Winning the ideological war against Hitler required a "coalition of all possible talents" believed Dawson

In the Fall of 1940, Dr Henry Dawson felt the Allies needed to enlist the widest possible diversity of humans and nature, if they were going to win the ideological and military war against the then very attractive* ideologies and very formidable armies of the Fascists + Nazis + Communists and their fellow travelling ilk.

(* See Anne Morrow Lindbergh's October 1940 bestseller, Wave of the Future, for proof of that claim.)

For in late 1940, the German-led coalition really included not just Germany itself together with Italy, Japan and Russia but also had silent supporters and fellow travellers in many nominally neutral fascist-leaning countries in Europe, South America and elsewhere.

(Yes Russia : for we must never forget (or forgive) the fact that if that country had acted to defend Poland in September 1939, instead of helping the Nazis invade and kill the Poles, there'd be no WWII.

Why Russia isn't paying war reparations to Europe and the Allied nations for this act , beats me.)

About all that this very diverse group had in common was that they were not just talking about killing off unwanted and unneeded groups in their societies but had a track record of actually doing so.

The western democracies also had a large body of elite opinion who favoured 'gassing the unfit' but so far that opinion had remained just that : talk.

That Fall, Dawson saw many of those in the American medical-scientific community who had been unwilling to intervene to help Europe's weakest now using the new talk of 'war preparation' as the excuse to do what they always had just talked about.

That is, abandoning the least fit in society, its 4Fs, to focus medical resources on its most fit, the 1As.

As it happens, (accurate) rumours were rife that Hitler had used the same 'war preparation' excuse to do the same thing.

Albeit, Hitler was actively killing the weakest in his society rather than just denying them proper medical care.

Dawson felt the Allies would never assemble a big enough coalition from the empathetic portions of world population that they needed to militarily win against Hitler's team, if they descended to his moral depths on issues like this.

And beyond moral issues, he felt a winning coalition couldn't be assembled if the Allies matched Hitler in draining the potential coalition gene pool down to only the pure and fit.

A coalition of all possible talents, fit and unfit, human and natural, would be needed to defeat Hitler.

That is why Dawson's Manhattan small penicillin Project wasn't really focused on penicillin per say.

walking up the rough side of the Penicillin mountain

With penicillin, Dawson always deliberately chose to walk up 'the rough side of the mountain'.

In 1940, the heavy money was betting it would be a lot easier to synthesize penicillin than try to grow masses of the tiny penicillium, but Dawson chose to focus upon them because he really wanted to make the wider point that even the weakest of beings could be pretty clever chemists.

(And how right he turned out to be !)

And if Dawson had merely wanted to make penicillin a quick public success, he would have focused on acutely ill pre-teen children for several reasons.

To begin with, these kids need far less penicillin than adults, weighting as they do about a fifth as much.

And if they have been generally healthy and then suddenly get acutely ill, they can look extremely terribly ill on photographs but ironically recover quickly within days or weeks, a bonus of their very healthy young immune systems, and then photograph the very picture of health.

Headlines like "Miracle of innocent child plucked from death's door ---- we have exclusive fore & after pictures as proof", are catnip to mass circulation newspapers, as Dawson well knew from earlier media sensations around children recovering thanks to insulin and the sulfa drugs.

Instead Dawson focused on the very unclimbable Mount Everest of all infections, young adults dying from then invariably fatal SBE (endocarditis of the heart valves), building a long lonely wall to bang his head against.

As well as visiting a part of medicine well beyond his demonstrated area of expertise.

But again he had another and wider point to make - he suspected (again amazingly correctly) that the SBEs would be the group of patients chosen to be abandoned to a certain death when the Allied death panels began to pick and choose who got heavily rationed lifesaving medicine.

Dawson wanted to make the point that a Nazi winning coalition needed to enlist all the talents, not cut down most of them, as the Axis were doing.

And he wanted to make the point that a Nazi-busting coalition had to be seen as being very different from Hitler's gang in their treatment of society's weakest.

