Watching THE THIRD MAN as a small child

I actually think I was thirteen going on fourteen when I first saw THE THIRD MAN, as part of Halifax CJCH-TV's nightly series of movies in the early evening.

I had read plenty of media account of the horrors of the Holocaust by then but hadn't really see anything cinematic about it, nothing to hit me really hard emotionally.

But THE THIRD MAN, centred on the morality of mis-used penicillin, did indeed hit me really hard.

No wonder, for it was a film that remains (65 years later) on many critics' lists of the top ten movies of all time.


As a small child, I had always found the events of WWII and the ten years thereafter very exciting and had always regretted never been being there mentally at firsthand (I was born in late 1951).

And in particular, I became an aware young person too late in the antibiotics revolution to be able to imagine the intense impact of this first miracle medicine upon human thought.

But the events in this film set in postwar Vienna changed all that : I could now feel, in my bones, for the first time how it was for people of that period.

How, for moviegoers back then, the ultimate good must be in providing penicillin to dying little ones and so the ultimate evil was not yet Auschwitz but rather those who would deny lifesaving penicillin to dying little ones.

I think the emotional wallop of that old B&W movie set my current penicillin project in motion --- only this time substituting Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey, Newton Richards and Winston Churchill for Harry Lime in the denying penicillin to dying children department ....

industrial Auschwitz vs artisan Penicillin

Dr Josef Mengele'e wartime efforts, aided by an assist from Dr Robert Oppenheimer, almost immediately knocked human-oriented Progress permanently off its pre-war pedestal, as every account of the birth of our post-war/post-modern Era attests.

But would it be heresy to suggest that in the same period, albeit rolled out at a much slower pace, Dr Henry Dawson offered up an sturdy alternative to pre-war progress ?

That is 'out with the old' was as successful as it was, because there was an 'in with the new' alternative waiting in the wings ?

And I do mean 'Alternative' in just the sense that left wingers and right wingers understand that term : Birkenstocks and whole grain bread and all.

Dawson's successful attempts to get the Allies to reverse their war aims for penicillin, from a "secret weapon of war" to "abundant wartime penicillin for all in need", began small and simple and natural.

Writers Hitler, A. and Lovecraft, H.P. thought the ultimate in evil was a fungoid growth.

But 'the other Manhattan Project' took up the despised little creature.

Eventually it, together with "4Fs,Women and the Grace of God", to use a description from a hostile OSRD critic, changed our whole world for the better, for ever.

Not just in what it did ---- but in how it did it, so very different in an era of Big Everything, particularly Big Science:

Un-patented, public domain, back-to-the-land, back-to-nature, small-is-bountiful penicillin.

Kitchen Tabletop penicillin, Homemade penicillin, DIY penicillin, Artisan penicillin, Crude and Primitive penicillin.

Penicillin you could almost imagine being at farmers' markets, or sold from a table at the back of the hall, after the gig....

Obstetricians to post-Modernity : doctors Mengele & Dawson

In Robert Clyde Allen's "Speaking of Soap Opera", he quotes one study of Golden Age radio soap operas that found over one half of all adult males in the shows were medical doctors.

In medical science's own Golden Age, roughly one long generation from the mid 1870s to the mid 1960s (the era of Progress and Modernity), soap operas loved doctors because that single profession was freighted with all the expectations humanity had for its highest civilizations.

This fraternity, and this one alone, was expected to do the impossible : to bridge over the many contradictions inherent in the Modern concept of Progressive civilization.

On one hand, as laboratory medical scientists, they were expected to display an alpha-male sized commitment to "double blind randomized" rationality, objectivity and the pursuit of scientific progression regardless of what dark alleys it might lead humanity into.

On the other hand, as medical frontline clinicians, they were expected to act out a selflessness and empathy for the suffering of others at a level we had traditionally only expected from Saints.

Since double blind randomized objectivity and agape empathy are fundamentally opposed, the bridge was bound to fail, particularly in times of extreme stress.

Such as happened during WWII.

In 1939, Josef Mengele had earned both a PhD and a MD and had started his career as a scientific researcher in genetics.

The son of a wealthy industrialist, he had imbibed the best of German high culture since childhood.

So he greatly enjoyed playing the best of German classical music, a love of visual art and engaging in Nordic sports like skiing, as well as a drive to excel in science.

But then he was called up for wartime military service before the ambitious young scientist had done a large enough piece of research to earn his "Habilitation", the post-PhD certification required before he could be appointed to a prestigious academic research position.

Mengele worried he was not getting any younger as the war unexpectedly dragged on, but then fate intervened.

He was wounded, supposedly too bad an injury for further front line service, and got assigned to Auschwitz.

Most of the SS doctors there did the minimum required.

However, the intensely ambitious Mengele saw that if he ingratiated himself with the camp superiors by his high energy level and his total commitment to its racist brutality, he could then have free rein over any sets of twins among the hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews shipped into Auschwitz to either be killed upon arrival or after a short period of brutally hard labour.

No previous student of twins science, a particular obsession with geneticists then as now, had been able to freely kill their subjects before.

This greatly expanded the invasiveness of the scientific questions that could be asked about twins.

What a splendid Habilitation Mengele could produce ! - his intellectual reputation made and a top research position secured --- this in a culture that put "Professor" above even General and only slightly below Fuhrer.

Mengele didn't stop with ingratiating himself with his SS bosses - he ntoably did the same with the young children twins in his study - until he cold-bloodedly disposed of them, like so much scientific rubbish left behind after a successful experiment.

Do anything, say anything, but get the badly-needed scientific evidence : the perpetually wonderful ends justify the short term pain of the means.

Medical scientists in Dawson's America were saying just this during the same period as Mengele was operating - but they always stopped short for directly murdering their charges as he did.

Slow quiet off-stage deaths by deliberate neglect was more their cuppa.

Not to say that Mengele wasn't a hypocrite, but somehow, his hypocrisy seemed at a lower level than their brand.

Nevertheless it was his hyped-up version of the then fully approved normal scientific mindset that has put Mengele (and not his American fellow colleagues in evil) into a very small community of celebrities that remain known all over the world with just a one word name : Beethoven, Hitler, Mengele, Bono, Elvis, Madonna.

Ego, ambition, fame, celebrity : it was these drives that lifted this rather typical example of SS member into the very top Parthenon of all time Evil.

By contrast, all these drives seemed lacking in Dr Henry Dawson.

Diffident, modest, caring, considerate instead.

But also quietly, determinately stubborn in seeing that the small and the overlooked got their propers.

In 1939, he was 15 years older than Mengele, already established as (and probably content to remain) a tenured middle level academic researcher and teaching hospital attending physician.

He had a good national (and even international reputation) in a tiny backwater of mid-century medical research : helping those chronically ill with arthritis.

If it was a backwater in peacetime, all the more in wartime.

A brave, decorated, twice wounded WWI military hero, he yearned to help fight Hitler but realistically what could a middle-aged man do in the frontlines of combat?

