World over Word : Penicillin's twelve lost years end with an (applied) ampoule , not an (theoretical) article ...

(Martin) Henry Dawson left no private papers, so his biography must be one of deeds not words.

It actually suits the man : he was a natural history type scientist, not a natural philosophy type.

Dawson's Follies...

... have improved the lives of ten billion of us , so far.

Dateline Manhattan : Something green and life-nurturing is brewing down the mean corridors of wartime science...

science LOST world war two...

'What ?! Don't be foolish : if historians of all stripes agree on one thing, it is that 'science' won WWII - the freedom-loving Allies simply had better 'science' then did the dictators of the Axis.'

I doubt that all historians think that way.

 I am fairly sure that British historian David Edgerton hardly agrees that mere science , rather than an extraordinary advantage held by the Allies in terms of population, territory and resources, 'won the day' (albeit six long years after the war began).

WWII : the dogma of pure simplicity confounded by reality's mixed complexity

Llewellyn Park Refined versus Brooklyn Crude ...

Llewellyn Park New Jersey, home to Merck's CEO, George W Merck, along with many other rich people, was democratic America's first gated community, designed pure and simple to keep Reality out.

Unsurprisingly then that six foot four George Merck spent all of WWII failing to make pure simple synthetic penicillin --- despite mounting scientific evidence suggested it couldn't be done even at a financial loss.

By contrast, John l Smith, the five foot nothing tall vice president of operations at Pfizer, lived in the polyglot capital of the world, Brooklyn NYC, and spent his war quietly accepting that the only penicillin landing on the D-Day beaches and filling grateful civilian and soldiers' veins would be his firm's complexly impure natural penicillin.

Just two of the world's two billion people in the early 1940s, all who had to decide for themselves what to do and what to think when the reality of the war situation conflicted with their pre-1939 dogma about the nature of reality......

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.....

PURE LOVE : Henry Dawson's Manhattan Project

The very first colleague that Henry Dawson brushed up against in his rush to save SBE patients being silently abandoned in the rush to replace social (4F) medicine with war (1A) medicine was Karl Meyer - a key member of Dawson's tiny four person penicillin team !

Meyer had pushed working with penicillin as his way to seek some (private) vengeance upon fellow German Jewish biochemist Ernst Chain who Meyer felt had misrepresented Meyer's pioneering work on the structure of lysozyme.

Meyer had private information that Chain had tried for two years to synthesize penicillin with no luck.

But how hard could it be ? After all it is a natural biological molecule no bigger than that of quinine. (Chemist joke.)

Meyer, no more hubris-blind that any other chemist in the golden age of chemistry, felt he could easily do the job in a few months and still keep up his regular research work on other topics.

So he wanted the first clinical tests to take place early in the new year (1941) and take place with his own 100% pure synthetic penicillin.

Dawson, a lapsed Calvinist on a catholic mission,  dismissed all his professions concerns over injecting anything less than 100% pure penicillin into humans, which had held up anyone using penicillin's amazing  life saving abilities for 12 solid years.

'Mixed caste' penicillin was more than good enough for Dawson, if it meant the difference between life or death.

So the very first patient given antibiotic penicillin , a young man named Charlie Aronson , was plucked from his seemingly inevitable endocarditis death with a little crude penicillin that was about eight to ten units of strength per milligram.

To put it in terms an ad man for Ivory Soap might understand, that meant it was .56 of one percent penicillin  and 99 and 44 one hundred percent  ?????

To Howard Florey, it was 99.44% pure dangerous dirty impurities.

To me ,perhaps secretly to Dawson as well , because the penicillin amount itself was far far too small to affect the bacteria on the heart valves, the only way Dawson's action could have saved Charlie's life was down to the morale-boosting effect Dawson's obvious care and concern had upon Charlie 's own bodily defences.

So to me, that very first penicillin was .56% penicillin and 99.44% pure love....

(and a big hat tip to Ronnie Milsap and Eddie Rabbitt  for their audio contributions to the writing of this piece.)

"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.... 

Penicillin is not Avastin, but it could have been...

My book - The smallest Manhattan Project  - is about us , all 10 billion of us , here today or years dead, whose lives have been improved by the advent of inexpensive penicillin.

