The Little Boy atomic bomb that dropped on Hiroshima was a very Big Bomb indeed : 5000 kilograms , 300 cm long, by 70 cm wide and 70 cm deep.
Long and thin : hence Little Boy.
Big Science needed tens of thousands of workers to build it.
By contrast, the tiny ampoule of natural penicillin that saved the life of little baby Patty Malone was only 5 grams in weight, .7cm by .7 cm by 3 cm in size.
Showing posts with label manhattan project. Show all posts
Showing posts with label manhattan project. Show all posts
Sunday, August 25, 2013
Thursday, August 22, 2013
In moral terms, WWII boils down to one simple - scientific - question : are the small a part of the future, or just of the past ?
G F Hegel, the 19th century's most influential philosopher, was famous for claiming that history wasn't an endless cycles of birth, maturity and death laced with infinite variations , as people had always observed.
Instead, he ventured that history has a single purpose and a single goal - together with a linear unbreakable path upwards to that goal - linear, unidirectional "Progress" with a capital "P".
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
to RAMZI YOUSEF : a loving rebuttal
When asked why he hoped his 1993 bomb inside Manhattan's World Trade Center would kill all of the 50,000 people at the complex, the chief planner of the attack, Ramzi Yousef, said the planned massive carnage was partly to avenge the 250,000 Japanese killed by the bombs of the Manhattan Project.
It is true that the current wartime image of Manhattan does present a particularly Mars like character.
Pre-1945 Manhattan was not just the birth place of the technology that fuelled the Cold War atomic arsenals, it was also the financial and intellectual home of Eugenics - which culminated in The Holocaust.
But Manhattan is Janus-like as we all are, as the whole world is.
Within it are found big and small, good and bad, Eugenics and Emma Lazarus : indeed Venus, as well as Mars.
Venus even in, particularly in, times of war - seemingly the natural home of Mars.
Martin Henry Dawson's Manhattan Project , to liberate natural penicillin from corporate greed and eugenic medicine so that it could bring succour to the poor, the tired and the huddled in a war-torn world, saved far more lives than The Bomb ever lost.
If Ramzi Yousef had only known the full (in the round /the 360 degree) story of Manhattan, he might have thought twice about planning that 1993 bomb.
Much the same goes for those who planned 9/11 and those planning future assaults on Manhattan.
I am not a Manhattanite and reluctant to blow someone other city's horn unasked : but I simply feel that the world - and that included Manhattanites - must know more of the long ago wartime days when 'Manhattan was from Venus' , as well as from Mars....
It is true that the current wartime image of Manhattan does present a particularly Mars like character.
Pre-1945 Manhattan was not just the birth place of the technology that fuelled the Cold War atomic arsenals, it was also the financial and intellectual home of Eugenics - which culminated in The Holocaust.
But Manhattan is Janus-like as we all are, as the whole world is.
Within it are found big and small, good and bad, Eugenics and Emma Lazarus : indeed Venus, as well as Mars.
Venus even in, particularly in, times of war - seemingly the natural home of Mars.
Martin Henry Dawson's Manhattan Project , to liberate natural penicillin from corporate greed and eugenic medicine so that it could bring succour to the poor, the tired and the huddled in a war-torn world, saved far more lives than The Bomb ever lost.
If Ramzi Yousef had only known the full (in the round /the 360 degree) story of Manhattan, he might have thought twice about planning that 1993 bomb.
Much the same goes for those who planned 9/11 and those planning future assaults on Manhattan.
I am not a Manhattanite and reluctant to blow someone other city's horn unasked : but I simply feel that the world - and that included Manhattanites - must know more of the long ago wartime days when 'Manhattan was from Venus' , as well as from Mars....
Sunday, August 18, 2013
Now I am become Hope, Healer of the Nations
Thanks to John Gray I can say, in a sideways allusion to his famous book, that wartime Manhattan displayed both a Mars and a Venus side to its Janus-like character and everyone instantly knows what I mean.
This is a lot easier than saying Manhattan have a Social medicine and War medicine side to its character and then have to spend a few thousand words and a long history lesson, to explain what I really mean.
Similarly the made-up quotation that titles this blog post is another sideways allusion --- this time to a very well known quote about Manhattan's best known wartime Project : the death-dealing Atomic Bomb.
Robert Oppenheimer, a Manhattan born and raised boy himself, defined the Bomb's nature (and America's newfound military and diplomatic power) by intoning a famous quotation from Hindu scripture :
But poetically, we can at least imagine that between 1943 and 1945 it did intone both....
This is a lot easier than saying Manhattan have a Social medicine and War medicine side to its character and then have to spend a few thousand words and a long history lesson, to explain what I really mean.
Similarly the made-up quotation that titles this blog post is another sideways allusion --- this time to a very well known quote about Manhattan's best known wartime Project : the death-dealing Atomic Bomb.
Robert Oppenheimer, a Manhattan born and raised boy himself, defined the Bomb's nature (and America's newfound military and diplomatic power) by intoning a famous quotation from Hindu scripture :
"Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds"Manhattan never itself intoned those words or the words at the top of this post - it can't .
But poetically, we can at least imagine that between 1943 and 1945 it did intone both....
Remembering when Manhattan was from Venus
"Now I am become Hope, Healer of Nations."
Just because that is all that the 9/11 bombers chose to recall , is no reason to emulate their example.
(Ie, the 911 planners chose only to focus upon the Mars side of Manhattan's Janus-like face.)
Yes , Columbia University in Manhattan ( along with a dozen other sites in greater NYC) was a key part of the best known wartime Manhattan Project, the militarization of the death-dealing atom.
In fact, the key part : because Columbia perfected gaseous diffusion, the method used on all sides to produce all the megadeath weapons of the Cold War.
Native Manhattanite, Robert Oppenheimer, seemingly sealed that image of Manhattan for all time, when he intoned after the first atomic blast, "Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds."
But Columbia University in wartime was also home to the other - the unknown - Manhattan Project : ensuring that the life-sustaining properties of natural penicillin were freely available to all , at a low price, and during the war years when it was so badly needed.
Henry Dawson did not discover natural penicillin, but he was key in insisting it be widely produced during WWII, rather than a half dozen lacklustre years later.
Far more fundamentally, he was key in de-militarizing wartime penicillin, making it not just a secret medicine available only to the Allied front line, but something than people of all nations, races, creeds and genders felt they had a right to obtain when they were dying, without the cost bankrupting their families.
It remains to this day, seventy five years later, that rarity : an inexpensive safe lifesaver that has never been patented and over-priced.
The dying Dawson did all this because in an era when Bigger was Better and the small were just impediments to Progress, he so strongly believed in their right to existence and happiness.
From his tiny lab in upper Manhattan he radiated a message of hope to a troubled world.
Like Lady Liberty herself, he reminded the world of the Venus side to Janus Manhattan....
Wartime Manhattan : from Mars ... or from Venus ?
If I might be permitted to gently chide the citizens of Manhattan, may I suggest that they had done very little, themselves, to balance the horrific wartime image of their city created by being tagged as the place that 'birthed' the atomic bomb and its potential destruction of the entire world.
To the 911 bombers, it is the best known image of the borough.
(And by the way, it is only men, like the bosses of the best known wartime Manhattan Project , who talk about 'birthing the bomb' and think of naming it 'Little Boy'.)
Woman know better.
They actually do birth children and know that a bomb isn't a baby.
But little Patty Malone was a baby - and it was only the fearless challenging spirit of the native born Manhattanite that saved her life ... when a heartless government refused to help.
So, People of Manhattan, take a bow.
True, it was only men that did all the heavy lifting in saving this particular child, but I am convinced that her story moved millions of Doctor Moms to demand that their men get off the sofa and start making penicillin for real, right away.
In particular, her story moved one Doctor Mom with the real power to move mountains of inertia : Mae Smith.
She was the wife of the boss of Brooklyn-based Pfizer, John L Smith.
In the summer of 1943, his firm was best positioned (culturally) in the world to make the needed penicillin ---- all by its self.
But he was a very cautious and frugal man and he refused to do the right thing, rather than the financially safe and lucrative thing.
Until his wife reminded him, once again, that Dr Henry Dawson had always insisted that their eldest daughter would have remained alive, if only penicillin had been earnestly produced, not long after its discovery.
Learning of little Patty Malone plucked from death's door touched Smith's heart ; finally made Dawson's claim seem real to John L.
In a few short months, Pfizer was indeed producing enough penicillin for all those in the world dying of susceptible infections.
