Upending Science after '45 : Purity into Diversity

They touted protecting the gene pool before WWII, yes they did, but they really meant just protecting and purifying the white European subset of the human subset of the overall global gene pool.

Purifying as in reducing, reducing human gene diversity down to the few genes they thought had rightly made white protestant middle class European males the top of the ladder of Life.

Putting all your eggs in one very small basket, because you know - you just know - that these few are all the right eggs needed to face and surmount all future crisis.

It displayed a confidence, an arrogance, a hubris that post 1945 humanity didn't have as much of.

Before WWII, Dr Martin Henry Dawson had researched and celebrated the neglected diversity that was the non-pathogenic bacteria world and the world of the shut-out-of-sight chronically ill physically handicapped.

So for him, in wartime, to suggest that the chemists that are the lowly penicillium slime could probably make penicillin better than all the smartest human chemists in the universe was probably no great leap.

Just as it was for him to say that the 4Fs of the 4Fs, the lowest of the low, young patients dying from invariably fatal SBE, were worthy of penicillin - even in wartime and should be be sentenced to dead from wilful neglect by Allied medical death panels.

In fact, they should be saved, particularly in wartime, if our claims of being morally different from the Nazis were to have any weight.

Small and weak he said, was bountiful and beautiful and worthy of respect and attention.

He saw protecting the gene pool meant leaving it as big as possible - because we all need each other's talents in a global Ministry of all the Talents, if we are to continue to survive all the human and natural menaces on this Earth...