'Hope without Borders' , 'Hope without Frontiers' --- the other Manhattan Project is STILL not finished

In late 1943, many people all over the Allied world rightly got very furious when they realized that the new hope that lifesaving penicillin represented was only going to unfaithful husbands and boyfriends who had got a dose of the clap overseas.

Hope without Frontiers

For Dr Henry Dawson's Manhattan-based 'penicillin-for-all' Project which began in the Fall of 1940 actually hoped to do two 'good things', first do something good for all of the small of the world and secondly, to do good by also inviting in all the small of the world to help make it happen.

All this really to make a much larger point to the Allied leadership.

That point was that a military-only approach to defeating the Axis wasn't likely to work, if the Allied coalition remained as small as it was in 1940 and remained as non committal as it was in putting its back into it.

In addition then, the Axis needed to be combatted, the Allies rallied and the Neutrals brought on side by also fighting on the moral front.

And here the world was quite rightly cynical that all of Winston Churchill's high sounding radio rhetoric and all the paper behind FDR's Atlantic Charter was really just 100% NATO : no action, talk only. 

But a "Big Tent" approach, one that honestly sought to invite in all the small and the weak in the world into the Allied effort, as helpers and as people to be helped, would remove that impression.

Penicillin diplomacy, the flying of penicillin around the world to save lives, regardless of their race, gender or social status, would be the quickest (and frankly, the cheapest) way to make that claim credible.

Dawson's unwavering conviction came from his belief that his scientific results was superior to that of the current "pop science" consensus.

That consensus basically held to a view, however cloaked in soft sawder and velvet, of the 'survival of the fit', that might was always right, bigger was always better, God always on the side of the Big Battalions.

This consensus gave anyone of empathy and conscience the resigned sense that, regrettably, the small were Nature's inevitable losers and couldn't be saved even with the best will in the world.

Dawson felt he had a new explanation (what we today call HGT) as to why the small (microbes) were still around two billion years later while the mighty (dinosaurs, for example) were but a passing flash in Nature's pan.

Basically HGT, to put it into human terms, was as if the microbes opened up the biggest of Big Tents in times of crisis, rather than running blood tests on the few they trusted to fight the fight (the human and Allied/Axis approach).

HGT allowed genes traditionally viewed as 'useless' and unused by human researchers, say the ones to allow microbes to resist an antibiotic, to spread very rapidly among all the various and very different microbes species - horizontally.

As result no microbe species is at all pure, all are totally mixed hybrids - and judging by two billion years of survival, all the better for it !

(I might add that the extended penicillin family genes also spread, via HGT, from bacteria to bacteria and then into the fungus family as well.)

Penicillin without borders

Think of HGT as spreading hope throughout the entire microbe world, regardless of borders or frontiers.

It might just be the meme we need to adopt today if the Earth and humanity is to survive human created ecological disaster....

Foreigners worked behind barbed wire fences to build atomic bomb and V2 rocket that America and Germany later claimed as totally their own

Allied America was not terribly different from Axis Germany when it came to employing hands and brains from dozens of foreign lands, often behind barbed wire fences, to do the heavy lifting for a super weapon they then had the chutzpah to claim as fully their own.

The atomic bomb project represented one vision of the future of world, one where the many labour so the few can benefit : think of it as country club Manhattan.

Big Tent Manhattan

Dr Henry Dawson also invited the small and the many in to labour on his Manhattan project as well.

But in this case, he worked to ensure that the benefits of that project (natural lifesaving penicillin) went as well to the small and the many, not just to the few that the Allies had originally intended it for.

His vision was of a world consisting of 'coalition of all possible talents' working to benefit all : think of it as Big Tent Manhattan.

So did Janus Manhattan's 1945 beacon shine dividedly forth to a tired and huddled world.

What, in the end, was that beacon to reveal : a vision of a Big Tent for all, be they powerless or powerful ----- or a vision of an exclusive country club, just the powerful ?

Dawson not asking why the move to WWII was started but rather asking - and answering - why it wasn't stopped

In the 1930s, Germany and Japan had big appetites and the means to war, at least upon smaller others near-by, to satisfy them.

Italy merely had a big appetite.

This we are all taught in school --- 'the causes of WWII'.

But is this a truly complete explanation for all of WWII - above all for its extraordinary long length and the almost surprising defeat of the victorious Axis ?

If 'the-rest-of-the-world-combined' had been seriously willing to war with 1930s Japan, Italy and Germany to stop their aggression, even 1940s Japan, Italy and Germany, the Axis would have been quickly defeated.

The Axis simply had far too little manpower and far too little strategic resources , even far too little capital resources such as existing factories, science labs, locomotives and merchant vessels - let alone enough tanks, planes and battleships.

