The Manhattan Engineering District aka The Manhattan Project aka The Bomb, was the biggest scientific project of WWII and indeed one of the biggest of all time.
In addition, it was one of the biggest engineering/manufacturing projects of the war.
By contrast, Martin Henry Dawson's wartime project, also set in Manhattan but sprouting no name at all, was one of the smallest projects of the war.
Deliberately small, in many ways.
Dawson sought to establish the absolute Right of LIFE for everyone in America - even the 4Fs of the 4Fs, even in the middle of a Total War.
Despite the small size of his project, despite the fact that he was dying of a disease that literally sapped all his energy, he succeeded where many other better funded, better connected social activists failed.
I suggest this was because his Jello-like conventional morality had the firm backbone of Dawson's understanding of new science discoveries that he had made.
He saw his numerous and powerful opponents as basing their appeals to him (to desist his project) on old and outdated scientific understandings , and so he could not and would not be moved.
If we base our morality on how we understand the ultimate realities and we see those ultimate realities through the Lens of Science, then when our scientific understanding changes so will our morality - with powerful consequences.
Our world and the world of 1942 looks very different: Dawson isn't the whole reason, but he's a mighty good place to start....
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
The OTHER Manhattan Project...
... Establishing the Right of Life.
Dr Martin Henry Dawson wasn't the most publicly articulate of individuals, to put it mildly.
However, his public deeds have stood in, just fine, for his lack of public words.
In the late Fall of 1940, I think he saw his prominent university, together with the American scientific establishment and his government, begin to act a bit like an Nazi , in their admirable attempts to stop the Nazis.
He may have felt that the minute we start acting like the Nazis, they've already started to win the war.
It probably started when he saw a Parkinson-afflicted patient named Charlie Aronson, probably a Russian or Polish born Jew, being set to lower priority (in the informal triage system), when it came to seriously treating his SBE disease.
This was because Dawson's university medical school, along with all of American medicine, began putting much less emphasis on Social Medicine (the strong helping the weak and the sick) and much more on War Medicine (the strong helping the fit and the strong).
If you want to see it as the American Right using the upcoming war as an excuse to turn back the advances of the American Left in the area of health care, few historians are going to call you wrong.
Dawson had the conventional Jello-like morality of his 134 million other fellow Americans - the sort of morality that publicly disapproved of the mass killing of Jews but stopped short of doing anything direct and immediate to stop it.
And he was dying of a terrible disease that literally sapped all of his strength.
Nevertheless he successfully defied his government at the height of its powers and moral authority.
Dawson succeeded in getting many others to ACT UP and defy the wartime government as well, until it bowed to massive public pressure and returned the Right Of Life to the weakest of its citizens.
He made sure his Natural penicillin would save Charlie and all the world's sick, in war as in peace ---- and it still does.
I am fascinated why a dying man was able to do so when so many better known, more motivated, more experienced social activists and critics failed in their wartime efforts to make the government do right.
I have come to believe the answer lies in his private, personal research project.
From 1926 till his death in 1945, Dawson was privately consumed by his fascination as to how weak, tiny, brainless bacteria and other microbes managed to co-exist and even flourish in a world seemingly dominated by beings much larger and smarter than they.
Dr Dawson did pioneering work in some of the most seminal Biology of the 20th Century : HGT DNA/Quorum Sensing/Microbial Mimicry/Biofilms.
He began to feel that the tiniest beings are very clever indeed, perhaps in some ways, even cleverer than the largest , smartest beings on Earth: us.
Through this work, over time, I think he began to fundamentally doubt the human counterpart to this: that it was unfortunately inevitable that Might was Right in the workings of human affairs
as well.
It was his new science, as critical to our understanding of our world today as Paul Direc's new science proved to be, that allowed Dawson to dispute the dictates of Charles Darwin and John Dalton
that drove the governments of Hitler and FDR.
It was his understanding of this new science that gave his moral jello the firm backbone of the latest science and led him to stubbornly oppose the entreaties of all his colleagues .
For they based their morality upon an older - and in Dawson's eyes - much discredited science.
I believe it was his newly found scientific certitude that enabled this most uncharismatic of men to become a moral beacon to others...
