Recollect early wartime pictures of clearly nubile young women holding milk bottles of live-giving penicillin to their chests.
Then recall war-end pictures of grave middle-aged men in white coats and pen protectors staring into instrument panels on the massive multi-storey stainless steel factory tanks making industrial penicillin.
A moral universe restored !
Wartime penicillin is a great study for feminist historians seeking to see how de-stabilizing natural penicillin and biology could be to 1930s-1940s era chemistry and gender relations ....
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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