Thursday, November 20, 2014

un-superheroes nurturing life-saving GREEN from wartime Gotham's concrete

Oxford University is justly famous for its lovely green campus .

How ironic then, that its Nobel winning slash failed efforts to produce wartime penicillin was actually an attempt to produce a form of AstroTurf - organic (chemistry) penicillin , as synthetic as plastic greenery.

By contrast , wartime New York's Gotham - at least as revealed in Super Hero comic books - was  supposedly nothing but a concrete jungle.

Life-saving GREEN from Gotham concrete


But in fact, from New York's concrete, a handful of un-superheroes spurred the successful nurturing of trillions of units of natural penicillin's life-saving green .

The concrete jungle's vats and vats of fermenting greenery , before war's end, were producing more than enough natural penicillin to save all those in the world dying from infections only the life-giving mold could stop.

In the end, Oxford University's efforts only produced scientific papers , a Nobel prize and a big thick book from OUP : but no actual penicillin.

In a further irony, New York's successful efforts to produce tons of badly needed wartime penicillin did not receive any Nobel prize - or any significant historical attention at all.

But then received history is rarely as it seems , Captain - the historian's skim milk often successfully masquerades as Devon cream ....

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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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