Particularly in wartime, when this highly moral stance might extract heavy costs, visibly proving the sentiment was genuine and not just a 'cheap round'.

By 1945 and his early death, Dawson had won his secondary point, as the Allies rushed to supply small microbe made penicillin to the small infected as well as the big infected, all over the world.

But it was not till 1985-1995 that he won his main point, that this world is very unpredictable and for Humanity to survive in it, they need to build a coalition of all possible human and biological talents and to maintain the widest possible diversity in their biological portfolio ...

Lindbergh's "Wave of the Future" and Prell's "Underdogma" : plus ca change, plus c'est meme chose ...

As 'literature', there isn't much in common between Anne Morrow Lindbergh's airy if wooly personal essay style 1940 "Wave of the Future" and Michael Prell's 2013 dense cut-and-paste thesis "Underdogma".

But in terms of actual intent, there is surprisingly little difference between the pair.

Isolationist Republican Lindbergh implies, in part, that America's traditional enemy, Britain, is once again trying to exploit American' heartfelt empathy for the underdog - here being Europe's smaller nations falling before Hitler and Stalin's might - to once again to try and drag America into Britain's wars, for Britain's benefit.

Tea Party Republican Prell says that that America's newest enemies (the Moslems being the most prominent) are exploiting Americans' traditional empathy towards the underdog to undercut Americians' sense of their right (simply because they are so big and so powerful) to lead the free world by dictatorial fiat and the bloody sword.

The upper/inner dogs (because they control "big business") always condemn any actions by what they call "big government"; actions that actually are designed to protect the small under/outer dogs from the big upperdogs

Both Lindbergh and Prell say that in terms of evolutionary success, Might is self evidently Right : current "big" successes speak for themselves.

But Darwin never said that.

Evolutionary success for him was limited to re-productive success, with the emphasis on the re-.

His theory was niche oriented and hence time based, not numbers based.

Darwin said, in effect, that a species that reproduced a trillion individual members over each of twenty generations and then went extinct was much less of an evolutionary success than a species that reproduced only a few thousand members over at least ten thousand generations and yet is still going strong.

This is because the smaller species lived in a much smaller niche so its small numbers were hardly a surprise - but its long term survival was a clear sign of its greater evolutionary success.

Misunderstanding Darwinism and abusing it, in the social arena, seems to never go out of style.

Ironically, Social Darwinism's ongoing ability to evolve and survive shows this inaccurate meme's amazing evolutionary success ....

"The Banality of Indifference" in WWII

Worldwide, for every individual WWII mass-murderer, 99 people were willing to fight to oppose to their behavior while 900 people were simply regretfully indifferent to the suffering they were causing others.

The article is about that vast majority - the nine hundred out of a thousand who all sighed for a moment on first hearing news of yet more brutalities but then did precisely nothing when it came to converting sighs into actions.

Pace Hannah Arendt, this is all about 'the banality of indifference'.

Almost 2.5 billion people lived or were conceived throughout the six years of WWII, of whom 75 million died as the direct or indirect result of the war :  .3% of the world population.

But 750 million suffered terrible privations in occupied or invaded/bombed territories -- many led shorter postwar lives as a result.

Beyond rationing and regulations, most of those in the better off countries also suffered --- particularly from worrying about relatives and friends in combat zones or upon learning of their deaths.

Of those 2.5 billion people, relatively few wanted to mass-murder people in the name of war and enjoyed it and fearlessly publicly justified it.

Let us suggest they might be as few as one person in a thousand - 2.5 million proud wartime mass-murderers world wide.

Most of the millions of others who mass-murdered in the name of war simply followed orders to shot hostages, fire up barns filled with children or bomb residential areas from the air because they feared harsh official punishment or social abuse from their male comrades if they failed to 'act tough' and be 'patriotic'.

