Microbes evolve into civilized Man, uncontroversial --- Microbes evolve while remaining microbes, heresy

In 1940, Dr Martin Henry Dawson was a scientific heretic.

His heresy was in focusing upon (and endlessly talking up) various discomforting forms of microbial evolution.

In 1940, microbes weren't supposed to evolve - I mean not after Day One.

Today we encounter all these forms of microbial evolution in our very first lectures in Microbiology 101 - they are essential learning.

Let's begin with all the wonderful lifesaving beta lactam antibiotics, starting of course with Dawson's natural penicillin. And how these amazing medicines work their non-toxic magic by breaking up molecules essential to other life forms but not to us humans.

But then how these antibiotic molecules, in turn, are liable to be broken up by other chemicals from the microbes under attack. And so it goes, on and on and back and forth.

How the bacteria and other microbes survive and flourish against all the best defence systems that the human body and human doctors can throw up against them.

Their sophisticated abilities in areas like Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT), quorum sensing and molecular mimicry, as 'lie low persisters', their various goo capsules, the daringly wall-less L-Form bacteria, their communal biofilms, all helping the microbe to survive inside us.

Then their dangerously effective chemicals like the flesh eating 'spreading factor' (hyaluronidase) that so helps them to flourish against us.

All subjects of scientific papers - often pioneering papers - from Dawson between 1925 and 1945 --- and still cutting edge science even today.

In 1940, the scientific consensus was that the 'essence' of all the microbes at the lower left of the ever upward arrow of progress was to be eternally stupid and weak ---- and to remain eternally unchanging.

Except that the primitive microbes were permitted to mark the very primitive beginnings of the long slow process of evolution ever upwards that ended in the brilliant changeability that is Civilized Man, at the upper right of the arrow of progress.

Dawson never denied that there were some things we humans do very well and the microbes do very badly.

He said only that that the converse was equally true : abilities and defects (physical and moral) were well and truly mixed throughout all the lifeforms, not exclusively separated into stupid and bad at the bottom and good and smart at the top.

Now exalting the concepts of mixing and mixtures is perhaps the most distinctive feature of the intellectual life of our present post-1945 age.

Whether you call it the post modern age or the post progress age, its all the same.

It is interesting to ask, therefore, what part did the popular journalism of wartime penicillin play in ending "The Progress Project" so abruptly in 1945 ?

Because try as the 1945 scientific/government/commercial elite might, they could never get the ordinary uneducated public (as opposed to say educated historians) to buy into the explanation that penicillin came from highly expensive, highly complicated, highly sophisticated chemical "deep tank" factories.

The popular journalism penicillin stories always seem to be what journalists call 'brites'.

You know : cute stories of dogs walking on back legs, cats smoking cigars and ordinary bread mold grown in ordinary bottles on ordinary kitchen tables saving lives when the most expensive drugs of the sophisticated corporate chemists couldn't.

I am not denying Auschwitz and the Atomic Bomb's hearty roles in the demise of "Progress".

But I have also come to believe that all these mass media "Ripley's Believe it or Not" flavoured tales of clever primitive microbes and stupid civilized chemists were as devastating, in their slow cumulative way, to The Progress Project as anything the then obscure Adorno and Horkheimer ever wrote ...

Why Adorno and Horkheimer got it partly wrong

I believe that Adorno and Horkheimer only got part of the correct explanation for why the Modernity Project so abruptly started dying in 1945, supposedly the moment of its greatest triumph.

Not because they were Central European Jews - it was right for them to intellectually fixate on the Nazis' industrial mass murdering of an entire people - because at the time no one else really was.

Their failure lay, I believe, in being old.

Old, at least relative to school age children.

For Adorno and Horkheimer was only in their forties when they were writing and revising their Dialectic of the Enlightenment, the first book to recognize the death of modernity.

In the 1950s (and for centuries earlier) early and middle adulthood was a relatively healthy time - violent deaths from accidents, wars and suicides aside.

It was actually in early childhood that lay the huge number of deaths from infectious disease that so skewed the entire life expectancy statistics downward.

At my schools, I knew kids whose older siblings had died from polio and kids who went away and never came back , because of 'leukemia'.

And in my family alone, we had already had scarlet fever and rheumatic fever together with measles and chicken pox.