In a sense, this book is a rarity : one written from the patient's eye view of how that drug came to be ; a welcome change after decades of endless books exclusively devoted to how penicillin looked to the people who discovered and developed it.

Penicillin is frequently called the Miracle Drug but few consider that its biggest medical miracle was really in fact its cost, or rather 'lack of cost'.

Because the diseases that penicillin treats are contagious,  patients too poor to afford a cure remains a reservoir of the most virulent strains, waiting to infect the rest of us.

There actually were methods of preventing much of these diseases before the development of penicillin : they included the ready availability of good jobs, good food, cleaner and bigger homes, greater social respect.

Baring that, only the worldwide availability of a drug that would cure those diseases once they started up, at a price that almost all could readily afford , could reduce these diseases from being endemic or epidemic to just names in a dusty medical textbook.

That is why I can say, with absolute assurance, that even those of us who have never had a single treatment of beta-lactam (penicillin family) antibiotics are in better health today because the grandparent of them all, Penicillin G , is water cheap - literally a lifesaver "too cheap to meter" .

But it almost didn't happen , we almost lost "inexpensive penicillin".

We almost got an expensively patented synthetic drug more akin to Avastin and all those other $100,000 a year plus medications.

"The smallest Manhattan Project" is the story of a doctor ( himself slowly dying of another unrelated disease) who sacrificed his own health to see penicillin from the patient's point of view.

His name should be honoured for all time.

This, despite the fact that he did not discover penicillin and then neglect it (Fleming) nor did he start its re-discovery and eventual development, albeit while pursuing a pathway that nearly killed off that development (Florey).

Dr Martin Henry Dawson, for that was his name, merely said penicillin should be made available - now! - for every single patient whose life could be saved by it , even during the height of a Total War .

Nay, he went much, much further.

Dawson in fact said all should have access to life-saving penicillin, particularly in the middle of a Total War.

That was because that war was supposedly being fought against one opponent in particular, solely because that opponent's core philosophy said that 'some lives are more worthy than others'.

How could we continue to conduct that war with any moral vigour when our own medical establishment was 'me-tooing' Hitler's doctors ?

Now the mantra 'Penicillin for all who needed it regardless of their income level or skin colour' in the mid-1940s meant its mass production, given the vast amount of infectious disease endemic in those years.

And mass production has its myriad ways of driving production costs down, down , down --- as happily happened in the case of Penicillin G in almost textbook manner.

'Penicillin for all' quickly became 'inexpensive penicillin for all' and once that happened, penicillin began to work almost like the way a good public health vaccine program should work : the treatment of the many ultimately offering 'herd protection' to all the rest of us, free of charge.

Insulin is another drug frequently called a miracle drug.

But the sad fact is that it is far more common today than it was beforeinsulin was discovered, for a variety of reasons.

By contrast, the names of all those bacterial household scourges that so terrified our mothers and grandmothers are not even known to most of us under the age of 50, and most doctors practising today have never seen a case of them.

And that is just the sort of modern day miracle that Dawson's mantra of 'penicillin for all' can produce.

For the complex truth is that our choice of medical ethics has economic consequences and these in turn feedback and have medical consequences.

The case of what the mantra of 'penicillin for all' ultimately led to should be taught in every health economics and health ethics oriented university department for just those very reasons....

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...

Lifesaving 'too cheap to meter:' the legacy of the smallest Manhattan Project

Remember that solemn pledge from the biggest Manhattan Project ?

After killing a few hundred thousand civilians overseas, they promised to make up for it by offering us endless, abundant, safe electricity at prices 'too cheap to meter'.

They were joking, right ?!

By contrast, consider the legacy of the smallest Manhattan Project.

It has offered us decades of lifesaving at prices 'too cheap to meter'.

That is an amazing feat considering it was performed against the combined resistance from the biggest of the wartime Allied  governments and from many politically powerful firms in wartime's Big Pharma.

Penicillin, more than 85 years after its initial discovery, still can stop cold the toughest bacterial infections going, and do so at prices dirt cheap, offering us true life saving at prices too cheap to meter.

Contrast that to today's to cancer drugs,  averaging at costs between $100,000 to $350,000 a year, that can only promise to extent the average life by about four months.

This is because natural penicillin was born in the public domain, born the original genetic drug , and Man failed totally to synthesize it and expensively patent it.

