On the afternoon of September 2st 1939, it seemed as if the global coalition of those nations willing to face down Hitler numbered exactly "zero".
(Poland had no moral choice to make - it was simply invaded.)
But Britain and France still had sizable numbers of their elite willing to listen to Italy's plea for a conference to settle this dispute between neighbours 'honorably' - as was done at earlier ...at Munich.
So World War II was by no means a certainty that afternoon.
Only at 1130 pm that night, during a tremendous thunderstorm, when the British Cabinet voted to go to war with Germany next morning, unless it ceased its war against Poland, did the 'world war' portion of the localized German-Polish war really begin.
As the 'Greatest Generation ever' basks in the glow of praise for doing its bit in 'the Best War ever'/ 'the last Good war' , it is worth recalling the long,long timeline of just when (or even if) each nation on earth decided to join the coalition of the willing against Hitler - and whether or not they followed these bold words up, by actually sending their citizens into combat.
Some waited the full twelve years from 1933 to 1945 to oppose Herr Hitler (and only verbally at that) and some never did.
The very first combatant nation was Germany , on August 31 1939. The last new combatant was the USSR, going to war against Japan on August 8th 1945.
In between those six years, the world's nations shifted their feet from side to side to side, going from neutrality to supporting one side but remaining neutral, to joining them formally as an ally to changing sides or back again to neutrality and just about everything in between.
Many only joined the war against Hitler in the Spring of 1945, with Germany defeated and in fear they would be denied a seat in the proposed postwar United Nations organization, unless they at least declared war on Hitler before Berlin surrendered.
At any one time, a nation's formal decision about wartime status and its more informal 'leanings' to one side or other (or the intensity of its commitment to its allies) were usually opposed by a good sum of its citizens as 'going too far' or 'not far enough'.
Really 'the coalition of those willing to oppose Hitler' was in the end made of of individuals, not nations.
They joined it one at a time and varied day by day in the intensity of their commitment against Hitler's ideals.
Looking for the opponents to Hitlerism at the level of 'the nation' reveals that all nations on earth were immorally slow to take him on and is a crude measure of the long road to defeating the ideas of Hitler as well as just his military forces.
Individuals both did much,much better than the various nations - and much,much worse...
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Friday, July 2, 2010
Does 'Mo goes Po' mean 'MOdernity goes POstal?'
A couple of friends, who know my sense of humour, asked me if "MO goes PO" stood for MOdernity goes POstal.
It does not, although I do think Modernity did go postal between 1939 and 1945 - its just that Modernity could have gone postal for a while and then made a complete recovery.
But it didn't.
So the bigger story is how Modernity plunged, over six years, from its Apogee at the New York World's Fair's visions of the World of Tomorrow all the way down to to its Nadir at Auschwitz.
It never recovered and it was forced to see its era very slowly and very quietly fade away.
(Significantly, the 1939-1940 NY World's Fair was also the time and place for the first ever fan convention for Sci Fi literature - at that time it was the literature that was the most unquestioningly Modern.
I doubt you could say that of most Sci Fi stories, post 1946.)
It is a lot to ask of the six short years from September 2nd 1939 to September 2nd 1945 ; can I make my case it actually happened in that a brief a time period?
I think so - the emotional change inside our hearts happened during the war, even if the actions that followed had to wait for peacetime conditions to be allowed to come forward.
If my project ever get produced as a play,film or musical, those six years will have to get packed into three hours - at the most - compressing the experience of the Mo-to-Po Revolution into an even tighter time experience.
It does not, although I do think Modernity did go postal between 1939 and 1945 - its just that Modernity could have gone postal for a while and then made a complete recovery.
But it didn't.
So the bigger story is how Modernity plunged, over six years, from its Apogee at the New York World's Fair's visions of the World of Tomorrow all the way down to to its Nadir at Auschwitz.
It never recovered and it was forced to see its era very slowly and very quietly fade away.