I could tell by the response of our elderly neighbours they were very frightening diseases -at least when they were young mothers.

My mother, a former medical lab tech, rushed to reassure me that, thanks to penicillium fungus and other microbes, these diseases were far less fearsome 'Since the War'.

From all the late night war movies I had watched with my parents since the age of six, I hadn't seen much evidence that the second world war had brought anything but tragic deaths and tears.

That the war had also brought us child's life saving antibiotics made a terrible big impression on this particular small child.

Perhaps if Adorno and Horkheimer had been young mothers (or even today's young fathers) while they were writing their masterwork, they might have seen that badness of Auschwitz alone couldn't kill the delusion of endlessly upward human Progress. in the minds of most humanity.

Because before we can dismiss a bad idea, we need a good idea to replace it.

Antibiotics, coming as they did from the despised fungus and microbes in the constantly overlooked soil right beneath our feet, was just that symbol of a hope-filled alternative way of looking at our fellow humans and the world.

Because the adults, like Adorno and Horkheimer, didn't really see this, everything had to wait until we 1950s kids got older.

The "Penicillium Kids"

When we did, in the mid and late 1960s, it was us postwar "Penicillium Kids" who started the postmodern recognition of rights for all types of people and beings that had been as traditionally overlooked as the soil microbes had once been ...

Plentitude or Plenticide : Janus Manhattan 1945

Manhattan was long regarded as Modernity's 'special' city, home to most of the world's skyscrapers (and centres of eugenic research).

But a Manhattan university campus was also the first home of Adorno & Horkheimer's modest little mimeographed effort entitled "Dialectic of the Enlightenment".

That collection of essays rather went against the grain of 1945's informed opinion, by dissing the Nazi plenticidal killing machine for being, of all things, 'Modernity on Speed'.

Thereby A&H helped birthed our present day era, without quite realizing it, simply by killing off Modernity stone cold.

But it was the Manhattan-led process that enabled natural penicillin to unexpectedly win out over modernity's efforts to create synthetic penicillin that supplied the new kid in town : plentitude, aka post-modernity...

Today's Conflicted Boomers : typical of any Transitional Generation

The main reason why the long dead Adorno and Horkheimer still get the big bucks in intellectual currency, while you and I pal pick about for chicken feed, all comes down to a mimeographed collection of turgid speculative essays the pair circulated among a few friends at the end of WWII.

At the time, all the rest of the world was beaming in self-satisfaction about Modern Science's obvious success (here insert A-Bomb) at beating back 'Barbaric Age' Axis science.

But Adorno and Horkheimer alone suggested that Janus Year 1945 really meant that the world was now in a 'transitional era' between a fading Modern Science (aka 'modernity') and a rising postmodern world.

But as the humble mimeographed nature of their book (The Dialectic of the Enlightenment) suggests, the pair were completely ignored at the time.

So what was first noted about all the kids being born between the early mid-1940s to the early mid-1960s was simply that : their extraordinary large numbers : hence 'Boomers'.

But would their highly unusual behavior during their plastic formative years been any different if their birth numbers had been considered 'normal' or low ?

I argue not.

The coincident fact that the peak of the transitional era's passing turbulence coincided with the Boomers' crucial formative years would have produced 'The Sixties' irregardless.

At the time, 'The Sixties' social conflict was neatly explained away by simply pointing to the Boomers' extra large numbers as sufficient explanation.

So the transitional nature of The Sixties was never recognized.

In particular no one looked at who all was retiring at the world's High Schools and Universities, instead of looking simply at who was newly coming in as students -- and then promptly protesting.

For in all times of transition, tides go out just as much as they come in.

Unlike their parents raised in unconflictedly modern schools - or their children raised in unconflictededly postmodern schools - the boomers got it from both barrels.

Early on : taught by moderns; later on : taught by post moderns : who now to believe ?

Before 1989, those Boomers who took the postmodern science way of viewing physical reality dominated their peers and the news pages.

But I argue that since "The End of The Cold War", those Boomers who went on to rule the world after 1990 - and who still do rule our world -  held more to the older 'modern science' way of viewing physical reality.

I argue their rise to power was itself transitional .

Mostly due to others abruptly retiring, due partly to old age but mostly because of satisfaction at completing their life work : defeating Communism.

