From acorns, oaks ...

I can't speak confidently about the impact upon the adult population of the 1950s of the startling news that all the world's best lifesaving medicines were being made by tiny, weak, slimy beings.

The tiny and the despised besting the smartest chemists in the universe

Synthesize anything, perfectly

The goal of modern scientism era synthesists was not to synthesize everything : in their minds 'everything' already existed : way too much of 'everything' ---- and none of it perfect.

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 !

1945's Natural Penicillin - and 1945's synthetic Nuclear Weapons - birthed 1960s Environmental Movement

No one who studies the matter doubts that mid-1950s fears about global fallout was the spur to today's environmental movements (and related human rights movements) that question the value of unbridled white European technology and science.

But you will have to be very,very old indeed to accept that 1945's unexpected triumph of natural penicillin from tiny primitive basement slime over the best chemical minds and laboratories in the world hit as hard a death blow to western scientism and hubris as the fallout from 1956's Castle Bravo nuclear test ever did.

Replacing Mother Nature : Synthetic Autarky and other male fantasies

Making clone babies in test tubes without any woman being involved is not a lot different than making silk in a test tube without Mother Nature being involved.

Investigate a tiny little bit and you soon see that Males/Men/Guys are almost always the push behind these schemes and one always wonders if their overt reasons for pursuing these aims are the actual and full truth.

For even those men most opposed to feminism never speak of Father Nature or Father Earth -- their unconscious speech betrays that they still see the fecund plentitude of the Earth's natural world being somewhat more female than male in orientation.

Florey quickly flees the biology of NRRL Peoria for the chemical comforts of Merck

Howard Florey probably spent no more than a few hours of his whole life in the labs of the NRRL at Peoria, Illinois where most of the fruitful work that gave us the antibiotics revolution was actually done.

Within hours, he had dumped his sidekick Norman Heatley there to toil on the rural farmer-like task of growing penicillin, because Florey preferred much more the urban chemistry-oriented approach of firms like Merck and Squibb and ICL.

Florey was no country hick and disdained 'farming' penicillin

Florey after all had wanted to be part of the then most glamorous part of science( chemistry) and only took up medicine as the easiest way for an Australian to get employment in scientific research (as a medical "doctor" , he hated dealing with patients and in fact, hated dealing with people in general.)

He remained a chemist-manque all his life.

Hence why he avoided doing any hands-on research at NRRL Peoria on increasing the biological yield of penicillin .

He much preferred the chemical synthesis approach of Merck and of its chief scientific consultant, A N Richards, new head of the war  medicine section of the war weapon research organization, the OSRD....