If selfless AGAPE has any real meaning , why aren't all religious publications also available via OPEN ACCESS ?

Money never grow on trees , even in Jesus's day, so printed on paper religious periodical and books will always cost much to manufacture and to ship about and it is only fair that their readers bear some of those costs.

But why not routinely make available the digital versions of the religious serials free as OPEN ACCESS journals and why not make the online versions of print books available as free downloadable e-books ?

Instead many successful religious authors can gain a good deal of personal wealth from their writing and speaking - as do their publishers and speakers' bureaus.

The books might talk much of selfless AGAPE and of charity but their authors fail to walk their own talk.

Religion , far from being too remote and too above the world is , in fact , too much in the world.

Religion is too much in the private sector, too much in the part of the world consumed only with making money - more and more and more money being seen as better and ever better still.

If you've checked out your nation's public sector lately, you will find that public servants also fully expect to have bosses' salaries and benefits.

The values of the private money-making-in-the-temple world has also invaded the public sector and charity/non-profit sectors.

No longer are hospitals run by charitable religious orders - even those 'non-profits' called charities have executive directors pulling down big coin and as likely as not to move on in a few years for a better paying job as a bank VP.

No more is your local library led by a head librarian - they are now called the CEO of the Library and the traditional patrons have all been re-booted as consumers.

Religion publishing needs to look to the world of academic and scientific publishing - with a few caveats

Academics and scientists may not make bank CEO money but they are hardly poor.

Even in the non-tenured world, they do much better than minimum wage workers and  even there the work gives a much higher social status and is far less physically and emotionally demanding than cleaning offices and hotel rooms.

The bulk of academics receive generously adequate salaries, benefits, pensions and their research is almost entirely paid (at least in terms of money and material) by government grants and university aid-in-kind.

Why seek direct author's money for a project where the direct costs were paid for by the public taxpayer ?

 And where the indirect monetary benefits for the author will come away , like bread cast upon waters , in the form of things like an increased number of citations .

Eventually leading to increased academic credibility and thus gaining things like tenure and full professorships,  as well as quicker access to bigger research grants ?

So when the academic come to publish, many seek out OPEN ACCESS journals where the knowledge they have gained is truly added to the global pool of knowledge and not just limited to rich institutions in rich nations.

Religious serials should follow suit.

But scholarly publishing and university presses haven't become so altruistic yet.

One can see why.

The learned societies and university presses are too busy struggling with ever more limited funds to try and produce ever more hardcover books that then sell ever less copies (maybe 300 copies worldwide if they are lucky) .

Just so their harried authors can finally pass muster before tenure committees.

Tenure committees are hardly in the business of increasing academic cum intellectual competition and so (in 2014 !) still demand costly hardcover books for tenure consideration.

They disdain the scholarly book world's equivalent of scholarly OPEN ACCESS journals.

That would see university presses routinely offering the worldwide digital distribution of free ebook versions of those hardcover monographs, so that poor scholars in poor nations can gain equal access to the independent knowledge expensively added by PhD candidates.

Perhaps if a few more - and bigger - university presses took this idea up , it might just embarrass religious bodies and authors to do the same.

I can dream , can't I ...

Martin Henry Dawson (1896-1945) : died much too young , so billions won't

When ten billion of us - so far - have lived longer and healthier lives because of Dr Dawson's agape sacrifice, it would seem that some stone monument to mark his brief time on Earth is neither fully adequate -- or required.

Martin Henry Dawson : The Agape Naturalist

In WWI , Philip Bent VC and Henry Dawson MC displayed great physical courage under enemy fire when they put themselves in lethal danger to rally their men to close a dangerous break in the Allied lines.

This was 'agape' valour in that they did not risk their lives simply for the men in their battalion whom they knew well (kith and kin) but rather they selflessly risked their lives for the entire overall Allied cause.

In WWII , Dawson displayed agape physical courage and moral courage .

Agape physical courage in the sense of selflessly sacrificing his health (and hence his life) to help total strangers.

Agape moral courage in the sense that his opponents were no longer the Hun but rather his own subculture of Allied doctors and scientists who were strongly opposed to his 'wasting' his (agape) penicillin on young people judged to be useless militarily.

But what did Dawson do in the 1920s and 1930s, between these two wars ?

I argue he was an agape naturalist in those years .

Perhaps because he was educated during the years of Alexander MacKay's regime as Superintendent of Education for Nova Scotia , Dawson displayed a wide catholicism of interest in the microbe world compared to other medical scientists and doctors of his era.

