The wartime Allies and their publics had three "P" questions to decide, each involving a choice between different kinds of penicillins, different kinds of producers to make it and different kinds of patients to receive it.
Showing posts with label martin henry dawson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label martin henry dawson. Show all posts
Friday, August 12, 2016
Monday, July 25, 2016
Dawson's Unwashed Penicillin for the Great Unwashed or Florey's Pure Penicillin for the Pure & Fit ?
Wars, externally, may involve the clash of guns, but inside, they're really about the clash of ideas
You may think that the seventy five year old conflict over how best to make and distribute wartime penicillin was simply not capable of being freighted with the key clash of ideas and values behind WWII, but I am here trying to convince you that it was.
Let's start with Truth Time : for all the highly technical industrial processes of 'purifying' of sophisticated antibiotics such as the penicillins, (whether they are made by microbes or by man) when you actually get down to it, they're pretty much downhome and domestic, basically consisting of a long series of repeated 'washings' by various liquid solvents.
And in point of fact, in the very early days of penicillin production, each washing by these strong chemicals tended to remove only a little of the relatively harmless impurities and a great deal of the scarce (and very fragile-seeming) penicillin intended for the dying patient
To be actually able to save lives (now !) rather than merely compete in the Alpha Dog contest to be the first to reach the Mount Everest of 100% pure penicillin, Dr Dawson's pioneering 1940 penicillin 'homebrew' had to be decidedly radical.
So his "Impure Manhattan" was not just the 'rushed' application of the naturally grown rather than waiting for the man-made stuff, it was also highly 'impure', because it had been deliberately under-washed.
Dawson's reasoning, set against the doubts of even his closest friends, was that in this way, more of his precious penicillin could be saved for his dying patients.
Dawson reasoned that the remaining impurities didn't seem to do more than offer a short term fever spike. Since penicillin itself remains about the most un-toxic lifesaver ever discovered, Dr Dawson sensed it all would balance out in the end.
(And for similar humanitarian reasons, Brisbane's Dr Vincent Duhig's homewbrew penicillin, three years later, was totally unwashed - merely strained once through a cheesecloth, no bigger than a perizoma loincloth. But with it, he saved many seemingly hopeless cases.)
To his doubting colleagues, Dr Dawson's sins were producing Underwashed Penicillin, for the Great Unwashed
In the eyes of Dawson's colleagues worldwide, his rush to put deliberately dirty penicillin into the holy temple of the human bloodstream (for this was an era when even scientists seemed to hold that our genome resided more in our 'blood' than within each cell) was only his first great sin.
His bigger sin was just who he choose to give these very first, very precious doses to, the very first doses of our present Age of Antibiotics.
To a Negro ! - and to a Jew ! - both members of the working class ! , both dying from hitherto invariably SBE, already judged by the Anglo-American medical establishment as a condition of 'no military importance' and so unworthy of scarce medical resources in wartime.
Dawson was proposing that the government had to see to the mass production of natural and impure (but good enough for dying patients) penicillin right now, and make enough for all the world in need of it.
A positive concrete example of the pious sentiments behind the Atlantic Charter and the four Freedoms : make penicillin the biggest possible of all Big Tents and invite all in.
Dr Dawson was no longer a religious believer but rather a lapsed Protestant like most of his colleagues, so no one seemed to have noticed the ironic Christian echoes in all this.
For one of Jesus's chief rhetorical styles was to deliberately compound the breaking of one social taboo by doing it in conjunction with another breaking of a social taboo --- all to reinforce his main point.
So Jesus choose not just to invite publicans, sinners and all manner of the socially marginalized into his new Big Tent Kingdom of God, he also did so at the communal dining table, hitherto a pure and safe pious Jews only sanctuary against the sin of the outer world introduced when they became a small part of the global Roman Empire.
Whether by instinct or as partial remembrance of his many years of early church going, Dawson had taken much the same rhetorical approach.
Florey's 100% Pure Penicillin, to which only the Pure & Fit are worthy
Opposing Dawson's ideas on penicillin was most of the scientific community and behind them, most of the educated world.
Their assumption was that microbial penicillin simply had to be as crude as they were, while man-made penicillin simply had to be as good as the best in human civilizations.
German chemists, for example, were widely viewed as the best in the world, and probably, in the Universe.
But as it happened the best of German chemists couldn't make life-saving penicillin, instead making only Auschwitz's life-taking Zyklon-B gas.
Florey and Fleming and the rest of the Anglo-American scientific establishment soldiered on, in part because synthetic penicillin also meant patented, controllable penicillin -- a tightly controlled and rationed penicillin that could be used, in wartime, to further the eugenic aims lacking popular support in peacetime.
Under the guise of wartime necessity, and via an artificially created scarcity, life-saving penicillin was meant to be kept for only the best of their citizens and also kept from from all those people judged eugenically as lives unworthy of penicillin.
But natural PD penicillin could be made by any old silly sentimental Hippocratic Code quoting doctor anywhere, so intent on saving the worthless dying that they were fatally undercutting the scientific establishments' eugenic intentions.
We view the clash of ideas behind WWII totally differently than 1940 did
Dawson's opening gambit in October 1940 had a much wider significance than just being seen as a in-house tiff over how best to produce and distribute wartime penicillin.
His opposition to the approach taken by Howard Florey, Alexander Fleming and the Anglo-American scientific establishment foreshadowed the approach most of us now take, seventy five years now, to the war of ideas that lay behind WWII's mass killing.
In a nutshell : we think that the war of ideas behind WWII was over whether most people back then preferred either our existing world of wide diversity or wanted a new utopian world of strict symmetrical uniformity and perfection.
But it is very important to realize that almost no one saw it that way back then ---- almost all felt a world of pure symmetrical uniformity was better scientifically and hence morally.
Simply put, Humanity changed, between how most felt in 1940 and how most feel today.
And someone and some event had to start that change.
Almost all historians will agree that the main reason why natural Biology is so much the leading science today when it was manmade Chemistry back in 1940, was as a result of the unexpected success of microbe penicillin making against the failed attempt to make commercially viable man-made penicillin during WWII.
