Arabic translation of "Hyssop in a time of Cedar" ?

I sure hope so. Many translations. But since Arabic was the common language of the 9/11 plotters, it have been nice if they had known a little more about the city they are so determined to destroy.

They only saw Manhattan as "coming from Mars", as the birthplace of  Eugenics and the Atomic War.

This is all true --- but only a partial truth.

Like all the world - like all of us - Manhattan is truly janus-like.

Within it, good and bad live in commensality, as does war and peace, love and aggression and big and small : all dine together at a common table.

I want to show the 9/11 plotters and their would-be successors that wartime Manhattan also "came from Venus".

 That the borough was also home to Emma Lazarus's Golden Door and to successful efforts to ensure that wartime's life-saving penicillin was made available to all the world's tired, poor and huddled 4Fs - regardless of race, colour ,creed or gender.

If a copy of my book makes even one future would-be plotter pause and re-consider, it will be worth it....

In a world war obsessed by 1A nations, soldiers and scientists, Henry Dawson dared to defend the worthiness of 4Fs... and 4F science

During WWII (1931-1946) a whole series of countries cum bullies - among the Allies as well as among the Axis - almost totally consistently choose to only attack those nations or peoples they judged weaker than themselves.

Britain, for example, shamefully refused to attack Germany with   its potentially much larger Commonwealth army manpower and felt the war could be won by invading weaker Italy instead.

It also choose to starved the prostrate peoples of occupied Europe by blockade , rather than attack Germany directly with all that  Commonwealth army manpower, in hopes this also would win the war, along with success in Italy.

Only twice, both times in December of 1941, did bullies deliberately choose to attack someone they believed was stronger than they were : when Japan and then Germany declared war on America , a nation with by far the biggest economy in the world and also by far the hardest country to invade.

In partial explanation of all this bully behavior, it was the Age of Modernity, when the majority of powerful opinion was firmly convinced that Evolution was unidirectional and always consolidating into fewer (and ever bigger) entities.

Fewer ever bigger animals and plants, fewer ever bigger buildings, ships and dams ,fewer ever bigger corporations and cities , fewer ever bigger nations and empires.

Ever bigger and bigger, ever better and better : so that the destruction and absorption of the smaller and the weaker was simply inevitable.

So what we might now regard - in post hegemonic times - as the shameful behavior of virtually all the nations and people of the world, two billion standing around as bystanders at a holocaust or a schoolyard bullying session, they then regarded as sad but inevitable, "letting Nature take its course."

Henry Dawson didn't agree and he put his strong disagreement into actions.

Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson never said why he did what he did, why he went so far out on a limb to do what he did or why he willingly gave up his life to aid his efforts.

But concrete deeds walk, while abstract talk ... just talks.

By his deeds, we can see that Dawson clearly thought even the 4Fs of the 4Fs were worth saving at the height of Total War, particularly when his side was fighting, after all, opponents who thought they weren't worth saving.

By his deeds, we know he clearly thought tiny 4F science had its own virtues, even during a war when Science, like skyscrapers, was thought only to get better when it got bigger.

Seventy five years on, his solitary figure looks now like the sensible one, while his many  opponents - basically the vast majority of informed opinion - now look to be sadly hubris-ridden and totally lack in the imagination to see beyond the obvious.

Dawson didn't say 'small was beautiful' and 'big was bad', partly because he didn't say anything at all.

 But he definitely acted as if he had concluded that Evolution as progressing in all directions : as often decomposing into tiny viruses as it was consolidating into big dinosaurs.

This could be because any acute observer of Life on Earth, and Dawson was acutely open to everything, would be forced to conclude that reality had indeed given the planet a dynamic mix of stability niches (aiding the existence of large entities) and instability niches (aiding the existence of small entities).

So an eternal global commensality of big and little entities was inevitable.

If Dawson had lived and had been in good health he might have formally stated what he believed and the lessons we might learn from his successes.

But he didn't, so we must tease them out : from his deeds....

What would the Commensal Story of WWII look like ?

Can the entire story of WWII ever be accurately and exhaustingly told, except from the point of view of the winning Great Powers like the USA, the UK and the USSR ?

Must Estonian historians be forever limited to writing only of WWII's localized impact on Estonia ?

Must we have authors from "BIG-LAND" only talk of the the BIG and writers from "small-land" only talk of the small ?

Or is there a theory that allows anyone (and everyone) to write insightfully about the interactions between the BIG and the small in WWII, interactions that did not ,in fact, all go the way the BIG would have wanted ?

I believe the theory of "involuntary commensality" , the claim that all Life must dine involuntarily at the common table that is Lifeboat Earth,  is just that window ....

Dawson's commensality supplies Modernity's "Missing Middle"

Seventy five years on, WWII (conventionally 1939-1945 but actually lasting much longer) looks like nothing more than two great grist stones, Reification and Reductionism, relentlessly grinding up all humanity between them .

For example, the Axis reified a scientific claim that humanity could be accurately divided into being either members or non-members of a concretely actual Aryan Race --- and then set out to eliminate all the non members.

The Allies, equally guilty, chose to worship at a scientific temple that claimed the reduction of all human complexity to the view we are but simple aggregates of tiny indivisible protons and electrons.

Neither claim can stand up to a probing examination - then or now.

But in fact, those claims weren't generally contested seventy five years ago.

However one scientist, Henry Dawson, while paddling in his quiet backwater of the study of human-bacterial commensality, implicitly seemed to offer up an extremely muted scientific critique of these two complementary explanations of Reality.

No wonder his view was ignored.

However he persisted because it did seem that these two complementary explanations - one encompassing the very biggest things in reality and the other covering the very small entities in reality - left out the vast middle of reality.

And that is the very place where all life (and most matter and energy) actually 'lives' .

The key concept in commensality ("the dining together of all life, big and small, at a common table") is that tiny but vital connector :  AND  .

Commensality re-unites what reductionism and reification divides.

Commensal Penicillin : the saving of the lives of 1A soldiers AND  4F civilians , on both sides of the war

But it was not until he put his ideas on commensality into practise, as he confounded the Allied plan to weaponize wartime penicillin, that commensality began to have an actual impact on the thoughts of scientists and the general population.