The new bosses, like the old bosses, were a hard,mean,uncharitable lot but their target and hence its solution, had greatly changed.

Their target was now environmentalists, not communists .

No longer was conflict over direct questions of ideology, basically 'trickle down' theories versus claims of 'human equality of access to basic life necessities'.

Now the conflict had become modern production science confronting postmodern impact science (over climate change in particular) to use Allan Schnailberg's highly influential formulation.

The dying-off Old Guard (the Modernist cum Greatest Generation) could find almost none among the Gen X and Millennials to carry on their battle against their true mortal enemy, the postmodern majority among the Boomers.

But not all Boomers resolved the conflict between modern and postmodern schooling in 100% favouring postmodernity.

This minority, the Rogue Boomers, (Stephen Harper and Tony Abbott come to mind) swallowed their internal doubts (that as conflicted Boomers they must have had) and made a big career advance - nailing their Boomer colours 100% to the fading modernist cause.

For these relatively young leaders have always found most of their votes among those much older than themselves - rather than among their peers.

But the older voter is always a constantly wasting resource.

Soon Boomers, more and more, will become the true older voter (because voting falls off sharply after age 75 - and all of the Greatest Generation will be over 75 in 2016's presidential election year.)

Because of their higher - age-related - turnout, Boomers will be the key voter up until the climate crisis's tipping point.

The fate of our world will thus turn not on a conflict between nations, ethnicities, religions, classes, genders or even generations - Fox and CNN to the contrary.

It will turn on a conflict within a highly conflicted transitional generation : the Boomers ....

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......

Modernity dies in an Adorno Moment : 1939-1945

Between  April 30th 1939 (when the New York's World Fair opened) and the November 20th 1945 (when the Nuremberg Trials opened) a lot of water (together with a lot of blood and brains) flowed under one of Modern civilization's few remaining un-bombed bridges :  call it WWII.

If  to the bemused Theodor Adorno, New York's fair was Modernity's bizarre apogee , he also saw Nuremberg's trials as Modernity's appalling nadir.

But I doubt that even Adorno and his co-conspirator Max Horkheimer had really expected Modernity to soar , burn and crash just that quickly.

Yet it clearly happened. Few people doubt that our new Age of post-Modernity can not be precisely dated to very late in the year of 1945.

Just as very few people deny that the opening of New York's World Fair of 1939 captured the absolute peak of Modernist optimism and hubris.

Now WWI also resulted in dramatic change all around the world.

But I would argue that while the surface of Modernity in 1919 was readily and intensely cracked all over, the deep superstructure actually held stronger than ever.

People often see WWI's dramatic results as the results of long standing tensions, buried below the surface, suddenly precipitating in a crisis situation.

Perhaps : tensions buried under the surface, but not that deeply buried.

By contrast, the surface of immediately post WWII Modernity didn't crack at all but actually burnished all the brighter ("Better Science won the War"), but deep down inside , the moral core of Modernity had lost its appeal to the young.

Modernist elders simply didn't seen their own self-inflicted wounds and so did nothing to reduce its shock upon their young.

As a result, the assault on their children's and grandchildren's moral certitudes was all the more stunning due to their elders' failure to genuinely reflect upon the meaning of the events of 1945.

But demographically, the rot had truly set in and it was now only a matter of time ------ and of baby booms ----  and of funerals....

Dawson's DIY penicillin a postmodernist "shot across the bow" of Modernist Big Pharma

Two hundred years from now, only the first of the Dawson team's many articles on wartime penicillin will still be cited and still considered seminal.

This, despite the fact that Nova Scotia-born Henry Dawson's last penicillin article told a surprised world that invariable fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis (the much dreaded SBE) had finally been cured - by his penicillin method that he had pioneered 5 years earlier.

But instead it is Dawson's first penicillin first article, the "impure but non toxic" article of May 5th 1941, that had (and continues to have) ramifications beyond any one disease, ramifications indeed beyond even medicine and science itself.

In that article, delivered before a large group of international medical researchers in Atlantic City and widely reported by the popular and scientific media from The New York Times to the South Africa Medical Journal, Dawson deliberately paired and then contrasted two oxymoronic phrases.

But first, recall that Dawson chose to appear in front of all his peers to praise his new drug to the heavens AND announce that it had no therapeutic effect on a series of four SBE cases in a row.

