Henry Dawson's 'Impurity Praising Manhattan' was never more than a sizeable minority of wartime Manhattanites

In 1940, most people in Manhattan, as in America - nay in the whole world - felt it best if they lived as much as possible in pure-as-possible exclusionary enclaves - working and playing and marrying their own 'kind', however that always moving target was currently defined.


The people at the top felt very much so - people lower down had rather less objections to their kids marrying someone who wasn't 'their own kind' --- as long as that the potential spouse was a good deal better off and socially more established than themselves.

But in 1940, the numbers of (non-Italian/non-Jewish) New Yorkers who felt that Manhattan was much better off, not worse off, because of its many Italians & Jews were a small (if hardly shy) minority.

Praising inclusive values as a wonderful attribute for a particular society was simply not on under Modernity.

School teachers, preachers and newspaper editors, who along with Mom and Dad, set the tone, did not praise or preach it.

Popular Eugenics peaked during War Years

Indeed popular eugenics (dividing all into lives worthy and unworthy) was at its very apogee in those early war years, along with an Isolationist-directed rejection of all war refugees who weren't upper class, wealthy or celebrated in science and the arts.

Later in the war years, widespread race riots broke out against blacks and Latinos and popular anti-semitism reached an all-time peak, albeit in a mostly hidden manner.

All this goes a long way to explain when details of The Holocaust were reported in accurate detail to our grandparents by the media, while it was still happening, still virtually nothing was actually done to try to stop it or bring refugees from it into America.

Everyone in the world - on or off Manhattan - agreed that the tiny island held an extraordinarily large and mixed population of ethnicities, religions, skin colors and lifestyles normally kept very far apart.

Something unique in the history of the world.

Manhattan found itself in the middle of the war's most important front line - which was the battle over moral values -  whenever people reflected for a moment on whether this mixed up impurity was a very good thing ---- or very bad thing ...

Modernity faithful dismissed complex scientific discoveries : 'Reality simpler than it looks'

The scientism "faith" of Modernity rose in panicked reaction to the late 19th century's many scientific discoveries revealing unexpected complexities in Deep reality.

Earlier late 19th century modernization (a unconscious process rather than a self conscious faith like Modernity) had already brought home the complexity of Surface reality to the educated middle class of the largest imperial civilizations.

That emotionally overwhelming complexity had arrived via half tone print media illustrations at their breakfast table or via the sight, sounds and smell of all the products of their imperial colonies (& sometimes even their imperial subjects themselves) hourly disembarking off steamships at their empire's metropolitan centre.

Repulsed by the facts of surface complexity revealed by Natural History, the science-minded middle class had sought mental relief in the arms of Natural Philosophy.

For millenniums the natural philosophers had claimed, with never any facts to support their theories, that ultimately reality was extremely simple and very stable: easily knowable,controllable and predictable.

Armed now with far more precise scientific instrumentation, the Natural philosophy end of Science, led by theoretical physicists and their fellow travellers in other sciences, were finally ready to put their funders' grant money where the philosophers' mouth was.

Problem : the instruments soon revealed that Deep reality was far far more complex than even Surface reality.

Most of the discoverers, despite generally regarding themselves as Positivists, refused (even into their graves) to fully accept the intellectual consequences of the results revealed before their own eyes.

Max Planck (quantum mechanics), Albert Einstein (relativity) and Frederick Griffith (HGT DNA) are merely a few examples of this intellectual discomfort.

While mainstream Science struggled to bury and explain away this uncomfortable evidence of Deep complexity, mainstream middle class civilizations responded by dividing all reality into just two general categories : worthy/simple/purity and unworthy/complex/ dirt.

Actually 'purity' and 'dirt' didn't have a secure or physical existence but were merely the passing virtual or intellectual rhetorical products of Modernity-in-argument, a faith that was always much much more interested in producing certainty/reducing uncertainty than in revealing the truth.

Consider what we mean when we claim to be "purifying" penicillium 'waste' water to obtain pure natural penicillin.

Penicillin molecules are hardly simple - still impossible for the best human chemists to synthesize economically or safely. While the waste molecule of water is a very simple molecule and easy to synthesize.

Or think of the long and uneven history of Nova Scotia's forests.

Initially only Nova Scotia's mast-making white pines were considered valuable and all the other trees mere junk. Then suddenly the best species for coal mine pit posts were the only trees considered valuable.

