Seemingly not an attractive choice is it but most people learned to take in all in stride as long as you weren't too blatant about it.
Most people during WWII had to make do with semi-purified fungus excrements (aka penicillin) injected into them.
An unlucky few got the penicillin extracted (sic) from the urine of men with VD at the Marine Hospital on Staten island who had just received penicillin.
From 40 to 60% of the original penicillin injected into us, leaves in our urine four hours later, completely unharmed.
The extraction was supposedly very simple, according to Dr LH Sophian, admittedly a very well regarded medical scientist.
(Basically making the urine even more acid by adding very strong HCL acid and then adding some acetone and chilling the mix in a fridge for 4 hours and then separating penicillin from acetone into water) and yielded up to 30% of the 40%-60% excreted.
That is 12% to 18% of the original penicillin.
But I doubt that the result could have been as pure as the original penicillin, itself already pretty impure.
Because if the result was at all pure, given such a supposedly easy extraction method, all the Allies' wartime drug industry would be busy extracting penicillin this way, on a commercial basis.
And very odd, when for 20 years the world's doctors and scientists were united in being repulsed by the mere thought of injecting natural fungus piss into humans, they said nothing about the idea of injecting VD filled "piss penicillin" into the same human veins...
Showing posts with label natural penicillin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label natural penicillin. Show all posts
Saturday, August 29, 2015
Saturday, August 22, 2015
The OTHER Manhattan Project : Dawson's "Small is Bountiful"
In 1940, the scientific maxim on everyone's lips was hardly "small is bountiful" and "we must protect biodiversity and the gene pool at all costs".
Instead it was "bigger is better" --- who can forget the Thirties absolute mania for breaking records of all sorts and for seeking ever bigger dams, bridges, factories, tanks, battleships, bombers, science projects, what have you.
The Universe, as was known in 1940, was certainly doing its part --- it had started off very small and very hot and very active and would end up someday very big, very cold and very inactive.
A clearly negative example for the case that "bigger is better", for here bigger only meant deader.
Instead it was "bigger is better" --- who can forget the Thirties absolute mania for breaking records of all sorts and for seeking ever bigger dams, bridges, factories, tanks, battleships, bombers, science projects, what have you.
The Universe, as was known in 1940, was certainly doing its part --- it had started off very small and very hot and very active and would end up someday very big, very cold and very inactive.
A clearly negative example for the case that "bigger is better", for here bigger only meant deader.
Thursday, August 20, 2015
Martin Henry Dawson : the "Roogy Batoon" of Antibiotics AND HGT Antibiotics Resistance
As a kid in the late 1950s I just loved the book entitled The Incompleat Pogo.
Particularly the chapter that involving a pelican called Roogy Batoon successfully peddling his cure for snake bites in a snake-free swamp ("Fortunately for you, I also brought some snakes").
That riposte, along with Harold Wilson's "a week's a long time --- in politics " appealed to the cynical side of my personality.
I didn't really expect to ever come across someone real with that much chutzpah but unexpectedly, I did.
And a nicer human being you could never meet.
Particularly the chapter that involving a pelican called Roogy Batoon successfully peddling his cure for snake bites in a snake-free swamp ("Fortunately for you, I also brought some snakes").
That riposte, along with Harold Wilson's "a week's a long time --- in politics " appealed to the cynical side of my personality.
I didn't really expect to ever come across someone real with that much chutzpah but unexpectedly, I did.
And a nicer human being you could never meet.
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Hitler's Dilemma : If we liquidate all the "Primitive" how can we tell that we are the "Advanced" ?
Until the advent of fossil fuel based energy slaves, the rich and powerful needed the poor and powerless to do all the hard unpleasant jobs.
In the1860s, (interestingly parallel with the growing popular elite acclaim for Darwin's and Spencer's theories of the survival of the fittest), elites began seeing that fossil-fuel 'energy slaves' were far cheaper, far more tractable and far more moral than employing human slaves.
Perhaps, said these early utilitarian proponents of the much later Aktion T4, Eastern Hunger Plan and the Holocaust, the poor need no longer be "aways with us".
But if the Nazis and their earlier ilk all around the world had succeeded in liquidating all the weak and the poor, the defective and the asocial, how then would one be able to tell - for certain - that the healthy and the wealthy were truly so ?
For, to give but one example, the idea of 'the wealthy' can be easily shown to be a relative term, not an absolute term.
A working class European family of this the early 21st century is far far wealthier, in terms of access to (energy) slaves, money and sheer comfort, than any of the top nobility families of the 13th century.
They only seem poor, only feel poor, when they compare themselves to the families of today's top 1%.
Similarly, the most advanced human civilizations circa 1940 had so many visible shortfalls from what their members hoped and thought they were capable of, that people at this imagined top could only console themselves by saying "at least we are more civilized than X, Y, or Z" down at the bottom tiers of Life.
X, Y and Z being perhaps Australian aboriginals, slime molds and the anthrax bacteria.
Civilized and advanced are relational concepts and only make sense when matched in opposing symmetry with the uncivilized and primitive.
Destroy the bottom and where then is the top ?
But as it happens, the Nazis and other Social Darwinists never got that far.
Instead Progress's symmetry of an advanced top and a backward bottom simply collapsed when assailed from top and bottom.
In WWII, the top proved to have so many moral failings (mass bombing and gassing of the innocent) at a time when the bottom proved to have so many technical advantages (natural penicillin from the penicillium slime) that the delicate balance of the symmetry of opposites couldn't hold anymore.
So, today, it is a commonplace to say that this planet was made and sustained for the tens of thousands of ancient species of microbe and the relatively recent and single human species is but a short term parasite "just visiting" planet Earth ---- a commonplace unlike to be uttered or believed in 1940 .....
In the1860s, (interestingly parallel with the growing popular elite acclaim for Darwin's and Spencer's theories of the survival of the fittest), elites began seeing that fossil-fuel 'energy slaves' were far cheaper, far more tractable and far more moral than employing human slaves.
Perhaps, said these early utilitarian proponents of the much later Aktion T4, Eastern Hunger Plan and the Holocaust, the poor need no longer be "aways with us".
But if the Nazis and their earlier ilk all around the world had succeeded in liquidating all the weak and the poor, the defective and the asocial, how then would one be able to tell - for certain - that the healthy and the wealthy were truly so ?
For, to give but one example, the idea of 'the wealthy' can be easily shown to be a relative term, not an absolute term.
A working class European family of this the early 21st century is far far wealthier, in terms of access to (energy) slaves, money and sheer comfort, than any of the top nobility families of the 13th century.
They only seem poor, only feel poor, when they compare themselves to the families of today's top 1%.
Similarly, the most advanced human civilizations circa 1940 had so many visible shortfalls from what their members hoped and thought they were capable of, that people at this imagined top could only console themselves by saying "at least we are more civilized than X, Y, or Z" down at the bottom tiers of Life.
X, Y and Z being perhaps Australian aboriginals, slime molds and the anthrax bacteria.
Civilized and advanced are relational concepts and only make sense when matched in opposing symmetry with the uncivilized and primitive.
Destroy the bottom and where then is the top ?
But as it happens, the Nazis and other Social Darwinists never got that far.
Instead Progress's symmetry of an advanced top and a backward bottom simply collapsed when assailed from top and bottom.
In WWII, the top proved to have so many moral failings (mass bombing and gassing of the innocent) at a time when the bottom proved to have so many technical advantages (natural penicillin from the penicillium slime) that the delicate balance of the symmetry of opposites couldn't hold anymore.
So, today, it is a commonplace to say that this planet was made and sustained for the tens of thousands of ancient species of microbe and the relatively recent and single human species is but a short term parasite "just visiting" planet Earth ---- a commonplace unlike to be uttered or believed in 1940 .....
Saturday, July 18, 2015
The twenty year old effort to 'civilize' penicillin was well funded, well studied, well honoured (and a big failure ...)
By contrast, the tiny and relatively brief (less than four years) effort to win (grudging) acceptance for 'primitive' penicillin was unfunded and unsupported, received no scholarly study or public honours ---- and was a huge, world-changing, success.