If not then in the sphere of military combat against the evil of Nazi values, then perhaps he could fight it in the moral sphere.

For Dawson saw that many medical researchers in the democratic West seemed to have drunk almost as much of the kool-aid of 'seeking scientific advance without moral restraints on the treatment of experiment subjects', as had scientists in Germany.

So Dawson decided to restore the dignity of the small and weak by deliberately contesting such values in America (and by implication in Germany as well).

He did so by (A) ignoring the scientific consensus and deliberately choosing to work with a much despised household pest, the primitive and small penicillium mold, rather than wait for commercial synthetic penicillin (which in fact never did come - not during the war or after.)

And rather than research the use of penicillium juice to cure unfaithful 1A servicemen of overseas-acquired VD, he sought instead to save the lives of a group of small and weak patients, the 4Fs of the 4Fs : working class youths dying of SBE, endocarditis caused by Rheumatic Fever.

The medical establishment were already writing off the poor SBEs as 'not a wartime priority' for scarce medical resources.

In fact, that elite was planning to keep all penicillin successes out of both the scientific and popular media, so it could be later unleashed as a secret military weapon of war, being produced (synthetically) in such small quantities that it could only aid the lightly wounded frontline Allied troops.

Dawson wanted primitive natural (un-patented) penicillin produced right now, in massive amounts, and given to anyone in a war-torn world who would have their lives saved by it.

The terminally ill Doctor Dawson (I did mention he was dying all through his project didn't I ?) successfully held off his own body and his own government just long enough to the Allied governments come around.

Just before he died, they did mass produce wartime natural penicillin and they did deliver it (by diverted-from-war bombers if need be) to save all those dying for lack of it.

This worldwide Penicillin "moral" Diplomacy did much to separate many Neutral nations from their fascination with fascism and thus helped secure and hold together 'the coalition of all the talents' needed to defeat the entrenched Axis powers.

But Dawson died as war's end and the Official Version of the wartime penicillin story (written by the losers who backed synthetic penicillin and restricted production and won the Nobel as a result) was able to keep him out of the re-telling.

But while sophisticated professionals fell then and still do fall for the Official Version, ordinary people (and little children) never did.

Behind all the Official Version's photographs of huge shiny penicillin-making machinery in oil refinery styled factories, the little people still correctly detected that tiny penicillin fungus factories were actually doing all the hard lifting.

And thus while the best in Civilization were busy bombing and burning as many ordinary people and little children as possible, some incredibly small and weak and supposedly 'simple' beings were saving more lives than even WWII could kill.

So it came to be that via popular public opinion rather than by scientific elite fiat, that Penicillin (and not the invisible Dawson,) joined the Parthenon of single-named worldwide celebrities.

And quite rightly, because Dawson's agape selflessness was the very opposite of Mengele's celebrity seeking.

Still, from opposing moral ends, Mengele's evil celebrity science and Dawson's selfless invisible science together put the fatal post into Modernity after 1945 and created our present age of cherishing diversity rather than cherishing eugenics....

Explaining Darwin's unexpected 1860s success : rising populations of labourers same time as the rise of their cheaper, more mallible replacement, the hydrocarbon energy slave

Unexpectedly, during the the 1860s, the global modern elite - including Darwin himself - found a little something to applaud inside the vast concept forest that was his theory of 'Natural Evolution'.


He and they basically rejected his key idea that evolution was totally directionless and that the variants that selection acted upon were thrown up totally by chance.

But elites everywhere seized upon the idea that they and not Darwin had actually invented : that Life was not a linked chain of being with every species needed to keep all the other species alive, as supposed for centuries.

Instead they took up the new claim that life was actually an enormous one-time track meet, entitled the Survival of the Fittest ---- with all the losers destined to slowly starve away.

That simply wasn't so - or at the very least, Darwin never actually said that.

Admittedly, in a very long lifetime of words, he totally buried the lede, but ultimately Darwin did say that Life was actually about a million races a year, each and every year, from the beginnings of Life in the yesteryear on into eternity.

Darwin-the-scientist said that each tiny little niche held its own race and as the niche changed, so a new race was run within it.

But Darwin-the-Manchester-Liberal, like almost all modern elites in the 1860s, tended to deny these claims and instead to fall in with Herbert Spencer's views about the survival of the fit instead.

Why ?

Cruel Timing

I believe it can all, Auschwitz,Hunger Plan East and all, can be put down to an unfortunate coincidence in timing - or mis-timing.

Mid Victorian families, like all earlier families, had lots of pregnancies because most kids died before birth or before the age of five.

Ten pregnancies to get five kids to survive to youth, so their labour could add to the income of the family farm or other human labour oriented family business.

Now in the 1860s, more of the traditional ten pregnancies were surviving to birth and even beyond the age of five, because of fewer reoccurring national famines and purer drinking water,etc.

National populations were soaring.

But once families realized that (a) more kids were surviving to their teen years and (b) less and less labour, including child labour, was going to be needed, they would reduce their pregnancies way way down.

But connecting the dots would take time - introducing a critical "lag".

Overcoming that demographic lag in understanding changing circumstances could take decades - it took exactly 100 years  for birthrates to fall in rural Antigonish, for example, as my partner Rebecca can personally attest!

At the very same time, smart minds among the greedy and ambitious were realizing that with cheap abundant hydrocarbon energy about, machines (machine energy slaves) would be much cheaper, much more reliable, much less tireless, much less likely to demand unions or vote for anti-capitalist governments, than human slave labourers.

But the rising national human survival rates were producing much more human labourers at the exact time the elites were deciding they needed much less.

A much older, much less hypocritical age might have just led the surplus labourers out into a wintry howling wilderness to die out of sight, but modern mass media and modern photography made that solution, as marxist-latte-lapping-academics are wont to say, "problematic".

The optics - and there would always be optics ( Aylan Kurdi as a recent example) - would look as "bad", as morally bad as this effort really was.

So Evolution cum 'The Survival of the Fittest' emerged just at the right time.

Now Evolutionary failure and Mother Nature could be blamed for Man's evil doings --- basically his finding as many ways as possible to speed Nature's reduction in the number of human "useless mouths", without getting caught at it.

But of course, as Hitler, Stalin and Tojo discovered during WWI and as we are still re-discovering in 2015, humanity's replacement, the mechanized slaves, can't always do many things (usually downmarket manual things, ironically enough) as well as people paid minimum wage and kept on unpaid 'call' for all hours.

Human Labour Shortage Looming

In fact, I predict that by the 2060s, the world will  face a simply enormous human labour shortage.

Another mistimed coincidence, in fact the exact reverse side of the 1860s situation.

Only now we will be running out of (cheap) hydrocarbons to do our dirty hard work just at the very time as our world fills up with retired ancients like me, demanding to be maintained in the swell lifestyle to which cheap hydrocarbons have accustomed us ...

Hitler searched for "THE" human genome

Remember the delusion behind the search for the essence of the human genome ?

The delusion that there was in fact just ONE human genome ?

Allowing, of course, for a few deviants and defectives and deficients ---that advanced (eu) genetic engineering would quickly excise away, once and for all time.