Scientists, as a result, had to re-consider their unquestioned assumptions about the supposed lack of abilities among the weak and the small and the
simple.
This at the same time that the new knowledge of Auschwitz forced them and all the world to also consider whether we really want to remove all the small and the simple and the mis-formed to create a future utopia of perfection and uniformity.
In 1945, those seemed totally separate questions - one scientific and one moral.
But over time, we have come to see them as fused - just as Dr Dawson did, way back in 1940 : welcoming the widest possible diversity not only feels morally right, it is also now well established, scientifically, as the most successful means of ensuring longterm evolutionary survival.
Dawson's Paradox : move over Fermi : why are microbes still here ?
Dawson's two decades of studies of the unimaginably wide scope of bacterial diversity had suggested an explanation for a profound paradox : "Why are microbes still here ?"
Why is it that the creatures at the very bottom of the progressive Tree of Life, the dumb, small, weak microbes, are also the most successful form of life, surviving four billion years against all odds when some of the biggest and toughest of beings, like the dinosaurs, are long gone ?
Dawson found that microbes tolerated their defectives and mis-formed members , finding them highly useful for survival when circumstances changed and their disadvantages suddenly become advantages.
Microbes even had a unique way (HGT) to see that these once-useless now invaluable genes could be quickly pass around the entire microbe community world wide, from species to species.
Microbial genes, in effect, are PD - Public Domain, not figuratively patented and held in guarded exclusively as human genes are.
We today think these sorts of approaches to safeguarding diversity against sudden disaster and the sharing of life-saving ideas as eminently sensible.
But few realize that they originated first among the simple microbes or that it was one man, Dr Henry Dawson, that first highlighted their worth...
Sunday, July 24, 2016
The greater evolutionary success, circa 1944 : Microbial diversity or Aryan uniformity ?
To Dr Martin Henry Dawson, after two decades of research into the astonishing and under-travelled scientific world of four billion years of microbial diversity, versatility and survival, the scientific answer to the secret of long term evolutionary success seemed perfectly clear.
This is not to say he did not also oppose Eugenics (Axis, Neutral & Allied) on purely moral grounds.
But in 1944, he stood almost alone in the scientific world in strongly opposing all attempts at perfecting, purifying and reducing the human gene pool.
For he saw it as positively harmful rather than helpful to humanity's future prospects.
he based this simply upon the great evolutionary success of the tiny, weak, simple, diverse bacteria versus the equally great survival failure of the much larger, stronger, smarter carnivores ---- and Nazis.....
This is not to say he did not also oppose Eugenics (Axis, Neutral & Allied) on purely moral grounds.
But in 1944, he stood almost alone in the scientific world in strongly opposing all attempts at perfecting, purifying and reducing the human gene pool.
For he saw it as positively harmful rather than helpful to humanity's future prospects.
he based this simply upon the great evolutionary success of the tiny, weak, simple, diverse bacteria versus the equally great survival failure of the much larger, stronger, smarter carnivores ---- and Nazis.....
Wartime penicillin : Patented for some or PD for all ?
For the young Black and Jewish men receiving those historical first needles (October 1940) of Dr Henry Dawson's "Impure Manhattan" brew. it is very important to note that this impure naturally grown penicillin were not at all dangerous, medically speaking.
As any 1940 era medical scientist or doctor, literate enough to read past medical journal articles on penicillin, knew well.
The supposed dangers of impure natural penicillin was just a 'Big Lie' generated from deep within the Anglo-American establishment, given out for media and laity consumption.
For Dawson's taboo-breaking needles were indeed highly dangerous, to that establishment and their ideology of Anglo-American racial superiority in all things intellectual and commercial.
Because the invisibly small and light spores of penicillin-producing penicillium were inherently PD (public domain) as they drifted everywhere throughout the world, in particular constantly drifting over and through the highest of tariff barriers like, well, like spores.
That meant any nation on Earth could make their own monopoly-breaking public domain natural penicillin and soon, all could consider making this wonderful (and wonderfully inexpensive) life-saving boon for humanity.
No chance then to add penicillin to the arsenal intended to promote the Anglo-American's postwar vision of "Soft Imperialism", wherein their exclusive control over items like atomic bombs, food, technology and life-saving medicines would allow them to create a whole slew of new "informal" colonies abroad.
The establishments in America and Britain were totally determined to patent and thus control highly expensive synthetic penicillin (meanwhile undercutting the much cheaper and equally effective natural PD penicillin by proclaiming over and over that the artificial stuff, like sarin gas, was 100% pure --- and hence, ipso facto, 100% safe).
So much so that they were committed to delaying, by all means fair and foul, the use of any penicillin to save wartime lives, until one of their cartel of organizations had patented a synthetic penicillin.
Dr Dawson was dying through the war and was often under emergency care, but his courage and his vision inspired a handful of equally determined colleagues, friends and associates to take up his cause and ultimately forcing the Allies to shift their position 180 degrees.
There was his Columbia University colleague Dr Rudy Schulinger, now in uniform in Europe, trying to get his superiors to demand penicillin from a reluctant Washington scientific bureaucracy to save American boys overseas.
Eventually the Army's commitment to getting penicillin, if necessary by making it themselves - such as Army doctor Frank B Queen in Utah had proposed - scared even the Washington wartime Beltway into giving way.
Dawson's patient, American super industrialist Floyd B Odlum, advisor to the head of the only remaining New Deal oriented Washington bureaucratic organization, the powerful WPB (War Production Board).
The WPB's bold decision to seek incredibly huge amounts of wartime penicillin, enough to deal with those dying for lack of it worldwide, tore open the cartel's tight control over limited production runs of penicillin.
A former patient of Dawson, Dr Dante Colitti, broke the story locally in New York City on the dire effects of the withholding of penicillin for a dying baby girl, Patty Malone.
One of the oldest saying in the American media is "if a New York story is breaking wide, its breaking stateside !" and this local story certainly did so, ultimately breaking worldwide as well.
In turn, it inspired Mrs John L Smith, mother of a girl who also had died through lack of penicillin and wife of industrialist who had been earlier working together with Dawson on penicillin.
