Manhattan gave the world's first shots of life-saving penicillin , seventy five years ago next October 16th (2015).
And if Manhattan and New York City is too damn modest to blow its own horn , well we in the rest of the world should start by thanking Manhattan for all the good penicillin and other antibiotics have done for us in the three quarters of a century since.
Starting January first next year, let us start sending cards, phone calls and online* messages to the mayor of New York City to thank Manhattan for changing our world for the better forever.
http://www.nyc.gov/html/static/pages/officeofthemayor/contact.shtml
Yes, wartime Manhattan also birthed the A-Bomb.
But let us never forget that NYC not only produced most of the wartime world's penicillin, it also established the fundamental right of ALL in the world to cheap abundant life-saving penicillin in wartime.
And that was the best possible moral rebuke to those like the Nazis who advocated that medicine, food and life itself should only go to the fit of the fittest nations ....
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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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