My current blog is "Upending Progress"

There are 1500 older posts on this blog ("Janus Manhattan's Children") detailing my earlier research discoveries in the dramatic story of WWII's Social Penicillin, aka "Penicillin-for-All".

I am not discounting any of them - they all reflect useful stops along a ten year journey for a researcher and author.

But my current blog on Social Penicillin is now "Upending Progress" .

That is merely because I feel that this new title better sums up my current thinking on the continuing postwar importance of Martin Henry Dawson's efforts.

Yes, he did give up his life during WWII in his efforts to see non-patented inexpensive natural Penicillin made in quantity and made available to all, regardless of the lack of charity that total war produces on all sides.

But in doing so, he perhaps inadvertently helped deal the global hubris of the Age of Progress a truly mortal blow ...

So please feel free to join the discussion about Social Penicillin over at Upending Progress .

The UNWANTED plentitude of gas warfare

To many of us who see 'death as death', it has always been un-obvious why coughing to death from WWI gas clouds was so much different than being hit in the guts out in No Man's Land and coughing your life away for a half an hour while your comrades are helpless to intervene.

A similar phobia existed against openly conducting warfare with radiation clouds or clouds of fire or germs.

History's first ever antibiotics injections were expected to be of pure synthetic penicillin

Back at the start of the 1940s, two highly skilled biochemists (Karl Meyer and Ernst Chain) both confidently expected to quickly synthesize artificial penicillin, as they knew natural penicillin was a relatively small biological molecule of only about 350 Daltons.

After 100 weeks of hearing this reoccurring promise of quick results from Chain, his imperious boss, Howard Florey, reluctantly decided to inject his first human patients in February 12th 1941 with still-impure natural penicillin.

Henry Dawson, normally the most diffident of men, changed his mind about waiting till  co-worker Meyer's synthetic penicillin arrived in January 1941, and after only five weeks into their joint penicillin efforts and without so much as a backward glance, injected his first patients with impure natural penicillin on October 16th 1940.

WWII's clash of arms ended in 1945 but clash of its ideals continues

In September 1939, Britain (and France) did reluctantly go to war against Germany when it invaded Poland --- but hardly to protect this smaller, weaker nation from being being swallowed up by a bigger neighbour.

They basically sat on their hands while Germany, Slovakia and Russia invaded it and then divided it up.

Right to the end of the war and beyond, Britain (and now America) secretly horse-traded away the freedom of small nations; yes including the soon to be liberated Poland.

E M Forster on Merck's mis-use of scientific writing

E M Forster is a name you pretty well have to come across  if you have ever been formally taught how to write better sentences, paragraphs and articles ---- and today that includes virtually all of us with a high school education or better.

Even senior scientists and academics. When those two deliberately ignore what they've been taught for decades, you should always expect foul play is afoot.

In an era that worshipped the Big, the Fast and the New, he championed the small, the slow and the old - and changed our whole world not just once but twice

The small and the slow and the old

A Canadian newspaper recently touted some Canadian based scientists as saying that the new techniques allowing the mass sequencing of genomes in test tubes, from DNA gathered up from all over the world, is letting science reveal hidden secrets from the distant past.

Hurray for Man !

Not mentioned is the fact that it is actually bacteria and their enzymes that do all the heavy lifting or that it was a Canadian (Martin Henry Dawson) who first put bacteria and DNA to work in a test tube eighty five long, dusty years ago.

the WHY of eugenics : enough with the 'what' already

Scientific discoveries can happen anytime anywhere and be announced  (be made public) anytime anywhere.

But scientific discoveries are only in turn "discovered" by the most powerful scientific, political, economic, media elites (ie made popular) when it suits the spirit of their particular place and time.

Plenticidal Revulsion (reductionism, reactionism) must always be simple - "terribly simple" - because Reality never is

The reaction thrown up by Plenticidal Revulsion (Lovecraftian Revulsion being the best known literary representation) must always and only seeks to see in its place a single, simple, pure vertical hierarchy and hegemony.

'Progress' is always simple looking at the top, complicated at the bottom

When you are a 'big person', residing at the top of the human food chain, totally engaged in the concept of an ever upward Progress, you tend never to look down at the complexity of Life below your feet.

Revulsion + Reductionism = Plenticide

Plenticide (eugenics, genocide, pesticides) : human civilization of the Modern era seems determined to get rid of all of its nearest and dearest , leaving just a tiny 'saving seed' of the most perfect and the purest of humanity to exist all alone in this vast lifeless Universe.

It just didn't make sense : for the more evidence that emerged that the universe was old, vast and empty the harder humanity, circa 1930, tried to eliminate most of what little life was confirmed to exist in the universe : that of Earth itself.

Fred & Henry Dawson spanned Modernity's biggest to the smallest

After 1930, Frederick James (Fred J) Dawson was the eldest (in the talk of children : "the biggest") of the surviving Dawson children and and Martin Henry (Henry) Dawson the youngest ("the smallest").