Penicillin is often called the miracle drug and perhaps its biggest miracle was economic, not medical : it could be given the opportunity to save hundreds of millions worldwide because it wasn't priced like Avastin but rather was almost as cheap as water.

(A real miracle - and I repeat, it almost didn't happen, we almost lost inexpensive penicillin.)

That was because our busy wartime Allied bureaucrats and busy wartime drug executives spent zillions in scarce tax dollars to try to synthesize and patent penicillin rather than getting down to doing Job One with readily available natural penicillin.

Their Job One and Two and Three should have been saving lives in a worldwide war crisis.

Henry Dawson's 'Penicillin-for-all' did not just mean making it available to all at a steep price, like Avastin : it meant making it available to all patients, at a price even the poorest can afford...

"Code Slow", the wartime SBE patients and Hearst's "Code Yellow"

What really happens whenever a family directs a hospital that its relative receives the full and rapid CPR response ("Code Blue") in the event of their quickly fatal cardiac or breathing arrest ?

Most the time, the medical and nursing staff will do their damnest to bring that patient back from the imminent grave.

But at times, the medical and nursing staff will form a silent consensus that they will just pretend to "code blue" a patient, but will actually merely go through the motions.

This is known as "Code Slow" and it is a serious breach in medical ethics.

The staff do so because (a) they believe that particular patient isn't worth saving ----(b) or less controversially , they honestly believe that particular patient at this point in their illness can't really be saved by fullout CPR and will merely experience additional pain en route to their death.

Reasons (a) and (b) are often mixed confusingly in actual practise ---- patients judged (subconsciously) as less valuable are more often also judged less able to benefit from full out CPR on strictly medical grounds.

WWII 's own "CODE SLOW"

During WWII, the millions of young people worldwide who had e potential to suffer the invariably fatal disease known as "Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis" (SBE) as a result of endemic Rheumatic Fever, were viewed by both Allied and Axis medical elites alike as 'useless mouths' during a total war.

They consumed a lot of scarce medical care and even if 1% of the time their illness was checked , it always returned a few months later and no one was ever known to survive a second or third hospital stay while suffering SBE.

True, by early 1943, Martin Henry Dawson had cured a few SBE patients , at least the first time, with moderately high amounts of what little public domain penicillin was available between 1940 and 1943 , but the Allied medical elite decided his success had to be discounted at all costs.

For if his success with SBE was accepted and publicised , it would lead overnight to a sudden sharp public demand for enormous amounts of penicillin.

(The thinking being that ordinary doctors would believe that if penicillin can cure SBE, the Mount Everest of infectious disease, then surely to God it could easily cure their patient's less invariably fatal infection.)

This would guy the game for those who hoped to use penicillin as a secret weapon of war - keeping it secret from the Allied public and hence the Axis-friendly diplomatic corps, so it was only available  to the Allied side during the big D-Day push.

It would also guy the game for those who hoped to hold off the public demand for this miracle drug until it had been safely synthesized and patented, when Big Pharma would finally freely sell it to everybody dying of bacterial infections ---- provided the dying or their families also had big wallets.

The hope was to keep Dawson's success out of the public eye until penicillin had been both patented and had been a surprise success on D-Day - mostly by denying him anymore public domain penicillin to repeat his feats.

He was known as not the type to 'spill all' to the press if he was denied more penicillin.

The SBEs wouldn't be denied all medical care and simply left to die, tempting as that was, because that could backfire and clash fearsomely with the Allied talk of the Four Freedoms.

Instead, they would be "code slow"-ed to death : given enormous amounts of useless (and abundant) sulfa drugs so their families would think something useful was being done for them, when it actually was not.

Unfortunately for these schemers, a fiery Italian American doctor,Dante Colitti, armed with his own private grudge against a medical elite for being prejudiced against allowing Italian Catholic cripples to get medical licenses, was far more willing to go to the media.

He got the master of the Yellow Press, Citizen Hearst and his paper chain, to go full out on behalf of this miraculous Yellow Magic stuff.

The rest, as they say, is history.

For in the end, "Code Slow" proved no match against "Code Yellow" .

A "Good News Story" from the "Bad News War".....