What these three nations did have, along with their fellow travellers around the world, was boundless will power and self confidence produced by the conviction that Science and Nature was on the side of their aggression.

That ------ and the fact that their very large (but also very reluctant) opponents basically agreed with them on the science of the matter.

Martin Henry Dawson's 'other Manhattan Project' had nothing really new to say as to why WWII was started.

But by successfully challenging the science that united Allied and Axis, it had plenty to say as to why it wasn't stopped ....

WWII's other manhattan project : 'expanding diversity' at war against 'reductive eugenics'

'Expanding diversity' was always as much a dog whistle concept to its supporters as 'eugenic reduction' was to its supporters.

Diversity supporters knew exactly what it meant.

It meant fairly sharing society's pie with coloreds, cripples, kikes, queers and gals as well as with the preppy jockie boys from the WASP side of life.

Just as reductionists knew their concept meant keeping almost the whole pie to themselves, with only the crumbs falling ("trickling down") to the small side of life.

Let the war drag on for years, rather than let Indian colonial soldiers win the war by being the bulk of our infantry

As a result, more than the course of the military war per say, the real fear among elites on all sides was that winning and surviving a total war would require a 'coalition of all the talents', fatally exalting expansive diversity for other 'lessers' over their own restrictive eugenics.


As Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Henry Stimson and Charles De Gaulle made abundantly clear, they'd rather lose the war or greatly delay its victory, than see their front lines dominated by those they regarded as genetically unfit.

The French military concept of "blanchiment" is a good start to describe their basic beliefs - though their phobia hardly started and stopped with men of color.

If anything, they feared the possible advance of women much more sharply.

Henry Dawson, in his own small way, decided to contest these views.

First by enlisting the most despised of the small in Nature - the penicillium fungoid growths (to use a term much favoured by A. Hitler and H.P. Lovecraft) - to save the lives of 'the least of these' in humanity.

These were "the 4Fs of the 4Fs", the SBE patients whom 'Republican Death Panels' had condemned to death by deliberately withholding their life-saving medicine.

The payoff for ten billion of us, since 1940, from Henry Dawson's wartime 'coalition of all talents' was a form of herd immunity from the endemic infectious diseases now contested by the vast penicillin (beta lactam) family of antibiotics.

Even more importantly, eugenics' strength is much reduced while embracing diversity is in favour with most of us.

This, rather than his boon of penicillin-for-all (or HGT et al), is the true legacy of Dr Dawson....

If we never longer think the Sun revolves around us, we still think it shines out our ass...

Life in the Universe apparently could occur on any one about 100 billion other planets that have the exact complex mix of conditions needed.

This is called the Mediocrity Principle and it has wider application in helping reduce our ever present human hubris.

Now as it happened, Life did occur on Earth and four billion years later it is still around, for now.

But with a slight shift in the conditions here on Earth it might never have happened - or not have happened for very long.

All down to chance, luck,buddy --- what have you.

Ditto for us humans generally.

God, having an inordinate fondness for beetles, has given Earth 150,000 species and trillions of individual members.

We humans are now down to one species and 70,000 or so years ago were down to perhaps a thousand breeding couples.

Humanity as an endangered species --- like Whooping Crane.

A slight change of conditions 4 million years ago, 400,000 years ago, 40,000 years ago, tomorrow - and we'd disappear --- maybe with nothing remotely like us ever re-emerging again.

So, a fragile and near run thing, this human civilization.

Not at all like the bacteria - there at the birth of Life and still ruling the Earth , four billion years later.

If humanity is like big hunky Sumo Wrestlers with a bad news cancer checkup ever just around the corner, bacteria seem to be like small jockeys that repeatedly break bones falling off mounts and yet keep on ticking.

Meek and small and weak, they definitely seem destined to inherit the Earth ---- as humans exist stage left a few thousand or million years from now.

If we humanoids persist in thinking that we have ascended far far above our early days as apes (or more accurately as bacteria), it should be shattering to accept that we still share almost all our DNA with the chimps and our most vital and fundamental genes with the earliest bacteria.

But our egos remain shatter proof--- the Dawsonian Revolution still seems something most of us slept right through.

And as a result, anthropocentric progress is still killing this planet with the Sixth Extinction.

Hence this book ...

If it feels like AKTION 4F's alter ego - that's because it is

This is new, additional, blog that will largely parallel the theme of my AKTION 4F blog.

So why yet another blog?

It is because I am 'test driving' my book series' title and subtitle which will appear on the books' front cover, website, posters etc.