To be specific - a mere handful actually and actively gassed or shot 6 million Jews but most of the educated world - in Germany and in the Allied and neutral worlds knew it was happening at the time and still did nothing, as once again the big brutalized the weak and the small.

Which is also what they had done as Manchuria, Ethiopia,Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, Finland,Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania , Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Greece, Yugoslavia all fell one after another, before their bigger neighbours.

A few individuals can hold their heads up for consistently urging military action to stop this onslaught of the big upon the small as early as the beginning of the1930s, but no single nation can do so.

Even the governments of France and Britain in September 1939 first sought a negotiated way out of actually having to go to war upon the invasion of Poland as they had earlier publicly promised.

The facts are harsh : almost no nation ever went into armed combat against the evil Hitler unless and until their landmass or sea vessels were directly attacked by the Nazis.

Until then, most remained agnostic as to the evils of Hitler.

In 1940, most of the world's population thought, in the abstract, that the invasion of the small by the big was morally very wrong ---- but that sadly it was also evolutionarily inevitable.

The inevitable 'wave of the future', in the words of that year's bestselling author, Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

The most successful evolutionary response, she and most of the educated people in the world believed, was to work to protect their 'own kind' and to reduce their morality urges to sending a few food bundles to the afflicted.

They failed to see that all of humanity was their 'own kind' and were light years away from present day thinking that all life on earth is also our 'own kind' and that we are all essential to each other's long term survival on lifeboat earth.

Using Anne's husband's Charles Lindbergh's diaries and verbal utterances in 1939-1941 as an example, protecting all life or protecting all humanity had literally narrowed down to protecting once's fellow white middle class protestant native born Republican Americans from the Mid West.

For Lindbergh's internal enemies list was even longer than that of Richard Nixon, but nowhere as as long as Lindbergh's 'mere indifference to their fate list' : for that spanned the world...

October 1940's Waves of the Future : Henry Dawson's vs Anne Lindbergh's

No book - not even Hitler's Mein Kampf or Stalin's Foundations of Leninism - so outraged Dr Martin Henry Dawson as early October 1940's The Wave of the Future by the quasi Christian author Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

Perhaps even enraged him enough to advance his team's planned first injections of  penicillin into human patients by three months - so his own 'wave of the future' would compete with her 'wave of the future'.

And in the end, he won.

To the extent that any of us know of Dawson's wartime efforts or recall Lindbergh's horrible book, we would all universally applaud him and disdain her.

That is because 'we are all Dawsonites nowadays', to adapt future King Edward VIII's famous 1895 quip.

Anne Lindbergh writes off the small and the weak

Lindbergh argued that the entire 1940 world was at truly 'at war' , but intellectually, not militarily.

 At war intellectually but not in the expected sense of capitalism versus nazism and communism.

No, it was a war between the ancient (small) staid past and a bold dynamic new (big) future ---- with the future to inevitably win.

Overlook, Lindbergh urged readers, overlook the small temporary horrors currently being inflicted on small countries like Belgium, Denmark and Latvia as they were overrun by their giant neighbours while neutrals like America just watched.

See the big picture, instead, as from Laplacian heights.

All this mere temporary pain and horror was but the inevitable consequence of rigid jaw flesh was being broken through for the first time by emerging baby teeth.

WWII reduced to a baby's temporary teething problem.

The bigger and the newer was always better - evolutionary progress was on the side of the ever bigger battalions : the dogma of Lindbergh's Edwardian era high school science teachers.

In the long run, more accurate science chases out less accurate science

But Dawson had uncovered evidence that reality didn't always work that way.

Yes, on some measures, the last were last - but on others they were first - and everything in between, depending on the attribute being measured.

Dawson's compassion having been given wings by his new science, he resolved to use the wisdom of the microbial last to give history's first life-saving injections of penicillin - to save some members of the last in human society.

A gentle, but firm, rebuke to the Anne Morrow Lindberghs of his world.