Trust me on this one : normally scientists do not rush to the biggest conference in town to proudly announce repeated failure.

But it wasn't the lack of therapeutic success from his impure natural penicillin that Dawson was really so eager to announce.

Rather it was the lack of toxic effects from his crude homemade mixture of natural penicillin and its natural impurities that he was so proud (and perhaps amazed) to announce.

(In a sort of 'reverse Ivory Soap', his starting penicillin brew was far less than 99 and 44 100th percent impure :  pure penicillin made up only one part per million of his mixture !)

It could have had - perhaps even should have had - a highly deadly mycotoxin  poison buried somewhere in that fungus mix, but God took pity on Humanity and it did not.

We do not have a complete version of Dawson's report and ad lib comments , only various precis. But assembled together, I believe we can garner Dawson's actual words and phrases used to prescribe his main intent behind this article.

He described how his tiny team made their hospital-grown crude (impure) and natural penicillin, calling it both more potent and much less toxic than the factory-made chemically pure synthetic sulfa drugs, less potent and more toxic, made by Big Pharma .

His takeaway line, as the CBC's Don Connolly likes to say, is that "despite being impure, homemade natural penicillin was actually less toxic and much more potent than factory-made pure synthetic sulfa drugs."

"Living better chemically ?"

Today, in this postmodern age,  this statement might hardly seem controversial ; but in 1940, at the apogee of Modernity, to diss the Du Pont slogan of "living better chemically" was to indulge in sheer heresy.

At the same university as Dawson (Columbia) and at the exact same time, famed German-scholars-in-exile Adorno and Horkheimer were busy dismantling 500 years of Modernity, brick by brick, and patiently reassembling them as Postmodernity.

Perhaps posthumously, their fellow university colleague Henry Dawson can lay claim to being among Postmodernity's first scientific converts.....

the fragments of a dialectic enlightenment :Adorno & Horkheimer as PUNK DIYers ...

If one of your dear, dear friends gave you as a christmas present, late in December, over 300 pages of turgid prose, written in fragmentary style, and mimeographed to ensure ultra low quality readability and then stuck it all between two dull brown covers, you might be forgiven if you waited until January before you began a token,polite, skim through it.

That would be January....... 1945.

1945 ! : post-hegemony's annus mirabilis.

And what a way to usher in the postmodern era but with a punk-DIY un-book, as principle author Adorno reminded his co-conspiractor, Horkheimer on the latter's 50th birthday.

Adorno felt that hardcover,professionally printed books brought in the Modernist era - so why not a humble mimeograph to do the honors for the new age ?

So 500 years of Modernity laid low in an instance by a ZINE, for crikes sake !

Well, that and a little help from Modernity itself, during that most modernist of wars : WWII ....

Dr Dawson a FIFTH COLUMN of low postmodernity , inside the Citadel of High Modernity?

The term "FIFTH COLUMN" is now more than 75 years old.

 It was first used in a radio address in 1936, by a right wing (Nationalist) general named Emilio Mola , during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, to describe his efforts to take left wing (Republican) Madrid .

 He unwisely claimed he had four visible columns of troops and tanks and planes advancing upon the capital but a secret hidden fifth column of sympathizers inside the city, awaiting to sow mayhem.

 Thousands of the semi-innocent were quickly murdered in Madrid, out of fear that Mola had been telling the truth (and not merely trying to evoke panic).

But already by the mid 1940s, 70 years ago, the phrase had lost it literal, real world, meaning because the people claiming to see fifth columnists had "cried wolf" once too often.

 It had been reduced to a metaphor, in fact a pejorative word, in the Cold War to semi-seriously describe others as hidden, secret communists or fascists.

Today, few are alive and active that can recall it's use as a word conveying real terror.

Maybe, then I can use it to describe the activities of Martin Henry Dawson's tiny team of DIY cum PUNK scientists inventing "GP" penicillin in that Citadel of High Modernity and Big Science, the Columbia University of the Manhattan Project.

He didn't see himself as a postmodernist because the term hadn't yet been invented : that was happening , about the same time as GP penicillin and the A-Bomb, in yet another part of Columbia University housing the social scientists Adorno and Horkheimer !

Dawson was a modest man (with much to be modest about) but he was also in his quietly defiant way, a true "Inside Agitator" (to mis-adapt that phrase much used by the Jesse Helms & Strom Thurmond generation of southern racists.