Seventy five years later, annually thousands of tons of 'Primitive' penicillin are still made the good old primeval way - by incredibly tiny fungal factories - and still form the basis for almost all of our life-saving antibiotics.
"Upending" - the blog, the musical and backstory non-fiction book - tries to make amends.
For "Upending" is based around the proposition that massive success usually deserves more attention than failure, even if (particularly if ?) that failure was supported by all the Smartest Men in the Universe...
Seventy five years later, annually thousands of tons of 'Primitive' penicillin are still made the good old primeval way - by incredibly tiny fungal factories - and still form the basis for almost all of our life-saving antibiotics.
"Upending" - the blog, the musical and backstory non-fiction book - tries to make amends.
For "Upending" is based around the proposition that massive success usually deserves more attention than failure, even if (particularly if ?) that failure was supported by all the Smartest Men in the Universe...
Wednesday, July 1, 2015
If we never longer think the Sun revolves around us, we still think it shines out our ass...
Life in the Universe apparently could occur on any one about 100 billion other planets that have the exact complex mix of conditions needed.
This is called the Mediocrity Principle and it has wider application in helping reduce our ever present human hubris.
Now as it happened, Life did occur on Earth and four billion years later it is still around, for now.
But with a slight shift in the conditions here on Earth it might never have happened - or not have happened for very long.
All down to chance, luck,buddy --- what have you.
Ditto for us humans generally.
God, having an inordinate fondness for beetles, has given Earth 150,000 species and trillions of individual members.
We humans are now down to one species and 70,000 or so years ago were down to perhaps a thousand breeding couples.
Humanity as an endangered species --- like Whooping Crane.
A slight change of conditions 4 million years ago, 400,000 years ago, 40,000 years ago, tomorrow - and we'd disappear --- maybe with nothing remotely like us ever re-emerging again.
So, a fragile and near run thing, this human civilization.
Not at all like the bacteria - there at the birth of Life and still ruling the Earth , four billion years later.
If humanity is like big hunky Sumo Wrestlers with a bad news cancer checkup ever just around the corner, bacteria seem to be like small jockeys that repeatedly break bones falling off mounts and yet keep on ticking.
Meek and small and weak, they definitely seem destined to inherit the Earth ---- as humans exist stage left a few thousand or million years from now.
If we humanoids persist in thinking that we have ascended far far above our early days as apes (or more accurately as bacteria), it should be shattering to accept that we still share almost all our DNA with the chimps and our most vital and fundamental genes with the earliest bacteria.
But our egos remain shatter proof--- the Dawsonian Revolution still seems something most of us slept right through.
And as a result, anthropocentric progress is still killing this planet with the Sixth Extinction.
Hence this book ...
This is called the Mediocrity Principle and it has wider application in helping reduce our ever present human hubris.
Now as it happened, Life did occur on Earth and four billion years later it is still around, for now.
But with a slight shift in the conditions here on Earth it might never have happened - or not have happened for very long.
All down to chance, luck,buddy --- what have you.
Ditto for us humans generally.
God, having an inordinate fondness for beetles, has given Earth 150,000 species and trillions of individual members.
We humans are now down to one species and 70,000 or so years ago were down to perhaps a thousand breeding couples.
Humanity as an endangered species --- like Whooping Crane.
A slight change of conditions 4 million years ago, 400,000 years ago, 40,000 years ago, tomorrow - and we'd disappear --- maybe with nothing remotely like us ever re-emerging again.
So, a fragile and near run thing, this human civilization.
Not at all like the bacteria - there at the birth of Life and still ruling the Earth , four billion years later.
If humanity is like big hunky Sumo Wrestlers with a bad news cancer checkup ever just around the corner, bacteria seem to be like small jockeys that repeatedly break bones falling off mounts and yet keep on ticking.
Meek and small and weak, they definitely seem destined to inherit the Earth ---- as humans exist stage left a few thousand or million years from now.
If we humanoids persist in thinking that we have ascended far far above our early days as apes (or more accurately as bacteria), it should be shattering to accept that we still share almost all our DNA with the chimps and our most vital and fundamental genes with the earliest bacteria.
But our egos remain shatter proof--- the Dawsonian Revolution still seems something most of us slept right through.
And as a result, anthropocentric progress is still killing this planet with the Sixth Extinction.
Hence this book ...
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
NYC World's Fair 1939-1940 : in a world facing an an apocalyptic war, a synthetic wonderland that presumed never an apocalyptic war
In the Spring and Summer of 1945 , the few people still left alive in war-seared Belarus,Ukraine and Poland could easily spot the difference between the new-fashioned synthetic food promised at New York's 1939-1940 World's Fair and good old-fashioned natural food.
If one looked hard enough, one could still natural food growing all by itself close by - without aid of any human effort - shoots, roots, fruits and berries growing in the hidden nooks and crannies of forests and fields.
At least something to fill the aching tummies of small children until the first peacetime harvest came in.
But all those factory-made synthetic foods were nowhere to be seen.
Because their nations' factories, power poles, power plants, streetcars, roads, bridges, railways were also nowhere to be seen.
For what a high tech and globally interconnected synthetic food system unconsciously presumes is a world at peace, with open trade for all.
It sees petroleum from the Near East shipped worldwide and then turned into Japanese seafood and American burgers and British fish 'n' chips.
To give a more important and more current example of our refusal to embrace the natural as a lifeline backup : America produces no lifesaving natural penicillin, from which it then makes almost all our semi-natural antibiotics.
The natural stuff all comes from a few big brewing factories in China and India.
In the event of a war, America might once again be reduced to following wartime's Dr Martin Henry Dawson and produce the natural stuff in any available room with any old bunch of used but clean food bottles.
In a perfect world, national depositories would carefully husband ultra high yielding surface grown strains of the penicillium to guard against such an event.
But I don't have to remind you, this is no perfect world - it is a mad, profit-driven, shortsighted, greedy world ...
If one looked hard enough, one could still natural food growing all by itself close by - without aid of any human effort - shoots, roots, fruits and berries growing in the hidden nooks and crannies of forests and fields.
At least something to fill the aching tummies of small children until the first peacetime harvest came in.
But all those factory-made synthetic foods were nowhere to be seen.
Because their nations' factories, power poles, power plants, streetcars, roads, bridges, railways were also nowhere to be seen.
For what a high tech and globally interconnected synthetic food system unconsciously presumes is a world at peace, with open trade for all.
It sees petroleum from the Near East shipped worldwide and then turned into Japanese seafood and American burgers and British fish 'n' chips.
To give a more important and more current example of our refusal to embrace the natural as a lifeline backup : America produces no lifesaving natural penicillin, from which it then makes almost all our semi-natural antibiotics.
The natural stuff all comes from a few big brewing factories in China and India.
In the event of a war, America might once again be reduced to following wartime's Dr Martin Henry Dawson and produce the natural stuff in any available room with any old bunch of used but clean food bottles.
In a perfect world, national depositories would carefully husband ultra high yielding surface grown strains of the penicillium to guard against such an event.
But I don't have to remind you, this is no perfect world - it is a mad, profit-driven, shortsighted, greedy world ...
Thursday, April 9, 2015
From acorns, oaks ...
I can't speak confidently about the impact upon the adult population of the 1950s of the startling news that all the world's best lifesaving medicines were being made by tiny, weak, slimy beings.
But I can say confidently how this seemingly little detail affected one particular small child from that era : me.
Big time !
And when I grew up, it still affected me as a young adult.
And still affected me , inspired me in fact, years later when I worked - at first all alone and with very few resources - to help create Nova Scotia's first political party for environmentalists....
The tiny and the despised besting the smartest chemists in the universe
Natural products made by the despised residents of dank basements, rotting bread, jungle dirt and sewage water - not synthetic chemicals made by middle class university men in big labs in the biggest and most civilized nations of the world.But I can say confidently how this seemingly little detail affected one particular small child from that era : me.
Big time !
And when I grew up, it still affected me as a young adult.
And still affected me , inspired me in fact, years later when I worked - at first all alone and with very few resources - to help create Nova Scotia's first political party for environmentalists....
