#HumanityWashesAshore ---- a threatening flood or a saving fountain ?

Aylan Kurdi : potentially harmful or potentially helpful ?

One can view this week's refugee crisis (just as one can view WWII and WWII Penicillin) as a conflict over varying ways to best control our fears of the future.

Because all humanity, all the time (sometimes consciously but often also unconsciously) worries about the unknown future.

It remains the sole most distinctive thing that we humans do that other lifeforms don't seem to do.

Victoria Oats Blight, 1940s : don't ever say Dawson didn't warn ya

To the sound of loud yawns, in 1930 Dr Henry Dawson dared publicly suggest that a phenomenon he called 'bacterial transformation' (the name was general from the 1930s till the 1980s when it was replaced by today's horizontal gene transfer or HGT), could explain the mysterious and sudden rise of epidemics of new highly virulent diseases.

Sometimes, he thought, a previously mildly virulent pathogen suddenly acquires, from other species of organisms, a new gene or three that made this former 97 pound pathogenic weakling suddenly highly virulent against its traditional victims.

And we now also know that the human breeding of plants and animals for commercial exploitation can also instantly flood the world with an entire population of long domesticated beings with an 'improvement'---- that in fact suddenly makes them very vulnerable to a long existing, mild pathogen.

Dawson died in 1945, before he could point to a clear case of a new epidemic thrown up by HGT like behavior from the victim or the pathogen --- or both.

Victoria oats blight fell upon the world very suddenly in the late 1940s - the result of two genetic events colliding.

Man had introduced an new gene into commercial oat species that made them better resist the much feared crown rust fungus disease.

Great --- except that a mild pathogen of oats had also gained a new gene cluster from HGT.

One that normally would have been quickly lost by evolutionary pressure  --- due to its added energy cost of making this new gene cluster versus null gain for the blight producer.

Except.

That now there were millions of acres of oats, all over the world, all bearing the a new gene that turned this pathogen's new virulency factor a decided advantage for it surviving and flourishing on oats.

Presto - all the world's oat crops, all with the same commercially-added gene, were suddenly under attack.

Science mucky--mucks investigated and reluctantly reversed one of their century old central dogmas --- that biodiversity was a bad bad bad thing (cue here, eugenics et al).

Amazing that anyone could make a million bucks (or get a PhD and do a post doctoral term of servitude) without ever hearing that old old folk saying about never putting all your eggs (or oat seed) in one basket, but there you are.

Commercial greed meet scientific hubris - you two suckers were born for each other ...

This Era of Plentudism : the post modern welcoming of plenitude vs modern plenticide

We are - deniers aside - all plentudists these days.

We actually welcome and cherish the chaos and complexity of a multilayered world - welcome and cherish communities composed of  many wildly different little neighbourhoods.

'The more the merrier' is today our motto.

We are all Jane Jacobs and not Robert Moses today - we are all Henry Dawson and not Howard Florey these days.

We no longer have a an almost physical phobia against the mere thought of anything that is all mixed together.

Be that a bunch of different New York City ethnicities,  New York City neighbourhoods or various unknown compounds in New York City crude penicillin juice.

We no longer seek to replicate the chemists' process of separation and purification outside the beaker and flask.

We no longer practise it on human cities ( via the doctrine of widely separated uses and strict zoning) or on so called human 'races' ( with white separated and superior to blacks and Jews).

Adolf Hitler, Robert Moses and Howard Florey all tried that during WWII , and all failed and all were eventually discredited .....

Henry Dawson DIDN'T discover penicillin , but after penicillin endured underemployment for 12 years , he did give it its first real job : lifesaving

There are always tons of people who claim to have "discovered" this or that movie star, after the fact, but only a handful who actually gave them their first part way back when.

As Scottish Christians are wont to say : there is a huge difference between all those who just talk the talk and the very few that actually walk the walk.

They should know.

Because when it came to giving penicillin a real job (saving lives) old scotsman Alexander Fleming only talked the talk - it was new scotsman Henry Dawson who actually walked the walk : October 16th 1940...

The Big Apple's (green) un-super heroes

The biggest horse races offer the biggest prize money so every jockey naturally wants to win big in the biggest of Big Apples - New York City.

Nothing living and green is implied in the term  --- nothing beyond the green colour of cold hard cash.

Its ironic then, isn't , that wartime's penicillium green grew best in The Big Apple's (The Green Apple's ?) concrete jungle.

Not in leafy green Oxford University.

Brewed up in Gotham by Henry Dawson's small group of unfits, misfits and rebels - fermenting up a revolution in how the world of medicine now views the natural world....

Abundant Penicillin by 1942 - only if Howard Florey didn't come to America ?

When ,in April 1941, Howard Florey learned that his best shot at world acclaim (as the only begetter of systemic penicillin) was at risk because Henry Dawson had got there first, the old claim jumper boot scooted over to America to shake a little dust.

Unfortunately, while in America he met and bonded with an old friend, A Newton Richards, the chief medical advisor (sans MD degree !) to both Merck and the US government's war science research arm , Vannevar Bush's OSRD.

Together the pair agreed that most of the wartime penicillin effort should go into first synthesizing it - rather than merely scaling up existing natural penicillin fermentation technology and getting penicillin to the military and civilian patients dying for lack of it - now.

Richards (who never met a conflict of interest he didn't like) was mindful that Merck's cross harbour rival, Pfizer, was likely to be the big winner if natural fermentation - and not Merck's strength artificial synthesis - was used to produce this priceless new drug.

Left alone, Pfizer (with Henry Dawson's team assisting) was already on the way, during that Fall in 1941 , to producing enough penicillin to get the show on the road.

A pity then that Florey had to spoil the show ...

Finally, a penicillin hero who is NOT "Box Office Poison"

Hollywood has never done a film about the exciting wartime history of the world's best known medicine, penicillin, because the character of two best known protagonists, Alexander Fleming and Howard Fleming - on closer examination - proved 100% pure Box Office poison, particularly to women who are the main customers for medically-oriented dramas.

