"Open Source Genetics" : "Thinking like a Microbe instead of a Macrobe"

Charles Darwin was the first person to ever use the legal term "inheritance" to describe the passing of (parts of) both parents genomes down to their natural children.

Hate hides behind gates but Hope is a boundless community

When Canada's first elected Jewish politician, Ezekiel Hart, tried to take his seat in Parliament back in 1808, he was kicked out - something was covering his head, the more conservative minded MPs complained.

Whether its 1917 or 2015, hate comes with frontiers designed to keep new ideas out

Briton (cum Canadian cum American) Anglo Saxon Supremacist Peter Brimelow and Australian (cum British cum Canadian) dog whistle wedge electioneer Lynton Crosby are the past and present intellectual inspirations for Canadian politician Stephen Harper.

Human equivalents to microbial HGT : Open Access, Open Data, Open Source, PD, Copyleft, Creative Commons ?

There are many reasons for the microbes not just surviving on this planet for four billion years but also dominating it.

Horizontal Gene Transfers (HGT) as a model for human survival

Incredibly small, usually immobile, fragile bags of mostly water : they hardly sounds like creatures capable of giving advanced human civilization, circa the 21st century, a vital formula for surviving the worst the Cosmos can throw at us.

Fundamentally, Henry Dawson did it all for 'the little ones'

Henry Dawson's other Manhattan Project wasn't really to advance the cause of penicillin, to aid the Allied military effort or even to save the SBEs : rather he did it all for 'the little ones', to persuade Humanity to build a "Big Tent" that included everyone.

For with rare exceptions (perhaps the early days of the Communist revolutions in some countries) a Big Tent doesn't need to invite the big and the powerful inside - for they are already there.

Instead a Big Tent always newly invites in the small, the weak, those traditionally judged unworthy and unfit.

Their ideas, emotions, fears, feelings, efforts are now considered to be as worthy as those of any other --- and worthy to be judged for their suitability to the collective task at hand.

Dawson felt his earlier scientific studies had revealed that a Big Tent approach (aka a tolerance for 'unfit' mutations and a global HGT system) had helped keep the microbes alive for four billion years.

Now it might just do the same for humanity : help keep human civilization alive for another four thousand years, if only given a chance to prove itself.

From tiny beginnings, his Big Tent Penicillin, produced by an unlikely 'coalition of all the talents' and given freely to all in need in a war-torn world, has since indirectly benefited ten billion of us (and counting) since 1940.

All through a form of herd immunity to formerly endemic deadly infectious diseases.

In doing so, I think he has successfully scaled up (and proven up) that this Big Tent concept also works for humanity !

"Survival of the Fit over the Unfit" flounders among Life's true survivors

Particularly after the whirlwind defeat of the effete French by the German Blitzkrieg in May-June 1940, it seemed obvious to most middle class people in the world that the fit 1As were bound to win , every time, over the unfit 4Fs.

Survival of the fit over the unfit : bigger is better/might is right : Q.E.D.

A Fact of Nature : the classic 'Appeal to Nature'.

But Dr Martin Henry Dawson strongly and fundamentally disagreed with this particular Appeal to Nature, or at the very least, he wished to make another and stronger scientific appeal to the Facts of Nature.

For he felt he had found another (and statistically much better) method for assuring long term survival, as revealed by his study of Nature.

Young Dawson had made his scientific mark, initially, by studying the pneumococcus "R"s.

Even though these "R" type was considered by most others to be unworthy of serious scientific study.

They were the deviants, the unfits, the 4Fs, the non-virulent and non-virile members, of what even human scientists had to admit were Life's most successful survivors, the microbes.

Exit the big and mighty (and very fit) dinosaurs

For almost four billion years, the microbes had survived all that the Cosmos and Nature had thrown at them and lived to see another day while the big creatures, like the dinosaurs, went extinct at the first downturn.

Dawson's study found that almost four billion years of existence had produced no evolutionary pressures to eliminate the 'unfit' among the present day populations of microbes that he had studied.

This despite Social Darwinist claims to see evidence of the same in the mere four thousand year recorded history of human civilization.

Evolutionary pressures of survival, the Social Darwinists claimed, would ensure that humanity's portfolio of genes would be gradually drained and reduced, down to a 'small tent' of just to the most fit 1A types.

But Dawson no doubt had already noted to himself that the microbes had been around a million times longer than human civilizations - surely the slowly grinding wheels of even Darwin's ultra leisurely concept of evolutionary change must have produced something by now.

Because his microbes seemed quite tolerant of what human scientists called the 'unfit' among them.

Indeed Dawson found that the 'fit' and 'unfit' among the pneumococcus microbes were free to be both patrons and authors in the microbes' world wide lending library of potentially useful genes.

In this "Big Tent" concept for a global library, any microbe - whether judged 'fit' or 'unfit' by human scientists, could freely offer up bits of DNA with potentially useful genes for a new crisis situation and any other microbe could take it up and in turn pass it on to another microbe and so on, quickly circling the world.

The miracle of HGT

This use of the unique-to-the-microbe HGT system (horizontal gene transfer), by the way, is how resistance to a brand new antibiotic can spread to the remotest corners of the world in a few years.

It is one of the key ways that microbes have survived for four billion years.

Most microbes would be considered in 1940 to be among the "lower" forms of life because they almost never reproduced sexually - that is by taking bits from the genome of both mom and dad.

Creatures unable to do that were considered to be incredibly primitive.

But Dawson showed that if the microbes could think, they might feel that sexual beings were truly incredibly primitive - for why stop at sharing the genes of just mom and dad when you could share the genes of a trillion times a trillion times a trillion of other microbes ?

