Manhattan gave the world the first life-saving penicillin shot - as well as the first death-dealing A-Bomb

Don't let terrorists like Ramzi Yousef limit Manhattan's wartime role to killing (and here I quote his justification for blowing up the twin towers of the World Trade Centre) "250,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki".

Let us never forget that Manhattan also gave the world its first ever penicillin shots 75 years ago next year.

New York then went on to provide the wartime world with the biggest chunk of its life saving penicillin and in the process developed the new micro-engineering  technology used by all the world ever since to make all antibiotics.

It did so by returning to 'the stone the (British) builders had rejected' ---- and made it the cornerstone of our world of antibiotic lifesavers.

Alexander Fleming in London had discovered penicillin 12 years earlier but had decided it would only be useful if made as a patentable man-made economical synthetic and even then only useful as a surface antiseptic - not in an internally-oriented pill or needle.

Howard Florey in Oxford had taken up Fleming's challenge and for a decade his team chased the chimera of man-made patentable economical man-made penicillin - but they never succeeded and no one else ever has.

New York went back to Fleming's original semi-purified natural penicillin and ran with it - in five short weeks Dr Martin Henry Dawson's tiny team had obtained spores, grown it , concentrated it and tested it for toxicity (on Dawson himself).

Now the team was ready to give it to patients dying of then invariable fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) for lack of it - a young black man from Sugar Hill, Harlem named Aaron Alston and a young Jewish man named Charles Aronson from the Bronx.

SBE patients were then considered the 4Fs of the 4Fs and not a priority to an Anglo-American medical establishment using the excuse of war preparation to curtail social medicine (medicine directed at the poor and minorities).

So the day Dawson picked for history's first penicillin shots couldn't have been more freighted in symbolism.

It was October 16th 1940 - the historic first day of America's draft registration process - a process still going strong 75 years later.

So on a day when all the minds of America and of the Allied and Axis world were focussed on whether or not the hardships of the Great Depression had reduced America's numbers of 1A fit-for-combat youth , a 4F black man and Jew got to make their own history  in a quiet corner of upper Manhattan's Columbia University Medical Centre...

Help celebrate Manhattan's 75 years of life-saving penicillin Oct 16 1940 --- Oct 16 2015

Manhattan gave the world's first shots of life-saving penicillin , seventy five years ago next October 16th (2015).

And if Manhattan and New York City is too damn modest to blow its own horn , well we in the rest of the world should start by thanking Manhattan for all the good penicillin and other antibiotics have done for us in the three quarters of a century since.

Starting January first next year, let us start sending cards, phone calls and online* messages to the mayor of New York City to thank Manhattan for changing our world for the better forever.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/static/pages/officeofthemayor/contact.shtml

Yes, wartime Manhattan also birthed the A-Bomb.

But let us never forget that NYC not only produced most of the wartime world's penicillin, it also established the fundamental right of ALL in the world to cheap abundant life-saving penicillin in wartime.

And that was the best possible moral rebuke to those like the Nazis who advocated that medicine, food and life itself should only go to the fit of the fittest nations ....

Manhattan gives world's first penicillin shots Oct 16 1940 : celebrating 75 years of natural penicillin live-saving !

Dr Dawson as "the Donald McKay of Medicine" 

It all happened in a blindingly fast five weeks leading up to October 16th 1940.

 Dr Martin Henry Dawson went from reading vague hints about the clinical possibilities of natural penicillium juice to find its spores to inventing ways to quickly grow and concentrate the substance.

He then gave a needle of it to himself , for signs of human toxicity - and survived.

The very next day, October 16th 1940, Manhattan was the site of the world's first penicillin shots - as Dr Dawson injected his team's 'crude' natural penicillin into two 4F patients (a black and a Jew).

Seventy five years ago next year !

On the very day the rest of America began its 75 year old practise of registering all their 1A males.

And 25 years to the day when New York and North America first heard of the execution of nurse Edith Cavell in Belgium.

This news had galvanized Dawson to drop university and join a hospital unit to help poor bleeding Belgium.

Social medicine - the type that helps the 4Fs of this world - was being dropped that Fall to focus on War medicine for the 1As of the world .

Dawson saw this 'eugenic triage' as the civilized world doing exactly what the Axis already advocated - when they should be instead opposing it with every breath and every bone in their bodies.

The world's 4Fs were now his new poor bleeding Belgium.

If the Allied world won't move - then he would. And he did - changing our world for the better forever - until his dying breath four and a half years later.

Dawson was a man with a prominent broad jaw - he simply looked like the sort of person who when he got a bone between his teeth won't let go and would really run with it.

That was a sight an earlier Nova Scotia immigrant to New York , Donald McKay, (who had also set records for speedy results as the builder of the world's fastest ever clipper ships) would know full well.

For when his clippers had a full head of sail they too moved really really fast , with 'a bone in their teeth' as the old salts used to say :

If you want something to really move , hire a Bluenoser !