The elevator pitch for "By stubborn, Stars we steer"

Some people call it the takeaway sentence while others call it the elevator pitch : that line that tags a movie's every radio/TV spot and poster, the same line that got the movie green-lighted (financed) in the first place.

"A Rare Breed Indeed" : US wartime Int'l treaties on the A-Bomb, Lend-Lease, Bases for Destroyers ... and synthetic penicillin

Most of the antibiotics we use today (beta-lactams) are still the close relatives of the first and best-ever antibiotic, Penicillin G.

They are all still produced, by mold slime, ie naturally : and this will probably always be so.

They are produced almost as bulk chemicals, thousands of tons worth annually, a multi-billion dollar industry that lies at the very foundations of the multi-trillion dollar health industry.

But there is (and was) no international treaty, closely negotiated at the very top level (Lord Halifax and Dean Acheson) , at the height of total war and over an extended period of two years, on the patents and scientific information involved in this crucial production of natural penicillin.

Martin Henry Dawson vs the American Red Cross 1940 on mixing blood of blacks , whites and slime

Heroes ????

The American Red Cross began WWII on the side of Hitler, banning the mixing of Negro blood with that of the pure white (Ayran) race when it came to blood transfusions, just as Hitler also opposed the mixing of Jewish and Ayran blood in German blood transfusions.

SKY GODS or earthlings : WWII's choices ...

Michael Marshall

My last blog, contrasting NORDEN MODERNITY to GEOSMIN COMMENSALITY was very long - and longwinded.

Maybe I can be more succinct.

Spread over an eighty acre corridor in Harlem, two very different projects at Columbia University during the WWII period laid out wildly different visions for humanity and its future on this planet.

Heavy stuff !

One Columbia University project, the massive Manhattan Project, was a last minute patch or kluge to the centerpiece of the Allied war effort, which was that high altitude bombing with that NORDEN BOMBSIGHT could end the war quickly and cheaply.

Quickly and cheaply, yet with minimum deaths for Allied A1 military personnel and for enemy and occupied  4F civilians.

The NORDEN, out in the real world, proved a military and moral disaster, but the A-Bomb painted such broad strokes that it could destroy entire cities (and end the war) , even when the NORDEN used to aim it once again missed.

(The A-bomb together Nature actually did the job : for the winds blow the fallout from the Bomb all over the world, regardless of  Humanity's best efforts to claim that this is entirely a man-made show. Fallout is so down-to-earth ,n'est-ce pas?)

But let us ignore such awkward truths and stick with the 'vision thing' :  call the original Norden plan part of the SKY GOD vision of Modernity.

All life on Earth would be nicely invisible (but still controllable) from 25,000 feet up ; controlled by coolly rational objective men modeling themselves quite self consciously upon PIERRE SIMON LAPLACE.

(Lenin's Omelets could still be made but no one would have to see or hear or smell the human eggs being broken.)

Laplace's vision was that scientific man, with a lot of effort , and thanks to Newton's three laws of physics - could observe the Universe from a place far above it and perfectly predict its past, present and future right down to the level of the atom.

The NORDEN, the assumed crown jewel (and as it turned out the culmination) of 250 years of Newtonian physics,  was just a start on this bold vision.

Modernist males (for this was a very male-centric vision) would become like the Sky Gods and Sky Fathers of ancient legend.

In another part of Columbia University - in the university but never really supported or encouraged by the university, unlike with the Manhattan Project - Martin Henry Dawson also had a vision.

Like him, the vision was unorthodox, humble and (literally) down-to-earth.

Down into the earth, actually.

 This was an earthling Vision of Life : our only possible home was down here on earth, at the ground zero of reality, not building some castles in the sky.

So he formed a commensal partnership with some of life's smallest and weakest beings.

 These were the earth fungi and bacteria whose presence
and 'earthy' smell was so familiar to him from his time in the WWI trenches.

All this so he could help the men and women and children in the figurative trenches of WWII - the 4F individuals overlooked or destroyed by a war that revolved very much around the 1As of intellectual and physical life.

But note first a further uncanny parallel with the much bigger, much badder, Manhattan Project.

His effort was seized upon, at the last minute after being either ignored or depreciated, by the Allied war effort in a determined effort to rescue another centerpiece of their war aims.

Dead soldiers were just that, dead ,said the Allied leadership.

 But soldiers,sailors and airmen seriously wounded and infected could be saved back to useful lives in WWII, unlike WWI, because we have got that wonderful man-made synthetic miracle drug called SULFA.

