A Complicated Triumph

The terrible simplicities of scientific reductionism was the very mother's milk of  all the horrible 'terrible simplifiers' of High Modernity (1875-1965): starting with Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and crossing the water to their gentler and kinder Anglo-American opponents.

For none of the big political ideologies of Modernity at all rejected reductionist science or damned it with faint praise - instead they clasped it to their bosom and then claimed it formed the spiritual foundations of their peculiar faith.

Manhattan natural penicillin Project a psychological antidote to the mental horrors unleashed by the Manhattan synthetic nuclear Project

In 1945 and 1946, many thoughtful people began realizing that human ingenuity had produced a nuclear bomb system powerful enough to kill an entire planet - a green (rather than merely a mineral-containing) planet that they had never really regarded as alive enough and fragile enough to be killed , until now.

For they began realizing that what Manhattan's Bomb's explosive force, searing heat and mutation-causing radiation could do to humans it could also do to all other living things.

35 word Elevator Pitch about a thesis

Why do so few thesis end up as the basis of mega billion dollar Hollywood blockbusters, Emmy-winning TV series, enduring Broadway musicals or global chart-topping hit songs ?

Just maybe, because after working on a thesis for ten solid years, their authors find it hard to reduce it all to a mere ten second and thirty five word elevator pitch.

But here it goes anyway :

Manhattan's Janus-headed "Double V" victory (atomic bomb autarky vs penicillin commensality) that ended the last global disaster (WWII), still hobbles the boomer generation as they now lead our world and must confront the new global disaster, the Sixth Extinction.

Wartime Manhattan's "Double V" triumphs

Synthetic plutonium ( in the world's biggest killing machine) and non-synthetic penicillin (in the world's smallest lifesaver) were the twin - and Janus-like - triumphs of wartime's two Manhattan Projects.

A "Double V" triumph indeed : one a victory by humanity against Nature and the other a victory of humanity with Nature.

Synthetic Autarky : Patenting the Bomb

For centuries, nominal democracies like America and Britain have yearned to control a war-stopping super-weapon that will give them a patent monopoly against others' aggression.

A super-weapon that they alone control because they have (a) kept it top secret and (b) hold all the patents on it.

Gosh, we might just as well be talking about the actual A-Bomb !

Researchers - not data - change

The historical ("primary") documents that fuel this blog don't change - can't change - frozen in time from the Manhattan of 75 years ago.

But my contemporary understanding of them continues to change, evolve, regress, whatever.

For a long time I saw today's bad climate change deniers as the best single contemporary example of the once widespread pre-war belief that denied any limits to Man's ability to control Mother Nature.

But these sort of deniers were actually the weak case.

Plentitude or Plenticide : Janus Manhattan 1945

Manhattan was long regarded as Modernity's 'special' city, home to most of the world's skyscrapers (and centres of eugenic research).

But a Manhattan university campus was also the first home of Adorno & Horkheimer's modest little mimeographed effort entitled "Dialectic of the Enlightenment".

WWII Columbia filters natural penicillin AND natural uranium

It is easy to see how Columbia University's two wartime Manhattan Projects differed : after all one saved countless thousands of lives while the other one caused countless thousands of deaths.

But it never hurts to consider how much they had in common - together - set against other parts of the Allied wartime nuclear and antibiotics effort.

1945 Janus Manhattan gives boomer children a morally muddled legacy

The mixed birthright of The Children of Janus Manhattan '45  : nuclear death/penicillin life

All of us alive are in some sense Children of Janus Manhattan : all seeing our lives potentially shortened or extended by 1945 Manhattan's twin legacies of deadly atomic bombs and freely available life saving penicillin.

But those who felt that Janus tug and pull most intensely I believe were my generation (cohort more accurately) : those of us born between 1940 and 1956.

This is because we few felt the waning of Modernity and the dawning of Postmodernity in our very bones as it all happened during our crucial formative years when our personalities were as plastic as our rapidly growing bodies.

We are starting to die off now and it is time to put into the historical record exactly what it felt like to be the healthiest most scared generation of children ever ....

dear Children of Janus Manhattan '45 : "If CO2 not at 350ppm by 2040, you'll tip us into a runaway disaster"

An Open Letter to my fellow members of the Boomer Generation:

(By 'boomer', I mean roughly all of us born after the initial start of what was to be the Manhattan Project and before the final implementation of the first Test Ban Treaty.)

Some of us, like myself, probably won't be alive when 2040 rolls around - we will never suffer the most severe consequences of our folly.