Abundant amounts of Pfizer Penicillin created an opportunity for America to practise influential penicillin diplomacy , replacing Pax Britannia with Pax Americana.
Britain and its Dominions had the most moral capital, from standing all alone against Hitler for years, and it had the moral first claim on penicillin.
But for want of a price of a single additional bomber squadron for Butcher Harris, the Conservative Party-dominated British government threw all that moral capital away, handed it over to the Americans on a platter, gratis.
That price, of just one bomber squadron among many, would have given Glaxo a Pfizer's sized plant, months before Pfizer.
By contrast, WWII is usually seen as the process that finally killed the hopes of the New Deal.
But I argue, that the New Deal's final act was actually its finest hour.
Britain's Ministry of Supply set the amount of penicillin it wanted produced during the war years to just be enough ( barely) for front line troops.
It forbade the bigger colonies like India to make their own penicillin (postwar export market considerations dominated official thinking.)
The supply amounts set by the gutless Dominions perfectly reflected Britain's niggardly attitude to the needs of their own civilians and the civilians of the occupied lands.
By contrast, in May 1943, one of the last big New Deal organizations created, the American WPB (War Production Board) , set the amounts of American penicillin it wanted produced so high that it could easily supply America ( military and civilian) and most of the world besides.
Thirties style "Social medicine" concerns had finally won out over the Forties "War medicine" niggardliness.
Henry Dawson's long, lonely defence of heightened social medicine in a time of war against an enemy who didn't believe in it even in peacetime had finally borne fruit : now America was preparing to combat the Nazis morally , as well as just militarily.
Venus Manhattan was in the driver's seat, along with Mars Manhattan ....
To the 911 bombers, it is the best known image of the borough.
(And by the way, it is only men, like the bosses of the best known wartime Manhattan Project , who talk about 'birthing the bomb' and think of naming it 'Little Boy'.)
Woman know better.
They actually do birth children and know that a bomb isn't a baby.
But little Patty Malone was a baby - and it was only the fearless challenging spirit of the native born Manhattanite that saved her life ... when a heartless government refused to help.
So, People of Manhattan, take a bow.
True, it was only men that did all the heavy lifting in saving this particular child, but I am convinced that her story moved millions of Doctor Moms to demand that their men get off the sofa and start making penicillin for real, right away.
In particular, her story moved one Doctor Mom with the real power to move mountains of inertia : Mae Smith.
She was the wife of the boss of Brooklyn-based Pfizer, John L Smith.
In the summer of 1943, his firm was best positioned (culturally) in the world to make the needed penicillin ---- all by its self.
But he was a very cautious and frugal man and he refused to do the right thing, rather than the financially safe and lucrative thing.
Until his wife reminded him, once again, that Dr Henry Dawson had always insisted that their eldest daughter would have remained alive, if only penicillin had been earnestly produced, not long after its discovery.
Learning of little Patty Malone plucked from death's door touched Smith's heart ; finally made Dawson's claim seem real to John L.
In a few short months, Pfizer was indeed producing enough penicillin for all those in the world dying of susceptible infections.
Abundant amounts of Pfizer Penicillin created an opportunity for America to practise influential penicillin diplomacy , replacing Pax Britannia with Pax Americana.
Britain and its Dominions had the most moral capital, from standing all alone against Hitler for years, and it had the moral first claim on penicillin.
But for want of a price of a single additional bomber squadron for Butcher Harris, the Conservative Party-dominated British government threw all that moral capital away, handed it over to the Americans on a platter, gratis.
That price, of just one bomber squadron among many, would have given Glaxo a Pfizer's sized plant, months before Pfizer.
By contrast, WWII is usually seen as the process that finally killed the hopes of the New Deal.
But I argue, that the New Deal's final act was actually its finest hour.
Britain's Ministry of Supply set the amount of penicillin it wanted produced during the war years to just be enough ( barely) for front line troops.
It forbade the bigger colonies like India to make their own penicillin (postwar export market considerations dominated official thinking.)
The supply amounts set by the gutless Dominions perfectly reflected Britain's niggardly attitude to the needs of their own civilians and the civilians of the occupied lands.
By contrast, in May 1943, one of the last big New Deal organizations created, the American WPB (War Production Board) , set the amounts of American penicillin it wanted produced so high that it could easily supply America ( military and civilian) and most of the world besides.
Thirties style "Social medicine" concerns had finally won out over the Forties "War medicine" niggardliness.
Henry Dawson's long, lonely defence of heightened social medicine in a time of war against an enemy who didn't believe in it even in peacetime had finally borne fruit : now America was preparing to combat the Nazis morally , as well as just militarily.
Venus Manhattan was in the driver's seat, along with Mars Manhattan ....
Thursday, August 15, 2013
Janus Manhattan : "destroyer of worlds" or "provider of life-affirming balm" or both ?
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| Penicillium Monstrance |
When native Manhattanite Robert J Oppenheimer proclaimed - portentously - "Now I am become DEATH , the destroyer of worlds" after the Manhattan Project's first atomic explosion , he seems to set Manhattan's wartime image in concrete for all time.
It was this existing image of Manhattan that the 911 bombers relied upon to soften the outrage against their mass killings.
But the real Manhattan is far too complex and dynamic to ever present just one face to the world --- and so it was with its activities between 1939 and 1945.
For Manhattan ,Janus-like , had another (almost unknown and largely mis-understood) Project during WWII.
Dr Martin Henry Dawson the medical scientist had a very simple thesis : that Life inevitably 'Comes in All Sizes'.
As a result, 'global commensality' (all life dines at a common table) is a necessity forced upon all of us living beings and we might as well learn to accept it.
But the tenet of his age, The Age of High Modernity (1875 -1965), was that Bigger was Better, in fact the inevitable path of progress.
So small life would have to give way and disappear before the forces of the giants of life.
Dawson believed that WWII would end quicker, with fewer deaths, if the Allies set out to defeat Hitler morally, as well as just militarily.
Instead they were seeming intent on matching Hitler's evil doctrines, albeit in a muted fashion, cut for cut.
Killing American patients like Charles Aronson by passive neglect was hardly morally different than killing German patients like Martin Bader by active injection.
In an era that exalted the Big, Dawson dared to defend the small : small patients like Charlie and small cures, like natural penicillin from mold slime.
Another native Manhattanite , Gladys Hobby, was the most religious devout on Dawson's tiny team.
Instead of a text from Hindu religion, we might choose to see a quasi-Christian symbol in her practise of daily carrying petri dishes of sectoring penicillium mold to the wards holding the dying patients like Charlie.
She did it, she says, to sustain their morale so they might live long enough for enough penicillin to be produced by her team to save their lives.
Anyone who as ever seen a photograph of sectored penicillium mold on a flat petri dish can not help but think it reminded them of something , but just what ?
Spikes of blue with golden droplets on top radiate in all directions, ending in a circle of white mold growth.
It is a radiant, jewel like image - rather like a stylized sun.
Like a - that's it - a monstrance : that sun-like object that contains the sacred Host and is held aloft by the priest and minister on special occasions.
A stylized sun, radiating in all directions, warming all, was always an universal symbol of life and hope, even before Christianity.
The Host in a monstrance - Jesus's body for real or as a symbol - is the unifying symbol of the Christian tradition : offering up the hope of (eternal) life , particularly as it is often exposed before those facing death.
But sometimes Jesus offered an earthly life as well as an eternal heavenly life.
So even Lazarus died, physically, in the end, as would patients like Charlie : but even so , every additional day on earth seemed a precious boom and balm to the troubled patient and their families.
Eventually a nearby doctor , Dante Colitti, was inspired to emulate Dr Dawson's government-bucking actions to obtain illicit penicillin supplies for discarded Americans.
He got the masters of Yellow Journalism , the Hearst papers, to go to bat on behalf of the Yellow Magic and a beautiful thing soon happened.
For when a two year baby named Patricia Malone got snatched back from death , around the world 'Doctor Mom' soon was demanding that the men get their butts off the couch and start seriously producing penicillin, now ! ----- fifteen long years after it was first discovered.
Dawson was only a part of the long story of penicillin and antibiotics but he is the whole story of wartime penicillin.
Without his moral drive, the medical cum scientific cum commercial powers-to-be would have still been trying to make highly profitable , patent-able ,synthetic penicillin years after the war ended, instead of mass producing life-saving natural ( public domain) penicillin during the war that so badly needed it.