His small science , DIY Punk approach to inventing GP penicillin was in its way, as typical of what we today call low postmodernity as the Manhattan Project's bigness in creating the A-bomb was of High Modernity......

PoMo Green versus Institutional Green

We all know institutional or hospital green, though we probably don't know much about it.

Technically it is called Chromium Oxide Green and though it is no longer made (much) it was a technical wonder in its day.

Most chromium paint wasn't green - the green color was selected for the paint used in public institutions like prisons (remember the Green Mile ?), hospitals and institutions for the chronically ill and mentally insane.

Today it gives a bad vibe for being associated with these places of discomfort and shame, but this pastel like shade of green was originally selected because color scientists judged it the most calming shade for institution inmates.

The reason why it was made from chromium oxide was because this paint was tough tough tough and chemically toxic - it resisted stomach contents and common hospital cleaners AND because it was so tough and smooth,that made it harder for germ-sustaining dirt to hang about.

It was the most typical color of the Streamlined Moderne Decade from about 1934-1944 - by no coincidence the Apogee of the Modernist Age.

But that is soooooo yesterday.

Today's green is PoMo Green and it is not a paint at all - it is the natural verdant color of Nature itself - green grass, green trees, green ocean deeps.

The very first PoMo green?

Glad you asked !

It was all those Kodachrome-vivid color photographs of green-blue penicillium molds in the color supplements so popular during the World War Two years (when neither TV or film gave you much color) that appeared post the Spring of 1944.

That was about the time when it became embarassingly apparent that man-made medicine was being eclipsed by life-saving medicine from a humble and slimy low life normally found in our basements --- a shock Modernist Science never really recovered from.

Now it would just take Adorno and Horkheimer to make it official, which they did - in The Dialectic of the Enlightenment.

Move over Mo, Po has arrived.....

Jack Frost Dark saved more lives ....

... than Al-Qaida will ever spend.

If you live in the Greater New York area, you don't need to be told that the Jack Frost brand of dark brown sugar, made in Yonkers, is good stuff.

Damn good stuff.

Your doctor might not agree though - so here is an argument that should appeal to their
medical 'sense of being': did they know that Jack Frost Dark led to the development of the greatest life-saver the world has ever known??!

I know, I know, I also said this about Vegamite, but both stories happen to be true.

Alexander Fleming got a lot of criticism over his use of ox heart medium to grow the first penicillin.

This abuse came from the first generation of penicillin authors -all sycophants of Howard Florey and all modernist to the core.

Ox heart medium is rich and complex and undefined - ie we don't know what all is in it or in what percentages.

As a result, chemists ( the modernist archetype ) hate it with a passion.

They prefer something like the all synthetic Czapek-Dox 'defined' medium - a bland mixture of water and salts you could just see Jeremy Bentham urging the British government to use to feed prisoners ,because it meant that they would remain alive while ensuring that they got no illict enjoyment from their food.

Unfortunately, the penicillium mold hates the stuff as much as prisoners do - it prefers the rich murk of the ox heart stew.

Fleming grew his mold juice in 4 to 5 days in ox heart stew while the chemists led by Raistrick took 15-20 days to get their mold juice on the sparse Quaker-approved diet.

(Interestingly, Fleming started his penicillium on a synthetic medium (Sabouraud's). He did know about them and used them ,despite what his hostile biographer, Ronald Hare, says.

But he found pre-digested extracts of spoiled meat made the penicillium produce faster AND was much much cheaper to buy. Engineers would approve on both counts - though chemists won't.)

Florey, being a chemist-manque, dismissed the ox heart brew and went for some Czapek-Dox synthetic purity instead. But it was so slooooow, and so he "modified" it.

In fact he modified it right back to Fleming's brew, more or less: he added brewer's yeast  (the cast-offs from brewing beer - rich, dirty, complex, undefined, cheap.)

Vegamite is basically brewer's yeast.

Florey retained the concept of his all important 'purity' (in his own mind ,at least) while he got the speed of faster production from this dirty stew.

Coghill, out in Peoria at the NRRL, was a chemist, but a chemist-out-of-water, in charge of a biologically-oriented Fermentation Station.

He devoted much time and effort to try to first purify and then synthesise penicillin - when that failed, he fell back to raving about the use of corn steep liquors to speed production times and increase penicillin output.