I believe it is a truism that while the Flag may follow the Constitution, the Supreme Court follows NATURE and SCIENCE .
Which is to say that our understanding of the ultimate reality, today mediated through the Lens of Science, is what generates and gives force to our sense of morality.
So it that when our scientific view of the world changes, as it did for Dawson, so does our sense of what is right and wrong, with sometimes powerful consequences...
Dr Martin Henry Dawson wasn't the most publicly articulate of individuals, to put it mildly.
However, his public deeds have stood in, just fine, for his lack of public words.
In the late Fall of 1940, I think he saw his prominent university, together with the American scientific establishment and his government, begin to act a bit like an Nazi , in their admirable attempts to stop the Nazis.
He may have felt that the minute we start acting like the Nazis, they've already started to win the war.
It probably started when he saw a Parkinson-afflicted patient named Charlie Aronson, probably a Russian or Polish born Jew, being set to lower priority (in the informal triage system), when it came to seriously treating his SBE disease.
This was because Dawson's university medical school, along with all of American medicine, began putting much less emphasis on Social Medicine (the strong helping the weak and the sick) and much more on War Medicine (the strong helping the fit and the strong).
If you want to see it as the American Right using the upcoming war as an excuse to turn back the advances of the American Left in the area of health care, few historians are going to call you wrong.
Dawson had the conventional Jello-like morality of his 134 million other fellow Americans - the sort of morality that publicly disapproved of the mass killing of Jews but stopped short of doing anything direct and immediate to stop it.
And he was dying of a terrible disease that literally sapped all of his strength.
Nevertheless he successfully defied his government at the height of its powers and moral authority.
Dawson succeeded in getting many others to ACT UP and defy the wartime government as well, until it bowed to massive public pressure and returned the Right Of Life to the weakest of its citizens.
He made sure his Natural penicillin would save Charlie and all the world's sick, in war as in peace ---- and it still does.
I am fascinated why a dying man was able to do so when so many better known, more motivated, more experienced social activists and critics failed in their wartime efforts to make the government do right.
I have come to believe the answer lies in his private, personal research project.
From 1926 till his death in 1945, Dawson was privately consumed by his fascination as to how weak, tiny, brainless bacteria and other microbes managed to co-exist and even flourish in a world seemingly dominated by beings much larger and smarter than they.
Dr Dawson did pioneering work in some of the most seminal Biology of the 20th Century : HGT DNA/Quorum Sensing/Microbial Mimicry/Biofilms.
He began to feel that the tiniest beings are very clever indeed, perhaps in some ways, even cleverer than the largest , smartest beings on Earth: us.
Through this work, over time, I think he began to fundamentally doubt the human counterpart to this: that it was unfortunately inevitable that Might was Right in the workings of human affairs
as well.
It was his new science, as critical to our understanding of our world today as Paul Direc's new science proved to be, that allowed Dawson to dispute the dictates of Charles Darwin and John Dalton
that drove the governments of Hitler and FDR.
It was his understanding of this new science that gave his moral jello the firm backbone of the latest science and led him to stubbornly oppose the entreaties of all his colleagues .
For they based their morality upon an older - and in Dawson's eyes - much discredited science.
I believe it was his newly found scientific certitude that enabled this most uncharismatic of men to become a moral beacon to others...
I believe it is a truism that while the Flag may follow the Constitution, the Supreme Court follows NATURE and SCIENCE .
Which is to say that our understanding of the ultimate reality, today mediated through the Lens of Science, is what generates and gives force to our sense of morality.
So it that when our scientific view of the world changes, as it did for Dawson, so does our sense of what is right and wrong, with sometimes powerful consequences...
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Berlin T4 ; Manhattan 4F
If World War Two was anything, it was War Among the Big Battalions.
Berlin's T4 project, the killing of hundreds of thousands of weak and small and 'useless'
Ayran GERMANS by other Ayran Germans - all through the war years, is the clearest example that even above nationality, race,religion and class, world war two's killing focused upon the killing the small.
Small was definitely not beautiful or fashionable back then.
Small people and small nations were speed bumps beneath the wheels of the mighty and the wise.
All of Civilization - be it Japanese, Russian, German or American agreed on this Cult of the Big.