(Another delusion by the way.)

The fact is, just as ancient religious texts always proclaimed and mothers have always noted, we are all different, all unique individuals.

Even in vastness of the three billion year old world of the bacteria, there has never been two exact clones.

We are all different - albeit often in too subtle ways to be noted by very important men (James Watson ?) cursively glancing at us from the Olympian heights of Vienna's Riesenrad Ferris Wheel, as if we were just a lot of similar 'dots' on the ground.

Even Dr Mengele's identical twins were different, unique, in spite of having the exact same genome in theory.

Now even James Watson easily accepts that highly civilized 'Man' makes many mistakes, down at the bank with his mortgage or at the government office with his new passport.

Why then is it so very hard to accept that 'primitive' Mother Nature makes mistakes too ?

That the supposedly "iron" laws of Nature frequently bend ?

Routinely Nature makes mistakes while copying both the protein-making genes and the turn-on-and-off-tap control genes from the original genome - too many of this, too little of that.

Not just a base here and there but also many, many huge chunks, each thousands of bases long, known as CNVs, copy number variants.

Experienced ward doctors would hardly be surprised to learn all of this as the scientific explanation for their routine experiences of every work day.

An explanation just why so often that two patients, of the same age and weight and at the same stage of the same disease, can react so differently to a drug dosage supposedly standardized to all these factors.

The answer just could be that one patient has three copies of a particular gene segment targeted by this drug and hence almost overdoses.

Meanwhile the other (because of an unusual 'tap' gene) has effectively less than one copy and so the course of their disease remains unchecked.

Because sub atomic particles, atoms and molecules spend all their time bouncing off of each other in an asymmetric fashion, everything in the Universe "jitters" all the time.

We average this out, over trillions of such objects, as a particular heat temperature --- think of it as the supposedly routine temperature for a given pheonomon.

But, in fact, that smoothly analog average that is a given temperature actually disguises huge variants in local energy levels from nanosecond to nanosecond - meaning 'heat' is better described in digital terms --- as 'thermal' zippering, noise and distortion.

All that wide variance in the energy of 'routine' particle jostling means that 'routine' chemical bond making and breaking don't always occur at all, or don't occur in the right order, or takes much more or less time that they 'routinely' should.

Mistakes and asymmetric results are a routine fact of the Universe and even the best error correcting system (itself subject to the same mistake-making environment) doesn't always fully correct them all.

Hard to think of Hitler going along with Einstein and millions of other intellectuals in eagerly advancing The Enlightenment Project's efforts to find all the right answers to all the questions of Reality.

But he did - in spades.

Because he and Einstein and most scientists and philosophers of his day believed, often unconsciously, in "Limited Essentialism".

That is the idea that everything (of substantial size) had a definable list of attributes that uniquely and permanently identified it.

'Close' was not good enough -  that was a defective deviant deficient copy.

But Reality is actually an example of "Unlimited Essentialism" - the fact that every single being and object in the Universe is unique and has an (ever changing) definable list of attributes that positively identify it, albeit from moment to moment.

Defined that way, Essentialism is emptied of all of its traditional restraining abilities.

The search for Reality's "right" answers left all lot of shot, gassed and burned wrong answers in its wake

The Enlightenment Project led inevitably up to the selection platform at Auschwitz in late 1944, where the incoming Hungarian Jews were separated into right answers and wrong answers.

While the whole world knew about it, by that date, (YES WE DID) - and still did nothing.

Only a world that had stopped believing in "right answers" would have moved to save them - move to save them all, as uniquely beautiful bits of the human kaleidoscope.

Now Hitler, Einstein and Watson have all been hoisted on their own petard - because their own search for the one right answer about the human genome has instead resulted in revealing billion and billions of unique human genomes.

Nothing that Momma and Jesus - and Martin Henry Dawson - didn't already know ....

Ending the Enlightenment Project with deeds, not words

There are two academic puzzles in dating the ending of the Enlightenment Project precisely to 1945.

One was that 1945 was supposed to be year of the Enlightenment's greatest success, not failure --- you remember, beating back the Nazi forces of darkness and barbarism etc.

The other was that 1945 had no great book and no great thinker proclaiming the end of one intellectual age and the birth of another.

No opus from no new Hume, Kant, Hegel or Newton, Galileo and Darwin.

Instead we had doctors Mengele and Dawson, operating from the opposite ends of the moral spectrum, putting the post into modernity.

Both men of deeds, not of words.

Doers - not thinkers - doing in the thinkers' Enlightenment Project : I kinda like that....

Why Adorno and Horkheimer got it partly wrong

I believe that Adorno and Horkheimer only got part of the correct explanation for why the Modernity Project so abruptly started dying in 1945, supposedly the moment of its greatest triumph.

Not because they were Central European Jews - it was right for them to intellectually fixate on the Nazis' industrial mass murdering of an entire people - because at the time no one else really was.

Their failure lay, I believe, in being old.

Old, at least relative to school age children.

For Adorno and Horkheimer was only in their forties when they were writing and revising their Dialectic of the Enlightenment, the first book to recognize the death of modernity.

In the 1950s (and for centuries earlier) early and middle adulthood was a relatively healthy time - violent deaths from accidents, wars and suicides aside.

It was actually in early childhood that lay the huge number of deaths from infectious disease that so skewed the entire life expectancy statistics downward.

At my schools, I knew kids whose older siblings had died from polio and kids who went away and never came back , because of 'leukemia'.

And in my family alone, we had already had scarlet fever and rheumatic fever together with measles and chicken pox.

I could tell by the response of our elderly neighbours they were very frightening diseases -at least when they were young mothers.

My mother, a former medical lab tech, rushed to reassure me that, thanks to penicillium fungus and other microbes, these diseases were far less fearsome 'Since the War'.

From all the late night war movies I had watched with my parents since the age of six, I hadn't seen much evidence that the second world war had brought anything but tragic deaths and tears.

That the war had also brought us child's life saving antibiotics made a terrible big impression on this particular small child.

Perhaps if Adorno and Horkheimer had been young mothers (or even today's young fathers) while they were writing their masterwork, they might have seen that badness of Auschwitz alone couldn't kill the delusion of endlessly upward human Progress. in the minds of most humanity.

Because before we can dismiss a bad idea, we need a good idea to replace it.

Antibiotics, coming as they did from the despised fungus and microbes in the constantly overlooked soil right beneath our feet, was just that symbol of a hope-filled alternative way of looking at our fellow humans and the world.

Because the adults, like Adorno and Horkheimer, didn't really see this, everything had to wait until we 1950s kids got older.

The "Penicillium Kids"

When we did, in the mid and late 1960s, it was us postwar "Penicillium Kids" who started the postmodern recognition of rights for all types of people and beings that had been as traditionally overlooked as the soil microbes had once been ...

Auschwitz and Penicillin put the fatal post into Modernity

Who stuck the fatal post into Modernity ?

Was the doctors of Auschwitz alone, with their horrific experiments on living human guinea pigs, with all their fatal injections and monitoring of mass gassings ?