Until after WWII that is, when the mines all closed suddenly and now the former waste species of balsam firs because the only valuable tree when newsprint pulp mills became the sudden rage.

Uranium ores were once very expensively processed for tiny tiny amounts of radium, used for cancer treatments, and the rest chucked out as dross .

Until the A-Bomb (and the resulting hospital cobalt 'bomb') made the uranium valuable and the radium a mere costly impurity no longer competitive with newer ways to treat cancers with radiation.

Just as there never was any blood type and DNA evidence to support the rhetorical claims that the Aryans were particularly 'pure' and the Jews was particularly 'impure'.

Modernity worked that way : you simply presented the claim that your side was purer,simpler, brighter, more worthy than the other side and then drew your swords.

After the battle, if your side were the survivors, your claim was judged correct : might, not facts, was right...

Between the wars 'Impure Manhattan' & involuntary inclusivity

The Era of High Modernity, while it really only lasted one lifespan (from 1875 to 1965), was uniquely notable as the period when virtually all of the most powerful people in the world (middle class, well educated urban dwellers of the biggest civilizations) held a decidedly dire Manichean take on Reality.

One of Modernity's leading lights, Baron Howard Florey, was fully typical in frankly preferring things to always be 'clearcut'.

Reality cut in two distinct binary opposed bits, as if by a sharp crystal diamond.

Normal vs Deviant, Clean vs Dirty, Synthetic vs Natural, Pure vs Mixed, Man vs Mother Nature, White vs Colored, Native born vs Foreigners, Man vs Women, Worthy of Life vs Unworthy of Life : above all, Us vs Them.

Your social and ethnic enclave kept well away from my social and ethnic enclave ----- and vice versa.

Manhattan was like that before, during and after the inter-war period : I use enclave rather than ghetto because few people call the Upper East Side a ghetto, except tongue in cheek.

Donald J Trump's father was a big part of that attempt to keep white middle class Manhattan well apart from its other bits.

'Old Man Trump', as Wood Guthrie always referred to him in his protest songs , was a former 1920s KKK rioter and a well known excluder of Negroes and other 'unwanteds' out of his rental properties.

In the end, inclusivity and commensality, involuntary or not, trumped Trump exclusivity

But my point is, despite the ernest intentions of all concerned, people and ideas refused to stay in their separate little worlds.

Not in a modern densely populated city where people had to daily leave their own little enclaves to work, shop, go to school or hospital and to be entertained -- mingling in shops, on ball park benches, walking along each other on sidewalks or seated together in subways.

And not when the culture and ideas of other enclaves assaulted you daily in your living rooms and bedrooms - invaded via the radio and the illustrated print media.

Everybody was involuntarily and unwillingly dependent on everybody else and living so cheek to jowl, it was a form of involuntary collective commensality.

Manhattan the human Rhizosphere

Many Modernists felt this constant close interaction between ethnic enclaves  in Manhattan was a surefire way for it to fail --- but others (then & now) credit for making Manhattan the world's number one most productive global city.

Rather like the extraordinary productivity thrown up by any tightly crowded & wildly varied little microbial community, whether it be in a human gut and oral cavities or in the rhizosphere in the soil around plant roots.

Competing furiously but also involuntary dependent on each other.

I deliberately call Manhattan a rhizosphere (the microbe-filled soil immediately around plant roots) to emphasize that despite the enormous size difference between the big tree and the tiny bacteria in this relationship, they both need each other to flourish.

'Impure Penicillin' could only have happened where it did and when it did

In that period between the wars, Manhattan-based Dr Henry Dawson and his co-worker Dr Gladys Hobby specialized in studying the crowded microbial community in that 'enclave of enclaves' the human oral cavity.

Dawson had previously worked at Manhattan's Rockefeller Hospital where the world's seriously ill elites came in a great panic when their 'top dog' immune system was struck down by Life's smallest weakest beings : Dawson early on learned again the power of David over Goliath in biological asymmetric warfare.

If they came to appreciate how sophisticated the enclaves' survival methods really were and how co-dependent each species was on each other, if might be because they already knew how truly world-class productive was the crowded little highly 'impure' city that they worked and lived in ...

An Era doesn't die when a US President say so, but only when a humble janitor does so

Nobody, not even the historians and archivists of the US National Park Service know exactly when, by whom and or even why, the tiny plaque bearing Emma Lazarus's now famous poem "The New Colossus" about the Mother of Exiles, was itself moved out of internal exile in some dusty backwater of the Statue of Liberty to the pride of place at the front of the whole ball of wax.