Thursday, March 19, 2015
savior of wartime Lazarus was born in a BASEMENT, not a barn
Since there are all kinds of perfectly rational explanations as to why the 'miracle' (as even admittedly atheistic scientists described life-saving natural penicillin) emerged in the times of the darkest depths of Hitler and Stalin's terror, we know that God couldn't possibly be involved, because He is irrational, right ?
Thus, as we are all agreed that the pairing of life-granting Lovecraftian penicillium slime, the lowest of the low, and mass-death-dealing war efforts of humanity's highest civilizations was just mere, sheer, pure coincidence, let us all least enjoy what a symbolic gift to narrative non fiction that coincidence really was.
For we all know that the view from the executive suite at the top of a gleaming white skyscraper was the favoured place of complacent Laplacian omniscience during Modernity, as countless art historian Powerpoint lectures have demonstrated.
So surely the mere thought of all that Lovecraftian fungal slime mysteriously oozing up on the dark dank basement walls of those same skyscrapers had to awake cosmic terrors (of which depths we can't never fully know... and still remain sane) in all those modernist minds.
For an entire secular - scientism - religion had arisen world wide, whose entire intellectual edifice rested upon the claim that the latest big and the complex at the top was always the source of all good and that the simple, small, stupid and ancient at the bottom was always the source of all evil and pestilence.
This religion - this claim - had already suffered existential doubts as the evidence of all the evils the top civilizations were capable of piled like bodies at a death camp.
Now, in addition, to discover that the only good that had ever come out of this bad news war was coming from the lowest of the low - every sense .
It was all too much : the horror, the horror !!
Thus, as we are all agreed that the pairing of life-granting Lovecraftian penicillium slime, the lowest of the low, and mass-death-dealing war efforts of humanity's highest civilizations was just mere, sheer, pure coincidence, let us all least enjoy what a symbolic gift to narrative non fiction that coincidence really was.
Gleaming white skyscrapers and ... Lovecraftian slime
For we all know that the view from the executive suite at the top of a gleaming white skyscraper was the favoured place of complacent Laplacian omniscience during Modernity, as countless art historian Powerpoint lectures have demonstrated.
So surely the mere thought of all that Lovecraftian fungal slime mysteriously oozing up on the dark dank basement walls of those same skyscrapers had to awake cosmic terrors (of which depths we can't never fully know... and still remain sane) in all those modernist minds.
For an entire secular - scientism - religion had arisen world wide, whose entire intellectual edifice rested upon the claim that the latest big and the complex at the top was always the source of all good and that the simple, small, stupid and ancient at the bottom was always the source of all evil and pestilence.
This religion - this claim - had already suffered existential doubts as the evidence of all the evils the top civilizations were capable of piled like bodies at a death camp.
Now, in addition, to discover that the only good that had ever come out of this bad news war was coming from the lowest of the low - every sense .
It was all too much : the horror, the horror !!
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
At Columbia-Cornell Medicial, pre-war modernity ain't dead yet
The website for New York City's Columbia-Cornell medical centre is finally touting the two famous universities' involvement in the triumph of wartime's natural penicillin.
So of course, the collective minds at C-C Medical choose to emphasize the project that quietly failed at their institute, not the one that succeeded beyond all measure.
For what they are really marking is wartime Cornell's failure to produce synthetic penicillin at commercial prices and in commercial grade purity.
Oh yes, they did produce incredibly small amounts of real penicillin but the yield was so tiny one might almost think it was an unexpected impurity in another process altogether.
Which in a sense it was : in chemical terms their synthesis did indeed produce a molecule, but it was not the beta lactam molecule fragment that gives penicillin and all subsequent beta lactams (still 75 years on, our major antibiotics) their ability to destroy bacteria without harming humans.
A very mixed result then for this attempt at fulfilling prewar modernity's dream of synthetic autarky.
What Columbia-Cornell has not yet honoured and will never yet honour (not until we can proclaim for sure that modernity is fully dead and buried) is that at Columbia, a small team led by Martin Henry Dawson worked in commensality with the tiny penicillium spores to create the world's first natural penicillin pilot plant.
And that on October 16th 1940, they gave the very first needlefuls of penicillin-the-antibiotic to a black lad and a Jewish lad dying from then invariably fatal SBE.
Eventually their penicillin cured SBE and prevented the disease that caused it : Rheumatic heart Disease : the leading killer of school age minority, poor and immigrant kids until the 1960s.
(Clearly not a triumph any rich donor-seeking medical centre wants to tout, obviously.)
Further : that this then led a small soda pop supplier in Brooklyn to make most of the war's penicillin by natural means - the means we still use to start the production of all the beta lactams that still dominate the world we call antibiotics.
In fact, very first signal triumph for what was to become today's huge and postmodern microbiology and microtechnology !
Shameful really...
So of course, the collective minds at C-C Medical choose to emphasize the project that quietly failed at their institute, not the one that succeeded beyond all measure.
For what they are really marking is wartime Cornell's failure to produce synthetic penicillin at commercial prices and in commercial grade purity.
Oh yes, they did produce incredibly small amounts of real penicillin but the yield was so tiny one might almost think it was an unexpected impurity in another process altogether.
Which in a sense it was : in chemical terms their synthesis did indeed produce a molecule, but it was not the beta lactam molecule fragment that gives penicillin and all subsequent beta lactams (still 75 years on, our major antibiotics) their ability to destroy bacteria without harming humans.
A very mixed result then for this attempt at fulfilling prewar modernity's dream of synthetic autarky.
What Columbia-Cornell has not yet honoured and will never yet honour (not until we can proclaim for sure that modernity is fully dead and buried) is that at Columbia, a small team led by Martin Henry Dawson worked in commensality with the tiny penicillium spores to create the world's first natural penicillin pilot plant.
And that on October 16th 1940, they gave the very first needlefuls of penicillin-the-antibiotic to a black lad and a Jewish lad dying from then invariably fatal SBE.
Eventually their penicillin cured SBE and prevented the disease that caused it : Rheumatic heart Disease : the leading killer of school age minority, poor and immigrant kids until the 1960s.
(Clearly not a triumph any rich donor-seeking medical centre wants to tout, obviously.)
Further : that this then led a small soda pop supplier in Brooklyn to make most of the war's penicillin by natural means - the means we still use to start the production of all the beta lactams that still dominate the world we call antibiotics.
In fact, very first signal triumph for what was to become today's huge and postmodern microbiology and microtechnology !
Shameful really...
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
October 1940 closing of the New York World's Fair & 'The World of Yesterday'
One can only imagine that after reading about or witnessing the exuberant optimism still omnipresent at the October 27th 1940 closing of the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair, many mommies and daddies apparently went straight to bed ... and made babies.
Lots and lots of babies.
How else to account for the world's near simultaneous Boom in Baby births a few months later in 1941---- this, after a decade of steady decline ?
All the men in their fifties and sixties designing the Fair had billed it as predicting and revealing the leading aspects of "The World of Tomorrow", the near future of the 1960s decade - a world a generation away that they didn't expect to be taking an active part in - maybe not even be alive to witness.
But, as usual in America, they did it 'all for the kiddies' .
Did it for kiddies already born and (as it turned out) zillions upon zillions of little kiddies about to be born, thanks in no small part to these planners' uplifting display of faith in the world-bending wonders of Modern Scientism.
Today we (we outside of the late night warm bathwater of all-man Fox TV) no longer display such a wide-eyed naive faith in the mind and matter altering powers of science-off-its-leash.
We see the Fair instead as the last gasp of Modernity, Modernity at its peacetime Apogee, just moments before Modernity finally got a war all of its own to play with.
The Fair displayed fully the sense that the human Will could triumph over anything the World could offer - that civilized Man could best primitive Mother Nature at anything and everything --- do it better, faster, cheaper.
But today we see lurking behind the 1940 New York Fair's massive ceramic Fountain of the Atom, promising future energy from the "atom-smashers" at NY's Columbia University that would be 'too cheap to meter', the Manhattan nuclear Project and Hiroshima and the Cuban Crisis.
Behind the synthetic autarky of Du Pont's fabulous new 'nylon' stockings and its boast that it could make anything and everything out of water air and coal ,today we see the synthetic autarky of the Nazi war machine revving up, fueled by hopes they could fight forever thanks to their synthetic petroleum made out of the same three bog-common ingredients.