Dawson's moral urgency personally moved the family of the Pfizer boss and moved that boss to mass produce natural penicillin as soon as possible - and it was Brooklyn based Pfizer that made the vast bulk of the wartime penicillin., let us never forget.
My book about Dawson's Manhattan Project is written as a deliberate rebuttal to the story the 911 bombers told against Manhattan, to try and justify their mass killings.
What they said about Manhattan wasn't totally untrue but it told only part of her story.
Because, like Life itself, Manhattan 'Comes in All Sizes' : she has been the home to unbelievably good things as well as bad things.
I would so much like to ask the 911 bombing planners and their supporters if they or their loved ones had ever been saved by cheap abundant penicillin and do they know that the effort to de-militarize penicillin and make it available to all was spawned in the same Manhattan they love so much to hate ?
Hopefully this book will be the start of that conversation we need to have with the Manhattan-haters.....
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Hyssop (In a Time of Cedar) : GOOD NEWS , from The Bad News War
The other Manhattan Project (1940-1945) was Henry Dawson's ultimately successful effort to "Defend the small, in a Time of the Big".
He sought to defend all of us as equally unique and small individuals.
This, in an age that preferred to see only large reified collectivities.
He had to fight against two billion people and a world that had taught themselves to show group love to their 'own kind' and exhibit group hate for all other humans.
While its impact was ultimately enormous, his four person team was as small as the better known Manhattan Project team was big.
But appropriately so.
Because both the patients he hoped to aid ("The 4Fs of the 4Fs" - young people needlessly dying because they were seen as worthless along the mean corridors of wartime medical science) and the means he hoped to use to save them (invisibly tiny fungus factories) were also very small.
This particular life-saving fungus that he was the first to use to save a life was originally found on a hyssop branch in Sweden .
We might recall that the Bible memorably uses the tiny hyssop to contrast with the enormous cedars of Lebanon, as examples of the breadth and width of God's concerns and love.
Modernity's War (WWII) was all about bigness --- as were the peacetime decades proceeding it.
It was a Time of Cedars and the smaller nations of the world were nothing but hyssop underfoot, trampled upon before the onslaught of German, Russia and Japan (and sometimes America and Britain.)
Dawson was too old (and too physically unfit) to once again to rush to the defence of small nations like Belgium --- as he had in WWI.
But he could at least defend the weakest members of the Allied Nations from efforts of many in the Allied medical and scientific elite to defeat the Nazis by matching the Nazi, tactic by tactic.
WWII was hardly The Good War, it was in fact a war of enormous bad faith on all sides, an all-around bad news war.
But in the story of Dawson's dying effort to aid others weaker than himself, we finally have, coming out of that dreadful conflict, a truly GOOD NEWS STORY.......
He sought to defend all of us as equally unique and small individuals.
This, in an age that preferred to see only large reified collectivities.
He had to fight against two billion people and a world that had taught themselves to show group love to their 'own kind' and exhibit group hate for all other humans.
While its impact was ultimately enormous, his four person team was as small as the better known Manhattan Project team was big.
But appropriately so.
Because both the patients he hoped to aid ("The 4Fs of the 4Fs" - young people needlessly dying because they were seen as worthless along the mean corridors of wartime medical science) and the means he hoped to use to save them (invisibly tiny fungus factories) were also very small.
This particular life-saving fungus that he was the first to use to save a life was originally found on a hyssop branch in Sweden .
We might recall that the Bible memorably uses the tiny hyssop to contrast with the enormous cedars of Lebanon, as examples of the breadth and width of God's concerns and love.
Modernity's War (WWII) was all about bigness --- as were the peacetime decades proceeding it.
It was a Time of Cedars and the smaller nations of the world were nothing but hyssop underfoot, trampled upon before the onslaught of German, Russia and Japan (and sometimes America and Britain.)
Dawson was too old (and too physically unfit) to once again to rush to the defence of small nations like Belgium --- as he had in WWI.
But he could at least defend the weakest members of the Allied Nations from efforts of many in the Allied medical and scientific elite to defeat the Nazis by matching the Nazi, tactic by tactic.
WWII was hardly The Good War, it was in fact a war of enormous bad faith on all sides, an all-around bad news war.
But in the story of Dawson's dying effort to aid others weaker than himself, we finally have, coming out of that dreadful conflict, a truly GOOD NEWS STORY.......
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
A war story for women : the story of the OTHER Manhattan Project
I fully expect many more women than men will read my book "Heart and Mind Agape - a Good News story from the bad news war".
Men already have tens of thousands of books and films written about WWII, detailing all its violence, death and pain.
Do we really need to read yet another book about a baby being vaporized in the war's concluding big bang ?
Why not a war-ending true story that has a newborn baby nosily whimpering at her mother's breast after that mother was saved from death, just in time, by salvation dropping from the skies like Manna ?
I wanted to tell the un-told story of Manhattan's other wartime Project, one with a much happier WWII ending and one with post-war ramifications much more uplifting than the other's enduring threat of nuclear death for all.
So yes, mine is a war book for women.
Men will just have to suck it up and get over it.....
Men already have tens of thousands of books and films written about WWII, detailing all its violence, death and pain.
Do we really need to read yet another book about a baby being vaporized in the war's concluding big bang ?
Why not a war-ending true story that has a newborn baby nosily whimpering at her mother's breast after that mother was saved from death, just in time, by salvation dropping from the skies like Manna ?
I wanted to tell the un-told story of Manhattan's other wartime Project, one with a much happier WWII ending and one with post-war ramifications much more uplifting than the other's enduring threat of nuclear death for all.
So yes, mine is a war book for women.
Men will just have to suck it up and get over it.....
Thursday, July 18, 2013
Group love and Group think --- formula for a disaster : or WWII
It is well accepted that an excessive group love, for the so called Aryan Race, led Germany on endless wars of conquest and that excessive groupthink by Hitler's inner circle defeated an hope of permanent success in those conquests.
I want to suggest that group-love and group-think are intimately related and equally doomed and that by contrast, an expansive openness to others, all others - as individuals and as collectivity, in need or not in need - is the best way for humanity to survive in a dynamic uncertain world.
I plan to contrast the WWII career of little known doctor Henry Dawson, with his manhattan project to save SBE patients by de-weaponizing penicillin, with the mistakes made by those WWII excessive lovers of their own groups and their groupthink, in both the Axis and Allied camps ....
I want to suggest that group-love and group-think are intimately related and equally doomed and that by contrast, an expansive openness to others, all others - as individuals and as collectivity, in need or not in need - is the best way for humanity to survive in a dynamic uncertain world.
I plan to contrast the WWII career of little known doctor Henry Dawson, with his manhattan project to save SBE patients by de-weaponizing penicillin, with the mistakes made by those WWII excessive lovers of their own groups and their groupthink, in both the Axis and Allied camps ....
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Allied war crimes of attrition vs Axis war crimes of aggression
Let us first always remember that it was the Germans, together with the Italians and the Japanese, who started WWII and created its spiral of ever increasing tit for tat violence.
Without the aggressive invasions of this Axis trio, the western Allies would never have done to Europe .... what they routinely did to the dark people of smaller, hotter nations and colonies.
That is to say, imposing total blockades of food, fuel and life-saving medicine upon the civilians of occupied Europe---- and then bombing and shelling them as well, killing many and "de-housing" many others.
The Allies committed these war crimes of attrition reluctantly and carefully, but they did it from 1939 to 1945: causing the premature deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians from occupied lands in the process.
And it was all legal, strictly legal, at least under the international law in place during WWII.
But perhaps partly as result of the brave wartime disobedience of William Douglas Home (brother of the later British (Tory) Prime Minister) at the siege of Le Havre, postwar conferences made the starving of civilians in siege situations illegal.
One classic example of Allied war crimes of attrition were the mass starvation of newly-occupied Greece in 1940-1941 --- a starvation deliberately not relieved by Churchill , against the wishes of most of his Allies and of American elite public opinion.
Another was the extensive aerial and naval bombing of factories and transport facilities in occupied cities from 1940 to 1945 , despite the widely known knowledge that it was always wildly inaccurate - killing outright hundreds of thousands of occupied civilians.
I have already mentioned the siege of German-occupied Le Havre in 1944, where the British refused the German request to evacuate the civilians : the British hoped the slow starvation of the French civilians beside them might convince the hardened SS troops to surrender quicker !
But denying the knowledge of new life-saving medications and disease-reducing insecticides to the civilians of occupied lands is a entirely unknown example of Allied war crimes of attrition, but that doesn't make it any less true.