Now her husband pushed his relatively small firm to buck the industry consensus on betting everything on synthetic penicillin, whenever and if ever it proved commercially viable (it still hasn't).
Instead his firm went down the natural PD penicillin route, ending up making most of the war's penicillin all by itself - while 'breaking' the law on giving penicillin to those dying who were deemed eugenically 'unworthy' of it.
FDR's personal physician Dr L W Gorham, was just one of a number of prominent doctors, men too powerful to easily bring to heal, also 'broke' the law on the making and use of wartime penicillin, inspired by Dawson's continuing lawbreaking example.
The wide availability of cheap abundant natural penicillin soon had a sort of herd immunity effect.
For it, unusually, reached those people ordinarily either too poor or too remote to receive cutting edge medicine and in helping cure them, also knocked back long endemic pools of infectious pathogens that had affected all the world's population.
Since October 1940, ten billion of us have led happier lives because of this herd immunity, all thanks to Dr Dawson....
As any 1940 era medical scientist or doctor, literate enough to read past medical journal articles on penicillin, knew well.
The supposed dangers of impure natural penicillin was just a 'Big Lie' generated from deep within the Anglo-American establishment, given out for media and laity consumption.
For Dawson's taboo-breaking needles were indeed highly dangerous, to that establishment and their ideology of Anglo-American racial superiority in all things intellectual and commercial.
Because the invisibly small and light spores of penicillin-producing penicillium were inherently PD (public domain) as they drifted everywhere throughout the world, in particular constantly drifting over and through the highest of tariff barriers like, well, like spores.
That meant any nation on Earth could make their own monopoly-breaking public domain natural penicillin and soon, all could consider making this wonderful (and wonderfully inexpensive) life-saving boon for humanity.
No chance then to add penicillin to the arsenal intended to promote the Anglo-American's postwar vision of "Soft Imperialism", wherein their exclusive control over items like atomic bombs, food, technology and life-saving medicines would allow them to create a whole slew of new "informal" colonies abroad.
The establishments in America and Britain were totally determined to patent and thus control highly expensive synthetic penicillin (meanwhile undercutting the much cheaper and equally effective natural PD penicillin by proclaiming over and over that the artificial stuff, like sarin gas, was 100% pure --- and hence, ipso facto, 100% safe).
So much so that they were committed to delaying, by all means fair and foul, the use of any penicillin to save wartime lives, until one of their cartel of organizations had patented a synthetic penicillin.
Dr Dawson was dying through the war and was often under emergency care, but his courage and his vision inspired a handful of equally determined colleagues, friends and associates to take up his cause and ultimately forcing the Allies to shift their position 180 degrees.
There was his Columbia University colleague Dr Rudy Schulinger, now in uniform in Europe, trying to get his superiors to demand penicillin from a reluctant Washington scientific bureaucracy to save American boys overseas.
Eventually the Army's commitment to getting penicillin, if necessary by making it themselves - such as Army doctor Frank B Queen in Utah had proposed - scared even the Washington wartime Beltway into giving way.
Dawson's patient, American super industrialist Floyd B Odlum, advisor to the head of the only remaining New Deal oriented Washington bureaucratic organization, the powerful WPB (War Production Board).
The WPB's bold decision to seek incredibly huge amounts of wartime penicillin, enough to deal with those dying for lack of it worldwide, tore open the cartel's tight control over limited production runs of penicillin.
A former patient of Dawson, Dr Dante Colitti, broke the story locally in New York City on the dire effects of the withholding of penicillin for a dying baby girl, Patty Malone.
One of the oldest saying in the American media is "if a New York story is breaking wide, its breaking stateside !" and this local story certainly did so, ultimately breaking worldwide as well.
In turn, it inspired Mrs John L Smith, mother of a girl who also had died through lack of penicillin and wife of industrialist who had been earlier working together with Dawson on penicillin.
Now her husband pushed his relatively small firm to buck the industry consensus on betting everything on synthetic penicillin, whenever and if ever it proved commercially viable (it still hasn't).
Instead his firm went down the natural PD penicillin route, ending up making most of the war's penicillin all by itself - while 'breaking' the law on giving penicillin to those dying who were deemed eugenically 'unworthy' of it.
FDR's personal physician Dr L W Gorham, was just one of a number of prominent doctors, men too powerful to easily bring to heal, also 'broke' the law on the making and use of wartime penicillin, inspired by Dawson's continuing lawbreaking example.
The wide availability of cheap abundant natural penicillin soon had a sort of herd immunity effect.
For it, unusually, reached those people ordinarily either too poor or too remote to receive cutting edge medicine and in helping cure them, also knocked back long endemic pools of infectious pathogens that had affected all the world's population.
Since October 1940, ten billion of us have led happier lives because of this herd immunity, all thanks to Dr Dawson....
Friday, July 15, 2016
the ALLIED HOLOCAUST : pure penicillin, for only some
The Nazis never fully carried out their original Hunger Plan and the Allies never carried out their original Penicillin plan.
So the Holocaust of Jews and Romas remains the outstanding horror of WWII, in terms of lives snuffed out prematurely and total suffering induced.
But it was a close run thing : because both the Nazi Hunger Plan and the planned shortage of pandemic-preventing Allied penicillin at war's end had the potential to kill far far more than 'The Holocaust' actually achieved.
Fortunately in the end, wartime penicillin became a moral triumph - a rare one in that morally squalid war - and a 'disgusting' affront to everything that Modernity stood for and an affront to Modernity supporters on all sides of WWII.
But by war's end, Modernity defenders no longer dared not say so, but instead merely lick their wounds silently as the world, their world until then, shifted tectonically beneath their feet.
For wartime penicillin was not a pure patented synthetic, made by 'the smartest chemists in the civilized human universe'.
Rather it was the impurely mixed, slimy, smelly, PD, natural effluent of simplest dumbest smallest microbes.
It was not made, during the war, in small amounts, profitably patented, and only used to quickly return lightly infected and wounded Allied soldiers to combat, so as to prevent upper middle class Allied youths being called up to replace them.
Yet one of the key lessons of WWI that the medical world had fully absorbed was that the war made the Spanish Flu much much worst than it already was.
