In one of those ironies of history, the smallest Manhattan Project has turned out to have had the biggest impact ...

The historian is always being assailed by new generations of social scientists and new generations of wannabe social scientists (utopians) both who claim that we can safely predict the future from our study of the repeating patterns of the past.

But the poor naive historian only sees that the past repeats itself so imperfectly each new time around as to require everyone to be cautious in predicting the future, merely from the events of the distant past and the events of the recent present.

Case in point : who in 1940 (besides perhaps Adorno) would have predicted that our present age's moral cum cultural views would look more like the moral cum cultural values of the smallest Manhattan Project rather than those of the biggest Manhattan Project ?

But as we approach 2015, that fact seems increasingly obvious......

A full two years after Florey arrives at Peoria, the NRRL starts looking for new sources of penicillin strains..."Soon" ?

Penicillin: II. Natural Variation

and Penicillin Production in

Penicillium notatum and

Allied Species

If pollyanna historians says two years - in the middle of a war - is "soon" , then I guess it must be so.

"Howard Florey arrives in Peoria in early July 1941 and "soon" planes of the American Air Transport Command are delivering moldy earth samples from the four corners of the world.... and that is why we have abundant penicillin today."

I always knew this story had to be bunk : the Air Transport Command won't even be in the four corners of the world for another year or two or three.

Ken Raper, the man at NRRL who directed that search and should know best says (in the1945 peer reviewed article at the top of this post) that the search started in June 1943.

Ie, after the OSRD stepped back from two years of navel fluff removal and the OPRD got involved in its typically no nonsense way.

If the OSRD's infamous AN Richards wasn't so hell-bound on a chemical synthetic solution, the NRRL would have gotten money and encouragement a lot earlier to search for higher producing strains than those held already by the NRRL  --- and these strains were key to the final successful chapter in the long penicillin saga...

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.........