(Significantly, the 1939-1940 NY World's Fair was also the time and place for the first ever fan convention for Sci Fi literature - at that time it was the literature that was the most unquestioningly Modern.
I doubt you could say that of most Sci Fi stories, post 1946.)
It is a lot to ask of the six short years from September 2nd 1939 to September 2nd 1945 ; can I make my case it actually happened in that a brief a time period?
I think so - the emotional change inside our hearts happened during the war, even if the actions that followed had to wait for peacetime conditions to be allowed to come forward.
If my project ever get produced as a play,film or musical, those six years will have to get packed into three hours - at the most - compressing the experience of the Mo-to-Po Revolution into an even tighter time experience.
Martin Henry Dawson
I think my 15 scenes plus one afterword will do a good job of compressing those six years into a fulfilling dramatical experience, at least as seen from the point of view of Martin Henry Dawson's tiny team in the lab on Floor G ....
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Personal animosities at Columbia Eye Institute pushed Meyer into Dawson's arms on penicillin?
Blepharitis , a chronic inflammation of the eyelids, remains one of the world's most common eye problems.
Much of the time it is caused by staph bacteria and at the start of world war two, staph was one of the few common pathogen bacteria not killed by the various sulfa drugs - the 'antibiotics' of the day.
This was a big problem for the military of all the combatant nations of that war.
They regarded aviation as the alpha and the omega of modern warfare and so gave inordinate attention to the brand new field of "aviation medicine".
One only has to recall the moral panic the Allies fell into on mere rumours that the Germans had discovered the Viagra of aviation - a cortisone that let their pilots fly higher faster longer, well you get the picture.
Meyer had a consultancy with Schering Corp America - an German-owned company - involving ,among other things, attempts to create stable esters of penicillin.
Fears that Schering's work on cortisone was at the behest of the Nazis, ( it was not) rendered Schering totally suspect in the eyes of British and American intelligence circles.
Anyone connected with Schering - like Karl Meyer and his penicillin efforts - went into a little black book of "no-nos".
Aircrews and Blepharitis
An existing, generally intractable, case of blepharitis kept a lot of potential air crews out of the various air forces right at the recruiting office - that was problem A.
Problem B was that a lot of crews seemed to get blepharitis, either after they had been through training or while out on active service .
This was perhaps due to the strain of operating in the air of five miles up, behind an oxygen mask for hours.
It doesn't directly worsen your vision but it gives you blurry eyes which comes much to the same thing.
It also needlessly worried aircrews, who feared it meant worse things than it did.
Not just pilots or gunners are hit by its effects - engineers, navigation officers and bomb setters all had to look at lots of crucial numbers on lots of dials in very dim light - one pair of blurred eyes at the wrong moment could be terminal for the entire plane and crew.
Karl Meyer ,as a German Jewish emigre, had an easier relationship with Dr Ludwig Von Sallmann, who also was in exile --- from his native Austria because his wive was Jewish.
But even Sallmann only seemed to want to put Meyer's semi-purified penicillin into animals and then didn't publish anything on the results till a few years later (in 1943 - at least 2 years after the first experiments).
Typically of many,many doctors, he published freely on his early work with penicillin only after Baby Patty Malone made penicillin world famous, safe and respectable.
At least Dr Phillips Thygeson did put the crude penicillin into the eyes of 8 patients with chronic blepharitis caused by (sulfa-resistant) staph bacteria, between the late Fall of 1940 and the early Spring of 1941, with some very good results.
But he refused to publish on this success (adding his name to Fleming and Paine et al in England who also refused to publish their spectacular early successes with crude penicillin and eye diseases.)
The history of penicillin might have been much different if these doctors had crowed just a little.
Thygeson finally published on bleparitis and penicillin - in 1945 - noting its key military importance !
I think an oral history interview with Thygeson late in life suggests what happened:
I don't think he could stand Meyer much.