Originally, Allied wartime penicillin intended only for the first, not the last

The unofficial Allied plan had been to first synthesize penicillin 100% pure and then patent it, to make it so expensive that only the peacetime rich could afford it.

 But meanwhile, during wartime, to underproduce it and thus justify the giving of it to only the moderately infected among the Allied frontline troops - so as they may more quickly return to battle, instead of their stay-at-home neighbours.

Dawson thought that naturally grown, semi-purified, penicillin would cure just as well and was available much quicker and much much cheaper --- available for all in need of it.

He wanted all in that heartless unforgiving wartime world - the last as well as the first, the 'unfit' as well as the 'fit', enemy as well as friend - to have cheap abundant penicillin, if it alone could save them from needless death from the infections it could stop.

And so it was thus - his small wave of the future, rather than Lindbergh's big wave, became our present : Obamacare is hardly what the President and medicine-for-all advocates wanted, but it is a good start ...

sincere compassion, hobbled by an equally sincere belief in non-accurate science, led to the horrors of WWII

There is no real evidence that people in 1940 were any less compassionate than people in 2015 --- forget that belief if you seek to account for history's most cruel and heartless war , cruel and heartless on all sides -- neutral, allied and axis.

Morality follows the Science

But ever since Darwin's 1859 "Origin of the Species", the world has increasingly tempered its innate compassion with what it thinks current science tells us about the way the world works and must work.

Science, today, has repeatedly demonstrated that a healthy planet needs plenty of biodiversity and a bigger, deeper, more varied gene pool.

Has demonstrated that we humans will never be able to predict the future, be it in terms of the stock market or the weather , well enough to risk putting all our money on just one or two nags in a gene pool.

But Science 75 years ago taught us precisely the opposite .

Putting all its faith in hard reductionism, the science of the Modernity era argued evolutionary progress led to the ancient and the small to be gradually and inevitably replaced as individual entities and instead to end up being bundled together in ever newer, bigger, stronger and smarter beings.

Thus : the first shall always be first and the last always shall be last and the small and the ancient are but road kill - regrettable - beneath the steam rollers of progress. Bigger is better and the Laws of Nature are on the side of the ever bigger battalions.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh : Christian advocate of do-nothing bystanding ; silently watching as the bully beats up a small child

The most eloquent advocate of this iron law of progressive determinism was perky Christian (sic!) housewife and mother Anne Morrow Lindbergh, author of October 1940's Wave of the Future.

"Relax, be happy America : Nazis and Communists are the inevitable wave of the future."

"Denmark and Belgium were but the regrettably inevitable small road kill in the pathway of progress - watch the bully but don't intervene America - stay neutral - relax, be happy."

When I was working in bookstores, I sold tons of her books to very sincere Christian women and I learned to curb my tongue on her pro-totalitarian views from years before.

Can a leopard ever change her spots ?

I don't think so - I think Mrs Lindbergh was as confident of her Edwardian era  high school science dogma (social darwinism and eugenics) on the day she died as she was when she learned it 80 years earlier.

Dawson's more accurate science gave wings to his compassion

There were a few exceptions of course - because even Dr Martin Henry Dawson learned the same inaccurate science as Mrs Lindbergh.

But in his published articles --- and in his hands-on work from the late 1920s to the early 1940s --- he provided the sort of evidence that helped write the rules of a new (kinder, gentler) science, today's science.

He has a reputation for being extraordinarily compassionate but I don't think this was so.

He had merely ordinary innate compassion --- but his science put wings beneath that compassion and didn't hobble it.

The very same month (October 1940) that Lindbergh published her pean to accepting the inevitability of totalitarianism and the thesis that the first have a right to always be first, Dawson gave history's first injections of life-saving penicillin to the last in society ; two poor young men , one black and one Jewish.

And his science proved more accurate than that of his opponents - not simply that his wide compassion overwhelmed their narrow intolerance.

This is why WWII, much to its own great surprise, ended with his Nature-produced penicillin being made freely available to all  --- the last as well as the first...