It is why I consistently refer to the high level Allied efforts to keep penicillin and DDT secret and restricted to frontline Allied troop use as their weaponizing , despite my listening audience's doubting stares.
Out of their homes thanks to Allied bombing, denied food and fuel by the Allied blockade, stressed by Nazi atrocities and oppression ,many Europeans were increasingly vulnerable to classic war diseases like typhus, which alone killed more than combat did, through all the big wars up to WWII.
The traditional insecticides used to try and stop typhus were much less effective a method than the new DDT and while the Sulfa family have worked well to prevent most killer infections between 1937-1942, there were to be no new Sulfa drugs coming along, and this at a time when bacteria was becoming rapidly resistant to Sulfa.
Thus a potential medical catastrophe was looming , bigger even than the double whammy of the Western Spanish Flu and Eastern Typhus that killed more at the end of WWI than did war combat itself.
Denying knowledge of the possible cure to occupied Europe would only make the catastrophe worse.
The wartime weaponizing of atomic fission to make bombs rather than electricity was opposed by a large number of very prominent scientists , yet failed totally.
The wartime weaponizing of penicillin was opposed by one - dying - middle rank medical scientist and yet was successful beyond his wildest dreams.
How successful ?
Take the example of 1949's THE THIRD MAN, recently voted the best British movie of all time.
In it, 'cheap, safe, abundant penicillin for all' is regarded as the mark of every civilized society and "the man who dared water the workers' penicillin" becomes the epitome of ultimate evil.
And thus we get an explanation as to why war hero Winston Churchill (the Harry Lime of wartime penicillin) so badly lost the 1945 British General Election.
For Churchill, the architect of the Allied war of attrition, simply could never understand the public's objection to his weaponizing of penicillin.
Why did the dying, modest Dr Henry Dawson succeed in confounding the weaponizing of penicillin when the very energetic Leo Szilard and others failed to do the same with atomic fission ?
I suggest the reason was not in their differing moral values, though this is part of the answer.
Instead, I argue that it was Dawson's greater scientific conviction of the rightness of his actions, based upon his theory of "the eternal commensality of the big and the small", that made his opposition much earlier, much more consistent and and much more unyielding.....
Without the aggressive invasions of this Axis trio, the western Allies would never have done to Europe .... what they routinely did to the dark people of smaller, hotter nations and colonies.
That is to say, imposing total blockades of food, fuel and life-saving medicine upon the civilians of occupied Europe---- and then bombing and shelling them as well, killing many and "de-housing" many others.
The Allies committed these war crimes of attrition reluctantly and carefully, but they did it from 1939 to 1945: causing the premature deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians from occupied lands in the process.
And it was all legal, strictly legal, at least under the international law in place during WWII.
But perhaps partly as result of the brave wartime disobedience of William Douglas Home (brother of the later British (Tory) Prime Minister) at the siege of Le Havre, postwar conferences made the starving of civilians in siege situations illegal.
One classic example of Allied war crimes of attrition were the mass starvation of newly-occupied Greece in 1940-1941 --- a starvation deliberately not relieved by Churchill , against the wishes of most of his Allies and of American elite public opinion.
Another was the extensive aerial and naval bombing of factories and transport facilities in occupied cities from 1940 to 1945 , despite the widely known knowledge that it was always wildly inaccurate - killing outright hundreds of thousands of occupied civilians.
I have already mentioned the siege of German-occupied Le Havre in 1944, where the British refused the German request to evacuate the civilians : the British hoped the slow starvation of the French civilians beside them might convince the hardened SS troops to surrender quicker !
But denying the knowledge of new life-saving medications and disease-reducing insecticides to the civilians of occupied lands is a entirely unknown example of Allied war crimes of attrition, but that doesn't make it any less true.
It is why I consistently refer to the high level Allied efforts to keep penicillin and DDT secret and restricted to frontline Allied troop use as their weaponizing , despite my listening audience's doubting stares.
Out of their homes thanks to Allied bombing, denied food and fuel by the Allied blockade, stressed by Nazi atrocities and oppression ,many Europeans were increasingly vulnerable to classic war diseases like typhus, which alone killed more than combat did, through all the big wars up to WWII.
The traditional insecticides used to try and stop typhus were much less effective a method than the new DDT and while the Sulfa family have worked well to prevent most killer infections between 1937-1942, there were to be no new Sulfa drugs coming along, and this at a time when bacteria was becoming rapidly resistant to Sulfa.
Thus a potential medical catastrophe was looming , bigger even than the double whammy of the Western Spanish Flu and Eastern Typhus that killed more at the end of WWI than did war combat itself.
Denying knowledge of the possible cure to occupied Europe would only make the catastrophe worse.
The wartime weaponizing of atomic fission to make bombs rather than electricity was opposed by a large number of very prominent scientists , yet failed totally.
The wartime weaponizing of penicillin was opposed by one - dying - middle rank medical scientist and yet was successful beyond his wildest dreams.
How successful ?
Take the example of 1949's THE THIRD MAN, recently voted the best British movie of all time.
In it, 'cheap, safe, abundant penicillin for all' is regarded as the mark of every civilized society and "the man who dared water the workers' penicillin" becomes the epitome of ultimate evil.
And thus we get an explanation as to why war hero Winston Churchill (the Harry Lime of wartime penicillin) so badly lost the 1945 British General Election.
For Churchill, the architect of the Allied war of attrition, simply could never understand the public's objection to his weaponizing of penicillin.
Why did the dying, modest Dr Henry Dawson succeed in confounding the weaponizing of penicillin when the very energetic Leo Szilard and others failed to do the same with atomic fission ?
I suggest the reason was not in their differing moral values, though this is part of the answer.
Instead, I argue that it was Dawson's greater scientific conviction of the rightness of his actions, based upon his theory of "the eternal commensality of the big and the small", that made his opposition much earlier, much more consistent and and much more unyielding.....
Monday, June 24, 2013
If you could only pick one Manhattan Project ...
One Manhattan Project, procuring the weaponization of atomic fission, was the biggest project of the War. The other Manhattan Project,confounding the weaponization of penicillin, was the smallest. But if you had to choose just one , which one would it be ?
If we seek hints from High Culture, it is noteworthy there have been no highly regarded movies,plays or novels about the project to divert the originally planned use of uranium fission , as a sort of superboiler, into becoming a super weapon instead.
But many non-fiction books have been written about the atomic project's supposedly 'dramatic' events.
All evade the awkward truth that without a genuine moral dilemma experienced by any key actors, there can be no real drama.
By contrast, immediately after the war, a very good movie came out about an effort to 'maximum profitize' penicillin, probably the closest peacetime and civilian equivalent of the Allied wartime effort to weaponize penicillin.
Clearly this 'crime' was regarded by the filmmakers (and more crucially by viewing audiences world wide as well) as almost the post war equivalent of the Holocaust and as the very symbol of the maximum evil possible.
For THE THIRD MAN was universally regarded as a classic on the day of its release and has stood the test of time, recently being voted the best British movie of all time - not bad for a black and white movie old enough to receive its Old Age Pension.
So its claim that any attempt to de-sanctifying 'the sacred penicillin' is the ultimate in evilness still seems to hold up as credible to modern audiences.
Just imagine then how that public would feel if they knew that the original narrow Allied plans for penicillin (and DDT), if unaltered, could have resulted in a greater loss of human life than even the Holocaust ?
Course unaltered, the far longer and far bigger and far more savage WWII should have seen even deaths due to misery,hunger and disease at war's end than even WWI.
As it was, the shorter, smaller WWI still lost millions at war's end to the Spanish Flu in the West and Typhus in the East.
Many millions did die at the end of WWII : but tens of millions of deaths could have been in the cards, if penicillin and DDT hadn't been available in sufficient amounts to serve all the world, not just Allied frontline troops as originally planned.
Thus Henry Dawson's lonely but ultimately successful effort to keep penicillin de-weaponized did help to reduce the possible high death toll at the war's end.
And we all should be grateful for that....
If we seek hints from High Culture, it is noteworthy there have been no highly regarded movies,plays or novels about the project to divert the originally planned use of uranium fission , as a sort of superboiler, into becoming a super weapon instead.
But many non-fiction books have been written about the atomic project's supposedly 'dramatic' events.
All evade the awkward truth that without a genuine moral dilemma experienced by any key actors, there can be no real drama.
