What if sci fi pioneer George Pal had completed his proposed film on Penicillin ?

George Pal's pioneering sci fi films tended to exalt Big Science - so I have to wonder how he would have dealt with the classic example of small science - the DIY, tabletop,homegrown, artisan making of primitive penicillin.

For after all, this was the bigger and (dramatically as well as morally) better half of the wartime penicillin drama.

The side of the race to produce wartime penicillin that actually beat the long odds and won...

Postmodernity/little science's Big Tent diversification versus Modernity/BigScience's little tent reductionism

As I have said before, the key ideology of the Era of Modernity,1870s to the 1960s, was popular or vulgar Uniformitarianism, lying never far beneath western liberal capitalism democracy and fascism/nazism and socialism/communism.

In its popularly understood form, uniformitarianism claimed tomorrow would be like yesterday and yesterday was like today : and you know what today is like here in the earthquake/famine free western world.

Life and Nature today, here, is calm, peaceful, predictable and basically open to anything humanity might throw at it.

Controllable by humanity to such an extent that one could pick future winners (ideas, nations, technologies) with quiet confidence because in the unlikely evident one winner proved a dud, humanity could quickly make a mid-course adjustment.

Nature won't bite, indeed couldn't bite.

Reductionism of gene and idea pools (and hence of possible alternative visions) quickly followed : pick the scientifically determined winners and bin the rest, with Zyklon B if need be.

The Science of Certainty : freely reduce the gene pool 

The very massive and yet very secretive Manhattan atomic Project was the apogee of such thinking.

It was 'Big Science' in terms of the number employed by it, but 'little tent' in the number of those employees, let alone the general public, who were informed of its ultimate purpose.

Speaking of Zyklon B, after the revelations of Auschwitz and the perfecting of global death via V2 rockets and atomic bombs, human catastrophe caused by the most sophisticated civilizations seemed to not just be possible, but inevitable.

Then, in 1954, there was news that airborne radioactive fallout from one thermonuclear bomb (Castle Bravo) in the remotest part of the South Pacific could bring death to human and animal babies all over the entire world.

This raised the stakes even further.

For now human-originated catastrophism could affect the entire biosphere, which clearly was interconnected as all Life was shown to dine at a common table, now covered in radioactive dust.

Enter stage left : Catastrophism

Lyell's ancient intellectual rival, popular Catastrophism, (the idea that some catastrophe can affect the whole world and humanity can't stop or control it) was suddenly back in discussion, at least in terms of catastrophes of a human-originated form.

But if one globe-wide catastrophe existed that humanity couldn't stop or control (in the form of all-out thermonuclear war/nuclear winter/global fallout's triple combo) then why not others of human, natural or even cosmic in origin ?

Some young scientists suddenly dared to look at the effects of past Ice Ages, beyond just their obviously mobile massive ice caps.

For the evidence of a North American continent wide massive flood of truly biblical proportions, caused by by a break in an ice dam and possibly affecting global temperatures even in areas beyond that covered by ice caps, had been known for a half century but had been strongly denied by the scientific community.

Scientists, en masse, back in the era of Modernity all saw the financial virtues of backing uniformitarianism.

It was essential to maintain a united front about uniformitarianism if they were to advance the then new claim that scientists should be paid big salaries, given lots of grants and treated with god-like status.

All on the basis that uniformitarianism proved that the future was predictable and was controllable and that they were just the boys to do it.

Admitting that there were global-wide disastrous catastrophes that scientists couldn't see coming or stop once recognized (popular catastrophism) was simply not good for their careers and pensions.

But the younger, postwar, scientists were much influenced by the fact that paying scientists good salaries and granting them high status and public money for research was now an established fact, so at long last they could be more honest about studying things they couldn't actually prevent or control.

There is my army, I must run hard to lead it...

In fact, they recognized that today's scientists had to be more upfront than their scientific elders had been about the possibility of scientist-caused global catastrophes like nuclear war --- or risk losing all that hard earned status with the public.

Because the least sophisticated of the general public was well ahead of them on this score : the sudden rise in popularity of global disaster-oriented science fiction films in the early 1950s was proof of that.

Some still think the films' radiation mutated giant bugs were really Russian communists in disguise : I think they were simply seen as giant city eating bugs and the result of mutations caused by nuclear tests.

Human global pollution effects (such as acid rain), human climate change, overfishing and species loss, on and on were soon added to the score.

Global pandemics like 1918's Spanish Flu were now re-cast as global catastrophes, capable of - on the actual record - of reaching into even the remotest of isolated islands to kill and maim.

And man's overuse of antibiotics was spurring on bacterial resistance that, coupled with global air travel, could see old and new pandemics arriving at the speed of sound and yet be unstoppable by the best in medical science.

Even the continents no longer bobbed up and down placidly in place but trashed around and smashed into each other as tectonic plates - yet another old set of evidence denied at the time as a threat to uniformitarianism but now accepted as scientists struggled to stay intellectually ahead of the young drive-in movie set.

And why stop at natural and human sources of global catastrophes ?

What if a giant rock from space - the sort that scientists were finally (at long last !) admitting they couldn't see coming with present technology, let alone stop, caused all the various mass extinctions of species.

