Postwar science as TV High School : a-bomb 'jocks' vs penicillium slime 'losers'

When I was very little (and very little for my age) I was always the new kid kid in town.

'Cause we moved around a lot, back then in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Bullied a bit.

For perhaps these reasons, I found the science talk of that time always left me very puzzled.

I don't just mean science talk in school, I mean science talk everywhere --- ads, news, literally everywhere - including science fiction books and sci fi movies as well.

Mostly science talk was was all about the big and about Man - big science run by big important men in big governments and big armies and big factories in big important countries.

Science as the topdog and Science as the TV high school jock set among nations, institutions and individuals.

But when it came to life-saving antibiotics for disease-prone little kids (a subject obviously hitting close to home for me) science was always about digging up dark jungle mud, scrapping smelly slime off basement walls or dipping into the effluent laden water at the mouth of sewer outfalls.

Antibiotics, we were told, were not man-made, not synthetic, but made by tiny invisible little microbes.

And judging by where these microbes hung out, I could clearly see even then that these marvellous lifesavers were from the TV high schools' loser side of the tracks - greasers and trailer trash.

There was one more puzzling thing about these antibiotics - they all came out of the Second World War and as far as I could see, were about the old good thing to ever come out of the awful war.

We didn't talk much back then - none of us - about the advanced civilization that produced the Auschwitz medical experiments, but we had all heard and seen - in TV sci fi serials and movies, if nowhere else - what the A-bomb could do to the human body.

And we all much preferred antibiotics like penicillin, big needle and all, to the A-bomb.

And we found it hard to marry together just how any civilization could produce both such a killer bomb and such a lifesaver pill, all out of the same horrible war ....

earth-shattering Hiroshima Bomb had but one millionth the power of 1997 El Nino

Instead of always writing that this or that weather system packs the punch of x number of A bombs or H bombs , why not reflect for a moment instead on how puny the world-changing Hiroshima bomb actually was.

It probably released less destructive energy then did the first conventional firebombing of Tokyo - where the mass of rapidly burning ground level wood buildings (firestorm) added so greatly to the effect of the bombing raid that it shouldn't be judged solely on the number of tons of high explosive that were dropped.

And, repeatedly throughout the entire war, huge weather systems applying much destructive (negative and positive) energy over wide areas showed an ability to stop even the largest invasions known in history literally in their (tank) tracks.

One thinks in particular of the threat of unexpectedly wicked storms in the shallow narrow English Channel that so hampered German and Allied invasion plans.

Or of the ability of monsoons to halt even the most sturdy/primitive war making in its (jungle), tracks from India to the western Pacific.

But even very low positive energy weather systems (think of the persistent cloud cover over North West Europe for example) can stymie the most carefully planned 1000 bomber raids.

And the massive negative energy of a stationary Russian cold air mass could stall the world's largest land invasion ever , as it literally seems to suck all the motive energy out of humans and the (heat) engines powering their tanks and trucks.

Another way to regard weather as a source of massive negative energy is to look at the the effect that a complex mixture of relatively moderately unsettled weather could have on Germany's fragile wartime domestic food harvests.

For food is measurable in quite conventional units of heat energy calories and a lack of food energy in Germany's own harvests usually meant people elsewhere by the tens and tens of millions went hungry and many died of huger-related diseases, from the Netherlands to Auschwitz. 

So, we talked about carpet bombing a lot during WWII but that is all that it was : talk.

Real carpet bombing is the pelting rain down from a massive monsoon that literally covers an eighth of the entire Earth's surface with a carpet of water.

Unlike today's man-made C02 crisis, Man really did virtually nothing to Mother Nature in WWII : she made all the rules and set all the paces.

The Hiroshima bomb was small potatoes indeed against her powers : only in their Hubris did WWII men approach the size of the 1997 El Nino ...

The OTHER Manhattan Project only made moral arguments rather than A-Bombs : but its impact has been immense

Moral conservatives such as today's American Republican Party frequently argue that morally medical care (such as expensive life saving drugs like Avastin) should only go to those who have worked hard enough to afford them.

They maintain this argument ( hello Obamacare !) even if this means that these drugs as a result of this limited market demand will remain in limited production forever and so be expensive forever.


The opposite moral argument (as made by Dr Martin Henry Dawson in his battle with the Allied governments in WWII) calls for the government to greatly expands the lifesaver's potential market by initially subsidizing the drug so that it available to all regardless of income, geography, race ,gender etc.

It is claimed this will encourage new producers to come in and try and find ways to compete with the established producer by lowering their production costs and hence ultimately reduce the price of the drug to the consumer.

Penicillin G provides the best possible example of this argument, proving the validity of this economical argument beyond all measure.

But greatly expanding the universe of people with affordable access to lifesaving Penicillin G also had an unexpectedly profound impact on the entire world's health.

Unusually cheap abundant public domain Penicillin G saved the lives of many people who are ordinarily too poor or in two remote regions to be treated and who thus remained reserve pools of highly virulent - and contagious - strains of the bacterial diseases that were endemic or epidemic worldwide for millenniums.

In a form of quasi Herd Immunity, billions of us (I estimate ten billion of us so far) have indirectly benefited when tens of millions of us directly had their lives saved by penicillin G shots.

Dangerously contagious bacterial diseases that terrified our grandmothers, that hung like the Sword of Damocles over all households rich or poor, are no more.

Those of us under the age of fifty have never even heard of most of them and few doctors practising today have even seen a single case of them.

The Big Manhattan Project made the A Bomb and made a huge array of massive buildings - it was big in every concrete sense of the word.

By contrast, the other Manhattan Project, that of Dr Dawson, only made moral arguments (and a little home brew penicillin) rather than Bombs or Buildings.

But who can save that this project's impact  - 75 years on - is not way, way bigger than that of the project headed by Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves....