It is still not often recognized that by the late 1930s, particularly after the huge success of the totally-not-from-nature Sulfa drugs (because they were 100% artificial) , high tech pharmaceuticals had became the key pillar upholding "The White Man's Burden".
Firstly - but still relatively unimportant compared to today - the biggest high tech pharmaceutical nations intended to earn lots of of export revenues, via exclusive sales of high tech drugs to their informal (Germany and America) or formal (Britain and France) empires.
To do so, they had to strongly imply that that the only really safe and effective drugs were made of pure chemical synthetics produced in the leading medical research and chemical industry nations - conveniently , themselves and themselves only.
But this claim has much bigger 'legs' .
Because high tech drugs could also be used as the best single way to defend an old and failing hegemonic trope : the so called "White Man's Burden".
In the recent past, Europeans and European Americans had justified invading and ruthlessly exploiting others' societies as part of a holy missionary drive to bring Christianity, peace and democracy to primitive or despotic cultures.
Doctors and nurses had always been a big part of that mission effort but only as clinicians : hands-on, bedside doctors and nurses.
This hands-on help was all part of the (now-fading) 19th century belief in empathy, charity and humanitarianism.
In the sparkling brand new Twentieth Century, cold hard rational Science was the new God.
Pharmaceutical research could be used to hold off the many new opponents Civilized European Man faced by the time of the Great Depression.
Let us imagine a drug company ad's illustration from circa 1940.
In one corner of the illustration : a white European-origined man , well educated and upper middle class, stern-faced in a white lab coat in a gleaming porcelain white laboratory located in a big country's biggest city, staring thoughtfully at the synthetic contents of a beaker.
In the other corner : a dark-faced peasant woman, poor and uneducated, cooking up some foul-smelling 'healing' Nature-based brew in her rural hovel, somewhere in the dank Tropics.
Implied strongly in the text copy below was the claim that her mishmash of a folk remedy would only harm rather than help, while his 100% pure synthetic drug cured - completely, cheaply and safely.
No Oxford-educated-darkie was going to be able to "outside agitate" his way around that winsome storyline.
Obviously ,no one expected an "inside agitator" would come along and betray both his race and his profession.
But that is exactly what New York's Columbia University based Henry Dawson did.
In 1941, in the august pages of the New York Times itself, house organ of modernity , he gave a loud defence of his life-saving "crude penicillin" as home-brewed himself from foul-smelling natural mold slime.
No wonder his ultimately hugely successful efforts were so resisted while he was alive and so buried with him after his premature death......
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Monday, September 9, 2013
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......
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......
The smallest Manhattan project had the BIGGEST impact : the irony of 75 years on ...
With the hindsight of 75 years on, for the Modern Age 1945 turned out to be "the best of times and the worst of times" , its apogee and its nadir.
The triumph of the biggest Manhattan Project : America's exclusive patent on the ability to synthesize and destroy the atomic building blocks of reality, seemed to demonstrate how potentially profitable the total control of Nature could be.
By contrast, the smallest Manhattan Project seemed a throwback to an earlier age.
It went back to Nature and to the penicillium mold to provide a medical miracle and then compounded this affront to the modern ethos by inclusively and cheaply offering it to all : to the poor, to the tired and to the huddled.
But if exclusivity and the synthetic were the hallmark of the Modern Age, our present age always seeks the greatest possible inclusivity and much prefers the natural over the artificial.
Perhaps then, in one of history's frequent ironies, 1945's smallest Manhattan Project turned out to have had the biggest impact after all......
The triumph of the biggest Manhattan Project : America's exclusive patent on the ability to synthesize and destroy the atomic building blocks of reality, seemed to demonstrate how potentially profitable the total control of Nature could be.
By contrast, the smallest Manhattan Project seemed a throwback to an earlier age.
It went back to Nature and to the penicillium mold to provide a medical miracle and then compounded this affront to the modern ethos by inclusively and cheaply offering it to all : to the poor, to the tired and to the huddled.
But if exclusivity and the synthetic were the hallmark of the Modern Age, our present age always seeks the greatest possible inclusivity and much prefers the natural over the artificial.
Perhaps then, in one of history's frequent ironies, 1945's smallest Manhattan Project turned out to have had the biggest impact after all......
Friday, September 6, 2013
" Crude is more than 'good enough' ...
... if it can save lives right now ! "
Lifesaving's perpetual understudy , Penicillin, unexpectedly made her long overdue debut in a medical theatre in uptown Manhattan on October 16th 1940 .
Albeit more than a dozen years after the best lifesaver ever known was first discovered.
It all happened when Dr Henry Dawson suddenly broke his understanding with biochemist Karl Meyer that penicillin would not be used systemically (given to save a life), until she had been synthesized or at least very highly refined.
It had been assumed that this happy event would probably occur sometime early in the new university term starting in January 1941.
But it had all changed now.
For Dawson was facing not just one but two young patients dying on his ward of the invariably fatal untreatable disease SBE that he was convinced penicillin could finally cure.
SBE usually hit the poor, immigrants and minorities.
Naturally enough, on the very first day of the new draft, they were judged by the eugenically-minded medical elite as being the 4Fs of the 4Fs, life unworthy of wasting too much expensive and scarce medical attention upon in a time of war.
Dawson felt passionately different - he felt that saving the 4Fs of the 4Fs in a time of war was the best possible riposte to Hitler and his values : because not a military victory but a moral victory for the Allies was what was really needed to fire the world up to tackle the Nazis with serious energy.
'If crude penicillin can start saving lives now, it is more than refined enough' was Dawson's new mantra , as he introduced this neologism into the medical-chemical vernacular.
To a chemistry-besotted medical fraternity, wedded to ever greater purity and refinement , this deliberate use of the term crude tied together with their main job, lifesaving, was like a red flag.
Crude penicillin for crude patients was their unspoken sentiment.
It didn't make Dawson popular then or now with the medical and chemical communities..... or their historians.
Because it reminds us all, that as Hippocrates looked on in horror, for 15 wasted years the world medical community choose to put refinement before life-saving.
But what ordinary patients thought of Dawson's notions has hardly ever been asked.
I am a patient who has received cheap, abundant , natural , non-synthetic, non-patented, "inclusive" penicillin of the Henry Dawson variety and I am grateful to him : eternally grateful.
I don't think I am alone.
"Hyssop in a time of Cedar" then is a 'patient's eye view' of Henry Dawson's impact on the genesis of wartime penicillin : from exclusive, secret, patented and militarized to inclusive, public, public domain and de-militarized.
Because the knowledge that cheap, abundant penicillin was being made available - now - to dying people of all classes, colours and genders around the world was more than just WWII's equivalent of WWI's promise of a return to "a land fit for heroes" : it was the Word made visible.
It was not just the fact that penicillin , like the sulfa drugs before it, saved lives - that was not enough.
It more in the way news reports revealed that it was carried literally around the world, by bombers diverted from their normal killing work, during the Total War to end All Wars, to save the lives of dying babies.
This - the promise of returning home to a world 'healthy enough for heroes' - finally seemed an Allied cause worth dying for.
This sentiment was best expressed, not by a British Prime Minister in a barnburner of a open air speech, but by the phrase-makers of an new age : an anonymous copywriter slaving away for a booze baron from somewhere out in the American Mid West.
Over a painting of a severely wounded American GI getting penicillin in a vividly colourful jungle battlefield, were the evocative words , "Thanks to PENICILLIN - he will come home! "
And thanks too, to the bog-ordinary mold that created this miracle this ad reminded its viewers.
That something ordinarily so small and despised could wrought such miracles - that too put paid to Hitler and Tojo's claim that Might made right and Bigger was always better.
If inclusivity , rather than unitary exclusivity, is the hallmark of our post-modern era, then Henry Dawson's crude penicillin for crude patients was one of the physical first artifacts of postmodernity...
Lifesaving's perpetual understudy , Penicillin, unexpectedly made her long overdue debut in a medical theatre in uptown Manhattan on October 16th 1940 .
Albeit more than a dozen years after the best lifesaver ever known was first discovered.
It all happened when Dr Henry Dawson suddenly broke his understanding with biochemist Karl Meyer that penicillin would not be used systemically (given to save a life), until she had been synthesized or at least very highly refined.
It had been assumed that this happy event would probably occur sometime early in the new university term starting in January 1941.
But it had all changed now.
For Dawson was facing not just one but two young patients dying on his ward of the invariably fatal untreatable disease SBE that he was convinced penicillin could finally cure.
SBE usually hit the poor, immigrants and minorities.
Naturally enough, on the very first day of the new draft, they were judged by the eugenically-minded medical elite as being the 4Fs of the 4Fs, life unworthy of wasting too much expensive and scarce medical attention upon in a time of war.