But the entire family of sulfa drugs - an army themselves with America alone issuing 7000 patents on the sulfa drugs during the war - were not working as promised.

Never fear, said modernist Chemistry,we'll synthesize this new stuff, penicillin, only make it better,  much cheaper and much much more plentiful.

A mini-Manhattan Project of money men and effort failed to produce any synthetic penicillin - or any synthetic quinine for that matter ----Nature did the job so much better, as it turned out.

Dawson's idea of a low tech factory of factories - trillions upon trillions of tiny fungi factories making penicillin inside low cost milk bottles in some underused milk plant - was working well , as GLAXO in England proved in spades.

It didn't use up scarce war-oriented resources or need highly skilled workers --- most of the workers growing and nurturing this precious life-giving crop were - surprise ! - women of child-bearing age.

Great !

Or was it ?

Not high tech enough for this science-run war of flash, glitz and Hollywood press agency.

Not male enough for testosteronic modernist science.

So the trillions of natural fungi penicillin makers were moved out of thousands of milk bottles and put into an extremely expensive milk bottle many stories high, made of scarce stainless steel and run by serious looking men in lab coats.

Now that seriously looked the business !

But it was in fact, just another kluge, a patch : like Newtonian Physics and the Norden , Chemistry had failed and Chemistry - the Queen of Science in the 1930s economy - never looked anywhere but downward from that point on.

(Just compare - if you will - the size of DuPont Chemicals versus the largest of the biotech companies in 1930 with DuPont and the largest of the biotech giants of today : no contest.)

So A-bombs and Penicillin:  two last minute kluges to cover male egos or two of the many planned high tech successes that ultimately won us the war ?

And which way forward: become like SKY GODS or humble and limit our hubris and become more like earthlings ????

MOdernity's War (1939-1945) : SUCCESS or FAILURE ??

Michael Marshall

No one disputes that 1939 -1945 was MOdernity's War.

The only real question is, 'was that war a success or a failure for Modernity?'

Most historians still feel that that only Modernity's Science saved "The Civilized World" from the evils of the anti-modernist Nazis, when the Allied fighting man proved no equal to the German armed forces in pure fighting technique.

By contrast, I feel that Modernity was the overarching ideology of the war, shared across all the Allied and Axis nations.

I believe that the Axis and Allied nations both had overly-optimistic initial war aims in 1938-1942.

 These hubris-filled PLAN As  came from both sides' overly optimistic views of Modernity's potential to excel particularly well under war conditions.

( Modernity had made many previous claims to hold all the secrets of Synthetic Autarky.)

I , on the other hand, feel that almost anyone - including Modernists - can govern in good times.

But that it is during wars that Modernity particularly fails to deliver its promised goods.

So what Modernists on both sides did was come up with new PLAN Bs when their original PLAN A failed ---- and then barefacedly claim that this new PLAN B was their old PLAN A all along !

Unexpectedly it worked.

It worked I think because almost all historians ,until recently ,were themselves fully modernist, and thus swimming in the same Kool Aid they were supposed to be analyzing.

I have already pointed out that Dr Martin Henry Dawson inadvertently became part of one Plan B.

Dawson ,working in a spirit of COmmensality with penicillium fungus, had put trillions of tiny unicelled fungi chemical factories into 700 two liter flasks and thus helped bring naturally-grown penicillin to a point where the public demanded it be made in huge amounts.

Pfizer, who had been working with Dawson, simply piled those trillions upon trillions of tiny penicillium factories into a series of impressive looking four storey tall 'flasks' and bare-facedly called it 'High Technology'.

The media ever a sucker for pretty pictures over hard digging, fell for the story.

 They needed a new High tech wins the war success story when war medicine's original PLAN A (synthetic penicillin) failed to materialize despite a Manhattan Project-scaled effort in the US and UK.

Even the Manhattan Project itself can be seen as a PLAN B too.

The original PLAN A (precision bombing, with high level B-29s and NORDEN Bombsights) failed totally in its claim to quickly bring Germany and Japan to their knees, without a need for an old-fashioned infantry-led invasion--- and without killing many innocent civilians.

Quietly Allied governments  fell back upon imprecise 'area bombing'  ----burning entire metropolitan cities, along with all their residents, evoking a faint hope clause that the heat of the fires might also twist those cities' war factories' machine tools into useless knots.

