What acid-dropping fiction-writing fabulist would ever dare suggest that WWII's successful natural penicillin efforts would emerge from Manhattan's concrete jungle while the failed attempt to make artificial penicillin would flourish amidst Oxford University's greenery ?
As we fans of G K Chesterton are so fond of asserting : why write humdrum fiction , when ordinary life is so much more extraordinary ?
Fortunately for me , I've still got this story to myself , seventy five years after the event --- possibly because no previous writer on wartime penicillin had Chesterton's acute sense for sensing life's funny little ironies...
On Oct 16th 1940, Gotham's concrete jungle rescued the NATURAL penicillin stone its (British) builders had rejected and gave the world's first antibiotic shot. Alexander Fleming's ARTIFICIAL penicillin (ironically from leafy green Oxford !) won a Nobel but failed morally and technically. Instead Manhattan Natural radiated hope to a world tired, huddled and wretched. On its 75th, let's remind terrorist Ramzi Yousef about a Manhattan project that saved far more lives than the A-Bomb ever killed.
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