The little Project that Could

Once upon a time there was a little yellow penicillin factory located very near that Great Grey Bridge that connects Fort Lee, New Jersey and Upper Manhattan.

It wasn't a very big operation - particularly not compared to the huge war-dealing projects located all over the world in all the combat nations in those years between 1940 and 1945.

But the long term impact it has had on all of us is far greater than any of its much bigger wartime rivals --- even the one that produced The Bomb and promised us safe perpetually renewable electricity at prices too cheap to meter.

It is only natural for our children and grandchildren, being very small themselves, to feel that a small person or group can never best those much bigger than themselves.

But I think my book on the story of the smallest Manhattan Project can be an object lesson  to our children and grandkids that size isn't everything in matters moral --- that a strong heart and a fierce determination to do right can indeed move mountains.

If I can even move a handful of kids to grow up determined to do the right thing by all the smallest and weakest among us, I will feel that my book efforts will have been worth it....
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What "The smallest Manhattan Project" is about

This book is about us. Ten billion of us, here today or years dead, whose lives have been changed by the advent of antibiotics.

It almost didn't happen ; we almost lost Penicillin, the only-begetter of this wonderful revolution.

"The smallest Manhattan Project" is the true story of a dying doctor who fought off his own body - and his own wartime government - just long enough to help Penicillin get its moral groove back, winning us cheap, abundant, natural Penicillin for all.

Above all it is a reminder that when it comes to having the moral courage to change our whole world for the better, size doesn't begin to matter ....

ALL life is worthy of life as a full citizen or are just SOME judged 'worthy' ?

Nazi Germany - even at the depths of its imminent defeat - treated its full citizens well : recall that POW Kurt Vonnegut was working in a Dresden factory that made food supplements for pregnant mothers at the time of that city's Allied firebombing in February 1945.

But its non full citizens it killed outright or worked to death as starved slaves.

'Life worthy of Life' - 'Life unworthy of Life' are infamous German cum Nazi catchphrases that have come to symbolize THEM, so as to separate US for any shared responsibility for the horrors of  the
eugenic mass murder of WWII.

But when we re-cast those catchphrases as' life worthy or unworthy of life as full citizens' , we become uneasily aware that no society in the early 1940s was free of the sin of treating some of its members as less than fully human.

None .

When Henry Dawson proved this up for the Anglo Allies over their denying of life saving penicillin to young SBE patients deemed useless for the war effort - judged just 'useless mouths' consuming valuable medical resources - he made it clear to many just how close the Nazis and their erstwhile opponents really were, morally......

Churchill's bombers burn babies while FDR's bombers deliver penicillin to babies

I have tried awfully hard to find stories of Churchill's bombers delivering bottles of penicillin, rather than bombs of napalm, to the world's babies.

No luck so far.

But newspapers in 1943-1944 were rife with stories of FDR's bombers delivering various tiny bottles of penicillin half way around the world to save babies.

It is usual to emphasis how well the left-leaning FDR government got along with the right-leaning Churchill government but it is also possible to overdo all the censor-approved bonhomie.

Wartime penicillin is a clear example where the two differed wildly, with dire permanent consequences for Britain and the British Tories.

The Tory-dominated Ministry of Supply ,egged on by the likes of Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey, successfully kept the miracles of penicillin out of the popular British press, so that it might remain below the radar of the German chemists.

The hope was secret penicillin could be a medical-military weapon, a nasty surprise to drop on the Jerries on D-Day when Allied troop casualties quickly returning to the front while Axis wounded festered and died with only the outdated sulfa drugs to heal them.

The cost of the beginnings of an adequate supply of penicillin for British civilian and soldier alike was only one or two of Butcher Harris's endless bomber squadrons, but the MOS successfully throttled back penicillin production expenditures so that only British troop needs could be ( just barely) met.

In America, FDR's new Deal was dying, a victim of the war.

But in its last hurrah, the very New Dealish WPB (War Production Board) set the USA supply requests at a level a thousand times higher than the British levels, despite a population only three times bigger !

Thanks to Henry Dawson and Dante Colitti and Citizen Hearst, an outraged American public, led by Doctor Mom, demanded to know why the American drug companies were not cashing in on those massive 'firm orders' from Uncle Sam.

Henry Dawson's early supporter from the drug industry, John L Smith of Pfizer, took up the public's challenge and soon was producing penicillin at rates many dozens of times higher than the rest of the world combined.