For in science, as in life generally, words - even peer-reviewed published words - don't always speak louder than actions....

Between PROGRESS and PROTONS : "The Missing Middle" , where we actually live

Thirties Reductionism said that once scientists knew the behavior of one of the Protons that made up Winston Churchill's body (and multiplied it by a trillion trillion trillion identical protons), they could then predict Churchill's behavior over the 1936 Abdication Crisis.

Thirties Reification said that Human Progress is real and concrete and since it was so clearly evident that Human Progress 'wants to get ever bigger and bigger',then dividing Human Progress up into the two billion individual people that existed in the world in 1939, would allow us to predict that particular individual Scott Nearing would also approve of things getting ever bigger.

But in fact he became famous for disagreeing bigger is better.

The average behavior of heterogeneous aggregates does not let us predict the behavior of an individual human being , anymore than than the behavior of  individual proton helps us predict the average behavior of  a heterogeneous aggregate.

Heterogeneous , because Churchill was not a vast crystal of trillions upon trillions of undifferentiated protons but rather a very  stratified collection of protons in a great variety of differently-sized and differently-arranged components that led each component to very unexpectedly different behavior.

And Human Progress had no protons, or even human individuals, within it, because it was simply an abstract idea rather a concrete physical object.

What most Thirties intellectual thought was desperately missing was in giving adequate attention to the vast "Missing Middle" between Protons and Progress, because inside that "Missing Middle" lies the life we actually live, including our twin delusions of reductionism and reification.

However, I believe that the prism of Commensality does allow us to re-capture that "Missing Middle" , and thus allows us to better understand Thirties intellectual thought's sad grandchild, WWII .....

WWII : began with "Bigger is Better - Inevitably" and ended up in "Global Commensality"

At the 1939 New York's World Fair , it seemed only common sense that life started out as tiny simple-minded microbes and inevitably ended up both bigger and smarter, with beings like us being the prime example.

After all, we all know that tiny embryos become babies then children before growing ever smarter and ever bigger as full grown adults.

True the big dinosaurs had disappeared while the tiny bacteria hadn't, but had not the dinosaurs been quickly replaced by mammals - not just as big as dinosaurs but also much smarter ?

Wasn't evolution, no matter how slowly and and how twistingly, inevitably progressing towards the reality that Bigger was not just Better (an idea that hardly needed proposing, it was so self evident to the 1930s mind) but Inevitable as well ?

These ideas were hardly the plot of conspiratory 1930s corporate elites, trying to hold down the working man , because everybody held these notions,  even if they only accepted them resignedly.

Bigger was Better and inevitable because Science had shown it to be natural and so man's efforts inevitably had to be but a mere echo of what was happening and had always had happened, everywhere, in Nature.

So instead every different ideology of the 1930s was content, or resigned, to merely contesting different 'Bigger Betters' : Big Fascism, Big Communism, Big Capitalism, Big Christianity and on and on.

But a few biologists in the Thirties - mostly microbiologists -  didn't find Bigger to be inevitably Better, at least in the natural interactions they were studying.

The brilliant if taciturn (Martin) Henry Dawson was in their forefront - certainly not as a verbal spokesman, but in his advanced concepts.

The 'little horse to big horse' dioramas beloved by every  local museum wall made it seem that small beings were just wayposts on the path to ever bigger-ness.

But instead of being just something to be eaten up or stomped on during the charge to Bigness , true natural reality, these handful of microbiologists claimed, showed small continuing to co-exist with the big, now as in the distant past.

And not just co-existing in widely separated niches either .

For trillions upon trillions of bacteria co-exist in and upon every one of us, along with endless numbers of viruses, fungi, protozoa, worms and mites.

With  all our medical science and with the best immune system in Life, it might see an easy task for us Biggies to dispose of such smallies but that hardly has proved the case .

As any infectious hospital ward in the Thirties would unhappily attest.

But Science, as always, had a ready answer whenever messy Reality clashed with the glib (Cartwright Machine) assumptions it shared with the non-scientific mind.

Science claimed that whenever a new small being invaded the human space, there was a tense period of ecological mismatch between the parasites' need for time to see to their continued survival versus their ability to make us (and thus them) instantly dead.

Dead human hosts meant dead microbe freeloaders.

So, gradually ,over time, the invading small beings reduced their virulency,the human host lived and reproduced and so did its parasites who also lived long enough reproduce their own kind.

Soon parasites became helpless and harmless commensals, merely tagging along with us for the ride.

Never again, once rendered a-virulent , would invading microbes bother the big and clever humans.

The 1930s Central Dogma of the Biology religion (one of many such Central Dogmas over the years) was that it was always a one way journey from high virulency to a-virtulency.

But Dawson , particularly in his studies between 1926 and 1940 ,
saw a much different picture.

To put it in modern day biological language, he was the first, or among the first, to explore Horizontal Gene Transfer, Quorum Sensing, Molecular Mimicry, L-forms, and Biofilms.

Just a few of the truly amazing and highly sophisticated ways bacteria survive in a hostile human body cum planet.

Because an individual bacteria is about the same size relationship to an adult human as a human individual is to the entire planet Earth.

Bacteria did not 'sense' they were invading and killing a fellow being when they land on and in us,  (as they might regard a competing fungi cell).

Instead each human body seemed an entire rich lush dangerous planet to them - one well worth learning to survive in , despite the risks.

because our human immune systems and human medicine are indeed big, rich and sophisticatedly complex.

But they proved to be, ironically, too big, too complex, too ponderous to beat back the microbes for very long.

Just too damned bureaucratical,  just like every big organization you and I have ever worked for.

The microbes' vast numbers (trillions) and short period between new generations (minutes), combined with their controllable ability to encourage new mutations to emerge and even travel from species to species,  ensured they could throw up a trillion new survival ideas in the time we got one new drug to stage three clinical trials.

Most of those new survival ideas would be harmful or useless, but with those numbers of ideas, it became like Monkeys typing Literature : something good was bound to come out eventually.

