It is too frequently claimed, by tenured people well schooled in the logical and analytical skills of philosophy and who thus really shown know better , that postmodernity is all about relativism and modernity is all about absolutes.
But is this in anyway accurate ?
Showing posts with label bacterial transformation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bacterial transformation. Show all posts
Sunday, March 15, 2015
Saturday, May 24, 2014
His agape love had no hometown....
(Martin) Henry Dawson was born in Truro but spent his formative years going to school in Halifax and Montreal or saving lives and fighting Huns in World War One France.
He later worked in hospitals in Kentucky and in New York City.
In WWII, he gave up his own life to try and save hundreds of thousands of people - people totally unknown to him and from all over the world - who were dying (needlessly) of subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) .
His actions ultimately has benefitted ten billion of us , so far, since 1940 - via a form of herd immunity generated when penicillin, thanks largely to Henry, became a inexpensive public domain lifesaver.
Whatever Henry did, Henry did by himself - it was not done by the community of his birth, Truro.
So honour him in Truro, if you want , but also honour him everywhere valour earns acclaim ...
He later worked in hospitals in Kentucky and in New York City.
In WWII, he gave up his own life to try and save hundreds of thousands of people - people totally unknown to him and from all over the world - who were dying (needlessly) of subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) .
His actions ultimately has benefitted ten billion of us , so far, since 1940 - via a form of herd immunity generated when penicillin, thanks largely to Henry, became a inexpensive public domain lifesaver.
Whatever Henry did, Henry did by himself - it was not done by the community of his birth, Truro.
So honour him in Truro, if you want , but also honour him everywhere valour earns acclaim ...
Sunday, August 25, 2013
Crude Penicillin and Bacterial Transformation : two neologisms of Henry Dawson
Henry Dawson was far from a wordsmith but he did coin two neologisms that have survived in today's scientific and historical lexicon.
One was "bacterial transformation" (a form of HGT, horizontal gene transfer -- basically non-Darwinian inheritance) and the other was "crude penicillin".
To explain this latter term is is best to recognize it is really a term of scientific and political polemics.
Let us imagine a British Empire in the early 1940s, badly hurting a time of war because it had refused to accept a fact known for at least two centuries.
That fact was that the most natural , most versatile and cheapest way to solve the naval and merchant ship scurvy crisis was with a good supply of citrus fruit kept on board.
Marshalled against this fact discovered by James Lind was an array of louder, better educated and greedier voices.
What they were telling the government and the media and future historians was that Britain's dying sailors must simply be patient.
In its own sweet time an expensive synthetic vitamin C was sure to emerge, fully patented, from one of the nation's chemical firms.
One expensively patented , tasteless , pill would solve the human daily needs for vitamin C - as would other patented pills for all our daily food intake.
We needn't waste time away from our desks on meals when a glass of water and a big handful or two of pills would solve the problem.
Against this chemical boasting would be an array of people saying that they looked forward to meals - perhaps even more than sex and certainly far more than they looked forward to work.
Others would point out that citrus fruit and vitamin C rich vegetables are found world wide - are both cheap and abundant - a security of supply issue.
They would further point out that the deadly delay in solving this sea-going crisis for the Empire was simply down to greed and ambition.
The delay was down to some ambitious scientists seeking the glory for having synthesized something Mother Nature already provided and to some greedy chemical companies wanting a profitable patent to exploit.
These claims against patented vitamin C pills are so damning a master scientific polemist would be called upon to defend Chemistry.
A scientific polemist like Howard Florey because he, too, was a bit of a neologism creator : he was the first person to talk about impure and pure penicillin, for example.
An orange ,he could point out, could potentially be a dangerous source of vitamin C because it was an impure source of the needed vitamin (in the sense that vitamin C only made up a tiny fraction of one percent of the orange by weight).
In a 1940s culture where the middle class had more education than common sense, this would be effective arguing : everyone wanted cleanliness and purity.
Henry Dawson immediately caught onto this "Only I know how to make pure safe penicillin" line of attack from Florey's very first article on penicillin and quickly mounted a rebuttal.
And he did so in the august pages of the New York Times on May 6th 1941.
In effect, he said an orange can be one of four things, as regards to being an safe source of vitamin C.
It could be unsafe because both the orange and its vitamin C are potentially dangerous.
It could be safe because both the orange and its vitamin C are harmless to consume.
It could be unsafe because vitamin C is potentially dangerous, perhaps in larger quantities.
It could be unsafe because the orange itself was potentially toxic.