But precision-bombing with High Explosives (HE) had been sold as an entirely man-made success story --- as a fully Modernist effort --- as military autarky.

The Norden Bombsight it was claimed, would aim the bomb so well that it would surmount any attempts by Mother Nature to pull it off its anointed course.

Man's high explosives (HE) also works as well in snow, rain,wind and excessive cold/ hot as in fair weather.

But the time-proven alternatives to HE and precision bombing were always rejected by the military leaders, out of a gut instinct that the real credit for their success would go to Nature, not to Modernist Man.

These alternatives I term "CLOUD WARFARE" .

For these war clouds of Poison Gas, Smoke, Radiation (Fallout),Incendiary (Fire) and Germ only succeed if the wind and humidity levels are just so.

Mother Nature can either help move these killers onto the target or scatter it wildly far away, diluting beyond effectiveness.

Consider the most successful bombing efforts of WWII : the firestorms of Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo.

Despite the massive amounts of fire bombs dropped, Modernist Man couldn't create those fire storms - or if so, firestorms would have happened many times over during WWII.

No, Mother Nature had to step in, in COmmensal fashion, and lend a hand - by giving the bombing crews lots of wind combined with super dry air (low humidity levels).

The fire bombs did no more than act as a sort of barbecue starter - the real fuel was the wood of the city combined with all that oxygen continuously coming in on the wind.

The energy from a thousand tons of  magnesium, phosphorus and napalm is nothing against the energy put out by 100,000 tons of combustible wood and oxygen.

Ancient warfare always knew that nothing could destroy an enemy's empire like firing up their cities on a nice hot,dry, windy day - firestorms are as much a part of pre-modernity as they are of the WWII era.

Even Hiroshima was as much death by fire and radiation as it was death by explosion - and if the winds had been high, many more might have died in other communities - conversely if heavy rains had fallen as the Bomb dropped, deaths would have been reduced by being limited to the immediate blast area.

Darn !

Nature gets much of the credit for the death rate in either case.

But Hiroshima was successfully sold as High Tech when in reality it was as ancient a form of warfare as anything the Hittites ever thought up.

Dr Henry Dawson worked with Nature to save hundreds of thousands of lives --- but General Curtis LeMay also worked with Nature, only this time to take hundreds of thousands of lives.

So WWII's COmmensality, (its low tech PLAN B solution to high tech PLAN A  public relations disasters) proved very much a two-edged  sword.

I never claimed global commensality was all hearts and flowers....

Two races against a dead - line, when "dead" not just a figure of speech

It was probably in late October 1940 , induced by the strain of setting up the world's first ever use of  penicillin-the-antibiotic, that Dr Martin Henry Dawson began his long slow slide into a terminal case of MG (Myasthenia Gravis).

A Canadian study had only recently determined
that a sufferer from  MG at that time lived an average of four and a half years.

Some lived much longer --- some much less.

However a rational individual , such as Dr Dawson was, would say he had till late April 1945 to live out his life.

He was proved exactly right - dying April 27th 1945.

I can't say he died happy, but I can speculate he didn't die unhappy .

Dawson lived just long enough to have the highly skeptical medical community around the world accept his claim that (systemic) (naturally-grown penicillin) (can cure SBE) --- yes, even the toughest cases of this hitherto invariable fatal disease more formally known as Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis.

I have written before of the jaw-dropping fact that by 1950, just five short years later, it was widely agreed that SBE had become, to quote Dr Charles Friedberg in the world famous medical journal JAMA, "the most common form of heart disease that can be cured."

In early 1945, as Dawson lay dying, with his labours just completed, he won his race by the narrowest of margins.

 JAMA , house organ of the American Medical Association (AMA) finally agreed to feature his long article on his four and half year battle - against his colleagues, his own government and his own body - to offer up "PROOF OF CONCEPT" on his bold claims.

Because he actually made three different, equally bold, claims.

He said the incurable SBE could be cured.

He said penicillin was  much better as a systemic antibiotic, if people would only try it, than it ever was as Alexander Fleming's topical antiseptic.

Finally, and most boldly by far, he said naturally grown penicillin , grown by trillions of incredibly tiny little biotech factories called unicell fungi , would be cheaper, better, more available than anything chemists might be able to synthesize.

He said that the big wartime projects of MOdernity's 'Chemical Man' are not inevitably smarter than the efforts put for by the smallest and weakest members of Life.

In 1945 that offered up a stinging rebuke to the entire civilized world.