Should it be:


 The OTHER Manhattan Project 
(In between the big, top, title and the small, bottom, subtitle will be my painted illustration of an August 1944 faux 'group photo' ---  4 team members  using crutches, canes or wheelchairs, together with two patients in wheelchairs, all exhibiting an air of tired and tattered triumph.)
Aktion 4F


Or should it be :




AKTION 4F  
(In between the big, top, title and the small, bottom, subtitle will be my painted illustration of an August 1944 faux 'group photo' ---  4 team members  using crutches, canes or wheelchairs, together with two patients in wheelchairs, all exhibiting an air of tired and tattered triumph.)
the other Manhattan Project




I am inclined to favor option one , but I will have to await further reader feedback....

Ungrateful bastards : Manhattan's penicillin saved a family member of everyone of the nineteen 9/11 terrorists

I admit that I didn't start this project on Dr Dawson's penicillin crusade with any intention to call it "the OTHER Manhattan Project".

But here is how it all came about, as best I remember it.

I was watching a CBC TV debate about the reasons why Manhattan was attacked on 9/11; this was some time in 2005... or even 2006.

Someone on the panel was trying to explain that older people everywhere around the world, rather like Frank Sinatra, just loved the Hollywood movie version of New York City.

However the younger generation, in general and not just in the Muslim world, had some quite different, additional, images conjured up whenever 'Manhattan' was mentioned .

Such as the worldwide recession and high youth unemployment caused by the excessive 'Greed-is-Goodism' of a small handful of traders from Manhattan Island's Wall Street.

 And the prospects of Mankind blowing us all up, thanks to the nuclear bomb possibilities generated by "The Manhattan Project."

At this point, I yelled up to my better half, Rebecca, in my usual exasperated TV-watching tone, "What about the OTHER Manhattan Project??"

"I'd bet my life", I said," that someone in everyone of those 9/11 hijackers' families at some time or other had their life saved by the antibiotics that came out of wartime Manhattan and Dr Dawson's quixotic efforts ----- those un - grate - ful bastards !!!!"

I promptly forgot all about it after blowing off steam.

But I soon took to calling my effort, informally and only to Rebecca, Manhattan's other Project or the other Manhattan Project.

But I didn't take it too seriously as an actual concept or theme.

Like most of us, I had long thought the 'Manhattan' part of the Manhattan Project was a clever ruse to put the Nazis off the scent - everyone knew the atomic bomb was developed in the desert of New Mexico and also in desert-like conditions in Washington State and backwoods Tennessee .

Dusty - or muddy - areas as empty of people and urbanity as Manhattan was full of them.

Clever, very clever.

But actually the planners of the Atomic Project were even cleverer.

They took a page from Edgar Allan Poe and put the brainy bits of the atomic effort in Manhattan - "hidden in plain sight" - and only put the final production plants out in the desert. But all that high tech equipment and manpower out in the desert actually came out of the North East industrial core, in particular from the Greater New York City area.

Atomic Historian, Robert S Norris, set the world straight on the massive amount of  atomic history that happened first and foremost in the New York area.

But what I specially noted, even if Norris didn't particularly highlight the fact, was that the Cold War Nuclear Threat was actually birthed in Harlem, not out in the desert, and within a few hundred meters of the most dramatic single event in all the penicillin saga.

As a Baby Boomer, 1950s antibiotics ending childhood diseases and Cold War mass production of  A- bombs possibly ending childhood, period, interested me far more than the small amount of inefficient bomb materials developed out in the desert to end WWII but then were never used again to make A-bombs.

If our world should end tomorrow, it is gaseous diffusion uranium that did it - and that was the stuff developed in Harlem's Nash Building and then taken up by all the world's big nuclear bomb makers.

Now I had the two biggest news stories of the entire 20th Century ( according to a poll of 35,000 Americans ) happening in the same year in the same 80 acre space in North West Harlem - what a story !

And I stand by my claim - everyone on Earth, 60 years after the beginnings of the Antibiotic Era, has had a family member, now or in the past, whose life was saved by the antibiotic revolution.

You all remember the british policeman, one of the most famous patients in all history, who told his family when they saw the tiny dot of blood on his cheek, "Don't panic - I just got scratched by a rose while out gardening and you can't possibly die from that !"

But before antibiotics, you could.

 And he did.

Hospitals back then were filled with foul-smelling septic wards and filled with septic cases, sad stories of  healthy young people dying needlessly of blood poisoning that all started with a little infection.

You don't have to be at death's door to have a course of antibiotics 'save your life' ---- you just need to make the emotional leap back in time to think what might of happened to you if your minor infection hadn't been nipped in the bud.

So don't be like those ungrateful 9/11 bastards.

 Thank your lucky stars, and thank Dr Dawson, the next time your doctor yawns behind their hand while they write out a prescription for a course of antibiotics after discovering you have a minor bacterial infection.

 'May life-saving always be so routine' .....