He accused him of being a constant paranoid about his work--- and having a gutteral accent that no student could understand.He said nothing about Sallmann's accent - though Sallmann had arrived in America about 8 years after Meyer.
Now a young student had heard all of these stories, feared dealing with Meyer but found him soft spoken and kind and stuck with him throughout his career long enough to write his affectionate obit - so opinions clearly differed on Meyer's manner and personality.
Dawson hung in with him for almost 10 years, so he couldn't have been impossible to work with.
In fact, Meyer gradually transferred himself from the eye clinic to the internal medicine department where Dawson worked.
Thygeson chose not to help out Meyer, Dawson or the fate of penicillin by publishing in an area sure to advance penicillin's importance in the eyes of the military-oriented OSRD of Vannevar Bush.
Instead he stuck to publishing on his results with sulfa drugs - these were totally pure, came via the highly conventional route of a commercial drug company - and didn't work and had potential toxic side effects.
But they didn't come from the home brew lab of Karl Meyer and that might have been a big point in their favour...
@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo
Much of the time it is caused by staph bacteria and at the start of world war two, staph was one of the few common pathogen bacteria not killed by the various sulfa drugs - the 'antibiotics' of the day.
This was a big problem for the military of all the combatant nations of that war.
They regarded aviation as the alpha and the omega of modern warfare and so gave inordinate attention to the brand new field of "aviation medicine".
One only has to recall the moral panic the Allies fell into on mere rumours that the Germans had discovered the Viagra of aviation - a cortisone that let their pilots fly higher faster longer, well you get the picture.
Meyer had a consultancy with Schering Corp America - an German-owned company - involving ,among other things, attempts to create stable esters of penicillin.
Fears that Schering's work on cortisone was at the behest of the Nazis, ( it was not) rendered Schering totally suspect in the eyes of British and American intelligence circles.
Anyone connected with Schering - like Karl Meyer and his penicillin efforts - went into a little black book of "no-nos".
Aircrews and Blepharitis
An existing, generally intractable, case of blepharitis kept a lot of potential air crews out of the various air forces right at the recruiting office - that was problem A.
Problem B was that a lot of crews seemed to get blepharitis, either after they had been through training or while out on active service .
This was perhaps due to the strain of operating in the air of five miles up, behind an oxygen mask for hours.
It doesn't directly worsen your vision but it gives you blurry eyes which comes much to the same thing.
It also needlessly worried aircrews, who feared it meant worse things than it did.
Not just pilots or gunners are hit by its effects - engineers, navigation officers and bomb setters all had to look at lots of crucial numbers on lots of dials in very dim light - one pair of blurred eyes at the wrong moment could be terminal for the entire plane and crew.
Karl Meyer ,as a German Jewish emigre, had an easier relationship with Dr Ludwig Von Sallmann, who also was in exile --- from his native Austria because his wive was Jewish.
But even Sallmann only seemed to want to put Meyer's semi-purified penicillin into animals and then didn't publish anything on the results till a few years later (in 1943 - at least 2 years after the first experiments).
Typically of many,many doctors, he published freely on his early work with penicillin only after Baby Patty Malone made penicillin world famous, safe and respectable.
At least Dr Phillips Thygeson did put the crude penicillin into the eyes of 8 patients with chronic blepharitis caused by (sulfa-resistant) staph bacteria, between the late Fall of 1940 and the early Spring of 1941, with some very good results.
But he refused to publish on this success (adding his name to Fleming and Paine et al in England who also refused to publish their spectacular early successes with crude penicillin and eye diseases.)
The history of penicillin might have been much different if these doctors had crowed just a little.
Thygeson finally published on bleparitis and penicillin - in 1945 - noting its key military importance !
I think an oral history interview with Thygeson late in life suggests what happened:
I don't think he could stand Meyer much.
He accused him of being a constant paranoid about his work--- and having a gutteral accent that no student could understand.He said nothing about Sallmann's accent - though Sallmann had arrived in America about 8 years after Meyer.