But we boomers currently rule the world and have done so since news of the 'hockey stick crisis' first hit the public media.

We are the boss in government and in the military, in finance, in intellectual and cultural circles.

We have heard the news, we are intelligent, highly educated people, we rule the world : we have no excuse, no barrier lay before us.

Only our selfish wills.

We are the children of Janus Manhattan '45 .

That janus year in the eternally janus city.

The New York City physicists of the Manhattan nuclear Project claimed that they had successfully bent even the most recalcitrant atoms to do Man's will: the signal triumph of 500 years of the Enlightenment Project.

By contrast, the New York City chemists of the Manhattan penicillin Project had admitted defeat : they had been unable to bend some very recalcitrant atoms into commercially viable synthetic penicillin.

Instead New York City biologists had shown how by working with Nature and not against her, humanity could produce abundant cheap natural penicillin-for-all : postmodern penicillin, Adorno's penicillin.

We boomers were given a choice : on one hand look backwards to the Manhattan nuclear Project with all its top down, anti-democratic secrecy and violence as a model of our relationship with the world and each other.

On the other hand, the Manhattan penicillin Project had involved tiny teams, even single individuals working on kitchen counters, using freely exchanged samples of penicillium spores.

With almost no government monies - often only hostility - they had proven to the rest of a doubting scientific world the clinical and economic value of freely-cooperating humanity and Nature working together around the commensal table.

We boomers had a choice : and some us became the classic boomer image of back to the land environmentalists - we got the message of natural penicillin.

But many others - like Prime Ministers Stephen Harper and Tony Abbott - spurned that trend among boomers, became instead rogue Boomers and drank deep from the tainted Kool-Aid of the myth of the Manhattan nuclear Project.

Now they are driving this planet , like a car with its emission controls removed, off a climatic cliff.

As long as we boomers control most of the world's governments, its wealth and its biggest media outlets, only us can stop them.

My part in this effort - as I see it - is to urge all of us to take a hard look again at the legacy we were left with from Janus Manhattan's twin - warring - Projects in the Fall of 1945 ...

Manhattan's janus children, transitional era boomers born 1940-1956

I am a member of the transitional era boomer generation (born 1940-1956) : we historical few who experienced both the waning of modernity and the dawning of postmodernity during our crucial - plastic - formative years.

Very few of us were born in Manhattan (very few people ever are) but we were all Manhattan's janus children in a very real sense : the healthiest and most frightened generation of children ever born.

Because we all knew that if the MANHATTAN  nuclear PROJECT didn't kill us from instant global death then the MANHATTAN penicillin PROJECT would likely ensure we'd live out our allotted three score and ten or more.

Everyone alive after 1945's janus-like delivery of atomic bombs and penicillin shots is in some sense Janus Manhattan's children - because we all have had our lives potentially lengthened and shortened by those twin warring developments from Columbia University's campuses in 1940s Gotham.

So to say we have absolutely no interest in this subject, is really to say that we have no interest in where we came from - or where we are going ...

Manhattan '45 : Janus year (on the Janus campus) in the Janus city

Ah, yes the year 1945 : it was the best of times , it was the worst of times.

It just all very much depended on who you chose to listen to.

To the many boosters of the baby-killing/war-ending Manhattan Project (like its leader General Leslie Groves) the year had given America the potential for global mass nuclear destruction 'too cheap to meter' : a future so bright that the world's morticians would have to wear shades.

Big Science, Big Modern Science had won the war against barbarians from the pre-scientific Dark Ages. The war's successful conclusion suggested that 1945 might just be the apogee of Modernity, all its centuries of promises finally fulfilled.

But to Theodor Adorno, Hiroshima, the Katyn Forest and Auschwitz were but the signs of the inevitable collective fall of Modernity and of the Enlightenment, no matter what varied ideological flag the mods had chosen to masquerade under.

(Cue 1945 as the nadir of Modernity and the birth year of post-Modernity.)

Indeed the tiny island of Manhattan, the former wartime home of both Groves and Adorno, had much to contribute to the global dialectic stew that year.

For the Manhattan nuclear Project seemed fully capable of delivering death to the globe at wholesale rates, promising to ensure hundreds of millions or more dead at the push of a red button.

Meanwhile, Manhattan's (natural) penicillin Project had just as dramatically brought the promise of a normal life of three score and ten to hundreds of millions or more who might otherwise expect to die prematurely from bacterial infections.

So if Manhattan's blast, heat and radiation didn't get you, its naturally brewed penicillin just might save you.