It was a sting felt never more strongly that in Germany, home of Modernist Chemistry, which had recently put its chemistry to its most spectacular use ever --- in the steam baths of Auschwitz.

He was proven right, then, on all three points and is still right today.

Dawson's decision to work with Nature, not against her, and work with Nature's 's weakest beings to save humanity's weakest beings, was COmmensality at its finest.

His battle to save a handful of SBE patients (judged to be the lowest of the low , the 4Fs of the 4Fs, during a war effort focussed on 1A soldiers) moved an older couple in Brooklyn New York .

They had lost a daughter in the age before Dawson introduced antibiotics into a doubting world.

The husband, egged on by his wife, resolved to do something about it.

At that time he was the boss of a medium sized company that was best known for making citric acid for the soda pop industry.

He would stick that company's neck way out on the line and gamble big on Dawson's claim that the tiny little penicillin factories could do the job better, faster, cheaper, safer, than anything American's chemists could come up with.

Once he made that decision he went all out - like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stockbroker Dodds in the short story, "A Shadow Before" , he became a bear in a bull stock market .

If his gamble failed - and all the betting money said it would - his firm would be ruined.

But Oh ! If it succeeded !

If it succeeded, penicillin would arrive just in time, after all, for the expected heavy casualties of D-Day and just in time for the millions of people around the world dying of infectious diseases as a result of years of wartime malnutrition.

His firm would smothered in thanks and drowned in profits.

That man, John L Smith, was proven right by Dawson and his firm, Pfizer, never did look back from that decision.

For Dawson, his race against a dead-line was a personal race --- to prove up his concept, against fierce resistance from his body and his government, before he himself was - dead.

On the same tiny island (Manhattan), in the same time period
(WWII) , at the same university (Columbia), there was another much better known race against a deadline.

This dead-line was peace - the end of the war.

If the war ended before the Manhattan Project offered up its "PROOF OF CONCEPT" by successfully wiping out a city filled with people and factories, the atomic bomb would die still born - billions spent but the bomb never used.

After all, billions were spent on poison gas and germ warfare yet none of it was ever used.

Because along with Peace came massive spending cuts on war projects.

All that research money would vanish forever, at war's end - unless there was PROOF OF CONCEPT of this untried super weapon.

It was this, not the fear of a Nazi Atomic Bomb, which had vanished in Britain or Russia by the Fall of 1942 and not incidentally both were the enemies of Germany most likely to be on the dying end of a German A Bomb, which actually drove the American Manhattan Project.

The dead in this dead-line was 100,000 dead civilians : PROOF OF CONCEPT personified in ash and traces on the concrete.

This cold callous mental calculation, by scientists as well as military men, was MOdernity at its very worst.

So, two parallel but totally different races against dead - lines , operating a few hundred metres apart from each other in Harlem : MOdernity versus COmmensality.

Now there's a story !

Thumbing their nose at MODERNITY.....

During WWII (the very apogee of MODERNITY) in New York City (the very epicenter of Modernity) , a dying doctor and his few square feet of Mother Nature quietly thumbed their nose at MODERNITY...

.... and changed our whole world, for the better, for ever.

Homegrown, natural , systemic penicillin is Dr Martin Henry Dawson's practical legacy, leading on from his insights into the commensal nature of Life that is his scientific legacy.

That same university on Manhattan Island ( Columbia) that Dawson worked at all during those war years, was also home to the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Bomb.

Columbia University thus was home to the Twentieth Century's biggest high tech disaster and its smallest low tech triumph : home to the stories of the Little Boy Bomb and the Baby Girl Patty Malone: the nadir and the apogee of Twentieth Century Humanity.

Sometimes Fact truly is stranger than Fiction ever could be...

God Knows What Henry Dawson,Robert Pulvertaft,Rudy Schullinger,Frank Queen And Jim Duhig Did With Penicillin...

... and now you are about to find out as well.

There have been many,many books written about PHASE I Penicillin : about the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming.

( And not enough books written as to why it then lay about unused for 12 years...)

Similarly there have been many books and articles written about PHASE II penicillin : the scientific research and development of penicillin by Howard Florey.

Supporters of both men have spent the 75 years ever since, fighting in print over which one deserves the most glory.

Very little - or nothing - has been written of  PHASE III penicillin.

('Agape penicillin').

'Agape penicillin' occurred when a few isolated individuals gave their arm and heart and brain - and sometime even their life - not to discovering or researching penicillin, but simply to using penicillin to save lives.