What exactly Henry Dawson contributed to the success of penicillin has never been in doubt, but what has frustrated American, British and Australian writers on penicillin has been determining just why this normally non-assertive, and now dying, doctor did what he did .

Why exactly did he push so hard  and so long to save the "4Fs of the 4Fs" , against the full force of wartime bureaucracy and at the cost of his own life ?

Here indeed was a hero on the Hollywood scale , if only it was clear why he did what he did .

I think the answer as to why he did what he did, is to consider the character-building events in his life,  before he settled permanently in New York and ultimately took out American citizenship.

After all, he spent the first two thirds of his relatively short life in Canada , in Nova Scotia ,where he was born and raised, in particular.

An instinctive feel for the uniqueness of Nova Scotia's history and culture in the tremulous period just after the turn of the last century is what all these foreign writers, fine as their other talents are, simply lack.

The story of Henry Dawson's quixotic-seeming but ultimately world-shaking Manhattan Project, his drive to see penicillin provided for ALL humanity, is as much character-driven as it is events-driven.

It is his quietly heroic character that will bring customers to buy the book, see the movie, attend the play and musical, above all to bring out those three hankies.

Any history of wartime penicillin seems like a chaotic jumble of events, one damn thing after another ,with no overarching theme to tie them all together.

But now wartime penicillin will be recast as the leading part of a globe wide conflict, taking place underneath the military events of WWII, between two very different ways of treating our fellow human beings .

And the clashing personalities of Henry Dawson and Howard Florey will aptly represent both sides.

But it is Henry Dawson's noble, selfless character, revealed for the first time, that will finally make the story of wartime penicillin the feel-good movie of the year it has always deserved to be....

"Agape's Penicillin : Henry Dawson's Manhattan Project"

Only six words this time : title and sub-title.

I should remind readers that the cover image for all my various book title and sub-titles remains the same.

It is a painting of a stylized pair of unnaturally thin and curving arms and hands lifting up a glowing petri dish of radiated* penicillium mold as if it was a monstrance* , the whole effect at a casual glance looking exactly like a stylized atomic mushroom cloud.

(Hopefully !)

(*Penicillium mold is extremely variable genetically and will usually mutate a few variants, even during the course of growing for a only few days on the petri dish, even if grown from a single spore - these variants are visible as the slightly different pie shaped wedges radiating outwards from the centre of the penicillium mold.

*Monstrances are that glowing sun-like thingy that the priests hold the communion host aloft in, on certain joyous occasions.)

The visual connection to an artist's painting of an upheld monstrance is immediately apparent if one has seen both.

Gladys Hobby, of Dawson's team, records in her book that she daily held up the mold on petri dishes ,in just such a manner, to lift up the spirits of the dying SBE patients.

So it is non-negotiable for me -- I must see the words "Manhattan Project" somewhere in title or sub-title.

I want to play off the idea that this tiny life-oriented Manhattan project, occurring in the same university campus and at the same time as as the atomic Manhattan project, was in every way its antithesis.

But I don't really care if title becomes sub-title etc - its all of one piece in the end.

The idea of someone no one has ever heard of, Henry Dawson, having something equal in importance to the very ultimate in Big Science/Big Government/Big Money/Big War hopefully will intrigue the potential customer enough to look inside the book.

             "Agape's Penicillin" 
The Manhattan Project of Henry Dawson 

is a slightly more academic a sub-title - but longer-winded and windier too....

ALL life is worthy of life as a full citizen or are just SOME judged 'worthy' ?

Nazi Germany - even at the depths of its imminent defeat - treated its full citizens well : recall that POW Kurt Vonnegut was working in a Dresden factory that made food supplements for pregnant mothers at the time of that city's Allied firebombing in February 1945.

But its non full citizens it killed outright or worked to death as starved slaves.

'Life worthy of Life' - 'Life unworthy of Life' are infamous German cum Nazi catchphrases that have come to symbolize THEM, so as to separate US for any shared responsibility for the horrors of  the
eugenic mass murder of WWII.

But when we re-cast those catchphrases as' life worthy or unworthy of life as full citizens' , we become uneasily aware that no society in the early 1940s was free of the sin of treating some of its members as less than fully human.

None .

When Henry Dawson proved this up for the Anglo Allies over their denying of life saving penicillin to young SBE patients deemed useless for the war effort - judged just 'useless mouths' consuming valuable medical resources - he made it clear to many just how close the Nazis and their erstwhile opponents really were, morally......

Hating the handicapped isn't a crime in the Canada of Henry Dawson's birth

When an Ontario mom living a few doors away wrote a letter urging a couple euthanize their autistic grandchild, the general public was outraged.

 But not the police ---- or the academics in this area of the law.

Apparently hating the handicapped is not a hate crime in Canada : but hating Jews, Blacks , Orientals, Catholics or Gays definitely is.

Despite this mile-wide gap in current law, it won't hurt to remind Canadians that Hitler started off by killing the handicapped and only moved onto killing Jews and Gypsies later.

Which is why Henry Dawson was so focused on protecting handicapped individuals, deemed "4Fs of the 4Fs",  from the baneful neglect of Allied governments seemingly intent on matching the Nazis' policies in a muted "me too", step by step ......

In moral terms, WWII boils down to one simple - scientific - question : are the small a part of the future, or just of the past ?

 G F Hegel, the 19th century's most influential philosopher, was famous for claiming that history wasn't an endless cycles of birth, maturity and death laced with infinite variations , as people had always observed.

Instead, he ventured that history has a single purpose and a single goal  - together with a linear unbreakable path upwards to that goal  - linear, unidirectional "Progress" with a capital "P".

Herbert Spencer and a thousand others said that , scientifically, Progress of this sort actually existed, wasn't just an intellectual debating point, and that Darwin's Evolution showed not just why it happened but why it had to happen.

Species and cultures and societies and businesses and empires started out young as small ,weak and foolish and just mightier and mightier and wiser and wider as they got older and older.

The small were useful - yesterday - but now they were just speed bumps in the way of Progress.

Tomorrow had no place for them.

This was the general tenor of the Modern Age between the 1870s and the 1960s.

