Wartime penicillin (discovered in 1928) actually had two miracles.
The first miracle was how the Allies managed to keep new of penicillin's wondrous lifesaving abilities from their own wartime public for so long.
The other miracle was that the Allies managed to produce at least some penicillin - despite their own best efforts - before the war's end.
Bruce Springsteen reminds us that blind faith in our leaders - be they political , military or medical - can get us all killed.
And this was as true during WWII as it still is today.
There are times when the only moral thing to do - the only patriotic thing to do - even during a Total War - is to Act Up.
And because seven cripples had the courage to Act Up over the immoral weaponization of wartime penicillin, the whole world got cheap abundant non-patented penicillin....
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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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