They tended to see microbes only as as bad germs to be ruthlessly eliminated or harmless avirilulent germs to be totally ignored.

Superintendent MacKay had gotten all Nova Scotia's rural and small town school children to regularly catalogue the start and end of seasons as marked by the first bloomings or first arrivals etc  of the various flora and fauna.

MacKay wanted to show how the life cycle of all life was affected by variations in the non-living world - the timing of the various seasons affecting directly when the first mayflower of the season appeared for example.

Perhaps this unique 'phenological' effort mentally rubbed off on the young Dawson - leading him to see life on Earth as sharing in a basic global commensality together.

Because during the 1920s and 1930s , Dr Dawson didn't just selflessly help those chronically ill humans dismissed as basically useless and worthless by most other people. He also regarded them as worthy in and of themselves , as they were.

He showed the same evenhanded regard for all when it came to all the 'odd' , 'useless' , 'unworthy of study', 'avirulent' microbes he chose to study at great cost to his career.

For just as he valued the great plenitude of human types, so he felt the same about the great variety and plenitude of non -human life not matter how useless they appeared to be to the rest of humanity.

Simply put,  I am saying that plenticide and selfishness and narrow group-love are much the same, just as support of plenitude  and commensality and agape love are basically the same.

With the sixth mass extinction - happening now - we are practising plenticide on a huge scale - and once again only the agape love of the agape naturalist will halt this madness .....

Agape Love as "brave compassion"

It is unusually difficult to be compassionate when one is also under attack.

I mean not just when enemy bullets are winging your way but also when your entire society, including all your friends and family around you, is seemingly opposing your compassion.

Being brave and compassionate under fire , when your nation expects all soldiers to be so , certainly requires a lot of physical bravery (after all , most VC recipients died while earning it).

But it rarely requires any real moral courage.

By contrast , opposing your own society to display compassion doesn't always require physical bravery - but it certainly requires a great deal of moral courage.

Henry Dawson's wartime compassion meant both having the physical courage to accept that his actions would only hasten his death from Myasthenia Gravis and the moral courage to deal with hostility from his colleagues, employer and national government.

This is why I think it useful to contrast Dawson's WWII Agape valour with the Agape valour he and fellow Nova Scotian Philip Bent VC displayed in WWI...

Agape compassion is easy - but Agape valour is very very hard

Agape love is not just 'compassion' - it is selfless limitless compassion for others (including enemies) even onto death.

By definition it seems to be more about limitlessness (of selflessness onto death) than mere normal (limited) expressions of compassion and mere normal (limited) acts of compassion.

Demands that we display agape love thus becomes one of Christ's notorious 'hard' sayings.

Despite this, the term 'agape' is most commonly found coupled with bog ordinary 'compassion' and very, very rarely with concepts like 'valour' (courage and bravery under conditions of likely death).

Valour seems to have become too associated with the wounded soldier awarded a VC for picking up a gun and going off by himself under heavy fire to kill a group of enemy machine gunners.

Valour seems to confined to an extraordinary activity redolent of offensive , aggressive , violent warfare.

The only military valour most of us like to applaud is that of the man who leaps on a live grenade, dying to save the life of his comrades.

Or even better, someone who goes back time and time again into a burning plane to pull out his friends - only to die himself when the plane explodes.

Brave onto death while saving others.

But true Agape valour - in Christ's sense of the term - might actually only fully apply to that rare soldier who dies trying to pull enemy soldiers out of their burning vehicle.

But no nation ever gives out medals for that --- and more's the pity.....

WWII plenticide and agape penicillin were made for each other : chalk and cheese, matter and antimatter , oil and water

WWII saw an unusually high number of civilians and POWS die in a war supposedly fought between modern civilizations : why ?

Out of thousands of possible drug choices, penicillin , dramatically emerging late in WWII , remains our best loved and best known medicine : why ?

I think these two unusual events are in fact closely linked : (behavior on both sides in) WWII being the disease and Agape penicillin being the cure.

Agape penicillin's plenitude curing plenticide against life and of compassion....

Dawson's Follies...

... have improved the lives of ten billion of us , so far.

Dateline Manhattan : Something green and life-nurturing is brewing down the mean corridors of wartime science...

In the stereotyped description of  the biggest teaching hospitals of the mid twentieth century, there is always a strict hierarchy cum pecking order of prestige, power and authority.

At the top were the surgeons, particularly those who had combine high technical skill with the cool ability to save lives under very rushed emergency conditions ; brain surgeons operating on newly discovered operable brain tumours probably being at the top.