And yes 1940 did also reveal yet more variants of the amazing life-saving synthetic sulfa medicines --- one of the most cherished fruits of 'living better through chemistry'.
The Nazi synthetic autarky went much further : they even saw chemistry's energy powering machines could replace the need to keep alive millions with human energy and skills.
That faith motivated their Hunger Plan East, to starve thirty million 'useless mouths' to death in western Russia, so all of her mechanized farm product could go to feed Germany and her armies instead.
(And it was the reason they felt comfortable diverting military resources to kill all nine million European Jews, even as that same war machine was starved for lack of extra civilian manpower.)
Behind the Fair's infamous rocketgun propelling passengers non-stop from New York to Europe, today we see WWII's V-2 rockets and their postwar kin, propelling nuclear mega-death 'too cheap to meter' half way around the world.
Non-stop.
But yes, we also see some of the Fair's actual predictions carried out in the 1960s.
Plastic and synthetic fabrics everywhere, near-artificial food like Wonder Bread and Tang, mechanized farms, rockets to the moon, super-highways and cars everywhere.
But that wasn't all of the Sixties - not by a long shot.
For every baby boomer enthralled with a high tech trip to the moon, another boomer was taking a low tech trek 'back to the land' , to cotton shirts, brown bread, organic farming and renewable non-polluting energy.
Could October 1940 New York have seen this - did October 1940 New York foresee this ?
I argue yes - yes it did.
For Columbia University is 'A House of Many Mansions' and on its uptown medical campus, a medical scientist was becoming less and less convinced that civilized Man had all the answers and that primitive Mother Nature had only the blank stares.
Martin Henry Dawson had first developed this idea in the 1920s and 1930s, while seeing how defensively the entire scientific world had instinctively rejected the very idea that tiny ancient primitive strep pneumonia bacteria could unerringly slice and dice genes to create new variants of itself - something that modern civilized Man could not dream of doing back then (and even now can't do unaided by bacteria).
Dawson took up the cause of what he called "bacteria transformation" and what we more generally today call HGT (horizontal gene transfer), becoming the first ever to set DNA to work in a test tube and to observe quorum sensing.
If biology rather than chemistry is the central science of the sciences today, much of the credit has to go to Dawson, because without his pioneering cheerleading efforts, HGT and DNA, along with the massive microbiology and microtechnology industries they spawned, might have died stillborn.
But now, in October 1940, Dawson sensed that some of the tiny and primitive beings of Mother Nature had more new - all natural - tricks up their sleeve that even the smartest synthetic scientist couldn't best.
He sensed that raw crude un-purified (natural) penicillin might cure diseases as well as or even better than human synthetic penicillin whenever or if ever (it never has) came along.
The analogy is how a glass of impure natural orange juice delivers a dose of vitamin C as well (and much tastier) than Tang (or a little white pill of the pure stuff) ever does.
He had a young black and a young Jewish patient before him , dying needlessly because their rheumatic heart disease (the polio of the poor) was judged unworthy of much medical research while American medicine prepared for war.
He was convinced that only penicillin and penicillin alone could save their lives (he was right).
So on October 16th 1940, just days before the Fair of the World of Tomorrow closed, Dawson opened our Age of Antibiotics, by being the first ever to inject penicillin-the-antibiotic, injected into the arms of his two patients, Aaron (Leroy) Alston and Charles Aronson.
I remember much more about my school yard bullying than about my school work as a young school kid.
But naturally, as a small kid much bullied by the big and the powerful, I remember well the takeaway lesson about small children's lives saved by antibiotics .
That lesson was that antibiotics were not made by scientific Man in some vast chemical lab, but came from tiny primitive creatures living in Mother Nature's dirtiest and most overlooked spots : basement wall slime fungus, jungle dirt and sewage outflows.
If future historians wish to look for the headwaters of postmodernity's belief in the value of the diversity of life, I suggest they look at naturally made antibiotics as a good place to start.
And that postmodern opening to the diversity of life began in October 1940, just as the prewar World of Yesterday, Modernity's Last Hurrah , was closing ..
Lots and lots of babies.
How else to account for the world's near simultaneous Boom in Baby births a few months later in 1941---- this, after a decade of steady decline ?
All the men in their fifties and sixties designing the Fair had billed it as predicting and revealing the leading aspects of "The World of Tomorrow", the near future of the 1960s decade - a world a generation away that they didn't expect to be taking an active part in - maybe not even be alive to witness.
But, as usual in America, they did it 'all for the kiddies' .
Did it for kiddies already born and (as it turned out) zillions upon zillions of little kiddies about to be born, thanks in no small part to these planners' uplifting display of faith in the world-bending wonders of Modern Scientism.
Today we (we outside of the late night warm bathwater of all-man Fox TV) no longer display such a wide-eyed naive faith in the mind and matter altering powers of science-off-its-leash.
We see the Fair instead as the last gasp of Modernity, Modernity at its peacetime Apogee, just moments before Modernity finally got a war all of its own to play with.
The Fair displayed fully the sense that the human Will could triumph over anything the World could offer - that civilized Man could best primitive Mother Nature at anything and everything --- do it better, faster, cheaper.
But today we see lurking behind the 1940 New York Fair's massive ceramic Fountain of the Atom, promising future energy from the "atom-smashers" at NY's Columbia University that would be 'too cheap to meter', the Manhattan nuclear Project and Hiroshima and the Cuban Crisis.
Behind the synthetic autarky of Du Pont's fabulous new 'nylon' stockings and its boast that it could make anything and everything out of water air and coal ,today we see the synthetic autarky of the Nazi war machine revving up, fueled by hopes they could fight forever thanks to their synthetic petroleum made out of the same three bog-common ingredients.
And yes 1940 did also reveal yet more variants of the amazing life-saving synthetic sulfa medicines --- one of the most cherished fruits of 'living better through chemistry'.
The Nazi synthetic autarky went much further : they even saw chemistry's energy powering machines could replace the need to keep alive millions with human energy and skills.
That faith motivated their Hunger Plan East, to starve thirty million 'useless mouths' to death in western Russia, so all of her mechanized farm product could go to feed Germany and her armies instead.
(And it was the reason they felt comfortable diverting military resources to kill all nine million European Jews, even as that same war machine was starved for lack of extra civilian manpower.)
Behind the Fair's infamous rocketgun propelling passengers non-stop from New York to Europe, today we see WWII's V-2 rockets and their postwar kin, propelling nuclear mega-death 'too cheap to meter' half way around the world.
Non-stop.
But yes, we also see some of the Fair's actual predictions carried out in the 1960s.
Plastic and synthetic fabrics everywhere, near-artificial food like Wonder Bread and Tang, mechanized farms, rockets to the moon, super-highways and cars everywhere.
But that wasn't all of the Sixties - not by a long shot.
For every baby boomer enthralled with a high tech trip to the moon, another boomer was taking a low tech trek 'back to the land' , to cotton shirts, brown bread, organic farming and renewable non-polluting energy.
Could October 1940 New York have seen this - did October 1940 New York foresee this ?
I argue yes - yes it did.
For Columbia University is 'A House of Many Mansions' and on its uptown medical campus, a medical scientist was becoming less and less convinced that civilized Man had all the answers and that primitive Mother Nature had only the blank stares.
Martin Henry Dawson had first developed this idea in the 1920s and 1930s, while seeing how defensively the entire scientific world had instinctively rejected the very idea that tiny ancient primitive strep pneumonia bacteria could unerringly slice and dice genes to create new variants of itself - something that modern civilized Man could not dream of doing back then (and even now can't do unaided by bacteria).
Dawson took up the cause of what he called "bacteria transformation" and what we more generally today call HGT (horizontal gene transfer), becoming the first ever to set DNA to work in a test tube and to observe quorum sensing.
If biology rather than chemistry is the central science of the sciences today, much of the credit has to go to Dawson, because without his pioneering cheerleading efforts, HGT and DNA, along with the massive microbiology and microtechnology industries they spawned, might have died stillborn.
But now, in October 1940, Dawson sensed that some of the tiny and primitive beings of Mother Nature had more new - all natural - tricks up their sleeve that even the smartest synthetic scientist couldn't best.
