There are many reasons for the microbes not just surviving on this planet for four billion years but also dominating it.
Showing posts with label public domain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label public domain. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 7, 2015
Thursday, February 19, 2015
Synthetic Autarky : Patenting the Bomb
For centuries, nominal democracies like America and Britain have yearned to control a war-stopping super-weapon that will give them a patent monopoly against others' aggression.
A super-weapon that they alone control because they have (a) kept it top secret and (b) hold all the patents on it.
Gosh, we might just as well be talking about the actual A-Bomb !
Now the 'top secret' bit we get - totally.
But why then also seek patents over the atomic bomb's components and production as well ?
One might argue that as capitalistically minded people, the American elites knew that even in free market economies, patent holders were totally free to deny licenses to some firms or nations while offering them to others.
This would allow the iron fist of the new American totalitarian political cum military monopoly on this world-destroying atomic bomb to appear softened by the velvet glove of the traditional free market patent monopoly process.
This is part of the picture - true - but only part of it.
We might ask ourselves why were entrepreneurs, businesses and governments around the world so interested in all three forms of synthesis (chemical, physical and biological) in the heyday of the Modernity period ?
Philosophically, I might argue that we can't really invent anything physical that isn't also fully natural - we can only copyright ideas inside our heads that defy natural laws.
So if everything we synthesis is really a variant on already existing natural materials or processes - why bother ?
The publicly stated reason is that the newly synthesized variant has been made better, cheaper, faster.
The real - private - reason is that Mother Nature, is by definition, all PD (Public Domain).
Anyone and all nations can turn rubber tree sap into some sort of tire.
There is no way to create a cartel or monopoly on rubber plants for very long, because someone always ends up slipping out a few seeds or stems out past the national border guards and then starts growing rubber plants a continent away.
But Man-made synthesis allows firms (and above all nations) to erect patentable synthetic autarkical monopolies against other firms and nations and even against Mother Nature herself.
So, on the chemical front, German chemists avoided having to rely on overseas suppliers' natural guano to make fertilizer or explosives during WWI - inventing a synthetic way to fix nitrogen instead.
During the interwar years, these same chemists hoped to perfect methods to turn abundant German coal, water and air into synthetic rubber, petroleum, wood and steel substituting plastics, fabrics and medicines - the list of possibilities went on and on.
Equally hard at work on the biological front, German eugenic experts (and murderous dysgenic experts) were trying to convert the raw natural population of Germany into a synthetic Aryan race - pure, perfect, tough, resistant, resilient.
In the area of physics, German atom-smashers hoped to bust atoms of raw natural elements common in Germany into the atoms of scarce and precious elements not common in Germany.
If we forget the traditional view of a man-made patent as something that is invariantly made public when confirmed, and drill down deeper, we see it is just an inherent monopoly that needn't be made public at all.
Because when Mother Nature made rubber tree sap strong enough to work as tires, she did so world-wide : no monopoly is possible in her world as long as seeds exist along with the winds to blow them hither and yon.
But man-made objects can be synthesized inside tightly guarded buildings and kept under wraps far longer than wild rubber plants springing up here there and everywhere in tropical forests.
Man-made synthetics needn't make all the natural variants of natural materials : why bother to synthesize the body excretions of 149,999 species of beetles when only one beetle species actually produces a life-saving drug in those excretions ?
In fact, why bother keeping any of the 150,000 species of beetle alive, period, when they are only a competitor for raw materials human chemists need to synthesis some more scientific wonders ?
Why bother to live in open commensality with all the messy plentitude of Mother Nature's beings as they compete with us human synthesizers over the earth's scarce natural raw elements ?
Patentable synthetic autarkic monopoly (Modernity in a long phrase) is thus inherently plenticidal : it sees no real need for keeping anything around in the natural world beyond a few raw basic elements.
Above all, it will seek the single simple raw element required for atom-smashing-together nuclear fusion synthesis to work : basically just hydrogen.
Easy then to imagine some future modernity-oriented new human colony on some vast hydrogen gas planet.
Outside is nothing but this vast ball of natural hydrogen gas but inside the plastic bubble is a world of gaudy artificially coloured materials recreating a simulacrum of whatever the human mind and the human chemist can invent.
Too bad about the pesky gravity three times as strong as on Earth - but the DNA boffins are onto it - soon they will perfect a synthetic new body for all these former earthlings....
A super-weapon that they alone control because they have (a) kept it top secret and (b) hold all the patents on it.
Gosh, we might just as well be talking about the actual A-Bomb !
Now the 'top secret' bit we get - totally.
