Nova Scotia-born Dalhousie graduate awarded Nobel for Physics

It is fair to say that Canadian-born scientists have had fewer than expected Nobel Prizes in physics - only two.

Both, interestingly enough, were awarded to scientists born in tiny Nova Scotia.

'Hope without Borders' , 'Hope without Frontiers' --- the other Manhattan Project is STILL not finished

In late 1943, many people all over the Allied world rightly got very furious when they realized that the new hope that lifesaving penicillin represented was only going to unfaithful husbands and boyfriends who had got a dose of the clap overseas.

Dawson's 'Penicillin without Frontiers'

If Vannevar Bush and Winston Churchill had had their way, penicillin would have become a secret and exclusive weapon of war, just as DDT and atomic energy became during WWII.

Dead nations never rise again? Hitler and Longfellow certainly felt so about Zion (Emma Lazarus disagreed, as did Henry Dawson regarding the 'certain' deaths of his Jewish SBEs)

When Emma Lazarus read Longfellow's otherwise moving poem about the old Jewish cemetery in Newport, Rhone Island, she hated the concluding line that - with Social Darwinistic finality - flatly stated that dead nations (ie Zion) never rise again.

Foreigners worked behind barbed wire fences to build atomic bomb and V2 rocket that America and Germany later claimed as totally their own

Allied America was not terribly different from Axis Germany when it came to employing hands and brains from dozens of foreign lands, often behind barbed wire fences, to do the heavy lifting for a super weapon they then had the chutzpah to claim as fully their own.

Fourth Wave Feminism : older, less educated, rural, conservative, white men oppose niqab because (wait for it !) it "oppresses women"....

Not because their deepest nightmare is the thought the darkie immigrants might someday re-populate the lands their aryan ancestors had wrestled away from its darkie aboriginals a century earlier, in a sort of a 'Revenge of the Melanin'.

I refuse to go especially to places, just in the hope that the trip might reveal what residents of that place looked ,and acted like, almost a century before ...

I'd never go on a walk or a run just for the sake of running and walking, but I will walk anywhere in any weather, if walking gets me to something I want to go to.

(I am also very cheap and hate to pay for taxis and its almost the same when it comes to spending money on our  quite cheap local transit service.)

So I didn't take any special trips to Pictou, Truro, Montreal,Vancouver, Detroit, the UK, New Jersey and New York City, etc, to research the life and times of Martin Henry Dawson.

Oh yes, I have been to almost all the places of great significance in Dr Dawson's short life, but only in passing, while attending to other affairs.

But if my brother hadn't got serious ill, I doubt I would have ever travelled to NYC, en route to his home in Belfast Northern Ireland, for example.

I guess I don't want to get into the bad journalistic habit of over-selling the claim that viewing the exteriors of the buildings of 2016 Truro will tell you a great deal about the interior lives of the residents of 1896 Truro...

Dawson not asking why the move to WWII was started but rather asking - and answering - why it wasn't stopped

In the 1930s, Germany and Japan had big appetites and the means to war, at least upon smaller others near-by, to satisfy them.

Italy merely had a big appetite.

This we are all taught in school --- 'the causes of WWII'.

But is this a truly complete explanation for all of WWII - above all for its extraordinary long length and the almost surprising defeat of the victorious Axis ?

If 'the-rest-of-the-world-combined' had been seriously willing to war with 1930s Japan, Italy and Germany to stop their aggression, even 1940s Japan, Italy and Germany, the Axis would have been quickly defeated.

The Axis simply had far too little manpower and far too little strategic resources , even far too little capital resources such as existing factories, science labs, locomotives and merchant vessels - let alone enough tanks, planes and battleships.

What these three nations did have, along with their fellow travellers around the world, was boundless will power and self confidence produced by the conviction that Science and Nature was on the side of their aggression.

That ------ and the fact that their very large (but also very reluctant) opponents basically agreed with them on the science of the matter.

Martin Henry Dawson's 'other Manhattan Project' had nothing really new to say as to why WWII was started.

But by successfully challenging the science that united Allied and Axis, it had plenty to say as to why it wasn't stopped ....

Dawson's Smalls

A small team of just four, working with small penicillium fungoid growths helpers, all to heal some small patients, working class SBE youths, the very "4Fs of the 4Fs".

Dr Henry Dawson seemed to have kept his team deliberately small, not just to maximize his freedom from the people and institutions who wanted to financially shut him down, but also to make a point of the continuing abilities of small science and small science teams to still do major work.

Again, he deliberately chose to rub the fur of Allied medical science the wrong way when he decided to break a worldwide medical taboo, and after only all five weeks into his project, inject the raw penicillin made from the dismissed-as-too-primitive penicillium mold into his patients' blood stream.

This, rather than wait years or decades for Big Pharma and Big Medicine to painstakingly and slowly bring mass clinically tested synthetic penicillin to market.