Flush with excess penicillin, America could easily afford to divert some of its bombers off the killing work and towards delivering tiny vials of penicillin to dying children world wide.

Widely reported in the world press, this penicillin diplomacy from America quietly replaced the Pax Britanica with Pax Americana despite the fact that the Brits had held an exclusive on the life-saving balm for more than a dozen years.

Back home in the UK, things got worse for Churchill.

He had been widely expected to win the 1945 election - not the least by his lackluster opponents in the Labour Party , for his efforts in winning the war.

But doubts over Tory fairness in the quality of medical care for rich and for poor, highlighted in a famous Daily Mirror cartoon of a wounded British soldier, silently moved many voters (in an era before 'public' public polling) over to their opponents.

Unfairness of who got or did not get scarce British penicillin ( versus news stories of obvious American abundance), highlighted by newspaper stories of dying British children with SBE being denied the life-saving mold , was an important part of that emerging move away from the Tory-led government.

Penicillin was British-born, damn it all, and Churchill's government had fumbled the ball, giving it away to the Americans and yet denying it to British civilians.

Who gave a hoot - now - about how many European babies Butcher Harris's bombers had burned while flying above a war won on the ground by millions of Ivans ?

Wartime penicillin never cured Churchill's pneumonia - that is a myth.

But its British failure surely killed his electoral prospects, just as its American success helped pull Harry Truman back out of his expected electoral defeat.....

1945's choices : the Modern exclusionary values that gave us Auschwitz or the post Modern values that gave us 'Public Domain' penicillin ?

In early 1945, two Manhattan doctors had dueling visions of the possible world ahead.

The prominent one, Foster Kennedy ,  wanted to kill all babies with developmental issues.

The unknown other, Henry Dawson, wanted all babies in the world to have access to cheap, abundant (Public Domain) penicillin.

By the end of 1945, the unknown Dawson was dead but - perhaps surprisingly - his idea lived on after him.


Because, with the beginnings of  public revulsion over the revelations of Auschwitz doctors and children coming out of the Nuremberg trials, it was clear that Dawson had won most of the educated public over to his vision.

And this only a few years after public polls indicated that the majority of the educated public favoured Foster Kennedy's murderous proposals instead.

Dawson's unstinting efforts to make wartime penicillin truly inclusive had greatly shortened his life, but clearly they hadn't been totally in vain ....

post Modern age ushered in by baby's whimper, not Bomb's bang

Two 'Booms' occurred in 1945 : which was more important ?

It was the year 1945, all historians seem to agree , that ushered out the Modern age and ushered in the post Modern age : and ushered it in with some sort of a bang.

But what sort of bang : was it the secretive Manhattan Project's Atom Bomb big Boom !!! ?

Or was it the smallest Manhattan Project's inclusive vision of penicillin priced and available for all , a vision that encouraged women all over the world to see a brighter future ahead and gave them reason to want to get pregnant ?

Was it then the penicillin-and-good-health fueled Baby Boom that really ushered in our current age ?

Was an old age ushered out by a newborn baby's contented whimper ?

That's sort of my take : yes, revulsion against yesterday's exclusionary values that gave us Auschwitz.

But also gratitude for today's inclusionary values that gave us  'cheap and abundant penicillin for all' , with its promise of a healthy childhood ahead for most newborn children.....

Dying life unworthy of wartime penicillin was Life unworthy of Life

"all Life is worthy of Penicillin"

The infamous term "Life unworthy of Life", created by a German psychiatrist Alfred Hoche in the 1920s , is generally thought of as bring used exclusively by the Nazis.

Used by them during a Total War to justify killing everyone from working class Aryan babies with developmental issues to the entire Jewish population of Europe.

But the term had a much greater transnational appeal than that .

Prominent American psychiatrist Foster Kennedy thought , in 1941 and 1942, during that same Total War, that the USA would be justified in killing its little Aryan babies with developmental issues.

Shamefully, America's leading psychiatric journal actually agreed with him and only one psychiatrist disputed his thesis.

And the Allies' medical establishment, led by Dr Chester Keefer and his NAS committee, used this idea to justify denying SBE-curing penicillin to young people dying of SBE all over the Allied world,  because they felt that even a cured SBE patient was still useless to the Total War effort.

