest corporate headquarters , it is also home to some of the world's smallest and most diverse ethnic neighbourhoods.
They have been attracted there by the myth - and sometimes the reality - of Emma Lazarus's Golden Door welcoming the poor, the tired and the huddled.
Henry Dawson, a Nova Scotian immigrant to New York himself , was determined that America and its Allies shouldn't only combat Hitler militarily, while weakly mimicking him morally.
He rejected the idea that young people dying of SBE were the "4Fs of the 4Fs" and prime examples of "life unworthy of expensive medical care in a military crisis".
He also had their solution ready at hand : microbe-made penicillin, manufactured in the world's smallest chemical factories, each weighing only a few trillions of a gram apiece.
Eventually his twin folly was embraced by the general public (particularly Doctor Mom), if not by the Allied scientists.
The Allies medical-scientific elite had long ago decided against his twin folly - and this in the middle of the worst war ever known, with the only existing life-saving alternative,the Sulfa drugs, failing day by day .
Instead they resolved that (a) penicillin would only be produced , during the war, in quantities sufficient to treat the wounded from the Allied front line and (b) it would only be manufactured in mass amounts, after it had been synthesized and profitably patented, war or no war.
It was never then synthesized at anything close to industrial amounts --- in fact it has never been synthesized in industrial amounts.
Natural penicillin - grown by incredibly small fungi - was and is produced in extraordinary amounts, extraordinarily cheaply.
And Dawson also won his moral war - the Allies relented.
At least the American War Production Board (WPB) did, in the signal last triumph of the fading New Deal .
During the war, it was quickly and cheaply found possible to supply all the world's soldiers and all its civilians with life-saving penicillin.
Most of it in fact came out of a disused ice-making plant that Dawson's only ally (a company making citric acid for the soda pop industry) had converted to the making of natural penicillin.
This, despite the fact that almost all the other drug companies backed trying to invent patentable synthetic penicillin sometime in the future instead of making the life-granting elixir today.
The moral capital that this small firm earned when it alone produced 85% of the penicillin landed on D-Day has stood Pfizer in good stead all these years ... whatever its postwar behaviour .
Wartime penicillin probably did its best job in the months and years immediately after the end of WWII, when much of the population of the occupied countries were hungry and cold and living in bombed out homes - rife to deadly infections.
Pfizer's penicillin stopped any possible epidemics from turning into pandemics and the world did not see a larger repeat of the 50 million killed in the post-WWI Spanish Flu.
For this alone, I believe Manhattan deserves a bow, not a bomb, from Yosef and his ilk ....
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