We must alway remember that there was an other Manhattan Project during WWII ; unfortunately one that remains almost totally unknown to this day.
It involved Dr Martin Henry Dawson sacrificing his own life, all in an effort to see that wartime penicillin's scanty production and distribution was de-militarized by the Allies and then made available to all the world's 'tired, poor and huddled'.
If his story had been better known much earlier, Janus Manhattan would have shown two faces to the world , above all to the world that spawned the 911 Bombers.
One face of Manhattan would still intone "Now I am become Death, Destroyer of Nations" and brandish Big Science and a Big Bomb to go with its earlier Mars-like image of Big Skyscrapers and Big Business.
But the other face could have intoned "Now I am become Hope, Healer of Nations" .
It would remind the world of Manhattan's Venus side during WWII.
And remind us of the Statue of Liberty and of the other face of a vast city where small diverse ethnic neighbourhoods are as least as common as big faceless corporate headquarters.
It is still not too late to tell Dawson's story to the world and hope it helps remind us not to see people and events through only a black and white lens but rather to see life in its full technicolor complexity....
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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