Not on the evidence.

The agreed Allied lie in 1945 was that the Nazis were an outlier, dedicated to destroying civilization and science and returning us all to a savage and more primitive age.

It sounded good - at least it sounded good to the people so far up the top of the Allied world that they had lost touch with the greater reality below.

But the billion or so ordinary people at the deeply suffering edge of WWII weren't so sure.

No, Auschwitz helped a lot - as did Naking, Hiroshima and the Katyn Forest killings.

But they altogether still weren't enough -  all dismissed as either horrors done by non-civilized evil-doers or regrettable actions done in the course of winning a great moral crusade.

What really put the fatal post into Modernity was the contrast provided by the fact that while the best of human civilization's chemists had totally failed to produce a lick of life-saving penicillin throughout the whole war, the much despised primitive basement slime produced scads of it - effortlessly.

Advanced German medicine - the best in the civilized world - gave us Auschwitz while the despised Lovecraftian slime gave us a priceless lifesaver.

Where on Earth was real Progress then to be found ?

Ladder of 'Progress' features primitive lifesaver at very bottom and advanced evil-doer at the very top ?

Imagine true Progress defined as a primitive basement slime saving millions of lives instead of being defined as an advanced civilization, Beethoven and Goethe to its past credit, coldblooded shooting thousands of babies in the face.

Pretty hard to imagine, isn't it ?

Much better we stick with tradition, tried and true : advanced Auschwitz at the very top versus primitive Penicillium at the very bottom.....

Scientism wins (and loses) WWII's victory legacy

Despite the many, many high tech weapons of death first used (and first perfected) in WWI, we still tend to recall it as a war of "elan" and of long lines of terribly brave doomed men charging machine gun posts with only their bayonets or horses.

By contrast, one can almost forget that there were any foot soldiers involved in the various famous victories of WWII, particularly among the victories of the western Allies and the Axis.

Instead, according to the omnipresent newsreels, their WWII seemingly only featured  white middle class men driving (or designing) modern day mechanical steeds such as aircraft, tanks, battleships, aircraft carriers, submarines or firing (and designing) ever-longer range guns, torpedoes and rockets.

Now a quick look at the demographic data of 1940 confirms that the British empire had by far the world's biggest pool of manpower .

Far greater than the empires of Germany, Japan, America, Russia or any of the three contesting chunks of the Chinese empire, let alone the French, Italian and Dutch empires.

But instead the British left and right elites melted together as one in claiming they ('they' in their mind seemingly reduced to the Home Counties of England) simply didn't have the manpower to have a foot soldier army anywhere near the size of Poland or France let alone match those of Russia, Japan, Germany and America.

By contrast, the Great Russians ruling the Russian empire, faced by the prospect of losing to Germany and then being put to the sword en masse by murderous Nazis, swallowed their racial prejudice and conscripted endless numbers of soldiers from all of the dozens and dozens of sub ethnicities in their vast empire.

They also embraced the idea - albeit reluctantly - of women in combat roles.

True, Stalin and his generals then needlessly killed millions of their resulting vast armies of ordinary soldiers in crude frontal attacks against the Germans but they did redeem themselves by their unwillingness to invent new high tech weapons during the war.

Instead they selected the cheapest and most reliable of their existing conventional weapons and then set about making them even more cheaply, more quickly and in truly mountainous numbers.

All the other empires very reluctantly recruited from minorities (aka 'coloreds') within their existing empires and newly conquered territories (in some cases such as British India, the 'minorities' vastly outnumbered the majority !)

They tended to mistrust these colonial troops even more than the enemy, to give them second rate weapons and third rate leadership and then denied them meaningful combat roles.

The clearest example is the unspeakable French, who would rather delay the liberation of metropolitan France and the defeat of Germany than let their own well tested colonial (aka 'colored') troops lead the attack.

Letting the coloreds lead the final attack would recall all too vividly how quickly their abject white European masters had surrendered France and the Empire in 1940 and 1941.

Churchill felt likewise about letting his six million man volunteer Indian army ( still the biggest volunteer army in history) anywhere near North Western Europe.

He'd rather Russia swallowed up half of Europe and the Americans the other half than left Indians led the British empire to victory over his fellow white Europeans.

Colored minorities weren't the only groups that the various upper middle class imperial elites were reluctant to see granted the entry card into full citizenship : being a veteran of combat.

They denied it to women as well of course.

But this is all relatively well known : the Americans, for example, being desperately short of ground troops during the critical Battle of the Bulge in late 1944 , all because they had resisted letting women do war factory jobs and resisted letting black, latino and native men serve in combat.

Not so accepted is the claim that the elites of the Democracies (so called) grew tired of the idea of mass national armies marching as one being a symbol and creator of mass united nationalities.

Conscripting vast numbers of working class soldiers turned them into vast armies of of 'our noble veterans' all demanding redress and entitlements , to be paid mostly by the older richer part of the tax paying body, the part that generally got to stay home and had only full bank accounts instead of full chests of medals to show for it.

Substituting middle class driven war machines for working class foot soldiers would ensure that veterans' pensions and veterans' moral power would at least remain among the well off taxpayers' children and keep the bolshie workers out beyond the Pale.

So, at various times, military America had more aircraft in its Tables or Organization than it had MOS 475s (bog ordinary riflemen) in its combat frontlines.

We all know the resulting war-ending victory scripts.

For WWI , it is of images of infantry assault troops during the famous Hundred Days, breaking the German lines and ensuring Germany's defeat a few months later.

For WWII, it is of the backroom boffins and scientists who designed the war-winning radars, aircraft, rockets, proximity fuses and A-Bombs that alone enabled the hard pressed Allies to defeat the top quality German and Japanese infantry forces.

A famous victory for modernity, the enlightenment project and for science - but it soon proved to be a famous pyhrric victory.

True, it was bog ordinary infantrymen who bayonetted all the innocent at Nanking and all through South East Asia or shot hundreds of thousands of Jews in cold blood at close range.

But strangely we barely remember such horrors - we choose to recall the high tech scientific deaths of Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden, Auschwitz, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Putting entire cities to the sword was old news in Jesus's time but a single bomb killing an entire city in a single instance seemed new (which it was) and extraordinarily barbaric (which it was not - morally, murder is murder).

Growing up as a boomer or transitional generation kid I heard  both takes on WWII and Science.

It left me well and truly conflicted - did science try to keep humanity alive or did it try its darndest to kill it --- or both ??

Scientism's victory in WWII gave Modernity's thirty years of glory - but it also sunk a postmodernist-promoting shaft in its chest nothing could pull out..

Manhattan Projects cause (rather than end) global environmental disasters

The year of 1945 was an unalloyed triumph for modernity thanks to  Allied big science's A-bomb decisively defeating the pre-modernity Axis.

But 1945 was also the start of post-modernity (and hence the start of the decline of the hegemony of modernity).

