How ironic then, that its Nobel winning slash failed efforts to produce wartime penicillin was actually an attempt to produce a form of AstroTurf - organic (chemistry) penicillin , as synthetic as plastic greenery.
By contrast , wartime New York's Gotham - at least as revealed in Super Hero comic books - was supposedly nothing but a concrete jungle.
Life-saving GREEN from Gotham concrete
But in fact, from New York's concrete, a handful of un-superheroes spurred the successful nurturing of trillions of units of natural penicillin's life-saving green .
The concrete jungle's vats and vats of fermenting greenery , before war's end, were producing more than enough natural penicillin to save all those in the world dying from infections only the life-giving mold could stop.
In the end, Oxford University's efforts only produced scientific papers , a Nobel prize and a big thick book from OUP : but no actual penicillin.
In a further irony, New York's successful efforts to produce tons of badly needed wartime penicillin did not receive any Nobel prize - or any significant historical attention at all.
But then received history is rarely as it seems , Captain - the historian's skim milk often successfully masquerades as Devon cream ....