As in most past wars throughout history, this war-spread infection preying up the worn out and hungry killed far more than the combat deaths of the war itself.
Most of its actual deaths were only the indirect result of the flu virus - pneumonia bacteria taking advantage of the situation was the actual killer and in 1943, penicillin was far and away the best way to stop pneumonia bacteria in its tracks.
The Allies fully expected some sort of infectious pandemic during the war or in its messy aftermath, so why they hoped to leave it to the rapidly failing Sulfa family of drugs to do all the heavy lifting is beyond criminal.
Fortunately and in a complete reversal, penicillin's wartime production was scaled up a thousand fold from the original plans and made abundant enough - and cheap enough - to be given to all, even during a total war.
No pandemic occurred in this world war, unlike the previous.
In fact, the fact that it was to be given to all, even during a total war, was deliberately highly publicized.
All because it was quickly apparent that this airlifting of penicillin to the world's dying was the first believable example to doubters that the Allies actually meant all that high flowing talk from their 1941 Atlantic Charter.
Now naturally impure penicillin was being given to badly wounded Allied troops and to Allied POWs ; to Allied civilians poor as well as rich, 'unfit' as well as 'fit', 'useless' as well as 'useful'.
To civilians in Neutral countries, to civilians in liberated lands, even to enemy wounded soldiers and enemy civilians.
Naturally, because the intellectual bread of Nobel committees always ends up somehow buttered side down, their prize went to the losing side, to Fleming & Florey.
Their eugenically-bounded side had been backed by virtually all the scientific and medical elites in every Allied nation.
Fleming and Florey had worked very hard to delay the widespread wartime use of naturally impure PD penicillin.
They wanted instead that wartime penicillin be first synthesized pure and patentable, no matter how long that took. (Almost ninety years on from Fleming's original discovery, it still hasn't happened.)
Even then, this pure 'fit' penicillin was to be made, during wartime, only in small amounts : just enough to allow 'fit' young 1As soldiers to survive to reproduce and 'save the race', not to save unfit 4Fs civilians and thus allow them to further 'swamp the race'.
Tolerance of mass death, 'for the greater eugenic good', was the moral value that Allied and Axis elites held in common and it was only by mere luck and the gumption of a dying doctor (Dr Martin Henry Dawson) that we remember the horror of Pure Auschwitz and not that of Pure Penicillin...
So the Holocaust of Jews and Romas remains the outstanding horror of WWII, in terms of lives snuffed out prematurely and total suffering induced.
But it was a close run thing : because both the Nazi Hunger Plan and the planned shortage of pandemic-preventing Allied penicillin at war's end had the potential to kill far far more than 'The Holocaust' actually achieved.
Fortunately in the end, wartime penicillin became a moral triumph - a rare one in that morally squalid war - and a 'disgusting' affront to everything that Modernity stood for and an affront to Modernity supporters on all sides of WWII.
But by war's end, Modernity defenders no longer dared not say so, but instead merely lick their wounds silently as the world, their world until then, shifted tectonically beneath their feet.
For wartime penicillin was not a pure patented synthetic, made by 'the smartest chemists in the civilized human universe'.
Rather it was the impurely mixed, slimy, smelly, PD, natural effluent of simplest dumbest smallest microbes.
It was not made, during the war, in small amounts, profitably patented, and only used to quickly return lightly infected and wounded Allied soldiers to combat, so as to prevent upper middle class Allied youths being called up to replace them.
Yet one of the key lessons of WWI that the medical world had fully absorbed was that the war made the Spanish Flu much much worst than it already was.
As in most past wars throughout history, this war-spread infection preying up the worn out and hungry killed far more than the combat deaths of the war itself.
Most of its actual deaths were only the indirect result of the flu virus - pneumonia bacteria taking advantage of the situation was the actual killer and in 1943, penicillin was far and away the best way to stop pneumonia bacteria in its tracks.
The Allies fully expected some sort of infectious pandemic during the war or in its messy aftermath, so why they hoped to leave it to the rapidly failing Sulfa family of drugs to do all the heavy lifting is beyond criminal.
Fortunately and in a complete reversal, penicillin's wartime production was scaled up a thousand fold from the original plans and made abundant enough - and cheap enough - to be given to all, even during a total war.
No pandemic occurred in this world war, unlike the previous.
In fact, the fact that it was to be given to all, even during a total war, was deliberately highly publicized.
All because it was quickly apparent that this airlifting of penicillin to the world's dying was the first believable example to doubters that the Allies actually meant all that high flowing talk from their 1941 Atlantic Charter.
Now naturally impure penicillin was being given to badly wounded Allied troops and to Allied POWs ; to Allied civilians poor as well as rich, 'unfit' as well as 'fit', 'useless' as well as 'useful'.
To civilians in Neutral countries, to civilians in liberated lands, even to enemy wounded soldiers and enemy civilians.
Naturally, because the intellectual bread of Nobel committees always ends up somehow buttered side down, their prize went to the losing side, to Fleming & Florey.
Their eugenically-bounded side had been backed by virtually all the scientific and medical elites in every Allied nation.
Fleming and Florey had worked very hard to delay the widespread wartime use of naturally impure PD penicillin.
They wanted instead that wartime penicillin be first synthesized pure and patentable, no matter how long that took. (Almost ninety years on from Fleming's original discovery, it still hasn't happened.)
Even then, this pure 'fit' penicillin was to be made, during wartime, only in small amounts : just enough to allow 'fit' young 1As soldiers to survive to reproduce and 'save the race', not to save unfit 4Fs civilians and thus allow them to further 'swamp the race'.
Tolerance of mass death, 'for the greater eugenic good', was the moral value that Allied and Axis elites held in common and it was only by mere luck and the gumption of a dying doctor (Dr Martin Henry Dawson) that we remember the horror of Pure Auschwitz and not that of Pure Penicillin...
Sunday, July 3, 2016
Teddy Roosevelt vs the Persister bacteria
Though 'persister' bacteria existed long before Teddy Roosevelt was born, they were not discovered until about twenty five years after he died, so he never lived long enough to see one of his many pet certitudes about 'Nature' being questioned by Nature.