Soon it appeared that indeed one such rock did kill off all the dinosaurs and much else besides.

Diversification of our gene and idea pools : the Science of Uncertainty

If Modernity and Big Science was about plumping all your money on just one high yielding blue stock, on a company selling something you sure would be popular long into the future (say newspapers for example - at their peak in the early 1950s), the post-modern, born after 1940, drive-in set wanted to hedge their bets.

Better to spread your investment widely, better to diversify your portfolio - maybe homos, cripples, women, negroes and darkies in general might have usefully talents and ideas as we faced a series of upcoming global catastrophe.

Better then lots of different little (DIY even) sciences and seeking a Big Tent of all possible talents.....

Postwar science as TV High School : a-bomb 'jocks' vs penicillium slime 'losers'

When I was very little (and very little for my age) I was always the new kid kid in town.

'Cause we moved around a lot, back then in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Bullied a bit.

For perhaps these reasons, I found the science talk of that time always left me very puzzled.

I don't just mean science talk in school, I mean science talk everywhere --- ads, news, literally everywhere - including science fiction books and sci fi movies as well.

Mostly science talk was was all about the big and about Man - big science run by big important men in big governments and big armies and big factories in big important countries.

Science as the topdog and Science as the TV high school jock set among nations, institutions and individuals.

But when it came to life-saving antibiotics for disease-prone little kids (a subject obviously hitting close to home for me) science was always about digging up dark jungle mud, scrapping smelly slime off basement walls or dipping into the effluent laden water at the mouth of sewer outfalls.

Antibiotics, we were told, were not man-made, not synthetic, but made by tiny invisible little microbes.

And judging by where these microbes hung out, I could clearly see even then that these marvellous lifesavers were from the TV high schools' loser side of the tracks - greasers and trailer trash.

There was one more puzzling thing about these antibiotics - they all came out of the Second World War and as far as I could see, were about the old good thing to ever come out of the awful war.

We didn't talk much back then - none of us - about the advanced civilization that produced the Auschwitz medical experiments, but we had all heard and seen - in TV sci fi serials and movies, if nowhere else - what the A-bomb could do to the human body.

And we all much preferred antibiotics like penicillin, big needle and all, to the A-bomb.

And we found it hard to marry together just how any civilization could produce both such a killer bomb and such a lifesaver pill, all out of the same horrible war ....

Four years difference really matter : when you're four and eight

On August 15th 1945, the two children (ages four and eight) of a young American serviceman in the Pacific preparing to invade Japan probably responded quite differently from the united way their two grandmothers (aged 59 and 63) reacted to the news that the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had caused the Japanese to sue for peace.

The two grandmothers were both united in giving comparatively little thought to all the grandmothers and grandchildren killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki , so glad were they that their son/son-in-law wasn't going to be killed during the Allied invasion effort.

The eight year old child agreed - very glad that Daddy wasn't going to die overseas and would be coming home soon unharmed.

But the four year old child probably hadn't even been told that Daddy was facing imminent death overseas or that two bombs that killed thousands of children would now bring Daddy home safe.

This child's reaction was no reaction.

Because when you are very young, even only being four years apart in age makes a huge difference - though four years difference means nothing when you are two grandparents nearing retirement.

Flash forward to the Spring of 1956 and the news that deadly nuclear fallout from an American Bravo Castle Test of an hydrogen bomb had gone around the world in the atmosphere strong enough to kill a Japanese fisherman thousands of miles from the test site.

The grandmothers are now in their seventies and the eight year old is now 19 and drafted into the Army.

Their fear over American nuclear fallout worries and their regret for the loss of a human life is undoubtedly tempered by the thought that the American A-Bombs had saved thousands of American lives and that the wartime Japanese had been particularly cruel to other ethnicities on many well documented occasions.

By contrast, the four year old is now 15 and this child is distinctly uncomfortable with possible death or genetic damage from fallout radiation - possibly because of her viewing of many youth-oriented movies on the subject.

The child knows - from schoolbooks - that the A-Bombs killed hundreds of thousands but also shortened the war , saving the lives of starving millions in Japan and in her overseas occupied territories, as well as tens of thousands of American servicemen.

But that child doesn't feel it - in her bones - as her older brother does.

She, being four, wasn't literally there, at the time on the dropping of the Bomb.

In body yes - but not in heart, mind and soul.

Four years difference among the young  really matter --- this is the starting thesis of this blog.

My postwar transitional generation, by definition a little too young to remember WWII first hand, only learned of WWII (and how supposedly Big Science won the war) second hand,  learned it in the mind but not experienced it in the heart.

During its key plastic formative years, my generation held both this second hand kernel of support for prewar modernity's Big Science and first hand support for the beginnings of post-modern/postwar human rights protests of the Sixties.

The key characteristic of this transitional generation was not Sixties street conflict but internal mental conflict - knowing both modernity and postmodernity but not being totally in either camp, unlike their parents or children...

distorting WWII with SOME of the facts ...

Why lie, as a historian, when you need simply instead to select a large number of widely agreed upon WWII facts from the infinitely broad and deep ocean of agreed upon facts about that war ?