The only thing to do , as always , was less talk and more experiments.
He tested impure penicillin (penicillium juice) upon himself and upon some human patients and found it perfectly safe.
He boldly called his successful medicine "crude penicillin" --- naturally made penicillin happily bathing its its naturally produced impure bath.
it was a medicine made by microbes and offered up to all, free in the Public Domain : thus meeting Florey's subtle corporate agenda head-on.
Ironically, years later, it was revealed that pure penicillin itself was potentially unsafe (unlike the rest of the harmless penicillium juice) because when pure it can be given in large enough amounts to result in sudden penicillin allergy deaths !
Pure members of the aryan races might still believe they can only survive on pure penicillin and pure vitamin C but the rest of this polyglot world still likes to take its daily nourishment 'crude' , dining around the table with family and friends.
It hasn't seemed to harm the seven billions of us so far....
One was "bacterial transformation" (a form of HGT, horizontal gene transfer -- basically non-Darwinian inheritance) and the other was "crude penicillin".
To explain this latter term is is best to recognize it is really a term of scientific and political polemics.
Let us imagine a British Empire in the early 1940s, badly hurting a time of war because it had refused to accept a fact known for at least two centuries.
That fact was that the most natural , most versatile and cheapest way to solve the naval and merchant ship scurvy crisis was with a good supply of citrus fruit kept on board.
Marshalled against this fact discovered by James Lind was an array of louder, better educated and greedier voices.
What they were telling the government and the media and future historians was that Britain's dying sailors must simply be patient.
In its own sweet time an expensive synthetic vitamin C was sure to emerge, fully patented, from one of the nation's chemical firms.
One expensively patented , tasteless , pill would solve the human daily needs for vitamin C - as would other patented pills for all our daily food intake.
We needn't waste time away from our desks on meals when a glass of water and a big handful or two of pills would solve the problem.
Against this chemical boasting would be an array of people saying that they looked forward to meals - perhaps even more than sex and certainly far more than they looked forward to work.
Others would point out that citrus fruit and vitamin C rich vegetables are found world wide - are both cheap and abundant - a security of supply issue.
They would further point out that the deadly delay in solving this sea-going crisis for the Empire was simply down to greed and ambition.
The delay was down to some ambitious scientists seeking the glory for having synthesized something Mother Nature already provided and to some greedy chemical companies wanting a profitable patent to exploit.
These claims against patented vitamin C pills are so damning a master scientific polemist would be called upon to defend Chemistry.
A scientific polemist like Howard Florey because he, too, was a bit of a neologism creator : he was the first person to talk about impure and pure penicillin, for example.
An orange ,he could point out, could potentially be a dangerous source of vitamin C because it was an impure source of the needed vitamin (in the sense that vitamin C only made up a tiny fraction of one percent of the orange by weight).
In a 1940s culture where the middle class had more education than common sense, this would be effective arguing : everyone wanted cleanliness and purity.
Henry Dawson immediately caught onto this "Only I know how to make pure safe penicillin" line of attack from Florey's very first article on penicillin and quickly mounted a rebuttal.
And he did so in the august pages of the New York Times on May 6th 1941.
In effect, he said an orange can be one of four things, as regards to being an safe source of vitamin C.
It could be unsafe because both the orange and its vitamin C are potentially dangerous.
It could be safe because both the orange and its vitamin C are harmless to consume.
It could be unsafe because vitamin C is potentially dangerous, perhaps in larger quantities.
It could be unsafe because the orange itself was potentially toxic.
The only thing to do , as always , was less talk and more experiments.
He tested impure penicillin (penicillium juice) upon himself and upon some human patients and found it perfectly safe.
He boldly called his successful medicine "crude penicillin" --- naturally made penicillin happily bathing its its naturally produced impure bath.
it was a medicine made by microbes and offered up to all, free in the Public Domain : thus meeting Florey's subtle corporate agenda head-on.
Ironically, years later, it was revealed that pure penicillin itself was potentially unsafe (unlike the rest of the harmless penicillium juice) because when pure it can be given in large enough amounts to result in sudden penicillin allergy deaths !
Pure members of the aryan races might still believe they can only survive on pure penicillin and pure vitamin C but the rest of this polyglot world still likes to take its daily nourishment 'crude' , dining around the table with family and friends.
It hasn't seemed to harm the seven billions of us so far....
Sunday, May 6, 2012
Big but Simple, Small but Complex, the paradoxes of PO-MO Science refutes central tenet of MODERNITY
Modernity was birthed in the late 19th century ,when Darwinian Biology saw a definite, if meandering, directionality to progress, leading through random activity into self organization - onward to ever bigger and hence ever more "complex" beings .
