... and now you are about to find out as well.
There have been many,many books written about PHASE I Penicillin : about the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming.
( And not enough books written as to why it then lay about unused for 12 years...)
Similarly there have been many books and articles written about PHASE II penicillin : the scientific research and development of penicillin by Howard Florey.
Supporters of both men have spent the 75 years ever since, fighting in print over which one deserves the most glory.
Very little - or nothing - has been written of PHASE III penicillin.
('Agape penicillin').
'Agape penicillin' occurred when a few isolated individuals gave their arm and heart and brain - and sometime even their life - not to discovering or researching penicillin, but simply to using penicillin to save lives.
Saving lives with penicillin as fast and as hard as they could, with whatever penicillin they could make or take, regardless of its 'purity' or lack there of.
Since no one else is writing their story, I am.
My qualifications are not that I am a doctor or scientist or even a published author.
It is simply that I am a former 'penicillin patient' (and aren't we all ?).
As such I care greatly about the stories of the first all-out efforts to take penicillin out of the science lab, to put it to work, inside patients, saving lives.
This is a book oriented towards readers who are or were patients receiving antibiotics, written by a former patient, rather than a book written by a scientist, academic or professional author.
If 'amateur author' means a book written out of love and gratitude , then I am an amateur for sure.
I started thinking about writing this book in 2005, in reaction to the aftermath to the events of 9/11. A lot of people - not just Moslems - seemed down on Manhattan, mostly for its global financial influence and partly for its part in the development of nuclear weapons during World War Two.
I decided the world needed to be reminded that not everything Manhattan did between 1941 and 1945 led to more killing and suffering.
TWO MANHATTAN PROJECTS:
The Manhattan Project had many connections to Manhattan Island and the surrounding Greater New York City area - as did the 'agape penicillin' project.
But the Manhattan Project leading to nuclear warfare was one of the biggest projects (in terms of money and manpower) - and certainly the best known, of all the projects of World War Two.
By contrast, the 'agape penicillin' project was one of the smallest and least known projects during the war.
Think of it, perhaps, as Manhattan's other Project.
If size matters to you above all else, this isn't likely to interest you.
But the 'agape penicillin' story is a truly epic story of courage arising above adversity to change our world forever, for better.....
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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...
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