"The penicillin shot heard around the world" (Washington Heights , October 16th 1940) changed our entire world , for the better , forever.
But it almost didn't happened.
If Dr Dawson had been content (as most of the world's doctors were) to wait for the wartime British (led by Fleming and Florey) to totally synthesize (patentable) penicillin, the world would still be waiting for the first mass produced antibiotic these 75 years later.
Thank God the other Manhattan Project rescued natural penicillin from the British.
Because New York got natural penicillin into mass production well before WWII was over, when it was most needed , and then turned that Mother Nature-produced technology into the cornerstone of our entire antibiotic defences against death from microbes.
Move over Concord ( or is it Lexington ?!) ...
Showing posts with label shot heard around the world. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shot heard around the world. Show all posts
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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...