Tired, Poor or Huddled

Roche's Avastin-for-all versus Henry Dawson's Penicillin-for-all , what's the difference ?

Avastin is not in short supply and Roche sells it to all, regardless of race gender et al.

Penicillin G : ditto,ditto .

But Avastin costs $100,000 a year and only extends life an average of 4 months.

In bulk, Penicillin G is only about $1 for a two week long life-saving treatment.

The Manhattan Project for the small

Gather 'round kiddies, as teacher tells you how America burned a hundred thousand children to a crisp, along with their mommies and daddies and grandmas.

Oh wait ---------- darn !! ------ there's a subtitle !

Ah hem.

Now children , have you ever been so sick that you have to go to the doctor ? Well sometimes children are so very sick that the doctor even comes to their house - and at top speed to.

Better for America winning friends : A-bomb or 'Penicillin-for-all' ?

How was the post-war Pax Americana to be best created ?

Was it best to intimidate other nations into being friendly to America by reminding them who held the A-Bomb, and held it alone ?

Or was it best to freely give away 'Penicillin-for-all' , to hope to win other nations' respect by this example of America's open-hearted generosity ?

In other words, was it best for America to project itself as the Gordon Gekko side of Manhattan and reward the efforts of those 'Masters of the Universe', Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves ?

Or was it best to project itself as the Emma Lazarus side of Manhattan and exalt the efforts of the smallest Manhattan Project , that of Henry Dawson, Karl Meyer, Eleanor Chaffee and Gladys Hobby ?

Manhattanites , "brag about your country"

It really shouldn't be my job to blow wartime Manhattan's horn.

Joe Howe, the Bluenosers' favourite son, always advised his countryman to brag about their country :

Brag of your country.  When I am abroad, I brag of everything 
Nova Scotia is, has  or can produce and when they beat me at 
everything else, I say, 'How high do your tides rise?


Don't let the 9/11 plotters define wartime Manhattan to the world 
for you.


Admit The Bomb and wartime eugenic inclinations , but also talk up Henry Dawson and Patty Malone , Dante Colitti and Penicillin.

Take a bow ....

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....

Henry Dawson, Champion of the Second Chance ... and the Second Glance

Manhattan-based doctor (Martin) Henry Dawson championed the smallest, weakest and poorest of beings all his life.

On one hand, they were human beings, such as the institutionalized chronically ill at Goldwater Hospital.

Or discarded young people , dying needlessly from subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE).

In both cases, he wanted to give them a second chance at a near normal life in what was, after all, the famed City of the Second Chance.

On the other hand, sometimes his focus was upon microbe beings, creatures about whom it can't really be said that he wanted to ensure their continued survival - he felt they did that well enough on their own !

Instead, he merely wanted all of us to take a Second Glance at just how well these incredibly tiny ,delicate, immobile sacs of water managed against extremities of physical conditions and the potent threat of the human immune system and modern medicine.

Starting in the 1920s, he pioneered studies of their survival techniques such as HGT, Quorum Sensing, Molecular Mimicry and Biofilms : still cutting edge science even today, eighty years later.

His subtle point was that if these, the smallest of the small, can manage survival so well than perhaps small human beings and small human nations can also manage equally well, if we just let them live rather than trying to enslave and kill them in the name of  a Progress that must always be Bigger , to be Better.

The Allied governments  never one to miss a chance to match the Axis in moral turpitude , wanted wartime penicillin to remain a secret available only for the 1As - "Penicillin from New York's Cold Spring Harbour's Eugenics lab" , as it were.

The tired, poor huddled 4Fs

Dawson was equally bull-headed in wanting to see the Nazis combatted morally as well as militarily, by demonstrating just how well we looked after our tired poor and huddled 4Fs,  even during a Total War : "Penicillin from New York's Emma Lazarus", as it were.

Janus-like Manhattan tried both approaches at first ,  very  strongly favouring the eugenic approach, until a few good Manhattanites rose up in protest.

Then wartime Manhattan was revealed to also come from the Venus of love and peace as well as from the Mars of anger and war.

Finally ... a Good News Story from the Bad News War.

Remembering when Manhattan was from Venus

"Now I am become Hope, Healer of Nations."

Why Manhattan choses to only remember its death-dealing activities during WWII is quite beyond me.

Just because that is all that the 9/11 bombers chose to recall , is no reason to emulate their example.

(Ie, the 911 planners chose only to focus upon the Mars side of Manhattan's Janus-like face.)

Yes , Columbia University in Manhattan ( along with a dozen other sites in greater NYC) was a key part of the best known wartime Manhattan Project, the militarization of the death-dealing atom.