Now a young student had heard all of these stories, feared dealing with Meyer but found him soft spoken and kind and stuck with him throughout his career long enough to write his affectionate obit - so opinions clearly differed on Meyer's manner and personality.
In fact, Meyer gradually transferred himself from the eye clinic to the internal medicine department where Dawson worked.
Thygeson chose not to help out Meyer, Dawson or the fate of penicillin by publishing in an area sure to advance penicillin's importance in the eyes of the military-oriented OSRD of Vannevar Bush.
Instead he stuck to publishing on his results with sulfa drugs - these were totally pure, came via the highly conventional route of a commercial drug company - and didn't work and had potential toxic side effects.
But they didn't come from the home brew lab of Karl Meyer and that might have been a big point in their favour...
@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Pneumococcal capsule,Hyaluronan,Penicillin like electron, proton and neutron to Dawson
I have said that Martin Henry Dawson's roughly 20 year career as a medical scientist can be divided into three parts based on three types of streptococcus bacteria: s pneumococcus, s pyogenes and s viridans.
Another way to look at the three phases is to look at the key substance he was studying in each phase and contrast how our body felt about each of them.
The pneumococcus flourish in the blood stream and in our liquid-oriented parts of our body by wearing a sugar-coated capsule around themselves, to evade the non-adaptive part of our immune system.
But humans also have an adaptive immune system and it can learn to recognize the sugar capsule and kill the bacteria inside it.
To survive, the pneumococcus have learned, in their own counter defense, to make a 100 different capsules (or to wear no capsule at all !). When this in turn doesn't work, they trade the various capsules around by HGT - horizontal gene transfer - the only reason we humans could begin play around with DNA.
So Dawson's pioneering work on DNA is obviously still hot stuff.
In terms of the body's immune system, these sugar capsules are highly anti-genic : the body sees them as the enemy and goes into warp overdrive to deal with them.
Dawson then flipped 180 degrees and dealt with the capsule of the deadly GAS bacteria - a bug that can still kill humans in dozens of different ways.
Their trick is to have a capsule made out of something only animals make - this chemical hyaluronan is used all through the animal body in dozens of quite different applications.
We humans now use it ,in medicine, for dozens of additional uses.
Our body regards it as 100% gen, ie "us" - the very us-ness of us.
Sometimes however the body in attacking the bacteria inside the hyaluronan capsule, thinks the capsule is also somehow non-human and then goes off attacking parts of the human body that look just like it.
This is called 'molecular mimicry' and it lies behind auto immune diseases like Rheumatic Fever that Dawson works so hard to cure.
Because so many of the diseases we are likely to get today are considered to be auto immune diseases, this also remains hot stuff in the area of medicine and science.
Finally Dawson flipped yet again ,180 degrees ,to take up the cause of penicillin in 1940 when it interested no one.
It is, at best, an okay killer of bacteria - when just viewed in its killing aspects. From the viewpoint of working doctors or pharma executives in 1940, its killing disadvantages far outweighed its moderate killing abilities.
Dawson saw beyond this, to grasp the one thing about penicillin which remains unique about it even today when there have been thousands and thousands of antibiotics tested
for their usefulness in fighting disease.
Some individuals are allergic to penicillin - very very few seriously.
But broadly speaking only some of us are allergic to something , while if it is toxic, it is toxic to all of us.
Penicillin isn't toxic to us - at all . The salt it is wrapped around, chemically speaking, can be toxic if we don't watch our fluid levels, but that is about it.
Our body regards this small molecule as basically invisible - it does not regard it as gen ( part of itself) or antigen (part of a pathogen) nor even as a potential food - it passes quickly through our body, our liver above all, as invisible and as harmless as water.
Most doctors - Alexander Fleming above all - only saw the fact that penicillin passed quickly through the body as its prime disadvantage.
