Penicillin-for-all was Emily Lazarus's Big Tent Manhattan while the America-only atom bomb was Gordon Gekko's "greed is good" Manhattan

Janus Manhattan 1945 : one secret Manhattan project to make an atom bomb only for America and another public Manhattan project to make penicillin for all.

One was Big Science for the few and the other was small science, nay tiny science, "homemade hope', for the many.

Big Tent Manhattan versus Greed is Good Manhattan

It almost was as if the ghosts of Emily Lazarus and Gordon Gekko were duking it out for the soul of Manhattan, America and the world...

1945 Janus Manhattan gives boomer children a morally muddled legacy

The mixed birthright of The Children of Janus Manhattan '45  : nuclear death/penicillin life

All of us alive are in some sense Children of Janus Manhattan : all seeing our lives potentially shortened or extended by 1945 Manhattan's twin legacies of deadly atomic bombs and freely available life saving penicillin.

But those who felt that Janus tug and pull most intensely I believe were my generation (cohort more accurately) : those of us born between 1940 and 1956.

This is because we few felt the waning of Modernity and the dawning of Postmodernity in our very bones as it all happened during our crucial formative years when our personalities were as plastic as our rapidly growing bodies.

We are starting to die off now and it is time to put into the historical record exactly what it felt like to be the healthiest most scared generation of children ever ....

Manhattan's janus children, transitional era boomers born 1940-1956

I am a member of the transitional era boomer generation (born 1940-1956) : we historical few who experienced both the waning of modernity and the dawning of postmodernity during our crucial - plastic - formative years.

Very few of us were born in Manhattan (very few people ever are) but we were all Manhattan's janus children in a very real sense : the healthiest and most frightened generation of children ever born.

Because we all knew that if the MANHATTAN  nuclear PROJECT didn't kill us from instant global death then the MANHATTAN penicillin PROJECT would likely ensure we'd live out our allotted three score and ten or more.

Everyone alive after 1945's janus-like delivery of atomic bombs and penicillin shots is in some sense Janus Manhattan's children - because we all have had our lives potentially lengthened and shortened by those twin warring developments from Columbia University's campuses in 1940s Gotham.

So to say we have absolutely no interest in this subject, is really to say that we have no interest in where we came from - or where we are going ...

First penicillin shot : October 16 1940 , DAILY DOSE to the contrary

Amazing what BS you can pick up on healthcentral.com websites - they can't even get the facts on the very first penicillin shots right - I'd hate to accept their advice on something serious !

Manhattanites , "brag about your country"

It really shouldn't be my job to blow wartime Manhattan's horn.

Joe Howe, the Bluenosers' favourite son, always advised his countryman to brag about their country :

Brag of your country.  When I am abroad, I brag of everything 
Nova Scotia is, has  or can produce and when they beat me at 
everything else, I say, 'How high do your tides rise?


Don't let the 9/11 plotters define wartime Manhattan to the world 
for you.


Admit The Bomb and wartime eugenic inclinations , but also talk up Henry Dawson and Patty Malone , Dante Colitti and Penicillin.

Take a bow ....

Arabic translation of "Hyssop in a time of Cedar" ?

I sure hope so. Many translations. But since Arabic was the common language of the 9/11 plotters, it have been nice if they had known a little more about the city they are so determined to destroy.

They only saw Manhattan as "coming from Mars", as the birthplace of  Eugenics and the Atomic War.

This is all true --- but only a partial truth.

Like all the world - like all of us - Manhattan is truly janus-like.

Within it, good and bad live in commensality, as does war and peace, love and aggression and big and small : all dine together at a common table.

I want to show the 9/11 plotters and their would-be successors that wartime Manhattan also "came from Venus".

 That the borough was also home to Emma Lazarus's Golden Door and to successful efforts to ensure that wartime's life-saving penicillin was made available to all the world's tired, poor and huddled 4Fs - regardless of race, colour ,creed or gender.

If a copy of my book makes even one future would-be plotter pause and re-consider, it will be worth it....

Henry Dawson, Champion of the Second Chance ... and the Second Glance

Manhattan-based doctor (Martin) Henry Dawson championed the smallest, weakest and poorest of beings all his life.

On one hand, they were human beings, such as the institutionalized chronically ill at Goldwater Hospital.

Or discarded young people , dying needlessly from subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE).

In both cases, he wanted to give them a second chance at a near normal life in what was, after all, the famed City of the Second Chance.