He sensed that raw crude un-purified (natural) penicillin might cure diseases as well as or even better than human synthetic penicillin whenever or if ever (it never has) came along.
The analogy is how a glass of impure natural orange juice delivers a dose of vitamin C as well (and much tastier) than Tang (or a little white pill of the pure stuff) ever does.
He had a young black and a young Jewish patient before him , dying needlessly because their rheumatic heart disease (the polio of the poor) was judged unworthy of much medical research while American medicine prepared for war.
He was convinced that only penicillin and penicillin alone could save their lives (he was right).
So on October 16th 1940, just days before the Fair of the World of Tomorrow closed, Dawson opened our Age of Antibiotics, by being the first ever to inject penicillin-the-antibiotic, injected into the arms of his two patients, Aaron (Leroy) Alston and Charles Aronson.
I remember much more about my school yard bullying than about my school work as a young school kid.
But naturally, as a small kid much bullied by the big and the powerful, I remember well the takeaway lesson about small children's lives saved by antibiotics .
That lesson was that antibiotics were not made by scientific Man in some vast chemical lab, but came from tiny primitive creatures living in Mother Nature's dirtiest and most overlooked spots : basement wall slime fungus, jungle dirt and sewage outflows.
If future historians wish to look for the headwaters of postmodernity's belief in the value of the diversity of life, I suggest they look at naturally made antibiotics as a good place to start.
And that postmodern opening to the diversity of life began in October 1940, just as the prewar World of Yesterday, Modernity's Last Hurrah , was closing ..
Monday, February 9, 2015
1945's Natural Penicillin - and 1945's synthetic Nuclear Weapons - birthed 1960s Environmental Movement
No one who studies the matter doubts that mid-1950s fears about global fallout was the spur to today's environmental movements (and related human rights movements) that question the value of unbridled white European technology and science.
But you will have to be very,very old indeed to accept that 1945's unexpected triumph of natural penicillin from tiny primitive basement slime over the best chemical minds and laboratories in the world hit as hard a death blow to western scientism and hubris as the fallout from 1956's Castle Bravo nuclear test ever did.
In fact, you'd have to be born in 1920 - or older - to really remember when the whole world was convinced (circa 1933 or so) that male chemists (and male physicists soon too) could and would make anything Mother Nature could make - but better, cheaper, easier.
Womb envy would disappear and Penis envy would reign erect - but only if males found any further need to keep women around.
In 1930, for example, the much honored Dr Willis Whitney, a chemist who ran one of the world's first and biggest research labs for General Electric said chemists can probably make anything they can conceive of and many things they do not yet conceive of.
Soon, for example, milk - which he described it as buggy and dirty - would be gone --- made from clean chemical elements in modern clean factories - not in dirty inefficient milk glands.
Milk - that ultimate symbol of female-only-ness - Whitney just happens to pick on it and not any of millions of other potential compounds and mixtures to focus upon.
Sheer coincidence, say most of today's male historians - still.
Now basement slime hardly seems particularly female or male or anything much to do with us humans.
But look again at the images of wartime penicillin.
Almost all the images of those tending the naturally grown penicillium fungus are women - in fact young nubile fertile working class 'girls' .
But the more chemical side of wartime penicillin shows stainless steel containers and lots of knobs and dials tended by stern faced middled aged middle class men in suits and white lab coats.
Nobel winner Peter Medawar remembers chemists semi-privately describing the idea of making live-saving penicillin naturally (with women gently nurturing the tender young fungi) as being like a return to the Middle Ages and Witches' Brews.
But human attempts to cheaply synthesis the relatively small (so thought relatively 'simple') penicillin molecule all failed during the war - and ever since.
So boomers like me grew up in the 1950s hearing that the antibiotics that had saved the lives of us children had all came from tiny bugs in jungle dirt, from sewage water or from basement slimes.
It planted a seed - I had no illusions about the wonders of chemistry growing up, the way I still did about safe cheap nuclear power for peace.
Natural penicillin helped turned this child into a young adult environmental activist.....
But you will have to be very,very old indeed to accept that 1945's unexpected triumph of natural penicillin from tiny primitive basement slime over the best chemical minds and laboratories in the world hit as hard a death blow to western scientism and hubris as the fallout from 1956's Castle Bravo nuclear test ever did.
In fact, you'd have to be born in 1920 - or older - to really remember when the whole world was convinced (circa 1933 or so) that male chemists (and male physicists soon too) could and would make anything Mother Nature could make - but better, cheaper, easier.
Womb envy would disappear and Penis envy would reign erect - but only if males found any further need to keep women around.
In 1930, for example, the much honored Dr Willis Whitney, a chemist who ran one of the world's first and biggest research labs for General Electric said chemists can probably make anything they can conceive of and many things they do not yet conceive of.
Soon, for example, milk - which he described it as buggy and dirty - would be gone --- made from clean chemical elements in modern clean factories - not in dirty inefficient milk glands.
Milk - that ultimate symbol of female-only-ness - Whitney just happens to pick on it and not any of millions of other potential compounds and mixtures to focus upon.
Sheer coincidence, say most of today's male historians - still.
Now basement slime hardly seems particularly female or male or anything much to do with us humans.
But look again at the images of wartime penicillin.
Almost all the images of those tending the naturally grown penicillium fungus are women - in fact young nubile fertile working class 'girls' .
But the more chemical side of wartime penicillin shows stainless steel containers and lots of knobs and dials tended by stern faced middled aged middle class men in suits and white lab coats.
Nobel winner Peter Medawar remembers chemists semi-privately describing the idea of making live-saving penicillin naturally (with women gently nurturing the tender young fungi) as being like a return to the Middle Ages and Witches' Brews.
But human attempts to cheaply synthesis the relatively small (so thought relatively 'simple') penicillin molecule all failed during the war - and ever since.
So boomers like me grew up in the 1950s hearing that the antibiotics that had saved the lives of us children had all came from tiny bugs in jungle dirt, from sewage water or from basement slimes.
It planted a seed - I had no illusions about the wonders of chemistry growing up, the way I still did about safe cheap nuclear power for peace.
Natural penicillin helped turned this child into a young adult environmental activist.....
Friday, February 6, 2015
distorting WWII with SOME of the facts ...
Why lie, as a historian, when you need simply instead to select a large number of widely agreed upon WWII facts from the infinitely broad and deep ocean of agreed upon facts about that war ?
To demonstrate the growth of Big Science, gentle historian, simply compare the 5 tonne Panzer I tank of 1939, with its half inch of armour and its low tech magazine loaded machine gun as its only armament with the 70 tonne Tiger II tank of 1945 with its 10 inches of armour and its ultra long barrelled ultra high velocity 88mm tank-killing gun.
Or a 1939 Fairey Battle 'bomber' to a war ending 1945 B-29 bomber.
A 1939 small and crudely adapted merchant vessel cum aircraft carrier to a huge 1945 purpose built Midway class aircraft carrier.
And so on and on.
But we need remember than 1939's extremely small and lightly built Japanese Zero fighters could still bring down massive 1945 B-29 bombers.
Or that 1890s technology torpedoes from WWI technology small coastal subs or E-boats could still sink the biggest 1945 era aircraft carrier or battleship.
A more balanced take on WWII and science-made warfare is to create a chart with 1939 at the left and 1945 at the right, but divided horizontally in the middle.
So that a steady climb left to right from 1939 to 1945 , on the top horizontal half of the chart would show the steadily increasing size of German Tanks --- but from 1939 to 1945 a line on the bottom horizontal half would also show an even steeper decline in the size of lethal anti-tank weapons, from the giant 7000 kg 88mm anti tank artillery piece of 1939 to the tiny 3 kg antitank bazooka called the Faust Patrone in 1945.
1945 and the war's end was both a triumph for BIG SCIENCE (A-Bomb, V-2 rocket etc) and small science (naturally grown penicillin, the Faust Patrone etc).
Hence postwar kids like me grew up in a totally confusing, conflicted Transitional Era , stuck midway between Modernity's Big Science and post-Modernity's small science ....
