Thank God, thank God, thank God ----- for unanswered prayers.
Thank God that all penicillin research was not as centralized as the atomic bomb research effort was.
Because the overwhelming consensus of the loudest, most aggressive, most powerful voices in science held a rigid dogma that synthesis was the only way forward for wartime penicillin.
But wartime (& postwar) penicillin synthesis efforts proved a total failure.
Showing posts with label small is beautiful. Show all posts
Showing posts with label small is beautiful. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 23, 2015
Tuesday, September 22, 2015
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.
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.
Monday, August 31, 2015
The Age of Progress was inevitably also the Age of Big
Michael B Schiffer (The Portable Radio in America) is fighting an uphill battle and he knows it.
Schiffer is hoping to show the rich history of success by American engineers at making extremely small and portable radios (and hearing aids) before WWII and before the transistor and before the Japanese.
I think his book and all its documentation makes his case - in spades.
But Schiffer is frank is stating the postwar American customer generally wanted no part of anything small - not in cars and not in radios or TVs ----- or in hydro dams, bridges, aircraft, bombers or battleships.
In a an era of Progress and Manichean Modernity, the Bigger was very much the better.
Microbes were small and hopelessly primitive --- Man and his works were big and clever.
Ipso Facto.
The cult of the small and the miniature, seen most fully in our present world of electronics, only truly came to the fore when the phrase "this is the microbes' world and we humans are just visiting" became a commonplace.
It may be a coincidence but I don't think so.
Like the TV detective always says, "I don't believe in coincidences"....
Schiffer is hoping to show the rich history of success by American engineers at making extremely small and portable radios (and hearing aids) before WWII and before the transistor and before the Japanese.
I think his book and all its documentation makes his case - in spades.
But Schiffer is frank is stating the postwar American customer generally wanted no part of anything small - not in cars and not in radios or TVs ----- or in hydro dams, bridges, aircraft, bombers or battleships.
In a an era of Progress and Manichean Modernity, the Bigger was very much the better.
Microbes were small and hopelessly primitive --- Man and his works were big and clever.
Ipso Facto.
The cult of the small and the miniature, seen most fully in our present world of electronics, only truly came to the fore when the phrase "this is the microbes' world and we humans are just visiting" became a commonplace.
It may be a coincidence but I don't think so.
Like the TV detective always says, "I don't believe in coincidences"....
Thursday, August 29, 2013
May the small, like the Big, always be with us....
A blog that celebrates the small, in a world that drinks the Kool-Aid of Bigness ...
The Big are in absolutely no danger of disappearing, certainly not from our culture and not even as a result of rapid changes in the global environment.
The small also are hardly in danger of disappearing in the world's rapidly changing environmental situation.
In fact, when the environment suddenly changes they always do much better than bigger beings : always have and always will.
But culturally, the small are very much a collection of Rodney Dangerfields : never getting anywhere near the respect they deserve.
As microbe beings too small for us to see with our naked eyes, they keep this whole biological ball of wax afloat : without them the world would be a barren chunk of rock.
Small but visible species of plants and animals are the next layer of beings that help make this rock a nice place to live for us, those human parasites at the topper-most top of the whole food , air and water chain.
Within the human species and culture, 'small' humans (aka the poor, tired and huddled) still tend to be treated with general indifference.
Small places and institutions are still quickly dismissed as yesterday's entities.
This blog , by contrast, is devoted to reminding us of the comforting safety factor that comes with the diversity and flexibility of a world with many small beings and entities all exploring different options.
It seeks also to remind us of the danger of putting all our intellectual eggs in a few Big (tired) baskets as we face a rapidly changing world.
And it seeks to remind us of the sheer joy we get out of being immersed in an incredible variety of experience.
And it intends to warn us of the danger of returning to being gray-suited citizens of a few unitary-minded empires that all look and act and feel alike as they march eagerly towards their environmental doom....
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Could "Small is Beautiful" have topped 1930s bestseller lists ?
He is a brilliant young economist, regarded as one of the best of his generation--- educated at Berlin and Bonn and at the London School of Economics, given a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford and Columbia University, where he is hired as a lecturer.
He also has real world experience as an international investment banker.
No wonder then that this wunderkind's PhD, "Small is Beautiful", is quickly published in 1938 upon his graduation at age 27, and soon climbs the bestseller lists and is translated into many languages and is regarded as a timeless classic and an epoch-making book.
Because most historians credit it for ending the then real possibility of a world-wide European War.
But alas, it is not to be : E F Schumacher had to wait 30 years and his retirement to begin writing the essays that made his 1973 publication the Bible of our Green Age.
His book or any book* like it, simply won't have become a bestseller in the 1930s.
(* Scott Nearing's "Must We Starve?" written from a back-to-the-land farm in northern New England in 1932, might be an example of a similar book, published in the 1930s that was largely un-read in the 1930s.)
The ordinary middle class members of the world of the 1930s (the grandparents and parents of the people who did eventually buy it) were simply opposed to the main ideas of "Small Is Beautiful".
Simply knew - in their heart of hearts - that while Schumacher's ideas were well intentioned, they were also quite simply, naturally wrong --- proven wrong by Nature.
Science had proved it so : sorry, end of story.
The origins of WWII come down, in the end, to the fact that the general public's belief in the "Progress is inevitably Bigger and Better" meta-ideology was just as strong as that of Stalin and FDR and Hitler.
Only the public's achingly slow post-war assessment of the sad lessons of WWII (when that meta-ideology was given its wings to fly) led them to the position where they could come to see the value of "Small Is Beautiful" .....
He also has real world experience as an international investment banker.
No wonder then that this wunderkind's PhD, "Small is Beautiful", is quickly published in 1938 upon his graduation at age 27, and soon climbs the bestseller lists and is translated into many languages and is regarded as a timeless classic and an epoch-making book.
Because most historians credit it for ending the then real possibility of a world-wide European War.
But alas, it is not to be : E F Schumacher had to wait 30 years and his retirement to begin writing the essays that made his 1973 publication the Bible of our Green Age.
His book or any book* like it, simply won't have become a bestseller in the 1930s.
(* Scott Nearing's "Must We Starve?" written from a back-to-the-land farm in northern New England in 1932, might be an example of a similar book, published in the 1930s that was largely un-read in the 1930s.)
The ordinary middle class members of the world of the 1930s (the grandparents and parents of the people who did eventually buy it) were simply opposed to the main ideas of "Small Is Beautiful".
Simply knew - in their heart of hearts - that while Schumacher's ideas were well intentioned, they were also quite simply, naturally wrong --- proven wrong by Nature.
Science had proved it so : sorry, end of story.
The origins of WWII come down, in the end, to the fact that the general public's belief in the "Progress is inevitably Bigger and Better" meta-ideology was just as strong as that of Stalin and FDR and Hitler.
Only the public's achingly slow post-war assessment of the sad lessons of WWII (when that meta-ideology was given its wings to fly) led them to the position where they could come to see the value of "Small Is Beautiful" .....
Monday, May 6, 2013
Modern "Bigger is Better" vs Post-modern "Small is Beautiful"
Kiddies, don't agonize about the complex differences between modernity and postmodernity when your prof poses the question at your next final exam ( trust me on this one - they will).
Just remind yourself that great-grandpa back in the 1930s was as unlikely to say "small is beautiful" as today's intellectuals on public broadcasting would ever proclaim "bigger is better" ....
Just remind yourself that great-grandpa back in the 1930s was as unlikely to say "small is beautiful" as today's intellectuals on public broadcasting would ever proclaim "bigger is better" ....
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