At the bottom were the staff in the hospital's day or outpatient clinics, dealing with chronic non-life-threatening conditions - aging-related (osteo) arthritis patients being the classic example.

Henry Dawson was the director of one such arthritis day clinic, at New York's world famous CUMC (Columbia University Medical Centre).

But this clinic work was not the reason why his bemused colleagues referred to his 'Follies' , far from it.

His was a pioneering clinic and he was a nationally and even internationally respected expert in arthritis, well regarded for his common sense caution over the possibility of  quick cures.

Not much for a prior hypothesises, he preferred the naturalist's method of gathering all sorts of data from hundreds of cases, to see if any common 'tendencies' emerged.

No, it was Dawson's private (non-day job, non-grant approved) scientific interests that bemused or angered his fellow medical scientists.

A traditional boon granted to the staff of hospital labs was the right to work on their own private research projects on equipment and in lab corners not in current use.

A boon usually available to the staffer in his off-work hours : evenings, weekends and holidays (hence the term EWH Research).

His day job bosses didn't directly oversee this research if the staffer had something like tenure and nor did senior members of the discipline ride shotgun on it by controlling the issuing of grant money, as is done today.

Nevertheless , the hope was that while this private research might be on the fringes of conventional science, its aim was ultimately to be useful.

And here Dawson seemed to have crossed some sort of line.

He was seen as being too interested in both avirulent commensal bacteria and in avirile 4F patients.

An applied scientist if there ever was any, a medical researcher was expected to be only concerned with virulent pathogens , ones that actually could kill or harm patients.

'Best leave the study of avirulent bacteria to the basic scientists in university biology departments'.

And so between the Spring of 1939 and the Winter of 1941 , the medical elite in America steadily moved staff and money away from the New Deal's emphasis on social medicine - helping to heal the avirile 4Fs in society - towards medical research directed towards helping 'our soon to be fighting boys' (the virile by definition 1As from the draft boards) .

This elite, being mostly Republicans sympathetic to popular eugenics and thus privately and publicly hostile to FDR's social medicine, they eagerly welcomed using the excuse of preparing for the upcoming war to shift emphasis away from this silly 'socialized medicine' stuff .

And they even had FDR's backing , as he publicly said he was no longer Doctor New Deal but now Doctor Win the War.

But Dawson's comeback was that using the excuse of 'war necessity' to throw the weak under the bus was exactly what Hitler did (in his notorious Aktion T4 program) and weren't we supposed to be opposed to his values ?

So his bosses grumbled and restrained but his not stop the work of this respected tenured polite member of their staff.

In the end he was forced to use the corridors of his hospital to house the five gallon bottles of agape penicillium he had brewed up.

But he still could extract enough under these conditions so hostile to the production of penicillin , to treat his pioneering series of  '4Fs of the 4Fs'.

These were young men with subacute bacterial endocarditis (the invariably fatal SBE that tended to befall the survivors of the then endemic Rheumatic Fever) that wartime medicine had directed should be 'code slowed' into an early grave.

Himself dying from an autoimmune disease, Dawson kept at it, in the face of the overt hostility of his colleagues.

Eventually, ordinary GPs, patients' families and ordinary journalists all "ACTED UP" on behalf of his project to see  that wartime penicilin  was made available to all those dying who could benefit from it.

Dawson died as the European part of the war was ending but not before knowing his tiny EWH project had changed world history.

Ten billion of us, to date, can only agree ....

It's Milton's AGAPE not the Greek AGAPE...

I have been going backwards and forwards in my mind - and in my heart - about the exact spelling (and pronunciation)  of my book title.
Agape with a macron (a long flat line as a accent) over the "e" at the end of the word signals the Greek word and meaning : pronounced a-GAP-eh, all slurred together.

 A word, used mostly by Christians, to mean an openness to others' needs.

Agape, without the macron, is a word invented by the famous Christian poet John Milton, from the word "gape" : to stare, open- mouthed.

A + gape gave us "agape", to be in the state of open-mouth-ness, in wonder,awe and eagerness.

Pronounced :  (soft a)  A   gape , with a small separation between A and gape.

As I have said in previous blogs, Dr Francis Peabody said that  a-GAP-eh ,to be truly effective in helping someone in need , requires our mind as well as our heart.

We must care about an individual, in all their unique individuality, if we are to be effective in caring for that individual's needs.

Dr Henry Dawson had spent a dozen years, from 1927 to 1939,  listening - really listening - to the strivings of Life's smallest and weakest beings, the microbes.