But why then also seek patents over the atomic bomb's components and production as well ?
One might argue that as capitalistically minded people, the American elites knew that even in free market economies, patent holders were totally free to deny licenses to some firms or nations while offering them to others.
This would allow the iron fist of the new American totalitarian political cum military monopoly on this world-destroying atomic bomb to appear softened by the velvet glove of the traditional free market patent monopoly process.
This is part of the picture - true - but only part of it.
We might ask ourselves why were entrepreneurs, businesses and governments around the world so interested in all three forms of synthesis (chemical, physical and biological) in the heyday of the Modernity period ?
Philosophically, I might argue that we can't really invent anything physical that isn't also fully natural - we can only copyright ideas inside our heads that defy natural laws.
So if everything we synthesis is really a variant on already existing natural materials or processes - why bother ?
The publicly stated reason is that the newly synthesized variant has been made better, cheaper, faster.
The real - private - reason is that Mother Nature, is by definition, all PD (Public Domain).
Anyone and all nations can turn rubber tree sap into some sort of tire.
There is no way to create a cartel or monopoly on rubber plants for very long, because someone always ends up slipping out a few seeds or stems out past the national border guards and then starts growing rubber plants a continent away.
But Man-made synthesis allows firms (and above all nations) to erect patentable synthetic autarkical monopolies against other firms and nations and even against Mother Nature herself.
So, on the chemical front, German chemists avoided having to rely on overseas suppliers' natural guano to make fertilizer or explosives during WWI - inventing a synthetic way to fix nitrogen instead.
During the interwar years, these same chemists hoped to perfect methods to turn abundant German coal, water and air into synthetic rubber, petroleum, wood and steel substituting plastics, fabrics and medicines - the list of possibilities went on and on.
Equally hard at work on the biological front, German eugenic experts (and murderous dysgenic experts) were trying to convert the raw natural population of Germany into a synthetic Aryan race - pure, perfect, tough, resistant, resilient.
In the area of physics, German atom-smashers hoped to bust atoms of raw natural elements common in Germany into the atoms of scarce and precious elements not common in Germany.
If we forget the traditional view of a man-made patent as something that is invariantly made public when confirmed, and drill down deeper, we see it is just an inherent monopoly that needn't be made public at all.
Because when Mother Nature made rubber tree sap strong enough to work as tires, she did so world-wide : no monopoly is possible in her world as long as seeds exist along with the winds to blow them hither and yon.
But man-made objects can be synthesized inside tightly guarded buildings and kept under wraps far longer than wild rubber plants springing up here there and everywhere in tropical forests.
Man-made synthetics needn't make all the natural variants of natural materials : why bother to synthesize the body excretions of 149,999 species of beetles when only one beetle species actually produces a life-saving drug in those excretions ?
In fact, why bother keeping any of the 150,000 species of beetle alive, period, when they are only a competitor for raw materials human chemists need to synthesis some more scientific wonders ?
Why bother to live in open commensality with all the messy plentitude of Mother Nature's beings as they compete with us human synthesizers over the earth's scarce natural raw elements ?
Patentable synthetic autarkic monopoly (Modernity in a long phrase) is thus inherently plenticidal : it sees no real need for keeping anything around in the natural world beyond a few raw basic elements.
Above all, it will seek the single simple raw element required for atom-smashing-together nuclear fusion synthesis to work : basically just hydrogen.
Easy then to imagine some future modernity-oriented new human colony on some vast hydrogen gas planet.
Outside is nothing but this vast ball of natural hydrogen gas but inside the plastic bubble is a world of gaudy artificially coloured materials recreating a simulacrum of whatever the human mind and the human chemist can invent.
Too bad about the pesky gravity three times as strong as on Earth - but the DNA boffins are onto it - soon they will perfect a synthetic new body for all these former earthlings....
Sunday, May 25, 2014
Scandal : Writers Union of Canada rejects BLOCKHEAD
Great news !
The Writers' Union of Canada has changed its membership requirements and I am still not allowed in.
For a few weeks there , I feared I might be.
I am still not allowed in , but it is not because I am female or black or gay --- writers' organizations have never been accused of arresting anyone for DWB (driving while black) .
No, it is because I have committed the ultimate taboo in the Union's eyes : I try to do good, as a writer, for others without expecting a reward in return.
I write without commercial intent.
Oh , the horror of it all !
As a writer, I am , as Samuel Johnson famously noted , a blockhead : I do not write for money.
I do not copyright my writing (I release it fully into the Public Domain without any sort of reservations) and I give my works away as either e-books or as downloadable print books.
