What acid-dropping fiction-writing fabulist would ever dare suggest that WWII's successful natural penicillin efforts would emerge from Manhattan's concrete jungle while the failed attempt to make artificial penicillin would flourish amidst Oxford University's greenery ?
As we fans of G K Chesterton are so fond of asserting : why write humdrum fiction , when ordinary life is so much more extraordinary ?
Fortunately for me , I've still got this story to myself , seventy five years after the event --- possibly because no previous writer on wartime penicillin had Chesterton's acute sense for sensing life's funny little ironies...
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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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