The Chemistry of Penicillin (1949) has more words in it than the Bible and is so heavy that if dropped from a plane, it would kill more people than penicillin has saved.
My review of it could consist of just three words : "why?" and "technically sweet" .
The effort of seeking to analysis the chemical nature of penicillin and then to artificially synthesize it only began to be done in dead earnest at the exact same time it was becoming clear that biological penicillin could do the just of saving millions just fine: cheaply and in time to be useful during the war.
"Why?" is thus answered by "penis envy" : chemists got jealous when it seemed biologists might get all the credit for the greatest medical discovery ever : this at a time when chemists alone - not physicists or biologists - ruled the top of the scientific roost.
But once started into it and the task proved to be exceedingly complicated, it became for all the alpha males who dominate the top of the science world all the more exciting.
The thrill of the chase took over : with catching the prize proving far more exciting than what might be actually done with the prize once it was got.
If this sounds at all familiar , it is because it is.
Robert Oppenheimer explained why so many supposedly pacifistic physicists went on building the A-Bomb when it should have been clear from the public war news in Europe in the Fall of 1944, that if the Germans actually had "The Bomb" they weren't about to use it even in the face of certain imminent defeat.
The A Bomb was proving a "technically sweet" scientific question : solve it first and then debate what to do with the results was what all these hundreds and hundreds of scientists (but one) resolved.
Synthetic penicillin, I argue, was equally morally vacuous from the Fall of 1944 onward...
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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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