Saturday, July 18, 2015

The twenty year old effort to 'civilize' penicillin was well funded, well studied, well honoured (and a big failure ...)

By contrast, the tiny and relatively brief (less than four years) effort to win (grudging) acceptance for 'primitive' penicillin was unfunded and unsupported, received no scholarly study or public honours ---- and was a huge, world-changing, success.

Seventy five years later, annually thousands of tons of 'Primitive' penicillin are still made the good old primeval way - by incredibly tiny fungal factories - and still form the basis for almost all of our life-saving antibiotics.

"Upending" - the blog, the musical and backstory non-fiction book - tries to make amends.

For "Upending" is based around the proposition that massive success usually deserves more attention than failure, even if (particularly if ?) that failure was supported by all the Smartest Men in the Universe...

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Why My Urgency ?

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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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