In human equivalent terms, when microbes were under attack by a powerful new antibiotic, as powerful as Hitler + Stalin + Mussolini + Tojo combined, they made the biggest possible Big Tent of all the talents, be they female or male microbes, black, red or yellow microbes, fit or unfit.

All hands on deck, without regard to limiting racism or prejudice !

Big Tent Penicillin

Dawson thought the Allied cause should not just rhetorically claim to do the same but actually and concretely do the same.

Not just for the traditional moral reasons, but because he had scientifically demonstrated that it had a proven record of success.

But in fact Dawson's earlier studies had largely been ignored.

This time though, he would combine microbe 4Fs ( in this case ,the lower fungi penicillium) with human 4Fs (the working class SBE patients), all to show just what a "Big Tent" approach could do in a time of grave human crisis...

Inventing "small" Penicillin

Martin Henry Dawson did not discover penicillin or Horizontal Gene Transfer or DNA as the location of the genes and all the other discoveries that his memory is usually associated with.

What he did invent (but not "discover") and what he should be remembered for and honored for, is "small" penicillin.

In a war of mass bombings and gassings and burnings led by the Bigs and fought over values exalting the Big, Dawson dared suggest that the small at all levels of Life are at least as worthy of life and dignity as the Big.

In 1940, he said that primitive penicillin produced by the small penicillium was good enough, particularly during a horrific global war of dead and dying, to start its mass production now and to start saving lives now.

And he acted upon his belief, on October 16th 1940, almost 75 years ago.

He worked to save the lives of everyone, not just the Big and the Best and most Fit and most A1.

Particularly because in a war against the Axis that was at least moral as it was material, he felt we must save the weak, the unfit, the 4Fs during the conflict itself not just after, lest we match the Nazis stroke by stroke as they rode a fast train down to Hell.

Primitive 'good enough' penicillin, produced by the small of the world for the small of the world, as well as the Big and the medium sized, now !

The assembled Big of the Anglo-American medical elite wanted wartime penicillin kept as a secret weapon of war, not as a medicine to save lives of all and sundry.

But the dying doctor Dawson (I did mention he was dying all through this unequal battle didn't I ?) won out, when the world's population outvoted their leadership with their voices.

Today wartime-produced penicillin is still regarded as history's best known and best loved medicine.

But Penicillin's moral dignity was a near run thing - it could just as easily be remembered today has being right up there with the world's collective refusal to help Europe's Jews escape Hitler as one of the great moral evils of the Allied side of WWII....

Martin Henry Dawson : the "Roogy Batoon" of Antibiotics AND HGT Antibiotics Resistance

As a kid in the late 1950s I just loved the book entitled The Incompleat Pogo.

Particularly the chapter that involving a pelican called Roogy Batoon successfully peddling his cure for snake bites in a snake-free swamp ("Fortunately for you, I also brought some snakes").

That riposte, along with Harold Wilson's "a week's a long time --- in politics " appealed to the cynical side of my personality.

I didn't really expect to ever come across someone real with that much chutzpah but unexpectedly, I did.

And a nicer human being you could never meet.

Dr Martin Henry Dawson did not discover HGT, the genetic mechanism that spreads microbial resistance to antibiotics around the world like wildfire, nor did he discover Natural Penicillin, the first and the best ever antibiotic.

But unlike their discoverers, he didn't try to bury them - instead he devoted his whole life to promoting this forgotten pair to an extremely indifferent scientific community.

Dawson died tragically young, worn out by his efforts, but he lived just long to see patients' families (and eventually even the scientists !) take a shine to naturally-made penicillin.

Fifty years after his death, the world also began hearing about HGT.

HGT means horizontal gene transfer - the unique ability of the "stupidest" and "weakest"  lifeforms to mix and match useful genes from across the world's vast microbial gene pool, rather than being limited to what gene variants mom or dad might vertically throw down, as in the case of us humans.

This process does many many marvellous things for microbes.

But we humans only began to care about it when we realized that it causes all our expensive new antibiotics to become decidedly less useful, all around the world, in only a few years.

So aging and new Pogo fans everywhere :  think of (a) Natural Penicillin = snake bite cure and (b) HGT microbial resistance = snake bite ---- and try not to laugh at human hubris.

Because there is irony-on-steroids buried in this tale, somewhere....

Microbes evolve into civilized Man, uncontroversial --- Microbes evolve while remaining microbes, heresy

In 1940, Dr Martin Henry Dawson was a scientific heretic.

His heresy was in focusing upon (and endlessly talking up) various discomforting forms of microbial evolution.

In 1940, microbes weren't supposed to evolve - I mean not after Day One.

Today we encounter all these forms of microbial evolution in our very first lectures in Microbiology 101 - they are essential learning.

Let's begin with all the wonderful lifesaving beta lactam antibiotics, starting of course with Dawson's natural penicillin. And how these amazing medicines work their non-toxic magic by breaking up molecules essential to other life forms but not to us humans.

But then how these antibiotic molecules, in turn, are liable to be broken up by other chemicals from the microbes under attack. And so it goes, on and on and back and forth.

How the bacteria and other microbes survive and flourish against all the best defence systems that the human body and human doctors can throw up against them.

Their sophisticated abilities in areas like Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT), quorum sensing and molecular mimicry, as 'lie low persisters', their various goo capsules, the daringly wall-less L-Form bacteria, their communal biofilms, all helping the microbe to survive inside us.

