Penicillin "J" : instead of the body and blood of a rural carpenter's helper

What if "Jew-Boy Jesus" came back during WWII & The Holocaust and no one even noticed ?

If instead of being a humble (but still very human) rural carpenter's helper offering the world's suffering His body and blood, this time He came back as a mere household pest.

Came back as that ever annoying blue green mold that ruins so much of our food and clothing.

Yes, as a 'fungoid growth', to paraphrase someone infamous.

And instead offering up His body and blood, this time the world's suffering and hurting got His poo and pee.

Because that is what the scientific consensus in that interwar period thought was the purpose of fungus secondary metabolites, like the life-saving penicillin - mere excretions of post-metabolic waste.

(Poo and pee, in words that even ankle-biters like Sam down at the daycare would understand.)

"J" as in Jewish or Jesus ?

The Double Miracle of penicillin "J".

In the face of Hitler's horror, a truly avenging Jewish Penicillin "J".

Saving lives and busting human hubris wherever it went.

Now of course many religious people think God is far too rational and level headed to do anything as hair-brained as that.

Myself, God is totally mysterious and free-spirited and loving and He just might.

For morally, for the most innocent of humanity-- its children, WWII was a truly desperate time, with the adult human ego and hubris on all sides of the conflict raging unchecked.

And desperate times do call for desperate (or at least inspired) measures....

Secondary metabolites : yesterday's microbial poo and pee, today's lifesaving antibiotics

We can't fairly  or accurately write a history of the earliest reception to the news that penicillium excrement might save human lives, if we credit the scientists of the 1920s and 1930s with all the hindsights that scientists and the public hold today about the best place to find new antibiotics.

Because in those heady early days of the discovery that metabolic activities can be usefully divided into essential-to-life primary metabolic activity and unknown-uses secondary metabolic activity, the metaphor most scientists reached for to explain the secondary metabolites of the lower fungus was of the well known plant and animal need to excrete unneeded and potentially deadly 'metabolic waste'.

Poo and pee and go-go and caca in daycare talk.

Would you, even today, instantly let your doctor to inject poo and pee into your blood stream when asked, without hesitation and discomfort ?

Let alone way back in the Era of (Man-centred) Progress, where it seemed impossible to believe anything a stupid simple little fungi cell could do might be superior to what advanced civilization's best chemical laboratories could invent.

Progress 1945 (upended) : primitive penicillium poo saving more kids than advanced civilization could bomb or gas.....