Wartime Penicillin's coke-addled Janus Month : March 1943

In March 1943 (midway through the war) , for the very first time in WWII, a part of wartime penicillin research that had been hitherto public was finally and effectively put under official government censorship : anything involving the chemistry of penicillin.

At the very same time, other (hitherto effectively secret) parts of the penicillin story were about to become globally publicized in official government propaganda !

"I am not making this up", as Canada's Liberal Party is wont to say.

The chemical nature of penicillin was about to become Top Secret and there was to be no more public articles by Howard Florey's or Henry Dawson's team, in journals like NATURE and SCIENCE, all about the chemical structure of penicillin to aid German or Japanese chemists on how to synthesize penicillin themselves.

But given the wide availability of all the previous chemistry structure-oriented articles in these two, the biggest of all general science journals in the world, the Axis might not need much further help.

Because back issues of these two journals were still easily available to the scientific diplomatic attaches of the many still-neutral nations  in  capital cities like London, Ottawa and Washington, the Axis chemists may not have needed to employ spies, to seek out the newest secret research .

But the Top Secret classification reflected a new found confidence at Merck, Oxford and the ORSD that the penicillin molecule had finally been cracked and the chemistry of the molecule was a commercial and possibly military secret well worth keeping.

Even Robert Coghill, the penicillin czar at the fermenatation-oriented NRRL labs,  was about to turn his coat to the side of synthesis.

What better time then to hand the hated finicky biological approach to penicillin production to the War Production Board, (the WPB) ?

Who cared if the WPB and the normally-secretive US Army seemed determined to widely publicize , to Allied, Axis and neutral nation alike, just how good this new fangled penicillin really was for military medicine ?

Yes.

Because for the first time in the war, parts of penicillin other that its chemistry (such as its clinical miracle cures which had been hitherto in America effectively if unofficially censored) were going to become the focus of official government propaganda  and broadcast to the heavens.

Janus month indeed.

In an variant on "the first shall be last and the last first", what had been public was about to become secret and what had been secret was about to become public.

In January 1943, Karl Meyer, the chemist of Dawson's team, could still publish the team's latest best guess on the chemical formula for penicillin, but the team still couldn't discuss their results on treating patients since October 1940.

By January 1944, Dawson could publish his success with patients and penicillin to the world via  JAMA, but later that same year, Meyer's harmless paper on biological products of penicillin written to be delivered at a conference,  was forced to be withdrawn at the last minute, for fear he'd say something chemical and hence secret.

Bizarre but true ...... !

NATURE survey confirms LIBERTARIAN GREED is humanity's dominant ideology

      Okay, okay, who uses gallows humour to describe our terrestrial spiral downwards into total disaster?
      But I just couldn't resist the opportunity to make a pun and a serious point about the just-published, highly depressing, BARNOSKY SURVEY.

     On June 6 2012, two dozen scientists led by Professor Barnosky issued a survey style report in the science journal NATURE, on whether the Earth is approaching another 'biological global tipping point' similar to past disasters caused by oxygen-emitting microbes, asteroids, massive volcanic eruptions or ice ages.
    Those massive die-offs of biodiversity led to the killing of from 50 to 95% of all species in a very short time in geological terms.
    They usually happened when 50 to 90% of the various individual, smaller, biosphere regions were disrupted.
    So how is MAN-THE-TAKER stacking up ?
    As disaster-causers go, pretty good, thank you very much.
    Currently 7 billion of us, most of us relatively poor in North American terms, have converted 43% of all the Earth's surface to agriculture or urban use.
     Soon, by 2050, we will be 9.3 billion - and that is 9.3 billion ambitious humanoids all striving to use resources 'just like a Canadian' : if they and their governments succeed, make that to be a 300% increase over what we consume today.
    Since we already directly consume, just our one species, 20% of the primary terrestrial bio production, I see that as putting us well past a dreadful tipping point ----60% will be consumed by us.
    Not enough food left for the bees that make our crops grow, to let our trees give us oxygen and get rid of CO2, not enough ocean microbes to kickstart the entire food cycle and other vital 're-cycle cycles'.
    In addition, we have broken up and separated large swaths of similar terrain by our human settlements and roads - this will prevent many species from steadily moving north or south within similar terrain, to gradual adjust to a rapidly changing climate.
    Stuck in their old habitat, now not right for their kind, they won't adjust quick enough in most cases - they will simply die.
   Movement, not mutations, is how most species - humans too - have always adjusted to rapid deadly changes in their own little biosphere.
    Now here , at last, is where the pun comes in : this was a survey published in NATURE but also a survey of Nature -Nature as in  all that stuff outside our air-conditioned little computer rooms.
    It says its hurting and it says it is because one species - ours - is too greedy, too individualistic, too self-centred, too egotistic - to share the earth's wealth or to even put a little in.
    Nature says it knows what ideology drives humanity
and it is Isobel Paterson,Rose Wilder Lane and Ayn Rand's Libertarianism.
    The Three Harpies From Hell : hellbent on killing Mother Nature and Mankind. Female Serial killers.
    Greed is not Good : we need to develop a set of moral values that sees greed as evil as we today see murder as.
    Global Commensality is the Matter to Libertarianism's Anti-Matter, our cheese to their chalk, our water to their oil.
   It does not say "let us take, take, take and never give anything back". It says "we will only take some of the world's resources and protect all of it -- we will share with all lifeforms the only lifeboat we can see in this vast hostile Universe".
   So which side are you on ?  Its a line in the sand : either for skygod libertarian greed -----or------for earthling commensality with all other lifeforms.....
  

As Earth approaches tipping point of disaster, SPACERS head for "PLANET B" : Mars

   Yesterday, June 6th 2012 should have marked the 68th anniversary of a famous 'invasion' of Earth : D-Day, the invasion of Nazi-held Europe.
   That invasion seems ( but only seems) to have gone un-noticed in the general gloom of a report released in NATURE that same day.

   A group of about two dozen scientists from a wide variety of disciplines had gathered to see if there were signs that the Earth's biosphere had ,or was , approaching the tipping point into non-stop disaster.
   They knew that stable flexible systems ( biological,mechanical, financial, political, etc ) can withstand short term, small, assaults by adjusting.
       But under large and prolonged assaults they can suddenly go into chaotic behavior until they return to relative, long term, stability at a very different set of arrangements --- at possibly a higher or possibly lower level of activity.
    In terms of the entire Earth ,we can study the remains of such past dramatic topping points : distant mass extinctions as well as relatively recent sudden shifts into and out of near global glaciation.
   The scientists in the NATURE report say we are close to disaster by pointing out how much of the Earth's surface and bio product is under the sway of just one species: us.
   It is close to 50% now and going to hit 65% soon, as humanity goes from 6 billion mostly poor people to 9 billion hungry want-to-be-rich people.
    We are takers ,not givers, and failing to share the world with the ultimate primary producers who actually give us all our oxygen, all of our food, all of the carefully balanced atmosphere.
   Past tipping point disasters have come from similarly unbalancing of hitherto balanced systems : the danger figure quoted is 50% - 90% etc.
   They freely admit that they could be right or they could be wrong.
    It is Russian Roulette, but for 9 billion.
    But on balance, these scientists say the disaster gun is fully loaded.
     So we believe them and  prepare, at great cost, to reduce the disaster.
     But when we pull the trigger 50 years from now - nothing happens - no disaster.
   False scare. "We was right,waste of money", exalts the DENIERS.
    Or perhaps, and more likely, the Deniers win today's battle : they say don't fear, the environmental gun isn't loaded - relax - and we believe them and do nothing.
    But 50 years from now, when we do pull the trigger, it does go off and 6 billion out of 9 billion die starvation deaths.
    I would, personally, prefer to prepare for disaster and be proven wrong by my survival, than to do nothing and be proven wrong---- by my own death.
    In other words, the "disaster" of good news, to me, is no disaster at all.
    But not everybody took the new news of disaster as gloomily as Earthlings did, or as derisively as the Deniers did.
    The deniers' fellow travellers ( for once, not a metaphor at all) the SPACERS, were taking the impending doom of Planet Earth very seriously.
   They have a Plan B, or more accurately, a Planet B : Mars.
    Soon they see all of humanity, or at least all of humanity with a spare million bucks under the mattress, living in Mars colonies.
   They don't see any need to worry about reducing this upcoming disaster for a planet they already see as filthy and clapped-out of mineral and energy wealth .
     Instead the science and technology of the godless scientists is about to rapture-up the wealthy 1% into a grand new secular heaven.
    We, or at least the wealthy 1% of we, were talking about invasions after all ,on the 68th anniversary of the D-Day invasion: not "The Invasion from Mars" of H G Wells, but rather "The Invasion of Mars".
    Ironic - no ????????