Then their dangerously effective chemicals like the flesh eating 'spreading factor' (hyaluronidase) that so helps them to flourish against us.

All subjects of scientific papers - often pioneering papers - from Dawson between 1925 and 1945 --- and still cutting edge science even today.

In 1940, the scientific consensus was that the 'essence' of all the microbes at the lower left of the ever upward arrow of progress was to be eternally stupid and weak ---- and to remain eternally unchanging.

Except that the primitive microbes were permitted to mark the very primitive beginnings of the long slow process of evolution ever upwards that ended in the brilliant changeability that is Civilized Man, at the upper right of the arrow of progress.

Dawson never denied that there were some things we humans do very well and the microbes do very badly.

He said only that that the converse was equally true : abilities and defects (physical and moral) were well and truly mixed throughout all the lifeforms, not exclusively separated into stupid and bad at the bottom and good and smart at the top.

Now exalting the concepts of mixing and mixtures is perhaps the most distinctive feature of the intellectual life of our present post-1945 age.

Whether you call it the post modern age or the post progress age, its all the same.

It is interesting to ask, therefore, what part did the popular journalism of wartime penicillin play in ending "The Progress Project" so abruptly in 1945 ?

Because try as the 1945 scientific/government/commercial elite might, they could never get the ordinary uneducated public (as opposed to say educated historians) to buy into the explanation that penicillin came from highly expensive, highly complicated, highly sophisticated chemical "deep tank" factories.

The popular journalism penicillin stories always seem to be what journalists call 'brites'.

You know : cute stories of dogs walking on back legs, cats smoking cigars and ordinary bread mold grown in ordinary bottles on ordinary kitchen tables saving lives when the most expensive drugs of the sophisticated corporate chemists couldn't.

I am not denying Auschwitz and the Atomic Bomb's hearty roles in the demise of "Progress".

But I have also come to believe that all these mass media "Ripley's Believe it or Not" flavoured tales of clever primitive microbes and stupid civilized chemists were as devastating, in their slow cumulative way, to The Progress Project as anything the then obscure Adorno and Horkheimer ever wrote ...

Dr Martin Henry Dawson, MD , LLB (Hon) : always about defending the underdog ?

From would-be lawyer (destined to defend the underdog) to a doctor and scientist defending the underdog ?

With no private papers available, it is hard to know for sure what really motivated pioneering medical scientist Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson, the first person to ever put DNA to work in a test tube and the first to ever inject an antibiotic (Penicillin) into a patient.

Dr Dawson, MD was actually enrolled in Arts at Dalhousie University, before the Great War changed everything.

But, from what we know of his adult personality and from his best marks in university, I would see him, if the war hadn't intervened, more as a university teacher - perhaps in history or perhaps teaching theory in law school.

Unusually for a scientist, he took no sciences courses as an undergraduate - except one in biology (where he topped his class).

His skill in German turned out to be very helpful - no great scientist before 1945 could really succeed if they couldn't read scientific German with smooth facility.

But his best courses are in areas like history, economics and philosophy.

It is important to recall he got his wartime BA degree after attending relatively few classes because he had such good marks in the few courses he did complete, before he left for the effort overseas.

Henry Dawson was far too studious to ever stop at a mere BA and then go on to teach high school - yet he never (so far as we can tell) formally enrolled in the pre-law, pre-engineering or pre-med options at Dal.

But ever loyal to his slightly older brother Howard, he might have joined him at law school but for the war.

Yet he didn't seem to have the commanding personality needed to be a successful courtroom lawyer defending the underdog.

And he certainly never ever wanted to be well off, let alone rich, as in 'rich corporate lawyer'.

But while at Dal, Dawson was busy helping teaching English to various foreign seamen at the YMCA mission to seamen, perhaps parallel to his brother Howard's similar involvement in evangelical good works.

And for what it is worth, his older brother Frank, while an engineering Dean in the American Mid West, so impressed a pioneering black engineering student with his non-prejudiced kindnesses, that the man fulsomely remembered Frank Dawson years later in his autobiography.

The entire family was not military minded but when they were needed - when poor little bleeding Belgium was betrayed by the Hun - all five boys stepped into the breach.

Belgium - again an underdog.

Henry was a (medically untrained) private in a university organized overseas military hospital at first.

Later Dawson was made an officer in the infantry and while badly wounded in the foot, still gave up his place in a stretcher for another much more wounded ordinary soldier, (an underdog) this after solving a battlefield crisis by running about on his wounded foot for ten hours.

His foot never really recovered as a result, but he received the Military Cross with citation for this selfless act.

Then at the very end of his wartime service and wounded yet again, Dawson changed his peacetime occupation from just "student" to "medical student".

His career changed - but I argue - not his urge to helping the underdog.

His lifelong concerns, as a ward doctor, were the chronically ill poor - then as now a low priority in high prestige teaching hospitals.

Underdogs of the medical world.

As a medical scientist, his interest was in the underdogs of the underdog microbes - then universally seen as primitive, primeval, weak, simple, small --- the ultimate in the living fossils.

So why then were they still here ?

If evolutionary theory was correct, Dawson wondered, shouldn't the weak and the small have long ago been vanquished by the big and the brutal ?

The microbes were once again the underdogs, the Rodney Dangerfields, of the Living World.

As a medical scientist, Dawson was particularly concerned about the harmless - hence uninteresting to other medical scientists - avirulent commensal bacteria.

Avirulent versions of 'normally' pathogenic bacteria were considered to be defective versions (of a lifeform already -see above - considered to be a living fossil).

So why then ,asked Dawson, were they still here inside us, often inside us for perhaps our entire lives -- undestroyed ?