And all this happened (nuclear weapons, Adorno's musings, natural penicillin) on the Janus like campus of Columbia University in that eternally Janus like city of Manhattan in the Janus like year of 1945.

Okay, Hollywood fiction meisters, do you think you can top that ?

'Running against New York City' secret of OSRD and NAS wartime success in Washington

In 1940 New York City and New York State were at the very height of their power in the United States.

At that time, they even retained a very significant chunk of the American population - which translated into things like crucial electoral college votes.

They held an even greater percentage of the nation's wealth and financial lending clout, its best research facilities and research libraries, its biggest and most varied industrial base (from light to the heaviest of industries), its media and cultural arbitors of national taste.

It was also filled with immigrants of all sorts, with uppity Harlem Negroes, priest-dominated Roman Catholic Italians and left wing Jews : everything the rest of America : mostly native-born, white, Protestant Anglo Saxons raised in small towns feared and disliked.

FDR had lot of New Yorkers in his regime : particularly lots of lefties and Jews - it was in fact one of the main reasons why he was so disked in Washington.

But for the war effort, he recruited rock-ribbed Republicans to run many important agencies, hoping their presence would bring 'their kind of people' on board to defeat the evil Hitler.

In those days, the highest concentrations of Republicans weren't found in business offices but in universities - particularly among the senior scientists.

So no surprise that his most egghead/ivory tower oriented agencies were run by Republicans.

The most successful of these (the OSRD's nuclear committee and NAS COC penicillin committee for example) quickly realized that while their being a small town WASP Republican was good news in Washington politicians' eyes it was not enough.

They were also some of them damn dome-headed eggheads, alway out of touch with rural realities.

More was needed to win the bureaucratic war between New Deal and Republican oriented agencies over congressional funding, influence and support.

So they worked hard to ensure that as few New York City boys as possible were added into their governing councils.

They couldn't get away with having no one from New York State - so they tried for token New Yorkers - ones without dominating Alpha Male personalities : bench warmers.

Now unlike FDR himself, comparatively few truly successful people made a career and a name for themselves in the states) were they were born and raised.

J Robert Oppenheimer was raised in the very heart of enemy territory, on Manhattan Island itself, but he had become a born-again Westerner so he is hard to fit in one slot.

If Harold Urey (nuclear) and Alphonse Dochez (penicillin) fitted the token New Yorker role in not having commanding personalities in committee, neither were actually born and raised in New York City where they now lived and seemingly represented in these key national power structures.

But look over the key figures in the atomic bomb and penicillin efforts and see if you don't agree with me ....

Manhattan's OTHER Project : Gotham's penicillin un-superheroes (and why they are ignored by academics)

If another secretive, undemocratic, big science Manhattan Project is more likely to cause a global environmental disaster (think nuclear winter or geo-engineering) than prevent it - then does the experiences of wartime Gotham have anything at all to still teach us, as we face global climate meltdown ?

Well, unbeknownst to virtually all, Manhattan actually had another ( far different) wartime project that still has lessons for today.

Its global effect were almost as big as that of the much better known atomic Manhattan Project, but by pointed contrast to it, it was near universally always warmly received worldwide.

Because Manhattan's real enduring gift to humanity during and after the war years was not The Bomb (or the infamous Norden Bombsight) but rather bog-ordinary cheap available-to-all public domain natural penicillin. You know - the stuff the academics are always telling us that the British gave us.

Now I sometimes joke that the only reasons the Scandinavians didn't give a joint Nobel Peace Prize to Stalin and Hitler was because the Nordics ran out of time - the guys died first.

But joking aside, the Nobel prize choices have rarely stood up well to the test of time.

Admittedly, Mr Nobel's naive requirements that everything significant that is discovered or invented was brought to mass use or mass knowledge by no more than three (still living) individuals does force the Nobel prize selection committees into mindless contortions.

Still - what of earth were the Nordics thinking - or not thinking - when the medicine committee gave the 1945 Nobel prize for penicillin to Fleming and Florey ?

After his 1928 discovery, Alec Fleming's main contribution was to tell everybody within earshot (for 15 wasted years) that penicillin would only work if used as a topical antiseptic (it doesn't work well there) and would NEVER work if taken internally (when in fact it works miraculously well there.)

Moreover he said it would never be useful for patients until artificially synthesized when in fact it never has : all clinical penicillin and the bulk of all of today's antibiotics (yes even today !) are still derived from natural penicillin made by fungus.

In this particularly obtuse claim, he was more than fully supported by chemist manque Howard Florey.

In fact Florey led the Allies' wartime charge to repeatedly try and to repeatedly fail to make penicillin by artificial (patentable) methods, rather than to simply produce enough natural (public domain) penicillin to meet current desperate wartime needs.

And Florey and Fleming, both strong supporters of the Conservative Party, fully backed the Conservative politicians in Britain's wartime coalition government who wanted to limit wartime penicillin production to only lightly wounded front line troops.

None for severely wounded troops or any home front civilians in Allied nations and colonies; none for civilians in Neutral, Occupied or Enemy countries - none for Allied POWs, let alone for enemy POWs !

All this because it had been determined that diverting British resources to set up enough British natural penicillin bottle plants in unused buildings to supply all military and civilian needs for the world (and thus to secure a postwar Pax Britannica based on this wartime humanitarian effort) would cost about ten million pounds.

And that was also enough for at least one or two more additions to Bomber Command's already many heavy bomber squadrons.

Since 1932 and Prime Minister Baldwin's famous speech, it had been become the 40th Article of the Conservative Party faith that 'the bomber always gets through' and that destroying people and not saving them was the Conservative way to the moral high ground and winning any war.

But what really made wartime penicillin the world's best known/best loved medicine is that as the last dying act of the New Deal, a new Pax Americana had suddenly made cheap non-patented (natural) penicillin abundantly available to all - wartime friend and foe alike.

But none of these good guys , none of the Americans (and a Canadian) centred in NYC who were mostly responsible for this boon to humanity, ever received a Nobel Prize or public acclaim for the miracle of cheap-penicillin-for-all : only the bad guys.

Because the good guys' approach couldn't have been more different than the atomic Manhattan project.

They were open about their intentions and pragmatically and morally committed to saving the little guy. They wasted little taxpayer money and resources and instead combined a 'little science' approach with a ruggedly low tech engineering style.

All of this was anathema to academics (including non scientists like historians) who wanted to ballyhoo the supposed wartime triumphs of heavily taxpayer funded basic science-big science as a way to getting the taxpayer to permanently fund their postwar hobbyhorses.

So - in a brazen conflict of interest and in violence to the known facts - academics have tended to give all the penicillin acclaim to the big science advocates (cum penicillin bad guys).

To those who were actually most dedicated to keeping wartime penicillin a much delayed, scarce and patented exclusive drug.

So Drs Florey and Fleming in Britain , along with Drs A N Richards and Chester Keefer in the States , got all the acclaim.

Logrolling is what they call this sort of stuff it in politics - I don't know what they call it inside the ivory tower bunker : false weighting of the scales of evidence maybe ?

Manhattan Projects cause (rather than end) global environmental disasters

The year of 1945 was an unalloyed triumph for modernity thanks to  Allied big science's A-bomb decisively defeating the pre-modernity Axis.

But 1945 was also the start of post-modernity (and hence the start of the decline of the hegemony of modernity).

Because millions of people worldwide were repulsed by what the Modernity Project had done during the war - at Auschwitz , Katyn Forest and Hiroshima - and so had begun looking for ways wherein humanity worked with Mother Nature, rather than sought total control over her....

'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 was a triumph for modernity AND postmodernity

And that can't possibly be !

It would be as if Matter and Anti-Matter went through a revolving door together and yet both emerged equally triumphant.

At the time ( just after September 1945) most militarily-oriented accounts of the end of WWII certainly played the Allied victory as a win-win result for the forces of Modernity against a threatened return to a barbaric dark age --- and many military-oriented accounts of WWII still spin it that way.

'Modern Big Science (here insert radar, jets, atomic bomb and penicillin perhaps) beats back masses of fiercely barbaric atavists'.

But some prescient scholars , even in 1945 , people more attuned to changes in fashions in philosophy and to changes in deep broad cultural life certainly saw that that Dresden, Hiroshima, Auschwitz , the Katyn Forest and the Fall of Singapore had opened up breaches in the old certitudes that time and sunshine couldn't heal.

So seventy years later we can still have dozens and dozens of new books every year focussed on the meaning of the events of 1945 emerging (as it were) from two separate but parallel universes.

1945 is laid out in these parallel but widely separated streams of books as either the birth of modern Big Science and a triumph for modern progressive rational planning ---- or as the beginning of the end of the 400 year old Enlightenment Project.

First, let me make it clear that all those who saw 1945 as a triumph for Enlightenment and Modernity were sincere - and those who still hold these views are equally sincere.

But being sincere and being correct are not the same.