 So he was in an excellent position, starting in September 1940, to effectively care for some of the wartime world's smallest and weakest human beings.

 They were "the 4Fs of the 4Fs" , the many young SBE patients dying needlessly of wartime benign neglect, by direct orders from the top of the Allied medical-scientific establishment.

His heart was open (agape) to the needs of the SBEs, but so were the hearts of many other doctors before him.

But unlike them, his mind was also open (agape) to the solution : medicine made by foul-smelling microbe feces , aka natural penicillin.

So Milton's Agape fits Dawson's efforts more completely than does the Greek Agape' from the New Testament, which also fits, but only partially so.

Similarly, my book's sub-title could refer the Gospel message (Good News).

Or it could merely repeat a cliche from contemporary news-reporting : with newscasters always trying to finish off the mostly grim news of the broadcast by ending with a "brite" or a "Good News Story" : a lighter toned, uplifting story.

One immediately thinks of the Anne Murray song, "A Little Good News", written by Rocco, Black and Bourke.

Its arresting opening referenced "Bryan Gumbel talkin' about the fightin' in Lebanon" --- a totally unexpected something cum hook  I am sure immediately caught the ear of every songwriter on the planet.

My book's title and sub-title doesn't preclude someone thinking of them as terms from the New Testament of two thousand years ago ,  but I wish to say that for me at least,  it is a variant of that old eternal message, but dressed in current post-modern garb....

Francis W Peabody : agape starts in the mind and moves to the heart

In the mid-1920s a busy dean of medicine, among many other things, briefly addressed a student body.

And then a year or two later he died, the early victim of fatal sarcoma.

Normally a dean of medicine from 80 years ago is remembered, if at all, only as one name among many underneath the long lines of dusty portraits in the hallway leading up to the office of the current med school dean.

But in fact Francis W Peabody lives on, bigger than he ever was in real life, because of a very short phrase he spoke to that student assembly, just one of the many things he did in the course of a short but very busy, productive life.

Fame into Posterity, indeed, is ever a case of quality over quantity.

In his talk, Peabody suggested a re-boot of the traditional common sense definition of charity and agape altruism : it was not enough to be 'open' to the needs of someone in pain or trouble --- to be agape with your heart.

It isn't even likely to be medically effective.

One , first, needs to be agape with your mind  : to be open to others' activities, to them as individuals, individuals with an inherent dignity , even when not needy.

"Caring for an individual really begins when we first care about them as individuals," said Peabody.

He emphasized that the main satisfaction in the medicine life is through the forming of brief but intimate bounds with patients and their families, even if the medical staffer fails to obtain a medical cure.

Dawson and Peabody, not Dawson and Cole ?

Now it is well known that Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson was a 1926-1927 NRC Fellow at the Rockefeller Hospital in New York, becoming the first to ever work with DNA in a test tube, before moving on to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and his equally pioneering work with Penicillin.

But his arrival at Rockefeller was not his only choice - dare I suggest, perhaps not his first choice as a NRC fellow ?

The journal SCIENCE records in May 21 1926, that Dawson could take his fellowship at Rockefeller under Dr Rufus Cole or at Boston's Thorndyke Lab under Dr Francis W Peabody.

But, alas, Peabody already had terminal sarcoma and so was too ill to take on new fellows - he died later in 1927.

It seems like a tragically missed opportunity, because I see very little of Cole in Dawson's character while he and Peabody could have been soul brothers.

In October 1940, for the first time in his medical career, Dawson's heart was fully open (agape) to helping save the lives of the many young people facing certain death from the dreaded SBE, subacute bacterial endocarditis.

(SBE was in a section of medicine about as far from his medical day job as a disease could be, so he won't have normally had an opportunity to exercise whatever agape his heart might have felt for the SBE patients.)

And his was hardly the only heart open to helping the SBEs, the "4Fs of the 4Fs".

(Admittedly , when he did get involved, he went much further than anyone else to save them in wartime when the Allied governments had collectively ordered that they to be abandoned to a certain death.)

But Dawson's mind was also agape, that rare scientist in 1940 who was truly open to taking in all that that life's small and the weak were capable of, whether in need or not.

So as a result, he was intellectually ready to understood what the other doctors and the rest of humanity circa 1940 could not, that a lowly fungi mold (among the "4Fs" of non-human life) could indeed be capable of saving the SBE and many others as well, when the best of human chemists had repeatedly failed.

His intellectual agape made his emotional agape medically effective.

