"Dead Men Waiting" or "Dead Women Waiting" is the way most staff in hospital regarded the the patients in the Green Wards where earlier Rheumatic Fever sufferers with green strep in their heart valves waited out their turn to die.
Dr Martin Henry Dawson was determined that his hand-grown penicillin could help them to beat those odds and return these lazaruses to health , to give them a fair crack at enjoying their three score and ten here on Earth.
His struggle - partly against the disease , mostly against his own colleagues and wartime government - cost him his own life , but in the end he succeeded against all measure of imagining , improving not just the future of the SBEs but of the entire world itself ....
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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