Appropriate then that engineer and heavy construction magnate Fred built some of the biggest things on Earth that had ever been made by living beings.

In the very demanding geography of rugged British Columbia he successfully built gigantic bridges, long highways and tunnels, military airports, large hospitals and deep water piers --- even helped build entire frontier towns like Kitimat.

In the 'bigger, faster, higher is always better' culture of Modernity, he clearly was one of the heroes of the most complex and advanced forms of civilized progress.

And appropriate too that Henry was a microbiologist, a scientist who specialized in studying lifeforms far too small to see with the naked eye.

Invisibly small and helplessly immobile sacks of liquid, ancient beyond time, Henry's microbes seemed almost too simple and too weak to even foot the bottom left hand corner of "The Arrow of Progress" that brother Fred's construction feats topped in the upper right hand corner.

But little brother Henry saw them as capable of creating incredibly complex structures, far more complex than any others had imagined possible.

Even more complex, in some ways, than the very big but comparatively straight forward structures that his big brother built.

And while brother Fred constructed enormous institutions to house the chronically ill (such as Vancouver's East Lawn Riverview) Henry beavered away inside similar chronic hospitals , trying to help the weakest and smallest in society because he felt his society was too quick to write them off.

Perhaps, like me, you are beginning to see a suggestive pattern in all this...

LIFE is rarest thing in Universe, not some obscure precious metal

So why was Thirties humanity so eager to destroy 99.99% of it, in an act of collective plenticide that would have dwarfed the Nazi genocide of Jews and Romas ?

Age of Antibiotics' Patients Zero : Aaron Alston of St Nicholas Ave, Harlem and Charles Aronson of Vyse Ave, the Bronx

Thanks to the hard work of two relatives of these penicillin pioneers (Claude Jay for Aaron and Lisa Liel for Charles), these forgotten individuals can emerge from the shadows almost fully formed.

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.

Modernity as the outward expression of the conservative brain

Partly due to genetics and partly due to their parents child rearing style and partly due to external circumstances, some children grow up to be a little or a great deal fearful of the outer world and other people -- that is, they grow up to be conservative.

Anyone who grew up in a family of several children born in close sequence knows that while these kids share a common/parental rearing style and a common set of external circumstances, the kids all rate as quite different on the conservative fearful/liberal trusting scale.

the mix of genes that conception genetics endows you and gestation genetic expression that the external environment gives each growing feutus makes each of us unique not a clone of good old dad or of our big brothers and sisters.

The plentitude of new plentitudes of new objects, ideas and experiences that modernization threw up made made people more than normally fearful - made the counter reaction, Modernity, more than normally strong .

And conservative ....

"A Small Triumph" --- wartime's natural penicillin-for-all a triumph FOR the small, BY the small

During the Error-of-Modernity (circa about 1875-1965), most educated humans sincerely believed that "Evolutionary Progress" had only one possible pole of measurement : basically, it boiled down to the number of peer-reviewed scientific articles published annually.

Naturally that meant that the oldest, smallest and least apparently complicated beings, like the microbes, were at the very bottom left of this "45 degrees to the right" Pole of Progress.

It was the era of 'Might is Right', 'Biggest is Best' and 'God and Evolution is on the side of the Biggest Battalions'.

And so at the top right were the newest, biggest and most complex human civilizations like those of the Germans, British, Americans, Russians, French and Japanese.

As a Law Of Nature and as a Fact Of Biology, this was a doozy.

Why conservatives hate slime-made antibiotics

People whose personalities are fearful, distrusting and easily disgusted (and who thus tend to think, act and vote conservatively), held up the development of naturally-made penicillin for fifteen - wasted - years between 1928 and 1943.

Chief among them : Sir Alexander Fleming and Sir Howard Florey, both who thought the stuff was best left on the shelf, until it was 100% man-made artificial.

Pushing & Pulling Modernity's Terrible Simplifiers

In the 1880s, the competing successes of both branches of science --- the real world oriented applied and natural history folks and the lab-bound experimental theory-oriented natural philosophy folks - gave Modernity a doubly fierce intensity of purpose.

Fear complemented Hubris inside their minds.

Non-Aryans under Modernity : from ally to enemy to input

One can't imagine youthful (second generation) Nazi scientists being content with merely removing the hair, teeth and skin from all the world's 'unfit', before burning their bodies for fuel, in the manner it was done way back in papa's day.

Instead these 'impure' bodies would be burned in high tech, high temperature atomic refineries.

DNA, Penicillin & Phenology : what great works A H MacKay hath wroth

Pioneering DNA and Penicillin scientist Dr Martin Henry Dawson (1896-1945) was undoubtably Nova Scotia Superintendent of Education A H Mackay's most illustrious student.

Dawson's pioneering investigating of the hidden complexities of microbial life (HGT, quorum sensing, molecular mimicry, biofilms, natural penicillin) flew in the face of all the 'modern' wisdom of the scientists and educated public of his day.

But in the end, it paved the way for our current post modern ways of wisdom.