Monday, March 12, 2012

Ironies abound: Dawson immediately BEFORE Penicillin was studying L-Form bacteria - that rare exception to penicillin's lethal charms ....

One of the very first people to study L-forms was Dr MARTIN HENRY DAWSON in 1939-1940.
Immediately afterwards, on October 16th 1940, he did something truly different.
He injected a young man (dying of 'incurable' subacute bacterial endocarditis) with the juice of some mold he brewed up.
The young man lived - becoming the first ever person to get a needleful of natural, systemic, penicillin.
What makes this so unusual is that L-forms are that rare form of bacteria that are IMMUNE to penicillin's effects.
Talk about an abrupt switch from MATTER to ANTI-MATTER !
Dawson paddled about in 'the quiet backwaters' of medical science in his detractors' eyes.
 Most doctors thought then and still do think that L-Form bacteria are defective ,useless, lab curios.
Bacteria define themselves by their strong semi-rigid outer cell walls - the secret of their success as Life's most plentiful and longest living life form.
L-forms lack that wall and by rights shouldn't be alive or reproduce.
But they do - and their success implies that all bacteria have retained extremely old genes (perhaps the oldest genes on Earth) that lie dormant until (or when) they are attacked by antibiotics that destroy cell walls.
Because penicillin-type wall-dissolvers weren't invented by Man (only in his dreams) but rather by other bacteria about the same time that the very first bacteria emerged.
The ability to survive without either bacteria walls (or bacteria's binary fission genes) means that L-forms probably look like the very first life-forms that ever existed - perhaps from before even DNA was perfected.
Still think they're useless ???????????
In his day job Dawson helped society's chronically 'defective' people live better lives : in his spare time, he studied bacteria's chronically 'defective' life forms.
What he learned from the 'defective' bacteria's amazing will to live, he later applied towards not letting any of his human 'defectives' be written off to die, by the cruel ramp doctors of American War Medicine....

No comments:

Post a Comment

Archive of older posts

Why My Urgency ?

My photo
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...

PEER REVIEW

The best form of 'peer review' is a diversity of comments from around the world - I welcome yours.