DNA, Penicillin & Phenology : what great works A H MacKay hath wroth

Pioneering DNA and Penicillin scientist Dr Martin Henry Dawson (1896-1945) was undoubtably Nova Scotia Superintendent of Education A H Mackay's most illustrious student.

Dawson's pioneering investigating of the hidden complexities of microbial life (HGT, quorum sensing, molecular mimicry, biofilms, natural penicillin) flew in the face of all the 'modern' wisdom of the scientists and educated public of his day.

But in the end, it paved the way for our current post modern ways of wisdom.

Dawson grew up right across the street from the Hub of Nova Scotia's public education system in downtown Truro and with his mother a teacher and his father on the school board, he could not help but do well in school, regardless of the level of his genetically given intelligence resources.

At at time (High Modernity), when all the high schools of the world were leaders among Jacob Burkhardt's "terrible simplifers", reducing all the newly uncovered complexities of reality back into a few simple Laws of Nature, Superintendent MacKay dared bucked this educational and societal trend.

Instead MacKay saw to it that all of the province's schools allowed their students to see for themselves just how complicated and varied the world really was.

He himself was a noted natural historian, publishing articles in scientific journals , despite natural history being dismissed as fit only for an an amateur hobby for under occupied rural parsons.

So he boldly supplemented the worldwide trend to spend most of the spare school tax money on equipping all high schools with shiny new white indoor laboratories.

(Dawson's own High School, being the Model High School for an entire, albeit a small and relatively poor, province, had far better - newer - scientific equipment than most of Canada and America's universities provided to their undergraduates.)

MacKay commanded that all children and teachers throughout the province had to collect datum on the timing of the seasons' naturally cyclical events, as noted on their to and from walks to school each day.

He made all these little ankle biters junior participants in the grown up science of phenology.

This science studies the interaction between a basically fixed genetic timetable for Nature to do things versus the interaction with an ever varying climate as well as other such variables such as elevation, shade and wind cover.

MacKay's very impressive data set, from almost thirty years of recording, collected by upwards of a hundred thousand students each year, is still being used to help us gauge the change in the climate over the last hundred or so years.

But that is at the macro level.

At the classroom level, down at the micro level of timing when each returning bird and plant was first seen by each school kid in the Spring, what the kids collectively saw was a constant complex variety of possibilities of timings and locations.

The program basically ran from the year of Dawson's birth (1896)to the year (1926) that he permanently departed the province for New York City and began his pioneering research at Rockefeller and Columbia Universities.

He had bathed in this natural Historical way of seeing the contingencies of reality for thirty years and when he grew up, he became a clinical investigator - constantly balancing the simplicities of artificial lab experiments against the unpredictable complexities of actual real life human patients.

At those universities,not unexpectedly, Dawson's research results revealing the overwhelming complexity of reality rather than demonstrating its supposed ability to all be reduced to a few simple laws governing the motion of atoms, were wildly unfashionable.

But today they all just seem perfectly normal.

I can't help thinking that old L.H. would be grinning from ear to ear if he woke from the dead and was suddenly dropped into any current biology conference .

'Believed at last, believed at last, Great God Almighty, believed at last' !!!!

Henry Dawson, Champion of the Second Chance ... and the Second Glance

Manhattan-based doctor (Martin) Henry Dawson championed the smallest, weakest and poorest of beings all his life.

On one hand, they were human beings, such as the institutionalized chronically ill at Goldwater Hospital.

Or discarded young people , dying needlessly from subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE).

In both cases, he wanted to give them a second chance at a near normal life in what was, after all, the famed City of the Second Chance.

On the other hand, sometimes his focus was upon microbe beings, creatures about whom it can't really be said that he wanted to ensure their continued survival - he felt they did that well enough on their own !

Instead, he merely wanted all of us to take a Second Glance at just how well these incredibly tiny ,delicate, immobile sacs of water managed against extremities of physical conditions and the potent threat of the human immune system and modern medicine.

Starting in the 1920s, he pioneered studies of their survival techniques such as HGT, Quorum Sensing, Molecular Mimicry and Biofilms : still cutting edge science even today, eighty years later.

His subtle point was that if these, the smallest of the small, can manage survival so well than perhaps small human beings and small human nations can also manage equally well, if we just let them live rather than trying to enslave and kill them in the name of  a Progress that must always be Bigger , to be Better.

The Allied governments  never one to miss a chance to match the Axis in moral turpitude , wanted wartime penicillin to remain a secret available only for the 1As - "Penicillin from New York's Cold Spring Harbour's Eugenics lab" , as it were.

The tired, poor huddled 4Fs

Dawson was equally bull-headed in wanting to see the Nazis combatted morally as well as militarily, by demonstrating just how well we looked after our tired poor and huddled 4Fs,  even during a Total War : "Penicillin from New York's Emma Lazarus", as it were.

Janus-like Manhattan tried both approaches at first ,  very  strongly favouring the eugenic approach, until a few good Manhattanites rose up in protest.

Then wartime Manhattan was revealed to also come from the Venus of love and peace as well as from the Mars of anger and war.

Finally ... a Good News Story from the Bad News War.