To dying patients in Columbia-Presbyterian's hospital , Gladys Hobby's arms daily held aloft a glowing green and gold petri dish of radiated Manhattan penicillin mold as a sort of monstrance of hope.
That image is a fitting and almost exact counterpoint to that other (rather more famous) Manhattan fungus .
We all know the atomic Manhattan Project's mushroom cloud -- also consisting of a glowing ball high on top of arms of roiling dust.
The Manhattan atom brought wartime death and suffering to Japan on a scale hitherto unimagined.
By contrast, Manhattan's natural penicillin offered all the world relative freedom from the deadly bacterial infections that had destroyed families in peace as well as in war.
Given this - the fact that Manhattan's natural penicillin has saved hundreds of times more lives than Manhattan's man-made Bomb ever took - why is it so uncelebrated ?
Why , as well , was the world morally and intellectually silent when Ramzi Yousef tried to justify his bombing of Manhattan's Twin Towers by claiming it was pay-back for the Manhattan Project killing 250,000 at Hiroshima and Nagasaki ?
We can't (and we shouldn't) deny wartime Manhattan's major role in all those atomic deaths.
But would it hurt someone to just once remind Ramzi Yousef and his ilk that wartime Manhattan also produced the safe, inexpensive, abundant natural antibiotic ?
The antibiotic that almost certainly saved the lives of someone in their families in the seventy five years since October 16th 1940 ?
I hope I am not speaking out of line to say that New Yorkers are hardly known for curbing their tongues when something really needs to be said.
But maybe the Big Apple doesn't like blowing its own horn - fair enough.
In which case, it is well past due time that the rest of us in the world should begin doing it for them instead ....
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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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