Many people made moral arguments against this claim - but morality carried far less weight in this age than did science.

Henry Dawson also made moral arguments against this scientific central dogma , but where he seemed downright foolish to his colleagues was that he also said that he had scientific evidence - proof - that this dogma wasn't actually confirmed out there,  in the real world.

A man of deeds ,not words, his scientific articles cut little ice : that had to wait for someone like Stephen Jay Gould a half century later.

By then  ,of course, Gould was writing to the half converted.

But what had made the world change its mind ?

Blame on the events of that momentous year 1945.

1945 was both the apogee and nadir of the Modern Age.

Apogee with one project from Manhattan that assembled a scientific team almost as big and strong as The Bomb's explosion itself.

Nadir with another project from Manhattan that had a scientific team almost as small and as weak as those that manufactured the cure and almost as small and as weak as the intended patients.

Robert Oppenheimer led one team ; Henry Dawson the other.

Time is starting to tell as to who ultimately had the greater impact.....

Group love and Group think --- formula for a disaster : or WWII

It is well accepted that an excessive group love, for the so called Aryan Race, led Germany on endless wars of conquest and that excessive groupthink by Hitler's inner circle defeated an hope of permanent success in those conquests.

I want to suggest that group-love and group-think are intimately related and equally doomed and that by contrast, an expansive openness to others, all others - as individuals and as collectivity, in need or not in need - is the best way for humanity to survive in a dynamic uncertain world.

I plan to contrast the WWII career of little known doctor Henry Dawson, with his manhattan project to save SBE patients by de-weaponizing penicillin, with the mistakes made by those WWII excessive lovers of their own groups and their groupthink, in both the Axis and Allied camps ....

Is Oscar Schindler proof that God has a sense of humour ?

The fact that the scoundrel Schindler personally rescued more Jews than did almost any canonized or beatified "Prince of the Church" is a particular vivid example of an ancient Bible claim.

The Bible repeatedly contends that God deliberately chooses to use the most weak, foolish and the broken of individuals to confound the Wise and Mighty, whenever these powerful beings fail to live up to their advance moral billing.

Almost all of the Princes of almost all the Faiths proved to be desk bureaucrats , rather than martyrs,  at this extreme junction of Good confronting Absolute Evil.

They were determined that their church structure survive as an institution, even if it had to be at the cost of emptying out all their church's ethical teachings.

Another example, perhaps, of God's sense of humour : the fact that some publicly avowed anti-semetics became leaders in the efforts to save Jews from Hitler !

Despite disliking these people individually and collectively, they still struggled to save them as fellow ( if "useless") beings.

Schindler, along with tens of thousands of others, broke Nazi laws and would have been executed if caught, because he operated inside occupied Nazi Europe.

In the rest of the world, probably only a few hundred in total risked, at most, their careers and social reputations when they broke or bent their country's immigration laws to bring out Jews ( or other refugees) from the fires of Hell.

One wants to ask two questions ; why so few when the risks were so much lower AND what personality features led them to become the rare exception ?

Despite death staring them in the face, many in Europe paradoxically had an easier opportunity to save Jews , for the potentially saveable Jewish family just lived next door.

Only a few in the rest of the world had the money, time and connections to be effective 'rescue operators' in the remaining Neutral nations that bordered Occupied Europe.

Today, millions worldwide can easily take to the nearest street to protest , before TV cameras, about an remote injustice - all doing their small bit to achieve an enormous result.

But in the 1930s and 19940s, street protests seemed something only Communists and Fascist-Nazis did : mostly  being deliberately staged street brawls between the two .

If potential protesters from any nations could have done it, culturally, even in wartime, it was Americans, yet even there any street marches on anything were extremely rare.

Street protests were not yet, culturally, a 'middle class' thing to do (and didn't become so until the mass European and North American protests against nuclear war in the mid-1980s , forty years later.)

The answer to the second question is that the people who put in extraordinary efforts to rescue all kinds of refugees in the 1930s and 1940s, operating in the free world, are usually described by the academics who have studied their biographies as already being 'outsiders' , thanks to their ongoing resistance to some institution or other in their own countries.

This seems to have made it easier for them to contemplate breaking the national laws to get the refugees in.

This makes one wonder if Dr Henry Dawson's outsider status revolved around scientific differences he had over the validity of American  War medicine replacing American Social medicine in a time of crisis.

(Dawson rescued 'The 4Fs of the 4Fs', patients dying from SBE, from death by deliberate medical establishment neglect, during WWII : de-weaponizing penicillin in the process.)

War medicine's underlying scientific assumption was that Nature had shown that the Bigger were better than the small and the weak, so that the big replacing the small was not just inevitable, it was also beneficial overall.

War medicine just hastened a process that was not just inevitable anyway but was better for all.

Dawson, through his study of R,S,M,L and V forms of oral commensal strep bacteria, had perhaps grown to see that the most ancient form of life, the bacteria, hadn't died out over billions of years, despite being small and weak and simple.

They were surviving, nay flourishing , and it just might be because they did not evolve the ability to kill-off their chronically weakened and weirdly mutated mates.

In this horizontally-oriented Evolution, the avirulent and the weak bacteria were not second-rate, but rather were just another(equal) part of a vast potential genetic pool, to help bacteria instantly response to changes in an ever dynamic world via Horizontal Gene Transfer.

Somehow, he might have mentally transferred this sense of the value of retaining a bigger genetic pool over to the worthiness of keeping even SBE 4Fs alive inside a Total War.

Sickle cell humans are a mutation that has remained in the human genetic pool, because while it causes one weakening disease, it also reduces the possibility of another life-ending disease.

But in addition,we should, but usually don't, recognize that every human offers up not just more variety to the human gene pool, they also contribute more variety to the human culture and happiness pool.

Every male scientist in 1941 who claimed that severely retarded children with a permanent mental age of only one were suffering and caused their parents to suffer and so deserved a merciful death by lethal injection , had obviously never played with their own one year old children.

( In fact, many a normal parent happens to wish their kids remained forever at age one when they were at their most loveable and obedient behavior ! )

Dawson with his own new infant, might have been struck anew by the absurdity of this old chestnut and became determined to confound the Dr Foster Kennedys of this world.