The small and nimble beat the big and ponderous often enough in our human corporate world to make Dawson's claim seem equally credible in the natural world.

Or so it might seem self evident , today, in our post-Modern world.

But that is getting well ahead of ourselves ---- because Dawson's 1930s notions of commensality are not just the object of our postwar post-modern gaze but one of the 1930s originating subject-creator of our postwar post-modernity.

Together with WWII itself.

Because until WWII came along and demonstrated over and over how often the very big fell before the very little , Dawson's notions gained no traction what so ever in the scientific or popular mind.

His scientific ideas did not change during WWII , but ours sure did .....

Henry Dawson never changed his mind about the Overdogs, but the World did ...

The idea that Nature favours the ubermenschs and overdogs,  that 'Might is Right' , were pretty well universally accepted, albeit sometimes resignedly, in 1939.

Henry Dawson, drawing much different conclusions from his decade long study of the constantly varying battles of Human-Bacteria Commensality, certainly didn't agree.

He gave at least equal odds to all the untermenschs and the underdogs of our natural slash human world.

His ideas were pretty outre with his fellow scientists and his fellow human beings in 1929 ......or even in 1939.

And remained so until about 1943, when the repetitious failure to have 'The War' go anywhere near the direction the various overdogs would have it go, caused many people around the globe to look at the maxim 'Might is Right' in a more jaundiced light.

Dawson never changed his mind - but  eventually the World did, thanks to WWII's unexpected off-coursedness.

The War's end found the World feeling much less Modern and feeling much more post all that sort of stuff - a position that has only grown stronger in the world, in the seventy or so years since Dawson's premature death in 1945.

I can only hope the irony amuses Dawson, wherever he is right now ....

Commensal thoughts were parents to the Humanitarian penicillin deed ...

Before 1945 and the rise of post-Modernity, it was rare for scientific doubts to turn into humanitarian actions, but Martin Henry Dawson's wartime efforts against the weaponizing of penicillin was an important exception.

From 1926 till 1940 , Dr Dawson had intensely studied how Nature's smallest beings ( the bacteria) managed to survive upon and co-exist with the smartest and most successful of Nature's largest beings (Man) .

His fourteen years of intense research in Commensality was dismissed by most of his colleagues as a sad mis-directed use of his considerable talents.

As with his colleagues, no one today really doubts that humanity is  a large being and very intelligent( ie is wise as well as mighty) while most of us still regard bacteria as barely living, incredibly small, blobs of jelly : as dumb as they are weak.

But as Dawson discovered, as fast as Man's sophisticated internal immune system and his equally sophisticated external medical system came up with ways to remove these commensal bacteria, the bacteria equally found ways to claw their way back.

Just as he knew that any forthright and honest look at the current and past workings of Nature would show that the tiny and the big are co-existing today and have been doing so for a very long time -----with no sign at all that the small were on their way out.

If anything, the fossil record showed how vulnerable the big could be to mass extinction in times of trouble.

Despite this rather bleak record for the bigger beings of  Nature, it was precisely to Nature ( rather than to the traditional arbiter, God) that Dawson's Era of Modernity appealed to.

All to back its central claim that 'only the strong survive', 'might is right' , 'law of the jungle', 'survival of the fit', 'Nature is on the side of the bigger battalions' and many other similar phrases.

Dawson was a dutiful fully paid-up member of Modernity.

But the more he investigated the many varied and ingenious ways his oral commensal strep bacteria hung in against Man's best efforts, the less willing he was to endure this constant claim of Nature's support for the self-centred and ruthless actions of the world's biggest human societies.

Once, (younger, unmarried, childless and without any old war wounds), he had been able to show his support for the smaller human societies by enlisting in WWI to fight for poor, pitiful Belgium and for the memory of Edith Carvell.

Now in October 1940, as an even more squalid WWII slid into its second year, he still hadn't found an equivalent way to do something in support of the small and the weak in this war.

Then echoes of the Nazi war on the weak reached his own American medical school and gave him the emotional opening he needed.

Suddenly "Social" medicine (the 1930s efforts to reduce sickness among the poorest and most vulnerable) , something he had much a part of through his advocacy on behalf of the neglected chronically ill poor, was to be downplayed in the school's curriculum.

Instead now all possible attention was to be directed to teaching "War" medicine and maximizing the health of America's most fit young men.

So the majority of his colleagues cheerfully clumped off , on the first day of America's first ever peacetime draft registration, (October 16th 1940), to help with medical examinations.

But while America's doctors attended to seeking out the most 1A men possible among America's youth, Dawson heard the beat of a different drummer.

He instead deliberately sought out the 4Fs of the 4Fs, young men dying of SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis), an invariably fatal progressive disease that mostly afflicted the poor, immigrants and minorities.

His team hadn't planned to start their first clinical trials till next year, 1941, but he changed all that with one sudden decision.

He chose to make Draft Day, October 16th 1940, the first day of his new Age of Humanitarian Antibiotics, picking that day to give History's first ever shots of penicillin.

 Two young men (black man Aaron Alston and a young Jewish boy named Charles Aronson) couldn't be part of that historical first day of peacetime draft registration because, as clearly terminal patients, it didn't seem worth the bother of the draft officials.

 But as the first ever patients of the Age of Antibiotics, they still ended up living on forever in the memory of anyone ever saved by this overdue (humanitarian-driven) advent of antibiotics....

Skygods vs Earthlings: a post-Modernist history of WWII

Modernity finally gets its own WAR

The historians of 75 years ago could only see the things that made the leading warring nations different but with the passage of time and today's new era, younger historians are beginning to see the thing that all the leading warring nations held in common: Modernity.
World War II was like all the certitudes of grade 11 High School Science, armed with machine guns and unleashed upon the physical reality outside the laboratory door : the most violent, evil, catastrophe that Humanity has ever inflicted upon itself.

Modernity's scientists - scientists of faith - lost the physical war but crucially won the postwar battle of words, won the war of books, myths and movies (or did they ?)

1945 : MO goes PO

Because today historians are starting to uncover the stories of WWII's evidence-based scientists ,who resisted the onslaught of science based on faith , as best they could.

