Fundamentally, Henry Dawson did it all for 'the little ones'

Henry Dawson's other Manhattan Project wasn't really to advance the cause of penicillin, to aid the Allied military effort or even to save the SBEs : rather he did it all for 'the little ones', to persuade Humanity to build a "Big Tent" that included everyone.

For with rare exceptions (perhaps the early days of the Communist revolutions in some countries) a Big Tent doesn't need to invite the big and the powerful inside - for they are already there.

Instead a Big Tent always newly invites in the small, the weak, those traditionally judged unworthy and unfit.

Postmodernity/little science's Big Tent diversification versus Modernity/BigScience's little tent reductionism

As I have said before, the key ideology of the Era of Modernity,1870s to the 1960s, was popular or vulgar Uniformitarianism, lying never far beneath western liberal capitalism democracy and fascism/nazism and socialism/communism.

In its popularly understood form, uniformitarianism claimed tomorrow would be like yesterday and yesterday was like today : and you know what today is like here in the earthquake/famine free western world.

Life and Nature today, here, is calm, peaceful, predictable and basically open to anything humanity might throw at it.

Controllable by humanity to such an extent that one could pick future winners (ideas, nations, technologies) with quiet confidence because in the unlikely evident one winner proved a dud, humanity could quickly make a mid-course adjustment.

Nature won't bite, indeed couldn't bite.

Reductionism of gene and idea pools (and hence of possible alternative visions) quickly followed : pick the scientifically determined winners and bin the rest, with Zyklon B if need be.

Winning a total war : its about building a Big Tent of all possible talent, not in draining down your gene pool

Early to mid September 1940 were undoubtably the darkest weeks of WWII.

Britain awaited an air assault followed by a sea invasion by a all-powerful German war machine that was backed by Russia, Italy and Japan along with a host of quasi fascist fellow travellers among the nominally neutral nations.

There was no Big Tent of all possible talents assembled to help Britain, or any of the dozen or so smaller nations who had already fallen, equally alone and isolated, to the Axis powers.

Britain was as guilty in all of this as any nation - for it too failed to build itself a Big Tent internally, to take advantage of its empire's overwhelming demographic superiority over all the Axis powers combined.