WWII as apogee AND nadir of Modern Science....

The night 'the music died' began when the young pilot of the small plane that Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens were in, misread an instrument and thought he was climbing above a storm when he was really going full blast down into the ground.

Various Modern scientists (and their shills the science 'journalists' , ie editors) might be considered to have done something very similar to that unfortunate pilot.

They mis-read the Atomic Energy fire-bombing of civilians, the mass production of cheap Natural Penicillin and Auschwitz's gas chambers and frugal use of the resulting dead humans as furnace fuel and for soap as triumphs - rather than failures - of Physics, Chemistry and Biology.

The Americans had thought the future of aerial bombing was the Norden bombsight's ability to accurately drop a bomb in a pickle barrel from 15,000 feet, not the ability of an atomic bomb to burn out an entire city, all in an effort to destroy that city's  single navy arsenal.

The British had thought the best, cheapest, quickest way to provide penicillin was to have chemists synthesize it in big chemical factories - but they ended up waiting upon tiny fungal factories (in far off America, to boot ) to do it all by hand.

The Germans had hoped for more positive eugenic activities east of Germany : the Master Plan East talked of settling happy, hard-working, clean, pure German peasants-soldiers on the new eastern agrarian frontier , producing huge wheat crops and guarding the border.

But few German peasants actually wanted to move into an area contested by partisans and Soviet troops.

 So as a result, Hitler quickly told his supporters that 'we actually went to war with Russia so we could totally eliminate (negative eugenics) all the Jews from Europe, once and for all'.

Plan Bs (nadir) glibly sold as Plan As (apogee) : I doubt if even used car salesmen could match the chutzpah of the scientists...

May 10 2013 POSTSCRIPT :

Re-reading this blog post, I realized that I hadn't specifically indicated that the A-Bombing of Hiroshima and the triumph of natural Penicillin occurred so close to the end of the war in 1945, that they share both a wartime and postwar time space.

The end of WWII also revealed another Plan B to to the Plan B (Auschwitz) of the wartime German genetic community.

 Oswald Avery's 1944 reductionist discovery that the chemical molecule DNA was the basis for all the genes (including the long reputed ones for  alcoholism and criminality, etc, etc) had been mostly ignored.

But it was suddenly taken up with particular renewed intensity with the revelations that Auschwitz was the end result of all the prewar German genetic efforts.

Particularly by the many active Jewish geneticists :  like all geneticists, they still held that Free Will barely existed, except among scientists, and that we were largely captives to our forebearers' genes.

But the word DNA seemed offer a way to carry on the good bits of the German prewar genetic program, but minus the gas chambers and under a new name.

Hitler,Tojo,Norden's big error: trusting HIGH SCHOOL Physics..

   Traditional High School level physics is, at best, only "sorta" okay.
   But only if you agree to do no more with it, than to follow someone else's orders and to keep your mouth shut and your pen capped.
   Shut and capped on the application of HS physics to any other world outside its proper - and severely limited - sphere.

