In the short term,during his tragically short life, Martin Henry Dawson and his tiny band did nothing more than pique the supporters of Modernity.
Annoyed them, but nothing else.
But over the longer term, Dawson's Pen "G" team were in the first ranks of those easing Modernity, 'The Father Of All Evils' , off the global stage and replacing it with our new world of Commensality.
Their natural penicillin triumph was the first in a long series of blows that replace the hitherto dominant chemical cartels with today's biotech giants.
(A mixed blessing, admitably, but still a turn away from Man as the Be-all of all Knowledge to a recognition that we have much to learn from Nature.)
In the long run, it was Dawson's HGT DNA that was the fatal blow, coming from the direction of Science rather than from post-Auschwitz morality, that finally did in (Social) Darwinism.
So, beyond saving the lives of a few World War II SBE patients and beyond finally kick-starting natural penicillin production worldwide during that war, Dawson's efforts had a far longer term, far wider, affect that is worth honoring...
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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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