We can't fairly or accurately write a history of the earliest reception to the news that penicillium excrement might save human lives, if we credit the scientists of the 1920s and 1930s with all the hindsights that scientists and the public hold today about the best place to find new antibiotics.
Because in those heady early days of the discovery that metabolic activities can be usefully divided into essential-to-life primary metabolic activity and unknown-uses secondary metabolic activity, the metaphor most scientists reached for to explain the secondary metabolites of the lower fungus was of the well known plant and animal need to excrete unneeded and potentially deadly 'metabolic waste'.
Poo and pee and go-go and caca in daycare talk.
Would you, even today, instantly let your doctor to inject poo and pee into your blood stream when asked, without hesitation and discomfort ?
Let alone way back in the Era of (Man-centred) Progress, where it seemed impossible to believe anything a stupid simple little fungi cell could do might be superior to what advanced civilization's best chemical laboratories could invent.
Progress 1945 (upended) : primitive penicillium poo saving more kids than advanced civilization could bomb or gas.....
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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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