To demonstrate the growth of Big Science, gentle historian, simply compare the 5 tonne Panzer I tank of 1939, with its half inch of armour and its low tech magazine loaded machine gun as its only armament with the 70 tonne Tiger II tank of 1945 with its 10 inches of armour and its ultra long barrelled ultra high velocity 88mm tank-killing gun.
Or a 1939 Fairey Battle 'bomber' to a war ending 1945 B-29 bomber.
A 1939 small and crudely adapted merchant vessel cum aircraft carrier to a huge 1945 purpose built Midway class aircraft carrier.
And so on and on.
We need some balance
But we need remember than 1939's extremely small and lightly built Japanese Zero fighters could still bring down massive 1945 B-29 bombers.
Or that 1890s technology torpedoes from WWI technology small coastal subs or E-boats could still sink the biggest 1945 era aircraft carrier or battleship.
A more balanced take on WWII and science-made warfare is to create a chart with 1939 at the left and 1945 at the right, but divided horizontally in the middle.
So that a steady climb left to right from 1939 to 1945 , on the top horizontal half of the chart would show the steadily increasing size of German Tanks --- but from 1939 to 1945 a line on the bottom horizontal half would also show an even steeper decline in the size of lethal anti-tank weapons, from the giant 7000 kg 88mm anti tank artillery piece of 1939 to the tiny 3 kg antitank bazooka called the Faust Patrone in 1945.
1945 and the war's end was both a triumph for BIG SCIENCE (A-Bomb, V-2 rocket etc) and small science (naturally grown penicillin, the Faust Patrone etc).
Hence postwar kids like me grew up in a totally confusing, conflicted Transitional Era , stuck midway between Modernity's Big Science and post-Modernity's small science ....
Saturday, January 31, 2015
Plentitude or Plenticide : Janus Manhattan 1945
Manhattan was long regarded as Modernity's 'special' city, home to most of the world's skyscrapers (and centres of eugenic research).
But a Manhattan university campus was also the first home of Adorno & Horkheimer's modest little mimeographed effort entitled "Dialectic of the Enlightenment".
That collection of essays rather went against the grain of 1945's informed opinion, by dissing the Nazi plenticidal killing machine for being, of all things, 'Modernity on Speed'.
Thereby A&H helped birthed our present day era, without quite realizing it, simply by killing off Modernity stone cold.
But it was the Manhattan-led process that enabled natural penicillin to unexpectedly win out over modernity's efforts to create synthetic penicillin that supplied the new kid in town : plentitude, aka post-modernity...
But a Manhattan university campus was also the first home of Adorno & Horkheimer's modest little mimeographed effort entitled "Dialectic of the Enlightenment".
That collection of essays rather went against the grain of 1945's informed opinion, by dissing the Nazi plenticidal killing machine for being, of all things, 'Modernity on Speed'.
Thereby A&H helped birthed our present day era, without quite realizing it, simply by killing off Modernity stone cold.
But it was the Manhattan-led process that enabled natural penicillin to unexpectedly win out over modernity's efforts to create synthetic penicillin that supplied the new kid in town : plentitude, aka post-modernity...
Friday, January 23, 2015
WWII Columbia filters natural penicillin AND natural uranium
It is easy to see how Columbia University's two wartime Manhattan Projects differed : after all one saved countless thousands of lives while the other one caused countless thousands of deaths.
But it never hurts to consider how much they had in common - together - set against other parts of the Allied wartime nuclear and antibiotics effort.
Because, in truth, most of the top Allied physicists focused all their pride on the Washington State based efforts to artificially synthesize Plutonium to make endless amounts of nuclear bombs and nuclear energy.
They found this far more exciting than Columbia's painful war-long efforts to filter out tiny amounts of natural U-235 from its more plentiful kissing cousin natural U-238.
Similarly, the Allies' top chemists found the thought of artificially synthesized penicillin far more exciting than they did thinking about ways to aid the painful efforts to separate tiny amounts of pure natural penicillin from all other metabolites thrown up by the penicillium fungus.
(Though I must remind readers that while U-235 won't go BOOM if it remains mixed with U-238, natural penicillin - like the Vitamin C in oranges - works equally well pure or if still mixed with the rest of the penicillium juice.)
Both the natural uranium bomb and natural penicillin needle ended up being the classic understudy Plan Bs, the ones that came in at the last minute to save the Allied bacon when the synthesists failed to deliver as promised ...
But it never hurts to consider how much they had in common - together - set against other parts of the Allied wartime nuclear and antibiotics effort.
Because, in truth, most of the top Allied physicists focused all their pride on the Washington State based efforts to artificially synthesize Plutonium to make endless amounts of nuclear bombs and nuclear energy.
They found this far more exciting than Columbia's painful war-long efforts to filter out tiny amounts of natural U-235 from its more plentiful kissing cousin natural U-238.
Similarly, the Allies' top chemists found the thought of artificially synthesized penicillin far more exciting than they did thinking about ways to aid the painful efforts to separate tiny amounts of pure natural penicillin from all other metabolites thrown up by the penicillium fungus.
(Though I must remind readers that while U-235 won't go BOOM if it remains mixed with U-238, natural penicillin - like the Vitamin C in oranges - works equally well pure or if still mixed with the rest of the penicillium juice.)
Both the natural uranium bomb and natural penicillin needle ended up being the classic understudy Plan Bs, the ones that came in at the last minute to save the Allied bacon when the synthesists failed to deliver as promised ...
Thursday, January 22, 2015
Synthetics : everything and anything -- from nothing
Natural antibiotics : perhaps a something, underneath everything
As a naive little child, I was fascinated - like a white mouse before a cobra - by the audacious claims of Fifties synthetic scientists - those modern day alchemists of chemistry and physics.
From out of nothing, nothing but coal, air and water, nothing but bog ordinary atoms like silicon, they said that they could make any molecule, any mixture - even any atom - known on Earth.
Anything and everything.
More than that, they could design and create as yet unknown molecules, mixtures and elements.
Anything and everything.
All from nothing.
Captain America, synthesist and superhero.
And what then -- once they did make all these molecules & mixtures perfectly, reliably, repeatedly, cheaply over and over - out of nothing , almost nothing but abundant and cheap raw materials ?
There really won't be a need then for Mother Nature to go on making them imperfectly and with all those bothersome and unexpected irregularities would there be ?
True, synthetic production did not directly lead to the today's Sixth Extinction (Humanity's Plenticide against Nature) but it smooth the way, it did ease the human conscience.
After all, why fret over rapidly declining numbers of elephants (and their precious elephant tusks) when artificial ivory made much better, much cheaper and much more reliable billiard balls ?
The gene pool had always been way too big - way too many parasites dining off bounty that more properly belonged to Man - the sooner the pool was drained and the whole thing was sorted the better.
The Fifties Synthesist puffed their pipes in their porcelain white labs, not so quietly expecting ever-upward success for the human species .
The Miracle of Penicillin -- from the humble slime
Completely opposite in their expectations were the Willy and Joe plodders among some of the naturalist scientists of the Fifties.
Though most professed to be atheists , there was an almost old fashioned Christianity about their scientific actions and beliefs.
(Miracles & Atheists ?!)
These scientists wanted to systemically plod their way through all of Nature's bounty, patiently hoping against hope that they might find another life-saving compound like penicillin.
Their expectations weren't that great, so they wanted all of Nature to be preserved, as is, as much as humanly possible.
For even if they failed to find a new miracle today, who knew when yesterday's useless bug or weed might be tomorrow's natural treasure ?
Maybe God had produced what seemed like a trulyexcessive number of beetles as Huxley had grumbled (an estimated 400,000 separate species at last count), but perhaps God had his reasons - reasons we were not yet privy to.
And who knew what unknown natural disaster lay ahead to test the human race - a drastic climate change or deadly pandemic - when some unknown compound lurking in some dirty dark forgotten hellhole might not prove our humble savior ?
Rather than plenticide against Nature and her excessively large gene pool, these scientists took comfort in the size of her current gene pool and sought ways to see it remained as big and as varied as possible.
Against the confident synthesists, all these Fifties scientist much more modestly hoped for was that the human species might survive a little while longer.
Synthetist versus Naturalist : two wildly different takes on the human relationship to existing physical reality.