By contrast, immediately after the war, a very good movie came out about an effort to 'maximum profitize' penicillin, probably the closest peacetime and civilian equivalent of the Allied wartime effort to weaponize penicillin.
Clearly this 'crime' was regarded by the filmmakers (and more crucially by viewing audiences world wide as well) as almost the post war equivalent of the Holocaust and as the very symbol of the maximum evil possible.
For THE THIRD MAN was universally regarded as a classic on the day of its release and has stood the test of time, recently being voted the best British movie of all time - not bad for a black and white movie old enough to receive its Old Age Pension.
So its claim that any attempt to de-sanctifying 'the sacred penicillin' is the ultimate in evilness still seems to hold up as credible to modern audiences.
Just imagine then how that public would feel if they knew that the original narrow Allied plans for penicillin (and DDT), if unaltered, could have resulted in a greater loss of human life than even the Holocaust ?
Course unaltered, the far longer and far bigger and far more savage WWII should have seen even deaths due to misery,hunger and disease at war's end than even WWI.
As it was, the shorter, smaller WWI still lost millions at war's end to the Spanish Flu in the West and Typhus in the East.
Many millions did die at the end of WWII : but tens of millions of deaths could have been in the cards, if penicillin and DDT hadn't been available in sufficient amounts to serve all the world, not just Allied frontline troops as originally planned.
Thus Henry Dawson's lonely but ultimately successful effort to keep penicillin de-weaponized did help to reduce the possible high death toll at the war's end.
And we all should be grateful for that....
Sunday, January 13, 2013
The elevator pitch for "By stubborn, Stars we steer"
Some people call it the takeaway sentence while others call it the elevator pitch : that line that tags a movie's every radio/TV spot and poster, the same line that got the movie green-lighted (financed) in the first place.
Ten seconds long ; one longish sentence .
My takeaway line , as you leave the elevator where you have been helplessly trapped with me as as I relentlessly tell you about Henry Dawson's own personal Manhattan Project :
Ten seconds long ; one longish sentence .
My takeaway line , as you leave the elevator where you have been helplessly trapped with me as as I relentlessly tell you about Henry Dawson's own personal Manhattan Project :
"Its a parable about Jesus and the Devil arm-wrestling over the soul of a pedestrian 'everyman' called John L Smith, who also happens to be the real life wartime head of Pfizer Drugs......"
"A Rare Breed Indeed" : US wartime Int'l treaties on the A-Bomb, Lend-Lease, Bases for Destroyers ... and synthetic penicillin
Most of the antibiotics we use today (beta-lactams) are still the close relatives of the first and best-ever antibiotic, Penicillin G.
They are all still produced, by mold slime, ie naturally : and this will probably always be so.
They are produced almost as bulk chemicals, thousands of tons worth annually, a multi-billion dollar industry that lies at the very foundations of the multi-trillion dollar health industry.
But there is (and was) no international treaty, closely negotiated at the very top level (Lord Halifax and Dean Acheson) , at the height of total war and over an extended period of two years, on the patents and scientific information involved in this crucial production of natural penicillin.
Instead another - exceedingly rare - international treaty was negotiated by the wartime American government --- a nation historically very loath to sign any sort of international treaty.
It focused exclusively on the post-war perfection of what had been - at one time - intended to be a timely wartime secret weapon of war : that elusive and illusionary phantom known as synthetic penicillin.
So it was that if between 1943 and 1946, a individual scientist had increased the amount of penicillin retained from the initial crude penicillin medium from 50% to 100% on first purification run through, she or he would have been classed be a war-hero and covered under this Acheson-Halifax Treaty, via its clause on the purification of penicillin.
(Even if success in this case might merely mean that the scientist retained 2 units of semi-purified penicillin per 2 units of initial crude penicillin rather than just the normal 1unit semi-refined from 2 units of initial crude penicillin.)
But if a scientist or firm increased the production of crude penicillin from the 2 crude units per ml of starting medium (as was common in the first 14 years of penicillin production) to 80,000 units of crude penicillin per ml of starting medium (as is common today) , they won't be considered important enough to be covered under this treaty !
It was this loophole that allowed a small soda pop supplier to become, in time, the biggest drug company in the world.
This was when Pfizer incredibly rapidly increased its production of natural penicillin from 2 units over 14 days to 2000 units over 4 days, per ml of starting medium ---- down right under the noses of the treaty negotiators.
As a result, 90% of the penicillin that landed on the D-Day beaches came from this one firm alone - making its world wide reputation over night.
That was because Pfizer's John L Smith, alone among his industry's CEOs, decided to make upping the production levels of natural penicillin his Job One, rather than going full out on synthesizing artificial penicillin and giving just lip service to public claims to be making more natural penicillin for the dying.
When a CUPE local for mental health orderlies and support staff went on strike here in Nova Scotia, I was no longer a mental health employee or union local member but I did devise the winning strike slogan : "Ten Percent of Nothing is Still Nothing !".
The government had told the public these ungrateful employees were getting a hefty 10% pay raise out of your tax dollars : but we came back with the fact some of the employees were earning less than the government's own, mandated by law, legal minimum wage !
Two units of penicillin per ml of starting medium is nothing, for such a lot of time, care and expense. Retaining 100% of it , instead of 50% of it , is still nothing.
The penicillin we use today is exceedingly cheap and abundant : because even if retaining only 50% of the 80,000 units per ml yield it is indeed still a very, very, very, big something....
They are all still produced, by mold slime, ie naturally : and this will probably always be so.
They are produced almost as bulk chemicals, thousands of tons worth annually, a multi-billion dollar industry that lies at the very foundations of the multi-trillion dollar health industry.
But there is (and was) no international treaty, closely negotiated at the very top level (Lord Halifax and Dean Acheson) , at the height of total war and over an extended period of two years, on the patents and scientific information involved in this crucial production of natural penicillin.
Instead another - exceedingly rare - international treaty was negotiated by the wartime American government --- a nation historically very loath to sign any sort of international treaty.
It focused exclusively on the post-war perfection of what had been - at one time - intended to be a timely wartime secret weapon of war : that elusive and illusionary phantom known as synthetic penicillin.
So it was that if between 1943 and 1946, a individual scientist had increased the amount of penicillin retained from the initial crude penicillin medium from 50% to 100% on first purification run through, she or he would have been classed be a war-hero and covered under this Acheson-Halifax Treaty, via its clause on the purification of penicillin.
(Even if success in this case might merely mean that the scientist retained 2 units of semi-purified penicillin per 2 units of initial crude penicillin rather than just the normal 1unit semi-refined from 2 units of initial crude penicillin.)
But if a scientist or firm increased the production of crude penicillin from the 2 crude units per ml of starting medium (as was common in the first 14 years of penicillin production) to 80,000 units of crude penicillin per ml of starting medium (as is common today) , they won't be considered important enough to be covered under this treaty !
It was this loophole that allowed a small soda pop supplier to become, in time, the biggest drug company in the world.
This was when Pfizer incredibly rapidly increased its production of natural penicillin from 2 units over 14 days to 2000 units over 4 days, per ml of starting medium ---- down right under the noses of the treaty negotiators.
As a result, 90% of the penicillin that landed on the D-Day beaches came from this one firm alone - making its world wide reputation over night.
That was because Pfizer's John L Smith, alone among his industry's CEOs, decided to make upping the production levels of natural penicillin his Job One, rather than going full out on synthesizing artificial penicillin and giving just lip service to public claims to be making more natural penicillin for the dying.
10% of nothing is ..... still nothing !!
When a CUPE local for mental health orderlies and support staff went on strike here in Nova Scotia, I was no longer a mental health employee or union local member but I did devise the winning strike slogan : "Ten Percent of Nothing is Still Nothing !".
The government had told the public these ungrateful employees were getting a hefty 10% pay raise out of your tax dollars : but we came back with the fact some of the employees were earning less than the government's own, mandated by law, legal minimum wage !
Two units of penicillin per ml of starting medium is nothing, for such a lot of time, care and expense. Retaining 100% of it , instead of 50% of it , is still nothing.
The penicillin we use today is exceedingly cheap and abundant : because even if retaining only 50% of the 80,000 units per ml yield it is indeed still a very, very, very, big something....
Friday, November 16, 2012
Martin Henry Dawson vs the American Red Cross 1940 on mixing blood of blacks , whites and slime
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| Heroes ???? |
The idea of mixing the blood of slime and white people found appalling by 99.9999% of western doctors
The Red Cross and Hitler were probably equally opposed to the idea of mixing the blood of dirty basement wall slimy fungus with that of white Ayrans, when it came to using impure natural penicillin in systemic (in the blood stream) medications.
