If the gameplan of the Manhattan atomic Project is followed once again, foreigners will do most of the heavy lifting while America will gets most of the credit, the profits and the protection.
Showing posts with label gordon gekko. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gordon gekko. Show all posts
Thursday, October 1, 2015
Penicillin-for-all was Emily Lazarus's Big Tent Manhattan while the America-only atom bomb was Gordon Gekko's "greed is good" Manhattan
Janus Manhattan 1945 : one secret Manhattan project to make an atom bomb only for America and another public Manhattan project to make penicillin for all.
Thursday, March 12, 2015
75 years ago, on a day supposedly devoted to 1As, two New York City 4Fs made medical history instead
It is an irony beyond all measure that on America's first ever peacetime Draft Registration Day, October 16th 1940, a day designed to separate the 1A sheep from the 4F goats, two 4Fs (a black man from Harlem and a Jew from the Bronx) instead made medical history by ushering in our current Age of Antibiotics !
And they made history not by accident of sheer coincidence either.
For their doctor, Martin Henry Dawson of Columbia University's Presbyterian medical campus,was incensed that his colleagues were using the move to a War Medicine footing (of which the separating of valued 1As from unvalued 4Fs was but one part) as an excuse to drop Social Medicine - the extending of life-saving medical care to those in need, regardless of their income, color or origins.
Dawson felt that a Double V Victory was needed to defeat the hold that Fascist values held among much of the world's Neutral nations - both a military defeat and a moral defeat.
Abandoning America's weakest and the smallest to medical benign neglect, just as the Nazis were currently doing with their own weak and small, was no way to win the 'hearts and minds' of the neutral nations.
These two young New York City boys, famed athlete Aaron Leroy Alston of St Nicholas Avenue and teletype operator Charles Aronson of Vyse Avenue, were dying of then invariably fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis, known to all as SBE, the disease that made Rheumatic Fever the most feared and fatal of all school age children's diseases.
It was also known as "The Polio of the Poor", which gives an indication that minorities , immigrants and the poor were the hardest hit by it.
For these two reasons, people with it were judged, by a medical establishment echoing the Manhattan of Gordon Gekko, to be of no value to the military or to hard-slog war-factory work ---- and so best left to die.
But Dawson, perhaps channelling the spirit of Manhattan's equally famous Emma Lazarus, saw the pair as worth saving and their disease as curable if only.
If only, twelve long years after penicillin's non toxic and bacteria killing nature were first discovered, some doctor plucked up enough courage to test its toxicity in the human blood stream.
Dawson did that crucial test - injecting it in himself.
Convinced it was safe, he then injected his team's home made penicillin into the pair and quietly, off stage in all that day's media splash, made history.
For journalistic hindsight is always 20/20, but back then it seemed clear that reporting upon possible student resistance (on the same Columbia campus) to the draft registration process was a far,far bigger story.
Hopefully, this time around, on the October 16th 2015 seventy fifth anniversary of those historic pair of antibiotic injections, the NYC area media will run with the ball ...
And they made history not by accident of sheer coincidence either.
For their doctor, Martin Henry Dawson of Columbia University's Presbyterian medical campus,was incensed that his colleagues were using the move to a War Medicine footing (of which the separating of valued 1As from unvalued 4Fs was but one part) as an excuse to drop Social Medicine - the extending of life-saving medical care to those in need, regardless of their income, color or origins.
Dawson felt that a Double V Victory was needed to defeat the hold that Fascist values held among much of the world's Neutral nations - both a military defeat and a moral defeat.
Abandoning America's weakest and the smallest to medical benign neglect, just as the Nazis were currently doing with their own weak and small, was no way to win the 'hearts and minds' of the neutral nations.
These two young New York City boys, famed athlete Aaron Leroy Alston of St Nicholas Avenue and teletype operator Charles Aronson of Vyse Avenue, were dying of then invariably fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis, known to all as SBE, the disease that made Rheumatic Fever the most feared and fatal of all school age children's diseases.
It was also known as "The Polio of the Poor", which gives an indication that minorities , immigrants and the poor were the hardest hit by it.
For these two reasons, people with it were judged, by a medical establishment echoing the Manhattan of Gordon Gekko, to be of no value to the military or to hard-slog war-factory work ---- and so best left to die.
But Dawson, perhaps channelling the spirit of Manhattan's equally famous Emma Lazarus, saw the pair as worth saving and their disease as curable if only.