Regard my comparatively short works as Tracts or Pamphlets and thus not real books - call me a Tractarian or Pamphleteer - as Eva Tanguay sang , "I don't care, I don't care, I don't care !"
How could I even think about selling my work for self gain when my books (Tracts/Pamphlets) are all about Agape selflessness ?
Did Dr Martin Henry Dawson or Philip Bent VC give up their lives, just for the money ?
So why should I write about their selflessness, for my selfish gain ?
The Writers' Union decision was widely reported and commented upon, in Canada and abroad.
But not once so far have I come across a negative comment on the Union's continued need for their potential members to want to make money off their writing.
Negative comments aplenty for sure from many independent authors.
But only over the Union deciding it had to vet the self published for quality control while letting in those published with someone else's money without any need to meet quality standards.
No one seems to think that working hard and skillfully at your occupation without expecting financial gain - much like the medical professionals in 'Doctors Without Borders' - is a worthy human activity.
Indeed since very few people these days agree to head up a 'professional' charity without being very well paid for doing good , why should professional writers feel any different ?
Right then - as an amateur (someone who does something out of love ) - it seems only appropriate that I call myself a proud amateur writer - and a 'blockhead writer' to boot ...
The Writers' Union of Canada has changed its membership requirements and I am still not allowed in.
For a few weeks there , I feared I might be.
I am still not allowed in , but it is not because I am female or black or gay --- writers' organizations have never been accused of arresting anyone for DWB (driving while black) .
No, it is because I have committed the ultimate taboo in the Union's eyes : I try to do good, as a writer, for others without expecting a reward in return.
I write without commercial intent.
WWCI : 'writing without commercial intent'
Oh , the horror of it all !
As a writer, I am , as Samuel Johnson famously noted , a blockhead : I do not write for money.
I do not copyright my writing (I release it fully into the Public Domain without any sort of reservations) and I give my works away as either e-books or as downloadable print books.
Tractarian ?
Regard my comparatively short works as Tracts or Pamphlets and thus not real books - call me a Tractarian or Pamphleteer - as Eva Tanguay sang , "I don't care, I don't care, I don't care !"
How could I even think about selling my work for self gain when my books (Tracts/Pamphlets) are all about Agape selflessness ?
Did Dr Martin Henry Dawson or Philip Bent VC give up their lives, just for the money ?
So why should I write about their selflessness, for my selfish gain ?
The Writers' Union decision was widely reported and commented upon, in Canada and abroad.
But not once so far have I come across a negative comment on the Union's continued need for their potential members to want to make money off their writing.
Negative comments aplenty for sure from many independent authors.
But only over the Union deciding it had to vet the self published for quality control while letting in those published with someone else's money without any need to meet quality standards.
No one seems to think that working hard and skillfully at your occupation without expecting financial gain - much like the medical professionals in 'Doctors Without Borders' - is a worthy human activity.
Indeed since very few people these days agree to head up a 'professional' charity without being very well paid for doing good , why should professional writers feel any different ?
Right then - as an amateur (someone who does something out of love ) - it seems only appropriate that I call myself a proud amateur writer - and a 'blockhead writer' to boot ...
Saturday, November 16, 2013
A freely available book about one man's struggle to make wartime penicillin freely available
When I started thinking about this project, ten years ago in 2004, I sensed that any book recounting Henry Dawson's heroic efforts to make wartime penicillin freely available to all humanity would itself have be freely available,to be morally effective.
That is, it would have to be released fully into the PUBLIC DOMAIN, to drift about globally like a spore of penicillium, sprouting up on whatever favourable ground it found.
But I also knew that most book reviewers, ironically particularly if left wing or green-oriented, distain reviewing newly published book that were both free and in the public domain.
(Prolific book reviewer George Orwell, as always, was the sturdy exception : he loved pamphleteers and tractarians, collected their work and did a massive book about them.)
And my chances for seeing the book's inspiring message spread by way of movie or musical or hard cover book also lessened if it was PD.
The producers of such expensive and lengthy productions need to be assured of an secure window for all their time and effort, via a copyrighted manuscript being exclusively optioned to them.
So I hemmed and hawed, back and forth.
But since 2004 the economics of book publishing and of web movies and musicals have greatly changed --- as have the life expectancies of general book review sections and their employees.
A web book or movie can be done far faster and cheaper and appeal to a potentially globe wide audience than its old school counterpart.
And when an item, like penicillin spore or a book text , is in the Public Domain and available for all to take up, the forces of competition can freely play themselves out.
Wealthy and well connected producers settling in to leisurely and extravagantly throw up an expensive product about a hot topic can find themselves outflanked by poorer but hungrier rivals who quickly and cheaply get their effort to market first.