But Dawson had devoted just 15 years to substances that hung about the body only too well and his mind was 'prepared' (in the Pasteurique sense of that word) to see the advantages of any substance that our body regarded as neither genic or antigenic or as food.
Penicillin was the neutron of the human immune system and Dawson put that neutron to work......
@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo
Another way to look at the three phases is to look at the key substance he was studying in each phase and contrast how our body felt about each of them.
The pneumococcus flourish in the blood stream and in our liquid-oriented parts of our body by wearing a sugar-coated capsule around themselves, to evade the non-adaptive part of our immune system.
But humans also have an adaptive immune system and it can learn to recognize the sugar capsule and kill the bacteria inside it.
To survive, the pneumococcus have learned, in their own counter defense, to make a 100 different capsules (or to wear no capsule at all !). When this in turn doesn't work, they trade the various capsules around by HGT - horizontal gene transfer - the only reason we humans could begin play around with DNA.
In terms of the body's immune system, these sugar capsules are highly anti-genic : the body sees them as the enemy and goes into warp overdrive to deal with them.
Dawson then flipped 180 degrees and dealt with the capsule of the deadly GAS bacteria - a bug that can still kill humans in dozens of different ways.
Their trick is to have a capsule made out of something only animals make - this chemical hyaluronan is used all through the animal body in dozens of quite different applications.
We humans now use it ,in medicine, for dozens of additional uses.
Our body regards it as 100% gen, ie "us" - the very us-ness of us.
Sometimes however the body in attacking the bacteria inside the hyaluronan capsule, thinks the capsule is also somehow non-human and then goes off attacking parts of the human body that look just like it.
This is called 'molecular mimicry' and it lies behind auto immune diseases like Rheumatic Fever that Dawson works so hard to cure.
Because so many of the diseases we are likely to get today are considered to be auto immune diseases, this also remains hot stuff in the area of medicine and science.
Finally Dawson flipped yet again ,180 degrees ,to take up the cause of penicillin in 1940 when it interested no one.
It is, at best, an okay killer of bacteria - when just viewed in its killing aspects. From the viewpoint of working doctors or pharma executives in 1940, its killing disadvantages far outweighed its moderate killing abilities.
Dawson saw beyond this, to grasp the one thing about penicillin which remains unique about it even today when there have been thousands and thousands of antibiotics tested
for their usefulness in fighting disease.
Some individuals are allergic to penicillin - very very few seriously.
But broadly speaking only some of us are allergic to something , while if it is toxic, it is toxic to all of us.
Penicillin isn't toxic to us - at all . The salt it is wrapped around, chemically speaking, can be toxic if we don't watch our fluid levels, but that is about it.
Our body regards this small molecule as basically invisible - it does not regard it as gen ( part of itself) or antigen (part of a pathogen) nor even as a potential food - it passes quickly through our body, our liver above all, as invisible and as harmless as water.
Most doctors - Alexander Fleming above all - only saw the fact that penicillin passed quickly through the body as its prime disadvantage.
But Dawson had devoted just 15 years to substances that hung about the body only too well and his mind was 'prepared' (in the Pasteurique sense of that word) to see the advantages of any substance that our body regarded as neither genic or antigenic or as food.
Penicillin was the neutron of the human immune system and Dawson put that neutron to work......
@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo
Dawson had been set to be the "invisible man", the Charles Fletcher of The Manhattan Pilot
I believe that for two critical weeks at the very beginning of the The Manhattan Project, Martin Henry Dawson was not set to be the team leader/senior investigator - in fact he was not expected to be involved at all.
The team was supposed to be led by the biochemist Karl Meyer, with someone (anyone) acting as the microbiologist to test the 'in vitro' activity of the penicillin produced , again with some doctor (anyone) from Columbia Presbyterian's eye clinic in the clinician's job (the nominal job of Dawson on the final Pilot team) .