Saving lives with penicillin as fast and as hard as they could, with whatever penicillin they could make or take, regardless of its 'purity' or lack there of.

Since no one else is writing their story, I am.

My qualifications are not that I am a doctor or scientist or even a published author.

It is simply that I am a former 'penicillin patient' (and aren't we all ?).

As such I care greatly about the stories of the first all-out efforts to take penicillin out of the science lab, to put it to work, inside patients, saving lives.

This is a book oriented towards readers who are or were patients receiving antibiotics, written by a former patient, rather than a book written by a scientist, academic or professional author.

If 'amateur author' means a book written out of love and gratitude , then I am an amateur for sure.

I started thinking about writing this book in 2005, in reaction to the aftermath to the events of 9/11. A lot of people - not just Moslems - seemed down on Manhattan, mostly for its global financial influence and partly for its part in the development of nuclear weapons during World War Two.

I decided the world needed to be reminded that not everything Manhattan did between 1941 and 1945 led to more killing and suffering.

TWO MANHATTAN PROJECTS:

The Manhattan Project had many connections to Manhattan Island and the surrounding Greater New York City area - as did the 'agape penicillin' project.

But the Manhattan Project leading to nuclear warfare was one of the biggest projects (in terms of money and manpower) - and certainly the best known, of all the projects of World War Two.

By contrast, the 'agape penicillin' project was one of the smallest and least known projects during the war.

Think of it, perhaps, as Manhattan's other Project.

If size matters to you above all else, this isn't likely to interest you.

But the 'agape penicillin' story is a truly epic story of courage arising above adversity to change our world forever, for better.....

1941-1950: Friedberg revises SBE deathwatch

In 1950 Dr Charles Friedberg told the readers of JAMA, one of the world's leading medical journals for frontline doctors, not to forget that SBE was now the easiest of the common heart diseases to cure.

They listened.

 Friedberg had quite literally wrote the book on SBE, back in 1941.

The, ahem, old book on SBE.

In that 1941 book, Friedberg and chief co-author Emanuel Libman had carefully surveyed 1200 cases of SBE in detail and said 'no cures' - at least no cures by the efforts of doctors.

 However three percent might expect a spontaneous cure.

Until the next and the next attack -  for SBE was a repeater disease and so really inevitably fatal - over the short medium term period.

Another researcher at the time was even less hopeful - finding  out of 249 of his SBE patients, maybe one had a temporary cure.

But now in 1950,Friedberg's 'invariable fatal SBE' had become Friedberg's 'the most curable common heart disease' !

The reason for this amazing turn about, Dr Martin Henry Dawson, had died a little earlier, back in April 1945.

But these amazing 1950 conclusions were due to his pioneering 1940-1945 efforts to prove up penicillin as an anti-biofilmic agent , able to penetrate SBE vegetations and kill the bacteria without killing the patient.

It was a mission carried on and brought to a spectacular conclusion by his assistant Thomas H Hunter, after the war.

DOCTOR MOM  now had one Sword of Damocles removed from over her head --- thanks to a doctor from Columbia University.

Just in time too.

Because another doctor from Columbia university, Harold Urey, PhD, had just given her a new Sword of Damocles.

During World War II, in one part of Columbia,
the former Lt Dawson,(winner of the Military Cross with Citation),was busy(illegally) curing "4F" SBE patients.

 Meanwhile, in another part of Columbia, Urey-The-Pacifist, with his crew of war-exempt healthy, young "1A" scientists, was busy inventing the Cold War's most fearsome weapon: the gaseous diffusion process for the extraction of uranium for the mass production of nuclear weapons.

As a result, 1950s kids, of which I was one, were the healthiest and the most scared generation of kids ever raised.

Thank you, Columbia.....

Physics,Chemistry break 1940 promises

At the time of the New York World's Fair, with its theme of a learned gaze into the crystal ball to reveal the America of the 1960s, Big Physics and Big Chemistry made two firm promises:

Physics promised that with nuclear fission newly achieved, by 1960 your family home would be heated and lit by electricity '"too cheap to meter", made by atomic energy.

It also said that this war would be a clean quick war, hitting only military targets, as  B-17 bombers, with precision Norden bombsights, would be able to drop a bomb into a pickle barrel ,from 15,000 feet.

Chemistry pledged that your family would be disease free by the 1960s, "with hospitals no longer used for infectious diseases", thanks to pure,defined, man-made chemicals like the growing family of sulfa drugs.