Above all, younger historians are starting to tell Mother Nature's version of WWII, because she easily bested Modernity's science, time and again.

Now we can see post-war 1945 for what it really was : the time when MO goes PO, when Modernity began to fade and be gradually replaced by post-Modernity's new Global Commensality Era.........

Two thirds of humanity are "Littorally" commensalists - and don't even know it !

   Two thirds of humanity lives along the edges of waterways - oceans, rivers, lakes : living in the Littoral Zone, as biologists and ecologists like to call it.
   Seaforth, along the Chezzetcook Lake/River/Inlet system is an example of but one such community drawn to the littoral.

   That place of half water/half land --- that highly biologically productive co-mingling of bodily fluids, that highly productive miscegenation of land and water - that bastard,mongrel, metis, half breed of  terra firma and H2O.
   It is that very high productivity that led humanity to the water's edge and kept it there - even in the days of Galton and Darwin when Social Darwinism proclaimed the degenerate dangers of mixing and half-breededness.
   But few within humanity are well taught in the public school system of the importance of water's-edge-living in the history of mankind and that is to be pitied.
   Because land and water mixing and sharing of each other - fresh and salt water mixing and sharing of each other ---- they are a textbook case of global commensality : littorally ....

Wendell Willkie, early COMMENSALIST...

Michael Marshall

In my last blog entry I mentioned that many inter-continental attacks were launched by both sides in WWII.

I deliberately brought in ICBMs (and inter-continental attacks in general) to this blog on commensality to re-emphasize that commensality can be a two-edged sword: all life on Earth can just as easily die - as dine - at our planet's common table.

WWII brought this fact home to many people the world over --- but not in some highly dramatic - instant - fashion, but in a sort of slow drip manner throughout the six years of war.

People tend to forget that Japan and Germany did not just sink ships right off North America public beaches and lob a few deadly shells at coastal harbour facilities and personnel - they actually invaded and held  bits of North America for years.

Greenland held German weather stations and westernmost Alaskan islands of Attu and Kiska were held by the Japanese.

Two thousand men died on the Allied side alone in the campaign to remove the Japanese from North America.

In turn, the Americans used the western Aleutian islands to raid the northern and westernmost islands of Japan by bomber and ship - well before the much better known B-29 attacks of almost 2 years later.

The island by island by island by island hop from Seattle or Edmonton to Fairbanks Alaska onward and onward to Siberian Russia or northern Japan, island by island, reminded North Americans that this trip cut both ways and Asia could invade the Americas as easily as we could do the reverse.

Similarly the island-hopping ferrying of Allied bombers from mid west America  via Gander-Greenland- Iceland -Orkneys- Faroes- Shetlands to the mainland of the UK and Europe reminded us that the ocean safety we had imagined would protect the new world from the wars of the old was not as vast and safe as we had thought.

Wendell Willke, the unexpected presidential candidate of those arch isolationists the Republicans, (deluding themselves that they could isolate themselves from Nature as well as from other humans), travelled around the world by plane ,in wartime, to publicize his theme "Its All (One World) Now."

I count Willke very much as an early commensalist.....

SCIENCE , not conservatives or moderates or liberals, has changed since 1973

Michael Marshall

A study of almost 40 years of public polling data has set the print-o-sphere and the blog-o-sphere aTwitter.

Gordon Gauchat published his study in the April 2012 issue of The American Sociological Review.

He says that after the 1973 Oil Crisis, people started to change how they viewed Science.

I disagree - totally.

Science is not the reified entity that scientists like to claim it is - universal, eternal, unchanging : sort of God-Without-The-Beard .

It is a human social system and as subject to change as any other human collectivity.

Scientists and hence Science changed after 1973 for two major reasons.

First, scientists in powerful positions but born in the modernist era started to retire and die.

Secondly, the scientists born after Hiroshima and Auschwitz who gradually came to positions of power within industry and academia no longer believed in the tenets of modernity, or at least no longer believed them as strongly as their elders.

Yes, liberals/lefties/greens also started to abandon the old modernist science and embrace the new post modern commensality science while religious conservatives, in reaction , joined old line modernists in defending the old time scientific religion all the stronger .

Enemy of my enemy must be my friend is the name of that  scientific theory.

There are two very different types of Science and scientists out there --- we need to be always very clear which ones we are talking about...

SKY GODS or earthlings : WWII's choices ...

Michael Marshall

My last blog, contrasting NORDEN MODERNITY to GEOSMIN COMMENSALITY was very long - and longwinded.

Maybe I can be more succinct.

Spread over an eighty acre corridor in Harlem, two very different projects at Columbia University during the WWII period laid out wildly different visions for humanity and its future on this planet.

Heavy stuff !

One Columbia University project, the massive Manhattan Project, was a last minute patch or kluge to the centerpiece of the Allied war effort, which was that high altitude bombing with that NORDEN BOMBSIGHT could end the war quickly and cheaply.

Quickly and cheaply, yet with minimum deaths for Allied A1 military personnel and for enemy and occupied  4F civilians.

The NORDEN, out in the real world, proved a military and moral disaster, but the A-Bomb painted such broad strokes that it could destroy entire cities (and end the war) , even when the NORDEN used to aim it once again missed.

(The A-bomb together Nature actually did the job : for the winds blow the fallout from the Bomb all over the world, regardless of  Humanity's best efforts to claim that this is entirely a man-made show. Fallout is so down-to-earth ,n'est-ce pas?)

But let us ignore such awkward truths and stick with the 'vision thing' :  call the original Norden plan part of the SKY GOD vision of Modernity.

All life on Earth would be nicely invisible (but still controllable) from 25,000 feet up ; controlled by coolly rational objective men modeling themselves quite self consciously upon PIERRE SIMON LAPLACE.

(Lenin's Omelets could still be made but no one would have to see or hear or smell the human eggs being broken.)

Laplace's vision was that scientific man, with a lot of effort , and thanks to Newton's three laws of physics - could observe the Universe from a place far above it and perfectly predict its past, present and future right down to the level of the atom.

The NORDEN, the assumed crown jewel (and as it turned out the culmination) of 250 years of Newtonian physics,  was just a start on this bold vision.

Modernist males (for this was a very male-centric vision) would become like the Sky Gods and Sky Fathers of ancient legend.

In another part of Columbia University - in the university but never really supported or encouraged by the university, unlike with the Manhattan Project - Martin Henry Dawson also had a vision.

Like him, the vision was unorthodox, humble and (literally) down-to-earth.

Down into the earth, actually.

 This was an earthling Vision of Life : our only possible home was down here on earth, at the ground zero of reality, not building some castles in the sky.

So he formed a commensal partnership with some of life's smallest and weakest beings.

 These were the earth fungi and bacteria whose presence
and 'earthy' smell was so familiar to him from his time in the WWI trenches.

All this so he could help the men and women and children in the figurative trenches of WWII - the 4F individuals overlooked or destroyed by a war that revolved very much around the 1As of intellectual and physical life.

But note first a further uncanny parallel with the much bigger, much badder, Manhattan Project.

His effort was seized upon, at the last minute after being either ignored or depreciated, by the Allied war effort in a determined effort to rescue another centerpiece of their war aims.

Dead soldiers were just that, dead ,said the Allied leadership.

 But soldiers,sailors and airmen seriously wounded and infected could be saved back to useful lives in WWII, unlike WWI, because we have got that wonderful man-made synthetic miracle drug called SULFA.

But the entire family of sulfa drugs - an army themselves with America alone issuing 7000 patents on the sulfa drugs during the war - were not working as promised.

Never fear, said modernist Chemistry,we'll synthesize this new stuff, penicillin, only make it better,  much cheaper and much much more plentiful.

A mini-Manhattan Project of money men and effort failed to produce any synthetic penicillin - or any synthetic quinine for that matter ----Nature did the job so much better, as it turned out.

Dawson's idea of a low tech factory of factories - trillions upon trillions of tiny fungi factories making penicillin inside low cost milk bottles in some underused milk plant - was working well , as GLAXO in England proved in spades.

It didn't use up scarce war-oriented resources or need highly skilled workers --- most of the workers growing and nurturing this precious life-giving crop were - surprise ! - women of child-bearing age.

Great !

Or was it ?

Not high tech enough for this science-run war of flash, glitz and Hollywood press agency.

Not male enough for testosteronic modernist science.

So the trillions of natural fungi penicillin makers were moved out of thousands of milk bottles and put into an extremely expensive milk bottle many stories high, made of scarce stainless steel and run by serious looking men in lab coats.

Now that seriously looked the business !

But it was in fact, just another kluge, a patch : like Newtonian Physics and the Norden , Chemistry had failed and Chemistry - the Queen of Science in the 1930s economy - never looked anywhere but downward from that point on.

(Just compare - if you will - the size of DuPont Chemicals versus the largest of the biotech companies in 1930 with DuPont and the largest of the biotech giants of today : no contest.)

So A-bombs and Penicillin:  two last minute kluges to cover male egos or two of the many planned high tech successes that ultimately won us the war ?

And which way forward: become like SKY GODS or humble and limit our hubris and become more like earthlings ????

NORDEN Modernity versus GEOSMIN Commensality

Michael Marshall

Do you remember the most famous scene in THE THIRD MAN movie?

(It is usually on somebody's top ten films of all time list.)

The villain HARRY LIME ,standing in for the Devil , takes the naive narrator HOLLY MARTINS to the top of Vienna's famous Ferris Wheel.

 Lime tells Martins that from this height, all the people in the world look ant-sized and that's all they're worth - ants to be crushed.

 'So Martins, why get all upset about a few kiddies dying from my adulterated penicillin --- just look the other way and go with the flow.'

(Harry Lime's diluted penicillin fails to save children with MENINGITIS whose lives could have been readily saved  - but only if enough Penicillin "G" is injected into them right away.

The fact that Pfizer chief "John L"  Smith's daughter had earlier died of meningitis that Martin Henry Dawson said his naturally grown penicillin could have cured, was probably the number one,two and three reasons we got WWII penicillin before D-Day ---- and not two years later.)

But in the movie, Martins, rather like Jesus, doesn't accept the 'high level' bribe and later on sets up Lime for his doom.

I often think of Harry Lime whenever I think of the men peering into the NORDEN BOMBSIGHT in some Allied bomber, coolly preparing to exact collective punishment on some enemy or occupied civilian population from 15,000 feet.

At that height, people aren't even ant-sized - they are bacteria or fungi sized - invisible.

Japanese microbes at Hiroshima.

When these people burn to death from your bombs, you don't hear their screams or smell their burning flesh.

Murder - Pierre-Simon Laplace style - from a remote outsider/ observer's position, coolly peering through the glass before pushing the button.

Like the way they did it as Auschwitz as well.

The overmen killing off the undermen , like ants under one's feet.

MARTIN HENRY DAWSON had his war too, but it was not a few hours spent at 15,000 feet above the ground --- he lived it from a position 5 feet below the ground, for months at a time - in a WWI trench.

Here the always present smell of the Earth was mixed with the smell of dead men and dead horses, feces and old mustard 'gas' .

You couldn't help hearing men from the raiding parties scream out their last on the barbed wire of No Man's Land or avoid seeing conrade's headless bodies still upright beside you - while their heads flew off to serve as a projectile to kill some other poor sod.

Here you saw Nature close up and raw - sunrise creeping up, sunset going down - rain, wind, midday heat - all the elements of the weather chilled your bones and soaked your clothes.

The most famous artwork from that war was a humble cartoon - it has two Tommies in a crude foxhole, trying to survive an intense bombardment.

One guy isn't happy about their chances in that particular hole - but the other says in effect, look around, shells exploding everywhere above ground - yes we're like rats in a hole in the earth, but its secure from all but a direct hit so, "if you know a better 'ole - go to it !"

We're like that today - we're stuck here on a crumbling Earth and some guy has the bright idea that life would be better if NASA flew all of us off to Mars or something.