Dawson felt passionately different - he felt that saving the 4Fs of the 4Fs in a time of war was the best possible riposte to Hitler and his values : because not a military victory but a moral victory for the Allies was what was really needed to fire the world up to tackle the Nazis with serious energy.
'If crude penicillin can start saving lives now, it is more than refined enough' was Dawson's new mantra , as he introduced this neologism into the medical-chemical vernacular.
To a chemistry-besotted medical fraternity, wedded to ever greater purity and refinement , this deliberate use of the term crude tied together with their main job, lifesaving, was like a red flag.
Crude penicillin for crude patients was their unspoken sentiment.
It didn't make Dawson popular then or now with the medical and chemical communities..... or their historians.
Because it reminds us all, that as Hippocrates looked on in horror, for 15 wasted years the world medical community choose to put refinement before life-saving.
But what ordinary patients thought of Dawson's notions has hardly ever been asked.
I am a patient who has received cheap, abundant , natural , non-synthetic, non-patented, "inclusive" penicillin of the Henry Dawson variety and I am grateful to him : eternally grateful.
I don't think I am alone.
"Hyssop in a time of Cedar" then is a 'patient's eye view' of Henry Dawson's impact on the genesis of wartime penicillin : from exclusive, secret, patented and militarized to inclusive, public, public domain and de-militarized.
Because the knowledge that cheap, abundant penicillin was being made available - now - to dying people of all classes, colours and genders around the world was more than just WWII's equivalent of WWI's promise of a return to "a land fit for heroes" : it was the Word made visible.
It was not just the fact that penicillin , like the sulfa drugs before it, saved lives - that was not enough.
It more in the way news reports revealed that it was carried literally around the world, by bombers diverted from their normal killing work, during the Total War to end All Wars, to save the lives of dying babies.
This - the promise of returning home to a world 'healthy enough for heroes' - finally seemed an Allied cause worth dying for.
This sentiment was best expressed, not by a British Prime Minister in a barnburner of a open air speech, but by the phrase-makers of an new age : an anonymous copywriter slaving away for a booze baron from somewhere out in the American Mid West.
Over a painting of a severely wounded American GI getting penicillin in a vividly colourful jungle battlefield, were the evocative words , "Thanks to PENICILLIN - he will come home! "
And thanks too, to the bog-ordinary mold that created this miracle this ad reminded its viewers.
That something ordinarily so small and despised could wrought such miracles - that too put paid to Hitler and Tojo's claim that Might made right and Bigger was always better.
If inclusivity , rather than unitary exclusivity, is the hallmark of our post-modern era, then Henry Dawson's crude penicillin for crude patients was one of the physical first artifacts of postmodernity...
Wednesday, September 4, 2013
thank GOD the Vatican isn't run by book reviewers...
...or we'd never have any Saints and Martyrs.
The book reviewers' world - amateur and professional - seems a material one , consumed by the almighty dollar figure on the cover of any book they choose to review.
Or so it seems : but there is actually a more acceptable reason for their surface shallowness.
Simply overwhelmed by all the books offered up for review, they share among themselves one simple - brutal - rule of thumb : if a book is really, really good a big canny commercial publisher would be offering it up for sale, at a hefty price.
If it is merely good, it would be at least published by some sort of commercial publisher or , if self-published, at least offered for sale at a hefty price on Amazon.
But a book researched, written and offered up for free on its own website, in an act of charity, merely because the subject of the book after all offered up his life in an act of charity ?
Interesting concept - worthy even - but we don't have time to review it.
Sorry.
So dear blog viewer, if you want to read all of "Life's Manhattan Project" for free - with colourful illustrations by the author to boot - cling to this blog site like a shipwrecked sailor clings to a log.
Otherwise, be prepared to pony up $9.99 and taxes to get the e-book version from Amazon Kindle : black and white text without the illustrations.
Or patiently wait for the off chance it might published in hardcover by one of the BigSix/ Five/ Four publishers at $39.95 a pop.
On that lachyrmose day, it might be expensive enough to be dissected by even the very overwhelmed book reviewers at the New York Times....
The book reviewers' world - amateur and professional - seems a material one , consumed by the almighty dollar figure on the cover of any book they choose to review.
Or so it seems : but there is actually a more acceptable reason for their surface shallowness.
Simply overwhelmed by all the books offered up for review, they share among themselves one simple - brutal - rule of thumb : if a book is really, really good a big canny commercial publisher would be offering it up for sale, at a hefty price.
If it is merely good, it would be at least published by some sort of commercial publisher or , if self-published, at least offered for sale at a hefty price on Amazon.
But a book researched, written and offered up for free on its own website, in an act of charity, merely because the subject of the book after all offered up his life in an act of charity ?
Interesting concept - worthy even - but we don't have time to review it.
Sorry.
So dear blog viewer, if you want to read all of "Life's Manhattan Project" for free - with colourful illustrations by the author to boot - cling to this blog site like a shipwrecked sailor clings to a log.
Otherwise, be prepared to pony up $9.99 and taxes to get the e-book version from Amazon Kindle : black and white text without the illustrations.
Or patiently wait for the off chance it might published in hardcover by one of the Big
On that lachyrmose day, it might be expensive enough to be dissected by even the very overwhelmed book reviewers at the New York Times....
Sunday, September 1, 2013
Wartime Penicillin intended to be secret and synthetic
It ended up public and 'public domain' natural, thanks to Henry Dawson and his supporters.
The British War Department and the American OSRD (run by Vannevar Bush) had expected to quickly, cheaply and, above all, secretively mass produce synthetic penicillin.
Enough artificial penicillin to supply the Allied front lines in the big pushback against Tojo and Hitler, while the enemy had to make do with the rapidly failing Sulfa drugs or try to produce tiny amounts of impure natural penicillin.
The whole project depended on keeping accounts of penicillin's miracle cures away from the Allied public.
That would only create a public sensation , as it had earlier for Sulfa's first miracle cures, which the Axis would soon learn about , thanks to newspaper articles in Neutral papers.
Once alerted, clever German and Japanese chemists would also soon synthesize penicillin and negate the temporary military advantage the Allies had gained via secrecy.
So : the potentially morally shabby story of wartime penicillin : medicine as a weapon.
But when the normally-stodgy Henry Dawson actually dared to steal government-sanctioned war penicillin to successfully save some young 4F kids banefully abandoned by their government as just 'useless mouths' , word spread rapidly in the gossip-driven circles of wartime medical New York.
A young doctor with his own burden of prejudice from the anglo protestant medical elite to rouse his ire, Dante Colitti, got the newspaper chain that invented yellow journalism (Hearst) to come to the defence of the yellow magic and no sooner than you could say 'that darling little Patty Malone', the jig was up for the OSRD and War Department.....
The British War Department and the American OSRD (run by Vannevar Bush) had expected to quickly, cheaply and, above all, secretively mass produce synthetic penicillin.
Enough artificial penicillin to supply the Allied front lines in the big pushback against Tojo and Hitler, while the enemy had to make do with the rapidly failing Sulfa drugs or try to produce tiny amounts of impure natural penicillin.
The whole project depended on keeping accounts of penicillin's miracle cures away from the Allied public.
That would only create a public sensation , as it had earlier for Sulfa's first miracle cures, which the Axis would soon learn about , thanks to newspaper articles in Neutral papers.
Once alerted, clever German and Japanese chemists would also soon synthesize penicillin and negate the temporary military advantage the Allies had gained via secrecy.
So : the potentially morally shabby story of wartime penicillin : medicine as a weapon.
But when the normally-stodgy Henry Dawson actually dared to steal government-sanctioned war penicillin to successfully save some young 4F kids banefully abandoned by their government as just 'useless mouths' , word spread rapidly in the gossip-driven circles of wartime medical New York.
A young doctor with his own burden of prejudice from the anglo protestant medical elite to rouse his ire, Dante Colitti, got the newspaper chain that invented yellow journalism (Hearst) to come to the defence of the yellow magic and no sooner than you could say 'that darling little Patty Malone', the jig was up for the OSRD and War Department.....
Read enough already of Death's Manhattan Project ?
Tired of seeing way, way, way too many books on wartime Manhattan's atomic death rays at your local library or friendly neighbourhood bookstore ?
Would you like to read instead of another wartime project from Manhattan ----- one that radiated hope and life , instead of death and destruction ?
Not convince that all wartime Manhattan Projects must come from Mars , and none from Venus ?
Then I have a forthcoming book just for you : "Life's Manhattan Project" ......
Would you like to read instead of another wartime project from Manhattan ----- one that radiated hope and life , instead of death and destruction ?
Not convince that all wartime Manhattan Projects must come from Mars , and none from Venus ?
Then I have a forthcoming book just for you : "Life's Manhattan Project" ......
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