Here is the contemporary explanation that Dawson objected to - see if you too can see its flaws in basic logic :

(1) The pneumonia bacteria can only survive in or on us - we are its only home.

(2) The normal variant of the bacteria that causes lung pneumonia and blood poisoning is deadly virulent and lives alone, floating in the blood and human intercell liquids, usually killing us (and them) in a week or two.

(3) The disease of lung pneumonia is not really contagious -- we can't really catch it from the coughing of a dying man -and remember with his death, so to die the bacteria (see #1 above).

(4) The abnormal, defective, avirulent, version harmlessly exists in tight massive colonies on the inner surfaces of our nose and throat - sometimes for our whole lives, without ever making us sick.

(5) We all have these harmless pneumonia bugs in our noses some of the time -  some of us all our lives - and when we have them, we are known as 'carriers' of these harmless commensal pneumonia bacteria.

Dawson wondered how a short life of a week or two in the lungs or blood streams of just a few of us (for even before penicillin, pneumonia bugs only killed perhaps 8% of us) could qualify as the normal form of existence for this bug.

All this, when 100% of us had the abnormal quote unquote bug in our noses for periods ranging from months and months to decades and decades ?

Haven't the normal definitions of usual and unusual been deliberately up-ended to suit an universally accepted but ultimately bizarre medical theory ?

Dawson's alternative explanation was that whether floating about alone in liquid or clinging in masses to walls, these were just normal evolutionary responses to changed niches.

If bacteria do the shapeshifting so quickly, it is not really just that they are much more plastic in the forms that they can adopt than we are capable of - it is also the simple math that a new generation to them can mean 25 minutes later not 25 years later as with us.

As a result, evolutionary response to a new crisis can happen a million times faster with them than us.

If we are honest with ourselves, an evolutionary response time like that is a big advantage and a big reason why these living fossils are still around.

Dawson spent his life tracking down the variants of bacteria that he believed demonstrated why these supposed underdogs were really Life's evolutionary topdogs.

He was the first, or among the first, to look at things like DNA-HGT,quorum sensing, molecular mimicry, CWD bacteria, biofilms and persisters.

Three quarters of a century or more later, those are still cutting edge scientific topics.

In 1940, scientific opinion was again convinced the underdog fungal slimes were incapable of making penicillin as efficiently and as cheaply as the topdog chemists of advanced human civilizations could.

Dawson disagreed - pioneering the Antibiotics Age - when he injected their 'primitive' penicillin into Aaron Alston and Charles Aronson on October 16 1940.

He was right - the topdog chemists failed totally and the underdog slime still makes all the basis of our lifesaving beta-lactam antibiotics to this very day.

When the Allied medical-political elite agreed that wartime penicillin would only go to the topdog frontline troops, Dawson characteristically objected and said all of us, dying for lack of penicillin, should receive it, war or not.

Dawson was himself dying but he gave up his life to - once again - fight for the underdog.

A life full of variations but always with that same consistency of conduct ....

Humans an annual; bacteria a perennial

The single human species can be thought of as an showy but short lived annual with the hundreds of thousands of unspectacular bacteria species as the perennials of major lifeforms.

Today's typical born-in-North-America human reproducing unit consumes enough energy and materials over a typical 25 year generation period to reproduce about a billion trillion trillion of individually slightly different bacteria in the same period of time.

Humans need hundreds of energy slaves to maintain their life style and even then many couples have only one or none kids - kids that take 25 years for themselves to be able to reproduce.

And of course, it takes two adults to make a baby.

Bacteria need very little material and energy to reproduce, sometimes in as little as 25 minutes, not years, and don't need a mate either.

They operate collectively as a vast world wide quasi lending library of genes - every bacterial a potential lender or borrower of 'sometimes useful' unique genes.

This would be far too expensive a library, in metabolical terms, for all bacteria to make all these genes all the time.

But when bacteria somewhere on Earth suddenly need one of these rare genes, they quickly obtain it from other bacteria that hold that particular rare gene, via horizontal gene transfer, HGT.

So while somewhat simple individually, overall the bacteria family is complex enough to handle almost any curve ball the changing environment can throw at it.

But above all, bacteria have evolved downward in size and movement and reproductive choice ( cloning) as to need very little energy and matter to survive, endure and in better times, reproduce.

Put another way, bacteria are not just Life's fastest breeders - they are also its slowest.

Bacteria can survive a hundred and fifty years or more barely alive before they get enough energy and material to reproduce, allowing this form of life to survive on one billion trillion trillionth of what a human couple would need to survive upon.

Human civilization is all very elaborate and showy but without a massive steady flow of energy and material to sustain it will quickly collapse.

A few thousand humans could live on as hunter gatherers in a moderately impoverished world - below that level of subsistence, they do would die out and vanish for all time as a species.

Meanwhile, those barely mobile tortoises of Life/ those non-spectacular perennials of Life (the bacteria) end up finishing the race of Life well ahead of the more showy annuals and speedier hares.

And what we humans need to ask ourselves : is true 'Progress' better defined as a matter of shortlived Annuals or of long living perennials ?

Victoria Oats Blight, 1940s : don't ever say Dawson didn't warn ya

To the sound of loud yawns, in 1930 Dr Henry Dawson dared publicly suggest that a phenomenon he called 'bacterial transformation' (the name was general from the 1930s till the 1980s when it was replaced by today's horizontal gene transfer or HGT), could explain the mysterious and sudden rise of epidemics of new highly virulent diseases.