Because millions of people worldwide were repulsed by what the Modernity Project had done during the war - at Auschwitz , Katyn Forest and Hiroshima - and so had begun looking for ways wherein humanity worked with Mother Nature, rather than sought total control over her....

Manhattan Indie PEN : penicillin misfits, unfits & rebels fermenting a revolution and renewing hope to a world tired, huddled and wretched

Today, words and phrases like "all-natural", "green" , "locally grown" and "no added chemicals" are such advertising cliches that it hard to believe there was a time , up to the end of WWII, when such phrases were totally anathema.

Back in that era , advertising cliches were more likely to invoke being chemically pure and to see being 100% synthetic , plastic and man-made as virtues to seek out.

But after Hiroshima , Auschwitz , Napalm and other WWII 'man-made wonders', these concepts very gradually fell out of vogue.


But at the beginning of WWII , they dominated thought in areas ordinarily seen as lying well beyond and above the thought behind popular magazine ads.

Areas such as the science of penicillin.

At a time - before as well as during the war - when only penicillin could save lives from some diseases , it seems incredible that medical researchers' aesthetic tastes could forestall the use of 'safe enough' indie PEN (crude penicillin juice) but it did - for 15 long, life-wasting years.

Before they'd be seen in public giving penicillin to the dying with no other alternative, most doctors wanted penicillin to be as pure as any chemical synthetic, as colorless and tasteless, and about as stable as any loaf of stabilizer-laced white bread could ever hope to be.

They'd rather inject almost any new manmade chemical into a human bloodstream before they would inject the life-saving juice from some bog-ordinary basement slime.

No slime from the basement of life on earth could possibly be better at saving lives than the PhD educated minds from the best Anglo Saxon universities in the land.

It was all a bit like letting your daughter date a Jew or a Negro.

Not done.

Today of course it is all totally different.

If people still don't want their daughters dating Jews or blacks, they have become smart enough not to say so in public.

And student numbers in chemistry degree programs have never been lower while biotechnology (with fermentation usually at the heart of its successes) is where all the graduates and jobs are at.

Manhattan Indie PEN

Manhattan Indie PEN - once only home to misfits, unfits and rebels has brewed up an intellectual storm so successfully that they have become the norm - with yesterday's rebels as today's bosses.....

1945's choices : the Modern exclusionary values that gave us Auschwitz or the post Modern values that gave us 'Public Domain' penicillin ?

In early 1945, two Manhattan doctors had dueling visions of the possible world ahead.

The prominent one, Foster Kennedy ,  wanted to kill all babies with developmental issues.

The unknown other, Henry Dawson, wanted all babies in the world to have access to cheap, abundant (Public Domain) penicillin.

By the end of 1945, the unknown Dawson was dead but - perhaps surprisingly - his idea lived on after him.


Because, with the beginnings of  public revulsion over the revelations of Auschwitz doctors and children coming out of the Nuremberg trials, it was clear that Dawson had won most of the educated public over to his vision.

And this only a few years after public polls indicated that the majority of the educated public favoured Foster Kennedy's murderous proposals instead.

Dawson's unstinting efforts to make wartime penicillin truly inclusive had greatly shortened his life, but clearly they hadn't been totally in vain ....

post Modern age ushered in by baby's whimper, not Bomb's bang

Two 'Booms' occurred in 1945 : which was more important ?

It was the year 1945, all historians seem to agree , that ushered out the Modern age and ushered in the post Modern age : and ushered it in with some sort of a bang.

But what sort of bang : was it the secretive Manhattan Project's Atom Bomb big Boom !!! ?

Or was it the smallest Manhattan Project's inclusive vision of penicillin priced and available for all , a vision that encouraged women all over the world to see a brighter future ahead and gave them reason to want to get pregnant ?

Was it then the penicillin-and-good-health fueled Baby Boom that really ushered in our current age ?

Was an old age ushered out by a newborn baby's contented whimper ?

That's sort of my take : yes, revulsion against yesterday's exclusionary values that gave us Auschwitz.

But also gratitude for today's inclusionary values that gave us  'cheap and abundant penicillin for all' , with its promise of a healthy childhood ahead for most newborn children.....

WWII as apogee AND nadir of Modern Science....

The night 'the music died' began when the young pilot of the small plane that Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens were in, misread an instrument and thought he was climbing above a storm when he was really going full blast down into the ground.

Various Modern scientists (and their shills the science 'journalists' , ie editors) might be considered to have done something very similar to that unfortunate pilot.

They mis-read the Atomic Energy fire-bombing of civilians, the mass production of cheap Natural Penicillin and Auschwitz's gas chambers and frugal use of the resulting dead humans as furnace fuel and for soap as triumphs - rather than failures - of Physics, Chemistry and Biology.

The Americans had thought the future of aerial bombing was the Norden bombsight's ability to accurately drop a bomb in a pickle barrel from 15,000 feet, not the ability of an atomic bomb to burn out an entire city, all in an effort to destroy that city's  single navy arsenal.

The British had thought the best, cheapest, quickest way to provide penicillin was to have chemists synthesize it in big chemical factories - but they ended up waiting upon tiny fungal factories (in far off America, to boot ) to do it all by hand.

The Germans had hoped for more positive eugenic activities east of Germany : the Master Plan East talked of settling happy, hard-working, clean, pure German peasants-soldiers on the new eastern agrarian frontier , producing huge wheat crops and guarding the border.

But few German peasants actually wanted to move into an area contested by partisans and Soviet troops.

 So as a result, Hitler quickly told his supporters that 'we actually went to war with Russia so we could totally eliminate (negative eugenics) all the Jews from Europe, once and for all'.

Plan Bs (nadir) glibly sold as Plan As (apogee) : I doubt if even used car salesmen could match the chutzpah of the scientists...

May 10 2013 POSTSCRIPT :

Re-reading this blog post, I realized that I hadn't specifically indicated that the A-Bombing of Hiroshima and the triumph of natural Penicillin occurred so close to the end of the war in 1945, that they share both a wartime and postwar time space.

The end of WWII also revealed another Plan B to to the Plan B (Auschwitz) of the wartime German genetic community.

 Oswald Avery's 1944 reductionist discovery that the chemical molecule DNA was the basis for all the genes (including the long reputed ones for  alcoholism and criminality, etc, etc) had been mostly ignored.

But it was suddenly taken up with particular renewed intensity with the revelations that Auschwitz was the end result of all the prewar German genetic efforts.

Particularly by the many active Jewish geneticists :  like all geneticists, they still held that Free Will barely existed, except among scientists, and that we were largely captives to our forebearers' genes.

But the word DNA seemed offer a way to carry on the good bits of the German prewar genetic program, but minus the gas chambers and under a new name.

Modernity: the 500 Year Reich

In retrospect, all of the promise of the New York's World Fair (1939-1940) turned out to be just the sad brief apogee of Late Modernity, indeed of all Modernity itself.

It hardly started out that way.

Five Hundred Years of Modernity was to be celebrated as part of the Fair's second year , marking the 500 years supposedly since Gutenberg invented the printing press --- and began the onset of cheap, mass produced, printed knowledge.

Talk of a 1000 Year Reich in places like Hitler's Germany, at this point, was just that : talk .

But Modernity's first 500 years was already safely in the record books and tangibly real, real for all to see and applaud.

In 1939, there seemed no reason why there shouldn't be at least another 500 years of triumph ahead for Modernity.

Yet it is now generally agreed that by the post-Auschwitz, post-Hiroshima, post-Katyn autumn of 1945 , Granddad's Modernity was well and truly broken.

And out of that wreckage gradually crawled a very different and very new era, our own Era of Post-Modernity.

What could have gone so terribly wrong, for Modernity to soar way to its apogee and then plunge way down to its nadir, in just six short years ?

Clearly it was World War Two (Modernity's own war, Modernity with its thrusters fully engaged) that was what had gone so badly wrong ....

WWII's sins of uncaring omission as War Crimes

Even animals would be discomforted at the audible and visual pain as millions of Indians starved to death during the Bengali Famine of 1943.

It is a pity that so many of us,supposedly more sophisticated, humans have been less discomforted about the event ever since.

Most of us - at least in the Allied West - would strongly reject the  idea that this totally unnecessary mass famine was a war crime and and a sin of uncaring omission.

To ease our own consciences, we much prefer to limit our definition of war crimes to sins of commission, done by obvious evil-doers : the direct shooting, gassing or bayoneting of civilians as at Nanking, the Katyn Forest or at Auschwitz.

But it is not enough to save "oops -sorry !" when bombs we intend for rail yards or oil refineries happen to fall upon 250,000 soon-to-be dead civilians in occupied countries - not if we also clearly know that most of our bombs always fall widely off target.

Claiming that anything and everything is justified if our intent (to defeat Hitler) is good is not a moral claim with legs.

It puts one to mind of the claims of George W Bush that he just had to suspend civil liberties in America ----- in order to bring them instead to the oppressed of the Middle East !

We must always demonstrate extremely due care when we kill some in an effort to save others : clearly seeking to see if there are not other ways to defeat evil without killing so many of the innocent.

Famine , fortunately, was not general throughout the Allied and Neutral world, between 1939-1945.

But many (powerless) people needlessly went more hungry than they had to , in many of the Allied-controlled colonies.

But if Allied famine had been widespread and prolonged - caused perhaps by normally reoccurring weather disasters adding to uncaring imperial government mis-management - would it have been moral to continue to treat DDT as a war secret and deny its use to civilians, to reduce additional loss of food to insect pests ?

The militarizing of wartime DDT thus escaped - just - being another war crime of uncaring omission.

But there are more uncaring crimes of omission in the Allied closet.

In 1940-1941, several years into WWII, the new class of sulfa drugs which had emerged only 5 years earlier, seemed a gift that just kept on giving.

Today when the doctor comes in with the test results and says "I'm very afraid it appears that the cancer has metastasized" , the room gets very still as patient, family and nursing personnel absorb the grim news.

In the years before sulfa and antibiotics, people rarely lived to an age where they could learn that their original primary (localized) cancer tumour had spread throughout their body and that their chances of survival were now slim.

Instead what they feared was something not un-similiar happening with an infection that had originally been localized to one lesion , something most bodies, and good nursing care, could eventually fight off on its own.

Now in came the doctor with the blood tests (indicating colonies of bacteria were thick throughout the entire blood supply) and the room would go similarly silent.

Septicemia (Sepsis) was what the doctor would call it, but laypeople  would whisper to friends "blood-poisoning" , just we tend today to whisper "the doctor says the cancer is all through the body".

While we are correct to say that cancer spreading throughout the body (ie a systemic cancer rather than a localized tumour) is deadly and will directly kill us, our concept of what blood poisoning actually means is only half accurate at best.

It is correct that a bacteria infection flourishing in the blood will spread through out the body (is now a systemic disease) but the bacteria will not directly kill us - not by their "poisons" or their physical actions.

Rather it is that our body overreacts to any massive (systemic) assault upon it - not just to systemic bacterial infections - and it is the body's immune defenses' overreaction that kills us in sepsis.

The 1930s - modernist - mindset thought everything humans did - including our immune system - was marvellous beyond words and simply much preferred to blame those nasty little devils, the bacteria.

Until Sulfa drugs came along, nothing but God's will and dumb luck could prevent sepsis from ending in death.

The arrival of the sulfa drugs had meant all sides in WWII went to war a bit more confident that infection deaths would be much reduced on and off the battlefield.

So, despite the war between them, both the Allies and the Axis went on investigating tens of thousands of sulfa drugs, publicly* patented thousands of them and seriously trying hundreds of them on animals and humans.

*Yes, even in wartime - on both sides ! A notable contrast with the Allied secrecy on DDT and penicillin.

The new sulfa drugs of 1940-1941 tended to be less toxic and more effective than the slightly older ones - some even treated diseases originally thought beyond the reach of sulfa.

How could life ever get much better than this ?

But a year is a very long time in infectious disease treatment when practised massively and on a global basis.

By late1942, the sulfas were in a dire crisis.

Two American chemists, Roblin and Bell- who had helped invent the latest in the sulfa wonder drugs - had just published a convincing chemical explanation for their claim that the sulfa molecule (whatever its other medical uses) would no longer produce any new antibacterial drugs.

Seventy five years on, their claim has stood the test of time.

Typically the popular media (Newsweek, September 21st 1942, for example) played Roblin and Bell's research as a good news story - saying that now chemists could tell if a drug would work, before actually assembling it in the test tube.

But frontline chemists in the sulfa-synthesizing business could not help but hear it as a death knell.

The sulfas had other problems.

A few strains of bacteria had always and instantly shown a resistance to their bacterial action. But now the numbers of strains so displaying resistance had exploded in numbers and their resistance was more potent.

The first human response was to up the dosages to overcome the resistance.

The sulfa drugs had always been moderately toxic even at low dosages and required attention to detail in monitoring their use.

But now heavy dosages and careless doctor and nursing care was leading to needless deaths from the drug itself.

More thoughtful doctors faced a horrible choice : too big and too long a sulfa treatment might kill or permanently damage the patient, but without it , the patient was almost certain to die from sepsis.

They jungled frantically, trying different sulfas as well as backing them off for a while and then returning to them.

This disaster in the sulfa treatment of systemic infections was effecting military hospitals as least as hard as civilian hospitals.

The dirty little secret of war wound medicine is that soldiers rarely die from localized infections, anymore than they do in civilian life.

Soldiers die all the time from massive wounds - as do civilians - but rarely is the fact that the wound is also locally infected the critical factor in their death.

But if any sized wound permits the infection to spread to the blood - then soldiers do die from the indirect result of a wound that was originally just locally infected.

Just as well then that the local curing of local wounds was largely irrelevant to life survival.

Because the sulfas were proving to be totally useless in curing local wound infections. In 1940, two British researchers, Fildes and Woods, had offered up an explanation for how sulfa works (that it is mistaken for a vital food bacteria needs) that has also stood the test of time for 75 years.

Their research also explained why sulfa sometimes didn't work even if the bacterial strain wasn't resistant to it.

If bacterial lesion had lots of the real food around, enough bacteria ate it, instead of the useless sulfa lookalike, to keep the infection going.

Wounds - badly tended war wounds in particular - had lots of that food provided by dead and dying flesh.

So no new sulfas on the way - ever , the ones now in use were proving to be either useless, toxic or increasingly resisted by more and more bacteria.

Today,at any one time, we prefer to use about a dozen different drugs to fight serious infections.

But also we have about one hundred we could use - including the sulfas - if the current dozen all suddenly proved useless.

More importantly, these one hundred represent many different classes of drugs - never is any one bacteria infection resistant to all of them.

These discarded drugs are both more toxic or less effective than those in preferred use, but if death by sepsis is the alternative, even a highly toxic drug is the better - more moral - choice.

But the sulfas were the one and only class of drugs in use in 1942 against systemic life threatening infection ; they all shared the same good and bad features, all shared the same fate.

So it appeared that inevitable death by blood poisoning , for both military personnel and civilians, was on its way back.

Unless .......penicillin was put into serious mass production.

But in 1942, both the British and American medical elites had already decided that penicillin was to be kept as secret as possible and used only as a weapon of war - used only to cure our side's wounded on the QT,  so no one else would pick up on it.

Letting civilians have it and above all letting civilian newspapers chatter on about miracle cures would only alter the enemy into making their own penicillin and the Allied military advantage would be gone.

Powerful figures in Britain and America decided that wasn't about to happen.

But in the Fall of 1942, one man realized that if penicillin was now the only thing between blood poisoning death and a nice long life, he would have to up his own ante in this relentless game of chicken.

So that Fall, Dr Henry Dawson stole his first supply of government-issued penicillin and put it to work saving lives from systemic SBE disease , again against strict government orders to let the SBE patients die.

By his reckoning, if the Allies could militarize penicillin, there seemed no reason why one - dying - doctor couldn't un-militarize it back again......

Resetting the Allied moral compass so that it diverged from the Nazis, not merely followed a muted parallel course

It remains unknown whether Henry Dawson expected his quixotic wartime efforts (to "waste" weaponized penicillin on 'useless' SBEs ) to go as far as they ultimately did.

He certainly was extremely unhappy that America was treating its wartime 'SBE lives unworthy of life' in almost as bad a fashion as Nazi Germany was known to be doing to its SBEs and others seen as "useless mouths".

But did he suspect his assault on weaponizing penicillin would extend beyond the Allies' horrific wartime neglect of the poorer chronically ill ?

He probably couldn't have foreseen just how quickly the pipeline of ever-newer ever-better sulfa drugs would dry up or just how quickly so many strains of deadly bacteria would become resistant to any sulfa drug , leaving penicillin as the  only  wartime lifesaver between disease and death.

This meant de-weaponizing penicillin had consequences far beyond those people suffering from SBE and denied their only chance at life.

If weaponized penicillin had remained throughout the war successfully censored and had remained denied to the civilian world (as weaponized DDT successfully was, never let us forget) , it would have ranked as one of WWII's major war crimes, like Katyn Forest or Auschwitz.

Millions of people around the world during WWII would have died needlessly from massive infections that only penicillin alone could have stopped.

Penicillin in 1943 was not as it is today,  just one among dozens of antibiotics - it was the only one - and in addition, no new anti-bacterial sulfa drugs were coming along to replace the ones that bacteria had so rapidly grown resistant to.

Refusing to divert a tiny amount of war resources to make penicillin available to civilians - anywhere and everywhere - was to refuse them Life itself.

Worse, there was no trade-off  to debate ; penicillin, like sulfa before it, was no war-winning secret medical weapon, at least in its intended war-winning use at the front .

Brand new (front line) wounds either contain abundant alternative bacteria foods to the deadly sulfa 'food' (the Fildes theory, known since 1940) or contain abundant proteins to bind to penicillin and render it useless.

However penicillin, and sulfa, were very useful a little further back in the military hospital system, as a life-saving systemic in cases of possible blood poisoning.

The case against secret weaponized penicillin gets even worse.

As an impure natural drug, penicillin would have taken the Germans at least a year or two or three to successfully mass produce it , even if its virtues had been sung from the heavens by the American media in 1942.

But as a pure synthetic penicillin in supposedly cheap abundant mass production (an event that in fact as not yet ever occurred) the chemistry-minded Germans would have rapidly back-engineered the drug and synthesized it rapidly themselves.

Because remember it took 15 years of hard effort to purify natural penicillin enough to determine its structure - but only months thereafter to 'synthesize' it artificially.

Back-engineering that synthesis would also only have taken months.

Penicillin's real secret was just how difficult the mass production of natural penicillin could be if you set your mind on doing everything the hard way ---- not the OSRD-Merck-Oxford fantasy of secret synthesis.

Dawson certainly set up the stage for the Allies re-setting of their moral compass , from his endocarditis efforts from September 1940 to September 1943 : but it was the immediate outcry resulting from the Patty Malone and Marie Barker cases that forced them to actually do something concrete.

His gut instinct in 1940 ,that not treating the otherwise fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis would prove the acid test for the Allies' pernicious morality, certainly was correct.

But while he couldn't have foreseen how far his actions would impact, he wouldn't have been unhappy that they did so......

The Cure for Auschwitz Disease : "Dawson's Crude" : .56% penicillin ...and 99 and 44/100ths pure love

Pray there comes a day when most premature deaths really are 'Acts of God', when even the best of money and the best of medical care could not result in a happy ending.

But until that happier day, most premature deaths in the world - in peace as in war - are 'Acts of Humanity' , or rather 'Acts of Lack of Humanity'.

Sins of Omission : premature death caused because the people dying are not judged (by others more fortunate) as worthy of devoting much money or effort towards saving.

In war, comparatively few people die as soldiers dying of mortal wounds gained in combat.

The Nazis' behavior provides a particularly clear example of this.

They fed and cared for  the captured POWs and enemy civilians of some nations (the Dutch for example) but for other (Russians and Poles for example) many or most of these people were shot after battle or left to starve and die of disease from lack of food, medical care and shelter.

The food and fuel saved as a result meant that no German citizen went hungry or cold.

The right kind of German civilian anyway.

Using the war as excuse, the Nazis killed many German civilians, those judged 'life unworthy of life' , to free up food and hospitals for other Germans.

In another well known example of  WWII's Sins of Omission, Winston Churchill ignored the pleas of his top British officials in India and let four million poor Bengali civilians needlessly starve to death in 1943-1944 ,rather than divert some food and some shipping from  Allied peoples he judged more worthy of receiving them.

Even the different death rates from wounds gained in combat  , among the so called "modern" nations engaged in World War Two is revealing.

The Americans and British generally devoted more resources to saving their wounded compared to the Germans, Japanese, Russians and Italians.

 As a result,more western Allied troops survived the same severity of wound as experienced by troops of these other nations.

