Rather incredulously, I slowly backed into the poop we call 2012's Climate Change Wars ---- from research I had been conducting on a highly similar war - from more than 75 years ago!
That war, more a skirmish in its earliest stages, was between the old anti-bacterial agent, natural penicillin and the new anti-bacterial agent, synthetic Sulfa.
At the July 1936 London meeting that was the Second International Congress on Microbiology, Martin Henry Dawson witnessed that the natural penicillin offered up by its discoverer , Alex Fleming, was winning no takers, not against the new synthetic Sulfa drug , whose life-saving possibilities were rapidly seized upon by keen-eyed researchers like Perrin Long.
Man-made totally beat nature-made, not unexpectedly in the Mid-Thirties : 1-0 for the Skygods.
But 7 years later in late 1943, the cart was on the other horse: the Earthlings, led by the hard-charging/rapidly dying Dr Dawson, had gotten a second wind and were miles ahead of the Skygods.
When Natural Penicillin beat Made-Made Sulfa ( sulfa what ? sulfa who ?), High Modernity & Scientism was not down and out - not yet - but it was badly wounded.
Naturally ( and not synthetically) I am very interested in Naomi Oreskes' MERCHANTS OF DOUBT, highlighting earlier corporate campaigns to sow doubt over scientific warnings, starting in the 1950s.
But I do think the battle raged on even earlier - but not in the area of popular science but inside public (peer-reviewed) science - as I hope my wartime penicillin study will show....
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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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