I well recall the very first time I first read, in the book "YELLOW MAGIC", how five gallon carboys of incredibly delicate penicillium slime effluent were daily - and carefully - taxied through NYC's hellish traffic all the way from Brooklyn to a hospital at the top of Manhattan.
All in a desperate effort to save lives and how, despite best efforts, the material often arrived destroyed and perhaps another life lost as a result.
At that moment, I shouted out to Rebecca : "MOVIE, MOVIE, MOVIE - finally a science story just made for the Big Screen !".
Too often a movie about an incredibly important science breakthrough has to compress time and 'gussy-up' the long drawn out and usually boring activities to make it dramatic enough for the camera.
But Dr Martin Henry Dawson's little Manhattan Project was a story so incredibly cinematic they would actually have to tone it down to make it seem creditable.
Others, I am sure, will make movies of Dawson's efforts (lots of movies because my writing has all been assigned to the Public Domain).
But I won't take any part in it : why set my sights so low ?
I began to see that Dawson's tale was really the tip of a much bigger story and that cinema's commitment to realism would only graze the surface of its emotional core.