Dawson's intellectual courage in seeing natural penicillin could cure the SBEs and then having the emotional courage to continue to apply that cure, against stiff wartime Allied government opposition, is the best example we have of Francis Peabody's dictate in action...

a GOOD NEWS story from what bad news war ?

Many people noting the unusual capitalization of the title of this blog post might begin to figure what it is all about. But even most of them will still be left wondering, "What bad news war , aren't all wars nothing but bad news ?"

Regular readers of my blogs, of course, will be in no doubt that I am referring to but one war in particular : The Good War, that war fought by The Greatest Generation Ever, aka WWII.

Rarely has any war been less worthy of being called Good and moral, rarely has one generation of wartime parents and grandparents (the attitude of the young soldiers is still an open verdict) being less accurately called Great.

For almost 15 years, dozens of small nations were beat up in the schoolyard by bigger - bully - neighbours while the rest of the world stood around like Bystanders at a Holocaust , only going to war against the bullies when they themselves were directly attacked.

A "Coalition of the very un-willing" indeed .

Princes of the churches, Statesmen and the collectives peoples of the gathered nations all fell down on the job : only a few individuals, here and there and plucked from obscurity God only knows why, actually did the sort of quiet heroics that the canonical myth said we all did back then.

And Henry Dawson's heroic story is surely one of those that richly deserves to be told, for the very first time, and in all its details...

Group love and Group think --- formula for a disaster : or WWII

It is well accepted that an excessive group love, for the so called Aryan Race, led Germany on endless wars of conquest and that excessive groupthink by Hitler's inner circle defeated an hope of permanent success in those conquests.

I want to suggest that group-love and group-think are intimately related and equally doomed and that by contrast, an expansive openness to others, all others - as individuals and as collectivity, in need or not in need - is the best way for humanity to survive in a dynamic uncertain world.

I plan to contrast the WWII career of little known doctor Henry Dawson, with his manhattan project to save SBE patients by de-weaponizing penicillin, with the mistakes made by those WWII excessive lovers of their own groups and their groupthink, in both the Axis and Allied camps ....

WWII : excessive group-love led to excessive groupthink

In my previous postings over the past few years, I have tried - separately - to indicate that the horrors of WWII were caused by excessive group-love and by excessive groupthink : I now realize both are bound intimately together.

The Age of Modernity (1870s to 1960s) was exemplified above all by a lack of charity and a lack of clarity.

By excessive group-love, I mean an inability to regard others others outside your nationality, ethnicity, race , class or religion as worthy of concern and compassion.

It is why most nations and most people choose to remain neutral in WWII, even as the greatest evil ever known gobbled up small nation after small nation, unless they themselves were directly attacked.

But the Allied willingness - even eagerness - to bomb and bombard a hundred thousand civilians to death in occupied Europe and Asia - people supposedly on the Allied side, does not just stem just from a group-love disregard for others.

It also stems from the Allies' prewar groupthink that touted strategic aerial bombing and naval blockading as the fastest, cheapest way to defeat Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini.

It hadn't worked in WWI - the evidence was already there if you were willing to look - and it prolonged rather than hastened the end to the misery of WWII.

But groupthink cherry-picks from a mass of conflicting evidence only that which fits their rhetorical-cum-scientific thesis.

WWII still holds powerful lessons for all of us - particularly for new emerging giants like Brazil and India where the powerful middle class still disdains their own poorer citizens as less than human.

Other people may appear simple-minded, small, weak, ill, dark, dirty, and poor but they are actually are as fully complex and interesting as we are.

In addition they hold useful gene combinations we don't have and would do well to preserve.

They definitely have different viewpoints we would do well to consider.

An unwillingness to open our hearts to other people goes hand in glove with an unwillingness to open our minds to other ideas.

Reality out there has always been and always will be highly dynamic and uncertain : a diversity of peoples and a diversity of ideas is the best way that humanity can survive life's challenges.

At least I think that is what Henry Dawson thought when he embarked upon his project to de-weaponize penicillin and other so called "war-medicines"....

Penicillin, from EROS to AGAPE : synthetic crystals to the natural mold

Anders Nygren,1890-1978, Swedish theologian and pharmacologist ?!

Why not ?

His seminal text of 1932, "Eros and Agape", does offer an unique way to compress the long wartime penicillin saga into something vividly digestible.

On one side, we have Professor Florey.

He basically ignores that:

 (a) there is a war on and people are dying daily from infected wounds from the Blitz
 (b) that natural impure penicillin had no toxic effects from its impurities and is available - now - to help those Blitz victims.

