An irony there : the fearsome Howard Florey stands revealed as an intellectual milquetoast , behind his public persona as verbal and physical monster terrifying the calm corridors of 1930s British academic science.
By contrast, to fellow scientists the 1930s Henry Dawson was seen as a submissive and an Omega male , but intellectually his personal ideas created great unease among those same scientists , in almost an Alpha manner.
Howard Florey gauged his very public and very blunt opinions extremely carefully.
He was always - always - on the cutting edge of medical progress - never ever before that edge and never ever behind it.
He distilled the commonplace ideas of the scientifically powerful and then spat them back at them as bluntly and loudly as he could.
"Oh, what a roaring colonial rebel that Florey is - but his new ideas make perfect sense to me" said his flattered superiors about this artful sycophant.
But when the meek and mild Dawson mumbled his shocking personal ideas, his superiors shifted uneasily in their seats and dismissed him as a good ('sound') man in the relative backwater of arthritis studies - but wildly off base in his wide claims about the fundamental importance of microbial variance.
So the wartime clash between Florey and Dawson - over penicillin - was bound to lack verbal and physical fireworks , with no efforts by Florey to get into a fist fight with Dawson as he had done with others in the past.
The fight was all intellectual - all about Dawson's Paradigm Science surmounting Florey's Normal Science - and here the Alpha Male lost completely ....
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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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