Gladys Hobby : Calvinist on a catholic mission...

From September 1940 till December 1943, Dr Gladys Hobby, a devout Presbyterian on a catholic mission ("Penicillin-for-all") , daily visited the Green wards of Columbia-Presbyterian hospital, where the young victims of green SBE waited out their inevitable deaths.

Daily, she held aloft before them a petri dish just aglow with radiated golden penicillium mold, as if it were some marvelous medical monstrance.

As she and her tiny team undoubtedly believed it was.

My recent electoral life

Darrell Dexter, the Nova Scotia provincial premier, totally ignored my mental telepathy request that he delay the election till the Spring of 2014.

In August, I had just started my commitment to being a full time primary care giver to an extremely lively one year old and so my commitment to her "small values" had to come before those of the adult voters in Halifax when the election was called September 7th.

So I stood for office ran than ran for it.

I was willing and eager to take part in every all-candidates -debates but there were none at all in metro and maybe one in a few rural ridings.

Apathy reigned --- many people were eager to throw out Premier Dexter and just waiting for the first day available to do so.

They didn't need speeches.

Unusually lucky for an Independent in Canadian politics, I did get a brief article about my platform in both of the province's two big papers.

Perhaps this is why I got a respectable 125 votes --- which was almost twice as much as my last outing as a Green.

(In Canada , candidates of registered parties get that fact printed on the ballot but Independents can't even use a single word to describe their philosophy).

So most independents are lucky to poll one or two percent unless they are extremely well known or running in a rural riding with low voter turnover.

Next election, in 2017, I should be able to mount a stronger effort on behalf of exalting 'small values' ...

The OTHER Manhattan Project only made moral arguments rather than A-Bombs : but its impact has been immense

Moral conservatives such as today's American Republican Party frequently argue that morally medical care (such as expensive life saving drugs like Avastin) should only go to those who have worked hard enough to afford them.

They maintain this argument ( hello Obamacare !) even if this means that these drugs as a result of this limited market demand will remain in limited production forever and so be expensive forever.

Economics as if human survival really mattered

Unbridled growth, even at the cost of burning to death in our own carbon wastes.

This is what the mantra of "ever bigger is ever better" is leading us to.

What it is not leading to is ever greater happiness.

For if the richest and most powerful among us are not happy, who on earth can be ?

Some apparently.

They live and work in smaller walkable communities without - thanks to the likes of Skype and the internet - feeling at all cut off from the great wide world and distant friends and kin.

They use less carbon energy than you or I not because they restrain themselves like monks but because their life is set up spatially to use and need less carbon energy.

They don't miss what they don't need.

More green energy is not the solution to our carbon addiction : more, more, more is never much of a permanent solution - in tumour growth or in real world economics.

We must develop full happy lifestyles where we need less energy to be well off and happy.

Many small communities in the past developed some of the ways to do so ---- often centuries and millenniums ago.

The very smallest Manhattan Project improved the lives of ten billion people

That is an awful lot of us , being positively affected by so few of them.

Many people today would like to do something to make our world a better place but are overwhelmed by the seemingly impossible odds against having any visible effect.

Take heart !

There was never more than three other people at a time involved with Dr Martin Henry Dawson in his five year long quest to bring forth  'penicillin for all'.

His tiny project had no government grants grants nor much enthusiastic institutional support from his own university.

 Even Dawson's immediate bosses opposed his efforts - but this was nothing to the resistance he got from the Anglo-American medical establishment.

That medical establishment was firmly enmeshed within the wartime governments of "win the war at all costs (to human rights)" FDR and Churchill.

Dawson himself was dying the whole time of his quest.

Dying of a particularly debilitating disease (Myasthenia Gravis , MG) , well before the days when patients with it could expect to make their way through semi-normal days.

Remember this was during a war that saw both sides mentally dividing the world into those worthy and those unworthy of life-saving food and medicine.

"Penicillin for all" fitted into neither side's plans.

Yet this dying doctor and his ragtag team , dismissed as '4Fs,Women and the Grace of God', took on the war's two biggest wartime governments - and won.

How ?

Well for a start, but only for a start, while Dawson was very quiet man (he oozed non-charisma in the land of the alpha male scientist !) he was also equally very stubborn.

Very,very, stubborn in a quiet 'head down' sort of way.

But in the end, he indeed proved that we individuals can even reverse course of the biggest stars in the human heavens .... if only we're stubborn enough.

Leni and Adolf won't have approved of his ends, but Dawson's enduring legacy of "inexpensive penicillin for all" was a signal triumph, indeed, of sheer human willpower......

Pen !!! Stat !!!!

In the house of the beta-lactams there are many mansions and one might think the most modest one might be occupied by the oldest beta-lactam, the only begetter , the original,  penicillin G.

But it 'taint necessarily so' .

Talking to an emergency ward nurse recently I asked her if they ever used penicillin G much these days.

"Oh my yes ",she said, but added with a smile, "we don't call it penicillin G any more."

"What do you call it then?" , I asked.

"We call it 'Pen Stat' and we say it like we might say 'Code Blue' ..."

Nice to know it is still in the medical armoire and still pulled out whenever the going gets tough and the tough get going : Pen !!!!! Stat !!!!!!

Calvinist, on a catholic mission....

From September 1940 till December 1943, Dr Gladys Hobby, a devout Presbyterian on a catholic mission ("Penicillin-for-all") , daily visited the Green wards of Columbia-Presbyterian hospital, where the young victims of green SBE waited out their inevitable deaths.

Daily, she held aloft before them a petri dish just aglow with radiated golden penicillium mold, as if it were some marvelous medical monstrance.

As she and her tiny team undoubtedly believed it was.