Sometimes, he thought, a previously mildly virulent pathogen suddenly acquires, from other species of organisms, a new gene or three that made this former 97 pound pathogenic weakling suddenly highly virulent against its traditional victims.

And we now also know that the human breeding of plants and animals for commercial exploitation can also instantly flood the world with an entire population of long domesticated beings with an 'improvement'---- that in fact suddenly makes them very vulnerable to a long existing, mild pathogen.

Dawson died in 1945, before he could point to a clear case of a new epidemic thrown up by HGT like behavior from the victim or the pathogen --- or both.

Victoria oats blight fell upon the world very suddenly in the late 1940s - the result of two genetic events colliding.

Man had introduced an new gene into commercial oat species that made them better resist the much feared crown rust fungus disease.

Great --- except that a mild pathogen of oats had also gained a new gene cluster from HGT.

One that normally would have been quickly lost by evolutionary pressure  --- due to its added energy cost of making this new gene cluster versus null gain for the blight producer.

Except.

That now there were millions of acres of oats, all over the world, all bearing the a new gene that turned this pathogen's new virulency factor a decided advantage for it surviving and flourishing on oats.

Presto - all the world's oat crops, all with the same commercially-added gene, were suddenly under attack.

Science mucky--mucks investigated and reluctantly reversed one of their century old central dogmas --- that biodiversity was a bad bad bad thing (cue here, eugenics et al).

Amazing that anyone could make a million bucks (or get a PhD and do a post doctoral term of servitude) without ever hearing that old old folk saying about never putting all your eggs (or oat seed) in one basket, but there you are.

Commercial greed meet scientific hubris - you two suckers were born for each other ...

In an era that worshipped the Big, the Fast and the New, he championed the small, the slow and the old - and changed our whole world not just once but twice

The small and the slow and the old

A Canadian newspaper recently touted some Canadian based scientists as saying that the new techniques allowing the mass sequencing of genomes in test tubes, from DNA gathered up from all over the world, is letting science reveal hidden secrets from the distant past.

Hurray for Man !

Not mentioned is the fact that it is actually bacteria and their enzymes that do all the heavy lifting or that it was a Canadian (Martin Henry Dawson) who first put bacteria and DNA to work in a test tube eighty five long, dusty years ago.

DNA

But bacteria slicing and dicing didn't really become popular until sixty years after it first was discovered in the early 1920s.

Instead all interwar genetic efforts (dominated by the big animal oriented zoologists) were focused at the other end of the ladder of progress - on larger beings.

Now we must partially thank the two men usually 'credited' for the discovery and development of bacteria genome splicing for creating this disconnect : because in truth Fred Griffith and Oswald Avery tried very very hard not to publish their results or those of their associates !

But blame the pair only partially.

Because Dawson did publish and broadcast about the importance for all biology of this bacteria gene splicing for the rest of his short life.

 And doing so basically ruined his career.

For daring, in an era devoted to the Big, Fast, and the New, to proclaim to anyone who would listen and to most that would not, that the small, slow and old could do things (genome splicing) that the most advanced human civilizations could not.

And that is precisely what between-the-wars western civilization did not want to hear.

PENICILLIN

And when in 1940-1944, Dawson said that the small and the slow and the old (penicillium cells) could make life-saving penicillin cheaply and abundantly when the assembled Smartest-Chemists-in-the-Universe couldn't even make it at all, again Science did not want to hear it.

But to this very day, penicillium cells still make all the basic penicillin that forms the base material for virtually all our life-saving antibiotics.

Microbiology technology is the current flavour of the age, with synthetic chemistry very much bringing up the rear.

No scientific discovery will ever go 'unpublished' in the technical sense of the word, if the discoverer wants it published.

But what makes an important new discovery or theory quickly popular ( popular in the sense it is taught in all the major science textbooks from high school to advanced study) is how well it gels with the spirit of the age.

Only in our post modern age, when the idea of a linear ladder of progress  with its easy to pick winners and losers has been firmly rejected by most of the educated public , was it possible for Dawson's scientific claims to win wide scientific acceptance ..

the WHY of eugenics : enough with the 'what' already

Scientific discoveries can happen anytime anywhere and be announced  (be made public) anytime anywhere.

But scientific discoveries are only in turn "discovered" by the most powerful scientific, political, economic, media elites (ie made popular) when it suits the spirit of their particular place and time.

So we have Eugenics (controlling the gene pool) - universally popular in 1928 and universally denigrated in 1998 --- while the anti-eugentics of uncontrollable HGT (horizontal gene transfer) was universally ignored in 1928 and universally supported in 1998.

Eugenics did not emerge into the popular domain simply because Galton announced it, but only when the elites of his time and place took it up with enthusiasm instead of ignoring it - as they later did HGT.

Galton's scientific discovery soothed their deepest emotional fear about all the intermingling thrown up by the same Modernization processes they were leading (and cheering on).

But the later scientific discovery of HGT ( promoted most ardently by Martin Henry Dawson) only fuelled that deep fear and revulsion.

For Modernity/Eugenics ( the two basically mean the same thing) was the shiny public - daytime - face of their deepest darkest nighttime fears.

It was their way of trying to control the processes they had unwittingly unleashed --- their attempt to put the modernization genie back in the bottle while still enjoying all the fruits of its successes.

If I were as scared and revulsed by the loss of hegemonic control as these elites were, I'd ignore HGT too....

DNA, Penicillin & Phenology : what great works A H MacKay hath wroth

Pioneering DNA and Penicillin scientist Dr Martin Henry Dawson (1896-1945) was undoubtably Nova Scotia Superintendent of Education A H Mackay's most illustrious student.