At least, this is all food for thought....

Allied war crimes of attrition vs Axis war crimes of aggression

Let us first always remember that it was the Germans, together with the Italians and the Japanese, who started WWII and created its spiral of ever increasing tit for tat violence.

Without the aggressive invasions of this Axis trio, the western Allies would never have done to Europe .... what they routinely did to the dark people of smaller, hotter nations and colonies.

That is to say, imposing total blockades of food, fuel and life-saving medicine upon the civilians of occupied Europe---- and then bombing and shelling them as well, killing many and "de-housing" many others.

The Allies committed these war crimes of attrition reluctantly and carefully, but they did it from 1939 to 1945: causing the premature deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians from occupied lands in the process.

And it was all legal, strictly legal, at least under the international law in place during WWII.

But perhaps partly as result of the brave wartime disobedience of William Douglas Home (brother of the later British (Tory) Prime Minister) at the siege of Le Havre, postwar conferences made the starving of civilians in siege situations illegal.

One classic example of Allied war crimes of attrition were the mass starvation of newly-occupied Greece in 1940-1941 --- a starvation deliberately not relieved by Churchill , against the wishes of most of his Allies and of American elite public opinion.

Another was the extensive aerial and naval bombing of factories and transport facilities in occupied cities from 1940 to 1945 , despite the widely known knowledge that it was always wildly inaccurate - killing outright hundreds of thousands of occupied civilians.

I have already mentioned the siege of German-occupied Le Havre in 1944, where the British refused the German request to evacuate the civilians : the British hoped the slow starvation of the French civilians beside them might convince the hardened SS troops to surrender quicker !

But denying the knowledge of new life-saving medications and disease-reducing insecticides to the civilians of occupied lands is a entirely unknown example of Allied war crimes of attrition, but that doesn't make it any less true.

It is why I consistently refer to the high level Allied efforts to keep penicillin and DDT secret and restricted to frontline Allied troop use as their weaponizing , despite my listening audience's doubting stares.

Out of their homes thanks to Allied bombing, denied food and fuel by the Allied blockade, stressed by Nazi atrocities and oppression ,many Europeans were increasingly vulnerable to classic war diseases like typhus, which alone killed more than combat did, through all the big wars up to WWII.

The traditional insecticides used to try and stop typhus were much less effective a method than the new DDT and while the Sulfa family have worked well to prevent most killer infections between 1937-1942, there were to be no new Sulfa drugs coming along, and this at a time when bacteria was becoming rapidly resistant to Sulfa.

Thus a potential medical catastrophe was looming , bigger even than the double whammy of the Western Spanish Flu and Eastern Typhus that killed more at the end of WWI than did war combat itself.

Denying knowledge of the possible cure to occupied Europe would only make the catastrophe worse.

The wartime weaponizing of atomic fission to make bombs rather than electricity was opposed by a large number of very prominent scientists , yet failed totally.

The wartime weaponizing of penicillin was opposed by one - dying - middle rank medical scientist and yet was successful beyond his wildest dreams.

How successful ?

Take the example of 1949's THE THIRD MAN, recently voted the best British movie of all time.

In it, 'cheap, safe, abundant penicillin for all' is regarded  as the mark of every civilized society and "the man who dared water the workers' penicillin" becomes the epitome of ultimate evil.

And thus we get an explanation as to why war hero Winston Churchill (the Harry Lime of wartime penicillin) so badly lost the 1945 British General Election.

For Churchill, the architect of the Allied war of attrition, simply could never understand the public's objection to his weaponizing of penicillin.

Why did the dying, modest Dr Henry Dawson succeed in confounding the weaponizing of penicillin when the very energetic Leo Szilard and others failed to do the same with atomic fission ?

I suggest the reason was not in their differing moral values, though this is part of the answer.

Instead, I argue that it was Dawson's greater scientific conviction of the rightness of his actions, based upon his theory of "the eternal commensality of the big and the small", that made his opposition much earlier, much more consistent and and much more unyielding.....

Allied war crimes of attrition vs Axis war crimes of aggression

Let us first always remember that it was the Germans, together with the Italians and the Japanese, who started WWII and created its spiral of ever increasing tit for tat violence.

Without the aggressive invasions of this Axis trio, the western Allies would never have done to Europe .... what they routinely did to the dark people of smaller, hotter nations and colonies.

Henry Dawson, Leo Durochers and The Virile Age

In 1939, the fiery new manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers set the tone for his famous tenure at the beleaguered team.

The Dodgers, Leo Durochers thought, were nice guys.

However, the Thirties were a Virile Age, with no time for tortoises or 97 pound weaklings.


Hares beat tortoises every time and Goliaths defeat Davids : yes, nice guys are nice and a joy to be around, but nevertheless they finish last every time.

If terminal diffidence is a form of niceness, then Henry Dawson was definitely nice.

Far far too nice nice to be a successful scientist in an age of virile men, what we would today probably call Type A personalities and Alpha Males.

Fortunately for humanity, Dawson combined his extreme diffidence with a stubborn intellectual courage.

Point of fact, most Alpha Males have never expressed an unconventional thought in their lives.

True they make a point of being offensive to nice people and 'ladies' , offensive to conventional niceness.

But alongside of conventional public niceness is an equally large body of semi-public locker room sentiments.

Alpha males merely express publicly what a lot of people say and think in private.

One thinks of General Secretary Henry Dawson's much better known counterpart at the Third International Congress on Microbiology, President Thomas "Tom" Rivers., a favorite among the media.

Old fashioned Southerner Tom was always brutally and colourfully frank about preferring his "boys" , those on his teams of researchers who were within his favoured circle, his "good ole boys".

This in pointed contrast to his other researchers on the team ,left outside looking in : the colored boys, the Jew boys and the gals.

Dawson kept his mouth politely shut about his critics  - not just in public but apparently in private as well.

But he was intellectually stubborn, literally onto death.

If he didn't have tenure, he'd give up his career to see his weekend and holiday research completed over the resistance of his boss (Avery).