'Of course', I hear you say, 'they were richer nations, it was easy for them !'

But no : they had a choice, because the extra money devoted to this extraordinary care of the wounded could have been allocated elsewhere: to more and better anti-tank artillery, for example.

An extraordinary effort to produce the best anti-tank artillery ever made was , in fact, probably the cheapest way for the Western Allies to have ended the war against Germany at least a year earlier than it did, saving millions of lives all around.

I raise the genuine issue of better earlier anti-tank artillery versus the best possible military health care to remind us that even total war still leaves us with genuine moral choices.

More Lancaster bombers versus more 17 pounder anti-tank guns versus raising everyone's morale by generously providing penicillin enough for all people were some of the choices - part political, part moral, part economical - that leaders had to make in WWII.

Making the wrong ones meant the war dragged on longer than it had to, costing more lives lost.

It is not enough to say Churchill won the war in 1945 ; better to ask, could he have won the war in 1943 ?

In 1940, Henry Dawson was battling a near universal mindset among the world's research-oriented doctors of that time : that a medical researcher's only task was to determine that disease A was caused by bug B and that bug B was killed by compound C.

Then, like sleeping under a bridge, the researchers considered that the cure for disease A was open to rich and poor alike : pay for three weeks of needles at $10 a shot: together with doctors fees, say $250 in total.

When the annual wages of the working poor, if they found work, was very lucky to be $750 in 1940, that was a cure well beyond their reach.

Besides the fact that their disease might be far harder to cure than that of someone well off, due to the cumulative affect of their lack of good nutritious food for years and years.

Or that fact that living, as they did, in poor and crowded housing, disease A was more likely to come back again, even after an impossibly expensive cure.

Now what if disease A is something one gets from having open wounds - such as the open wounds all civilian mothers have after childbirth, or the open wounds that soldiers get after exposure to shell fire in battle.

How do we judge western Allied governments unwilling to provide the only life saver for disease A , either to any civilian moms (except those personally known to lead disease A researchers) or to any soldiers with wounds so severe they will be discharged and pensioned off, if they live ?

And how do we judge these governments when at the same time, they are gladly willing to provide live-saving compound C  (totally free !) to men who had either very high and very low peacetime incomes, just as long as their war wounds (by sheer luck) are only moderately severe and they can be expected to return soon to combat duty ?

Is this attitude not different in kind from that of the Nazis, but merely different in degree ?

Dawson had no realistic expectations that a few small injections of a very crude penicillin powder, hastily made in a few weeks, would cure such an incurable invariably fatal disease as subacute bacterial endocarditis, (SBE), then as now the acid test of all infectious diseases.

His powder had only about 8 to 9 units of penicillin per mg in it ; ie it was only about .56% pure.

The rest (the remaining 99 and 44/100ths worth),was in many researchers' minds, "junk".

Rather as they later described most of our DNA : "junk".

I believe Dawson considered his little bit of brown powder to be .56% penicillin and 99.44% pure love.

99.44% pure care, concern, caring.

For Dawson was judging his attempt to save Aaron Alston and Charlie Aronson by a much different - and much more moral - acid test.

To Dawson, SBE in the Fall of 1940 was not the acid test of infectious disease, but rather the acid test of pernicious morality.

These SBE patients were be judged to be 1940 America's "4Fs of the 4Fs", suffering from the militarily most useless disease on earth and not worthy of wasting any precious medical resources upon.

Now a doctor named Francis Peabody that Dawson had hoped to train with (but who died of cancer before that could occur) had earlier and famously said that the care of the patient begins (only begins in fact ) if the doctor first cares about the patient.

A single doctor can't hope to directly save everyone dying in a big war.

But by setting a very public example about caring for the least of these, those judged "unworthy of life", even in the midst of a war , they can hope to begin to still the trigger fingers of those all too willing to kill prisoners  just because 'it is too much bother to bring them back to our own lines'.

Only when the world is willing to care about "useless" others, even in the midst of wars, can we expect to begin to see war deaths reduced to combat mortal wounds, and then to ultimately see lesser and shorter and less brutal wars.

Only in a world where ordinary people care about others judged "useless", can we expect to still the hand that dropped the pellets at Auschwitz .

Which is why I earnestly claim that Dawson's Crude was the best and only cure for the Auschwitz Disease ....

Medical ethics - not medical techniques - are probably the leading way to decrease or increase deaths due to war

How doctors and nurses morally regard all of their fellow human beings, rather than how they medically treat their actual, relatively few, patients, is probably the number one determinate in whether wars are relatively bloodless or particularly bloody.

The entire culture takes many of its moral cues from the medical professionals and when they (as in WWII Germany and America )  sanction or even advocate neglecting or killing those judged lesser than others, this attitude bleeds across the whole country and into the actions of its troops --with horrendous consequences.

But when doctors and nurses publicly stress , particularly in wartime , that every life (even those weak and destined never to be able to contribute much directly to the war effort) is infinitely valuable and infinitely worth saving, they indirectly shorten wars and reduce bloodshed.

Because wars drag on and killing is unlimited when (a) participants feel that the other side is so worthless that it isn't wrong to kill them even after they surrender and (b) the other side is reluctant to negotiate a surrender, correctly believing they will then be all killed after they laid down their arms.

The Geneva Conventions do shorten wars and do reduce war deaths when all sides accept them and act upon them , observing the spirit of those conventions, and just not 'the letter of the law'.

In many ways, the Allies failed to observe the spirit of those conventions.

By way of pointed contrast, Henry Dawson felt it critically important that his nation be publicly seen as expending great efforts to save the lives of its most worthless citizens, even in the midst of an all-out world war.

Hence his accelerated offering of a little penicillin-of-hope for two young men dying of invariable fatal SBE infection, precisely on the morning of October 16th 1940.

He wasn't assuming it would actually save their lives, but it might* , and he was determined that they and their families would know that all efforts possible had been done to save them, despite being in a teaching hospital gearing up to focus on 1A war medicine instead.

(* Just as Dawson hadn't given up his place in a WWI  stretcher for the battlefield wounded to a man triaged as dying, in the belief that it would thereby save his life, only that it might and was worth a try.)

These two youths  can be regarded as representative of all those  about to be regarded as the 4Fs of the 4Fs, "mere useless mouths", as the first day of America's first peacetime draft registration process remorselessly triaged American citizens into those worthy and those unworthy.

Green Ward or railway siding ...

This relatively inexpensive simple act, Dawson felt, if extended  to all of America's weak and sickly, would reassure all of its citizens, all those of neutral and occupied nations, even all those of enemy combatant nations, that joining such a nation as an ally or surrendering to it, would not result in their own deaths.

Sometimes, as Medicins Sans Frontieres has shown time and and again ,the publicly perceived ethics of doctors have done far more to save lives than any surgical or chemotherapeutic procedure they could devise.

Doctors, whether in a terminal SBE "Green Ward" at Columbia Presbyterian or at a railway siding at Auschwitz, set an crucial example that all the rest of society observes and acts upon......