If only, twelve long years after penicillin's non toxic and bacteria killing nature were first discovered, some doctor plucked up enough courage to test its toxicity in the human blood stream.
Dawson did that crucial test - injecting it in himself.
Convinced it was safe, he then injected his team's home made penicillin into the pair and quietly, off stage in all that day's media splash, made history.
For journalistic hindsight is always 20/20, but back then it seemed clear that reporting upon possible student resistance (on the same Columbia campus) to the draft registration process was a far,far bigger story.
Hopefully, this time around, on the October 16th 2015 seventy fifth anniversary of those historic pair of antibiotic injections, the NYC area media will run with the ball ...
Friday, February 20, 2015
Pushing NATURE out of World's Fairs
Many excellent historical surveys exist about the century long* rise, apogee and decline of the concept of World's Fairs around the globe - more than enough to give proof to my claim.
(*Matching almost in lock step - by no mere coincidence - the century long rise, apogee and decline of the Era of Modernity, also roughly running between the late 1860s to the late 1960s.)
If you are at all green-minded, you will come away from reading such accounts - from it no matters which author or their mode of attack - with a strong sense of the gradual, persistent pushing out of Mother Nature and her wondrous products from these exhibitions.
Pushed far out to the dark Pale beyond the Fair's artificially illuminated gates - to be replaced by the ever more wondrous synthetic inventions of Man.
Sometimes in fact the wonders of Nature were still found inside the Fair gates, on full display, but the culture of the day (and future historians) totally ignored their presence.
The only reason any of us (under the age of eighty) even knows that Australia's pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair features the highly traditional natural fabric "wool" is because, by way of pointed contrast, the building itself was a latest word in 1930s Streamlined Moderne architecture .
That was a much commented upon first for the highly, highly, conservative official culture of Australia of 1939.
The 'fabric of the day 'at this Fair is very well known - well remembered ever since by even those of who were never there : totally Man-made synthetic nylon - nylons.
Rather like the ersatz tires and petro that the Nazi war machine literally ran upon, it was made - as DuPont ads were ever wont to say - entirely from bog-common air, water and coal.
No more American - and soon no more human - abject dependency on the Japanese and their tiny primitive (but oh so clever) silk worms.
Soon no more dependency on the Aussies, their sheep and their wool either.
For tasty, cheap, year around fresh artificial lamb chops were - as always, in what we touching like to call scientific journalism - on their way.
Oh, what a difference a mere 75 years (and perhaps the success of Dawson's natural penicillin and all the other natural antibiotics ?) can make upon the eternally tabula rasa of the scientific mind.
My amused eye caught a story yesterday out of the University of Portsmouth published in one of the Royal Societies journals : it announced the strongest material known was probably not the silk of the humble little spider but rather the teeth of limpet, the ones they use to scrap their microbial food off ocean rocks.
Study lead author, professor Asa Barber, found Nature is an endless source of inspiration for (human) mechanical structures that are strong and enduring because Nature's structures have evolved through century upon countless centuries of ceaseless trial and error advance.
So if World's Fairs still mattered - and currently they don't - perhaps limpet teeth might be the hot exhibit instead of the latest iteration of still tasteless Tang and the never-yet-seen artificial lamb chop ...
(*Matching almost in lock step - by no mere coincidence - the century long rise, apogee and decline of the Era of Modernity, also roughly running between the late 1860s to the late 1960s.)
If you are at all green-minded, you will come away from reading such accounts - from it no matters which author or their mode of attack - with a strong sense of the gradual, persistent pushing out of Mother Nature and her wondrous products from these exhibitions.
Pushed far out to the dark Pale beyond the Fair's artificially illuminated gates - to be replaced by the ever more wondrous synthetic inventions of Man.
Who on earth ever let her (M. Nature) in ???
Sometimes in fact the wonders of Nature were still found inside the Fair gates, on full display, but the culture of the day (and future historians) totally ignored their presence.
The only reason any of us (under the age of eighty) even knows that Australia's pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair features the highly traditional natural fabric "wool" is because, by way of pointed contrast, the building itself was a latest word in 1930s Streamlined Moderne architecture .
That was a much commented upon first for the highly, highly, conservative official culture of Australia of 1939.
Wool or Nylon, ma'am ?
The 'fabric of the day 'at this Fair is very well known - well remembered ever since by even those of who were never there : totally Man-made synthetic nylon - nylons.