To demonstrate the growth of Big Science, gentle historian, simply compare the 5 tonne Panzer I tank of 1939, with its half inch of armour and its low tech magazine loaded machine gun as its only armament with the 70 tonne Tiger II tank of 1945 with its 10 inches of armour and its ultra long barrelled ultra high velocity 88mm tank-killing gun.

Or a 1939 Fairey Battle 'bomber' to a war ending 1945 B-29 bomber.

A 1939 small and crudely adapted merchant vessel cum aircraft carrier to a huge 1945 purpose built Midway class aircraft carrier.

And so on and on.

We need some balance

But we need remember than 1939's extremely small and lightly built Japanese Zero fighters could still bring down massive 1945 B-29 bombers.

Or that 1890s technology torpedoes from WWI technology small coastal subs or E-boats could still sink the biggest 1945 era aircraft carrier or battleship.

A more balanced take on WWII and science-made warfare is to create a chart with 1939 at the left and 1945 at the right, but divided horizontally in the middle.

So that a steady climb left to right from 1939 to 1945 , on the top horizontal half of the chart would show the steadily increasing size of German Tanks --- but from 1939 to 1945 a line on the bottom horizontal half would also show an even steeper decline in the size of lethal anti-tank weapons, from the giant 7000 kg 88mm anti tank artillery piece of 1939 to the tiny 3 kg antitank bazooka called the Faust Patrone in 1945.

1945 and the war's end was both a triumph for BIG SCIENCE (A-Bomb, V-2 rocket etc) and small science (naturally grown penicillin, the Faust Patrone etc).

Hence postwar kids like me grew up in a totally confusing, conflicted Transitional Era , stuck midway between Modernity's Big Science and post-Modernity's small science ....

WWII & 'small science' : how new WWII small science infantry weapons helped create our post-war post-modern world

The usual guff about WWII was that the Axis infantry soldier was far better than the Axis infantry soldier but the Allies won because of their superior BIG SCIENCE, with the big war-ending A-Bomb delivered in the big B-29 bomber offered up as a key proof.

But is any of this true ?

Could it not be claimed that while the (relatively few) Axis soldiers actually were a fair better - as individuals - than the average Allied soldier, the Allies had such potentially large numbers of recruits available that the advantage should have gone to the Allies by sheer weight of numbers.

But the Allies deliberately choose to starve their infantry both in manpower and even more critically, in material.

Because the key reason why the German infantry was so superior was that the Germans invented some small science infantry weapons so good the world is still using them as warfare blueprints 75 years later.

The Allied infantry doctrine focussed on squads of mostly riflemen slowly firing rifles discharging large, long range, bullets.

Things like squad level light machine guns were relatively few in number and pretty pitiful as suppression fire weapons.

By contrast, the Germans focussed on supplying each infantry squad with a number of a superior general purpose air-cooled machine gun .

The MG42 was made cheaply, quickly and lightly of stamped parts.

It was most famous for a very rapid rate of fire - sustained by the use of endlessly linked belts of ammunition, not small magazines, and by the ability to change the overly-hot barrels in seconds.

More importantly in the big picture, being so light for such a deadly weapon, it could be easily carried into battle and fired by one soldier, if need be - supplying the fire power of an entire typically combat-thinned British battalion of bolt action rifles.

The fact that German ammunition was generally far less smokey than Allied ammo, meant this one-man-battalion could remain better concealed longer.

Next in importance was the Germans heavy use of the infantry level mortar - an improved version of WWI's most significant infantry level invention - the British Stokes mortar.

Thanks to pipe manufacturer Wilfred Stokes, mortars, in an instant of inspired invention by this sheer amateur, went from being a big bulky heavy bit of artillery to something that ultimately a single soldier could carry and fire.

Again, it multiplied the ability of one or two foot soldiers to impede an entire advancing battalion.

It could be fire from the lee side of a hill and hit advancing troops without them being able to directly fire at it.

The WWI sniper rifle was also improved - more consistent matching of ammo and individual gun barrel and better optical scopes.

All three impeded, from a safe distance , a broad front infantry advance over open ground.

And their price for doing so - peanuts, both to make and keep supplied with ammunition.

 And they totally resisted technological obsolescence that doomed so many highly expensive Big Science weapons within months of delivery. They remain deadly to this day, in their original WWII or even WWI configurations.

Can't say that about WWI and WWII planes, tanks or subs now can we ?

And for close combat, particularly in built-up areas, three other German weapons proved small science could still best Big Science.

The German anti-tank mine was a very cheap and very low tech weapon , considering it could take out one of the leading edges of WWII warfare - the fifty plus ton Main Battle Tank.

Military leadership as carefully counted the estimated totals of MBTs on each side in WWII as they had counted estimates of dreadnoughts in WWI.

The German's 1944 Topfmine for instance was made of a casing of tar-covered cardboard - to resist water, detection and because it was light and dirt cheap.

With the use of a shovel, it was literally dirt-cheap to employ by the tens of thousands as well.