Dawson's pioneering investigating of the hidden complexities of microbial life (HGT, quorum sensing, molecular mimicry, biofilms, natural penicillin) flew in the face of all the 'modern' wisdom of the scientists and educated public of his day.

But in the end, it paved the way for our current post modern ways of wisdom.

Dawson grew up right across the street from the Hub of Nova Scotia's public education system in downtown Truro and with his mother a teacher and his father on the school board, he could not help but do well in school, regardless of the level of his genetically given intelligence resources.

At at time (High Modernity), when all the high schools of the world were leaders among Jacob Burkhardt's "terrible simplifers", reducing all the newly uncovered complexities of reality back into a few simple Laws of Nature, Superintendent MacKay dared bucked this educational and societal trend.

Instead MacKay saw to it that all of the province's schools allowed their students to see for themselves just how complicated and varied the world really was.

He himself was a noted natural historian, publishing articles in scientific journals , despite natural history being dismissed as fit only for an an amateur hobby for under occupied rural parsons.

So he boldly supplemented the worldwide trend to spend most of the spare school tax money on equipping all high schools with shiny new white indoor laboratories.

(Dawson's own High School, being the Model High School for an entire, albeit a small and relatively poor, province, had far better - newer - scientific equipment than most of Canada and America's universities provided to their undergraduates.)

MacKay commanded that all children and teachers throughout the province had to collect datum on the timing of the seasons' naturally cyclical events, as noted on their to and from walks to school each day.

He made all these little ankle biters junior participants in the grown up science of phenology.

This science studies the interaction between a basically fixed genetic timetable for Nature to do things versus the interaction with an ever varying climate as well as other such variables such as elevation, shade and wind cover.

MacKay's very impressive data set, from almost thirty years of recording, collected by upwards of a hundred thousand students each year, is still being used to help us gauge the change in the climate over the last hundred or so years.

But that is at the macro level.

At the classroom level, down at the micro level of timing when each returning bird and plant was first seen by each school kid in the Spring, what the kids collectively saw was a constant complex variety of possibilities of timings and locations.

The program basically ran from the year of Dawson's birth (1896)to the year (1926) that he permanently departed the province for New York City and began his pioneering research at Rockefeller and Columbia Universities.

He had bathed in this natural Historical way of seeing the contingencies of reality for thirty years and when he grew up, he became a clinical investigator - constantly balancing the simplicities of artificial lab experiments against the unpredictable complexities of actual real life human patients.

At those universities,not unexpectedly, Dawson's research results revealing the overwhelming complexity of reality rather than demonstrating its supposed ability to all be reduced to a few simple laws governing the motion of atoms, were wildly unfashionable.

But today they all just seem perfectly normal.

I can't help thinking that old L.H. would be grinning from ear to ear if he woke from the dead and was suddenly dropped into any current biology conference .

'Believed at last, believed at last, Great God Almighty, believed at last' !!!!

"The Last are sometimes First" : confounding Modernity's Terrible Simplifiers

Reduced (one of its characteristic terms) to an aphorism, Modernity is basically about believing that, in terms of intelligence and progress ,"the First (largest,newest, most complex) were always and inevitably First ".

And as the First, destined to succeed and endure.

(Also implying that the last are always and inevitably last and doomed to fail).

A simple - and terrible - and terribly wrong - scientific thesis.

Seeing under his microscope that some of the supposed last (bacteria) were in some ways the First (in abilities to do genetic manipulation) led scientist Martin Henry Dawson to conclude the results of this sort of backwater microbial research would have a profound effect on the whole wide science of biology.

And as the key intellect memes in the Era of Modernity were all really just 'applied biology' , the impact could, in theory, go much, much wider.

It didn't, not then at least : for Dawson wasn't the one to lead any sort revolution of words and ideas - only perform a quiet revolution of deeds.

But today the idea that a deep wide genetic pool, well stocked with the intelligence from all possible sizes, complexity and types of beings, is Humanity and the Earth's best insurance against destruction is a commonplace.

It is the meme that holds up the entire intellectual structure that we call postmodernity ...

Dr Dawson vs Dr Luke : "The postmodern revolution will not be rhetoricized"

What a powerful rhetorical slogan, clearly evoking separation and dualities, that the Bible's Dr Luke unfurled for Christians to march behind on the way to their revolutionary barricades : "the Last shall be First".

By contrast Dr Henry (Dawson), who seemed not to have a single rhetoric-producing gene in his entire body, would only ferment his revolution by cautiously mumbling in the pages of scientific articles that "the Last may be First, or Last, or indeed Anything In Between --- it all depends."

This revolution, at least, would be quintessentially postmodern in that it definitely won't be rhetoricized ...

How HGT helped end Modernity

It is too frequently claimed, by tenured people well schooled in the logical and analytical skills of philosophy and who thus really shown know better , that postmodernity is all about relativism and modernity is all about absolutes.

But is this in anyway accurate ?

Postmodernism's Absolutes

True, postmodernist thought does typically say things like this : "the matriarch of an extended aboriginal family is as smart in her own way as is the boss of a New York brokerage firm".

But is this nothing more the evoking two forms of one absolute, 'smartness' ?

Modernity's Continuum of relative Progress

Contrast this with a typical modernity claim, that that 'the bigger and more complex are inevitably smarter than the small and the less complex, just as the newer is always smarter than the ancient'.

So : the header of a current brokerage firm is inevitably smarter than the head of an ancient aboriginal family.

Further : that a modern civilization is far smarter (because it is so big/complex and created so recently) than a tiny simple bacteria that first existed billions of years ago.