   But you really need a couple of Physics degrees and lots of maturity (and lots of post-doc discussions with your elders), before you are fit to talk up the limitations of all traditional (Newtonian) physics, not just HS physics, to any areas outside of things like bridge-building and chemical plant operating.
   Some metaphors from the world of popular music making might make the reasons a little clearer.
   Anyone who has ever played or sung popular music - or even just read about or hung about people who have - knows about the echo button and the reverb button.
   We may be limited to knowing just what they sound like and how they differ. But real musicians & singers, real record and film producers, must be able to buy those effects successfully and economically.
  Quickly they discover that any price point echo equipment will do the job - the cheapest ,oldest equipment even have their own (un-natural but charming) uses.
   But cheap reverb simply sounds bad. And as your music making ears get more acute , even highly expensive reverb sounds bad.
   And not just bad - unlike the few obvious and reliable controls on an inexpensive echo unit, the expensive reverb unit has many many controls that collectively can unpredictably veer from acceptably okay to horribly awful, at the mere touch of a dial.
   Professionally-oriented musicians and producers are finally forced to learn a little physics to make sense of it all.
   Echo, they learn, is a simple audio event, so simple in fact that high school physics students could and perhaps should, replicate it with a freeware, software, digital audio editor.
   Record your voice - copy the sound and paste it forward on the editor screen (a metaphor for actually moving it forward in time by a few dozen thousands of a second (milliseconds) ).
   Reduce the copy's volume relative to the original, and filter off some of the treble.
  Voila ! A perfect echo - indistinguishable from one we can make in a cave.
   Newton or Norden - maybe even Hitler - would have recognized what HS physics has done: solved a two body problem.
   Body A, our voice, hits the cave's very distant wall and causes Body B, the wall, to reflect our voice back to us , but delayed by the distance (in space and time) between us and the wall and the return.
   The effect is echo : the sound of our own voice in our ear, followed by tiny fraction of a second later, by an echo of our voice, reduced in volume and in brightness by the sound wave weakening itself as it passed from atom to atom, trillions of times over.
   This is High School and University Undergraduate Physics in a nutshell - or rather a cave, a sort of Plato's cave in fact.
   We come away after completing the course and going on with our lives, outside the real world of full time professional physics, think life is really like that : just two bodies,mechanical, linear, determinist cause and effect: life as clockwork.
   But Reality in fact is mostly like the weather - or reverb - its a three body (IE multiple, maybe trillions upon trillions) problem.
   Echo is simple because the distantly returning echo is too weak
upon finally reaching other walls to do more than die there as heat - standing in, incidentally, as proof of the Second Law of Thermodynamics --- the idea that all energy inevitably degrades down to useless low temperature 'heat' .
   But in most buildings, the walls are close enough and hard enough to reflect back echo, but not 100.00000000000000000%
perfectly. There is a slight angle to the return: north south east west - it doesn't matter.
  That means the earliest outgoing re-echo doesn't die in destructive interference with its incoming later original self.
  Instead it hit the other wall and again is deflected slightly off angle in random fashion, dependent ultimately on how smooth the paint or plaster job is - and to air molecules and sound waves, it is never smooth enough.
   In milliseconds, the voice sound - a three dimensional wave remember - a sort of bubble of sound, is reflecting back from all angles and interfering and re-enforcing echos in a madly complex but very ear-satisfying manner that we call reverb.
   It took hundreds of the world's best physicists, working decades, with the best computer equipment at their disposal, to create an approximately acceptable form of reverb artificially.
  Even mass produced, the best of that approximately good artificially-produced reverb still costs tens of thousands of dollars.
  And actually, it is semi-artificially produced - the creators of the best reverb systems simply copy (sample) what Nature produces, without in fact knowing how to recreate those effects themselves 'from first principles'.
   For reverb, substitute the weather in four days time or the climate in four decades time : issues that are vital to our species' survival and yet madly complex beyond any amount of HS physics.
   By contrast, one feels that Hitler  felt that the so called 'fog of war' was all baloney : the science of war was actually more like Newton's planetary motion than it was like predicting the weather.
   So he moved little wooden counters on his war maps as if they were points, masses and forces on some half-remembered HS physics chalkboard.
   Body A (a wooden counter labelled Army Group Centre) was
moved by a wooden stick to Body B (a wooden counter labelled Moscow defenses) and Voila !
  The job was done : cause and effect, linear war.
  Army group A inevitably caused the effect upon Body B of entrapment and surrender : QID !
   In reality, there were three (and more bodies) actually playing at this two body game.
    Counters labelled "earlier-than-expected Fall rains and muddy roads" and "colder-than-expected-Winter-temperatures" also wanted to have their say.
   Once they had their say and had turned simple HS physics echo into highly complex reverb, the jig - as they say - was up.
   Up for Hitler, up for Tojo, up for Norden, up for Newton and above all - up for Modernity....

NORDEN Modernity versus GEOSMIN Commensality

Michael Marshall

Do you remember the most famous scene in THE THIRD MAN movie?

(It is usually on somebody's top ten films of all time list.)

The villain HARRY LIME ,standing in for the Devil , takes the naive narrator HOLLY MARTINS to the top of Vienna's famous Ferris Wheel.

 Lime tells Martins that from this height, all the people in the world look ant-sized and that's all they're worth - ants to be crushed.

 'So Martins, why get all upset about a few kiddies dying from my adulterated penicillin --- just look the other way and go with the flow.'

(Harry Lime's diluted penicillin fails to save children with MENINGITIS whose lives could have been readily saved  - but only if enough Penicillin "G" is injected into them right away.

The fact that Pfizer chief "John L"  Smith's daughter had earlier died of meningitis that Martin Henry Dawson said his naturally grown penicillin could have cured, was probably the number one,two and three reasons we got WWII penicillin before D-Day ---- and not two years later.)

But in the movie, Martins, rather like Jesus, doesn't accept the 'high level' bribe and later on sets up Lime for his doom.

I often think of Harry Lime whenever I think of the men peering into the NORDEN BOMBSIGHT in some Allied bomber, coolly preparing to exact collective punishment on some enemy or occupied civilian population from 15,000 feet.

At that height, people aren't even ant-sized - they are bacteria or fungi sized - invisible.

Japanese microbes at Hiroshima.

When these people burn to death from your bombs, you don't hear their screams or smell their burning flesh.

Murder - Pierre-Simon Laplace style - from a remote outsider/ observer's position, coolly peering through the glass before pushing the button.

Like the way they did it as Auschwitz as well.

The overmen killing off the undermen , like ants under one's feet.

MARTIN HENRY DAWSON had his war too, but it was not a few hours spent at 15,000 feet above the ground --- he lived it from a position 5 feet below the ground, for months at a time - in a WWI trench.

Here the always present smell of the Earth was mixed with the smell of dead men and dead horses, feces and old mustard 'gas' .