Teddy Roosevelt campaigned long and hard against men and women who refused to have lots of children, or even no children at all.
He labelled them all as weaklings and defectives, traitors to the race and said their behavior was an affront to Nature and sure to lead to race suicide. But was he scientifically accurate in saying so ?
Persister bacteria - first described in 1942 by Dr Gladys Hobby of Henry Dawson's wartime penicillin team - are a very small but also very constant presence in bacteria populations, bacteria that don't do that most characteristic behavior of all other bacteria : make more babies incessantly.
We are not talking about the general fact that bacteria that can reproduce in as little as twenty minutes can also hold off for hundreds of years, if food is short.
It is not so much that persisters totally fail to reproduce but that they do so very very slowly, in bacterial terms, even when conditions are stable and food is plentifully.
They are indeed one of Roosevelt's 'defective' beings, in the least prejudicial and most accurate sense of that word.
But their continued existence is not an inexplicable aberration but rather an example of one of Nature's widest and most enduring general rules.
Counterintuitively, in terms of evolutionary survival, it actually makes sense for species to be cautious and risk adverse in good times and yet to be willing to throw caution to the winds and be willing to take big unknown risks in bad times.
To go on as before is to die out for sure, but by hedging one's risks by being willing to try anything and everything might just pay off with continued survival.
Animals, insects, microbes and quite recently, even plants have displayed this behavior, known as RST, Risk Sensitivity Theory.
Microbes display it when in times of great stress, their ability to repair mistakes in DNA and RNA reproduction greatly worsens and more and more genetic aberrations emerge.
These aberrations can be as simple as a gene that is normally kept switched off is suddenly full on.
It only takes one of these genetic monsters, revealing an unrivalled ability to survive the stress, to ensure the survival of the entire bacteria species.
Because when good times return, the aberration individuals are usually 'repaired' out of existence as the gene is again shut back off -- or it may simply be that they reproduce too slowly, when compared to their other bacteria compatriots common in times of plentiful food.
The persisters are one such example : the short term doses of antibiotics that bacterial competitors exude into the common living fluid when the overall food is short in supply kills only bacteria actively and rapidly reproducing and thus leaves most of the very slowly reproducing persisters unharmed.
But when new food arrives and the reproductively-costly antibiotics are shut back off, the persisters slowly reproduce their kin - most of whom are not persisters like their parents and so rapid reproduction resumes as normal.
It is very hard to think of a close human equivalent for this bacteria behavior.
Perhaps the situation when two nations are at war and both are very short of food, but one side has a lot more single young men with no small children of their own.
Each young man is made a soldier and is given food but no scarce food needs to be allocated to their non-existence children, children who can not in any case fight away.
In a short war, this fact might give this nation an advantage.
But in more human terms, Risk Sensitivity Theory suggests that counterintuitively, human societies should not seek greater conformity in total war crisis.
Rather instead, societies hoping to win wars of life and death survival should encourage dissent and questioning of the conventional and should seek out all sorts of normally outcast people and ideas to bring inside the national Big Tent.
Henry Dawson was a scientist more likely to reify practise than theory so we can only examine what he actually did, to act as a stand in or surrogate for what he perhaps thought.
We know that Dawson went very much against the very fibre of his profession, at the very apex of Modernity, by preferring to study non-virile and non-virulent bacteria.
He made his mark studying, not the assumed normal "S" forms bacteria but rather the "R", "M","L" and "P" forms before his early death stopped all further investigation.
One of those, the "M" form, is more virulent than the "S" norm but the other three are decidedly less virulent or virile.
The survival of bacteria into the present day was already inexplicable, based on the conventional view of Evolution as leading to ever newer, bigger, stronger more complex beings inevitably replacing the older, smaller, weaker and more simple beings.
Bacteria being the very oldest, smallest, weakest, simplest of all life forms, there was no good (Darwin-generated) answer why they were still around, let alone found everywhere on earth and in numbers of individuals that were millions of times more plentiful than any other species.
Dawson knew of this paradox, but he had another big one to explore.
Why did Bacteria, surviving for four billion years under very harsh natural conditions, still have at least as many defective variants as did modern western society ?
For the Darwinist majority of scientists claimed it was only modern western societies' cosy cosseted conditions that allowed human defectives to survive long enough to reproduce.
They further claimed - again without proof - that this rising tide of rapidly reproducing human defectives would soon lead to white race suicide.
Claims that defectives persist in human society, generation after generation after generation, is actually hard to prove ---- giving the slowness we modern middle class types reproduce even one generation : about the same time length as the life career of a typical scientist.
But some very rapidly growing bacteria species can actually give forth a new generation in one millionth the time a middle class western professional family might do so.
Dawson had thus repeatedly seen how defective bacteria were reproduced generation onto forever generation without appearing to harm the overall bacteria species.
Now, an even further Darwinian heresy emerged : for Dawson found more and more evidence that variation and defectives seemed to actually help, rather than hinder, the bacteria's ability to survive tough times.
So : R forms don't have conventional 'virulence factors' and thus don't provoke human immune systems to attack them, L forms lack cell walls so can't be attacked by antibodies IDing bacteria by their cell wall material and slow reproducing P forms can't be hit by rapid-reproduction-oriented killer antibiotics.
I could also throw in Dawson's pioneering research on other sophisticated bacterial survival techniques from the supposedly 'primitive' microbes : HGT, Quorum Sensing, Molecular Mimicry, but you get my point.
Perhaps all this mounting evidence did produce some sort of theory in Dawson's mind but he seemed to have kept strictly shtum about it.
But two practises of his during WWII, maintained against fierce pushback from his bosses and the Allied governments, hint at what it might have looked like.
Firstly, Dawson was initially and for many years, the only scientist in the entire world convinced that the 'primitive' penicillium fungus were probably better at making penicillin, after millions of years of practise, than even the best human chemists would be at first.
He was thus an early, steadfast and strong advocate for immediately mass producing natural penicillin to use to save lives during the war, rather than wait for for chemists to commercially synthesize and patent it - something they still haven't done, even now.