This is the Continuum of relative Progress that formed the base for all the towering modernist-scientism thought that lay above it.

A straight arrow of progress and smartness, ever upward towards today's biggest and the newest.

Anchored - in the minds of modern scientism at least - by the obvious smartness of today's biggest and newest human civilizations versus the obvious stupidity of the shapeless, immobile tiny bacteria first born billions of years earlier.

The real target of this line of thinking was not the bacteria, so very far beneath the pale, but humans in the middle of this continuum : the natives of the many overseas colonies held captive by western nations claiming to be their 'moral stewards' using this scientific argument.

Muller vs Dawson on Evolution and Progress

Now as it happens, one of the smartest beings in the Modernity universe, an American scientist named Herman J Muller, had been busy at work studying genetic mutations beginning at Columbia University in 1918 , trying to alter the genetic makeup of living beings.

He zapped the multitudes of these assembled beings with overdoses of deadly radiation.

Now most died right away but some lived a little while longer while being deformed into useless mutations as the radiation altered their genes.

By once in a while a being survived into old age but with a mutation that was either harmless or even possibly helpful.

He became famous overnight when he gleefully telegraphed his results at the end of 1927.

The Swedes, belatedly impressed by the mis-shaped mutations that the wartime A-Bombs had coughed up amid all the dead and dying, gave Muller a Nobel Prize in 1946.

Enter Griffith and Dawson

Now that same month as Muller announced his attempts at gene modification, a British scientist named Frederick Griffith very reluctantly submitted a paper on his discovery (made in 1923, just as Muller had done his first radiation experiments) that primitive, ancient, tiny, simple bacteria could also affect gene change.

Albeit without millions of bystanders being killed in the process.

His news was totally ignored - first by scientists and thus by their syncopants*, the so called science 'journalists', and then by ordinary journalists and their readers.

(*I have always wondered why football team cheerleaders are not similarly called sports 'journalists'.)

Unlike Muller, Griffith did not expand upon his research and nor did anyone else , except a Canadian-born scientist named Martin Henry Dawson.

His work too got little attention.

No wonder !

The Moderns has replace their parents' belief in a personal God with a belief in an Impersonal Science but that did not mean an end to needing to believe in dogmas.

They needed more of them - now more than ever.

We all know them - as historical relics, albit still taught to innocent high school kids by the old Faithfuls.

Such as "One gene = One protein", the famous central dogma of biology.

In Dawson's own skill areas, bacteriology and immunology, 'Strain-Typing' was the operating philosophy.

It was based on another famous dogma, Koch's First Postulate, that a specific disease-causing strain of bacteria will always be found in a person suffering such a specific disease but never in a healthy person.

Simply examine the various bodily fluids of a sick person possibly suffering from an unknown-for-certain disease, find within it lots of strain x of bacteria Y that always causes a particular disease Z and you are done.

Possibly a cure is known and the patient lives --- or possibly the disease hasn't yet a cure and they die - but your job, as a typing bacteriologist at the hospital lab is all done , 'where's my pay cheque ?'

Let the frontline doctors on the wards deal with the emotional fallout from this definitive diagnosis.

HGT

What Dawson boldly dared suggest - unlike the timid and disbelieving Griffith - was that the harmless strains of bacteria carried by almost all of us in our throats and noses at sometime in our lives - could be changed into dangerous strains by HGT.

This meant that simply typing a patient as having only non-pathogen bacteria in them wouldn't ensure they couldn't get a new pathogen disease when thus harmless strains took up harmful genes from other bacteria.

The professions of Bacteriology and Immunology were less than a generation old but now Dawson's suggestion of infinite bacteria genetic plasticity threatened their members' only recently attained job security and new high status within medicine and science.

He actually called his process by the plain-spoken term "bacterial transformation", but today we use the more descriptive term "horizontal gene transfer", hence HGT.

For - contrary to the God-disbelieving Charles Darwin's own personal dogma- Evolution isn't all about vertical descent from parent to child.

Non-vertical Evolution

Sometimes Evolution actually arrives horizontally, when bits of DNA from one strain of microorganism are incorporated into the "adult" DNA of another strain or even another species of microorganism - and possibly even into the DNA of complex beings like us .

The ancient stupid/simple microorganisms have evolved ways to painlessly insert foreign DNA into their own DNA - and the new clever/ complex human civilization hadn't .

True, we eventually wised up and borrowed the tools of the bacteria to do the job for us - we call it recombinant DNA and PCR.

We then have the sheer nerve to give Nobel Prizes to their mere human discovers rather than their true inventors, the bacteria !

But if HGT demonstrated the bottom end of an upward-oriented continuum of relative 'smarterness' was actually smarter in the area of recombinant DNA than the very top, could that continuum be said to actually exist ?

However remaining stands of Scientism - tenured up to the hilt and marxist cum modernist to the core - doesn't like facing up the the fact that their own central dogma, the Continuum of Progress, has no basis in fact.

Instead, modern big complex human civilization is just as smart - in its own way - as is that of ancient as ancient simple small microorganisms.

Just as the postmodernists claim ...

October 1940 closing of the New York World's Fair & 'The World of Yesterday'

One can only imagine that after reading about or witnessing the exuberant optimism still omnipresent at the October 27th 1940 closing of the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair, many mommies and daddies apparently went straight to bed ... and made babies.

Lots and lots of babies.

How else to account for the world's near simultaneous Boom in Baby births a few months later in 1941---- this,  after a decade of steady decline ?

