During WWII (the very apogee of MODERNITY) in New York City (the very epicenter of Modernity) , a dying doctor and his few square feet of Mother Nature quietly thumbed their nose at MODERNITY...
.... and changed our whole world, for the better, for ever.
Homegrown, natural , systemic penicillin is Dr Martin Henry Dawson's practical legacy, leading on from his insights into the commensal nature of Life that is his scientific legacy.
That same university on Manhattan Island ( Columbia) that Dawson worked at all during those war years, was also home to the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Bomb.
Columbia University thus was home to the Twentieth Century's biggest high tech disaster and its smallest low tech triumph : home to the stories of the Little Boy Bomb and the Baby Girl Patty Malone: the nadir and the apogee of Twentieth Century Humanity.
Sometimes Fact truly is stranger than Fiction ever could be...
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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