Despite this,Florey and his wartime coterie of Platonists and New Alchemists wasted their time and ours seeking after the chimera of a 100% pure --- all white---- crystalline penicillin for their Scientific monstrance, to hold aloft before the adoring Faithful.

Its just the sort of New Age nonsense we've come to expect from the hardheaded science departments of Oxford University.

And I really do think that its a 'guy thing' ,this growing of crystals.

Women prefer to grow living things: plants, pets and above all their own children.

But crystals are about the only non-living object that grows before your very eyes.

They don't lay you up for nine or more months,change your shape, never wake you at night, never have to have their diapers changed.

What is there not for men to like ?

And if your vision of BEAUTY sees it as a pure, austere, hard-edged sort of mechanical regularity, you will find it best displayed in crystals.

In Nygren's definition of human EROS love, EROS is found whenever humans seek to ascend to a 'god-like' status , by demonstrating their love for (and ability to grow) beautiful (literally beauty-filled) objects - in this case crystals.

They take in/ draw down some of that beauty
and by loving beauty,add some of its value to their own worthfulness.

But Nygren contrasts this to AGAPE love - a spontaneous, undignified, excessively operatic, self-denying,heart-on-our-sleeve love of the unloveable - with our enemies being the best possible objects of our agape out-flowing.

We don't draw down some of BEAUTY's perfection and purity to give us additional value and to help us ascend upwards.

Instead we give away love -and our life if necessary - down to the 'ugly' and the evil and they gain BEAUTY by our doing so.

We become "like God" by descending to the level of the ugly, flawed and evil and giving them all our love nevertheless -- just as Jesus did.

In 1940 ( as it is in 2010) people tended to see that gooey smelly mold ruining their basement walls and fixtures as something almost evil and definitely ugly and unloveable.

It took a special sort of person to see the worthfulness of the penicillium mold - that person being Doctor Dawson.

His co-worker Gladys Hobby writes of his tiny band of followers creating their own Monstrance of the furry, blue-green, smelly, mold with its clear urine-like drops of yellow penicillin, holding it aloft daily before the unlovable SBE patients, to give them courage and comfort in this world - and in the Next.

And because of Dawson's AGAPE love of this humble mold, millions of other beings - human beings - had their chance to live out their three score and ten.....

'AGAPE penicillin' project was ALL about smallness and simplicity

Manhattan's other Project was one of World War Two's smallest projects in what turned out to be History's biggest ever human effort; our biggest effort - if one of our least moral - by what ever measure is taken.

Smallest is rarely an indicator of importance, and never less so than when set against the world's largest ever war.

In addition, this small project happened seventy years ago, and great distance back in time tends to render small projects even less of importance to us.

Everything about World War Two was gigantic.

Armed military occupied the deeps of the middle of the oceans, the heights of the skies and the tops of mountain ranges. They were found in the high Arctic and the deep Antarctica - in fact for the first time ever war touched every continent on earth simultaneously.

Fighting occurred year around, night and day, in all kinds of weather, for six long years - fighting in the dry heat of desert sands,  in the cold of ice and snow, in the wet heat of dark jungles.

Geographic spread was matched by the number of people pulled in directly as soldiers, war workers, in occupied nations and as refugee peoples. 

Indirectly, almost everyone on Earth suffered restrictions on where they could travel or what they could buy and at what price.

Globally, about 100 million people either died during the war, or not long after the war, because of wartime conditions.

In terms of non-renewable resources consumed - literally - blown up, burnt up or sunk deep in the ocean, our share of the world's bounty took a hit we will never ever recover from.

We are still paying the debt of fighting the war and for repairing the structures and bodies affected.

The opportunities lost for what we might have achieved, as a human race ,without WWII, can never be known - only regretted.

Set against all these Big Battalions of facts and figures, why should historians, anymore than God, care about a truly tiny project ?

Well, I happen to believe, with all my heart and soul, Napoleon to the contrary, that God is actually totally on the side of the small battalions.

AGAPE penicillin was not just a small project, it was a project  about smallness, all about smallness.

 In fact, it seemed almost designed to defend the worthiness of smallness and simplicity and to rebuke Modernity and WWII's bigness obsession, doing so by both its ends and its means.

The smallness of its ends --- the people it was intended to help -- is blindingly clear.

RHD was the leading killer of working class school kids and the resulting invariably fatal SBE, the leading killer of slightly older working class RHD victims.

 However, the upper middle class medical and scientific leadership of the Allies had determined that the working class SBEs were unworthy of a share of the small amount of natural penicillin the scientific establishment had half-heartedly produced in the 15 years after its discovery.