The German Faust Patrone was a very cheap and low tech one time use recoilless weapon that could destroy medium tanks and stop a big tank by destroying its tracks.

Weapon and firing tube together weighed only 3 kilos and was a metre long, the tube being made of cheap stamped steel and wood.

It was easily carried and used by one soldier , who would remain mobile enough to make it hard for tank or accompanying infantry to hit him.

It fired a very low velocity projectile about 30 metres - thanks to its low tech centuries old black powder propelling charge.

 Yet with its carefully shaped explosive charge of only a third of a kilogram it was easy able to penetrate six inches of armour.

It proved even more useful at destroying infantry strong point bunkers.

For the first time ever, even super thick armour was defeated without the need for a large, bulky, heavy artillery piece with long thick gun barrel , elaborate mounting system and case-hardened shell to penetrate armour.

At the very short ranges typical of combat in city streets, a well concealed, poorly trained one man team could fire a cheap 3 kg weapon more effectively than a bulky, hard to move, expensive 7000 kg 88mm anti-tank weapon with a large highly trained crew!

Now even the relatively light MG42 is a big bulky heavy piece of overkill in city combat. Its ability to kill two kilometres away usually irrelevant.

But a single solder firing a lightweight, cheap (stamped-parts) sub machine gun firing pistol strength small cartridges was more effective - more mobile, better able to carry more (smaller) rounds upon themselves.

Instead of mortars lobbing explosives up from concealed positions, this soldier also made free use of small, light cheap hand grenades.

All this little science infantry weapons had an enormous impact , post WWII - in fact helping to bring about our post-modern world .

Post modern in the sense that a truly key hallmark of Modernity - advanced nations lording it over small less advanced nation in the form of imperialism and colonies -  has totally died away.

It all happened when nationalist rebels began using these sorts of small science infantry weapons in rural and urban settings .

That made for such big casualties that Big Science/low casualties oriented western nations gave up their colonies rather than endure losing such long term and asymmetrical wars ....

'Rogue Boomers' : optimistic, naive

If we ever do encounter a 'spot of bother' (their words) over global warming, Rogue Boomers fervently expect the engineering equivalent of the tooth fairy or superman to waft over and quickly sort it out .

Their forebears used to worship scientists and science , so this is a bit of a change - because these Boomers don't like scientists, at least as they imagine them to be.

University profs mostly, sitting in ivory tower labs, forever dissing this or that sincere effort to 'grow' the economy.

What they do still like are engineers - at least they imagine them to be - actually often their imagined engineers are scientists - field or production scientists employed by private industry.

Pose any big crisis at these Rogue Boomers and just wait for it : yep, within a minute or two, they are sure to pull out the 'it just needs another Manhattan Project - this time for cancer - to solve it'.

Big Science - Big Money - Big Faith : throw enough at it and any problem will go away.

By contrast, my segment of that same Boomer generation, those of us I call the 'Noir's Children', just as confidently expect that 'anything that can go wrong, will go wrong'.

It is not as if we always grimly shut off the TV after viewing a downbeat Film Noir and go put our heads in the oven.

It is more that if a mysterious light ever glows overhead and a thousand soldiers arrive to seal off the site , we don't take it on faith when some guy in a suit arrives and says "I'm from the FBI in Washington - and I am here to help."

Ronald Reagan conservatives bought that line - the Rogue Boomers still buy that line - but we don't ...

1945 Big Science's failed promises : synthetic stability and predictability

Chemically-minded/blinded scientists (and during WWII that included almost all scientists) hate, hate, hate penicillium mold.

To them , it is like an unbroken , un-house-trained mustang bronco .

A petulant two year old pooping penicillin all over the floor and then mutating like crazy so it now refuses to eat right, go to bed on cue or produce more penicillin on demand.

And natural penicillin itself - it also sometimes mysteriously lost its potency in mere days or even hours.

"For Darwin's Sake, give me man-made penicillin every time !" was their universal cry.

"It will be stable in shelf life and with all its predictable characteristics both known in advance and consistently stable."

But if we have learned anything since Big Science's apogee in 1945, it is that merely because a substance is man-made does not mean we can predict all its characteristics in advance.

Witnesses in my defence ?

Freon Gas, Leaded Gasoline, DDT and Thalidomide just for starters.

As the offspring of a philosophy prof who taught intro logic for decades , I am tempted - very tempted - to say that all scientists need to pass a tough course in logical fallacies.

For these sort of fallacies tend to show up ,time and again, not in scientists' overt research data, but in their unspoken and unquestioned silent assumptions....

1945's apogee of Modern science , Big science, Synthetic science : Zyklon-B, Plutonium, Napalm , DDT , Freon and leaded gas

Wow ! Quite a lot for Big Science (particularly chemists and synthetic scientists) to celebrate in 1945.

Set against that , a bit of a minor and undoubtedly temporary disappointment.

For there was (also in 1945) the totally unexpected failure by a thousand of the smartest guys in the room - nay the entire universe - to quickly synthesize the simple small molecule made by some small and extremely simple beings : penicillin.

Flash forward Gordon to 2015.

Chemistry (what's left of it) is now Green , a johnny-come-lately attempt to regain ground lost to biology and penicillin-mediated microbiology in particular.