Dr Dawson obviously did not agree with any of this : his first patients to receive his life-saving impure natural systemic penicillin were a young black man and a young Jewish man : October 16th 1940 , New York City : the other (life-saving, not life-killing) "Manhattan Project" .....
Saturday, April 7, 2012
SKY GODS or earthlings : WWII's choices ...
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| Michael Marshall |
Maybe I can be more succinct.
Spread over an eighty acre corridor in Harlem, two very different projects at Columbia University during the WWII period laid out wildly different visions for humanity and its future on this planet.
Heavy stuff !
One Columbia University project, the massive Manhattan Project, was a last minute patch or kluge to the centerpiece of the Allied war effort, which was that high altitude bombing with that NORDEN BOMBSIGHT could end the war quickly and cheaply.
Quickly and cheaply, yet with minimum deaths for Allied A1 military personnel and for enemy and occupied 4F civilians.
The NORDEN, out in the real world, proved a military and moral disaster, but the A-Bomb painted such broad strokes that it could destroy entire cities (and end the war) , even when the NORDEN used to aim it once again missed.
(The A-bomb together Nature actually did the job : for the winds blow the fallout from the Bomb all over the world, regardless of Humanity's best efforts to claim that this is entirely a man-made show. Fallout is so down-to-earth ,n'est-ce pas?)
But let us ignore such awkward truths and stick with the 'vision thing' : call the original Norden plan part of the SKY GOD vision of Modernity.
All life on Earth would be nicely invisible (but still controllable) from 25,000 feet up ; controlled by coolly rational objective men modeling themselves quite self consciously upon PIERRE SIMON LAPLACE.
(Lenin's Omelets could still be made but no one would have to see or hear or smell the human eggs being broken.)
Laplace's vision was that scientific man, with a lot of effort , and thanks to Newton's three laws of physics - could observe the Universe from a place far above it and perfectly predict its past, present and future right down to the level of the atom.
The NORDEN, the assumed crown jewel (and as it turned out the culmination) of 250 years of Newtonian physics, was just a start on this bold vision.
Modernist males (for this was a very male-centric vision) would become like the Sky Gods and Sky Fathers of ancient legend.
In another part of Columbia University - in the university but never really supported or encouraged by the university, unlike with the Manhattan Project - Martin Henry Dawson also had a vision.
Like him, the vision was unorthodox, humble and (literally) down-to-earth.
Down into the earth, actually.
This was an earthling Vision of Life : our only possible home was down here on earth, at the ground zero of reality, not building some castles in the sky.
So he formed a commensal partnership with some of life's smallest and weakest beings.
These were the earth fungi and bacteria whose presence
and 'earthy' smell was so familiar to him from his time in the WWI trenches.
All this so he could help the men and women and children in the figurative trenches of WWII - the 4F individuals overlooked or destroyed by a war that revolved very much around the 1As of intellectual and physical life.
But note first a further uncanny parallel with the much bigger, much badder, Manhattan Project.
His effort was seized upon, at the last minute after being either ignored or depreciated, by the Allied war effort in a determined effort to rescue another centerpiece of their war aims.
Dead soldiers were just that, dead ,said the Allied leadership.
But soldiers,sailors and airmen seriously wounded and infected could be saved back to useful lives in WWII, unlike WWI, because we have got that wonderful man-made synthetic miracle drug called SULFA.
But the entire family of sulfa drugs - an army themselves with America alone issuing 7000 patents on the sulfa drugs during the war - were not working as promised.
Never fear, said modernist Chemistry,we'll synthesize this new stuff, penicillin, only make it better, much cheaper and much much more plentiful.
A mini-Manhattan Project of money men and effort failed to produce any synthetic penicillin - or any synthetic quinine for that matter ----Nature did the job so much better, as it turned out.
Dawson's idea of a low tech factory of factories - trillions upon trillions of tiny fungi factories making penicillin inside low cost milk bottles in some underused milk plant - was working well , as GLAXO in England proved in spades.
It didn't use up scarce war-oriented resources or need highly skilled workers --- most of the workers growing and nurturing this precious life-giving crop were - surprise ! - women of child-bearing age.
Great !
Or was it ?
Not high tech enough for this science-run war of flash, glitz and Hollywood press agency.
Not male enough for testosteronic modernist science.
So the trillions of natural fungi penicillin makers were moved out of thousands of milk bottles and put into an extremely expensive milk bottle many stories high, made of scarce stainless steel and run by serious looking men in lab coats.
Now that seriously looked the business !
But it was in fact, just another kluge, a patch : like Newtonian Physics and the Norden , Chemistry had failed and Chemistry - the Queen of Science in the 1930s economy - never looked anywhere but downward from that point on.
(Just compare - if you will - the size of DuPont Chemicals versus the largest of the biotech companies in 1930 with DuPont and the largest of the biotech giants of today : no contest.)
So A-bombs and Penicillin: two last minute kluges to cover male egos or two of the many planned high tech successes that ultimately won us the war ?
And which way forward: become like SKY GODS or humble and limit our hubris and become more like earthlings ????
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
MOdernity's War (1939-1945) : SUCCESS or FAILURE ??
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| Michael Marshall |
No one disputes that 1939 -1945 was MOdernity's War.
The only real question is, 'was that war a success or a failure for Modernity?'
Most historians still feel that that only Modernity's Science saved "The Civilized World" from the evils of the anti-modernist Nazis, when the Allied fighting man proved no equal to the German armed forces in pure fighting technique.
By contrast, I feel that Modernity was the overarching ideology of the war, shared across all the Allied and Axis nations.
I believe that the Axis and Allied nations both had overly-optimistic initial war aims in 1938-1942.
These hubris-filled PLAN As came from both sides' overly optimistic views of Modernity's potential to excel particularly well under war conditions.
( Modernity had made many previous claims to hold all the secrets of Synthetic Autarky.)
I , on the other hand, feel that almost anyone - including Modernists - can govern in good times.
But that it is during wars that Modernity particularly fails to deliver its promised goods.
So what Modernists on both sides did was come up with new PLAN Bs when their original PLAN A failed ---- and then barefacedly claim that this new PLAN B was their old PLAN A all along !
Unexpectedly it worked.
It worked I think because almost all historians ,until recently ,were themselves fully modernist, and thus swimming in the same Kool Aid they were supposed to be analyzing.
I have already pointed out that Dr Martin Henry Dawson inadvertently became part of one Plan B.
Dawson ,working in a spirit of COmmensality with penicillium fungus, had put trillions of tiny unicelled fungi chemical factories into 700 two liter flasks and thus helped bring naturally-grown penicillin to a point where the public demanded it be made in huge amounts.
Pfizer, who had been working with Dawson, simply piled those trillions upon trillions of tiny penicillium factories into a series of impressive looking four storey tall 'flasks' and bare-facedly called it 'High Technology'.
The media ever a sucker for pretty pictures over hard digging, fell for the story.
They needed a new High tech wins the war success story when war medicine's original PLAN A (synthetic penicillin) failed to materialize despite a Manhattan Project-scaled effort in the US and UK.
Even the Manhattan Project itself can be seen as a PLAN B too.
The original PLAN A (precision bombing, with high level B-29s and NORDEN Bombsights) failed totally in its claim to quickly bring Germany and Japan to their knees, without a need for an old-fashioned infantry-led invasion--- and without killing many innocent civilians.
Quietly Allied governments fell back upon imprecise 'area bombing' ----burning entire metropolitan cities, along with all their residents, evoking a faint hope clause that the heat of the fires might also twist those cities' war factories' machine tools into useless knots.
But precision-bombing with High Explosives (HE) had been sold as an entirely man-made success story --- as a fully Modernist effort --- as military autarky.
The Norden Bombsight it was claimed, would aim the bomb so well that it would surmount any attempts by Mother Nature to pull it off its anointed course.
Man's high explosives (HE) also works as well in snow, rain,wind and excessive cold/ hot as in fair weather.
But the time-proven alternatives to HE and precision bombing were always rejected by the military leaders, out of a gut instinct that the real credit for their success would go to Nature, not to Modernist Man.
These alternatives I term "CLOUD WARFARE" .
For these war clouds of Poison Gas, Smoke, Radiation (Fallout),Incendiary (Fire) and Germ only succeed if the wind and humidity levels are just so.
