"Natural Penicillin For All" a sort of spiritual balm, one that moved the heart, rather than changed the mind

For reasons they couldn't really explain, and at a pace as slow and as unremittingly as the tide going out, the post WWII world fundamentally changed.

That world now repulsed the approach of those who long advocated "purifying" the gene pools down to just the "fit".

Instead it accepted that the world's very survival depended on the widest possible diversity of life: survival lay in expanding gene pools, not shrinking them.

I didn't say "the world's population changed their mind" because the world didn't : this was no intellectual or rationally thought out conversion, no decision made 'inside the brain'.

It was an emotional conversion, made 'inside the heart' and the language that best describes that sort of change is that used by the religious.
I accept that the heart isn't really the seat of human emotions, but we still use that older language when we wish to emphasize changes that can be more felt than logically described : feelings both deep and yet subtle.

That emotional change was most marked - and here I speak from personal experience - in the young postwar baby boomers.

As a small child - a very small child among bigger bullies - I well remember vaguely cheering up as my teacher and popular media told of expeditions to the darkest vilest corners of the earth to pick up icky slimy small weak despised microbes that still somehow were the only ones willing to give the medicines that saved young kids like myself from infectious death.

Our school books exalted the 'scientists' : grave middle aged middle class men in shiny white lab coats in shiny white laboratories, but from our viewing of Fifties Sci Fi movies, we all knew that all they actually did was build the atomic bombs that irradiated monsters from the deep to grow to tremendous size and to rise up to threaten the world.

We kids "got it" when we learned how that despised, dirt-common kitchen mold, the blue green penicillium, had made the life-saving penicillin during WWII while the white coated scientists only dropped the atomic bomb.

Instinctively, we sense that the weak, small ("unfit) had indeed morally bested the big, strong ("fit")---- just as Jesus in our catechism classes had proclaimed they would...