On WWII's equivalent of the internet, no one knew that Dawson's project was a dog

Dawson's 'other Manhattan Project' might not have been hurt as much as one might think by being before the age of the internet and with tight wartime censorship keeping its successes out of the scientific and popular media.

In times of little real (uncensored) news and with the official version too upbeat to be trusted, person-to-person gossip is often reviewed as perhaps most reliable source of information around.

Gossip has no airs.

The gossip of the poor sounds the same as the gossip of the rich : it removes money and power from the conversation, it is the true 'Great Leveler' rather like today's internet.

Doctors don't gossip, of course : too unprofessional - and in times of war - too un-patriotic as well.

But as every patient knows, they sure do consult each other a lot - and thank God for that !

So it all comes down to the same thing really.

News of Dawson's penicillin success in beating the unbeatable SBE did indeed spread, by doc-to-doc 'consults', rather like wildfire through dry grass, all over the very large medical fishbowl in tri-state NYC, in the Spring and Summer of 1943.

When one well browned off young medical professional went to Citizen Hearst's largest paper to plead for some of this miracle cure, an evening paper that was the largest in North America and syndicated all over, the rest was history.

In 2015, it is clearly not wartime and so equal-to-rich-and-poor-gossip will never elect Canada's federal Green Party.

But the internet could - because on it, no one knows you are a dog or a barely above the fringe party.

But no, the Greens head out, every election, deliberately looking for walls to bloody their head against.

Local candidate signs is probably the biggest single election expense in Canada, bar none.

The Greens don't have enough money to buy enough, big enough, slick enough, signs or enough volunteers to put them up quickly or enough supporters who can find their website quick enough to request the 'tipping point number of signs early on' to really move votes to the party locally.

Leaflets ? Ditto. Too few, too unslick, too few volunteers, too slow to get them printed.

The same with all printed material - the media only wants slick PDFs of your party platform and a dead cow can bang those out as good as the fifty million dollar conservative party machine.

Matching the big guys big and busy local campaign HQs - ditto.

Matching the big parties' constant national leaders' tour requires your own jet and a huge advance organization and enough supporters to provide the constant rent a crowds.

The Greens can't do it, so shouldn't do it.

But what the official party can do and the unofficial supporters should also do - in spades - is create those short snappy, hard hitting, funny, posters, ads, testimonials, streeters, rants, songs, etc etc that go viral, cost nothing but brains and sweaty hard work.

You know the ones that never seem better or worse - when viewing online or by mobile - that the best the slick Toronto ad boys do for the two big parties.

Free - did I also mention they are free to make and free to post online ?

Who will this hurt?

Well the majority of the people in every party spend the majority of their working days pleading for enough money to pay their salary and a minority actually doing something to increase thir party vote.

Parties mostly operated by amateurs of good will will mean these people will have to get a real world job.

Even Stephen Harper had a real job - in a mailroom, once.

For a few months.

Turning him back into an amateur might unleash his well developed sense of humour which he now keeps well hidden.

I'd love to see him in the Youtube mode, of course along side 50,000 Green activists...

How big is the metropolitan New York City area ?

For people like newspaper reporters, sales reps and professionals delivering a lecture or paper, the furthest extent of metro NYC is pretty easy to measure.

If you can get into work early, check in and then take a car or train to the location, do some useful business and then return late to the office, and then still later home to sleep in one's own bed, it's still metro.

Rising early and home late may be hellish and the checkins at the office bookending your work day may be mere tokens but it avoids that expensive hotel room and best of two days (or more) away from family and office.

The time of day for your key business is paramount - an evening lecture or presentation makes the circle of distances evoke by words 'metro NYC 'very much much smaller.

Measuring the extent of metro NYC is important in the tale of the Gotham Eight because metro residents shared a lot in common with Dr Dawson and his team.

Metro residents all heard NYC radio, possibly watched - even then - NYC TV , read the big NYC papers , understood all the local NYC area references , took in big NYC movies and musicals and sports events.

You were among your own kind, sharing a common metro culture - even in fairly frequent (because it was relatively inexpensive) all important 'personal' contact.

By contrast, Dawson's infrequent but extended wartime trips ( all prior to his late 1942 success with SBE) to such places as Baltimore, Washington DC, St Louis , Louisville, California , even his native Nova Scotia took him into fairly alien terrain.

In wartime conditions of restricted travel and censorship, and given his rapidly declining health, Dawson's post November 1942 success with penicillin for SBE was not known beyond metro NYC's medical and research community.

But a community he had been very active in , for almost twenty years.

And fortunately for all of us , the small wartime fish bowl he was stuck in (metro NYC) was a community with more people than most 1940 nations, living in close proximity with good intersecting communications and was home to much of the regional, national and global media.

So while it is true that word of his SBE successes spread only locally inside the fish bowl via local medical gossip (noting that in wartime gossip becomes much more important and much more believed) , only London could really equal metro NYC as a fortunate and powerful fish bowl to be stuck in....