On the other hand, sometimes his focus was upon microbe beings, creatures about whom it can't really be said that he wanted to ensure their continued survival - he felt they did that well enough on their own !

Instead, he merely wanted all of us to take a Second Glance at just how well these incredibly tiny ,delicate, immobile sacs of water managed against extremities of physical conditions and the potent threat of the human immune system and modern medicine.

Starting in the 1920s, he pioneered studies of their survival techniques such as HGT, Quorum Sensing, Molecular Mimicry and Biofilms : still cutting edge science even today, eighty years later.

His subtle point was that if these, the smallest of the small, can manage survival so well than perhaps small human beings and small human nations can also manage equally well, if we just let them live rather than trying to enslave and kill them in the name of  a Progress that must always be Bigger , to be Better.

The Allied governments  never one to miss a chance to match the Axis in moral turpitude , wanted wartime penicillin to remain a secret available only for the 1As - "Penicillin from New York's Cold Spring Harbour's Eugenics lab" , as it were.

The tired, poor huddled 4Fs

Dawson was equally bull-headed in wanting to see the Nazis combatted morally as well as militarily, by demonstrating just how well we looked after our tired poor and huddled 4Fs,  even during a Total War : "Penicillin from New York's Emma Lazarus", as it were.

Janus-like Manhattan tried both approaches at first ,  very  strongly favouring the eugenic approach, until a few good Manhattanites rose up in protest.

Then wartime Manhattan was revealed to also come from the Venus of love and peace as well as from the Mars of anger and war.

Finally ... a Good News Story from the Bad News War.

Remembering when Manhattan was from Venus

"Now I am become Hope, Healer of Nations."

Why Manhattan choses to only remember its death-dealing activities during WWII is quite beyond me.

Just because that is all that the 9/11 bombers chose to recall , is no reason to emulate their example.

(Ie, the 911 planners chose only to focus upon the Mars side of Manhattan's Janus-like face.)

Yes , Columbia University in Manhattan ( along with a dozen other sites in greater NYC) was a key part of the best known wartime Manhattan Project, the militarization of the death-dealing atom.

In fact, the key part : because Columbia perfected gaseous diffusion, the method used on all sides to produce all the megadeath weapons of the Cold War.

Native Manhattanite, Robert Oppenheimer, seemingly sealed that image of Manhattan for all time, when he intoned after the first atomic blast, "Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds."

But Columbia University in wartime was also home to the other - the unknown - Manhattan Project :  ensuring that the life-sustaining properties of natural penicillin were freely available to all , at a low price, and during the war years when it was so badly needed.

Henry Dawson did not discover natural penicillin, but he was key in insisting it be widely produced during WWII, rather than a half dozen lacklustre years later.

Far more fundamentally, he was key in de-militarizing wartime penicillin, making it not just a secret medicine available only to the Allied front line, but something than people of all nations, races, creeds and genders felt they had a right to obtain when they were dying, without the cost bankrupting their families.

It remains to this day, seventy five years later, that rarity : an inexpensive safe lifesaver that has never been patented and over-priced.

The dying Dawson did all this because in an era when Bigger was Better and the small were just impediments to Progress, he so strongly believed in their right to existence and happiness.

From his tiny lab in upper Manhattan he radiated a message of hope to a troubled world.

Like Lady Liberty herself, he reminded the world of the Venus side to Janus Manhattan....

To 911 Bombers, Manhattan was from Mars - Henry Dawson's story could have reminded them it was also from Venus

We must alway remember that there was an other Manhattan Project during WWII ; unfortunately one that remains almost totally unknown to this day.

It involved Dr Martin Henry Dawson sacrificing his own life, all in an effort to see that wartime penicillin's scanty production and distribution was de-militarized  by the Allies and then made available to all the world's 'tired, poor and huddled'.

If his story had been better known much earlier,  Janus Manhattan would have shown two faces to the world , above all to the world that spawned the 911 Bombers.

One face of Manhattan would still intone "Now I am become Death, Destroyer of Nations" and brandish Big Science and a Big Bomb to go with its earlier Mars-like image of Big Skyscrapers and Big Business.

But the other face could have intoned "Now I am become Hope, Healer of Nations" .

It would remind the world of Manhattan's Venus side during WWII.

And remind us of the Statue of Liberty and of the other face of a  vast city where small diverse ethnic neighbourhoods are as least as common as big faceless corporate headquarters.

It is still not too late to tell Dawson's story to the world and hope it helps remind us not to see people and events through only a black and white lens but rather to see life in its full technicolor complexity....