Dear me, is God a lawyer?
Because He (or She) certainly seems to be speaking out of the mouth on this issue.
————- WWII’s AAA : the Allies, the Axis and the Amorals ———-
All sides in WWII (the Allies, Axis and Amoral neutrals) in October 16 1940 at least agreed on one thing : the Big Battalions of the big civilizations were dominating the world and bound to do so into the distant future — Jesus’s Sermon On The Mount be damned.
And the most powerful of the Big Battalion civilizations had a decidedly nasty look about it.
Life seemed bleak indeed for the little nations and the little people of the world.
However, Manhattan doctor Martin Henry Dawson choose that moment to throw his small spinner in this collective work, intending to bring hope to a hopeless world. Hope from the invisibly smallest of beings, with his own all-natural livesaving penicillin pilot plant, the world’s first.
It was the first Manhattan Project.
Meanwhile everyone else in that fabled era of High Modernity also considered chemists to be The-Masters-Of-The-Universe and The-Smartest-Men-In-The-Room.
And definitely men : educated upper class urban white men of north western European origin.
Chemists themselves considered themselves to be a subset of the science of Geology —- viewing everything and everybody as merely an elaborated mixture of minerals and elements, just waiting to be broken down and built into something newer and better.
Ninety seven cents worth of common chemicals and a lot of un-distilled water was how I believe they dismissed humanity.
Botany (the second rate science reserved for women) with its vitalism hints that Life was more than just the sum of its mineral parts, was their sworn enemy.
To the chemists, penicillin, about the same small molecular size as quinine, would be just as easy as that malaria-fighting drug to synthesize.
But in the fact. In the end, at the end of the war and the end of High Modernity, the big factories of the chemists had totally failed to commercially synthesize penicillin and it was the left to Dawson’s tiny small factories of microbes to make the life-saving stuff.
Today, in our decidedly post-Modernity era, university chemistry departments are being closed all around the world and Bio-Tech (basically tiny bugs in bottles) is the flavour of the month among the “smart” money....