However ,Martin Henry Dawson seems to have had a quarrel with this consensus within World Civilization, during those six dreadful years of war without mercy or chivalry.
So what did his 'small three' of October 1940 have in common ?
Well what The Spazz (Charlie Aronson), The Slime (the tiny penicillium cell factories producing his pencillin ) and The Ramshackle Pilot (Dawson's makeshift penicillin-producing pilot project in the corridors of Columbia Presbyterian) all had in common was that they were small and weak and foolish , at least by the dictates of the day.
The Fall of 1940 saw Columbia Presbyterian turn to offering War Medicine courses : now how to aid the war efforts of the 1A /fit was the new priority --- not in helping heal the 4Fs/unfit.
Charlie was dying of the then incurable terminal disease SBE and was a 4F of the 4Fs to his draft board.
A useless mouth and a drain on an overtaxed medical economy, in many doctors' minds - and some were even enboldened enough to say so publicly.
Even worse Charlie was a victim of post sleeping sickness parkinsonism - a spazz in 'non politically correct speak'.
Already, in Germany doctors were killing his kind if their names were something like Martin Bader (and not Adolf Hitler- himself a parkinson sufferer!).
Charlie was 'small' in the medical priorities of the time.
Next ,the slime. 'Natural' was not 'in' in those years - instead artificial/synthetic/man made/ chemically-made were all the buzz.
Civilizied opinion was firmly of the thought that penicillin shouldn't be talked up unless (and until) it was safe under a profitable manmade patent in a chemical factory.
Fermentation by microscopic ( bacteria-sized tiny) little biological factories seemed so inefficient, wasteful, dirty, impure.
Why you could make it up at home, without high tech factories and chemists with PhDs.
That was vaguely threatening to the professional class and anyway, it was so old fashioned - like farming for our food.
The last 'small' was Dawson's ramshackle pilot project, using 700 flasks filled with these trillions of tiny penicillium factories to yield a measly 50 US gallons of penicillin water .
His hospital and university dismissed his efforts and declined to give him a room for his work - and because penicillium, like beer yeast, stop eating if they are moved, this fatally doomed his project in terms of anything like medically useful yields.
That same university did see another tiny pilot project as having great value in a war economy of Big Battalions - so Fermi and Szilard did get the university support to get the Manhattan Project off the ground at Columbia.
If we ever blow up the world (instead of letting global warming burn it up), lets give some of the credit to Columbia.
Columbia made its moral choices and so Dawson had to move his penicillium growths in and out of spare classrooms and labs, wearing him out and killing off his yields.
So a freezing cold and dark fire escape became a makeshift ventilation hood while the hospital corridors stored his carboys of unconcentrated penicillin water.
The new way to develop a new drug like penicillin if you were the doctor first discovering it, even back then,was to quickly to become a consultant to a big drug company, seeking grants and production assistance from them in return for doing the basic science stuff.
You'd share in the resulting patents. But that ended it for you.
Another huge separate set of doctors would run clinical trials.
Finally the FDA would permit the drug company to sell the approved, pre-tested drug.
But it could only sell it only to drug stores, not directly to consumers.
In turn the dispensing druggists would in turn only sell it to patients upon the prescription of a GP doctor, who in turn was acting on the advice of a specialist doctor.
Many, many, many, separate hands would be involved.
Long gone were the days when rural doctors made up medications in competition with small town druggists AND big city drug companies AND metropolitan teaching hospitals --- AND in competition with patients and local healing women made up their own alternative medications.
To Civilization, Dawson was small time in doing everything himself.
But in fact ,he didn't want to do this pilot project - he just didn't give up when Big Pharma proved indifferent --- he saw patients dying needlessly in front of him - small patients.
He pulled a Banting on Big Pharma - called their bluff - it had worked for insulin and it worked, eventually, for penicillin as well.
The substance of Berlin's T4 project was never secret -- its evilness was widely reported in the world media.
Dawson did more than bemoan it - he answered with Manhattan's 4F project.
The three smalls confronted the Belief that 'Might Makes Right', 'Only the Strongest Survive', 'Its the Law of the Jungle' that Big
Battalion Civilization touted unquestioned in 1939.