This metaphor was extended to all things : Big Government, Big Corporations, Big Unions ,Big Bridges, Big Dams, Big Battleships , ever onwards.
Bigger was Better,Law of the Jungle, Might Makes Right: Darwin our God was definitely on the side of the Biggest Battalions.
But quantum physics and molecular biology in the 1930s put a question mark on these certitudes.
Or should have - if Science works like it claims it does.
For example, the alchemists' claim of transmutation of atoms turned out to be possible after all - the hundred plus elements were not just a given at the birth of the Universe.
So some physicists in the 1930s were speculating that in the seconds after the Big Bang, its immense heat and pressure fused subatomic particles into ever bigger subatomic particles and ultimately produced the lightest element hydrogen and a few of its lightest cousins.
What what could have given the truly tremendous energy and pressure needed, by quantum theory, to fuse the heaviest elements into being ?
A mystery.
But with the 1930s discovery of Super Novas, we now had a source for the immense energy needed.
It came from explosions of the biggest discrete objects in the Universe .
But there was a real paradox here : there is nothing bigger or more energetic than a Super Nova exploding, but all it could produce for all its labour was the tiny - and relatively simple - atom.
Yes, the simple atom : For by the 1930s, the new sciences of Polymer Chemistry and Bio Chemistry were coming to the conclusion that true complexity lay in the giant biological-created molecules.
These were a mixture of thousands of different atoms, but arranged in such complex three dimensional shapes that each enzyme or protein molecule to be an incredibly tiny but precise factory or robot.
Ironically, some claimed that it was Life's smallest beings, the microbes, who designed and used these giant molecules the best.
Martin Henry Dawson called this bacterial transmutation of biological molecules (like DNA) via HGT (horizontal gene transfers) "Transformation", but many others simply called it biological transmutation a la the alchemists and the elements .
So now ,big Super Novas produced small and simple atoms , while tiny microbes produced big and complex molecules.
But in fact, these discoveries made by Quantum Physics and Molecular Biology between 1890s to the 1930s seemed to hold
little 'real world' relevance to politicians and businessmen, until WWII (Modernity's War) exposed Modernity' weaknesses.
Martin Henry Dawson's friends, Floyd Odlum and Jackie Cochrane, were in turn close friends with the most influential advocate of air power in WWII : General Hap Arnold, US Army Air Force.
Arnold felt that Carl Norden had the war-winner in his bombsight, so deadly accurate there would be no need to use old-fashioned infantrymen like Dawson.
However, Newtonian Physics/ Norden Physics totally failed to get its promised bombs into the proverbial pickle barrel from 15,000 feet up.
The military were forced to go back to the ancient method used by the armies of tens of thousands of years earlier : firing up of entire cities.
(That and calling in those low tech/old fashioned infantrymen to once again close the deal.)
The fire came from the atomic bomb with such force that aiming accurately was rendered irrelevant -- even a miss still wiped out the entire city.
Suddenly, after August 1945, that long-haired Quantum-whatever physics stuff that had produced the a-bomb seemed to be something politicians, generals and newspaper editors would have to take seriously. Newton - and Norden - would have to go to the museum.
The revelation of Auschwitz's medical experiments in November 1945 had already made everyone question just what evil alley Galtonian Biology was leading humanity up.
Dr Joseph Mengele's 'research' (via photographs and measures of people's external bodies) leading to crude carving and sewing up of people to make the perfect race suddenly seemed irredeemably old-fashioned.
The future of genetics seemed to lie instead in tiny objects inside those bodies - lie inside the molecules of life.
Dawson's former colleagues at the Rockefeller Institute might just hold the new key to biology - via a sudden interest in researching Dawson's old DNA stuff.
Not that any politician or businessmen actually said that - not for 50 more years.
But the ambitious young at the leading edge of science sure did --- they moved into molecular biology from all branches of science after 1945, from physics and chemistry and geology as well from zoology and botany.
Daltonian Chemistry was in no better shape - its traditional method of choice - huge factory vats to heat up and heat down, under tremendous pressure, to create a few simple chemicals - also seemed suddenly irremediably old fashioned by 1945.
A tiny - invisible - fungus factory, as advocated by Martin Henry Dawson, could gracefully produce the Life-saving penicillin at normal temperature and pressures while the huge chemical plants just spun their wheels, failing to produce any synthetic penicillin.
