....was not SBE, Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis, as important as it was and as important as it was to Martin Henry Dawson.
I am not writing my account of the Penicillin Saga because it conquered SBE.
I am going after much bigger game.
The dreadful disease I think NATURAL penicillin conquered in 1944 was Modernity.
I think today's GREEN movement can trace some of its beginnings to that blue green penicillium mold's triumph against the best efforts of man to recreate everything natural in an artificial form, merely because they could.
Defeating Modernity was the best thing natural penicillin ever did.
That's why I am writing this work - that's why I do what I do....
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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