Corn steep is another industry cast-off, the stuff left over after all the pure starch has been removed from corn.

It is complex, undefined, dirty and cheap.

Coghill and Merck and many others spent the entire war, trying to figure out what was the one ingredient in corn steep liquor that gave the much better results they got with it.

They planned to synthesis that one ingredient and then dump the corn steep like a used condom.

Others, like the Dawson team, just took the dirty complex stuff as a 'black box' and a gift - they wanted penicillin for patients ,not penicillin for academic papers and academic acclaim.

In the end, it was dozens of things in the corn steep or the dirty sugar that the mold loved - we still use this stuff today - as 'undefined' as ever.

Chalk one up for the post modernist way of thought.

Adorno, the German philosopher working on the Columbia campus in 1941 could explain (and did explain) this Modernist preference for inefficient and expensive defined growth mediums over cheap and efficient but undefined growth mediums.

(Or for that matter, the equally odd Modernist obsession of favoring toxic but defined drugs over drugs that are undefined but perfectly non-toxic. As a patient, I know which one I would prefer to have coursing through my veins !)

In his 1944 "DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT", published at Columbia, (the seminal work that ushered in the post modernist era), he said that the Enlightenment's promise to lead us out of the darkness of ignorance was really an exaggerated fear of the unknown.

Not a sensible fear of the dangerous but an a priori fear of anything unknown, even ahead of things that are dangerous but known.

For penicillin read Dangerous= toxic.

Let us turn, finally, from Adorno to Meyer and Hobby and Chaffee and Dawson.

In 1942, they told the world of their secret food for their pilot penicillin plant: Jack Frost Dark.

Many others, Merck Inc among them, took up their idea, seeking the dirtiest, darkest, cheapest substitute they could find in their own local area --- if Jack Frost wasn't around.

The best brown sugar was natural or industrial brown sugar - sugar with lots of crude molasses's minerals and bio-organism waste products still in it.

It could be gotten directly from some sympathetic sugar factory chemist. Since so many industry chemists in the New York area were German or Jewish ( or both) in those days, Meyer wouldn't have found it hard to get a few hundred pound bags right off the boats from the West Indies.

It was dirt-cheap and because it was also dirty, it gave the best yield of penicillin .

You see 'defined' medium means we know exactly what the microbes like to eat, to make them produce what ever it is we want.

But using complex, un-defined ,industrial cast-off brews means we throw our hands up in the air and admit we really don't know Nature.

Instead we gave them everything and the kitchen sink and said "pick whatever you think suits you best".

I see the entire Penicillin development story 1940-1945 as a prime example and the most suitable metaphor of the shift from Modernity to Post Modernity.

So while I am making a little sport with Vegamite and Jack Frost Dark - I am also deadly serious .

 Both of these common domestic foodstuffs did not just give us greater penicillin supplies when they were so badly needed.

They also represented some of the first examples of the green post-modernist way of viewing Man's relationship to Nature's creatures as being co-equals rather than Master and Slave --- when we feed penicillium Jack Frost or Vegamite, we say " maybe you are smarter than us" .

Pass the brown sugar won't you ?

Columbia drops ball,Oxford runs with it

For ten months,(early September 1940-early July 1941) Columbia University had a clear lead on bringing mass produced penicillin to the world, but it blow it.

America had to give up its lead to Oxford University and the British. America lost the moral edge on this story.

But before Congress and the federal government bring out committees and commissions to investigate Columbia, it should remember it ,too, had a chance and it blew it.

"You sir, had a Choice"

Columbia and Washington may say 'we had no choice' but as Mulroney says, "you sir, had a choice."

During those same ten months, Columbia and America had another clear lead - in atomic energy.

This is the one that the federal government choose to fund, this is the one that Columbia administrators choose to find rooms for.

And as the Manhattan Project grew and grew, Columbia and the federal government found new rooms for it in the heart of Manhattan's traditional milk plant district, in north west Harlem, in the corridor connecting the downtown campus to the medical campus.

Even the Japanese hardly a milk-guzzling nation and totally cut off from all the events in Britain and America surrounding penicillin from 1940 to 1944, could instantly tell that every photo they could find of an interior of a penicillin plant looked like nothing but a typical milk plant.