The (moral) battle was on !
Berlin's T4 project, the killing of hundreds of thousands of weak and small and 'useless'
Ayran GERMANS by other Ayran Germans - all through the war years, is the clearest example that even above nationality, race,religion and class, world war two's killing focused upon the killing the small.
Small was definitely not beautiful or fashionable back then.
Small people and small nations were speed bumps beneath the wheels of the mighty and the wise.
All of Civilization - be it Japanese, Russian, German or American agreed on this Cult of the Big.
However ,Martin Henry Dawson seems to have had a quarrel with this consensus within World Civilization, during those six dreadful years of war without mercy or chivalry.
So what did his 'small three' of October 1940 have in common ?
Well what The Spazz (Charlie Aronson), The Slime (the tiny penicillium cell factories producing his pencillin ) and The Ramshackle Pilot (Dawson's makeshift penicillin-producing pilot project in the corridors of Columbia Presbyterian) all had in common was that they were small and weak and foolish , at least by the dictates of the day.
The Fall of 1940 saw Columbia Presbyterian turn to offering War Medicine courses : now how to aid the war efforts of the 1A /fit was the new priority --- not in helping heal the 4Fs/unfit.
Charlie was dying of the then incurable terminal disease SBE and was a 4F of the 4Fs to his draft board.
A useless mouth and a drain on an overtaxed medical economy, in many doctors' minds - and some were even enboldened enough to say so publicly.
Even worse Charlie was a victim of post sleeping sickness parkinsonism - a spazz in 'non politically correct speak'.
Already, in Germany doctors were killing his kind if their names were something like Martin Bader (and not Adolf Hitler- himself a parkinson sufferer!).
Charlie was 'small' in the medical priorities of the time.
Next ,the slime. 'Natural' was not 'in' in those years - instead artificial/synthetic/man made/ chemically-made were all the buzz.
Civilizied opinion was firmly of the thought that penicillin shouldn't be talked up unless (and until) it was safe under a profitable manmade patent in a chemical factory.
Fermentation by microscopic ( bacteria-sized tiny) little biological factories seemed so inefficient, wasteful, dirty, impure.
Why you could make it up at home, without high tech factories and chemists with PhDs.
That was vaguely threatening to the professional class and anyway, it was so old fashioned - like farming for our food.
The last 'small' was Dawson's ramshackle pilot project, using 700 flasks filled with these trillions of tiny penicillium factories to yield a measly 50 US gallons of penicillin water .
His hospital and university dismissed his efforts and declined to give him a room for his work - and because penicillium, like beer yeast, stop eating if they are moved, this fatally doomed his project in terms of anything like medically useful yields.
That same university did see another tiny pilot project as having great value in a war economy of Big Battalions - so Fermi and Szilard did get the university support to get the Manhattan Project off the ground at Columbia.
If we ever blow up the world (instead of letting global warming burn it up), lets give some of the credit to Columbia.
Columbia made its moral choices and so Dawson had to move his penicillium growths in and out of spare classrooms and labs, wearing him out and killing off his yields.
So a freezing cold and dark fire escape became a makeshift ventilation hood while the hospital corridors stored his carboys of unconcentrated penicillin water.
The new way to develop a new drug like penicillin if you were the doctor first discovering it, even back then,was to quickly to become a consultant to a big drug company, seeking grants and production assistance from them in return for doing the basic science stuff.
You'd share in the resulting patents. But that ended it for you.
Another huge separate set of doctors would run clinical trials.
Finally the FDA would permit the drug company to sell the approved, pre-tested drug.
But it could only sell it only to drug stores, not directly to consumers.
In turn the dispensing druggists would in turn only sell it to patients upon the prescription of a GP doctor, who in turn was acting on the advice of a specialist doctor.
Many, many, many, separate hands would be involved.
Long gone were the days when rural doctors made up medications in competition with small town druggists AND big city drug companies AND metropolitan teaching hospitals --- AND in competition with patients and local healing women made up their own alternative medications.
To Civilization, Dawson was small time in doing everything himself.
But in fact ,he didn't want to do this pilot project - he just didn't give up when Big Pharma proved indifferent --- he saw patients dying needlessly in front of him - small patients.
