Monday, September 22, 2014

Merck's conflict of interest : planning to use molds as poisons of war makes it hard to see molds as lifesavers...

George W Merck (with big cigar) with Chemical Warfare officer at a drug trade conference (!)

George W Merck spent most of WWII dividing his time between heading the biological weapons effort of the US government (which including researching molds as deadly poisons) and trying to create a synthetic version of the lifesaving penicillium mold.

Mentally that must have made it hard for Merck, head of Merck Drugs, to give a fair hearing to the possibility that the penicillium mold - all by itself, 'as is' - might be able to save lives...
@ Hope w/o Frontiers at
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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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