Most of the world's first penicillin plants used the equipment,technologies,staff - and sometimes the very plants - of milk companies.

Columbia had the team - and very nearby it had the equipment, to start saving millions of lives, way back in 1941.

But it blew it - it morally blew it.

Columbia developed three world-shaking ideas on its campus during World War Two.

The Age of Antibiotics started there -millions of lives saved by the actions of a decorated frontline combat hero named Dawson.

With Adorno and Horkheimer's seminal text, in humble mimeographed form, the age of Postmodernity started there.

And the technology that powered the Cold War, on both sides, was started and perfected there - in that life-giving milk plant  district - perfected by a life-long pacifist named Harold Urey.

Yes, most of the uranium that blew up Hiroshima was not made by Columbia's technology.

But the instance the war was over, the competing totally inefficient plants were closed and massive gas diffusion plants were built instead using Columbia's technology, to create the tens of thousands of bombs on all sides during the Cold War.

That same deadly uranium is still around, fashioned into today's current bombs.

Thanks Columbia, 'Home of the Cold War' !

Now if you went to the Columbia campus today , would you find a plaque to Dawson and Adorno or to Urey ?

You guessed right - Adorno and Dawson are non-persons but Urey and death are honored to the hilt at Columbia.

 And in Washington.

The self-promoting Florey and Britain get all the moral glow of penicillin instead.

Columbia blew it - and it is still blowing it......

What a difference one little substitute word can make...

My partner Rebecca said some very nice things about this, my new blog.

But I am afraid I misled her a little in describing my take on Postmodernity.

I meant to say that Modernity was a particular and peculiar form of  'Aesthetics masquerading as Science' ---- and functioning as an entire worldview and ideology.

And that Postmodernity was more than 'just' the aesthetics of contemporary painting, pop music and architecture - it was another particular form of Aesthetics and also functioning as an entire worldview and ideology.

I think I have now found a succinct way to describe the difference between Modernity and Postmodernity and it is in the new subtitle of this blog .

Taking the widest view of the term Postmodernity : converting it - but only very slightly -  from my emphasis on ethics and morality to one of aesthetics - it can be phrased as a difference in  the sort of people we find aesthetically attractive.

Today we are far more willing to see attractiveness in many more body shapes,  skin colors and lifestyles - or at least to let other people see beauty in people we don't find  that particularly attractive.

It is typical of this Postmodernity era to learn of a recent poll saying that most of us find a person of mixed color ( the tawny or coffee colored flesh tone so common in places like Brazil) as the most attractive physical type.

(Just as it is a hangover from our grandparents' Modernity era to learn that most high fashion models continue to be the icy blue-eyed blonds of  1930s Aryan wet dreams.)

My take is that between 1939 and 1945 (and in the immediate postwar period), many - but by no means all - of the middle class educated people in the most modern countries in the world changed their minds.

They decided, albeit in a subdued and inchoate fashion, that  all  life was in some sense
worthy of life and dignity and worth.

When they repudiated Eugenics (and again not everybody did) they repudiated the core tenets of Modernity --- just as Professors Adorno and Horkheimer had insisted they had to do in 1944, in their famous little mimeo-book ( Dialetic of the Enlightenment), circulating throughout the campus of Columbia University in New York City.

Currently, there is no record of what Professor Martin Henry Dawson, also at the same university at the same time, thought about Adorno and Horkheimer's claim - or in fact about virtually anything - we have no personal papers.

But in his public 'biography of deeds', he certainly acted in a postmodern fashion - giving up his life to save the life of someone (Charlie Aronson) who many American doctors considered a prime example of the fact that only 'some life is worthy of life'.

In one of those improbable coincidences that make up reality,Dr Foster Kennedy advocated that only some lives are worthy of life and that all others should be killed (at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association) on the same day as Dawson first announced (at the annual meeting of the American Clinical Society) that he was trying to save the lives of the unfit, with some penicillin he had brewed up himself.

In a sense, to Kennedy's statement, Dawson merely substituted the little word "all" for "some" and then forcibly acted upon that statement, against the greatest of obstacles.

Mo only truly goes Po when somebody actually does something concrete.

 And it was Martin Henry Dawson putting PoMo thought into PoMo action that made all the difference - for Charlie and then ultimately, for all of us .....

@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo