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.

Nothing can stop an idea that even tiny children can understand : sometimes, the Last May Be First

I argue that nobody really understood (or understands) the world of sub-atomic particles as it emerged, in ever growing complexity, from the 1890s to the 1940s and that as a result, it failed to change the childlike faith people still held in Hard Reductionism and Determinism.

But even as a tiny kid, I got the point of the story of microbe-made antibiotics - particularly as a tiny , powerless, kid.

Postmodern science was born in early postwar childhoods

Tiny weak beings, just like me, found in the ordinary and despised basement slime, in jungle dirt and in the filthy sewer water of Sardinia all were besting the smartest chemists in the universe ("big people" in kidspeak) and producing all the medicines that were saving the lives of tiny kids like me.

It was a grownups' science story that even I could rock and roll !

Otherwise we only learned in science of the effort of thousands of important big people, working in vast clean white labs  with billions of times our weekly allowance, making atomic energy for us - and for world-ending bombs....

TOP DRAWER people have not changed their mind about Science, scientists have changed their minds about TOP DRAWER people ...

Michael Marshall

Scientists haven't changed their minds on GOD - they still don't believe in GOD, by and large.

But they are no longer certain HE is on the side of the Big Battalions.

They no longer believe Charles Darwin's claim that civilized man will inevitably kill off the weak and the small.

Instead they fear Humanity's stay on earth will be relatively short and it will end up being inherited, once again, by the meekest of the meek - the microbes.

Naturally, this does not leave the people in the Big Battalions and in the skyscrapers of Ever-Upward-Human-Progress very happy.

 That is what I  take away from Gordon Gauchat's study on why the Republicans hate 'Science' ....