The fungus chemists have had 500 million years to get penicillin making down to an art and a science but to human chemists in the 1940s, it all was very new and puzzling.
No wonder then that the penicillium could make penicillin out of useless farm trash, with no expensive high-pressure-withstanding reactors, no expensive energy costs, no long lists of expensive chemical reagents, --- all done at normal temperatures and normal pressures in invisibly small microbe factories.
And that chemists in the 1940s needed huge factories with tons of high tech equipment, lots of carbon energy to heat up and cool down the process, dozens of highly refined chemical reagents - and lots of skill engineers --- to make even the simplest of biologically active substances.
In human activities we expect the most experienced chemical firms to do things the economically and the most accurately - and companies new to any particular chemical trade to do everything the hard way and to get there by taking the longest route to the result.
Why then do we reverse these expectations when we compare experienced senior fungus chemists to inexperienced junior human chemists ?
Anthropocentrism - impure and unsimple
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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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