Not a perfect fit to Dunlap & McCright's Production scientist versus Impact scientist thesis but I believe suggestive none the less ...
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Manhattan '45 : Janus year (on the Janus campus) in the Janus city
Ah, yes the year 1945 : it was the best of times , it was the worst of times.
It just all very much depended on who you chose to listen to.
To the many boosters of the baby-killing/war-ending Manhattan Project (like its leader General Leslie Groves) the year had given America the potential for global mass nuclear destruction 'too cheap to meter' : a future so bright that the world's morticians would have to wear shades.
Big Science, Big Modern Science had won the war against barbarians from the pre-scientific Dark Ages. The war's successful conclusion suggested that 1945 might just be the apogee of Modernity, all its centuries of promises finally fulfilled.
But to Theodor Adorno, Hiroshima, the Katyn Forest and Auschwitz were but the signs of the inevitable collective fall of Modernity and of the Enlightenment, no matter what varied ideological flag the mods had chosen to masquerade under.
(Cue 1945 as the nadir of Modernity and the birth year of post-Modernity.)
Indeed the tiny island of Manhattan, the former wartime home of both Groves and Adorno, had much to contribute to the global dialectic stew that year.
For the Manhattan nuclear Project seemed fully capable of delivering death to the globe at wholesale rates, promising to ensure hundreds of millions or more dead at the push of a red button.
Meanwhile, Manhattan's (natural) penicillin Project had just as dramatically brought the promise of a normal life of three score and ten to hundreds of millions or more who might otherwise expect to die prematurely from bacterial infections.
So if Manhattan's blast, heat and radiation didn't get you, its naturally brewed penicillin just might save you.
And all this happened (nuclear weapons, Adorno's musings, natural penicillin) on the Janus like campus of Columbia University in that eternally Janus like city of Manhattan in the Janus like year of 1945.
Okay, Hollywood fiction meisters, do you think you can top that ?
It just all very much depended on who you chose to listen to.
To the many boosters of the baby-killing/war-ending Manhattan Project (like its leader General Leslie Groves) the year had given America the potential for global mass nuclear destruction 'too cheap to meter' : a future so bright that the world's morticians would have to wear shades.
Big Science, Big Modern Science had won the war against barbarians from the pre-scientific Dark Ages. The war's successful conclusion suggested that 1945 might just be the apogee of Modernity, all its centuries of promises finally fulfilled.
But to Theodor Adorno, Hiroshima, the Katyn Forest and Auschwitz were but the signs of the inevitable collective fall of Modernity and of the Enlightenment, no matter what varied ideological flag the mods had chosen to masquerade under.
(Cue 1945 as the nadir of Modernity and the birth year of post-Modernity.)
Indeed the tiny island of Manhattan, the former wartime home of both Groves and Adorno, had much to contribute to the global dialectic stew that year.
For the Manhattan nuclear Project seemed fully capable of delivering death to the globe at wholesale rates, promising to ensure hundreds of millions or more dead at the push of a red button.
Meanwhile, Manhattan's (natural) penicillin Project had just as dramatically brought the promise of a normal life of three score and ten to hundreds of millions or more who might otherwise expect to die prematurely from bacterial infections.
So if Manhattan's blast, heat and radiation didn't get you, its naturally brewed penicillin just might save you.
And all this happened (nuclear weapons, Adorno's musings, natural penicillin) on the Janus like campus of Columbia University in that eternally Janus like city of Manhattan in the Janus like year of 1945.
Okay, Hollywood fiction meisters, do you think you can top that ?
Monday, December 8, 2014
How to be intellectually invisible : criticize the modern era's grand narratives --- without offering up one of your own
The Modern Era (1875-1965) was very tolerant of criticisms of its rules - as long as your criticism played by those same rules.
So individual Modern intellectuals might disagree profoundly with the content of your particular grand narrative but they still greatly admired the fact that you had one.
Dozens of major ideologies - isms of all sorts and shapes - poured forth in that age - each vigorously disagreeing with all others, except for the Modern Era's one overarching grand narrative : that to make a credible critique of Modern grand narrative, one must have one as well.
It was not the time for guardedly measured criticisms : it was an age of Alpha Male ideologies and their Alpha Male critics : dream (and critique) big and bold --- or stay home.
Martin Henry Dawson differed profoundly with this world : perhaps most defiantly in denying the need for grand critiques against grand narratives.
As a result, he simply doesn't figure as an intellectual (by word and pen) critic of his era.
He was, instead, a critic by deed .
He carried on his efforts to secure life-saving penicillin for those young patients deemed by the Allied scientific cum medical establishment as lives unworthy of life-granting penicillin even at the cost of his own life.
But he succeeded in the end and his vision of penicillin-for-all, particularly during a total war in an era that denied the universality of all humanity, was to be profoundly influential in the post-Modern era.
Dawson did not destroy the Modern era - it did that mostly on its own.
But his Manhattan project (the wartime mass production and mass distribution of natural penicillin) sure helped speed it along ...
So individual Modern intellectuals might disagree profoundly with the content of your particular grand narrative but they still greatly admired the fact that you had one.
Dozens of major ideologies - isms of all sorts and shapes - poured forth in that age - each vigorously disagreeing with all others, except for the Modern Era's one overarching grand narrative : that to make a credible critique of Modern grand narrative, one must have one as well.
It was not the time for guardedly measured criticisms : it was an age of Alpha Male ideologies and their Alpha Male critics : dream (and critique) big and bold --- or stay home.
Martin Henry Dawson differed profoundly with this world : perhaps most defiantly in denying the need for grand critiques against grand narratives.
As a result, he simply doesn't figure as an intellectual (by word and pen) critic of his era.
He was, instead, a critic by deed .
He carried on his efforts to secure life-saving penicillin for those young patients deemed by the Allied scientific cum medical establishment as lives unworthy of life-granting penicillin even at the cost of his own life.
But he succeeded in the end and his vision of penicillin-for-all, particularly during a total war in an era that denied the universality of all humanity, was to be profoundly influential in the post-Modern era.
Dawson did not destroy the Modern era - it did that mostly on its own.
But his Manhattan project (the wartime mass production and mass distribution of natural penicillin) sure helped speed it along ...
Thursday, November 6, 2014
1945 was a triumph for modernity AND postmodernity
And that can't possibly be !
It would be as if Matter and Anti-Matter went through a revolving door together and yet both emerged equally triumphant.
At the time ( just after September 1945) most militarily-oriented accounts of the end of WWII certainly played the Allied victory as a win-win result for the forces of Modernity against a threatened return to a barbaric dark age --- and many military-oriented accounts of WWII still spin it that way.
'Modern Big Science (here insert radar, jets, atomic bomb and penicillin perhaps) beats back masses of fiercely barbaric atavists'.
But some prescient scholars , even in 1945 , people more attuned to changes in fashions in philosophy and to changes in deep broad cultural life certainly saw that that Dresden, Hiroshima, Auschwitz , the Katyn Forest and the Fall of Singapore had opened up breaches in the old certitudes that time and sunshine couldn't heal.
So seventy years later we can still have dozens and dozens of new books every year focussed on the meaning of the events of 1945 emerging (as it were) from two separate but parallel universes.
1945 is laid out in these parallel but widely separated streams of books as either the birth of modern Big Science and a triumph for modern progressive rational planning ---- or as the beginning of the end of the 400 year old Enlightenment Project.
First, let me make it clear that all those who saw 1945 as a triumph for Enlightenment and Modernity were sincere - and those who still hold these views are equally sincere.
But being sincere and being correct are not the same.
I see this being the result of an inevitable mental time lag between when truly philosophy-shredding events occur and when humanity correctly assesses their meaning.
During that time lag, modernity-besotted scholars can celebrate Vannevar Bush for both developing a differential analyser (basically an aiming device designed to accurately drop a shell or bomb down a pickle barrel inside a distant military plant) and for leading the development of the atomic bomb - which could miss the infamous pickle barrel by miles and still destroy the plant (and the entire city surrounding it as well).
Ouch ! What ever else these academics think they might be doing - being rationally consistent certainly isn't one of them.
Bush and the American Air Force strategic bomber proponents had claimed - for years before, during and after WWII - that the war could be quickly and humanely won by highly accurate precision bombing.