(As when Pfizer's John and Mae's Smith public domain penicillin resoundingly beat George W Merck's wannabe-patented penicillin to the crucial D-Day beaches market ---- and Pfizer never looked back.)
Book reviewing hasn't really disappeared --- there are more scholar books than ever but also more scholarly journals than ever to review them.
Similarly every new author with their first self published romance novelette still finds reviews on the zillions of tiny and not so tiny romance genre review blogs .
Books like my "All Life is Family" always tend to do better anyway when general reporters talk them up on the general news pages as newsworthy items in themselves.
In my book's case, a mention can be dropped in as "a new book casts a historical light onto the ongoing debate over Obamacare".
General book reviews sections have shrunk or disappeared altogether because they have become small ghettos in overall newspaper readership -- largely because non-genre "literary" novels , poetry, dramas and short stories have lost most of their intellectual cachet and in fact have been reduced to a high brow genre themselves.
No longer does the well educated citizen feel that if they can't read Don DeLillo 's latest Pulitzer prize winning novel ,that they should at least read a long enough review of it to be able discuss it intelligently at cocktail parties.
If the general book reviewer doesn't need me and this book, the feeling is almost mutual.
So, I have finally pulled the plug on the discussion - I have assigned all my rights in my book to the Public Domain and once that is done, there is no putting the genie back....
That is, it would have to be released fully into the PUBLIC DOMAIN, to drift about globally like a spore of penicillium, sprouting up on whatever favourable ground it found.
But I also knew that most book reviewers, ironically particularly if left wing or green-oriented, distain reviewing newly published book that were both free and in the public domain.
(Prolific book reviewer George Orwell, as always, was the sturdy exception : he loved pamphleteers and tractarians, collected their work and did a massive book about them.)
And my chances for seeing the book's inspiring message spread by way of movie or musical or hard cover book also lessened if it was PD.
The producers of such expensive and lengthy productions need to be assured of an secure window for all their time and effort, via a copyrighted manuscript being exclusively optioned to them.
So I hemmed and hawed, back and forth.
But since 2004 the economics of book publishing and of web movies and musicals have greatly changed --- as have the life expectancies of general book review sections and their employees.
A web book or movie can be done far faster and cheaper and appeal to a potentially globe wide audience than its old school counterpart.
And when an item, like penicillin spore or a book text , is in the Public Domain and available for all to take up, the forces of competition can freely play themselves out.
Wealthy and well connected producers settling in to leisurely and extravagantly throw up an expensive product about a hot topic can find themselves outflanked by poorer but hungrier rivals who quickly and cheaply get their effort to market first.
(As when Pfizer's John and Mae's Smith public domain penicillin resoundingly beat George W Merck's wannabe-patented penicillin to the crucial D-Day beaches market ---- and Pfizer never looked back.)
Book reviewing hasn't really disappeared --- there are more scholar books than ever but also more scholarly journals than ever to review them.
Similarly every new author with their first self published romance novelette still finds reviews on the zillions of tiny and not so tiny romance genre review blogs .
Books like my "All Life is Family" always tend to do better anyway when general reporters talk them up on the general news pages as newsworthy items in themselves.
In my book's case, a mention can be dropped in as "a new book casts a historical light onto the ongoing debate over Obamacare".
General book reviews sections have shrunk or disappeared altogether because they have become small ghettos in overall newspaper readership -- largely because non-genre "literary" novels , poetry, dramas and short stories have lost most of their intellectual cachet and in fact have been reduced to a high brow genre themselves.
No longer does the well educated citizen feel that if they can't read Don DeLillo 's latest Pulitzer prize winning novel ,that they should at least read a long enough review of it to be able discuss it intelligently at cocktail parties.
If the general book reviewer doesn't need me and this book, the feeling is almost mutual.
So, I have finally pulled the plug on the discussion - I have assigned all my rights in my book to the Public Domain and once that is done, there is no putting the genie back....
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Most of the penicillin grown in its first 15 years, was wasted on useless attempts at synthesis, not used to save the dying
If my claim be wrong : show me the money !
Open all the archives on university, hospital and corporate penicillin files.
Show us the size and number of penicillin production runs, month by month, from September 1928 to September 1943 ( ie including the first four years of the war).
Then shows us the amount of penicillin units actually released for therapeutic use on human patients suffering from infections suspected of being defeatable by penicillin, during that same time period.
I have never seen any published accounts where the responsible authorities complained about all the precious potentially life-saving penicillin that was being wasted ---- during an all-out Total War ! ----on a futile 20 year long effort to synthesize patentable profitable penicillin from PD (public domain) natural penicillin.