Mother Nature can either help move these killers onto the target or scatter it wildly far away, diluting beyond effectiveness.
Consider the most successful bombing efforts of WWII : the firestorms of Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo.
Despite the massive amounts of fire bombs dropped, Modernist Man couldn't create those fire storms - or if so, firestorms would have happened many times over during WWII.
No, Mother Nature had to step in, in COmmensal fashion, and lend a hand - by giving the bombing crews lots of wind combined with super dry air (low humidity levels).
The fire bombs did no more than act as a sort of barbecue starter - the real fuel was the wood of the city combined with all that oxygen continuously coming in on the wind.
The energy from a thousand tons of magnesium, phosphorus and napalm is nothing against the energy put out by 100,000 tons of combustible wood and oxygen.
Ancient warfare always knew that nothing could destroy an enemy's empire like firing up their cities on a nice hot,dry, windy day - firestorms are as much a part of pre-modernity as they are of the WWII era.
Even Hiroshima was as much death by fire and radiation as it was death by explosion - and if the winds had been high, many more might have died in other communities - conversely if heavy rains had fallen as the Bomb dropped, deaths would have been reduced by being limited to the immediate blast area.
Darn !
Nature gets much of the credit for the death rate in either case.
But Hiroshima was successfully sold as High Tech when in reality it was as ancient a form of warfare as anything the Hittites ever thought up.
Dr Henry Dawson worked with Nature to save hundreds of thousands of lives --- but General Curtis LeMay also worked with Nature, only this time to take hundreds of thousands of lives.
So WWII's COmmensality, (its low tech PLAN B solution to high tech PLAN A public relations disasters) proved very much a two-edged sword.
I never claimed global commensality was all hearts and flowers....
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Two races against a dead - line, when "dead" not just a figure of speech
It was probably in late October 1940 , induced by the strain of setting up the world's first ever use of penicillin-the-antibiotic, that Dr Martin Henry Dawson began his long slow slide into a terminal case of MG (Myasthenia Gravis).
A Canadian study had only recently determined
that a sufferer from MG at that time lived an average of four and a half years.
Some lived much longer --- some much less.
However a rational individual , such as Dr Dawson was, would say he had till late April 1945 to live out his life.
He was proved exactly right - dying April 27th 1945.
I can't say he died happy, but I can speculate he didn't die unhappy .
Dawson lived just long enough to have the highly skeptical medical community around the world accept his claim that (systemic) (naturally-grown penicillin) (can cure SBE) --- yes, even the toughest cases of this hitherto invariable fatal disease more formally known as Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis.
I have written before of the jaw-dropping fact that by 1950, just five short years later, it was widely agreed that SBE had become, to quote Dr Charles Friedberg in the world famous medical journal JAMA, "the most common form of heart disease that can be cured."
In early 1945, as Dawson lay dying, with his labours just completed, he won his race by the narrowest of margins.
JAMA , house organ of the American Medical Association (AMA) finally agreed to feature his long article on his four and half year battle - against his colleagues, his own government and his own body - to offer up "PROOF OF CONCEPT" on his bold claims.
Because he actually made three different, equally bold, claims.
He said the incurable SBE could be cured.
He said penicillin was much better as a systemic antibiotic, if people would only try it, than it ever was as Alexander Fleming's topical antiseptic.
Finally, and most boldly by far, he said naturally grown penicillin , grown by trillions of incredibly tiny little biotech factories called unicell fungi , would be cheaper, better, more available than anything chemists might be able to synthesize.
He said that the big wartime projects of MOdernity's 'Chemical Man' are not inevitably smarter than the efforts put for by the smallest and weakest members of Life.
In 1945 that offered up a stinging rebuke to the entire civilized world.
It was a sting felt never more strongly that in Germany, home of Modernist Chemistry, which had recently put its chemistry to its most spectacular use ever --- in the steam baths of Auschwitz.
He was proven right, then, on all three points and is still right today.
Dawson's decision to work with Nature, not against her, and work with Nature's 's weakest beings to save humanity's weakest beings, was COmmensality at its finest.
His battle to save a handful of SBE patients (judged to be the lowest of the low , the 4Fs of the 4Fs, during a war effort focussed on 1A soldiers) moved an older couple in Brooklyn New York .
They had lost a daughter in the age before Dawson introduced antibiotics into a doubting world.
The husband, egged on by his wife, resolved to do something about it.
At that time he was the boss of a medium sized company that was best known for making citric acid for the soda pop industry.
He would stick that company's neck way out on the line and gamble big on Dawson's claim that the tiny little penicillin factories could do the job better, faster, cheaper, safer, than anything American's chemists could come up with.
Once he made that decision he went all out - like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stockbroker Dodds in the short story, "A Shadow Before" , he became a bear in a bull stock market .
If his gamble failed - and all the betting money said it would - his firm would be ruined.
But Oh ! If it succeeded !
If it succeeded, penicillin would arrive just in time, after all, for the expected heavy casualties of D-Day and just in time for the millions of people around the world dying of infectious diseases as a result of years of wartime malnutrition.
His firm would smothered in thanks and drowned in profits.
That man, John L Smith, was proven right by Dawson and his firm, Pfizer, never did look back from that decision.
For Dawson, his race against a dead-line was a personal race --- to prove up his concept, against fierce resistance from his body and his government, before he himself was - dead.
On the same tiny island (Manhattan), in the same time period
(WWII) , at the same university (Columbia), there was another much better known race against a deadline.
This dead-line was peace - the end of the war.
If the war ended before the Manhattan Project offered up its "PROOF OF CONCEPT" by successfully wiping out a city filled with people and factories, the atomic bomb would die still born - billions spent but the bomb never used.
After all, billions were spent on poison gas and germ warfare yet none of it was ever used.
Because along with Peace came massive spending cuts on war projects.
All that research money would vanish forever, at war's end - unless there was PROOF OF CONCEPT of this untried super weapon.
It was this, not the fear of a Nazi Atomic Bomb, which had vanished in Britain or Russia by the Fall of 1942 and not incidentally both were the enemies of Germany most likely to be on the dying end of a German A Bomb, which actually drove the American Manhattan Project.
The dead in this dead-line was 100,000 dead civilians : PROOF OF CONCEPT personified in ash and traces on the concrete.
This cold callous mental calculation, by scientists as well as military men, was MOdernity at its very worst.
So, two parallel but totally different races against dead - lines , operating a few hundred metres apart from each other in Harlem : MOdernity versus COmmensality.
Now there's a story !
A Canadian study had only recently determined
that a sufferer from MG at that time lived an average of four and a half years.
Some lived much longer --- some much less.
However a rational individual , such as Dr Dawson was, would say he had till late April 1945 to live out his life.
He was proved exactly right - dying April 27th 1945.
I can't say he died happy, but I can speculate he didn't die unhappy .
Dawson lived just long enough to have the highly skeptical medical community around the world accept his claim that (systemic) (naturally-grown penicillin) (can cure SBE) --- yes, even the toughest cases of this hitherto invariable fatal disease more formally known as Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis.
I have written before of the jaw-dropping fact that by 1950, just five short years later, it was widely agreed that SBE had become, to quote Dr Charles Friedberg in the world famous medical journal JAMA, "the most common form of heart disease that can be cured."
In early 1945, as Dawson lay dying, with his labours just completed, he won his race by the narrowest of margins.
JAMA , house organ of the American Medical Association (AMA) finally agreed to feature his long article on his four and half year battle - against his colleagues, his own government and his own body - to offer up "PROOF OF CONCEPT" on his bold claims.
Because he actually made three different, equally bold, claims.
He said the incurable SBE could be cured.
He said penicillin was much better as a systemic antibiotic, if people would only try it, than it ever was as Alexander Fleming's topical antiseptic.
Finally, and most boldly by far, he said naturally grown penicillin , grown by trillions of incredibly tiny little biotech factories called unicell fungi , would be cheaper, better, more available than anything chemists might be able to synthesize.
He said that the big wartime projects of MOdernity's 'Chemical Man' are not inevitably smarter than the efforts put for by the smallest and weakest members of Life.
In 1945 that offered up a stinging rebuke to the entire civilized world.
It was a sting felt never more strongly that in Germany, home of Modernist Chemistry, which had recently put its chemistry to its most spectacular use ever --- in the steam baths of Auschwitz.
He was proven right, then, on all three points and is still right today.
Dawson's decision to work with Nature, not against her, and work with Nature's 's weakest beings to save humanity's weakest beings, was COmmensality at its finest.