You couldn't help hearing men from the raiding parties scream out their last on the barbed wire of No Man's Land or avoid seeing conrade's headless bodies still upright beside you - while their heads flew off to serve as a projectile to kill some other poor sod.

Here you saw Nature close up and raw - sunrise creeping up, sunset going down - rain, wind, midday heat - all the elements of the weather chilled your bones and soaked your clothes.

The most famous artwork from that war was a humble cartoon - it has two Tommies in a crude foxhole, trying to survive an intense bombardment.

One guy isn't happy about their chances in that particular hole - but the other says in effect, look around, shells exploding everywhere above ground - yes we're like rats in a hole in the earth, but its secure from all but a direct hit so, "if you know a better 'ole - go to it !"

We're like that today - we're stuck here on a crumbling Earth and some guy has the bright idea that life would be better if NASA flew all of us off to Mars or something.

I hope I speak for you when I say, "go ahead sonny - if you think you know a better 'ole, then go to it - I am staying here and muddling through".

I can smell the Earth and I like it - and its all we've got.

Commensality in the Trenches ????

It multiplied in the trenches - your mates - and the rats - were as close as girlfriends back home - and body lice were so plentiful that they literally changed the color of your skin by their massed presence there.

And above all you could smell your ever present commensal companions, the fungi and bacteria, in the soil all around you.

You know that smell of freshly turned soil we sometimes smell after a rain ?

 We also can smell it on grapes/wine or in  beets or in the flesh of catfish.

Some love it, call it 'earthy' ; others hate it and call it 'musty/moldy'.

But all humans can smell it - at levels as few as a few parts per trillion.

For some reason it is a critical smell to our survival.

Here is maybe one reason why:

When an infantryman hugs the earth, literally, trying to survive, he knows that of all his tools for survival it is his entrenching shovel and a few feet of soil around him that is a better protector of his personal safety than his side's tanks, artillery or bombers.

He loves the smell of the soil that his shovel has freshly turned over.

That smell is called GEOSMIN : think of it as geos min ,literally meaning 'earth smell'.

It is produced, mostly, by bacteria that live together with fungus in the soil.

 They look and act a lot like fungus but aren't.

In fact the fungi probably copied them not the other way around.

We tend to lump both together and call them mold - and this is not too inaccurate - because they both do much the same thing from a lay person's point of view.

Those bacteria are the streptomyces - the soil lovers that directly produce much of the world's antibiotics - and produce most of the rest indirectly - by transferring the crucial genes to make penicillin to the penicillium fungus about 370 million years ago.

The soil fungus and the streptomyces bacteria grow by joining together as filamentous multi-celled super organisms.

Not exactly like a human multi-celled organism - these guys, particularly the bacteria, remain semi-independent in the sense that all continue to reproduce themselves by cloning.

So a trillion bacteria or fungus cells in a teaspoon each with potentially different DNA - because they are designed to be unstable genetically - producing many similar but slightly different offspring.

Even the fungus offspring don't always combine their DNA sexually like we do , instead they sometimes exchange some of their DNA with each other - horizontally - as well as with other non-fungus beings near by.

The filamentous (thread-like) nature of these soil creatures - dozens of feet of incredibly tiny threads of life in each tiny colony - allows them to find nutrients in every nook and cranny in a nutrient poor world .

The competing filamentous strands of bacteria and fungi mean they lie together in extensive,intimate, personal contact - allowing both to make the most of the very rare opportunities to exchange DNA between the seeming wide divide between the animal kingdom (fungus) and the bacteria kingdom.

(Wide if you believe Darwin and his fans - but I don't.)

Dawson worked hard at Bacterial Transformation (aka horizontal gene transfer) (aka recombinant DNA), from 1928 to 1933 at least, long before the rest of science ever did.

 But I doubt that even he knew for sure that the penicillin he worked with from 1940 to 1945 was the result of  some earlier Bacterial Transformation experiments ----done by the microbes themselves !

But he might have suspected something - he knew that Selman Waksman at nearby Rutgers University had already shown that these soil bacteria produced a lot of antibiotic materials while it was rare to see antibiotics from fungus in general - except for the fungi closest in lifestyle to the soil bacteria.

Commensality between fungus and bacteria in the soil gave us penicillin.

No, I stand corrected.

It was Dawson's openness to those moldy musty smells, from his World War One trench experiences 25 years earlier, that brought penicillin out of the trench and into the hospital ward.

I mean that not as a metaphor but as reality : penicillium and streptomyces are found in the earth, literally in the trenches.

And just as the earth once acted as a barrier to shell fragments and saved many an infantryman's life during WWI, now trench earth bacteria and fungus gave us antibiotics to again save the infantryman in WWII , if he was hit by a shell fragment.

Dawson saw the war and the world down at ground level, at the level of the MOS 745 - the bog ordinary Grunt,GI or Tommy,  not from some Olympian Height of indifference.

 And this is why he gave his life, so some bog ordinary 4F patients and 4F grunts could live....