In August 1941, Howard Florey published a gripping human interest drama in the pages of the world's leading medical journal, THE LANCET, complete with dramatic before and after photos of little kiddies rescued from certain death.
Yet no reporter in Great Britain's highly competitive newspaper world ever published a single word about it !
Why not ?
I think it is because the general reporters who would have published such a gripping human interest story in a shot never heard of it from their "filtering" colleagues, the beat specialists.
Otherwise, general reporters only write such stories if they had had a personal approach - say by the parents of one of the boys in question.
But general reporters do not generally scan endless numbers of highly specialist publications like THE LANCET looking for likely stories and exclusives - that "filtering" job is the role of their papers' specialist or beat reporters.
These beat specialists cover only Parliament, or only The City.
(Or perhaps only the labour scene, or medicine and science , or the police courts, sports etc.)
During WWII , effective if informal censorship existed for all the Allies' scientific and technical publications.
A word to the wise to a few key technical-scientific editors about subjects to be low-balled generally worked better than a legal (and hence highly public) censorship notice detailing all the subjects these publications could not talk about.
For that method had the paradoxical effect that it only alerted everybody on the specific scientific areas the military was most concerned about !
I think that almost* all the beat reporters covering medicine and science for the general media during WWII got too close to their sources and too far away from the readers who paid their wages .
They thus failed - for but one example - to ask why such a good news story - already published globally, during a world war, in THE LANCET - couldn't also be read by the millions of downmarket readers of the UK's DAILY MIRROR ?
William L Laurence - the New York Times science reporter who shilled under the table for the Manhattan Project - is the best known example of this process of being morally captured by the sources you are supposed to cover objectively for readers outside that field.
But surely , he can't be the only one....
* One key exception : James McKeen Cattell , publisher of the giant scientific journal SCIENCE, who went to bat with great courage in the darkest days of early 1942 , against censoring Dawson and his Penicillin-for-All proposal.
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Thursday, July 17, 2014
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
WWII:began optimistically as Science, ended tragically as Engineering..
WWII, in other words, began in Modernism and ended in post-Modernism.
It should be understood at the onset that Science's task is strictly pedagogical and that it doesn't have to provide answers that are true, in any realistic sense, merely ones that are correct.
In other words, an excellent science experiment also is an excellent exam question.
I am speaking here of course only of the physical sciences, those sciences that form a subset of human psychology.
Their main function in life is to boost the students' self esteem and make them willing and - God Bless 'Em ! - even eager to take on the world outside the High School or University as a non-physical science grad.
These science experiments are meant to give non-scientists and non-engineers, and probably a lot of engineers and scientists as well , the confidence-building illusion that the world outside the lab is as controlled and predictable as it is inside the university's "sheltered workshop".
As I have said before, philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright's key insight (aka the "Cartwright machine") is that the crucial component that Science, along with its machines, experiments and laboratories, requires to be a successful human activity is a metaphorical ROOF , to shelter those activities from messy Reality's wind, rain and dust.
And Frederick Christiansen argues that successful engineering often means adding yet more roofs to the designs-with-roofs coming out of the science labs, to make them robust enough to endure daily Reality.
So, for example, Newtonian ballistic equation solving (classical science at its purest) can take on a very different cast in actual battles of war.
Now our young university physics graduate is behind a gunnery rangefinder, high up on a heaving battleship in the dark of night, himself just barely awake.
His battleship is making a desperate turn, in high wind and waves, and at top speed, to dodge a possible incoming torpedo.
Meanwhile our young officer is trying his absolute best to get his 12 inch gun turret to score at least on hit on an heavily armoured (and armed) enemy battleship.
The enemy is also is bobbing up and down and turning left and right at high speed in equally heavy seas a dozen or so miles away in the dark.
The enemy ship is trying just as hard to land one or two shots on the superstructure of his own battleship - which if it happens, will likely kill him and render moot any success at getting his battleship's guns to hit the enemy.
This, despite the fact that both his battleship's hull and its gun turrets, both heavily armoured, remain totally undamaged.
He has been taught to use Newtonian ballastics to hit and destroy 60,000 ton ships, only to discover that what he is really aiming for with his massive one ton armouring piercing shell is the 150 fragile pounds of his counterpart gunnery officer.
Neither officer will ever hit what they were aiming for, but both are likely to end up dead --- when their ships make the wrong turn and run into an enemy shell equally off target.
Ballastics has descended in to a good old fashioned low tech infantry fire fight: fire as many shots as quickly as you can in the general direction of the enemy and hope some by mischance actually hit him.
Forget even that it is nighttime and in heavy seas, with two ships very far apart, moving at top speed in irregular weaving patterns while bobbing up and down in the water irregularly.
And that the eye on the rangefinder is hindered by all the bright flashes and dense smoke of real battles.