The weak, as it turned out, might inherit the universe after all, just as the Bible claimed many eons ago....
This metaphor was extended to all things : Big Government, Big Corporations, Big Unions ,Big Bridges, Big Dams, Big Battleships , ever onwards.
Bigger was Better,Law of the Jungle, Might Makes Right: Darwin our God was definitely on the side of the Biggest Battalions.
But quantum physics and molecular biology in the 1930s put a question mark on these certitudes.
Or should have - if Science works like it claims it does.
For example, the alchemists' claim of transmutation of atoms turned out to be possible after all - the hundred plus elements were not just a given at the birth of the Universe.
So some physicists in the 1930s were speculating that in the seconds after the Big Bang, its immense heat and pressure fused subatomic particles into ever bigger subatomic particles and ultimately produced the lightest element hydrogen and a few of its lightest cousins.
What what could have given the truly tremendous energy and pressure needed, by quantum theory, to fuse the heaviest elements into being ?
A mystery.
But with the 1930s discovery of Super Novas, we now had a source for the immense energy needed.
It came from explosions of the biggest discrete objects in the Universe .
But there was a real paradox here : there is nothing bigger or more energetic than a Super Nova exploding, but all it could produce for all its labour was the tiny - and relatively simple - atom.
Yes, the simple atom : For by the 1930s, the new sciences of Polymer Chemistry and Bio Chemistry were coming to the conclusion that true complexity lay in the giant biological-created molecules.
These were a mixture of thousands of different atoms, but arranged in such complex three dimensional shapes that each enzyme or protein molecule to be an incredibly tiny but precise factory or robot.
Ironically, some claimed that it was Life's smallest beings, the microbes, who designed and used these giant molecules the best.
Martin Henry Dawson called this bacterial transmutation of biological molecules (like DNA) via HGT (horizontal gene transfers) "Transformation", but many others simply called it biological transmutation a la the alchemists and the elements .
So now ,big Super Novas produced small and simple atoms , while tiny microbes produced big and complex molecules.
But in fact, these discoveries made by Quantum Physics and Molecular Biology between 1890s to the 1930s seemed to hold
little 'real world' relevance to politicians and businessmen, until WWII (Modernity's War) exposed Modernity' weaknesses.
Martin Henry Dawson's friends, Floyd Odlum and Jackie Cochrane, were in turn close friends with the most influential advocate of air power in WWII : General Hap Arnold, US Army Air Force.
Arnold felt that Carl Norden had the war-winner in his bombsight, so deadly accurate there would be no need to use old-fashioned infantrymen like Dawson.
However, Newtonian Physics/ Norden Physics totally failed to get its promised bombs into the proverbial pickle barrel from 15,000 feet up.
The military were forced to go back to the ancient method used by the armies of tens of thousands of years earlier : firing up of entire cities.
(That and calling in those low tech/old fashioned infantrymen to once again close the deal.)
The fire came from the atomic bomb with such force that aiming accurately was rendered irrelevant -- even a miss still wiped out the entire city.
Suddenly, after August 1945, that long-haired Quantum-whatever physics stuff that had produced the a-bomb seemed to be something politicians, generals and newspaper editors would have to take seriously. Newton - and Norden - would have to go to the museum.
The revelation of Auschwitz's medical experiments in November 1945 had already made everyone question just what evil alley Galtonian Biology was leading humanity up.
Dr Joseph Mengele's 'research' (via photographs and measures of people's external bodies) leading to crude carving and sewing up of people to make the perfect race suddenly seemed irredeemably old-fashioned.
The future of genetics seemed to lie instead in tiny objects inside those bodies - lie inside the molecules of life.
Dawson's former colleagues at the Rockefeller Institute might just hold the new key to biology - via a sudden interest in researching Dawson's old DNA stuff.
Not that any politician or businessmen actually said that - not for 50 more years.
But the ambitious young at the leading edge of science sure did --- they moved into molecular biology from all branches of science after 1945, from physics and chemistry and geology as well from zoology and botany.
Daltonian Chemistry was in no better shape - its traditional method of choice - huge factory vats to heat up and heat down, under tremendous pressure, to create a few simple chemicals - also seemed suddenly irremediably old fashioned by 1945.
A tiny - invisible - fungus factory, as advocated by Martin Henry Dawson, could gracefully produce the Life-saving penicillin at normal temperature and pressures while the huge chemical plants just spun their wheels, failing to produce any synthetic penicillin.
The weak, as it turned out, might inherit the universe after all, just as the Bible claimed many eons ago....
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