When he did have tenure, he bucked his critics by not requesting grants and extra facilities.

He knew of the snares in the strings that would come attached to those grants and extra facilities .

He stayed small and on the cheap, but he stayed free.

And if you like semi-happy endings and tortoises, yes he finished first, well ahead of his hare competitors . And then he died.

Died of the disease that crippled him all the time he was proving up the immediate use of wartime life-saving natural penicillin.

If he hadn't remained stubbornly in the race, we'd probably would not have had abundant natural penicillin for WWII's wounded and all those rendered sick in the hunger and dislocation of the war's end.

It turns out that even in The Virile Age, nice guys and 97 pound weaklings finish first....

1939-1945 : Nesvizh Jews fight for life, at home and abroad

While Jews in the democratic West during WWII were unwilling  to do something even as minor as chaining themselves to government fences ( a la the suffragettes) to protest the mass killing of their counterparts in Europe, this did not mean that other Jews were not fighting for their right to life in those years.

Consider the brave Jews of Nesvizh.

Ninety percent of the Jews of that small city, 60 miles south west of Minsk (today part of Belarus, then part of Poland), were killed by the Germans, in one day, in October 1941.

The remaining 600, locked in a tiny ghetto, resolved to try an armed breakout, rather than die quietly.

The forests were right next to the city and the ghetto and once the Jews were in the woods, filled with lethal partisans hidden behind dark trees, the Germans and their helpers quickly lost their dutch courage and gave up the chase.

On July 21 1942, hearing a police company of Nazi collaborators was coming to kill the remaining 600, the Jews started their break out.

Yes, most got killed in the process, but perhaps 10% of the 10% got away to try and survive the grim and short lives of forest partisans.

Maybe a handful of the original 6000 survived to the end of the war.

Nevertheless, this tiny ghetto was the first, or one of the very first, groups of Eastern European Jews to fight to the death in an effort to stay alive.... and is widely honored worldwide today for doing so.

Particularly by those children of Western Jews who know their own parents and grandparents, under far more safe circumstances, did basically nothing, certainly nothing so bold and courageous, during WWI to hinder the Nazi efforts to kill all of the world's Jews.

Most of the Jewish people of  Nesvizh survive today as the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of the people of that shtetl who emigrated to places like New York in the brief window of opportunity between the 1890s and the start of WWI.

Charlie Aronson 

We still know very little about this man, the very first person to receive lifesaving penicillin-the-antibiotic (systemic penicillin) and who did so on October 16 1940 in New York.

We do know a fair bit of his medical history, but as to Charles Aronson himself, we only know he was born about 1913.

We are very lucky that in 1944 much of his complicated medical history was abstracted by his doctor in a published article because today's America would let us know nothing of this man born a 100 years ago.

America is a country where it is much easier to buy an assault rifle then it is for a historian to get any personal information about historical figures.

But importantly we do know a fair bit of the career of his doctor (Dr Henry Dawson) , particularly with regard to the disease that Charlie Aronson was being treated for (subacute bacterial endocarditis) (SBE).

Prior to Charlie, Dawson had never treated SBE and obviously , at that point, no one had treated anyone anywhere with systemic penicillin.

From these few scant facts, we can make a few educated , aka statistical, guesses about the identity of Charlie.

Because some academics have studied the matter thoroughly, we have a pretty good idea of how ordinary (non well-to-do) New Yorkers picked the solutions to their medical problems in 1940.

The densely populated centre of New York City is also home to one of the world's largest arrays of hospitals and doctors in the world.

A short bus ride in any direction in the three mile circle around your home threw up lots of possible healers.

Even the poorest weren't short of choices - many NYC hospitals and doctors were also research oriented and if you submitted to their new therapy trials, you got (hopefully) cutting edge treatment for little or no cost.

Generally, distance was a big factor : since so many good hospitals lay close at hand in every direction, so why go further only to find your family and friends can't easily visit you daily ?

The exception was if a doctor or hospital was very famous for its special advanced treatment of a particular fatal disease : then people would come from all over the continent or the world, desperate for a possible lifeline.

Dr Henry Dawson ,and systemic penicillin, in October 1940, were the furthest possible from that sort of fame in the case of SBE.

In October 1940, nobody had a cure for SBE : when you got very sick with it, you went to any old hospital and patiently waited to die from this 99% invariable fatal disease.

So in looking for a patient named Charles Aronson, born around 1913, who attended Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in upper Manhattan in October 1940, the first place to look is in the recent release of the 1940 federal US census, seeking a man of that name and age living pretty close to the hospital.

As it happens, the only man having that name and age in the 1940 census living within a few miles of Columbia- Presbyterian lived very close indeed: two miles away at 1202 Vyse Avenue in the (South) Bronx.

(The handwritten census indication of the street is often misread as Nyse Avenue (sic!).

Most - but not all - of the people in New York City in 1940 named Aronson were recent Jewish immigrant families from The Pale of Russia , places like today's Poland, Ukraine and Belarus.

Places like Nesvizh.

The Charles Aronson born around 1913 living at 1202 Vyse Avenue, has a brother Samuel, a sister Lillian, a mother Olga and a father Alex.

Vyse Avenue, in 1940, was home to a closely knit community from the Minsk and Nesvizh areas and so when we see an Alex Aronson from the Bronx on two lists of members of a Nesvizh landsmanshaften, we may well have something.

(Landsmanshafts were Jewish fraternal organizations based on all members being former residents of a very small part of the Old World. Think of it as a big neighbourhood emigrating en masse and re-constituting itself in another country. It functioned as a hometown collective self-help, burial and social organization.)

The 1940 census says that Alex and Olga were born in the former Russian Empire in the late 1880s (and Minsk/Nesvizh was certainly part of that Empire back then.)

Charlie and his siblings were all born in New York and I feel we can safely speculate that Olga and Alex migrated to New York as twenty year olds just before WWI and started their family there.

The 1940 census tells us not just ages and birthplaces and current residence, it tells us of the education, occupations and incomes of all on the census.