Rather like the ersatz tires and petro that the Nazi war machine literally ran upon, it was made - as DuPont ads were ever wont to say - entirely from bog-common air, water and coal.
No more American - and soon no more human - abject dependency on the Japanese and their tiny primitive (but oh so clever) silk worms.
Soon no more dependency on the Aussies, their sheep and their wool either.
For tasty, cheap, year around fresh artificial lamb chops were - as always, in what we touching like to call scientific journalism - on their way.
Green amidst the concrete
But Mother Nature is herself a bit like her weeds - if she is banished in one place, she just springs up anew in another.
Banished from the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, she turns up in northern Manhattan's concrete upon primeval bedrock of the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Centre.
There in 700 two litre flasks, Dr Martin Henry Dawson and his tiny four person team nurtured the blue green penicillium to offer up some of its precious yellow drops of the life-granting penicillin juice , all to save the lives of two boys judged ( by other doctors) as 'lives unworthy of much medical care', as medical America prepared itself for Total War.
It was as if Gordon Gekko and Emma Lazarus had exchanged their normal roles.
For history celebrates only the artificial and the synthetic at 1940's Flushing Meadows' green acres while noting only the green growing at 1940's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Centre's mass of concrete and stone.
It was as if Gordon Gekko and Emma Lazarus had exchanged their normal roles.
For history celebrates only the artificial and the synthetic at 1940's Flushing Meadows' green acres while noting only the green growing at 1940's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Centre's mass of concrete and stone.
Limpet prose
My amused eye caught a story yesterday out of the University of Portsmouth published in one of the Royal Societies journals : it announced the strongest material known was probably not the silk of the humble little spider but rather the teeth of limpet, the ones they use to scrap their microbial food off ocean rocks.
Study lead author, professor Asa Barber, found Nature is an endless source of inspiration for (human) mechanical structures that are strong and enduring because Nature's structures have evolved through century upon countless centuries of ceaseless trial and error advance.
So if World's Fairs still mattered - and currently they don't - perhaps limpet teeth might be the hot exhibit instead of the latest iteration of still tasteless Tang and the never-yet-seen artificial lamb chop ...
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
"Janus Manhattan" : home to both wartime's synthetic plutonium death-dealing and to natural penicillin lifesaving
Why write fictions about Manhattan --- when its real life is so much more exciting than anything Hollywood screenwriters could ever dream up ?
What cautious Hollywood studio boss is ever going to greenlight a fictional script that sets up the Nash Garage Building at Manhattan's 133rd Street and 3280 Broadway as the wartime home of the death-delivering technology that produced almost all of the world's nuclear weapons and the Lutheran Hospital at Manhattan's 144th Street and 343 Covent Ave as the birthplace of the push for providing lifesaving penicillin for all ?
It all seems to be too neat and too cosy a location for such a monumental clash of human values : to set this cosmic clash in two small buildings half a mile from each other, two buildings that are within sight of each other from their top floors.
But it actually happened that way - the same tiny space , the same brief moment in time : the Summer of 1943 : working to producing endless Little Boy death bombs versus working to save the life of one little baby girl named Patty Malone.
I suppose - pace Tom Wolfe the younger -Manhattan fiction allows an author to gild the lilly.
But first you must start with really beautiful lillies.
And non-fictional Manhattan has them in buckets ...
What cautious Hollywood studio boss is ever going to greenlight a fictional script that sets up the Nash Garage Building at Manhattan's 133rd Street and 3280 Broadway as the wartime home of the death-delivering technology that produced almost all of the world's nuclear weapons and the Lutheran Hospital at Manhattan's 144th Street and 343 Covent Ave as the birthplace of the push for providing lifesaving penicillin for all ?
Janus Manhattan : home to both Gordon Gekko and Emily Lazarus
It all seems to be too neat and too cosy a location for such a monumental clash of human values : to set this cosmic clash in two small buildings half a mile from each other, two buildings that are within sight of each other from their top floors.
But it actually happened that way - the same tiny space , the same brief moment in time : the Summer of 1943 : working to producing endless Little Boy death bombs versus working to save the life of one little baby girl named Patty Malone.
I suppose - pace Tom Wolfe the younger -Manhattan fiction allows an author to gild the lilly.
But first you must start with really beautiful lillies.
And non-fictional Manhattan has them in buckets ...
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