A-Bomb and Penicillin secrets 'Hidden in Plain Sight' : un-redacting wartime Manhattan's two "Projects"

The structure of my drama in five acts, "Manhattan Natural" (the other Manhattan Project) , has one obvious influence --- the efforts of science historian Robert S Norris to destroy the oldest and biggest myth of wartime's Atomic Bomb.

Norris , in "The Manhattan Project" (published by Black Dog and Leventhal) , first recounts the usual version of this pernicious myth.

We all know - vaguely - how it goes.

Manhattan Natural : 'The other Manhattan Project', Manhattan natural penicillin renewing hope in a war world tired, huddled and wretched.

To dying patients in Columbia-Presbyterian's hospital , Gladys Hobby's arms daily held aloft a glowing green and gold petri dish of radiated Manhattan penicillin mold as a sort of monstrance of hope.

That image is a fitting and almost exact counterpoint to that other (rather more famous) Manhattan fungus .

The penicillin shot heard around the world : how New York rescued NATURAL penicillin from the British and gave it to all of us

"The penicillin shot heard around the world" (Washington Heights , October 16th 1940) changed our entire world , for the better , forever.

But it almost didn't happened.

If Dr Dawson had been content (as most of the world's doctors were) to wait for the wartime British (led by Fleming and Florey) to totally synthesize (patentable) penicillin, the world would still be waiting for the first mass produced antibiotic these 75 years later.

Thank God the other Manhattan Project rescued natural penicillin from the British.

Because New York got natural penicillin into mass production well before WWII was over, when it was most needed , and then turned that Mother Nature-produced technology into the cornerstone of our entire antibiotic defences against death from microbes.

Move over Concord ( or is it Lexington ?!) ...

Manhattan gave the world the first life-saving penicillin shot - as well as the first death-dealing A-Bomb

Don't let terrorists like Ramzi Yousef limit Manhattan's wartime role to killing (and here I quote his justification for blowing up the twin towers of the World Trade Centre) "250,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki".

Let us never forget that Manhattan also gave the world its first ever penicillin shots 75 years ago next year.

New York then went on to provide the wartime world with the biggest chunk of its life saving penicillin and in the process developed the new micro-engineering  technology used by all the world ever since to make all antibiotics.

It did so by returning to 'the stone the (British) builders had rejected' ---- and made it the cornerstone of our world of antibiotic lifesavers.

Alexander Fleming in London had discovered penicillin 12 years earlier but had decided it would only be useful if made as a patentable man-made economical synthetic and even then only useful as a surface antiseptic - not in an internally-oriented pill or needle.

Howard Florey in Oxford had taken up Fleming's challenge and for a decade his team chased the chimera of man-made patentable economical man-made penicillin - but they never succeeded and no one else ever has.

New York went back to Fleming's original semi-purified natural penicillin and ran with it - in five short weeks Dr Martin Henry Dawson's tiny team had obtained spores, grown it , concentrated it and tested it for toxicity (on Dawson himself).

Now the team was ready to give it to patients dying of then invariable fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) for lack of it - a young black man from Sugar Hill, Harlem named Aaron Alston and a young Jewish man named Charles Aronson from the Bronx.

SBE patients were then considered the 4Fs of the 4Fs and not a priority to an Anglo-American medical establishment using the excuse of war preparation to curtail social medicine (medicine directed at the poor and minorities).

So the day Dawson picked for history's first penicillin shots couldn't have been more freighted in symbolism.

It was October 16th 1940 - the historic first day of America's draft registration process - a process still going strong 75 years later.

So on a day when all the minds of America and of the Allied and Axis world were focussed on whether or not the hardships of the Great Depression had reduced America's numbers of 1A fit-for-combat youth , a 4F black man and Jew got to make their own history  in a quiet corner of upper Manhattan's Columbia University Medical Centre...

Ramzi Yousef - and the British - mustn't be allowed to forge the last word on Manhattan's wartime role

Yes, a thousand times yes, many of the events that birthed the Atomic Bomb that killed 250,000 did in fact occur on Manhattan and in the surrounding Greater New York City area.

But there was another wartime Manhattan project which has saved far far far more lives than the A-Bomb ever took : a wartime project a lot more from Venus than from Mars, a project more Emma Lazarus than Gordon Gekko.

Manhattan began by birthing the first ever use of antibiotics on October 16th 1940.

Columbia University Medical Centre associate professor and medical doctor Martin Henry Dawson aimed to see the wartime development of "Penicillin-for-All" : for friend, enemy and neutral alike.

Yes, even in -- especially in -- a Total War against an opponent who thought only the 'fit' of the 'fittest races' deserved medicine , food and life.

The Anglo American scientific-medical establishment hotly opposed Dawson but his tiny team of misfits and unfits persisted.

Dawson told the world of his first ever use of penicillin as an antibiotic in February 1941 and again in May of that year.