I see this being the result of an inevitable mental time lag between when truly philosophy-shredding events occur and when humanity correctly assesses their meaning.

During that time lag, modernity-besotted scholars can celebrate Vannevar Bush for both developing a differential analyser (basically an aiming device designed to accurately drop a shell or bomb down a pickle barrel inside a distant military plant) and for leading the development of the atomic bomb - which could miss the infamous pickle barrel by miles and still destroy the plant (and the entire city surrounding it as well).

Ouch ! What ever else these academics think they might be doing - being rationally consistent certainly isn't one of them.

Bush and the American Air Force strategic bomber proponents  had claimed - for years before, during and after WWII - that the war could be quickly and humanely won by highly accurate precision bombing.

Slow but steady infantry fighting, like slow but steady democracy, they felt was simply not up for defeating absolute evils like Hitler and Tojo.

Superheroes with superweapons were needed to impose extralegal violence , all to quickly restore justice and peace.

Indeed, the American Air Force's single bomb on Nagasaki did 'quickly' end the war --- albeit six years after it began .

 But Nagasaki's target aiming results could hardly be called accurate --- despite conditions being virtually ideal to demonstrate precise bombing --- if it actually existed anywhere outside its supporters' minds.

Similarly , throughout WWII Vannevar Bush thought natural penicillin was totally unfit for use as a medicine.

He pushed instead for penicillin to first become a man-made chemical synthetic before seeking wide public use, thereby delaying its mass introduction for precious years during an all-out Total War.

What he actually accepted credit for however, at war's end , was the unlikely triumph of natural penicillin.

Modernity's 1945 big triumphs, in other words, when more closely examined were actually modernity's biggest failures -- triumphs instead for postmodernity.

Hence my journal's focus on wartime Gotham and its doubly twin Manhattan Projects.

On one side of wartime Gotham's Janus face , modernity's failures to precisely craft the Carl Norden bombsight and Merck synthetic penicillin .

On the other side, postmodernity : Columbia University's 'close is good enough' Atomic bomb (and the Grumman close-in fighter-bomber) together with Pfizer/Dawson's slime-produced natural penicillin.

I think the subject matter for my journal is both a dramatic page-turner story for people who enjoy exciting narrative nonfiction - and a good time and place to look to discover when, how and why modernity failed and postmodernity climbed out of the wreckage.

Because modernity failed but didn't die - it lives on inside the minds of our climate deniers inhabiting almost all the places of power and wealth.

And unless we can make them see that their gods have failed , the future global debacle they have planned for all of us will make WWII look pretty petty ante ...

"The 'Cillium is a Roan that's never been rid , though thousands of chemists once claimed they did "

The title is a snatch of a song about the penicillium chrysogenum , with apologies to Curley Fletcher and his rather better known tale of the Strawberry Roan that also was never successfully rode.

To justify the expense of the Manhattan Project , America's military research bosses at the OSRD saw to it that A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then credited (wrongly) with being the sole cause for ending WWII.

To justify all the OSRD money wasted on not synthesizing penicillin, particularly when their rival WPB-OPRD spent far less to quickly make natural penicillin a resounding success, the OSRD bosses faked a synthetic success (about penicillin) to release to the gullible scientific media.

du Vigneaud's synthetic success (read synthetic = fake)

For Vincent du Vigneaud's team at Cornell Medical in NYC did indeed produce a little biologically active penicillin in the course of their efforts to synthesize penicillin.

So thousands of the world's top chemists got to take a public bow for yet another signal triumph in modern - BIG - science's endless progress ever upward.

But privately most knew that du Vigneaud synthetic goal was towards a molecule shape that did not match the necessary shape of biologically-active natural penicillin.

So this tiny amount of real penicillin must have been an accidental impurity of a mis-conceived theoretical approach !

More than 85 years after it was discovered, chemists have still not commercially synthesized a better or cheaper base penicillin molecule than what the tiny weak fungi can do on its own ...

A-Bomb and Penicillin secrets 'Hidden in Plain Sight' : un-redacting wartime Manhattan's two "Projects"

The structure of my drama in five acts, "Manhattan Natural" (the other Manhattan Project) , has one obvious influence --- the efforts of science historian Robert S Norris to destroy the oldest and biggest myth of wartime's Atomic Bomb.

Norris , in "The Manhattan Project" (published by Black Dog and Leventhal) , first recounts the usual version of this pernicious myth.

We all know - vaguely - how it goes.