And yes penicillin is still unpatented, still cheap and abundant, still only created by those extremely simple minded little slime cretins.

Synthetic is now passe , un-cool, like white bread to whole grain bread , and natural is the thing.

We're almost all post-moderns now (angry old white protestant male deniers of climate change, Auschwitz and post-modernity aside.)

For once Big Modern Synthetic Science was given its head (aka WWII) , a lot of us apparently didn't like what we saw.

That is why I find 1945's climatic battle between modern synthetic penicillin and postmodern natural penicillin so darn fascinating.

For the long, broad and convoluted battle between modernity and postmodernity is a story only a seasoned academic could love or fully understand.

But the tale of 1945 penicillin is a tight page turner that both laity and ivory tower can really enjoy...

Penicillin-for-All : Postmodernity's "Manhattan Project"

We know far too well Modernity's "Manhattan Project" - Big Science's  Atom Bomb - it sometimes seems that middle-aged male non-fiction writers write about nothing else than those heady - now long gone -days of Modernity and Male dominance.

(Yes it is almost always middle-aged men who write the books and articles about Manhattan's atomic bomb .

And perhaps it is also almost always middle-aged men who read them , despite the fact that ordinarily most readers are women of all ages.

This publishing fixation on the past glories of long gone Modernity may hurt publishing firms' bottom line but it is unlikely to change as long as most publishing bosses are also middle-aged males with a strong taste of nostalgia for when men like themselves ruled the roust unchallenged.)

Few middle-aged male writers , however , write about the simultaneous (in time and space) Post Modern Manhattan Project --- Penicillin-for-All.


P-F-A was an unexpected triumph -- because all-powerful wartime Big Government (and Big Pharma) definitely had other plans.

It was the unexpected triumph of a tiny band of unfits (with no government grants to aid them by the way) successfully defying both Allied and Axis eugenicism (and their own physical failings) to bring us Penicillin-for-All.

Call it a triumph of the unfit, weak, small - above all call it the triumph of DIY small science, since key to the unfits' success was their ability to create their own tiny life-saving penicillin factory , regardless of how Big Pharma and Big Government wanted to play out wartime penicillin.

So if WWII definitely began in 1939 at the height of the Era of Eugenic Modernity , equally it ended in 1945 at the beginnings of our present Era of Welcoming Diversity & Postmodernity and it is time male non-fiction writers accept this historical reality...

Manhattan's OTHER project : how seven lives 'unworthy of life' improved the lives of seven billion of us ...

WWII as a triumph of small science

Conventional accounts of the atomic Manhattan Project and of the development of wartime penicillin strongly emphasize that they were the first of what has come to be called Big Science  --- something that is taken as the norm for today's science.

But in fact much of the science of the atomic bomb and atomic energy was actually done by very small teams working with very little money and home made equipment - it was the engineering aspects that were the truly massive part of that particular project.

With regards to wartime penicillin it was much the same : small science ,  not Big Science.

One must remember that wartime penicillin's powerful impact came not merely from its unique scientific characteristics --- ie that it was first (and to some extent, the last) broad spectrum but non-toxic bacterial killer.

Its biggest impact really came from the fact that wartime penicillin G was unexpectedly inexpensive and and unexpectedly widely available for such a potent lifesaver.

This is because a very cheap and abundant (because it was non-patented) lifesaver could save far more lives than any very expensive patent-limited lifesaver could ever do.

And then we all benefit.

Because by a sort of a global herd immunity when even the poorest people living in the most remote places on Earth are cured of killer strains of disease, we in wealthier places tend also to never see those diseases again.

This is because such diseases have been around seemingly for ever as endemic diseases  --- all by surviving in geographic cum cultural pockets, among those considered too poor or too worthless to treat properly medically.

So the true miracle of wartime penicillin was more moral than scientific in nature.

Its miracle lay in the unexpected success of a small band of seven physically challenged individuals in convincing the American public that penicillin should be made available to all Americans who need it to survive.

Convincing them that their Allied leaders should not just producing a small amount of penicillin as secretively as possible, just so they could use it as a weapon of war to give D-Day's front line Allied commanders an advantage over their Nazi counterparts.

The Allies had - because of dysgenic fears - far too few infantrymen to really defeat the Nazis or the Japanese in a hard fight.

(And the few infantrymen they did have were more 4F than 1A, in comparison to the average military serviceman !)

The Allies instead hoped to quickly re-use most of their relatively small forces of infantry when they got moderately severely wounded - by employing advanced medical efforts - so their frontline rifleman could get a second and third crack at being killed in combat.

(As a member member of an reserve infantry unit, may I quickly say ---- "Oh joy !!")

If these medical efforts failed , it meant many more 'decent, middle class, white, Protestant men' would end up dying in the PBI (Poor Bloody Infantry) and this was seen as an eugenic mistake that the Allied cultural elite was not about to repeat from WWI.

If their scheme worked, they would keep the best of their breed safe from the trenches and still have a big advantage over the enemy.

Because , by contrast, they figured the average German infantry, when moderately severely wounded , was out for half a year - while the average Japanese under such circumstances simply died of their wounds.