The second one caught the attention of the American media and through a big story in the New York Times , the eye of a then small citric acid producer in Brooklyn called Pfizer who soon began a prolonged engagement with Dawson's project.

Then thanks to Dawson's former patient (and Manhattan resident) Floyd Odlum , one agency (the War Production Board (WPB) -- out of many for the Allies -- caught his vision too.

They ordered that enough American wartime penicillin to be be produced to save all those dying in the Allied civilian and military worlds , with enough left over to save many of those dying in the rest of the world as well.

But Big Pharma sat on its hands, hoping public domain natural penicillin might soon be replaced by high profit patented synthetic penicillin.

But when another former patient of Dr Dawson,  Dr Dante Colitti from the Bronx , broke the embargo on going to the popular press to plead for government penicillin for dying baby Patty Malone of Queens.

Soon a local Manhattan news story broke big - first going stateside (thanks to the newspaper chain of Citizen Hearst) and then going international , despite the war censorship.

(Good News travels fast --- never faster than in the middle of a Bad News War.)

Pfizer boss John L Smith was moved because the plight of the little Patty because it reminded him so much of the unhappy circumstances surrounding the un-necessary meningitis death of his daughter Mary Louise. (Penicillin usually quickly cures cases of frequently fatal meningitis.)

She had died basically because the (healthy) Alexander Fleming couldn't get off his fanny in the early 1930s to make penicillin in the same way that the (terminally ill) Dawson had done in the 1940s.

John L and his wife must have had a serious heart to heart pillow talk about this one night because soon the normally extremely cautious Smith had thrown off all traces.

'Damn the rest of Big Pharma, and damn petty government regulations forbidding Pfizer and Smith from giving away secret penicillin to keep people alive.'

He ordered in Klieg Lights and put the firm on a 24/7 mad rush to complete the world's first really big penicillin plant.

He was moved as well by all the successes Dawson was having in curing endless kinds of diseases with penicillin - and by the unexpected discovery made in a Staten Island hospital that penicillin quickly and safely cured the age old scourge of syphilis.

John L was big Dodgers fan - he owned part of the club - and in the early summer of 1944 the baseball team stiffed.

Despite this , Brooklyn still scored big on an extended road trip : Omaha, Utah, Juno , Gold and Silver.

For 80% of the penicillin that landed on D-Day came from Pfizer's converted ice-cube plant on Marcy Avenue in "The-Borough-That-Builds" -- and for the rest of the war Pfizer supplied by far the biggest portion of the world's penicillin.

Obviously more than just a tree grew green in Brooklyn that summer.

Britain had discovered penicillin and done almost all the work on it until Dawson's first ever injections of penicillin-the-antibiotic on October 16th 1940.

But the attitude of the leading British researcher, Oxford's Dr Howard Florey , was directly opposed to Dawson's humanitarian values.

He wanted penicillin kept secret and used only as a weaponized medicine , something that would give Allied troops a surprise advantage over the Germans.

Allied civilians and POWs , along with the dying in the occupied countries, the neutrals and the enemy would just have to wait at the back of the bus.

In addition, Florey (and Fleming) banked all his hopes on the chimera of cheap synthetic penicillin - something still not achieved - or ever likely to be!

So as American natural penicillin (and not British synthetic penicillin) flew by plane all over the the world, very highly publicized in the global media, to save dying children in Allied and Neutral countries (some like Australia a former close ally of Britain and ironically , the home of Florey !) , something very important for our post-war world happened.

Pax Britannica , sustained up to now by collective memories the British bravery under the Blitz, faded and was replaced by the new Pax Americana.

Or perhaps Pax Penicillia ? Pax Manhattana ? Pax New York ?

When Dawson died of his terminal disease in the spring of 1945 , just after the death of FDR and just before those of Mussolini and Hitler, his passing got a moment of respectful recognition for all he wrought.

But Dawson safely dead, Fleming and Florey got all the credit ever since though they had signally failed to produce any synthetic penicillin for either the war effort or for the world's dying.

The were aided by Britons , all of them - from top to bottom , unconsciously determined to recover something from a costly war they supposedly won.

Ever since then, the British have rivalled the Russians in the number of important wartime inventions and discoveries that only they supposed did the fundamental work in --- even though the hard evidence says many people in many nations made important contributions over many decades.

Penicillin , along with radar and the jet , occupies the very Parthenon of this false-memory syndrome.

If left to British science - and left to Churchill's Conservative British government - the war or the postwar would never have seen cheap abundant penicillin produced all over the planet.

Endless endemic diseases would not have been knocked back - millions would have died - with billions suffering ill health.

Come on up Manhattan and New York - on October 16th 2015 take a deep bow for your role in wartime's humanitarian "Penicillin-for-All" - you fully deserve it !

And Ramzi Yousef and all your terrorist ilk - Manhattan penicillin has saved far more of your kinfolk than your bombs will ever kill - at least try and show a hint of respect.

Don't be like the ungrateful British....

Penicillin-for-All : Postmodernity's "Manhattan Project"

We know far too well Modernity's "Manhattan Project" - Big Science's  Atom Bomb - it sometimes seems that middle-aged male non-fiction writers write about nothing else than those heady - now long gone -days of Modernity and Male dominance.

(Yes it is almost always middle-aged men who write the books and articles about Manhattan's atomic bomb .

And perhaps it is also almost always middle-aged men who read them , despite the fact that ordinarily most readers are women of all ages.

This publishing fixation on the past glories of long gone Modernity may hurt publishing firms' bottom line but it is unlikely to change as long as most publishing bosses are also middle-aged males with a strong taste of nostalgia for when men like themselves ruled the roust unchallenged.)

Few middle-aged male writers , however , write about the simultaneous (in time and space) Post Modern Manhattan Project --- Penicillin-for-All.


P-F-A was an unexpected triumph -- because all-powerful wartime Big Government (and Big Pharma) definitely had other plans.

It was the unexpected triumph of a tiny band of unfits (with no government grants to aid them by the way) successfully defying both Allied and Axis eugenicism (and their own physical failings) to bring us Penicillin-for-All.

Call it a triumph of the unfit, weak, small - above all call it the triumph of DIY small science, since key to the unfits' success was their ability to create their own tiny life-saving penicillin factory , regardless of how Big Pharma and Big Government wanted to play out wartime penicillin.

So if WWII definitely began in 1939 at the height of the Era of Eugenic Modernity , equally it ended in 1945 at the beginnings of our present Era of Welcoming Diversity & Postmodernity and it is time male non-fiction writers accept this historical reality...

Manhattan's OTHER project : how seven lives 'unworthy of life' improved the lives of seven billion of us ...

WWII as a triumph of small science

Conventional accounts of the atomic Manhattan Project and of the development of wartime penicillin strongly emphasize that they were the first of what has come to be called Big Science  --- something that is taken as the norm for today's science.

But in fact much of the science of the atomic bomb and atomic energy was actually done by very small teams working with very little money and home made equipment - it was the engineering aspects that were the truly massive part of that particular project.

With regards to wartime penicillin it was much the same : small science ,  not Big Science.

One must remember that wartime penicillin's powerful impact came not merely from its unique scientific characteristics --- ie that it was first (and to some extent, the last) broad spectrum but non-toxic bacterial killer.

Its biggest impact really came from the fact that wartime penicillin G was unexpectedly inexpensive and and unexpectedly widely available for such a potent lifesaver.

This is because a very cheap and abundant (because it was non-patented) lifesaver could save far more lives than any very expensive patent-limited lifesaver could ever do.

And then we all benefit.

Because by a sort of a global herd immunity when even the poorest people living in the most remote places on Earth are cured of killer strains of disease, we in wealthier places tend also to never see those diseases again.

This is because such diseases have been around seemingly for ever as endemic diseases  --- all by surviving in geographic cum cultural pockets, among those considered too poor or too worthless to treat properly medically.

So the true miracle of wartime penicillin was more moral than scientific in nature.

Its miracle lay in the unexpected success of a small band of seven physically challenged individuals in convincing the American public that penicillin should be made available to all Americans who need it to survive.

Convincing them that their Allied leaders should not just producing a small amount of penicillin as secretively as possible, just so they could use it as a weapon of war to give D-Day's front line Allied commanders an advantage over their Nazi counterparts.

The Allies had - because of dysgenic fears - far too few infantrymen to really defeat the Nazis or the Japanese in a hard fight.

(And the few infantrymen they did have were more 4F than 1A, in comparison to the average military serviceman !)

The Allies instead hoped to quickly re-use most of their relatively small forces of infantry when they got moderately severely wounded - by employing advanced medical efforts - so their frontline rifleman could get a second and third crack at being killed in combat.

(As a member member of an reserve infantry unit, may I quickly say ---- "Oh joy !!")

If these medical efforts failed , it meant many more 'decent, middle class, white, Protestant men' would end up dying in the PBI (Poor Bloody Infantry) and this was seen as an eugenic mistake that the Allied cultural elite was not about to repeat from WWI.

If their scheme worked, they would keep the best of their breed safe from the trenches and still have a big advantage over the enemy.

Because , by contrast, they figured the average German infantry, when moderately severely wounded , was out for half a year - while the average Japanese under such circumstances simply died of their wounds.

Their thinking was that that much bigger Axis armies, with much of their troops in hospital beds, couldn't defeat assaults from much smaller Allied Corps , if the Corps had most of their troops in fighting trim.

Because the medically convincing details of the lifesaving results of penicillin were only known by the Allied medical establishment , the  hard pressed Nazis and Japanese hadn't given the development of penicillin (which they had read about in the public scientific literature) much of a priority.