His battle to save a handful of SBE patients (judged to be the lowest of the low , the 4Fs of the 4Fs, during a war effort focussed on 1A soldiers) moved an older couple in Brooklyn New York .
They had lost a daughter in the age before Dawson introduced antibiotics into a doubting world.
The husband, egged on by his wife, resolved to do something about it.
At that time he was the boss of a medium sized company that was best known for making citric acid for the soda pop industry.
He would stick that company's neck way out on the line and gamble big on Dawson's claim that the tiny little penicillin factories could do the job better, faster, cheaper, safer, than anything American's chemists could come up with.
Once he made that decision he went all out - like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stockbroker Dodds in the short story, "A Shadow Before" , he became a bear in a bull stock market .
If his gamble failed - and all the betting money said it would - his firm would be ruined.
But Oh ! If it succeeded !
If it succeeded, penicillin would arrive just in time, after all, for the expected heavy casualties of D-Day and just in time for the millions of people around the world dying of infectious diseases as a result of years of wartime malnutrition.
His firm would smothered in thanks and drowned in profits.
That man, John L Smith, was proven right by Dawson and his firm, Pfizer, never did look back from that decision.
For Dawson, his race against a dead-line was a personal race --- to prove up his concept, against fierce resistance from his body and his government, before he himself was - dead.
On the same tiny island (Manhattan), in the same time period
(WWII) , at the same university (Columbia), there was another much better known race against a deadline.
This dead-line was peace - the end of the war.
If the war ended before the Manhattan Project offered up its "PROOF OF CONCEPT" by successfully wiping out a city filled with people and factories, the atomic bomb would die still born - billions spent but the bomb never used.
After all, billions were spent on poison gas and germ warfare yet none of it was ever used.
Because along with Peace came massive spending cuts on war projects.
All that research money would vanish forever, at war's end - unless there was PROOF OF CONCEPT of this untried super weapon.
It was this, not the fear of a Nazi Atomic Bomb, which had vanished in Britain or Russia by the Fall of 1942 and not incidentally both were the enemies of Germany most likely to be on the dying end of a German A Bomb, which actually drove the American Manhattan Project.
The dead in this dead-line was 100,000 dead civilians : PROOF OF CONCEPT personified in ash and traces on the concrete.
This cold callous mental calculation, by scientists as well as military men, was MOdernity at its very worst.
So, two parallel but totally different races against dead - lines , operating a few hundred metres apart from each other in Harlem : MOdernity versus COmmensality.
Now there's a story !
Monday, March 12, 2012
Thumbing their nose at MODERNITY.....
During WWII (the very apogee of MODERNITY) in New York City (the very epicenter of Modernity) , a dying doctor and his few square feet of Mother Nature quietly thumbed their nose at MODERNITY...
.... and changed our whole world, for the better, for ever.
Homegrown, natural , systemic penicillin is Dr Martin Henry Dawson's practical legacy, leading on from his insights into the commensal nature of Life that is his scientific legacy.
That same university on Manhattan Island ( Columbia) that Dawson worked at all during those war years, was also home to the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Bomb.
Columbia University thus was home to the Twentieth Century's biggest high tech disaster and its smallest low tech triumph : home to the stories of the Little Boy Bomb and the Baby Girl Patty Malone: the nadir and the apogee of Twentieth Century Humanity.
Sometimes Fact truly is stranger than Fiction ever could be...
.... and changed our whole world, for the better, for ever.
Homegrown, natural , systemic penicillin is Dr Martin Henry Dawson's practical legacy, leading on from his insights into the commensal nature of Life that is his scientific legacy.
That same university on Manhattan Island ( Columbia) that Dawson worked at all during those war years, was also home to the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Bomb.
Columbia University thus was home to the Twentieth Century's biggest high tech disaster and its smallest low tech triumph : home to the stories of the Little Boy Bomb and the Baby Girl Patty Malone: the nadir and the apogee of Twentieth Century Humanity.
Sometimes Fact truly is stranger than Fiction ever could be...
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
God Knows What Henry Dawson,Robert Pulvertaft,Rudy Schullinger,Frank Queen And Jim Duhig Did With Penicillin...
... and now you are about to find out as well.
There have been many,many books written about PHASE I Penicillin : about the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming.
( And not enough books written as to why it then lay about unused for 12 years...)
Similarly there have been many books and articles written about PHASE II penicillin : the scientific research and development of penicillin by Howard Florey.
Supporters of both men have spent the 75 years ever since, fighting in print over which one deserves the most glory.
Very little - or nothing - has been written of PHASE III penicillin.
('Agape penicillin').
'Agape penicillin' occurred when a few isolated individuals gave their arm and heart and brain - and sometime even their life - not to discovering or researching penicillin, but simply to using penicillin to save lives.
Saving lives with penicillin as fast and as hard as they could, with whatever penicillin they could make or take, regardless of its 'purity' or lack there of.
Since no one else is writing their story, I am.
My qualifications are not that I am a doctor or scientist or even a published author.
It is simply that I am a former 'penicillin patient' (and aren't we all ?).
As such I care greatly about the stories of the first all-out efforts to take penicillin out of the science lab, to put it to work, inside patients, saving lives.
This is a book oriented towards readers who are or were patients receiving antibiotics, written by a former patient, rather than a book written by a scientist, academic or professional author.
If 'amateur author' means a book written out of love and gratitude , then I am an amateur for sure.
I started thinking about writing this book in 2005, in reaction to the aftermath to the events of 9/11. A lot of people - not just Moslems - seemed down on Manhattan, mostly for its global financial influence and partly for its part in the development of nuclear weapons during World War Two.
I decided the world needed to be reminded that not everything Manhattan did between 1941 and 1945 led to more killing and suffering.
TWO MANHATTAN PROJECTS:
The Manhattan Project had many connections to Manhattan Island and the surrounding Greater New York City area - as did the 'agape penicillin' project.
But the Manhattan Project leading to nuclear warfare was one of the biggest projects (in terms of money and manpower) - and certainly the best known, of all the projects of World War Two.
By contrast, the 'agape penicillin' project was one of the smallest and least known projects during the war.
Think of it, perhaps, as Manhattan's other Project.
If size matters to you above all else, this isn't likely to interest you.
But the 'agape penicillin' story is a truly epic story of courage arising above adversity to change our world forever, for better.....
There have been many,many books written about PHASE I Penicillin : about the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming.
( And not enough books written as to why it then lay about unused for 12 years...)
Similarly there have been many books and articles written about PHASE II penicillin : the scientific research and development of penicillin by Howard Florey.
Supporters of both men have spent the 75 years ever since, fighting in print over which one deserves the most glory.
Very little - or nothing - has been written of PHASE III penicillin.
('Agape penicillin').
'Agape penicillin' occurred when a few isolated individuals gave their arm and heart and brain - and sometime even their life - not to discovering or researching penicillin, but simply to using penicillin to save lives.
Saving lives with penicillin as fast and as hard as they could, with whatever penicillin they could make or take, regardless of its 'purity' or lack there of.
Since no one else is writing their story, I am.
My qualifications are not that I am a doctor or scientist or even a published author.
It is simply that I am a former 'penicillin patient' (and aren't we all ?).
As such I care greatly about the stories of the first all-out efforts to take penicillin out of the science lab, to put it to work, inside patients, saving lives.
This is a book oriented towards readers who are or were patients receiving antibiotics, written by a former patient, rather than a book written by a scientist, academic or professional author.
If 'amateur author' means a book written out of love and gratitude , then I am an amateur for sure.
I started thinking about writing this book in 2005, in reaction to the aftermath to the events of 9/11. A lot of people - not just Moslems - seemed down on Manhattan, mostly for its global financial influence and partly for its part in the development of nuclear weapons during World War Two.
I decided the world needed to be reminded that not everything Manhattan did between 1941 and 1945 led to more killing and suffering.
TWO MANHATTAN PROJECTS:
The Manhattan Project had many connections to Manhattan Island and the surrounding Greater New York City area - as did the 'agape penicillin' project.
But the Manhattan Project leading to nuclear warfare was one of the biggest projects (in terms of money and manpower) - and certainly the best known, of all the projects of World War Two.
By contrast, the 'agape penicillin' project was one of the smallest and least known projects during the war.
Think of it, perhaps, as Manhattan's other Project.
If size matters to you above all else, this isn't likely to interest you.
But the 'agape penicillin' story is a truly epic story of courage arising above adversity to change our world forever, for better.....
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