But in 1945, atomic energy was used only to destroy homes (and the families inside).

(And with a bomb that powerful there was no need to aim, which was just as well ,as the Norden bombsights turned out to be useless.)

True, diseases were being held at bay, but not conquered, by 1945.

But not by the toxic and increasingly ineffective sulfa drugs.

Rather the success was due to penicillin - an impure,undefined mixture made by Nature and grown on an impure, undefined mixture of nutritional mediums also made by Nature.

And it was the humble science of biology that helped make it all work - while chemists only got in the way.

World War Two was NOT a triumph of nerdy,weedy scientists in spectacles winning the war when the stud muffin /BMOC /football captains of America proved unable to best the visiting German and Japanese teams out on the field.

This was the official take on World War Two Science, as produced by the leading science bureaucrats in their official and semi-official histories.

Because this 'revenge of the nerds' is so self-flattering to academics, even normally skeptical historians have lapped up the 'official version' like it was mother's milk.

In truth, Science suffered as many defeats to its ego during WWII as any over-confident general ever did.

In 1940, Man may have batted first, but by 1945 it was Nature that bats last: and Nature bats last and Nature bats long ....

It would perhaps be a bit much to ask today's historians to turn their sights on their colleagues and themselves and ask have they probed the truth of the penicillin saga or , to paraphrase Donald J McGraw,("On Leaving the Mine ", 1991) have they been content to merely uncritically retell tales already told too often ?

Columbia drops ball,Oxford runs with it

For ten months,(early September 1940-early July 1941) Columbia University had a clear lead on bringing mass produced penicillin to the world, but it blow it.

America had to give up its lead to Oxford University and the British. America lost the moral edge on this story.

But before Congress and the federal government bring out committees and commissions to investigate Columbia, it should remember it ,too, had a chance and it blew it.

"You sir, had a Choice"

Columbia and Washington may say 'we had no choice' but as Mulroney says, "you sir, had a choice."

During those same ten months, Columbia and America had another clear lead - in atomic energy.

This is the one that the federal government choose to fund, this is the one that Columbia administrators choose to find rooms for.

And as the Manhattan Project grew and grew, Columbia and the federal government found new rooms for it in the heart of Manhattan's traditional milk plant district, in north west Harlem, in the corridor connecting the downtown campus to the medical campus.

Even the Japanese hardly a milk-guzzling nation and totally cut off from all the events in Britain and America surrounding penicillin from 1940 to 1944, could instantly tell that every photo they could find of an interior of a penicillin plant looked like nothing but a typical milk plant.

Most of the world's first penicillin plants used the equipment,technologies,staff - and sometimes the very plants - of milk companies.

Columbia had the team - and very nearby it had the equipment, to start saving millions of lives, way back in 1941.

But it blew it - it morally blew it.

Columbia developed three world-shaking ideas on its campus during World War Two.

The Age of Antibiotics started there -millions of lives saved by the actions of a decorated frontline combat hero named Dawson.

With Adorno and Horkheimer's seminal text, in humble mimeographed form, the age of Postmodernity started there.

And the technology that powered the Cold War, on both sides, was started and perfected there - in that life-giving milk plant  district - perfected by a life-long pacifist named Harold Urey.

Yes, most of the uranium that blew up Hiroshima was not made by Columbia's technology.

But the instance the war was over, the competing totally inefficient plants were closed and massive gas diffusion plants were built instead using Columbia's technology, to create the tens of thousands of bombs on all sides during the Cold War.

That same deadly uranium is still around, fashioned into today's current bombs.

Thanks Columbia, 'Home of the Cold War' !

Now if you went to the Columbia campus today , would you find a plaque to Dawson and Adorno or to Urey ?

You guessed right - Adorno and Dawson are non-persons but Urey and death are honored to the hilt at Columbia.

 And in Washington.

The self-promoting Florey and Britain get all the moral glow of penicillin instead.

Columbia blew it - and it is still blowing it......

MO goes PO: Death or Life: America picks death

"In the 'soldiers/guns/cities/Canada/we did not make this up' department, is this bizarre but true story from America."

After you read the above blog post, reflect upon this:

Wasn't it old Ronnie Reagan who said the scariest thing you could ever hear is someone saying:

"Hi,I am from the federal government and I am here to honor you" ???

Trust the fed bureaucrats to honor Columbia University for the totally wrong wartime project - and trust Columbia University to go along with the gag....