Luckily the youngest Aronson of this family , Samuel, was asked a few more questions - in particular he said his childhood home language was Jewish (Yiddish), indicating this family was in fact Jewish.

Alex had 3 years of school, worked as a machine operator making ladies cloaks, earning $1400 a year ( a typical skilled working class wage in that year.) Olga had no formal education and worked at home as a homemaker.

Samuel had one year of college and was looking for work as a machine operator making ladies belts.

Lillian had 4 years of High School and made $900 a year as a machine operator making ladies belts.

Charles also had 4 years of High School and was making $950 a year working as a teletype operator at a newspaper.

Perhaps at a gentile newspaper but far more likely at a Jewish newspaper.

If this Charles Aronson was the same one who received history's first ever shot of antibiotic and went on to recover from invariable fatal SBE not just once but twice, it was remarkable he had so much education and had a skilled job.

Because the SBE Charlie had had many close calls with death and permanent disability.

When he was eight,in the early 1920s, Charlie had gotten Rheumatic Fever (RF) , which until 1960, the leading case of death in school age children.

His was an unusually severe version, as it hit the cells of his joints, the cells of his heart and the cells of his nerves.

He was lucky not to die - most poor kids at that time did die outright from this severe an attack.

Then he went right on to get a severe attack of the post WWI worldwide epidemic of a mysterious sleeping sickness, encephalitis lethargica, not at all to be confused with the disease caused by the tropical tsetse fly.

Today the evidence points away from what was originally seen as the cause, flu, and towards an auto immune response to particular strains of strep bacteria causing a case of strep throat weeks or months before the onset of this particular disease.

Rheumatic Fever is another in a whole series of auto-immune diseases caused by some people's particular gene set over-reacting to certain strains of strep throat bacteria.

Thanks to Oliver Sacks, most people today know far more about sleeping sickness than do they of Rheumatic Fever, and most know that while many died of the initial attack, others survived it only to become victims of permanent post-infection parkinsonism.

Such was SBE Charlie's unlucky fate.

Still he survived two should-be fatal attacks by strep before 1940 and remarkably he would survive two more should-be fatal attacks by different strep bacteria between 1940 and 1944.

And a life-threatening stroke : a cat of more than just nine lives !

These latter strep were the normally harmless mouth strep bacteria than can invade damaged heart valves caused by Rheumatic Fever and almost always (before systemic penicillin) kill the patient : the dreaded SBE.

Attacks to your nerve cells  such as hit Charlie twice, can give a person temporary or semi-permanent mental, emotional and behavioral issues.

The Nazis in particular feared those with this form of sleeping sickness and their Aktion T4  murder teams usually sought out and killed such people, even when the person generally functioned as a hard working tax paying citizen.

Such as poor Martin Bader, who was murdered by German doctors in late June 1940.

This was the very same time as two American doctors, Dawson along with Dr Karl Meyer, were first learning of penicillin's unknown systemic potential from unpublished verbal reports from an American student forced to leave Oxford University after the Fall of France.

Already the two were thinking of it for a new use as a life-saving therapy.

Dawson was a humanitarian doctor but in addition his particular private research interest was oral strep diseases.

Charlie may have been a last minute attention to the initial SBE penicillin trial (despite Dawson not having enough penicillin for one, let alone two SBE patients) because he had survived both RF and sleeping sickness and now was under attack from strep bacteria for a third time.

Charlie never faced direct assault from Nazis as did his remaining relatives in Nesvizh, if that is where indeed his dad came from.

But Charlie's life was threatened by Nazi-like thinking by the American medical elite, who felt, like Himmler and Hitler, that SBE patients, particularly if they also suffering from parkinsonism, were just useless mouths to feed in an all-out total war, and so should be left to die---- in this case, by deliberate neglect.

They ordered doctors not to waste penicillin on SBE patients.

Charlie and Doctor Dawson fought back - not with guns - but Dawson did break the wartime laws and did steal scarce government controlled penicillin, all to keep SBE patients alive.

His "ACTING UP" finally provoked a national and then international public reaction against the Allies' Nazi-like attitude to SBE patients and penicillin.

The character of Allied penicillin also changed at that moment - from a secret weapon of war, to a public and universal life-saver.

Dawson himself was dying of an auto-immune disease from 1940-1945 and did not live to see the end of the Nazis, but Charlie did.

To the Polish government at the beginning of the war, Charlie was a Polish citizen living overseas.

No country in the world had a worse war than the Poland of the 1939 boundaries.

The Allies with great consistency treated it as badly in 1945 as they did in 1939, matching the Nazis stroke for stroke.

It is satisfying to know that at least one citizen of Poland was treated fairly during WWII, treated as fairly as every individual should be treated all the time,  and that the result of his being treated with compassion, penicillin became about the only good news story that ever did come out of that bad news war ....

WWII's sins of uncaring omission as War Crimes

Even animals would be discomforted at the audible and visual pain as millions of Indians starved to death during the Bengali Famine of 1943.

It is a pity that so many of us,supposedly more sophisticated, humans have been less discomforted about the event ever since.

Most of us - at least in the Allied West - would strongly reject the  idea that this totally unnecessary mass famine was a war crime and and a sin of uncaring omission.

To ease our own consciences, we much prefer to limit our definition of war crimes to sins of commission, done by obvious evil-doers : the direct shooting, gassing or bayoneting of civilians as at Nanking, the Katyn Forest or at Auschwitz.

But it is not enough to save "oops -sorry !" when bombs we intend for rail yards or oil refineries happen to fall upon 250,000 soon-to-be dead civilians in occupied countries - not if we also clearly know that most of our bombs always fall widely off target.

Claiming that anything and everything is justified if our intent (to defeat Hitler) is good is not a moral claim with legs.

It puts one to mind of the claims of George W Bush that he just had to suspend civil liberties in America ----- in order to bring them instead to the oppressed of the Middle East !

We must always demonstrate extremely due care when we kill some in an effort to save others : clearly seeking to see if there are not other ways to defeat evil without killing so many of the innocent.

Famine , fortunately, was not general throughout the Allied and Neutral world, between 1939-1945.

