When the possibility of your nation joining a world wide war looms, getting your first ever draft registration card must feel just like getting the kiss of death, to a young man on the campus of Columbia University.
But when you are a young man on another part of Columbia's campus who has been written off 'as soon to die from an invariably fatal disease', getting instead History's first ever needle of antibiotics, must feel just like getting the kiss of life.
Hence the spooky Janus-like nature of Dies Mirabilis , October 16th 1940.....
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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