Secondly, Dawson strongly opposed the semi-secret plan of the Allied governments that only enough wartime penicillin should be produced to just treat lightly wounded frontline troops judged capable of returning to immediate combat duty.
Dawson, by contrast, wanted wartime penicillin to be plentiful enough and cheap enough to treat all humanity - not just all the troops and all useful civilians but even civilians considered to be worse than useless towards the war effort and thus not a priority for scarce medical resources.
Into Dawson's wartime Big Tent solution to defeat the Axis went not just 1A troops, 1A war work civilians and 1A medicines but also 4F medicines like impure natural penicillin and human 4Fs like the incurably-useless-for-war-work SBEs - a disproportional number of whom were from outcast groups like Jews, Blacks, the poor and immigrants.
Many decent people during WWII felt that morally, defectives shouldn't be left to die just because it was wartime, despite sincerely believing it to be bad news biologically for overall humanity.
Only Dawson felt that not only was it morally wrong, it was even biologically wrong - because times of crisis call for actively seeking out and exalting all the beings and ideas considered deviant and defective.
Dawson thought that leaving 'defectives' and 'deviants' like Alan Turing, an invert, or Stephen Hawking, a cripple, to die during WWII to save scarce medical resources would only have hurt - not helped - humanity.
Teddy Roosevelt would have strongly disagreed with Dawson but I think time has proven Dawson amply right ....
Teddy Roosevelt campaigned long and hard against men and women who refused to have lots of children, or even no children at all.
He labelled them all as weaklings and defectives, traitors to the race and said their behavior was an affront to Nature and sure to lead to race suicide. But was he scientifically accurate in saying so ?
Persister bacteria - first described in 1942 by Dr Gladys Hobby of Henry Dawson's wartime penicillin team - are a very small but also very constant presence in bacteria populations, bacteria that don't do that most characteristic behavior of all other bacteria : make more babies incessantly.
We are not talking about the general fact that bacteria that can reproduce in as little as twenty minutes can also hold off for hundreds of years, if food is short.
It is not so much that persisters totally fail to reproduce but that they do so very very slowly, in bacterial terms, even when conditions are stable and food is plentifully.
They are indeed one of Roosevelt's 'defective' beings, in the least prejudicial and most accurate sense of that word.
But their continued existence is not an inexplicable aberration but rather an example of one of Nature's widest and most enduring general rules.
Counterintuitively, in terms of evolutionary survival, it actually makes sense for species to be cautious and risk adverse in good times and yet to be willing to throw caution to the winds and be willing to take big unknown risks in bad times.
To go on as before is to die out for sure, but by hedging one's risks by being willing to try anything and everything might just pay off with continued survival.
Animals, insects, microbes and quite recently, even plants have displayed this behavior, known as RST, Risk Sensitivity Theory.
Microbes display it when in times of great stress, their ability to repair mistakes in DNA and RNA reproduction greatly worsens and more and more genetic aberrations emerge.
These aberrations can be as simple as a gene that is normally kept switched off is suddenly full on.
It only takes one of these genetic monsters, revealing an unrivalled ability to survive the stress, to ensure the survival of the entire bacteria species.
Because when good times return, the aberration individuals are usually 'repaired' out of existence as the gene is again shut back off -- or it may simply be that they reproduce too slowly, when compared to their other bacteria compatriots common in times of plentiful food.
The persisters are one such example : the short term doses of antibiotics that bacterial competitors exude into the common living fluid when the overall food is short in supply kills only bacteria actively and rapidly reproducing and thus leaves most of the very slowly reproducing persisters unharmed.
But when new food arrives and the reproductively-costly antibiotics are shut back off, the persisters slowly reproduce their kin - most of whom are not persisters like their parents and so rapid reproduction resumes as normal.
It is very hard to think of a close human equivalent for this bacteria behavior.
Perhaps the situation when two nations are at war and both are very short of food, but one side has a lot more single young men with no small children of their own.
Each young man is made a soldier and is given food but no scarce food needs to be allocated to their non-existence children, children who can not in any case fight away.
In a short war, this fact might give this nation an advantage.
But in more human terms, Risk Sensitivity Theory suggests that counterintuitively, human societies should not seek greater conformity in total war crisis.
Rather instead, societies hoping to win wars of life and death survival should encourage dissent and questioning of the conventional and should seek out all sorts of normally outcast people and ideas to bring inside the national Big Tent.
Henry Dawson was a scientist more likely to reify practise than theory so we can only examine what he actually did, to act as a stand in or surrogate for what he perhaps thought.
We know that Dawson went very much against the very fibre of his profession, at the very apex of Modernity, by preferring to study non-virile and non-virulent bacteria.
He made his mark studying, not the assumed normal "S" forms bacteria but rather the "R", "M","L" and "P" forms before his early death stopped all further investigation.
One of those, the "M" form, is more virulent than the "S" norm but the other three are decidedly less virulent or virile.
The survival of bacteria into the present day was already inexplicable, based on the conventional view of Evolution as leading to ever newer, bigger, stronger more complex beings inevitably replacing the older, smaller, weaker and more simple beings.
Bacteria being the very oldest, smallest, weakest, simplest of all life forms, there was no good (Darwin-generated) answer why they were still around, let alone found everywhere on earth and in numbers of individuals that were millions of times more plentiful than any other species.
Dawson knew of this paradox, but he had another big one to explore.
Why did Bacteria, surviving for four billion years under very harsh natural conditions, still have at least as many defective variants as did modern western society ?
For the Darwinist majority of scientists claimed it was only modern western societies' cosy cosseted conditions that allowed human defectives to survive long enough to reproduce.
They further claimed - again without proof - that this rising tide of rapidly reproducing human defectives would soon lead to white race suicide.
Claims that defectives persist in human society, generation after generation after generation, is actually hard to prove ---- giving the slowness we modern middle class types reproduce even one generation : about the same time length as the life career of a typical scientist.
But some very rapidly growing bacteria species can actually give forth a new generation in one millionth the time a middle class western professional family might do so.
Dawson had thus repeatedly seen how defective bacteria were reproduced generation onto forever generation without appearing to harm the overall bacteria species.