I hope I speak for you when I say, "go ahead sonny - if you think you know a better 'ole, then go to it - I am staying here and muddling through".

I can smell the Earth and I like it - and its all we've got.

Commensality in the Trenches ????

It multiplied in the trenches - your mates - and the rats - were as close as girlfriends back home - and body lice were so plentiful that they literally changed the color of your skin by their massed presence there.

And above all you could smell your ever present commensal companions, the fungi and bacteria, in the soil all around you.

You know that smell of freshly turned soil we sometimes smell after a rain ?

 We also can smell it on grapes/wine or in  beets or in the flesh of catfish.

Some love it, call it 'earthy' ; others hate it and call it 'musty/moldy'.

But all humans can smell it - at levels as few as a few parts per trillion.

For some reason it is a critical smell to our survival.

Here is maybe one reason why:

When an infantryman hugs the earth, literally, trying to survive, he knows that of all his tools for survival it is his entrenching shovel and a few feet of soil around him that is a better protector of his personal safety than his side's tanks, artillery or bombers.

He loves the smell of the soil that his shovel has freshly turned over.

That smell is called GEOSMIN : think of it as geos min ,literally meaning 'earth smell'.

It is produced, mostly, by bacteria that live together with fungus in the soil.

 They look and act a lot like fungus but aren't.

In fact the fungi probably copied them not the other way around.

We tend to lump both together and call them mold - and this is not too inaccurate - because they both do much the same thing from a lay person's point of view.

Those bacteria are the streptomyces - the soil lovers that directly produce much of the world's antibiotics - and produce most of the rest indirectly - by transferring the crucial genes to make penicillin to the penicillium fungus about 370 million years ago.

The soil fungus and the streptomyces bacteria grow by joining together as filamentous multi-celled super organisms.

Not exactly like a human multi-celled organism - these guys, particularly the bacteria, remain semi-independent in the sense that all continue to reproduce themselves by cloning.

So a trillion bacteria or fungus cells in a teaspoon each with potentially different DNA - because they are designed to be unstable genetically - producing many similar but slightly different offspring.

Even the fungus offspring don't always combine their DNA sexually like we do , instead they sometimes exchange some of their DNA with each other - horizontally - as well as with other non-fungus beings near by.

The filamentous (thread-like) nature of these soil creatures - dozens of feet of incredibly tiny threads of life in each tiny colony - allows them to find nutrients in every nook and cranny in a nutrient poor world .

The competing filamentous strands of bacteria and fungi mean they lie together in extensive,intimate, personal contact - allowing both to make the most of the very rare opportunities to exchange DNA between the seeming wide divide between the animal kingdom (fungus) and the bacteria kingdom.

(Wide if you believe Darwin and his fans - but I don't.)

Dawson worked hard at Bacterial Transformation (aka horizontal gene transfer) (aka recombinant DNA), from 1928 to 1933 at least, long before the rest of science ever did.

 But I doubt that even he knew for sure that the penicillin he worked with from 1940 to 1945 was the result of  some earlier Bacterial Transformation experiments ----done by the microbes themselves !

But he might have suspected something - he knew that Selman Waksman at nearby Rutgers University had already shown that these soil bacteria produced a lot of antibiotic materials while it was rare to see antibiotics from fungus in general - except for the fungi closest in lifestyle to the soil bacteria.

Commensality between fungus and bacteria in the soil gave us penicillin.

No, I stand corrected.

It was Dawson's openness to those moldy musty smells, from his World War One trench experiences 25 years earlier, that brought penicillin out of the trench and into the hospital ward.

I mean that not as a metaphor but as reality : penicillium and streptomyces are found in the earth, literally in the trenches.

And just as the earth once acted as a barrier to shell fragments and saved many an infantryman's life during WWI, now trench earth bacteria and fungus gave us antibiotics to again save the infantryman in WWII , if he was hit by a shell fragment.

Dawson saw the war and the world down at ground level, at the level of the MOS 745 - the bog ordinary Grunt,GI or Tommy,  not from some Olympian Height of indifference.

 And this is why he gave his life, so some bog ordinary 4F patients and 4F grunts could live....

COMMENSALITY: Two Bodied or Many-Bodied ?

Michael Marshall

Modernity, NEWTONIAN Modernity, was a simple-minded ideology, asking simple questions and expecting even simpler answers.

The NAIF philosophy of a NAIF-minded age.

Newton more or less correctly predicted the short term stability of the biggest objects in our Solar System, after they had stopped their earlier ,dangerously irregular ,behavior when the Solar System was in its youth.

He could correctly predict the future paths a single big object and a single small object would make, considering only that both attracted each other via the force of gravity.

Sun and Earth, Earth and Moon : Newtonian Science's triumph : 'Solving the Two Body Problem'.

But the really dangerous objects in the Solar System these days are those tens of thousands of various-sized irregular chunks of rock in the Asteroid Belt.

Because they are so small they reflect little sunlight and so are dark and nearly invisible to even today's best human observation tools and skill sets.

All those semi-equally-sized thousands of irregularly shaped rocks tumbling about relatively near to each other leads to highly unpredictable summing of the gravity forces acting on each other, minute by minute, let alone decades in advance.

This means the asteroids' paths through space are highly erratic in normal times.

 Even worse, they can fall into a sort of avalanche-waiting-to-happen mode where a tiny unexpected twitch could send a huge high speed missile headed for Earth with the force of hundreds to hundreds of thousands of H-Bombs.

If we don't see them in time, and if we don't send up a rocket and a nuclear bomb to divert their path away from Earth, its game over civilized Humanity and maybe even game over all Life on Earth bigger than a microbe as well.

Preventing this should have been JOB ONE in the 300 plus years that Newtonian Science has been around, but it's scientific theories simply weren't up for the job.

Fair enough I say: admit it, and let someone else do the job right.

But no.

Newtonian Science was proclaimed - and taught - (is still taught) as all that a practical man needs to order his world.

A problem that Modernist Science couldn't solve wasn't explained away as 'being in God's hands', (because of course Modernity didn't believe in God.)

No, it simply wasn't talked about as all.