But many (powerless) people needlessly went more hungry than they had to , in many of the Allied-controlled colonies.

But if Allied famine had been widespread and prolonged - caused perhaps by normally reoccurring weather disasters adding to uncaring imperial government mis-management - would it have been moral to continue to treat DDT as a war secret and deny its use to civilians, to reduce additional loss of food to insect pests ?

The militarizing of wartime DDT thus escaped - just - being another war crime of uncaring omission.

But there are more uncaring crimes of omission in the Allied closet.

In 1940-1941, several years into WWII, the new class of sulfa drugs which had emerged only 5 years earlier, seemed a gift that just kept on giving.

Today when the doctor comes in with the test results and says "I'm very afraid it appears that the cancer has metastasized" , the room gets very still as patient, family and nursing personnel absorb the grim news.

In the years before sulfa and antibiotics, people rarely lived to an age where they could learn that their original primary (localized) cancer tumour had spread throughout their body and that their chances of survival were now slim.

Instead what they feared was something not un-similiar happening with an infection that had originally been localized to one lesion , something most bodies, and good nursing care, could eventually fight off on its own.

Now in came the doctor with the blood tests (indicating colonies of bacteria were thick throughout the entire blood supply) and the room would go similarly silent.

Septicemia (Sepsis) was what the doctor would call it, but laypeople  would whisper to friends "blood-poisoning" , just we tend today to whisper "the doctor says the cancer is all through the body".

While we are correct to say that cancer spreading throughout the body (ie a systemic cancer rather than a localized tumour) is deadly and will directly kill us, our concept of what blood poisoning actually means is only half accurate at best.

It is correct that a bacteria infection flourishing in the blood will spread through out the body (is now a systemic disease) but the bacteria will not directly kill us - not by their "poisons" or their physical actions.

Rather it is that our body overreacts to any massive (systemic) assault upon it - not just to systemic bacterial infections - and it is the body's immune defenses' overreaction that kills us in sepsis.

The 1930s - modernist - mindset thought everything humans did - including our immune system - was marvellous beyond words and simply much preferred to blame those nasty little devils, the bacteria.

Until Sulfa drugs came along, nothing but God's will and dumb luck could prevent sepsis from ending in death.

The arrival of the sulfa drugs had meant all sides in WWII went to war a bit more confident that infection deaths would be much reduced on and off the battlefield.

So, despite the war between them, both the Allies and the Axis went on investigating tens of thousands of sulfa drugs, publicly* patented thousands of them and seriously trying hundreds of them on animals and humans.

*Yes, even in wartime - on both sides ! A notable contrast with the Allied secrecy on DDT and penicillin.

The new sulfa drugs of 1940-1941 tended to be less toxic and more effective than the slightly older ones - some even treated diseases originally thought beyond the reach of sulfa.

How could life ever get much better than this ?

But a year is a very long time in infectious disease treatment when practised massively and on a global basis.

By late1942, the sulfas were in a dire crisis.

Two American chemists, Roblin and Bell- who had helped invent the latest in the sulfa wonder drugs - had just published a convincing chemical explanation for their claim that the sulfa molecule (whatever its other medical uses) would no longer produce any new antibacterial drugs.

Seventy five years on, their claim has stood the test of time.

Typically the popular media (Newsweek, September 21st 1942, for example) played Roblin and Bell's research as a good news story - saying that now chemists could tell if a drug would work, before actually assembling it in the test tube.

But frontline chemists in the sulfa-synthesizing business could not help but hear it as a death knell.

The sulfas had other problems.

A few strains of bacteria had always and instantly shown a resistance to their bacterial action. But now the numbers of strains so displaying resistance had exploded in numbers and their resistance was more potent.

The first human response was to up the dosages to overcome the resistance.

The sulfa drugs had always been moderately toxic even at low dosages and required attention to detail in monitoring their use.

But now heavy dosages and careless doctor and nursing care was leading to needless deaths from the drug itself.

More thoughtful doctors faced a horrible choice : too big and too long a sulfa treatment might kill or permanently damage the patient, but without it , the patient was almost certain to die from sepsis.

They jungled frantically, trying different sulfas as well as backing them off for a while and then returning to them.

This disaster in the sulfa treatment of systemic infections was effecting military hospitals as least as hard as civilian hospitals.

The dirty little secret of war wound medicine is that soldiers rarely die from localized infections, anymore than they do in civilian life.

Soldiers die all the time from massive wounds - as do civilians - but rarely is the fact that the wound is also locally infected the critical factor in their death.

But if any sized wound permits the infection to spread to the blood - then soldiers do die from the indirect result of a wound that was originally just locally infected.

Just as well then that the local curing of local wounds was largely irrelevant to life survival.

Because the sulfas were proving to be totally useless in curing local wound infections. In 1940, two British researchers, Fildes and Woods, had offered up an explanation for how sulfa works (that it is mistaken for a vital food bacteria needs) that has also stood the test of time for 75 years.

Their research also explained why sulfa sometimes didn't work even if the bacterial strain wasn't resistant to it.

If bacterial lesion had lots of the real food around, enough bacteria ate it, instead of the useless sulfa lookalike, to keep the infection going.

Wounds - badly tended war wounds in particular - had lots of that food provided by dead and dying flesh.

So no new sulfas on the way - ever , the ones now in use were proving to be either useless, toxic or increasingly resisted by more and more bacteria.

Today,at any one time, we prefer to use about a dozen different drugs to fight serious infections.

But also we have about one hundred we could use - including the sulfas - if the current dozen all suddenly proved useless.

More importantly, these one hundred represent many different classes of drugs - never is any one bacteria infection resistant to all of them.

These discarded drugs are both more toxic or less effective than those in preferred use, but if death by sepsis is the alternative, even a highly toxic drug is the better - more moral - choice.

But the sulfas were the one and only class of drugs in use in 1942 against systemic life threatening infection ; they all shared the same good and bad features, all shared the same fate.

So it appeared that inevitable death by blood poisoning , for both military personnel and civilians, was on its way back.

Unless .......penicillin was put into serious mass production.

