The why of Dawson's "small" penicillin

Life, if we but let it, is a 'Coalition of All Talents', containing not just Plan A but also all other Plans right up to Plan Z, and is never more useful then in a crisis situation.

If, instead, one instantly consigning all the small to the category of 'useless' and then start doing the same to all women and to all non-WASP populations etc, that is rather like sending more than half of your army home ---- on indefinite leave.

Not a smart move in any war --- particularly not in a war that you are already losing.

Dawson's "small penicillin", a cure for a disease forty years in search of a name

Until the very end of WWII, Sir Charles Lyell ruled the intellectuals' world unchallenged.

The 19th century victory of his claim about the uniformity of the past, present and future geological worlds, over other scientists who said the world had faced past global catastrophes, laid the groundwork for Modern Science's hubristic confidence about a predictable future much like the present and the past.

But the technological development of unstoppable V2 rockets and of atomic bombs, together with evidence from Auschwitz of no limits to human evil, led a small number of people to begin to doubt the impossibility of planet wide catastrophes.

Inventing "small" Penicillin

Martin Henry Dawson did not discover penicillin or Horizontal Gene Transfer or DNA as the location of the genes and all the other discoveries that his memory is usually associated with.

What he did invent (but not "discover") and what he should be remembered for and honored for, is "small" penicillin.