Newton's laws could tell us that Mars wasn't about to crash into the Earth - which none of us had thought would ever happen anyway, even before Science chimed in with its me-too-ism.

(I say 'Mars isn't about to crash into Earth' because newer computer models show a very slim chance it could happen someday if the variety of gravity forces in the entire Solar System happen to hit a not-so-sweet resonance point.)

That was Newtonism's 'triumph' and it was the hollowest triumph ever touted this since of Madison Avenue hucksterism.

Newtonian Science's failures were many (predict the weather or turbulent current flows anyone ?) but the failure to predict an asteroid killing us all while we sleep overnight has to be its biggest single failure.

The real world, outside the tenured offices and laboratories of basic science, is the home of applied science and this is where Newton hit a snag.

The Sun and the Earth have an infinite number of gravity and electromagnetic forces impacting on them, from all angles, at all
levels of energy, and varying independently minute by minute.

There is no real world 'two body problems' .

I repeat, no real world 'two body problems'- all problems  in this universe/ in this reality are many-bodied.

Admitably all those forces upon the Earth normally are tiny, even when summed in some unholy alliance, compared to the attraction the giant Sun has for the tiny Earth.

So a 'two body problem' is really like the relationship between that of parent and child, man and woman, master and slave,human host and microbe.

I hope one can begin to see the social/economic/ideological attraction for the modernist male for saying that the important problems in the physical world are all 'two body problems'.

It can neatly be carried over to all of life's problems.

And , of course, everything that happens seem to happen as seen through the larger object's eyes.

For example.

We tend to think and act as if the microbes upon us are either predators (parasites) or spongers (commensal) or at best creatures we endure because we give them lots of free food and they give us back a few vitamins (mutualists).

We are the HOSTS and they mostly unwanted guests eating at our table: its another two bodied problem, big Sun-like Host and tiny parasite-like Earth.

But in fact, we humans can only breath air, survive in a moderately stable climate and find food to live off of, because of microbes.

(My definition of microbe is all life forms too small to see with the casual naked eye --- effectively they are invisible to us.)

Remove just them, but all of them, and Humanity would start dying off in a few months and I do not see any way we could do much about it.

They have not just been on Earth for a thousand times longer than humanoids have - and a million times longer than civilized humanity has , they live everywhere --- from miles underground to high in the sky, in frozen ice and scalding hot chemical waters.

And size ?

Individually invisible, collectively they well outweigh all other life on Earth - not just humans but giant whales and giant trees as well.

They are our Host globally and we are their Host locally (on or in our individual bodies.)

But once we look with our new commensally-oriented eyes, we quickly find there are many Hosts and Guests interacting throughout the Earth's biosphere.

We could claim that "we get our oxygen through trees" (not true but partially true - we get some from them) - "we don't need microbes after they taught the trees to split water and give us oxygen".

But in fact most trees could not survive if the microbial fungi that co-exist by their roots weren't there, these two lifeforms are simultaneously Host and Guest, clinging to each other closely for continued life.

Consequences quickly multiply unexpectedly in a many-bodied commensal world: when a fungicide ends up killing the fungi on those roots and the trees start dying, for example.

But that is a problem relatively easy to avoid.

However all the various recycling of scarce nutrients that keep the earth livable and edible react with one another in complex and unpredictable ways that are well beyond our understanding let alone our controlling at the present time.

By this I mean they react sort of consistently with each other up to a point in a sort of 'varying mildly around a midpoint equilibrium' and then suddenly shift to a wholly new equilibrium point that could leave the world very different indeed.

As in puff - all human are gone.

Nothing dramatic seems to happen for a long time as we alter the ratios of the various nutrients (oxygen,nitrogen,carbon,sulfur, phosphorus, potassium, etc) flying about around us until they reach that point in an avalanche's life when the slightest breeze causes a landslide.

Mars suddenly does crash into Earth or the polar ice caps suddenly do all melt in 25 years.

We can't solve any many-bodied problem in physics with the entire global economy devoted to the computer trying to solve it.

And basic science craves exact solutions and reproducibility as basic tenets of whether something is scientific.

Unexpectedly, I totally agree with them.

Most of the 'science' successes that we humans talk about today , and most of them from the past, hasn't been pure science, but rather trial and error technology, informed massively by the near successes of pure science.

Many bodied problems - the problems of the real world, can not be solved in the exact meaning of scientists and math professors.

But we can often get in real close, coming up with a tentative, approximate, temporary solution, provided we also keep our eyes open for any signs of a sudden change possibly coming up in the near future.

We do it by trial and error, caution, openness, humility - muddling through.

Similarly with Life on Earth and its 'many bodied commensality' - we can't perfectly solve it or perfectly predict it, but we can muddle through it, with caution mixed with openness to change and humility to admitting failures....

If GOD is COMPLEXITY, He's not necessarily on the side of the BIG Battalions

Michael Marshall

Bacteria, like man-made proximity fuses, are very small but not necessarily simple.

Man-made polymer plastic molecules - or the world's largest molecule (the one large molecule of cell wall that wraps around and protects a bacteria's interior) - are big but not necessarily complex.

Modernity was naif in most ways, particularly when it came to the paradoxes of lifeforms.

It had a simplistic hierarchy of size and complexity - and could never stop from conflating the two.

Ever bigger and bigger hydro dams and cannons and skyscrapers  and battleships and on and on could always be trusted to get Modernist Man's juices flowing.

But inside a bacteria's tiny genome are packed a surprisingly large number of highly varied genes.

They don't program , for example, for 40 pounds of relatively undifferentiated muscle like you might see on the average male human.

Yes, its big, its butch, its bulky but frankly its like knitting : knot one purl one, knit one ,purl two - for billions of iterations.

By contrast each of a bacteria's hundreds of gene complexes can hide a completely different form of metabolism - those guys can eat a surprisingly wide variety of food stocks - thing that frankly we don't see as food.

That is why they have hung on on Earth for four billion years through extreme heat and cold, or poison gases and resource famines ; surviving millions of years of droughts and ice ages in deep sleep only to emerge alive and ready to rock and roll.

But us ?

Yes we're big.