Fundamentally, Henry Dawson did it all for 'the little ones'

Henry Dawson's other Manhattan Project wasn't really to advance the cause of penicillin, to aid the Allied military effort or even to save the SBEs : rather he did it all for 'the little ones', to persuade Humanity to build a "Big Tent" that included everyone.

For with rare exceptions (perhaps the early days of the Communist revolutions in some countries) a Big Tent doesn't need to invite the big and the powerful inside - for they are already there.

Instead a Big Tent always newly invites in the small, the weak, those traditionally judged unworthy and unfit.

"Survival of the Fit over the Unfit" flounders among Life's true survivors

Particularly after the whirlwind defeat of the effete French by the German Blitzkrieg in May-June 1940, it seemed obvious to most middle class people in the world that the fit 1As were bound to win , every time, over the unfit 4Fs.

Survival of the fit over the unfit : bigger is better/might is right : Q.E.D.

A Fact of Nature : the classic 'Appeal to Nature'.

But Dr Martin Henry Dawson strongly and fundamentally disagreed with this particular Appeal to Nature, or at the very least, he wished to make another and stronger scientific appeal to the Facts of Nature.

For he felt he had found another (and statistically much better) method for assuring long term survival, as revealed by his study of Nature.

'We're doing this all for the little ones'

World powers (or parents) who too stridently claim they're doing it all 'for the little ones' invariably are not.

One case in point, Great Britain and her Allies.

Britain never actually conducted its war in 1914-1918 - or the peace process in 1919 - with a prime objective the protecting of the rights of 'poor little Belgium'.

Ditto for Belgium, and a dozen other small nations, in 1939-1945 and afterwards.

Henry Dawson bought into the propaganda claim in 1914-1918 --- but not again in 1940.

His response was to set "The other Manhattan Project" in motion....

If small science is beautiful and bountiful then no smaller (or better) example exists then the tiny penicillium factories that produced penicillin when the biggest factories of Man could not

In the Fall of 1940, Dr Henry Dawson set out to embarrass the Allies to actually do something concrete to match their high sounding (but actually empty) Atlantic Charter style rhetoric about protecting the rights of the small in the war against Big Evil.

So he deliberately recruited some very small (and very overlooked) individuals into his "Big Tent Coalition of All the Talents" that came to be the other Manhattan Project.

"4Fs, Slime and a Cracked Pot"

Re-reading Hotchkiss and Dubos's various 1940 era papers on their quick "small science" success at extracting, crystallizing and analyzing high yields of gramicidin, an early (unfortunately deadly) antibiotic exuded by microbes, one is struck by the apparent ease of the whole project.

By contrast, penicillin, another antibiotic exuded by another microbe, was extremely difficult to successfully handle - in every single aspect of it --- from growing the microbe to the ultimate failure to commercially synthesize penicillin itself.

This despite a multi-nation effort that eventually rivalled the Manhattan atomic Project for "Big Science" funding and skilled manpower levels.

But biochemist Dr Karl Meyer was not to know this in September 1940 when he recruited his co-worker, bacteriologist Dr Martin Henry Dawson, to "just" grow a little bit of the fungus microbe, for a "little while".

A seemingly small request, for a short period of time, that cost Dawson his life but also ended up changing our entire world, for the better, forever.

Was Harper willing to pimp out Rachel in Niqab in Riyadh, to hustle arms deal for General Dynamics , while refusing to let her wear Niqab in Quebec City ?

The Economist Magazine says Canada has been revealed to the world as exhibiting an unexpected mean streak in the current election.

This election has indeed been unusual but not because Canada has a new mean streak.

During WWII, Canada, the country of birth of my biographic subject Dr Martin Henry Dawson, had a secret internal plan than "No (Jews) Is Too Many" --- while publicly proclaiming itself as the Peaceable Kingdom.

Infrequently admitted by Canada-boosters, the country ended up with the worst record in the entire world when it came to accepting Jews fleeing the Holocaust.

What is really new is that Canadians are suddenly reversing this hundred and fifty year old policy and being mean in public.

Given that traditionally Canadians have been secretly mean to outsiders all the while being publicly hypocritically proud of their exalted human rights record, Canadians being forthrightly mean in public might even be seen as a moral step forward !

The elevation of a forthright Australian gun-for-hire named Lynton Crosby to run the Canadian Conservative Party's electoral campaign begins then to make sense.

Crosby has orders to re-elect PM Stephen Harper by creating some of his infamous 'dog whistle' wedge issues: in this election, in this country, by suddenly turning the election ballot question onto the mostly ignored but very divisive minor issue over whether women should be allowed to wear Niqabs at government offices.

Harper has always said he'd never put the almighty dollar above defending human rights when it comes to personally hustling massive Canadian weapon sales abroad.