But in 1942, both the British and American medical elites had already decided that penicillin was to be kept as secret as possible and used only as a weapon of war - used only to cure our side's wounded on the QT,  so no one else would pick up on it.

Letting civilians have it and above all letting civilian newspapers chatter on about miracle cures would only alter the enemy into making their own penicillin and the Allied military advantage would be gone.

Powerful figures in Britain and America decided that wasn't about to happen.

But in the Fall of 1942, one man realized that if penicillin was now the only thing between blood poisoning death and a nice long life, he would have to up his own ante in this relentless game of chicken.

So that Fall, Dr Henry Dawson stole his first supply of government-issued penicillin and put it to work saving lives from systemic SBE disease , again against strict government orders to let the SBE patients die.

By his reckoning, if the Allies could militarize penicillin, there seemed no reason why one - dying - doctor couldn't un-militarize it back again......

1940 Penicillin : localized Gas Gangrene or systemic SBE ?

Within days of reading war-dodger Howard Florey's published conclusion that the as-yet-unproven penicillin was particularly suited to the military's most feared infection, gas gangrene, war-hero Henry Dawson defiantly decided - by pointed contrast - that penicillin was particularly well suited to defeat the ultimate in non-military infections, deadly subacute bacterial endocarditis, SBE.

The timing of Dawson's decision - during the most critical days of the expected Invasion of Britain - only heighten this highly unusual contrast between how we expect war-heroes and war-dodgers to behave and how these two examples actually did behave.

Florey had declined to serve his country when he was young but now was very eager to aid it (as a draft-proof middle ager) by steering the new penicillin towards use as as a local antiseptic for gas gangrene infections in frontline casualty tents.

For centuries, gas gangrene infections were the most dreaded and also the most uniquely wartime forms of death (rarely causing death in peacetime).

Any talk of the possibility of finally ending gas gangrene's terrors was acutely pitched to catch the ears of war's political, military and medical leadership.

By contrast, when on the day of America's first peacetime Draft Registration, a day dedicated to locating all of America's 1A youth,  Dawson choose to instead try and save the lives of two SBE sufferers, one Black and one Jewish, he was focused on the most 4F imaginable of the unwanted 4Fs.

The most 4F of all the 4Fs : the SBEs

For no nation's military , no matter how hard pressed for manpower, was likely to regard SBEs as more than just a particularly costly burden for a wartime economy to bear.

It usually hit young adults , the prime category for draft boards and munition factories, but no matter what modern medicine threw at it, it always ended after months of expensive effort with the inevitable death of the patient.

In that Fall of 1940, the Medical School at Columbia University, which employed Dawson, had moved to reduce its offerings in Social medicine and up its offerings in War medicine, in response to the battle for civilization not taking place over the skies of Britain.

It certainly had no cause to expect any complaints from professor Dawson, he of all its employees.

He was, after all, from a Canadian family of five brothers, all who volunteered to fight in WWI, all who were wounded in the front lines - one who had paid the ultimate price and others who got medals for bravery and leadership under fire.

Dawson likely had more front line experience - in the medical corp, the infantry and in artillery - than any one else in the Medical School.

When he wasn't serving in hospitals dealing with wounded soldiers, he was in military hospitals himself as a patient - fighting off life-threatening infected war wounds he himself received.

Surely such a patriot and such a veteran of battlefront infections  saw the sense on Howard Florey's proposal to focus penicillin research on battlefront wound infections  and to agree with his university's decision to focus on war related medical research ?

But clearly he did not - and the mystery is to account for why he did not - but instead, precisely and perversely, did exactly the opposite.

Penicillin did not, in the end, reduce deaths due to gas gangrene - in fact penicillin pioneer ( and WWI veteran) RJV Pulvertaft found that the evidence suggested that the percentage of gas gangrene sufferers who died actually went up in WWII , compared to the results obtained in the last years of the previous war !

By contrast, in the end, penicillin proved to be the best medicine ever seen to stop deadly systemic (body-wide) infections like SBE and blood-poisoning.

Explaining the mystery and the paradox

Based on just the evidence, part of the mystery might therefore seemed to solve itself: the modest Dawson was simply a far better scientist than the very pushy and ambitious, but ultimately plodding, Florey.

But Dawson was also extremely patriotic in ways that Florey couldn't begin to imagine and we still must explain why he felt  that his best way to personally aid the war effort was to come to the aid of Life's weakest members.

Saint Peter had only denied Christ's pleas three times, but between 1931 and 1941, America had denied pleas for help from smaller, weaker countries under attack over two dozen times, only deciding
to put the Greatest Generation Ever to work fighting the only Good War, after it itself was attacked.

Helping Life's weakest members is all very nice in theory said America - but what in the hell does it have to do with fighting WWII - which was all about one's own naked self interest ?

Perhaps Dawson was merely confused -  was still fighting WWI - was still fighting for poor bleeding little Belgium.

Perhaps....

Henry Dawson : The biography of dull dishwater or of the first modernist to leave the reservation and go PoMo ?

I don't doubt that Henry Dawson's colleagues felt he made a 'perfectly competent associate professor' ( in the most damming sense of that ominous phrase) ---- but that as an individual he was a man extremely unremarkable and totally non memorable.

Even those who knew him very well, and who choose to write their personal and scientific memoirs, still found virtually nothing to say about Dawson.

I have been attempting to write his non-authorized biography for almost nine years now and I still know very little about the inner Dr Dawson.

What keeps me happily to my post is my fascination with what Dr Dawson did , not what he said or felt - that, and the lure involved in searching for a reasonable explanation why this most ordinary of men did the things he did , and under the most trying conditions imaginable.

We have accounts of the Modern Age and of our own Post Modern Age, just as we have biographies of Modernists and of Post Modernists.

But in Henry Dawson we have the rarest of rare species : a Modernist caught is the process of becoming a Post Modernist and in the process, shaking the world around us completely.

So a dull as dishwater backwater modernist ? Or a world-class disturber of Modern decorum, a ravager of Modernity ? Or a bit of both, a sort of latter-day Henry Alline ?

I chose Answer three......