To misdirect curiosity away from all the secret atomic research going on in a remote desert location in the empty dusty American South West, the entire Project was supposedly - and very cleverly - given the title of that location's geographical and cultural opposite.

So the rural-focused A-bomb project was named after the most urban location in the world - Manhattan Island, with all its skyscrapers, in the far off and crowded American North East, two thousand miles away.

Norris seeks to destroy this utter nonsense .

"The Purloined Bomb"

He hints that Edgar Allan Poe himself might have approved the truly audacious cleverness that lay behind the naming of the top secret atomic project.

Because the A-Bomb was actually a secret 'hidden in plain sight', just as in Poe's famous story, "The Purloined Letter".

The easy - cheap - fast - part of the entire atomic project was the basic science bits - the realm of atomic physicists as atomic physicists.

The truly difficult parts - consuming tons of money , man and woman power and  scarce time, were the engineering and manufacturing aspects- chemists and metallurgists playing key roles.

 (Along with the printers who made the boxes Chiclet chewing gum came in !)

Most of the physicists, most of the time, were hands on engineers in all but formal title.

And much of all that activity - along with a lot of the basic science - happened in America's industrial and technical heartland.

In 1940 , that was definitely centred around New York , not in some empty desert.

After reading Norris,  it is clear that any history of the wartime atomic bomb that never once mentions personalities, institutions and events in the greater NYC area would read like one of those 'forthright' investigative reports loved by the CIA and NSA  - all those reams of redacted paper more black than white.

Here is a link to a tour of all of the many Manhattan sites connected to the A-Bomb that he conducted with science reporter William J Broad of the New York Times.

( Equally interesting atomic tours could be conducted in the other boroughs, on Long island and in nearby communities in New Jersey and the Hudson Valley.)

I knew Norris's claim of the Manhattan-ness of the Manhattan Project to be even more profoundly true of 'The other Manhattan Project' :  the successful development of wartime natural penicillin.

After about one hundred big books on penicillin , something entirely new : an account of the one successful penicillin project , not another hagiographic account of Oxford penicillin's failed effort.

(The unsuccessful development of wartime natural penicillin's rival , synthetic penicillin , by way of pointed contrast, happened everywhere but NYC !)

A very interesting and historically accurate account of the development of successful wartime penicillin can be told by simply centring it in New York City with Dr Martin Henry Dawson's team.

Outlier chapters will be added as events - sparked by Dawson's efforts in Manhattan - gradually emerge elsewhere.

I intend to parallel the story of Dawson's project with my recalling of the New York City aspects of the story of the A-bomb.

(Albeit in much less detail than from scholars like Norris.)

All this designed to highlight the truly Janus-like nature of the mercurial and mysterious little island of Manhattan : always seemingly two parts Gordon Gekko and two parts Emma Lazarus ....

Manhattan Natural : 'The other Manhattan Project', Manhattan natural penicillin renewing hope in a war world tired, huddled and wretched.

To dying patients in Columbia-Presbyterian's hospital , Gladys Hobby's arms daily held aloft a glowing green and gold petri dish of radiated Manhattan penicillin mold as a sort of monstrance of hope.

That image is a fitting and almost exact counterpoint to that other (rather more famous) Manhattan fungus .

We all know the atomic Manhattan Project's mushroom cloud  -- also consisting of a glowing ball high on top of arms of roiling dust.

The Manhattan atom brought wartime death and suffering to Japan on a scale hitherto unimagined.

By contrast, Manhattan's natural penicillin offered all the world relative freedom from the deadly bacterial infections that had destroyed families in peace as well as in war.

Given this - the fact that Manhattan's natural penicillin has saved hundreds of times more lives than Manhattan's man-made Bomb ever took - why is it so uncelebrated ?

Why , as well , was the world morally and intellectually silent when Ramzi Yousef tried to justify his bombing of Manhattan's Twin Towers by claiming it was pay-back for the Manhattan Project killing 250,000 at Hiroshima and Nagasaki ?

We can't (and we shouldn't) deny wartime Manhattan's major role in all those atomic deaths.

But would it hurt someone to just once remind Ramzi Yousef and his ilk that wartime Manhattan also produced the safe, inexpensive, abundant natural antibiotic ?

The antibiotic that almost certainly saved the lives of someone in their families in the seventy five years since October 16th 1940 ?

I hope I am not speaking out of line to say that New Yorkers are hardly known for curbing their tongues when something really needs to be said.

But maybe the Big Apple doesn't like blowing its own horn - fair enough.

In which case, it is well past due time that the rest of us in the world should begin doing it for them instead ....