Some have objected that Warren Weaver,long time chief of the Rockefeller Foundation Natural Sciences Division was one of the most astute men in American science.
I say he was a math teacher, placed in charge of allocating millions in grants devoted to discerning the 'deepest secrets of biology' and what he did not know about the basics of biology and medicine would fill a library.
In particular, can you see the people in the medical side of the Rockefeller Foundation buying the Florey and Chain claim of 1939 that penicillin was an enzyme (ie a foreign protein) and yet, once purified ,it could be safely injected into a vein as a systemic medicine?
Aren't we also always told that Fleming's penicillin was too
unsafe to inject as a systemic medicine?
This because the mold was grown in a foreign protein medium and so was too deadly to inject into humans.
Though Fleming ,in fact, showed that neither penicillin juice or the medium juice seemed to affect mice when injected into them.
Weaver knew next to nothing medical, but he loved a good line.
The line he always loved best was that chemists, physicists and mathematicians and other hard science types would quickly clear out the soft descriptive clinical types holding up true medical progress.
So he gave Florey and Chain all they asked for.... and more.
A good thing really - because Florey would never have given penicillin a moment's notice, if he hadn't a nice grant to do so.....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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