Dawson and his AGAPE team resolved to make their own semi-concentrated impure natural penicillin to treat these '4Fs of the 4Fs' , these 'lives unworthy of penicillin' - and hence - of life.

But what is my  point in exalting the smallness of the  AGAPE team, the small means to that small end ?

Again, the physical - or surface - smallness of Dawson's project is clearly self evident.

The team consisted of between two and six individuals - but most of the time consisted of just three or four individuals  - people who already had busy jobs in the rest of their work day.

In terms of treating SBE patients - its main emphasis - it treated about 35 patients during World War Two - set that against the seventy million war who died during and because of World War Two.

NONE of those war dead died of SBE - it is doubtful that any sort of war action made an individual's chances of getting SBE any more likely.

In direct terms, the AGAPE project contributed nothing to the direct war effort - and many argued, then and since, that it actually hurt the war effort, albeit in a small way.

The project occupied a small lab or two, the wall of part of a corridor and a typical hospital ward of the smaller sort. (And whatever space they could temporarily scrounge for their equipment - including an outside fire escape.)

AGAPE penicillin consumed a small amount of resources that weren't particularly scarce.

It doesn't seem to have won more than lukewarm support from Dawson's hospital and university colleagues.

 And I have found no evidence of any government agency or large foundation voting to earmark funds specifically for the AGAPE project - so it had not been formally peer-financed/peer-approved by any of the scientific establishment.

Its cost in terms of dollars couldn't have been much - seemingly absorbed out of normal department and clinic budgets.

An impressive catalogue of 'smallness' , but this is not at all what I mean by saying that its means were as small as its ends.

I mean that literally: many of the team members, the biological agent they employed, even their bacterial adversary were all about as 4F as the 4F patients they treated or afflicted.

Henry Dawson - because of his weak lungs - had Terminal-MG-just-waiting-to-happen. He frequently was stuck in an oxygen tent and could only be permitted to get away to work, if he agreed to be tethered to an oxygen tank and mask, probably in a wheelchair.

His soul mate and writing/editing assistant, his wive Marjorie, had a congenital hip problem that was never successfully treated and she needed a cane at times.

His leading clinical aide, intern and then resident Dr Tom Hunter, had had polio and needed two crutches to get about.

His friend when he really needed him,the big industrialist Floyd Odlum had contracted an extremely severe case of Rheumatoid Arthritis --- while employed to worry about the fate of ( irony !) of tiny businesses under a war economy that favoured only the biggest firms.

As a result, he frequently needed to get about with  crutches or a wheelchair.

When 4F patient Charlie Aronson got his SBE-induced stroke, he too got a wheelchair  and his oxygen tank- but among this 4F medical bunch, he'd scarcely stick out !

During most of the war, informed medical opinion rejected the idea that NATURAL impure (but totally safe) penicillin could have any war role.

NATURAL penicillin, not to put too fine point on it, is produced when penicillium molds 'pee'  a yellow liquid  into their own bathwater.

No 'pee water' of dirty, smelly basement molds and fungi
was going to sully the veins of the White Races - anymore than black Negro blood was going to go into those veins, even if needed to save a life.

Artificially made (chemically synthesized like the existing Sulfa drugs) all-white ,crystal pure, 1A penicillin had to be created in mass amounts before the medical and scientific establishment was even going to tell the wartime laity about the wondrous life-saving qualities of natural penicillin.

In a war all about 1A men and 1A chemicals, the penicillium mold was smalltime and 4F.

In fact, it was suspected that very soon, there wouldn't even be an adversary for natural or artificial penicillin to test its mettle against.

Edward Mellanby, the head of Britain's all-powerful MRC and the chief financial backer of Howard Florey, had said in 1937, that in fifty years there wouldn't be any hospitals about devoted to infectious diseases, because they would all such diseases would have been conquered, permanently, by chemical medicines like the thousands of sulfa variants.

So, too, the Strep and other pathogenic bacteria were assigned to the 4F, loser, section of Life.

All penicillin books to date - even that written by AGAPE team member Gladys Hobby's, at least to some extent - devote almost all their length to Howard Florey's effort to create chemically pure penicillin.

But midway through their 300 pages and 120,000 words, they break long enough to devote a paragraph or page to the AGAPE team.

One can accurately summarize all their writing thusly:

"Actually, and unknown to them, the Florey team was not the first to treat a patient with systemic (antibiotic) penicillin. That happened a few months earlier at New York's Columbia University when Dr Martin Henry Dawson gave a small amount of weak penicillin to a patient, Aaron Alston, with incurable SBE.