Or that in the minute or two it takes to set range and elevation, the gun to be fired and for the shell to travels to its target, the other ship will have irregularly altered what ever semi-predictable course,speed and elevation it was following at the time of 'set'.
Think about the intermittent winds across the path of that dozen or so miles - winds with different temperatures and density of air - all which affect how a shell deviates from its Newtonian path.
The gun barrel, its wearing-out with repeated shooting and even its changing temperature from shot to shot, all effect the accuracy of our departing shell.
Each new shell is never been machined as true to its designed shape as one would like - just as the bags of propellant each display a random slightly difference in the amount of force they provide.
Many of these factors, but not all, can be accounted on the naval battleship range and after a number of shots, gunnery officers do hit a target and retire to the wardroom.
But even the most lifelike gunnery range practise, far more real-world than the university lab, does not prepare the gunnery crews for a real-world battle.
In a real battle, it is far more likely that three battleships and heavy cruisers on each side are all trying to hit each other at the same time : what fans of Newton like to call "many-bodied problems" , the kind they'd rather not talk about in the physics classroom.
Yet battleship gunnery crews in WWII were the best trained, best equipped, most scientifically up to date gunners of all the war effort : none of the six nations that had modern battleships spared any expense or scientific effort to make their gunners topnotch.
But equally, all the odds against the various gunners hitting their targets had been equally up-gunned.
Faster and more agile opposing ships, heavier armour, longer and bigger guns, extreme firing ranges, night fighting, heavy weather fighting, submarines and dive bombers coming at them as well as big shells : it just never stopped.
Most of the (hugely expensive, manned by thousands of highly trained men) aptly named "capital" ships that were sunk in WWII, did not fall before the big guns, but rather to much smaller,cheaper, simpler weapons : sea mines, torpedoes, dive bombers, kamikazes.
Ballastics and science hardly entered into most of those losses : instead very brave men got within pointblank range and then eyeballed their way to success.
Engineers can understand that 'can-do' attitude perfectly well....
It should be understood at the onset that Science's task is strictly pedagogical and that it doesn't have to provide answers that are true, in any realistic sense, merely ones that are correct.
In other words, an excellent science experiment also is an excellent exam question.
I am speaking here of course only of the physical sciences, those sciences that form a subset of human psychology.
Their main function in life is to boost the students' self esteem and make them willing and - God Bless 'Em ! - even eager to take on the world outside the High School or University as a non-physical science grad.
These science experiments are meant to give non-scientists and non-engineers, and probably a lot of engineers and scientists as well , the confidence-building illusion that the world outside the lab is as controlled and predictable as it is inside the university's "sheltered workshop".
As I have said before, philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright's key insight (aka the "Cartwright machine") is that the crucial component that Science, along with its machines, experiments and laboratories, requires to be a successful human activity is a metaphorical ROOF , to shelter those activities from messy Reality's wind, rain and dust.
And Frederick Christiansen argues that successful engineering often means adding yet more roofs to the designs-with-roofs coming out of the science labs, to make them robust enough to endure daily Reality.
So, for example, Newtonian ballistic equation solving (classical science at its purest) can take on a very different cast in actual battles of war.
Now our young university physics graduate is behind a gunnery rangefinder, high up on a heaving battleship in the dark of night, himself just barely awake.
His battleship is making a desperate turn, in high wind and waves, and at top speed, to dodge a possible incoming torpedo.
Meanwhile our young officer is trying his absolute best to get his 12 inch gun turret to score at least on hit on an heavily armoured (and armed) enemy battleship.
The enemy is also is bobbing up and down and turning left and right at high speed in equally heavy seas a dozen or so miles away in the dark.
The enemy ship is trying just as hard to land one or two shots on the superstructure of his own battleship - which if it happens, will likely kill him and render moot any success at getting his battleship's guns to hit the enemy.
This, despite the fact that both his battleship's hull and its gun turrets, both heavily armoured, remain totally undamaged.
He has been taught to use Newtonian ballastics to hit and destroy 60,000 ton ships, only to discover that what he is really aiming for with his massive one ton armouring piercing shell is the 150 fragile pounds of his counterpart gunnery officer.
Neither officer will ever hit what they were aiming for, but both are likely to end up dead --- when their ships make the wrong turn and run into an enemy shell equally off target.
Ballastics has descended in to a good old fashioned low tech infantry fire fight: fire as many shots as quickly as you can in the general direction of the enemy and hope some by mischance actually hit him.
Forget even that it is nighttime and in heavy seas, with two ships very far apart, moving at top speed in irregular weaving patterns while bobbing up and down in the water irregularly.
And that the eye on the rangefinder is hindered by all the bright flashes and dense smoke of real battles.