Their thinking was that that much bigger Axis armies, with much of their troops in hospital beds, couldn't defeat assaults from much smaller Allied Corps , if the Corps had most of their troops in fighting trim.

Because the medically convincing details of the lifesaving results of penicillin were only known by the Allied medical establishment , the  hard pressed Nazis and Japanese hadn't given the development of penicillin (which they had read about in the public scientific literature) much of a priority.

If these lifesaving successes could continue to be kept out of the medical and public media until D-Day , only the Allies would have abundant patented (secret) penicillin to return their wounded to combat much quickly than had traditionally been the case.

D-Day would spill the beans soon enough , but long before the Germans and Japanese chemists had broken the penicillin patent and gone into mass production,  the war would be over.

The Seven Crips

The seven argued - by contrast - that the war to defeat Hitler was as much moral as military.

Germany was the moderately big schoolyard bully and Poland was the moderately small schoolyard victim.

Hitler had gotten away with his bullying because the rest of the world - which vastly out-numbered and out-gunned him, had not intervened against his bullying but instead talked up the virtues of non-intervention in European 'schoolyard squabbles'.

Not my words - rather the shameful words of endless newspaper editorials and 'statesmen' the world over in the early 1940s.

The seven said we must not just talk The Atlantic Charter talk (the Allied declaration that said all - even the smallest and weakest and most valueless - had an absolute right to life and security).

The seven said we must make sure our own Allied actions don't echo the Nazi's counterclaims.

(That the strongest are morally justified in denying the weakest and smallest the right of life and succour.)

But instead the Allies were actually and openly "Code Slowing" tens of thousands of mostly young, mostly poor and minority people.

People with the SBE version of endocarditis - SBE being the final - hitherto terminal - disease that made childhood Rheumatic Fever such a terror.

The SBEs were considered to be so useless that they couldn't even be recruited to work in the war industries , let alone be in the military.

So no wartime penicillin was to be wasted on them and they were to be left to die --- for two reasons.

The unimportant reason was that currently penicillin was still in limited supply and the SBE were below the lowest in priority, particularly as some cases of SBE did consume extremely large amounts of that limited penicillin.

The important reason was that SBE was regarded as the "Gold Standard" of intractable infections.

Any evidence that this new fangled 'penicillin' stuff could actually cure this famously most incurable of infectious diseases would tend to break the whole story of wartime penicillin wide open in the American news media.

And nothing (to paraphrase an old old adage of the pop music business) only 'breaks local' in America .

A big news story in America becomes a big news story worldwide - including in Japan and Germany, via friendly neutral diplomats in Washington.

The seven may have realized that while the Allied medical establishment won't easily bend on the issue of SBE and penicillin, it was also a hard position for the Allied elite to sustain publicly.

Letting young kids die needlessly merely on account of being judged 'life unworthy of life' would be a hard moral sell for the Allies warring against evil governments that basically did exactly the same thing.

Dr Dawson, the leader of the seven , decided to liberate ie 'steal' government controlled penicillin to successfully save five young women dying of SBE but his success was written out of the official report indicated penicillin test results.

And there it might of ended.

But for the fact that his successes and how this most unlikely of heroes was driven to steal to save lives had become the stuff of legend in New York's wartime-strengthened gossip grapevine among it tens of thousands of medical staffers.

A former patient of his, a fellow crip and fellow doctor named Dante Colitti , decided to emulate Dawson and saw to it that the fount of Yellow Journalism, Citizen Hearst's newspaper empire , covered his efforts from gavel to gavel.

The story - involving a terminally ill and terminally cute two year old toddler named Patty Malone - broke wide , broke stateside, broke worldwide.

Soon defeated in the court of public opinion by the formidable Doctor Mom, the Allies really opened the penicillin floodgates wide when Dawson's friend among Big Pharma , John L Smith of Pfizer , took up his cause and started producing it at levels a million times higher than Pfizer had done earlier.

Small science ?

Well the seven cripples had no government grants, had strong enemies rather than warm friends in high places and were - obviously - in poor physical vigour.

That they nevertheless brought the massed Allied governments - during a Total War - to their knees shows us all what sheer raw moral courage can do.

And that when we see those physically and mentally challenged as 'lives useless of life', they are anything but ....

1945 : annus mirabilis or annus horribilis for Scientism ?

I have always been fascinated by the Janus-like nature of the year 1945 in its relationship to Science and the undue worship thereof.

1945 was the year that it was widely admitted that it was only the Allies' mild-mannered/white-coated men of modern science who had bested the superior combat skills of the jackbooted henchmen of the Axis and so won the war for humanity.

A good year for Scientism.

But 1945 was also the year that we now conventionally mark the start of post-modern science... and hence marks the end of modern science.

Surely then a bad year for Scientism.

Clearly we have two views on the alleged success of modern science in 1945 - one made at the time and still held firmly by elderly academics and citizens and another made forty years later and just as firmly held by young academics.

One credits it for ending the war on behalf of the morally right side and the other blames it for starting the war and behaving so beastly during it.