The penicillin pilot's aim, at that point, was simply (!) to purify and then synthesize penicillin - most of the small amounts of crude penicillin produced would have to be destroyed in crystallization (purification) experiments.
Only tiny, tiny amounts could be spared to show the resulting penicillin still retained the needed biological activity against bacteria on a glass slide or against bacteria on/in a human.
These were expected to be merely subordinate activities to the main show - "making penicillin".
These were expected to be merely subordinate activities to the main show - "making penicillin".
Now any drug, not just penicillin, needs to be first proven safe for humans when taking internally and be available in huge amounts, before it can be injected into the body as a 'systemic' --- versus simply being dropping a bit of it into the restricted/external area around the eyeball as an 'antiseptic'.
Penicillin, in particular, quickly slips out of the body and so needs even larger amounts than most drugs to work successfully as a systemic.
This is why penicillin's first successes in Britain during the 1930 (but tragically for humanity never published), were in removing deadly bacteria from the area around the eyes.
Meyer ,working in an eye clinic ,knew these truths better than most. In fact, he did involve two doctors from his clinic to use some of his penicillin with their patients but both doctors (Von Sallmann and Thygeson) seemed dubious about its usefulness around and in the eyes (as well they should have been).
The results were not spectacular and were published a few years later.
Eyes were saved in the early 1930s from a lifetime of blindness with treatments of diluted crude penicillin that in total must have consisted of only 1.6 Oxford units of biological activity (that is equal to one millionth of a gram of pure penicillin).
By contrast, Dawson's disease of choice to test penicillin upon, SBE, subacute bacterial endocarditis, may today require 1.6 billion units of penicillin to cure.
That is one kilogram of pure penicillin - one billion times as much penicillin.
It was known in 1940 that SBE would need an extraordinary large amount of whatever drug that could kill the bacteria in its vegetations because of the unique location of the lesions and the poor blood supply of the heart valves they rested upon- that is the problem in fact that still makes SBE the 'gold standard' of intractable infections.
All drugs to date, as of 1940, had to be used in such large amounts to kill the bacteria that they killed the patient first - because even a relatively "non-toxic" drug is deadly if used by the shovelful !
It was Dawson's genius to see that penicillin's strength was not what the popular books on it still proclaim - its ability to kill bacteria - but rather its ability not to kill the patients, even when used in extraordinarily high amounts for months at a time.
And SBE proved to be just the disease to demonstrate that fact....
@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Agape Science: thinking commensally : going Po
I have often said my Martin Henry Dawson project is "all about love" - all three variants of it.
Eros, romantic love, might seem a stretch.
However Dawson had seen too many fellow teenagers die in the trenches of WWI, without ever even having had a kiss or a girlfriend ,to fail to understand what a diagonsis of Rheumatic Fever meant to kids, back in those days.
Doctors and friends told parents in total earnestness, that any extra stress on their child's heart after they had had Rheumatic Heart Disease could kill them.
That meant no dancing, or sexual intercourse or pregnancies and childbirths - all the things that make a young person's life worth living !
Patria love or philia/filial love, love of one's own family and their country, was the reason why the 'greatest generation ever' finally went off to fight.
But patriotism isn't that high on the scale of wrong or right, in the way Jesus reckons things.
He placed agape love, the willingness to die, if necessary, for someone else's country well above the willingness to die to save one's own country.
Here America fell down .
Twenty seven times, by my count, small groups of American citizens came before their congressmen to plea for Congress to intervene militarily when their ( or the family's) homeland was invaded.
Peter only refused 3 times - American did it it 27 times between 1931 and 1941.
(Not that my country - Canada - was all that much better.)
One wonders if Japan had gone into Russia instead of Pearl Harbour would America had gone to war at all in World War Two ?
Even on December 8th 1941, FDR and Congress only went to war against Japan - it took Hitler declaring war on America to bring it out fighting against the greatest evil our world has ever known.
Dawson had already taken up arms years earlier to defend a little country from a bully and been wounded twice for his efforts and gotten the Military Cross with citation for his bravery.