Or that in the minute or two it takes to set range and elevation, the gun to be fired and for the shell to travels to its target, the other ship will have irregularly altered what ever semi-predictable course,speed and elevation it was following at the time of 'set'.
Think about the intermittent winds across the path of that dozen or so miles - winds with different temperatures and density of air - all which affect how a shell deviates from its Newtonian path.
The gun barrel, its wearing-out with repeated shooting and even its changing temperature from shot to shot, all effect the accuracy of our departing shell.
Each new shell is never been machined as true to its designed shape as one would like - just as the bags of propellant each display a random slightly difference in the amount of force they provide.
Many of these factors, but not all, can be accounted on the naval battleship range and after a number of shots, gunnery officers do hit a target and retire to the wardroom.
But even the most lifelike gunnery range practise, far more real-world than the university lab, does not prepare the gunnery crews for a real-world battle.
In a real battle, it is far more likely that three battleships and heavy cruisers on each side are all trying to hit each other at the same time : what fans of Newton like to call "many-bodied problems" , the kind they'd rather not talk about in the physics classroom.
Yet battleship gunnery crews in WWII were the best trained, best equipped, most scientifically up to date gunners of all the war effort : none of the six nations that had modern battleships spared any expense or scientific effort to make their gunners topnotch.
But equally, all the odds against the various gunners hitting their targets had been equally up-gunned.
Faster and more agile opposing ships, heavier armour, longer and bigger guns, extreme firing ranges, night fighting, heavy weather fighting, submarines and dive bombers coming at them as well as big shells : it just never stopped.
Most of the (hugely expensive, manned by thousands of highly trained men) aptly named "capital" ships that were sunk in WWII, did not fall before the big guns, but rather to much smaller,cheaper, simpler weapons : sea mines, torpedoes, dive bombers, kamikazes.
Ballastics and science hardly entered into most of those losses : instead very brave men got within pointblank range and then eyeballed their way to success.
Engineers can understand that 'can-do' attitude perfectly well....
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Ironic convergent property of Modernity : collectivist thrust from reductionism !
Politically, Modernity (1873-1973 RIP) , had a strong collectivist thrust, exalting the collective nation, race and planet over the individual being.
At the same time, and in a typical reductionist fashion that at least had the virtue of consistency, this collectivist superstructure was fully explained as simply the consequence of many trillions of highly individual actions at the basement fundamental level of Reality.
The harder modernity scientists tried to deny the existence of convergent behavior , the more it poked its ironic little head up, even in their reductionist of moments.......
At the same time, and in a typical reductionist fashion that at least had the virtue of consistency, this collectivist superstructure was fully explained as simply the consequence of many trillions of highly individual actions at the basement fundamental level of Reality.
The harder modernity scientists tried to deny the existence of convergent behavior , the more it poked its ironic little head up, even in their reductionist of moments.......
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Wartime Penicillin's coke-addled Janus Month : March 1943
In March 1943 (midway through the war) , for the very first time in WWII, a part of wartime penicillin research that had been hitherto public was finally and effectively put under official government censorship : anything involving the chemistry of penicillin.
At the very same time, other (hitherto effectively secret) parts of the penicillin story were about to become globally publicized in official government propaganda !
"I am not making this up", as Canada's Liberal Party is wont to say.
The chemical nature of penicillin was about to become Top Secret and there was to be no more public articles by Howard Florey's or Henry Dawson's team, in journals like NATURE and SCIENCE, all about the chemical structure of penicillin to aid German or Japanese chemists on how to synthesize penicillin themselves.
But given the wide availability of all the previous chemistry structure-oriented articles in these two, the biggest of all general science journals in the world, the Axis might not need much further help.
Because back issues of these two journals were still easily available to the scientific diplomatic attaches of the many still-neutral nations in capital cities like London, Ottawa and Washington, the Axis chemists may not have needed to employ spies, to seek out the newest secret research .
But the Top Secret classification reflected a new found confidence at Merck, Oxford and the ORSD that the penicillin molecule had finally been cracked and the chemistry of the molecule was a commercial and possibly military secret well worth keeping.
Even Robert Coghill, the penicillin czar at the fermenatation-oriented NRRL labs, was about to turn his coat to the side of synthesis.
What better time then to hand the hated finicky biological approach to penicillin production to the War Production Board, (the WPB) ?
Who cared if the WPB and the normally-secretive US Army seemed determined to widely publicize , to Allied, Axis and neutral nation alike, just how good this new fangled penicillin really was for military medicine ?
Yes.
Because for the first time in the war, parts of penicillin other that its chemistry (such as its clinical miracle cures which had been hitherto in America effectively if unofficially censored) were going to become the focus of official government propaganda and broadcast to the heavens.
In an variant on "the first shall be last and the last first", what had been public was about to become secret and what had been secret was about to become public.