Slow but steady infantry fighting, like slow but steady democracy, they felt was simply not up for defeating absolute evils like Hitler and Tojo.
Superheroes with superweapons were needed to impose extralegal violence , all to quickly restore justice and peace.
Indeed, the American Air Force's single bomb on Nagasaki did 'quickly' end the war --- albeit six years after it began .
But Nagasaki's target aiming results could hardly be called accurate --- despite conditions being virtually ideal to demonstrate precise bombing --- if it actually existed anywhere outside its supporters' minds.
Similarly , throughout WWII Vannevar Bush thought natural penicillin was totally unfit for use as a medicine.
He pushed instead for penicillin to first become a man-made chemical synthetic before seeking wide public use, thereby delaying its mass introduction for precious years during an all-out Total War.
What he actually accepted credit for however, at war's end , was the unlikely triumph of natural penicillin.
Modernity's 1945 big triumphs, in other words, when more closely examined were actually modernity's biggest failures -- triumphs instead for postmodernity.
Hence my journal's focus on wartime Gotham and its doubly twin Manhattan Projects.
On one side of wartime Gotham's Janus face , modernity's failures to precisely craft the Carl Norden bombsight and Merck synthetic penicillin .
On the other side, postmodernity : Columbia University's 'close is good enough' Atomic bomb (and the Grumman close-in fighter-bomber) together with Pfizer/Dawson's slime-produced natural penicillin.
I think the subject matter for my journal is both a dramatic page-turner story for people who enjoy exciting narrative nonfiction - and a good time and place to look to discover when, how and why modernity failed and postmodernity climbed out of the wreckage.
Because modernity failed but didn't die - it lives on inside the minds of our climate deniers inhabiting almost all the places of power and wealth.
And unless we can make them see that their gods have failed , the future global debacle they have planned for all of us will make WWII look pretty petty ante ...
It would be as if Matter and Anti-Matter went through a revolving door together and yet both emerged equally triumphant.
At the time ( just after September 1945) most militarily-oriented accounts of the end of WWII certainly played the Allied victory as a win-win result for the forces of Modernity against a threatened return to a barbaric dark age --- and many military-oriented accounts of WWII still spin it that way.
'Modern Big Science (here insert radar, jets, atomic bomb and penicillin perhaps) beats back masses of fiercely barbaric atavists'.
But some prescient scholars , even in 1945 , people more attuned to changes in fashions in philosophy and to changes in deep broad cultural life certainly saw that that Dresden, Hiroshima, Auschwitz , the Katyn Forest and the Fall of Singapore had opened up breaches in the old certitudes that time and sunshine couldn't heal.
So seventy years later we can still have dozens and dozens of new books every year focussed on the meaning of the events of 1945 emerging (as it were) from two separate but parallel universes.
1945 is laid out in these parallel but widely separated streams of books as either the birth of modern Big Science and a triumph for modern progressive rational planning ---- or as the beginning of the end of the 400 year old Enlightenment Project.
First, let me make it clear that all those who saw 1945 as a triumph for Enlightenment and Modernity were sincere - and those who still hold these views are equally sincere.
But being sincere and being correct are not the same.
I see this being the result of an inevitable mental time lag between when truly philosophy-shredding events occur and when humanity correctly assesses their meaning.
During that time lag, modernity-besotted scholars can celebrate Vannevar Bush for both developing a differential analyser (basically an aiming device designed to accurately drop a shell or bomb down a pickle barrel inside a distant military plant) and for leading the development of the atomic bomb - which could miss the infamous pickle barrel by miles and still destroy the plant (and the entire city surrounding it as well).
Ouch ! What ever else these academics think they might be doing - being rationally consistent certainly isn't one of them.
Slow but steady infantry fighting, like slow but steady democracy, they felt was simply not up for defeating absolute evils like Hitler and Tojo.
Superheroes with superweapons were needed to impose extralegal violence , all to quickly restore justice and peace.
Indeed, the American Air Force's single bomb on Nagasaki did 'quickly' end the war --- albeit six years after it began .
But Nagasaki's target aiming results could hardly be called accurate --- despite conditions being virtually ideal to demonstrate precise bombing --- if it actually existed anywhere outside its supporters' minds.
Similarly , throughout WWII Vannevar Bush thought natural penicillin was totally unfit for use as a medicine.
He pushed instead for penicillin to first become a man-made chemical synthetic before seeking wide public use, thereby delaying its mass introduction for precious years during an all-out Total War.
What he actually accepted credit for however, at war's end , was the unlikely triumph of natural penicillin.
Modernity's 1945 big triumphs, in other words, when more closely examined were actually modernity's biggest failures -- triumphs instead for postmodernity.
Hence my journal's focus on wartime Gotham and its doubly twin Manhattan Projects.
On one side of wartime Gotham's Janus face , modernity's failures to precisely craft the Carl Norden bombsight and Merck synthetic penicillin .
On the other side, postmodernity : Columbia University's 'close is good enough' Atomic bomb (and the Grumman close-in fighter-bomber) together with Pfizer/Dawson's slime-produced natural penicillin.
I think the subject matter for my journal is both a dramatic page-turner story for people who enjoy exciting narrative nonfiction - and a good time and place to look to discover when, how and why modernity failed and postmodernity climbed out of the wreckage.
Because modernity failed but didn't die - it lives on inside the minds of our climate deniers inhabiting almost all the places of power and wealth.
And unless we can make them see that their gods have failed , the future global debacle they have planned for all of us will make WWII look pretty petty ante ...
Thursday, September 18, 2014
I'm a thinkin' : maybe its the Gotham EIGHT ?
I've always regarded the number of Gotham's 'unfits' who rescued natural lifesaving penicillin and set it free to do good as being just seven in number but now I am thinking that I was wrong.
First, the two unfit clinicians, Dr Henry Dawson and his assistant Dr Thomas Hunter.
Then three other unfits who greatly assisted them (Dawson's wife Marjorie Granger Dawson, his friend and ex-patient Floyd Odlum , and his ex-patient Dr Dante Colitti).
Finally, the two unfit patients, Charles Aronson and Ms H. H. , whose continued survival under Dawson's pioneering treatment, despite repeated setbacks, allowed the program time to finally succeed in spades.
But I now realize that these seven unfits didn't need to have gotten involved in the first place.
Not if the eighth Gotham 'unfit' , the penicillium notatum. had been accepted on its own considerable merits instead of being dismissed on sight as too small, too simple, too weak and too too disgusting.
But the God of the Modern Era (from the 1870s to the 1960s) was always on the side of the biggest battalions and the Moderns saw most of the world as being on the unworthy-of-life side of the fit/unfit question.
But they were dead wrong.
Because in fact the greatest medical blessing this world has ever seen was brought to us by a handful of unfit doctors serving unfit patients with unfit medicine.
Their unexpected victory in 1945 did not spell the immediate end of the Modern Era and the immediate rise of our present post-Modern Era.
But it certainly spelt the beginning of that end...
First, the two unfit clinicians, Dr Henry Dawson and his assistant Dr Thomas Hunter.
Then three other unfits who greatly assisted them (Dawson's wife Marjorie Granger Dawson, his friend and ex-patient Floyd Odlum , and his ex-patient Dr Dante Colitti).
Finally, the two unfit patients, Charles Aronson and Ms H. H. , whose continued survival under Dawson's pioneering treatment, despite repeated setbacks, allowed the program time to finally succeed in spades.
But I now realize that these seven unfits didn't need to have gotten involved in the first place.
Not if the eighth Gotham 'unfit' , the penicillium notatum. had been accepted on its own considerable merits instead of being dismissed on sight as too small, too simple, too weak and too too disgusting.
But the God of the Modern Era (from the 1870s to the 1960s) was always on the side of the biggest battalions and the Moderns saw most of the world as being on the unworthy-of-life side of the fit/unfit question.
But they were dead wrong.
Because in fact the greatest medical blessing this world has ever seen was brought to us by a handful of unfit doctors serving unfit patients with unfit medicine.
Their unexpected victory in 1945 did not spell the immediate end of the Modern Era and the immediate rise of our present post-Modern Era.
But it certainly spelt the beginning of that end...
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