("Life judged unworthy of Penicillin.")

By contrast, Henry Dawson and a handful of other doctors worldwide supported, and fought for, the notion that "All Life is worthy of Penicillin" - even in , particularly in , a Total War supposedly  fought precisely against the evil idea that some Life was, ipso facto, unworthy of Life.....

WWII was a conflict within nations and within INDIVIDUALS ... as well as between nations

War ,to give it a quick definition, is a violent conflict conducted between nations, not between individuals.

But the intensity of commitment with which individuals and groups within any nation fight in that nation's war can vary immensely --- perhaps never more so than during WWII.

(We are not considering the rare case when a citizen is in total non-compliance with their nation's war decisions, by becoming a complete conscientious objector or a traitor.)

The existing WWI paradigm ,within which all existing history on that war has been written to date , never denies that each nation had a somewhat divided mind between 1931-1945 on various war issues.

Still writers accepting of that paradigm tend to focus exclusively on the nation against nation conflict and - I claim ! - seriously distort what was really going on and what was truly fundamental in a 'long history' view.

These writings tend to limit the war's big moments to a military battle between the modern age's various ideologies : liberal capitalist democracies versus race (Japan, Germany,and Italy's fascism) and class based (communist Russia) dictatorships.

There is no denying that for the world's population living inside the modern age bubble seventy five years ago , it was the differences between the various strands of modern thought that so dominated their minds.

But what excuse have we historical-minded authors , living seventy years after that bubble began breaking, to be 'captured' by our protagonists' ways of thinking ?

Historians like to claim lots of time is necessary between historian and event to render the beginnings of an objective assessment of it.

Isn't seventy five years (and more) time enough to look anew at WWII ?

To see it no merely as a Modern war, but in fact the last Modern war, and the beginnings of the post-Modern world ?

If we look again at the three big Modern ideologies : liberal capitalist imperialism, fascist cum racial imperialism and communist imperialism, we could today try to see that what they had in common , as opposed to what divided them.

What they held in common was an exclusivist or imperialist worldview that divided all the world into those deserving and those undeserving of the basic rights of humanness.

Does it really matter now, except in the details, whether or not their 'undeserving' included blacks or Jews or well off peasants ?

A Leningrad communist harshly criticizing another young communist for sharing her ration with her dying grandmother, saying the grandmother can contribute nothing to the struggle against the Nazi siege, but that young girl could and she needed all that food to keep up her strength.

A Nazi plan to kill off all German mentally challenged children in taxpayer-supported institutions so that their hospitals and staff could be used instead to look after moderately wounded soldiers capable of returning to the front.

An Allied medical establishment ( take your pick : America, the UK , Canada or Australia ) callously saying SBE was not 'a war disease' and so wives dying from it must be denied life-saying penicillin, so erring husbands with VD can return to fight on the front-lines.

This modern age utilitarianism and instrumentalism run wild - can you really tell its practitioners apart,  without a label ?

But there was an individual-based counter-reaction against it.

People all over the world between 1931 and 1946 began to internally wrestle with the morality of a exclusivist versus inclusivist worldview.

Admittedly tiny in numbers at first when it came to open rebellion against the Modern worldview, this critique came to centre on the idea that wartime penicillin should be offered to all and any.

We do know it received widespread public support, from August 1943 onwards,  at a time when the polls said that most peoples' hearts were still hardened against treating the Jew or black as fully human .

SBE, a rheumatic heart disease, was primarily a poor person's disease : the people who got it tended to be the poor among the visible minorities and immigrants.

The world's daily press correctly sensed it first.

They sensed the widespread public support for the idea these young patients with SBE should be saved, war or no war ---- number one by making a lot lot lot more penicillin than had been produced during the 15 years to date.

By 1949, the once-radical change was complete and modern exclusivity was being replaced plank by plank by our current post-Modern inclusivity.

So, for example, the  idea that it was right that enemy children should die because members of the Allied population had cut their penicillin for illicit gain was now widely viewed by film-goers as the ultimate of all possible evils,  as indicated by the viewer love of  a film that still ranks in the top ten of all time : "The Third Man" .

If only Henry Dawson was still around in 1949, to see what change in the public morality that he had wrought ....