In January 1943, Karl Meyer, the chemist of Dawson's team, could still publish the team's latest best guess on the chemical formula for penicillin, but the team still couldn't discuss their results on treating patients since October 1940.
By January 1944, Dawson could publish his success with patients and penicillin to the world via JAMA, but later that same year, Meyer's harmless paper on biological products of penicillin written to be delivered at a conference, was forced to be withdrawn at the last minute, for fear he'd say something chemical and hence secret.
Bizarre but true ...... !
At the very same time, other (hitherto effectively secret) parts of the penicillin story were about to become globally publicized in official government propaganda !
"I am not making this up", as Canada's Liberal Party is wont to say.
The chemical nature of penicillin was about to become Top Secret and there was to be no more public articles by Howard Florey's or Henry Dawson's team, in journals like NATURE and SCIENCE, all about the chemical structure of penicillin to aid German or Japanese chemists on how to synthesize penicillin themselves.
But given the wide availability of all the previous chemistry structure-oriented articles in these two, the biggest of all general science journals in the world, the Axis might not need much further help.
Because back issues of these two journals were still easily available to the scientific diplomatic attaches of the many still-neutral nations in capital cities like London, Ottawa and Washington, the Axis chemists may not have needed to employ spies, to seek out the newest secret research .
But the Top Secret classification reflected a new found confidence at Merck, Oxford and the ORSD that the penicillin molecule had finally been cracked and the chemistry of the molecule was a commercial and possibly military secret well worth keeping.
Even Robert Coghill, the penicillin czar at the fermenatation-oriented NRRL labs, was about to turn his coat to the side of synthesis.
What better time then to hand the hated finicky biological approach to penicillin production to the War Production Board, (the WPB) ?
Who cared if the WPB and the normally-secretive US Army seemed determined to widely publicize , to Allied, Axis and neutral nation alike, just how good this new fangled penicillin really was for military medicine ?
Yes.
Because for the first time in the war, parts of penicillin other that its chemistry (such as its clinical miracle cures which had been hitherto in America effectively if unofficially censored) were going to become the focus of official government propaganda and broadcast to the heavens.
Janus month indeed.
In an variant on "the first shall be last and the last first", what had been public was about to become secret and what had been secret was about to become public.
In January 1943, Karl Meyer, the chemist of Dawson's team, could still publish the team's latest best guess on the chemical formula for penicillin, but the team still couldn't discuss their results on treating patients since October 1940.
By January 1944, Dawson could publish his success with patients and penicillin to the world via JAMA, but later that same year, Meyer's harmless paper on biological products of penicillin written to be delivered at a conference, was forced to be withdrawn at the last minute, for fear he'd say something chemical and hence secret.
Bizarre but true ...... !
Saturday, April 7, 2012
Contra Chris Mooney , SCIENCE & REPUBLICANS once exchanged bodily fluids quite happily ...
 |
| Michael Marshall |
Yep.
Science - conservative Modernist/Progressive Science - was very popular with the not-yet-angry-wealthy-white-guys back then.
For it had demonstrated, from the example of Nature, that it was natural and inevitable for the big and the powerful to vanquish the small and the weak - and those red letter passages in the New Testament be damned.
(I mean had this Jesus guy ever even so much as run a single lab experiment ??)
Conservatism is the business of relishing certitudes in an uncertain world and Science, Modernist Science, sure delivered some beauts.
But after 1945, Auschwitz and Hiroshima, scientists - the younger ones particularly - started having their doubts and by the late 1970s they were coming on to replace the dying and retiring modernists in science's positions of power.
The certitudes of modernist science had actually been proven wrong almost as soon as they were publicly uttered but these failings were downplayed and buried--- until the post war post modern generation found the courage to speak up.
As scientists showed the world to be even more uncertain than any lay person imagined possible, the conservative personality left the ship of science in droves.
What college town today votes Republican? - the idea seems absurd.
In which case, Chris Mooney is right and I am wrong.
But look it up - they did once.
In spades....
The Science of CERTITUDES to the Science of UNCERTAINTY : no wonder conservatives dislike the new science...
|
| Michael Marshall |
(To be clear - this means, for example, that Russian conservative personalities yearn for the good old days of Stalin and fear greatly
the fact that tiny Estonia isn't under Russia's firm thumbs.)
Modernist Science was full of certitudes - all lies of course, the sort of self-flattering lies we humans delude ourselves with.
As those lies were exposed - by further scientific activity - scientists gradually abandoned modernist science and became more commensal and green --- and more and more willing to accept that humanity's knowledge had its limits and human uncertainty would always exist about life and reality.
Conservative personalities naturally found this hard to take and abandoned post-modern science and this age of commensality and sought out the old science of certainty in whatever elderly nooks it could be still found in.
Conservative personalities haven't changed - never can and never will - that is what makes them conservative.
But scientists have ....
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