All Life is Family , part one and two, explores why it was possible for most of the modernist audience of 1945 not to see the many failings of wartime science on both sides, technical as well as moral, running from 1939 through to war's end.

And why historians ever since have repeated this initial error.

The war is simply never broken out of its narrative mode to present the predictions that each and every participant had made at a particular point in time together with an assessment of whether those predictions came to pass.

Who, for example, predicted that Hitler won't conquer Moscow within four months after June 1941 ?

No one that I am aware of, as Stalin himself soon had his doubts about this capitol's survival - some military 'experts' even publicly ventured that Moscow would fall in mere weeks not months !

Predictions proved about as inaccurate during WWII as they had all throughout history - only this time they were pressed forward with the strong claim that they were backed by the best science.

If so, the best science was wrong, over and over and over for six long years.

And if "All Life is Family" is the first to say so, so be it .....

"Sending in the Shovels" : June 6th 1944

How Omaha got its "P"

It was never supposed to have to come to this: the smart money - and Big Science - had long promised that (a) high tech strategic bombing would force the Germans out of the war without any need of an invasion and that (b) the Allies would have lots of cheap, pure, high tech synthetic penicillin.


But as usual Bullshit talks and Reality walks as the two "S"s both failed spectacularly to deliver.

 So it was then that early in the morning of June 6th 1944, a hundred thousand shivering infantry with low-tech rifles and a hundred thousand doses of  low tech natural penicillin were bobbing about off the beaches of Normandy, about to do the job right.

Once again at the last minute , to snatch low tech victory from the jaws of high tech defeat, the wise and the mighty were reduced to "sending in the shovels".

Shades of the supposed "high tech" led victory of Vimy Ridge...

This may not the history of WWII that you are used to hearing - because it is not really true that only the victors write history : in reality it is often powerful victors with something to hide, with something to spin, that end up writing the big histories: Whig History.

 A special kind of Whig History, history re-written with an unique type of hindsight, so that it appears that all events on the victor's side of the war worked together to bring the war to the conclusion that actually happened.

D-Day then not just happened (hard to deny something as big as that anyway !) but was always planned to have happened, and happen when it did and as it did.

But while WWII was Modernity's very own war , at last, it turned out to be the Nadir of Modernity as well.

Because D-Day and the infantry-led conquest of Hitler's Germany, like the mass production of cheap natural penicillin , like the "non-precision" bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , weren't supposed to happen.

 They were , all three , low tech "Plan B"s ,to cover-up the failure of three of the Allies' high tech "Plan A"s.......

Thanks to DOCTOR MOM, "he (and she) will be coming home!"

Most wartime GIs who drank too much Schenley whiskey and ran their jeeps off the road and woke up in the hospital with a penicillin drip in their arm, never realized that not only did Schenley sell them the bite of a snake but they also sold them the cure.

That wartime penicillin might have come from Schenley Labs.

Their whiskey is still here  - but their penicillin is long gone.

But Schenley did have the satisfaction for having produced the most iconic image of the entire saga of early penicillin.

Printed in rich vivid glossy magazine color, this ad featured the realistic style painting of a medic putting penicillin in the arm of a wounded Marine in a place that looks to be Tawara, as photographed by Marine photographer Norman Hatch.

 Seventy years later, Hatch's photos remain the gold standard of 'you are there' combat photography.

This famous island battle first brought home to America just how bloody this war was going to be - particularly because of the casualty count.

 But mostly because Hatch's grim photographs were deliberately released, rather than censored, to toughen up Americans at home to the mounting death toll that lay ahead.

So the ad's painting immediately conjured up a grim backdrop to any magazine readers in 1943-1945.

But the cutline below was pure uplift : "Thanks to PENICILLIN...
he will come home !"

Often rendered in the retelling as "Thanks to Penicillin, he will be coming home !"

The combination of image and cutline basically assures home viewers worried about their relative overseas that "Despite the vicious fighting and the terrible jungle conditions, thanks to penicillin, he WILL be coming home !"

This ad went totally unremarked upon during the war.

 But in the 65 years since, it has grown by leaps and bounds in importance as almost every scholar today finds it to be the best single wartime expression of the sheer hope that grew in a world (bone tired of 15 years of Depression and War) that something good must lie ahead.

Usually, their subtext when recalling this ad is "Thanks to Big Science bringing us Penicillin, he will be coming home !"

I don't think this is true at all.

I believe that if left to their own devices (along with scads of our tax dollars) it would have been 1946 or later before enough penicillin would had been produced to help the soldier at the front , let alone the patient back home.

I think there were two competing strategies to speed up the production of wartime penicillin.

One was develop scientific evidence on a very wide and deep front ("Big Science") to convince scientists in universities, hospitals, corporate research labs and in bureaucratic offices that a small shift in international wartime priorities was justified to produce large amounts of penicillin as a supplement to the sulfa drugs for illnesses resistant to sulfa like those caused by staph bacteria.

But that only enough penicillin needed to be produced to aid the fighting men, at least until the war was finally won.

I hope you sense the contrast between a massive effort of "means" to secure a limited "end".

This was Howard Florey and his supporters' thesis.