The truth was that wartime Columbia University and Manhattan island were a Janus-like combo - part killer/ part livesaver --- a pity that only the killer side has been honored to date....

70th Anniversary of 'the little $6,000 that grew'

In February 2010, most of the world will not celebrate the 70th anniversary of the start of the Manhattan Project.

Nor should they.

But they should mark it, and pause to reflect on its continuing consequences for us here today.

For 1940 was truly an Annus Mirabillis , and only partly because it marked the start of the development of the world's biggest life-taker.

Because 1940 was also crucial in the development of the world's smallest life-saver .

And aren't these two things the Alpha and the Omega of a continuing human existence in this universe?

During that February almost seventy years ago, two lead investigators at Columbia University in Manhattan were given $6,000 in federal tax dollars to look into the possibility of developing an atomic 'boiler' - which is to say, given money to develop an engine, not a bomb.

But the money came from orders of the president himself and FDR knew the project, if fully successful, would lead to investigating the building of an atomic bomb, to be held in reserve against the possibility the Nazis were already trying to build - and use - one.

Seventy years on, the six thousand dollars has become, for the American taxpayers alone, six trillion dollars and counting.

Laying blame for the current American debt crisis ? February 1940 is as good a place as any to start - that six trillion dollars would sure erase a lot of America's public and private debt worries.

If the American nuclear bomb arsenal of today ever gets used in a shooting match, the cost in lives would be six billion plus - and probably no one left to do the counting.

The costs of this the best known of Manhattan's wartime projects, in terms of the tarnishing of America's image abroad, is impossible to calculate.

"THE BUCK STARTS HERE"

The desk of the president is famously thought of as the place where the sign reads "the buck stops here".

But this project was highly unusual, in that it can be more truly said of the Manhattan Project, that "the buck started here", right at the president's desk.

As its political and financial father, FDR 'knew' about the start of the building of the world's biggest life-taker long before almost anyone else on the planet.

Not so with the start of the other Manhattan-based project , the one to finally start saving lives with the world's smallest life-saver, twelve years after its initial discovery.

FDR first learned of this life-saving substance at the exact same time that the rest of the world did , by opening his paper and reading a highly dramatic news story, one morning in mid-August 1943, almost three years after the life-saving project's obscure beginnings.

Perhaps the delay in the president learning of this life-saver is best explained by the fact that this project's lead investigator, also at Columbia University, never asked for any federal government grant or presidential 'seal of approval' - and in fact never sought a grant from anyone.

Still , his work never added a cent to the federal debt and his legacy continues to add lustre to the American image abroad.

Few people around the world, including those terrorists who harbor nothing but ill will towards Manhattan Island, do not have a family member or friend whose life was spared, thanks to the kick-starting efforts of this Manhattan Island life saver.

His project's 70th anniversary also comes up next year, in September 2010.

Perhaps this other Manhattan Project also needs a moment from us, to reflect on the changes it has brought into our world.

In this case, changes much for the better....

The Manhattan Project: Hidden in Plain Sight

Mention the Manhattan Engineering District (MED) aka 'The Manhattan Project', along with the wartime Atomic Bombs, and for most of us, our first thought is a mushroom cloud rising from a dry desert bed somewhere in the dusty south west of America.

Perhaps we think of other,later, Atomic Tests from similarly dusty deserts in Nevada and Utah. And their assembly - wasn't that done in isolated big plants inevitably set on dusty plains or deserts somewhere in southern and western America ? Isn't it still being done out there, somewhere ?

We are certain of one thing - none of this is taking place - or ever took place - anywhere near the wet, green, heavily urbanized American north east - certainly not in the New York City area.

THE DEVILISHLY CLEVER GENERAL GROVES

As is well known, the Atomic Bomb project was not just the most secret project in the Allied pipeline of new weapons, it was one of the few efforts rated 'Top Secret' that actually stayed truly top secret - even incoming President Truman knew nothing of it until he took office after FDR's death.

Many credit this to the mania for security to the Army Engineer Corps officer who really turned the faltering project around after he took charge in September 1942 - Colonel (and soon to be General) Leslie Groves.

Groves, born and raised in upstate New York, it is claimed, took a perverse delight in naming a project centered in rural wilderness in the South West after the biggest urban centre in the world - Manhattan - never the most popular part of New York State to its upstate residents.

Actually, it was a group decision to name the Top Secret project after Manhattan and that decision was even more brazen than any of us imagined.

