It is fair to say that Canadian-born scientists have had fewer than expected Nobel Prizes in physics - only two.
Both, interestingly enough, were awarded to scientists born in tiny Nova Scotia.
The latest Nova Scotian Nobel winner, Arthur B MacDonald, was born in Sydney and got his B.Sc and M.Sc at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
Dalhousie, which will be marking two hundred years of existence in 2018, is certain to prominently mention MacDonald's Nobel prize as among its achievements over the centuries.
Hopefully, it will also mention the Manhattan-based project of another Dalhousie graduate, Martin Henry Dawson, in its celebrations.
Dawson's pioneering research in revealing the unexpectedly sophisticated abilities of supposedly stupid 'unfit' microbes (HGT,Quorum Sensing etc) and his pioneering efforts to research treatments for the then much neglected chronically ill 'unfit' came together in this wartime project.
Dawson hoped to see wartime penicillin provided-for-all, even for the 'unfit', much against the wishes of the Allied scientific and political hierarchy to only use it for the 'fit'.
And he planned to do so by using 'unfit' microbes rather than 'fit' humans to make it, again very much against the wishes of the Allied hierarchy.
Dawson was dying himself all through this period from a fatal and chronic disease and was pushing his project basically all alone.
Metaphorically turning an ocean liner around, on a dime, is never easy - and the ocean liner that was the Allied war effort in WWII was probably the biggest ocean line of all time.
But this stubborn and brilliant scientist did just that : by 1944, the Allied high command was dancing to his tune when it came to both the production and distribution of wartime penicillin.
His combination of scientific smarts and high moral intent represented, I believe, the best of what Dalhousie traditionally hoped to instil into its graduates...
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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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