Now, an even further Darwinian heresy emerged : for Dawson found more and more evidence that variation and defectives seemed to actually help, rather than hinder, the bacteria's ability to survive tough times.
So : R forms don't have conventional 'virulence factors' and thus don't provoke human immune systems to attack them, L forms lack cell walls so can't be attacked by antibodies IDing bacteria by their cell wall material and slow reproducing P forms can't be hit by rapid-reproduction-oriented killer antibiotics.
I could also throw in Dawson's pioneering research on other sophisticated bacterial survival techniques from the supposedly 'primitive' microbes : HGT, Quorum Sensing, Molecular Mimicry, but you get my point.
Perhaps all this mounting evidence did produce some sort of theory in Dawson's mind but he seemed to have kept strictly shtum about it.
But two practises of his during WWII, maintained against fierce pushback from his bosses and the Allied governments, hint at what it might have looked like.
Firstly, Dawson was initially and for many years, the only scientist in the entire world convinced that the 'primitive' penicillium fungus were probably better at making penicillin, after millions of years of practise, than even the best human chemists would be at first.
He was thus an early, steadfast and strong advocate for immediately mass producing natural penicillin to use to save lives during the war, rather than wait for for chemists to commercially synthesize and patent it - something they still haven't done, even now.
Secondly, Dawson strongly opposed the semi-secret plan of the Allied governments that only enough wartime penicillin should be produced to just treat lightly wounded frontline troops judged capable of returning to immediate combat duty.
Dawson, by contrast, wanted wartime penicillin to be plentiful enough and cheap enough to treat all humanity - not just all the troops and all useful civilians but even civilians considered to be worse than useless towards the war effort and thus not a priority for scarce medical resources.
Into Dawson's wartime Big Tent solution to defeat the Axis went not just 1A troops, 1A war work civilians and 1A medicines but also 4F medicines like impure natural penicillin and human 4Fs like the incurably-useless-for-war-work SBEs - a disproportional number of whom were from outcast groups like Jews, Blacks, the poor and immigrants.
Many decent people during WWII felt that morally, defectives shouldn't be left to die just because it was wartime, despite sincerely believing it to be bad news biologically for overall humanity.
Only Dawson felt that not only was it morally wrong, it was even biologically wrong - because times of crisis call for actively seeking out and exalting all the beings and ideas considered deviant and defective.
Dawson thought that leaving 'defectives' and 'deviants' like Alan Turing, an invert, or Stephen Hawking, a cripple, to die during WWII to save scarce medical resources would only have hurt - not helped - humanity.
Teddy Roosevelt would have strongly disagreed with Dawson but I think time has proven Dawson amply right ....
Tuesday, June 28, 2016
Teddy Roosevelt : 4F &1A, fit and unfit, defective, degenerate --- and heroic
When Theodore Roosevelt was a young adult, he was told by his doctors that because of his many serious chronic diseases, he should take up a soft indoor occupation if he wished a normal lifespan.
Instead, Teddy self-consciously took up his famous 'vigorous life'.
(However, partly due to his excessive vigour, he in the end only lived to age sixty, which he might also have reached if he had taken up the soft life !)
He lived in an age when most scientists considered that humans had a very, very, limited ability to alter the health their genome gave them at birth ------ except to drive it downhill and then inevitably pass that bad health on to their descendants.
As such, he should have been written off from childhood as defective, degenerative, unfit, 4F.
If he was born poor, black or foreign, he probably would have been --- but he was born instead into one of the most famous of old families and wanted for little all his life - good health aside.
So Teddy got to display the incredible plasticity that lifeforms are truly capable of, when driven hard enough by sheer need and strong will.
Roosevelt was the US president during the formative years of Canadian-born Martin Henry Dawson and I often wonder whether his very well known story influenced Dawson's contrary attitude to his chronically ill charges written off by most of the world.
My 'wonder' matters because however it was formed, the dying Dr Dawson's unwillingness to let other chronically ill die by government benign neglect during WWII kickstarted the systemic use of naturally-made penicillin and thus made life better for ten billion of us (and counting) ever since October 1940....
Instead, Teddy self-consciously took up his famous 'vigorous life'.
(However, partly due to his excessive vigour, he in the end only lived to age sixty, which he might also have reached if he had taken up the soft life !)
He lived in an age when most scientists considered that humans had a very, very, limited ability to alter the health their genome gave them at birth ------ except to drive it downhill and then inevitably pass that bad health on to their descendants.
As such, he should have been written off from childhood as defective, degenerative, unfit, 4F.
If he was born poor, black or foreign, he probably would have been --- but he was born instead into one of the most famous of old families and wanted for little all his life - good health aside.
So Teddy got to display the incredible plasticity that lifeforms are truly capable of, when driven hard enough by sheer need and strong will.
Roosevelt was the US president during the formative years of Canadian-born Martin Henry Dawson and I often wonder whether his very well known story influenced Dawson's contrary attitude to his chronically ill charges written off by most of the world.
My 'wonder' matters because however it was formed, the dying Dr Dawson's unwillingness to let other chronically ill die by government benign neglect during WWII kickstarted the systemic use of naturally-made penicillin and thus made life better for ten billion of us (and counting) ever since October 1940....
Sunday, June 26, 2016
Racial purity hedges assets, Racial diversity hedges risks
The two geographies of pure Auschwitz and impure Manhattan (those opposing antidotes to each other) nevertheless shared the concept of 'hedging', in its metaphorical sense.
Modernity re-invented nations away from being historically based on a common voluntary citizenship among a diversity of languages and ethnicities and religions.
Now they were to become entities striving to become ever more biologically pure as race-nations, based on the supposedly common genetic origins of the majority group religious-language-ethnicity within them.
Now you were to either be born a citizen-for-life (your choice removed) based on your putative ethnicity or never-can-be-a-citizen (again your choice removed) based upon your putative ethnicity.
The main way all nations adopting this scheme used to become ever more racially pure was a migration control 'hedge' around the national borders : let no foreigners in as citizens and 'ethnic cleanse' internal minorities out, never more to return, by denying them all sorts of civil rights, such as access to jobs and education.