The top secret project was hidden, in plain sight, in all of all places , Manhattan itself !

Most of the emotional high points of the wartime atomic project (and many of its technical solutions) happened on Manhattan or in the environs close around Manhattan and New York City.

Surprisingly, many of those warehouses,factories, office buildings and labs are still around.

Author Robert S Norris delights in reminding residents of the Big Apple that much of the world's atomic history lies all around them, unknown, as part of their daily work life environment.

It is easy to see how this confusion happened.

Most atomic authors, from 1945 till this day, have been voluntarily 'self-embedded' in the corps of the nuclear physicists, seeing the entire project through the physicists' eyes.

For the nuclear physicists, the world revolves around the Los Alamos weapons-development lab , set in the south west desert.

Without Los Alamos and its team of scientists, we won't have had the second , plutonium, (Nagasaki) bomb. But we would have had a bomb.

And it is worth noting that most of the deadly material in all of the world's Cold War nuclear arsenals was uranium, not plutonium - something you'd never gain from reading the average atomic author's breathless prose over the plutonium breakthrough.

(Uranium was a natural element, while until recently it was believed plutonium was man-made, artificial, synthetic - so it simply had to be the better and more exciting part of the atomic story.)

Actually, all of the physicists involved in the MED were, in a sense, mostly redundant after 1941 - if all had died in a plane crash in early 1942, the project would have still gone on to drop the Hiroshima bomb.

Chemists, engineers, metallurgists, factory artisans - all deserved more credit than the physicists for the first Bomb.

And in the early 1940s, most of the high tech firms and factories they worked for were headquartered or located in the greater New York City area....

Manhattan's OTHER Project - one of them anyway

The RAF deserved much of the odium that is still attached to the concept of 'area bombing' , the idea you can win a war by killing and de-housing most of the residents of your opponents' cities if only you sprinkle enough bombs willy nilly over them.

But the ultimate examples of "close is good enough in horseshoes and in area bombing" comes from the American Army Air Force planes flying over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

POOR AIM UNDER IDEAL CONDITIONS

They were two of the best bombing crews in the entire Allied air forces - in particular, having two top notch bomb-aimers on board.

They had no fighters or ack-ack guns to contend with, were flying in daylight and in pretty good weather and yet still managed to miss their targets widely.

It didn't matter - the Manhattan Project planes still destroyed all of both cities with just one bomb falling well off the target area.

A week after those two bombs, the Japanese unexpectedly surrendered, so these 'far-off-the-targets' results still seemed a victory for the Project planners and for their namesake, Manhattan, where so much of the atomic bomb effort had taken place.

THE VIEW FROM SEPTEMBER 1939

But September 1945 seemed a long way from September 1939, when Americans told themselves they would be immune from the new European general war - because of a project well underway in ....Manhattan.

Daylight flights by Army bombers flying well offshore of America itself and flying thousands of feet above the range of enemy warship ack-ack guns, would "drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 feet", and sink the battleship or aircraft carrier below.

The enemy fleets destroyed in mid ocean, the land war would never even reach America's shores.

This project - the Norden bombsight - would be as big a secret as the atomic bomb and cost as many billions to produce and use.

BILLIONS WASTED

But the Norden's total failure, embarrassingly (if still secretly) evident by mid war, was the real reason the hitherto reluctant American military-scientific leadership gradually ramped up the atomic bomb in time to be used in this, the second world war.

They needed a PR victory from the vast amount of money and lives spent on aerial bombing , no matter how that victory was achieved.

Area bombing, based on the ancient idea (5,000 years old in 1945) of starting fires in the enemies' cities and then letting the city's own materials provide most of the inflammable energy used to destroy it, was a low tech solution to the failure of Manhattan's first high tech 'project' - the Norden Bombsight and 'Precision Bombing' ....

Wartime Manhattan's PROJECTS

Wartime Manhattan's natural penicillin project and natural uranium bomb project were not high tech triumphs as they are usually portrayed to this day.

Instead they were both last minute/low tech/wide brush solutions to the failures of two of Manhattan's earlier High Tech /High Precision projects.

Those being man-made precision 'magic bullet' Sulfa drugs and man-made precision 'pickle barrel' Norden bomb sights.

Thus AR thinks that to continue to speak exclusively of 'The Manhattan Project' is a bit of a misnomer --- it would be much more accurate to speak of "Manhattan's Projects" and admit that their fascinating and interwoven story has never been properly told....