But there are plenty of complaints from the higher-ups about all the penicillin being wasted on saving the lives of ("useless feeders") young people dying from hitherto invariably fatal SBE (endocarditis)......
Open all the archives on university, hospital and corporate penicillin files.
Show us the size and number of penicillin production runs, month by month, from September 1928 to September 1943 ( ie including the first four years of the war).
Then shows us the amount of penicillin units actually released for therapeutic use on human patients suffering from infections suspected of being defeatable by penicillin, during that same time period.
Patents, Profits and Patriotism : pick two out of the three...
I have never seen any published accounts where the responsible authorities complained about all the precious potentially life-saving penicillin that was being wasted ---- during an all-out Total War ! ----on a futile 20 year long effort to synthesize patentable profitable penicillin from PD (public domain) natural penicillin.
But there are plenty of complaints from the higher-ups about all the penicillin being wasted on saving the lives of ("useless feeders") young people dying from hitherto invariably fatal SBE (endocarditis)......
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
How Parke-Davis could have made a fortune in 1929 from the ultimate in generic drugs : natural penicillin
 |
| Parke-Davis, as seen from my folks' homes |
Penicillin - in theory - is one such 'ultimate generic drug' , but was it in fact, in 1929 ?
Many strains of various bacteria and molds make penicillin-like beta-lactam materials but most do so in such small quantities that it takes very sensitive testing to discover their existence.
As such, St Mary's hospital in 1929 had the only two known strains of microbes known to make sufficient penicillin to be useful to man.
The original mold had been gathered as part of John Freeman's pioneering studies in allergies.
(Freeman's researches were the only part of the entire Wright-Fleming money-making empire that had any longterm scientific validity - as evidenced by being the only part of the Institute that a drug company, Beecham, was actually willing to part good money for in the 1950s after Fleming and Wright were safely in their graves.)
Spores from Freeman's unique mold had drifted up to Fleming's lab and so the hospital now controlled two copies of the same unique strain of mold.
Parke-Davis lost its chance to remain the world's biggest drug company
The Institute had a close contractual relationship with what was then the world's biggest and best research-oriented drug company - Detroit's Parke-Davis.
(Their enormous ( for their day) research labs were/are clearly visible right across the river from both my parents' home in Windsor Ontario.)
Patents were impossible for natural drugs but hardly needed, for St Mary's/Parke-Davis controlled the only source of the vital reagent needed to make penicillin : their unique strain of penicillium.
Keep that strain in-house and they could have a profitable monopoly forever.
Think this wildly unlikely ?
How do you think today's real penicillin makers still act ?
They develop in-house strains of penicillium and never patent them or share them.
The down-stream techniques after the penicillium express the penicillin juice are/were patented and hence public, for a fee.
But they are useless without a stable, high producing penicillium strain : one can afford to be quite cavalier with one's chemical engineering efficiencies when your unique strain out-produces all your competitors by an order or two of magnitude !
Trade Secrets rather than patents remain the most profitably business method in the biological drug business - now in 2012 as in 1928 .
When Fleming, after he too-quickly dismissed penicillin for systemic use, started freely giving away penicillium spores as a low value lab clearing agent, he ruined any hopes that Parke-Davis and St Mary's might put heavy money in penicillin production and promotion.
Ironically when he thus destroyed the early commercial hopes for penicillin production, his spores out there in the wider medical world, successfully kept the MRC/NAS/OSRD triad from delaying wartime penicillin any longer than they already did....
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
ME? An AUTHOR ?! God, I hope not ....
 |
| Michael Marshall |
I suppose ---- a few.
No names spring to mind immediately, though.
I am certainly no 'author' .
How dare you ?
Some have tried to smeared my name .
Called me a pamphleteer.
I picked up their smears and spread them more generously over my whole body : I am a pamphleteer and I am quite proud of it.
Has any pamphleteer ever pamphleteered, except for passion ?
Maybe, some, can't say I can think of any.
Profit and pamphleteering just don't seem to go together , not in the way that pamphleteering and passion do.
My blog posts are in the PUBLIC DOMAIN , and are designed to be globally commensal.
Like HGT (Horizontal Gene Transfers) I hope they cross fertilize intellectual discussions around dinner tables, the world over.
So if I blog with what seems excess passion, do not expect me to apologize (at least not very often !).
In this century's war of words and deeds between the old and the new science, real worlds are at risk : I believe there can be no neutrals in this war over Life.
Which side are you on ?
I know I have picked mine.....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...