If these lifesaving successes could continue to be kept out of the medical and public media until D-Day , only the Allies would have abundant patented (secret) penicillin to return their wounded to combat much quickly than had traditionally been the case.

D-Day would spill the beans soon enough , but long before the Germans and Japanese chemists had broken the penicillin patent and gone into mass production,  the war would be over.

The Seven Crips

The seven argued - by contrast - that the war to defeat Hitler was as much moral as military.

Germany was the moderately big schoolyard bully and Poland was the moderately small schoolyard victim.

Hitler had gotten away with his bullying because the rest of the world - which vastly out-numbered and out-gunned him, had not intervened against his bullying but instead talked up the virtues of non-intervention in European 'schoolyard squabbles'.

Not my words - rather the shameful words of endless newspaper editorials and 'statesmen' the world over in the early 1940s.

The seven said we must not just talk The Atlantic Charter talk (the Allied declaration that said all - even the smallest and weakest and most valueless - had an absolute right to life and security).

The seven said we must make sure our own Allied actions don't echo the Nazi's counterclaims.

(That the strongest are morally justified in denying the weakest and smallest the right of life and succour.)

But instead the Allies were actually and openly "Code Slowing" tens of thousands of mostly young, mostly poor and minority people.

People with the SBE version of endocarditis - SBE being the final - hitherto terminal - disease that made childhood Rheumatic Fever such a terror.

The SBEs were considered to be so useless that they couldn't even be recruited to work in the war industries , let alone be in the military.

So no wartime penicillin was to be wasted on them and they were to be left to die --- for two reasons.

The unimportant reason was that currently penicillin was still in limited supply and the SBE were below the lowest in priority, particularly as some cases of SBE did consume extremely large amounts of that limited penicillin.

The important reason was that SBE was regarded as the "Gold Standard" of intractable infections.

Any evidence that this new fangled 'penicillin' stuff could actually cure this famously most incurable of infectious diseases would tend to break the whole story of wartime penicillin wide open in the American news media.

And nothing (to paraphrase an old old adage of the pop music business) only 'breaks local' in America .

A big news story in America becomes a big news story worldwide - including in Japan and Germany, via friendly neutral diplomats in Washington.

The seven may have realized that while the Allied medical establishment won't easily bend on the issue of SBE and penicillin, it was also a hard position for the Allied elite to sustain publicly.

Letting young kids die needlessly merely on account of being judged 'life unworthy of life' would be a hard moral sell for the Allies warring against evil governments that basically did exactly the same thing.

Dr Dawson, the leader of the seven , decided to liberate ie 'steal' government controlled penicillin to successfully save five young women dying of SBE but his success was written out of the official report indicated penicillin test results.

And there it might of ended.

But for the fact that his successes and how this most unlikely of heroes was driven to steal to save lives had become the stuff of legend in New York's wartime-strengthened gossip grapevine among it tens of thousands of medical staffers.

A former patient of his, a fellow crip and fellow doctor named Dante Colitti , decided to emulate Dawson and saw to it that the fount of Yellow Journalism, Citizen Hearst's newspaper empire , covered his efforts from gavel to gavel.

The story - involving a terminally ill and terminally cute two year old toddler named Patty Malone - broke wide , broke stateside, broke worldwide.

Soon defeated in the court of public opinion by the formidable Doctor Mom, the Allies really opened the penicillin floodgates wide when Dawson's friend among Big Pharma , John L Smith of Pfizer , took up his cause and started producing it at levels a million times higher than Pfizer had done earlier.

Small science ?

Well the seven cripples had no government grants, had strong enemies rather than warm friends in high places and were - obviously - in poor physical vigour.

That they nevertheless brought the massed Allied governments - during a Total War - to their knees shows us all what sheer raw moral courage can do.

And that when we see those physically and mentally challenged as 'lives useless of life', they are anything but ....

Oct 16 '40 : for Jack Kerouac, a 1A's first ever Draft registration day was eventful ...

October 16th 1940 : Dies Mirabilis

As a husky football player from a poor family ,  John "Jack" Kerouac was not earning his usual drinking money that day by being part of the team of Columbia U football players hauling about tins of graphite or uranium for Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi's forerunner to the Manhattan Project .

Yes this gridiron hero drank.

Lord he drank , drank mostly to drown out memories of the painful prolonged death of his saintly slightly older brother Gerald,  from Rheumatic Fever in 1926 when Jack was only four.

Rheumatic Fever - and not the rather more famous polio - was far-and-away the leading killer of school age children, but it tended to kill the poor mostly .

(And because New York book editors are themselves rarely poor,  we don't hear much about this Sword of Damocles that hung over America's families for almost a hundred years.)

So with no tins of uranium to muck about, our future Poster Boy of the Beat Generation was instead enthusiastically obeying his legal requirement to be part of the historic registration process for America's first ever peacetime draft .

After registering * in the morning - he was certain to be classed 1A at any subsequent medical - job two for our future Beat that day was to go off in the afternoon to play his second ever football match for Columbia - and to promptly break a leg tibia bone.

Coach Furey didn't take the leg break seriously, told him to 'walk it better' - so Kerouac never went to Columbia university's own hospital , the Presbyterian, to have it checked out properly.

So - and rather ironically - he never got to meet Dr Martin Henry Dawson there that day , busy succouring some of NYC's 4Fs of the 4Fs ( sufferers from the endocarditis complications of childhood Rheumatic Fever) by giving them history's first ever antibiotics.

That broken leg - plus his string of arguments with his head coach Lou Little - doomed Kerouac's football scholarship to Columbia and he soon dropped out.

This 1A exemplar of American manhood went on instead to write novels and poetry , join the Merchant Marine and US Navy , drink lots more, travel, find world fame - and die young at age 47...

* Jack was only 18 in 1940, so it doesn't appear he even could be registered - the lower age limit for draft registration was 21 in 1940.  But Kerouac's biographers insist he did register too - he certainly joined his slightly older classmates in enjoying this big moment on campus - but actually registering ? -- Who knows for sure !

Is the male-dominated media biased as to which historical events get commemorated ?

The answer - unfortunately - is yes : male-dominated news coverage is still very gender-biased.

When it comes to commemorating violent versus beneficial historical events , it usually proves that male journalists are from Mars and the women from Venus.

And since most executive editors and executive producers are still men , guess which kind of historical events are splashed about and which get merely 'noted' ?

Wartime New York had two Manhattan Projects - one pioneering death-dealing atomic bombs and the other pioneering life-saving penicillin.

Both will be celebrating their seventy five anniversaries next year but it is quite likely that you will only see news stories about one of them.


In March 1940, Columbia University scientists Fermi and Szilard got $6,000 for building their atomic pile , on the authorization of President Roosevelt, an event usually viewed as the start of the atomic Manhattan project.

Call this the 'Little Boy' Manhattan project, after the name of the first bomb. (Would women name a bomb that was about to burn tens of thousands of children to death after a child ?)

The American national government has since spent far more than six trillion dollars on atomic research - a sum (by no coincidence) that is about the size of the entire publicly held debt of the America national government.

Try converting all that into new books for school libraries, extra staff for nursing homes and new places in daycare centers to imagine what $ six trillion dollars looks like when it is spent on something useful and productive.)

On October 16th 1940, penicillin's Manhattan project began, when the first needles of penicillin-the-antibiotic were given to patients Charles Aronson and Aaron Alston by Columbia University scientist Martin Henry Dawson, thus ushering in our Age of Antibiotics.

And by the way, Dr Dawson - who was combatting a painful terminal illness the whole time he was fighting for abundant cheap wartime penicillin for all humanity - never asked for any money from the government.

Call his effort the 'Baby Girl' Manhattan project .

(After the August 1943 story about how dying baby girl Patty Malone only received penicillin after intervention by Citizen Hearst's newspapers sparked a national protest by Doctor Mom that finally made penicillin world famous overnight, fifteen neglected years after it was first discovered.)

If male journalists continue to rule the roost - guess which event will be ballyhooed next year and which one will be ignored or only 'dutifully noted' ?

Mars may still domain the battlefields - but it does not have to go on dominating the newsroom and the TV in our living rooms .

A 1999 Newsday/Newseum survey of 35,000 American media consumers confirms that male readers think that the atomic bomb and the Little Boy story was the top news story of the 20th century.

But the women thought penicillin and the Baby Girl story was the top news story of the 20th century.

Since there are slightly more women than men , a prudent journalist should try and think of all their audience when they have two similar stories at the same time to report.

But unless New York's female media 'Act Up' , I think the events behind the 75th anniversary of the start of the life-saving Age of Antibiotics will be ignored --- once again....

Agape's TRINITY : dawning the Age of Antibiotics , October 16th 1940 , New York City

To female members of the media reading this blog : 

Another 16th day , July 16th 1945 , is considered the dawn of the Atomic Age , our new age of possible instant global death , and it is a day well marked by (male) historians and (male) journalists alike.

But who marked then - who will mark now (because its seventy fifth anniversary is next October 2015)  - of the dawning of a more hope-filled and life-saving age, our current Age of Antibiotics ---- if not you ?

On October 16th 1940, registration day for America's first ever peacetime draft , all media eyes (along with the eyes of a good many diplomats from Germany and Britain)  were on the 1a students of  New York's Columbia University.

After all , three thousand of Columbia's students had famously voted to never again to go to war - would they now register , to fight a new possible war ?

No eyes were on another part of the near-deserted Columbia campus (all classes were cancelled to ease the registration process) as a new class of medication was about to undergo its first critical (systemic/internal) test on an actual human patient.

Columbia's medical school dean knew of this crucial test but deliberately chose not to release a press release about it - so how could any media have reported upon it ?

But would they have anyway ?

Because as America girded up for a possible war, 1A young men and their medical conditions - war medicine - was the new priority.

Lowest of the lowest priorities - for news media and medical researchers alike - was 4F medicine - social medicine.

For that was the news that had greeted all of Columbia's medical researchers as they returned to work in the Fall of 1940.

Even lower still in priority were any pioneering efforts to help the 4Fs of the 4Fs.

People like the young men with weakened heart valve conditions likely to die at some point of invariably fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis , because they were judged unfit not just for military life but even for work in the crucial war industries.

This instrumentalist view of humanity : viewing the worth of your fellow human being by only what they can contribute to the war effort - was really done best by Hitler and Stalin.

But America was willing to give it the old school try - starting with the SBE sufferers.

However - and thankfully for all humanity - one Columbia medical professor, Dr Martin Henry Dawson , felt quite differently.

He began his own Manhattan Project - Agape penicillin - on that October morning.

A military hero of WWI,  he nevertheless felt that one of the best ways to combat Hitler was morally - by showing in practise how much we opposed the Nazis' instrumentalist view of humanity.

So on October 16th 1940, he felt America should show it cared at least as much about its unfit 4F youth as it did about their fit 1A companions.

A  Jew, Charles Aronson , firstly, and then a black man , Aaron Alston - in 1940 America they were practically 4F simply by ethnicity alone - were the two patients who got the first ever needles of penicillin-the-antibiotic that day.

Aaron eventually died but amazing, Charles survived : a hopeful start to the new Age of Antibiotics.

So on October 16th 2015, seventy years later, will the New York media mark the start of the American peacetime draft registration - still very much a part of American life ?

Or will the New York media mark the start of the Age of Antibiotics  , still very much part of everyone's life around the world ?

Or hopefully both - seeing how intimately the two events were intertwined,  way back in October 1940 .

But I doubt - if left to the men alone - it'll ever happen.

A 1999 Newsday-Newseum survey of 35,000 American men and women revealed a perhaps not so surprising difference of opinion as to the top news story of the 20th century.

The men thought it was the death-dealing Manhattan Project and its atomic bomb.

But the women thought it was the life-saving Manhattan Project and its wartime vision of cheap abundant penicillin for all humanity.

So women, particularly if you work in the media - its time to step up to the plate and make sure that , this time , the dawn of the Age of Antibiotics gets its due ...

Fungus cloud rises 35,000 ft over New Mexico desert as Oppenheimer intones "I am become death , destroyer of nations"

The Boys Own Manhattan Project

Trinity's famous FUNGUS cloud

The seminal image of the other Manhattan Project, the Boys-Own version , is of a lethal fungus cloud radiating forth , roiling and boiling as it ascended to 35,000 feet above the New Mexico desert . Down below , Dr Robert Oppenheimer intoned portentously "I am become Death, destroyer of nations".

Doctor Mom's Manhattan project 

Lifesaving MONSTRANCE of penicillium

Dr Martin Henry Dawson's Manhattan Project ( the Doctor-Mom's version) also had its seminal image , also of a fungus radiating forth.

It was held aloft like some sort of Roman Catholic monstrance (albeit by devout Presbyterian layperson Dr Gladys Hobby in New York's Presbyterian hospital !) to offer hope and succour to SBE patients facing imminent death.

This lifesaving fungus radiated forth in all directions over a large Petri dish, with its golden droplets along the wedge lines in the green blue mold looking like the rays of the sun itself.

Two wildly different fungus , two wildly different faces of Janus Manhattan.

One Manhattan , the Manhattan of Gordon Gekko , cold and mean  - the Manhattan of the Hiroshima bomb droppers that 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef raged so hard against.

The other Manhattan, the Manhattan of Emma Lazarus, offering the warm golden lamp of welcome to all the world's tired, hungry and huddled - the Manhattan that Yousef and his ilk never got to know.

If Manhattan is ever to stop the Yousefs of this world, it needs to show the Emma Lazarus side of its face.

I hope my books on Martin Henry Dawson's Manhattan Project (Agape penicillin) help start that process...

Ramzi Yousef : here's the beatific side of wartime Manhattan ...

When asked why he hoped his 1993 bomb inside Manhattan's World Trade Center would kill all of the 50,000 people at the complex, the chief planner of the attack, Ramzi Yousef, said the planned massive carnage was partly to avenge the 250,000 Japanese killed by the bombs of the Manhattan Project.

It is true that the current wartime image of Manhattan does present a particularly Mars like character.
Pre-1945 Manhattan was not just the birth place of the technology that fuelled the Cold War atomic arsenals, it was also the financial and intellectual home of Eugenics - which culminated in The Holocaust.

But Manhattan is Janus-like as we all are, as the whole world is.

Within it are found big and small, good and bad, Eugenics and Emma Lazarus : indeed Venus, as well as Mars.

Venus even in, particularly in, times of war - seemingly the natural home of Mars.

Martin Henry Dawson's Manhattan Project , to liberate natural penicillin from corporate greed and eugenic medicine so that it could bring succour to the poor, the tired and the huddled in a war-torn world, saved far more lives than The Bomb ever lost.

If  Ramzi Yousef had only known the full (in the round /the 360 degree) story of Manhattan, he might have thought twice about planning that 1993 bomb.

Much the same goes for those who planned 9/11 and those planning future assaults on Manhattan.

I am not a Manhattanite and reluctant to blow someone other city's horn unasked : but I simply feel that the world - and that included Manhattanites - must know more of the long ago wartime days when 'Manhattan was from Venus' , as well as from Mars....

remembering when wartime Manhattan was from Venus

Now I am become Hope, the Healer of Nations

Thanks to John Gray I can say, in a sideways allusion to his famous book, that wartime Manhattan displayed both a Mars and a Venus side to its Janus-like character and everyone instantly knows what I mean.

This is a lot easier than saying Manhattan have a Social medicine and War medicine side to its character and then have to offer up a few thousand words and a long history lesson, just to explain what I really mean.

Similarly the made-up quotation that heads this blog post is another sideways allusion --- this time to a very well known quote about Manhattan's best known wartime Project : the death-dealing Atomic Bomb.

Robert Oppenheimer, a Manhattan born and raised boy himself, defined the Bomb's nature (and America's newfound military and diplomatic power) by intoning a famous quotation from Hindu scripture :

"Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds"

Manhattan never itself intoned those words or the words at the top of this post - it can't .

But poetically, we can at least imagine that between 1943 and 1945 it did intone both....

Penicillin Agape, with a macron over the "e" in Agape

I have had no end of possible titles and sub titles for my book about Manhattan doctor  Henry Dawson's selfless wartime penicillin project.

But most end up being delegated to chapter titles (I'm frugal !) because they are too obscure, too long winded or simply not melodious enough to be a main title.

Agape Penicillin sounds too harsh and too un-melodic to be a book title , as accurate as it is.

But Penicillin Agape does sound poetic enough for a main title.

And my sub-title (wartime Manhattan's other project) is easy-to-figure out yet fully accurate, while subtly implying itself as a peace-loving (agape, right ?) alternative to the better known war-making Manhattan (capital "P") Project.....

"Agape's Penicillin : Henry Dawson's Manhattan Project"

Only six words this time : title and sub-title.

I should remind readers that the cover image for all my various book title and sub-titles remains the same.

It is a painting of a stylized pair of unnaturally thin and curving arms and hands lifting up a glowing petri dish of radiated* penicillium mold as if it was a monstrance* , the whole effect at a casual glance looking exactly like a stylized atomic mushroom cloud.

(Hopefully !)

(*Penicillium mold is extremely variable genetically and will usually mutate a few variants, even during the course of growing for a only few days on the petri dish, even if grown from a single spore - these variants are visible as the slightly different pie shaped wedges radiating outwards from the centre of the penicillium mold.

*Monstrances are that glowing sun-like thingy that the priests hold the communion host aloft in, on certain joyous occasions.)

The visual connection to an artist's painting of an upheld monstrance is immediately apparent if one has seen both.

Gladys Hobby, of Dawson's team, records in her book that she daily held up the mold on petri dishes ,in just such a manner, to lift up the spirits of the dying SBE patients.

So it is non-negotiable for me -- I must see the words "Manhattan Project" somewhere in title or sub-title.

I want to play off the idea that this tiny life-oriented Manhattan project, occurring in the same university campus and at the same time as as the atomic Manhattan project, was in every way its antithesis.

But I don't really care if title becomes sub-title etc - its all of one piece in the end.

The idea of someone no one has ever heard of, Henry Dawson, having something equal in importance to the very ultimate in Big Science/Big Government/Big Money/Big War hopefully will intrigue the potential customer enough to look inside the book.

             "Agape's Penicillin" 
The Manhattan Project of Henry Dawson 

is a slightly more academic a sub-title - but longer-winded and windier too....

"Agape's Manhattan Project : Ten billion of us, better off , because a dying Manhattan doctor put saving ten lives above his own"

Or :

             "Agape's Manhattan Project" 
Ten billion of us, our lives improved ,because a dying doctor put the saving of ten others' lives above his own

"The other Manhattan Project : Penicillin for 'life unworthy of life'

Henry Dawson was in moral combat with the Allied medical-scientific elite and their handmaids, the wartime Allied governments.

He felt the best way to win over all the people worldwide who were neutral towards the conflict with Hitler and Tojo was to demonstrate - in actions, not just empty words - that morally the Allies were different from the Nazis, not just a weak 'me-too' echo.

He felt the "CODE SLOW" (denying life-saving penicillin)  imposed upon the SBE youths dying in Allied hospitals because their disease was judged to be  "not militarily important" was the moral equivalent of the Nazi Aktion T4 , the project to kill all Germans judged to be" life unworthy of life" .

Time says he was right - when Doctor Mom joined his battle, the Allies reluctantly had to give in and started a massive program - at least in America - to provide abundant cheap penicillin to all....

The OTHER Manhattan Project only made moral arguments rather than A-Bombs : but its impact has been immense

Moral conservatives such as today's American Republican Party frequently argue that morally medical care (such as expensive life saving drugs like Avastin) should only go to those who have worked hard enough to afford them.

They maintain this argument ( hello Obamacare !) even if this means that these drugs as a result of this limited market demand will remain in limited production forever and so be expensive forever.


The opposite moral argument (as made by Dr Martin Henry Dawson in his battle with the Allied governments in WWII) calls for the government to greatly expands the lifesaver's potential market by initially subsidizing the drug so that it available to all regardless of income, geography, race ,gender etc.

It is claimed this will encourage new producers to come in and try and find ways to compete with the established producer by lowering their production costs and hence ultimately reduce the price of the drug to the consumer.

Penicillin G provides the best possible example of this argument, proving the validity of this economical argument beyond all measure.

But greatly expanding the universe of people with affordable access to lifesaving Penicillin G also had an unexpectedly profound impact on the entire world's health.

Unusually cheap abundant public domain Penicillin G saved the lives of many people who are ordinarily too poor or in two remote regions to be treated and who thus remained reserve pools of highly virulent - and contagious - strains of the bacterial diseases that were endemic or epidemic worldwide for millenniums.

In a form of quasi Herd Immunity, billions of us (I estimate ten billion of us so far) have indirectly benefited when tens of millions of us directly had their lives saved by penicillin G shots.

Dangerously contagious bacterial diseases that terrified our grandmothers, that hung like the Sword of Damocles over all households rich or poor, are no more.

Those of us under the age of fifty have never even heard of most of them and few doctors practising today have even seen a single case of them.

The Big Manhattan Project made the A Bomb and made a huge array of massive buildings - it was big in every concrete sense of the word.

By contrast, the other Manhattan Project, that of Dr Dawson, only made moral arguments (and a little home brew penicillin) rather than Bombs or Buildings.

But who can save that this project's impact  - 75 years on - is not way, way bigger than that of the project headed by Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves.... 

World's most effective lifesaver is also the most beloved AND the cheapest

That's not at all like Big Pharma, the world's least beloved industry.

Usually their effective lifesavers cost a big fortune and their ineffective ones merely cost a small fortune.

By contrast, our beloved inexpensive penicillin G has seen wide use among the world's poorest patients and as a result  billions of us have had a 'free ride' :  a quasi-herd immunity to millennium old contagious bacterial infections like Rheumatic Fever.

Diseases today most of us under the age of 50 have never even heard of and most doctors have never seen.

But it almost didn't happen ; we almost lost inexpensive- penicillin-for-all

At the height of WWII, when the only other anti-bacterial agent, the Sulfa drugs, were visibly failing, Big Pharma in Britain and America held off mass production of the only alternative (Penicillin) until they had synthesized it and patented it.

Meanwhile , in the middle of that desperate world war, American and British diplomats sat down to leisurely haggle over how to divide the massive world profits on synthetic penicillin ; visions of post-war sugar plums dancing through their heads.

Now you don't have to be a student of foreign affairs to suspect that America is very, very, very reluctant to sign international treaties --- so this alone suggests how profitable the two superpowers thought patented penicillin would be.

That could only mean sticker shock at the drugstore cash register for ordinary families, of course.

And the world's poor ? Forget it !

One doctor bucked the combined Anglo-American scientific-medical establishment ,and eventually when even Doctor Moms joined in,  the American politicos smelling electoral disaster backed off.

The British politicians did not and the election shock of 1945 was the price they paid.

The story of the smallest Manhattan Project and its battle for inexpensive-penicillin-for-all is fascinating  ---- and almost totally unknown even to penicillin historians....

The light of the littlest red lighthouse can light up the world better than that of the greatest grey bridge

I wonder if Marjorie and Henry Dawson ever read the tale of The Little Red Lighthouse to their youngest child before Henry died in mid-1945 ?

That small and seemingly powerless-feeling child, born in 1941, was of the right age to especially appreciate the special message of the classic children's book, which first came out in 1942.

Particularly considering his father worked daily right beside the real life great grey bridge and the real life little red lighthouse.

If not, I hope the Dawson child eventually absorbed the lesson of that little book more directly, by learning more of his late father's own little Manhattan Project between 1940 and 1945.

Both the example of the book's story and the story of Henry Dawson's tiny Manhattan Project demonstrate to small children the reminder that a determined few, no matter how small in number or in power, can light up the whole world for the better .

And that little children shouldn't give up either, at the first hurdle...