Big like dinosaurs and all the other extinct mega fauna - and just about as vulnerable to even minor changes in our feeding regimes.

In our post-modern AGE OF COMMENSALITY we are beginning to accept that Life's tiniest beings have much hidden complexity under the hood that we are only just beginning to learn about.

Bring back the Dr Martin Henry Dawson from 1927 into the research labs of today and he'd hit the ground running - nothing we have uncovered in 85 years since would really throw him for a loop.

Been there, done that.....

"I" goes "CO" : human "I"solationism goes "CO"mmensal, 1939-1945

Michael Marshall

After 500 years of world dominance, something subtly changed in the psyche of Modernist Man over the relatively brief period of 1939-1945.

Modernist Man reluctantly began to accept that Humanity was not "I"solated above and beyond nature and stopped denying nature can affect us and that we can impact it.

Very tentatively, Modernist Man began to accept that Humanity was deeply embedded within nature --- and that like it or not, we along with all other Life on Earth, dine or die at a "CO"mmon table.

Now, admittedly, terms like Isolationism or Denialism are not conventionally used to describe MOdernity's relationship with Nature.

Instead those words evoke some Americans from the Midwest first fighting to remain isolationist, between 1939 to 1941, on the question of preventing the Polish Holocaust and then later, not missing a beat, going to their graves denying it ever happened.

But if we recall that in the 1940s many Midwesters did consider their "Polack" neighbours as lesser beings and much too close to Nature for comfort, we begin to see the parallels....

post MODERNITY is pre COMMENSALITY , n'est pas ?

This blog argues that while the Peak of Modernity was the New York's World's Fair of 1939, Modernity was heading for its Nadir by 1945.

But !

But still hasn't hit its nadir yet - more than sixty five years later .

Post Modernity, which is the only world that the majority of the world's population (human, plant, animal,microbe) has ever known, is a hybrid existence.

It has elements of both the older Modernist Age and the newer Commensal Age co-existing in somewhat parallel streams, rather than having the two ideologies contesting each other directly and continuously.

This blog's job, as I see it, is to hasten MODERNITY out the door.

And, of course, to hasten on Commensality, before Modernity burns up this planet and renders the whole question moot.

But there is no way I am going to sprout cliches that we are "standing on the threshold of a totally new world, etc,etc."

All my talk of "LIFE 2.0" is rhetoric, not a fact.

We are changing, we have been changing and will go on changing forever.

No revolution - no revolution truly worthy of that name - will ever be televised : it will drift in slowly like early morning fog, speaking a language of its own new invention.

We will only truly realize that it has arrived ,at the moment of its departure - in the clarity of  hindsight.

I don't know how COMMENSALITY will turn out  and I am very mindful that most future-oriented predictions throughout history have been less accurate than flipping a coin with your eyes closed.

But this blog can (and will) imagine how it might look.

That is, it will express my personal hopes for the shape of the future, without pretending they are predictions worth betting the store upon.

I truly believe that the coming into being of The Commensal Age is already happening, without much conscious action on the part of anyone to make it so.

But I also believe a single individual can help speed it along and shape its path, to the fullest that their talents will allow....

May 1940: our two protagonists enter stage left

The Penicillin Story had been underway for almost twelve years when our two protagonists, Howard Florey and Henry Dawson, first seriously entered the story in May 1940, Mensis Horribilis, and changed the Story's direction completely.

It is true that Ernest Chain, Leslie Epstein, and Norman Heatley had been working with penicillin at the Dunn Pathology Institute at Oxford University for about two years by that point.

But only when it became intensely and personally important to the Dunn's director, Howard Florey, (when he injected the first therapeutic doses for some artificially infected mice),did it gain some real momentum for the side of the war time penicillin story that I will call "Chemistry".

Dawson's team (Karl Meyer specifically) didn't display any interest in penicillin still sometime between June 10th 1940 and September 7th 1940 when he first heard of it from Leslie Epstein, newly arrived from Oxford and the Dunn.

Dawson didn't become directly involved in penicillin until he first heard of Florey's published results from Meyer, sometime around September 9th 1940.

But he was emotionally ready for committing to penicillin as his ABF agent (Anti BioFilmic agent) since a series of New York area symposiums on Rheumatic Fever and Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis (SBE) in April and May 1940, that had just been published in article form in August 1940.

After the development of the Sulfa drugs, bacterial diseases seemed passe to the ambitious medical researcher.

As a result, it was becoming clear that the victims of (middle class) virus diseases like Polio would soon occupy the emotional and charitable space once occupied by (working class) Rheumatic Fever patients.

But Rheumatic Fever/SBE was still the major killer of school age children and young adults, killing far more than Polio by at least ten to one.

Dawson was not employed by his hospital and university to worry himself over SBE, to put it mildly.

Endocarditis was generally thought of as a disease for heart specialists, while Dawson operated a day clinic for chronic arthritis - in 1940, about as low as you could go on status
ladder in an acute-life-threatening-disease-oriented teaching hospital.

But it seems he stepped in, early in September 1940 when he found no heart specialists felt penicillin could be the long sought cure and he found no drug company willing to make clinical penicillin for such a disease.

His heart drew him in.

But his head kept him there.

His lifelong hobby or personal research focus, as opposed to his day job, had always been the commensenality shared between humans and their live-in microbes, a sort of uneasy co-existence or cold war as we and they struggled to survive against the activities of the other side.

His two previous developments ( HGT/Q-Sensing for s. pneumoniae and Molecular Mimicry for s. pyogenes)  had profound implications for all Biology, not just Medicine.

Unfortunately, they had no immediate application for fighting back these two sometimes-deadly bugs.

But his instant and intense conviction that penicillin's combination of non-toxicity and extreme diffusability made it the perfect ABF tool for penetrating SBE vegetations ((biofilmic colonies) on heart valves would let him get three bugs for the price of one.

This was because it was s. pyogenes that caused our bodies to attack its own heart valves - damaged areas that later were colonized by s. pneumoniae or s. viridans - leading to  fatal acute or subacute endocarditis.

I will call this side of the wartime penicillin story, "Commensality" ....