In fact, the key part : because Columbia perfected gaseous diffusion, the method used on all sides to produce all the megadeath weapons of the Cold War.

Native Manhattanite, Robert Oppenheimer, seemingly sealed that image of Manhattan for all time, when he intoned after the first atomic blast, "Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds."

But Columbia University in wartime was also home to the other - the unknown - Manhattan Project :  ensuring that the life-sustaining properties of natural penicillin were freely available to all , at a low price, and during the war years when it was so badly needed.

Henry Dawson did not discover natural penicillin, but he was key in insisting it be widely produced during WWII, rather than a half dozen lacklustre years later.

Far more fundamentally, he was key in de-militarizing wartime penicillin, making it not just a secret medicine available only to the Allied front line, but something than people of all nations, races, creeds and genders felt they had a right to obtain when they were dying, without the cost bankrupting their families.

It remains to this day, seventy five years later, that rarity : an inexpensive safe lifesaver that has never been patented and over-priced.

The dying Dawson did all this because in an era when Bigger was Better and the small were just impediments to Progress, he so strongly believed in their right to existence and happiness.

From his tiny lab in upper Manhattan he radiated a message of hope to a troubled world.

Like Lady Liberty herself, he reminded the world of the Venus side to Janus Manhattan....

To 911 Bombers, Manhattan was from Mars - Henry Dawson's story could have reminded them it was also from Venus

We must alway remember that there was an other Manhattan Project during WWII ; unfortunately one that remains almost totally unknown to this day.

It involved Dr Martin Henry Dawson sacrificing his own life, all in an effort to see that wartime penicillin's scanty production and distribution was de-militarized  by the Allies and then made available to all the world's 'tired, poor and huddled'.

If his story had been better known much earlier,  Janus Manhattan would have shown two faces to the world , above all to the world that spawned the 911 Bombers.

One face of Manhattan would still intone "Now I am become Death, Destroyer of Nations" and brandish Big Science and a Big Bomb to go with its earlier Mars-like image of Big Skyscrapers and Big Business.

But the other face could have intoned "Now I am become Hope, Healer of Nations" .

It would remind the world of Manhattan's Venus side during WWII.

And remind us of the Statue of Liberty and of the other face of a  vast city where small diverse ethnic neighbourhoods are as least as common as big faceless corporate headquarters.

It is still not too late to tell Dawson's story to the world and hope it helps remind us not to see people and events through only a black and white lens but rather to see life in its full technicolor complexity....

The 1940 Peace Bomb joins the 1800 Peace Mine...

In any other circumstances, pacifist Leo Szilard might have been best remembered as the inventor (along with fellow pacifist Albert Einstein) of the modern fridge.

Instead he joined some others (sometimes pacifist others) in working on a super weapon that would so frighten the planet's militarists that they would instantly sue for permanent world peace.

Unfortunately, it was agreed that the backward militarist mind would require a convincing demonstration project, before being convinced.

So in the end a few hundred thousand people ended up dead in radiation and fire, all for 'the greatest good of the greatest number' ---but universal peace still did not break out - far from it.

So poor Szilard is today primarily remembered for instigating the Manhattan Project rather than inventing the perfect fridge ....or the perfect peace.

By contrast, Robert Fulton, a fellow New York City area resident like Szilard, (albeit from a hundred and fifty years earlier ), is best known today for building the first commercial steam boat service in the world, between New York City and Albany.

But as H. Bruce Franklin points out in his ground-breaking book "War Stars" , Fulton had had his utopian pacifist weapon scheme as well.

This submarine and sea-mine system was designed to destroy the British navy, freeing the high seas for universal free trade and commerce and thus introducing an era of permanent world peace.

This was/is standard centuries-old Liberal dogma, still much spouted today.

Fulton's willingness to sink a few real ships (along with their real crews) is also right on par with all the many Liberal peace bomb efforts: in the utilitarianism-driven willingness to see a 'few' die (unwillingly and unasked) for the greater good of the greater number.

Between Fulton and Szilard, New York has thrown up a number of Liberal pacifist and their peace weapons - perhaps most notably that shy pacifist Carl Norden.... and his precision WW II bombsight of the same name.

All these plans start off as efforts to design a totally new advance on weapon systems.

But these superweapons are not for profitably continuing sales in continuous wars.

Rather they are to 'demonstrate' their horrific effects just once and then usher in world peace forever.

All of them have a scope and gravitas and a vision about them that seems perfectly cut to fit Manhattan's taste in grandness-for-the-sake-of-grandness, thus becoming 'the Empire State Building of New York intellectual conceits'.....