But in this war, he was dying and unfit for military service overseas.
Still he exhibited agape love and agape science when he sought to save the lives of people America's leaders in science and medicine said were unworthy of much medical attention in times of war....
@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo
Eros, romantic love, might seem a stretch.
However Dawson had seen too many fellow teenagers die in the trenches of WWI, without ever even having had a kiss or a girlfriend ,to fail to understand what a diagonsis of Rheumatic Fever meant to kids, back in those days.
Doctors and friends told parents in total earnestness, that any extra stress on their child's heart after they had had Rheumatic Heart Disease could kill them.
That meant no dancing, or sexual intercourse or pregnancies and childbirths - all the things that make a young person's life worth living !
Patria love or philia/filial love, love of one's own family and their country, was the reason why the 'greatest generation ever' finally went off to fight.
But patriotism isn't that high on the scale of wrong or right, in the way Jesus reckons things.
He placed agape love, the willingness to die, if necessary, for someone else's country well above the willingness to die to save one's own country.
Here America fell down .
Twenty seven times, by my count, small groups of American citizens came before their congressmen to plea for Congress to intervene militarily when their ( or the family's) homeland was invaded.
Peter only refused 3 times - American did it it 27 times between 1931 and 1941.
(Not that my country - Canada - was all that much better.)
One wonders if Japan had gone into Russia instead of Pearl Harbour would America had gone to war at all in World War Two ?
Even on December 8th 1941, FDR and Congress only went to war against Japan - it took Hitler declaring war on America to bring it out fighting against the greatest evil our world has ever known.
Dawson had already taken up arms years earlier to defend a little country from a bully and been wounded twice for his efforts and gotten the Military Cross with citation for his bravery.
But in this war, he was dying and unfit for military service overseas.
Still he exhibited agape love and agape science when he sought to save the lives of people America's leaders in science and medicine said were unworthy of much medical attention in times of war....
@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo
"Going Po" /"Going Native"/"Letting Down the Side"
I have often wondered about why Martin Henry Dawson's legacy was so quickly - and quietly - 'disappeared' after his early death.
I mean Penicillin was very big news, Rheumatic Heart Disease remained the leading killer and crippler of school age kids (well above the numbers affected by polio), DNA was becoming big news.
I think one explanation was that many of his contemporary fellow doctors and scientists felt that he had 'let down the side' or 'gone native' when he 'went Po' and tried so hard to save the lives of people that many of them considered unworthy of much medical attention at the height of Total War.
I think Dawson would argue - but only if he was forced to argue, with a gun at his head ! - that the whole point of that Total War, the whole point of the quarrel with our Japanese and German cousins, really revolved around the question 'were all lives worth saving, or only some ?'
He was sure which side the Axis was on, he thought that the Allies were on the other.
Publicly, they were - they just didn't mean to see it carried out in practise.
When Dawson did so, he exposed their inconsistencies : talk versus walk.
No one ever honors someone who reveals them to be hypocrites.....
@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo
I mean Penicillin was very big news, Rheumatic Heart Disease remained the leading killer and crippler of school age kids (well above the numbers affected by polio), DNA was becoming big news.
I think one explanation was that many of his contemporary fellow doctors and scientists felt that he had 'let down the side' or 'gone native' when he 'went Po' and tried so hard to save the lives of people that many of them considered unworthy of much medical attention at the height of Total War.
I think Dawson would argue - but only if he was forced to argue, with a gun at his head ! - that the whole point of that Total War, the whole point of the quarrel with our Japanese and German cousins, really revolved around the question 'were all lives worth saving, or only some ?'
He was sure which side the Axis was on, he thought that the Allies were on the other.
Publicly, they were - they just didn't mean to see it carried out in practise.
When Dawson did so, he exposed their inconsistencies : talk versus walk.
No one ever honors someone who reveals them to be hypocrites.....
@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)