All the men in their fifties and sixties designing the Fair had billed it as predicting and revealing the leading aspects of "The World of Tomorrow", the near future of the 1960s decade - a world a generation away that they didn't expect to be taking an active part in  - maybe not even be alive to witness.

But, as usual in America, they did it 'all for the kiddies' .

Did it for kiddies already born and (as it turned out) zillions upon zillions of little kiddies about to be born, thanks in no small part to these planners' uplifting display of faith in the world-bending wonders of Modern Scientism.

Today we (we outside of the late night warm bathwater of all-man Fox TV) no longer display such a wide-eyed naive faith in the mind and matter altering powers of science-off-its-leash.

We see the Fair instead as the last gasp of Modernity, Modernity at its peacetime Apogee, just moments before Modernity finally got a war all of its own to play with.

The Fair displayed fully the sense that the human Will could triumph over anything the World could offer - that civilized Man could best primitive Mother Nature at anything and everything --- do it better, faster, cheaper.

But today we see lurking behind the 1940 New York Fair's massive ceramic Fountain of the Atom, promising future energy from the "atom-smashers" at NY's Columbia University that would be 'too cheap to meter', the Manhattan nuclear Project and Hiroshima and the Cuban Crisis.

Behind the synthetic autarky of Du Pont's fabulous new 'nylon' stockings and its boast that it could make anything and everything out of water air and coal ,today  we see the synthetic autarky of the Nazi war machine revving up, fueled by hopes they could fight forever thanks to their synthetic petroleum made out of the same three bog-common ingredients.

And yes 1940 did also reveal yet more variants of the amazing life-saving synthetic sulfa medicines --- one of the most cherished fruits of 'living better through chemistry'.

The Nazi synthetic autarky went much further : they even saw chemistry's energy powering machines  could replace  the need to keep alive millions with human energy and skills.

That faith motivated their Hunger Plan East, to starve thirty million 'useless mouths' to death in western Russia, so all of her mechanized farm product could go to feed Germany and her armies instead.

 (And it was the reason they felt comfortable diverting military resources to kill all nine million European Jews,  even as that same war machine was starved for lack of extra civilian manpower.)

Behind the Fair's infamous rocketgun propelling passengers non-stop from New York to Europe, today we see WWII's V-2 rockets and their postwar kin, propelling nuclear mega-death 'too cheap to meter' half way around the world.

Non-stop.

But yes, we also see some of the Fair's actual predictions carried out in the 1960s.

Plastic and synthetic fabrics everywhere, near-artificial food like Wonder Bread and Tang, mechanized farms, rockets to the moon, super-highways and cars everywhere.

But that wasn't all of the Sixties - not by a long shot.

For every baby boomer enthralled with a high tech trip to the moon, another boomer was taking a low tech trek 'back to the land' , to cotton shirts, brown bread, organic farming and renewable non-polluting energy.

Could October 1940 New York  have seen this - did October 1940 New York foresee this ?

I argue yes - yes it did.

For Columbia University is 'A House of Many Mansions' and on its uptown medical campus, a medical scientist was becoming less and less convinced that civilized Man had all the answers and that primitive Mother Nature had only the blank stares.

Martin Henry Dawson had first developed this idea in the 1920s and 1930s, while seeing how defensively the entire scientific world had instinctively rejected the very idea that tiny ancient primitive strep pneumonia bacteria could unerringly slice and dice genes to create new variants of itself - something that modern civilized Man could not dream of doing back then (and even now can't do unaided by bacteria).

Dawson took up the cause of what he called "bacteria transformation" and what we more generally today call HGT (horizontal gene transfer), becoming the first ever to set DNA to work in a test tube and to observe quorum sensing.

If biology rather than chemistry is the central science of the sciences today, much of the credit has to go to Dawson, because without his pioneering cheerleading efforts, HGT and DNA, along with the massive microbiology and microtechnology industries they spawned, might have died stillborn.

But now,  in October 1940, Dawson sensed that some of the tiny and primitive beings of Mother Nature had more new - all natural - tricks up their sleeve that even the smartest synthetic scientist couldn't best.

He sensed that raw crude un-purified (natural) penicillin might cure diseases as well as or even better than human synthetic penicillin whenever or if ever (it never has) came along.

The analogy is how a glass of impure natural orange juice delivers a dose of vitamin C as well (and much tastier) than Tang (or a little white pill of the pure stuff) ever does.

He had a young black and a young Jewish patient before him , dying needlessly because their rheumatic heart disease (the polio of the poor) was judged unworthy of much medical research while American medicine prepared for war.

He was convinced that only penicillin and penicillin alone could save their lives (he was right).

So on October 16th 1940, just days before the Fair of the World of Tomorrow closed, Dawson opened our Age of Antibiotics, by being the first ever to inject penicillin-the-antibiotic, injected into the arms of his two patients, Aaron (Leroy) Alston and Charles Aronson.

I remember much more about my school yard bullying than about my school work as a young school kid.

But naturally, as a small kid much bullied by the big and the powerful, I remember well the takeaway lesson about small children's lives saved by antibiotics .

That lesson was that antibiotics were not made by scientific Man in some vast chemical lab, but came from tiny primitive creatures living in Mother Nature's dirtiest and most overlooked spots : basement wall slime fungus, jungle dirt and sewage outflows.

If future historians wish to look for the headwaters of postmodernity's belief in the value of the diversity of life, I suggest they look at naturally made antibiotics as a good place to start.

And that postmodern opening to the diversity of life began in October 1940, just as the prewar World of Yesterday, Modernity's Last Hurrah , was closing ..