The other strategy was proposed by just one man - a soon-to-be dying man - in  September 1940 and maintained by him until his death in April 1945.

Martin Henry Dawson.

He said penicillin had already been privately discovered, in 1928 by Fleming, but no one had been roused and no lives had been saved.

Penicillin had also been publicly discovered,( ie published in the scientific media) in 1929 by Fleming and again in 1940 by Florey but no one had really been roused and no lives had been saved.

Dawson proposed instead to have penicillin popularly discovered - by Doctor Mom.

It was a Man's World back in 1940 .

(It mostly still is, but not as bad as back then !)

But even in 1940 women voted, bought much of the family's purchases and they were the daughters, mothers, sisters and spouses of the prominent men who ultimately ran things.

If they got on the case of the men to bring them penicillin and they stayed on the case (as women are very good at doing - some dare call it 'persistent nagging') , even reluctant men will eventually give in and get moving.

So Dawson persuaded Meyer and Hobby and Chaffee, his entire team of 'little science', to refocus their primary aim of their newborn penicillin pilot project.

He said they should immediately and narrowly focus on curing  a single disease, Rheumatic Fever-induced Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis.

This disease was the one that all parents in the western world regarded as a constant Sword of Damocles over their heads ,at least until all their children had gotten safely into their early twenties.

Tuberculous might be the disease feared more by the poorest families and Diphtheria and Scarlet Fever  might have been feared more in grandma's day, but from about 1910 to 1960, Rheumatic Fever (RF) was the number one killer of school age kids .

In addition, the invariably fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) it brought to many Rheumatic Fever 'survivors' was a big killer of youth and adults all along life's journey.

But the main point of the myth of The Sword of Damocles was not the pain of the instant the sword actually did fall and kill you but rather that the situation made you afraid all of your life, just waiting for the day the sword might fall.

Most parents never experienced their children getting RF or SBE but all dreaded it might happen someday.

RF starts with a child getting a sore throat or tonsillitis from strep bacteria.

Think about it - what child doesn't get tons of those, even today with antibiotics?

Before antibiotics, the kids might cure themselves.

But one attack did not bring immunity.Your children got them again and again  - like the common cold they were common, endemic ,ubiquitous.

Always the fear was that this strep throat attack will lead to something worse. Many kinds of worse, but the deadliest and the most common was Rheumatic Fever (RF).

Most times, nothing happened. But like Russian Roulette, for no good reason one strep throat attack or tonsillitis attack could lead to RF.

Now RF could kill your child outright, during the very first attack.

But in most cases, the child lived, even emerged unharmed.

But again it did not bring immunity.

Far from it, one incident of RF made a child more vulnerable to another and more severe attack of RF and so on and so on, ever downhill.

Now suppose the child survived all those severe repeater attacks but with a damaged heart - particularly damaged heart valves.

Now in their teens, the child was less likely to see RF ever again, but instead they faced the fact that ordinarily harmless tooth bacteria, swept into their blood stream by a single vigorous tooth brushing, could settle in on their damaged heart valves and lead to an 'invariably fatal' case of SBE.

They might , nevertheless, fight off a single bout of SBE - as perhaps as many as 10 to 20% did.

(The near 100% death rate for SBE as normally reported, was biased by only counting cases sick enough to end up in hospitals. But autopsy work often revealed hints of healed SBE scars on the valves of young traffic accident victims.)

But again, and I know I am a broken record, one cure of SBE did not prevent those tooth bacteria from settling in again on your valves - and the second bout was fatal.

RF induced SBE was a chronic ,invariably fatal, disease.

Dawson treated patients as young as 10 and as old as 60. After penicillin, patients were found to dying of RF mediated SBE into their seventies - deaths often disguised as a 'stroke' .

More bad news : the kind of strep throat bacteria that gives you RF grow more virulent by being passed back and forth repeatedly between humans in close contact.

If you had lots of children,  that meant that your chances that several would get RF and SBE was higher than the statistical average, even when corrected for the number of children you had.

That is if you had six kids and a small house, their chances that one
of them would get RF should be six times 3.3 per 100,000 ( ie 1 in 5,000) but in fact it was much higher than this - more like 1 in a 1,000.

Small houses and big families being more common among poorer families, they got hit the hardest, resulting in it being called The Polio of the Poor.

But no family was really immune.

Dawson knew that a report of a cure for either RF or SBE would grab the attention of every single DOCTOR MOM in the world.

And Doctor Mom, not Dad (in charge of the bread winning), was the person in charge of the entire family's health -- if she wanted penicillin , now, she would get it - or governments (even wartime governments) would tremble.

Drug companies would rush in to take her money.

This was Dawson's thesis.

He had a small crew - four people, no government or foundation funding, with curing a single disease as its sole thrust. But against those small 'means', look at its broad 'ends'.

Doctor Mom, said Dawson, would see to it that her entire family all got lots of penicillin, now, not after the war - penicillin enough for  both Frank on the battlefield on Tarawa and for little Susie in the Rhemuatic Fever ward in America.

Was he right - or did Florey's view prevail?

I will 'tell all' - on October 16th this year - in my e-book "MO goes PO".....