Ultimately, this led to the ultimate means to purify a biological nation : killing centres like Aktion T4's Grafeneck and the Holocaust's Auschwitz to remove defectives from the majority ethnicity and then go after minority populations, seen as all defective.
This hedge shielded what the promoters considered their nation's best asset : its original majority ethnic group, no longer to be diluted by in-migration of strangers (and often, not to be diluted by out-migration of the majority group membership, which was made as difficult as politically possible.)
Negative eugenics having eliminated much of the unwanted impurities, positive eugenic measures like state support for mothers and children of the majority group further protected the main asset.
It was K-selection among the human nations : deliberately work to drain your gene pool, put all your eggs in one basket, bet the farm on carefully raising a relatively restricted number of offspring as best you can.
Microbes don't operate this way and neither does impure Manhattan, the original home of human diversity.
Because instead of hedging assets, they hedge bets/risks.
Striving to survive and flourish in a complex and dynamically changing environment, they choose to spread their risks by containing within a wide number of different phenotypes, all in the expectation that at any given moment, a few types among many will be ideally suited to surmount current difficulties and seize any current opportunities.
These r-selected nations (or microbe species) take all the risks that they collectively expect to face over time and space and 'hedge off' (limit the damage of) each individual risk by coming up with a phenotype that may be inefficient most of the time but when this particular risk arises, they excel in efficiently surmounting it and even taking advantage of it as an opportunity, not a danger.
To surmount as many unknown future risks as possible, they eagerly seek in advance of any such threats to fill, not drain, their gene pool.
I argue that based on the historical facts, K-selection like pure Auschwitz is not successful in the long run, while r-selection like impure Manhattan, is.
History shows that the r-selected family of life par excellence, the microbes, surviving all that reality can throw at them, for almost four billion years.
The K-selected lifeforms often do very well, for a time, but then are usually quickly killed off whenever a big asteroid drops by for a visit.
Martin Bader was 39 when he died, a skilled craftsman (master shoemaker) with much street smarts --- and with past parkinson syndrome from WWI's sleeping sickness epidemic, murdered by the Nazis at Grafeneck's industrially organized death factory.
Charles Aronson was also 39 when he died, also a skilled craftsman (holding a demanding teletype operator's job at the world's largest newspaper and news agency flagship) with past parkinson syndrome from WWI's sleeping sickness epidemic.
But his life was prolonged, as long as possible, by a doctor (Martin Henry Dawson) who literally gave up his own life to see that life's useful variations, called 'defectives' by the middle class intellectuals of Modernity, enjoyed as much out of life as possible.
In Charles' case, Dawson kickstarted the stalled systemic impure penicillin project and in so doing so, also made life better for ten billion and counting of us since 1940 ....
Modernity re-invented nations away from being historically based on a common voluntary citizenship among a diversity of languages and ethnicities and religions.
Now they were to become entities striving to become ever more biologically pure as race-nations, based on the supposedly common genetic origins of the majority group religious-language-ethnicity within them.
Now you were to either be born a citizen-for-life (your choice removed) based on your putative ethnicity or never-can-be-a-citizen (again your choice removed) based upon your putative ethnicity.
The main way all nations adopting this scheme used to become ever more racially pure was a migration control 'hedge' around the national borders : let no foreigners in as citizens and 'ethnic cleanse' internal minorities out, never more to return, by denying them all sorts of civil rights, such as access to jobs and education.
Ultimately, this led to the ultimate means to purify a biological nation : killing centres like Aktion T4's Grafeneck and the Holocaust's Auschwitz to remove defectives from the majority ethnicity and then go after minority populations, seen as all defective.
This hedge shielded what the promoters considered their nation's best asset : its original majority ethnic group, no longer to be diluted by in-migration of strangers (and often, not to be diluted by out-migration of the majority group membership, which was made as difficult as politically possible.)
Negative eugenics having eliminated much of the unwanted impurities, positive eugenic measures like state support for mothers and children of the majority group further protected the main asset.
It was K-selection among the human nations : deliberately work to drain your gene pool, put all your eggs in one basket, bet the farm on carefully raising a relatively restricted number of offspring as best you can.
Microbes don't operate this way and neither does impure Manhattan, the original home of human diversity.
Because instead of hedging assets, they hedge bets/risks.
Striving to survive and flourish in a complex and dynamically changing environment, they choose to spread their risks by containing within a wide number of different phenotypes, all in the expectation that at any given moment, a few types among many will be ideally suited to surmount current difficulties and seize any current opportunities.
These r-selected nations (or microbe species) take all the risks that they collectively expect to face over time and space and 'hedge off' (limit the damage of) each individual risk by coming up with a phenotype that may be inefficient most of the time but when this particular risk arises, they excel in efficiently surmounting it and even taking advantage of it as an opportunity, not a danger.
To surmount as many unknown future risks as possible, they eagerly seek in advance of any such threats to fill, not drain, their gene pool.
I argue that based on the historical facts, K-selection like pure Auschwitz is not successful in the long run, while r-selection like impure Manhattan, is.
History shows that the r-selected family of life par excellence, the microbes, surviving all that reality can throw at them, for almost four billion years.
The K-selected lifeforms often do very well, for a time, but then are usually quickly killed off whenever a big asteroid drops by for a visit.
Martin Bader was 39 when he died, a skilled craftsman (master shoemaker) with much street smarts --- and with past parkinson syndrome from WWI's sleeping sickness epidemic, murdered by the Nazis at Grafeneck's industrially organized death factory.
Charles Aronson was also 39 when he died, also a skilled craftsman (holding a demanding teletype operator's job at the world's largest newspaper and news agency flagship) with past parkinson syndrome from WWI's sleeping sickness epidemic.
But his life was prolonged, as long as possible, by a doctor (Martin Henry Dawson) who literally gave up his own life to see that life's useful variations, called 'defectives' by the middle class intellectuals of Modernity, enjoyed as much out of life as possible.
In Charles' case, Dawson kickstarted the stalled systemic impure penicillin project and in so doing so, also made life better for ten billion and counting of us since 1940 ....
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