Two caretakers ushered in the age of Postmodernity

Supposedly it happened in 1945, although even normally fastidious professional historians are unwilling to footnote exactly how they know that "fact" to be true.

(How can you tell when a historian is lying or 'winging it' ? When you can't see their footnotes move.)

I think it all came down to a couple of low level caretaker janitor grunts, busy tidying up the monument (closed all through WWII) so it could be re-opened.

They, and they alone, decided that Emma Lazarus's words now really spoke to them, particularly after the recent horrible revelations at Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald.

With an unspoken mixture of pride and shame and guilt motivating them, they quickly and quietly unscrewed the little plaque and screwed it back up again just as quickly and quietly at the main entrance.

That is how, with a quiet whimper of a janitor bemoaning a too small screwdriver (and not with the loud bang of an A-Bomb) an Age and an Era really dies.....

Dawson: first with both 'in vitro' DNA & 'in vivo' Penicillin

Because 'in vitro' research (inside glass test tubes) and 'in vivo' research (inside the body) are considered the polar opposites of each other, it is the rare scientist indeed who scores a notable first in both fields.

So consider the fact that for billions of years DNA had worked its magic solely inside the body, until 1929 when Dr Henry Dawson first put it to work inside a glass test tube (in vitro) : dawning the age of direct genetic modification.

Or that for millions of years penicillin had worked its magic solely outside the human body, until 1940 when Dr Henry Dawson first put it to work inside the human body (in vivo) : dawning the age of life-saving systemic antibiotics.

So the unknown Dawson's firsts include in vitro DNA & in vivo Penicillin

Perhaps it is true when academics explain away these breakthroughs of the relatively unknown Dawson as simply the result of just someone being lucky.

But as Dawson's competitor Sir Ernst Chain once said in dismissing his own receiving of the Nobel Prize, "no, true genius is a matter of being 'lucky', twice !"

And so let us remember the genius of the unknown (but twice lucky) Dr Dawson .....

rarity among Penicillin pioneers, Henry Dawson avoids the "S" word

I have never found a single instance when the first doctor to use penicillin to save a human life, Henry Dawson, ever said that 'further lifesaving with this wonder drug must first await the development of synthetic penicillin'.

Odd that, because that is what those other two penicillin pioneers, Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey, always gave as their excuse for their relative clinical inaction with wartime penicillin.

Years after Dawson's premature death, a member of his team was still publishing scientific articles, touting the potential superiority of impure natural penicillin over that of 100% pure penicillin whether natural or synthetic.

Dawson seemed to have acted as he did because he felt that the fungus, who had been making penicillin for tens of millions of years, might well have evolved a quicker easier cheaper method of doing so than whatever even huge teams of the world's best chemists could eke out synthetically after only a few years research.

He was of course right --- seventy five years on, we humans still can't make penicillin one thousandth as cheaply as the invisibly small little fungal factories can.

Humbling indeed for human modernist hubris -- and highly prescient of Dawson...

Pecking Order Shocker !!! Lowly day clinic doctor launches Age of Antibiotics

All teaching hospitals display an informal but exceedingly powerful medical pecking order in terms of prestige and access to scarce resources.

At the very very bottom of the food chain are those day/outpatient clinics that serve patients who are both walking ambulatory and suffering from non-acute non-life threatening conditions.

Wrongly, the old fashioned arthritis day clinic (today's rheumatology day clinic) was seen as to fit that description to a "T".

That was perhaps because that description did indeed fit most of its patients, suffering as they were from osteoarthritis, but in fairness, many other forms of arthritis are much more acute or are chronic yet decidedly life-shortening.

In any case, arthritis clinic staff, like Rodney Dangerfield, got little respect or status from the greater medical research world, in the years on both immediate sides of WWII.

How utterly galling then that it was that a lowly arthritis clinic doctor, Henry Dawson, who ushered in our present Age of Antibiotics and then led the finally successful effort to see the use of non-patented natural fungus-made penicillin to win the war, instead of pissing countless lives away while the world's scientific elite chased the hopeless chimera of synthetic patented man-made penicillin.

Most importantly, Dr Dawson's natural non-patented fungus-made penicillin is still the all important base behind almost all of our (lightly semi-synthesized) lifesaving antibiotics we depend upon seventy five years later...