Whom would make wartime penicillin ?
Henry Dawson's tiny ancient "natural" fungi factories with a few hundred million of years of experience under their belt ?
Or Howard Florey's big clumsy lumbering "synthetic" chemists' factories, built along lines more familiar to Heath Robinson or Rube Goldberg fans than to fans of the ever graceful Nijinski ?
To whom would wartime penicillin go to ?
Just to lightly injured front line Allied troops, but only after D-Day, with penicillin used for a secret weapon of war, as Florey and the American OSRD planned ?
Or to everyone in a war-shattered world who was dying for lack of it, as Dawson wanted ? Penicillin to be used both as a medical lifesaver and as tardy but tangible proof of the long claimed moral difference between Allies and Axis ?
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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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