If Vannevar Bush and Winston Churchill had had their way, penicillin would have become a secret and exclusive weapon of war, just as DDT and atomic energy became during WWII.
But penicillin escaped this fate, thanks to Dr Martin Henry Dawson's "Big Tent" Manhattan Project.
Dawson thought that natural penicillin - cheap abundant "PD" penicillin - should be made available to all in the world in need of its lifesaving properties.
Particularly during a total war against a evil Axis.
As a concrete example of how the Allies really were different from Hitler - and not just differing only in their high-sounding (but ultimately hollow) rhetoric.
Doctors without Frontiers didn't emerge formally for twenty five years after Dawson's premature death, but if he had lived, he would have cheered its birth to the rafters....
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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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