The amount was far too small to have an affect but was judged to be non-toxic. 

 Alston died and Dawson, already suffering from incurably MG, was too weak to do any further work and also died. His brief report, read before a medical conference, was never published and while noted in the New York Times, had no impact on the further course of wartime penicillin and he necessarily passes out of our story."

None of this was true.

Aaron was treated on that first day back in October 16th 1940, and he did seems to have died, perhaps by February 1941.

 But the first patient ever treated with penicillin was almost certainly Charles Aronson, also treated that same day, with an amount of penicillin that also was far too small to have any effect on his heart bacteria.

But Charlie was made of the stuff God usually assigned to cats with nine lives and the fact that he knew he was getting not the back of medicine's hand but rather receiving the first ever systemic dose of a new wonder drug may have affected his heart - his emotional heart.

In any case, he survived this bout of SBE - a very rare but very real possibility with any case of a supposedly 'incurable' disease - perhaps because this 'boost to his morale' was converted into a 'boost to his immune system'.

This was no temporary event - he remained free of SBE for three years and was cured a second time by Dawson - again with penicillin - and was still alive at the war's end.

In 1945, Charlie could say "I'm still here !", despite being written off years earlier by all the doctors.

Worse, he has been written out of history by stupid,dumb,lazy,f-king brain-dead writers ever since.

(His history, the best recorded of any of Dawson's three dozen SBE patients, can be found in two frequently cited landmark medical articles, easily available to any writer seriously researching Dawson's part in penicillin's story.)

Dawson did get terminal MG a few months after beginning the AGAPE project, but he hung on for four and half years, the normal time patients with serious MG hung on in the early 1940s.

He worked steadily until a month before he died, and the long list of published articles and recorded appearances before public scientific meetings, demonstrates that fact to even today's stupidest,laziest writers - if they hadn't a semi-conscious agenda to bury him even deeper in the ground than any grave digger could arrange.

In early 1945, he also could say "I'm still here !" and point to the fact that not only was he still alive and active, but that even the AMA had accepted his claim that systemic natural penicillin could cure the incurable SBE.

Further, his close medical companion, the penicillium mold, if it could only speak, could also claim that it too was "still here !"

Florey's seven year effort to find chemically pure penicillin to inject into patients had failed - synthetic penicillin was a disaster in terms of yield and even in terms of its chemical rationality.

Naturally produced penicillin was the only penicillin used to save lives during World War Two--- and in the seventy years ever since.

And Dawson's first time use of systemic (internal) penicillin to treat human disease had not only ended up near the business pages of the New York Times - it had influenced at least some of those all important men-with-money.

A then small 'fine chemical' company with only a toe hold in the outskirts of the drug business (Pfizer) answered his clarion call for help.

 Eventually, moved emotionally ( just like Charlie) by the AGAPE project, they betted their house on the unpopular NATURAL penicillin and won big - they ended up producing most of the penicillin of World War Two.

Today they are not just one of the biggest drug companies in the world , they are one of the biggest companies in the world, period.

Dismissed by Florey, in preference for 1A chemically-oriented MERCK , Florey never even visited Pfizer in 1941.

But in 1944 he simply HAD to go to Pfizer driven there by the dictates of the PR battle touting the hope of penicillin as the best single reason for everyone to hang on until the war's end.

So there he was, standing beside the AGAPE project's Gladys Hobby, and pretend to be moved by all the vials of natural penicillin tumbling off their production line while his own baby, synthetic penicillin, lay stillborn.

Pfizer too could say in 1945, "we may have been judged 4F by Howard Florey, but we too 'are still here' !"

Even Dawson's adversaries, the bacteria, could prove Edward Mellanby's proud boast wrong by 1945.

 Even in 1945, sulfa and penicillin-resistant bacteria were abundant -- and the situation is even more serious today -  so the small bacteria too could say "I'm still here !"

And of course ( because there always is a 'of course' in my blog entries) of course PostModernity is all about smallness, localness, variety, diversity, alternative modes of existence --- just as Modernity is all about 'bigger always being better'.

AGAPE penicillin - in all its dimensions - was the first successful postmodernist rebuke of the life-hostile ethics of Modernity and the Modernist war that was WWII.....

God Knows What Dr Dawson Did With Penicillin...

.... and HE doesn't need a book to remind HIM.

But perhaps our new health science grads could still use a little inspiration....