Campaigning in Quebec City, Harper insists he is totally opposed to forcing women to wear Niqabs - a form of face covering most often seen in ultra traditional Moslem countries like Saudi Arabia, where this is hardly the Saudis' worst violation of individual rights - the country executes almost as many people each year as North Korea, China or even America.

Daughters for Dollars

But Harper would hardly be the first world leader (or monarch !) who has been willing to meet the Saudis' strict social customs more than half way, at least while in Riyadh and at least long enough to successfully hustle a few billion more dollars in arms contracts.

I believe Stephen Leacock's once highly popular "Arcadian Adventures among the Idle Rich" may hold the key to the Canadian character.

For Dr Dawson was an young man when this searing attack on Canadian hypocrisy by a professor at his university came out.

Perhaps partially as the result of this famous book, Dawson, born into an atmosphere of traditional Canadian hypocrisy but raised with a pronounced moral conscience, was always particularly sensitive to the contrast between high blown public sentiments and low blown private government inactions.

For example, the very public Atlantic Charter versus the very private reality that all Allied governments sharply restricted volunteer colored recruitment in the Allied invasion armies, even if it meant Hitler had a military advantage as a result.

Combatting (Allied) bystander hypocrisy rather than bully (Axis) meanness was what Dawson chose to focus on in 1940 -1945.

In 1984-1993, I chose to do exactly the same here in Nova Scotia when I found people laughing about an open secret, a powerful politician's serial sex crimes, yet were unwilling to stop him, so more young girls wouldn't assaulted.

Sexual assaults and then the brutal murders of hundreds of women, aboriginal women in particular, is the issue Canada and PM Harper should really be discussing in this election - not a handful of women choosing, of their own free will, to wear niqabs, at a public ceremony in a supposedly free country.....

Dr Dawson's project was a deliberate poetically inchoate protest

Dr Martin Henry Dawson clearly was not always a cautious person but he was always highly cautious in his public print and speech - a man more of concrete deeds than hollow words.

He didn't live into middle age, let alone live long enough to be safely retired (and with most of his senior colleagues safely dead) so he could at last write a rather frank account of the amazing events of forty years before.

One is left, therefore, to tease out for oneself what really lay behind Dawson's rather quixotic little alternative to the much bigger Manhattan Project.

And yet it may be all summed up right there - yes, there - did you not see it ? - there in that previous sentence.

Little versus Big.

Obstetricians to post-Modernity : doctors Mengele & Dawson

In Robert Clyde Allen's "Speaking of Soap Opera", he quotes one study of Golden Age radio soap operas that found over one half of all adult males in the shows were medical doctors.

In medical science's own Golden Age, roughly one long generation from the mid 1870s to the mid 1960s (the era of Progress and Modernity), soap operas loved doctors because that single profession was freighted with all the expectations humanity had for its highest civilizations.

This fraternity, and this one alone, was expected to do the impossible : to bridge over the many contradictions inherent in the Modern concept of Progressive civilization.

Winning a total war : its about building a Big Tent of all possible talent, not in draining down your gene pool

Early to mid September 1940 were undoubtably the darkest weeks of WWII.

Britain awaited an air assault followed by a sea invasion by a all-powerful German war machine that was backed by Russia, Italy and Japan along with a host of quasi fascist fellow travellers among the nominally neutral nations.

There was no Big Tent of all possible talents assembled to help Britain, or any of the dozen or so smaller nations who had already fallen, equally alone and isolated, to the Axis powers.

Britain was as guilty in all of this as any nation - for it too failed to build itself a Big Tent internally, to take advantage of its empire's overwhelming demographic superiority over all the Axis powers combined.

The side of the Big Battalions brought us a mushroom cloud. And Death.

Also from Manhattan, the side of the small battalions brought us fungus juice. And Life.

Two very different Manhattan Projects indeed ....

In the darkest weeks of the war, a quixotic project is launched in Manhattan, directed not against the wars' bullies, but against its bystanders...

On Saturday September 7th seventy five years ago, church bells rang out all over Eastern England, signalling both the start of both the softening-up Blitz and the expected Nazi sea invasion of Britain.

It was a bit of a false alarm, but everybody in the know realized that the invasion would have to begin in the next few weeks, before the start of the annual (and terrible) English Channel storms of late September.

With the expected fall of the aircraft carrier Britain, now all alone against the might of a loose coalition of Germany, Russia, Italy and Japan, these remain the darkest two weeks of the entire war for the cause of freedom and peace.

Dr Martin Henry Dawson had spent time, during his military service in WWI, hiking along the very short route the German tanks would take from Kent's sandy beaches to the southern suburbs of London.

He knew how it could be all over in a day or two's fighting.

Dawson was now too old to be effective at the fighting end of this war but his fighting spirit still hadn't left him.

Bu what on earth could a middle aged top notch medical researcher, albeit in the non-military area of chronic arthritis, actually do now to help the cause ?