He pulled a Banting on Big Pharma - called their bluff - it had worked for insulin and it worked, eventually, for penicillin as well.
The substance of Berlin's T4 project was never secret -- its evilness was widely reported in the world media.
Dawson did more than bemoan it - he answered with Manhattan's 4F project.
The three smalls confronted the Belief that 'Might Makes Right', 'Only the Strongest Survive', 'Its the Law of the Jungle' that Big
Battalion Civilization touted unquestioned in 1939.
The (moral) battle was on !
Monday, December 12, 2011
The "Concert Manque" ? or "Three Waller" ?
When asked by a Canadian "what am I
working on, I explain, "its a sort of "Billy Bishop Goes To Manhattan".
" I mean a sort of 'Ten Lost Years' or 'Tighten the Traces, Haul in the Reins'".
They generally know what I mean, right away.
But would the rest of the world?
I doubt it.
However most educated Canadians already know how rurally-raised playright John Gray came to conceive of the format for his megahit "Billy Bishop Goes To War".
He did while touring rep theatre in rural southern Ontario.
He couldn't help noticing that most Canadians, deep down, think it is RUDE to spy on people up on stage, through a Fourth Wall Removed.
So he elected to have his actors pretend to be in a Christmas Concert -- and thus have an excuse to directly address the audience before they sing.
But his actors also pretend to be Billy Bishop, so I always felt John held back the full impact of his insight.
A better model might be those successful Canadian folksingers in coffeehouses or 'boite a chansons' who have learned to combine a bit of standup/ monologue cum performance art with their song.
They aren't an actor playing the role of a singer, they are a real life singer who tells stories and evokes the past ( rather than re-enacts it in character) with a few basic props, in both speech and song.
This isn't Fourth Wall Removed at all - it is 'Never Been A Fourth
Wall To Remove' .
A Three Waller - a concert.
But it can go too far.
When the performance only seems to be a concert - because the story telling and evoking is so extensive relative to the singing, and when it is also supported by too many and too obvious sound effects and props,(ie when it goes Broadway-wanna-be) it really is a concert manque, not a real concert, pure and simple.
Now, that's my objective: a Canadian-style talk 'n' sing three waller that doesn't degrade into a full blown concert manque ...
working on, I explain, "its a sort of "Billy Bishop Goes To Manhattan".
" I mean a sort of 'Ten Lost Years' or 'Tighten the Traces, Haul in the Reins'".
They generally know what I mean, right away.
But would the rest of the world?
I doubt it.
However most educated Canadians already know how rurally-raised playright John Gray came to conceive of the format for his megahit "Billy Bishop Goes To War".
He did while touring rep theatre in rural southern Ontario.
He couldn't help noticing that most Canadians, deep down, think it is RUDE to spy on people up on stage, through a Fourth Wall Removed.
So he elected to have his actors pretend to be in a Christmas Concert -- and thus have an excuse to directly address the audience before they sing.
But his actors also pretend to be Billy Bishop, so I always felt John held back the full impact of his insight.
A better model might be those successful Canadian folksingers in coffeehouses or 'boite a chansons' who have learned to combine a bit of standup/ monologue cum performance art with their song.
They aren't an actor playing the role of a singer, they are a real life singer who tells stories and evokes the past ( rather than re-enacts it in character) with a few basic props, in both speech and song.
This isn't Fourth Wall Removed at all - it is 'Never Been A Fourth
Wall To Remove' .
A Three Waller - a concert.
But it can go too far.
When the performance only seems to be a concert - because the story telling and evoking is so extensive relative to the singing, and when it is also supported by too many and too obvious sound effects and props,(ie when it goes Broadway-wanna-be) it really is a concert manque, not a real concert, pure and simple.
Now, that's my objective: a Canadian-style talk 'n' sing three waller that doesn't degrade into a full blown concert manque ...
Thursday, October 20, 2011
the OTHER Manhattan Project
The problems of 'Doctor D', 'Miss H' and of Charlie don't seemed to have loomed up very large in the work of historians, novelists, composers or movie makers in the 75 years since those problems first began.
Set along the mean hospital corridors of an America almost as much at war with itself as it was with the Axis, these problems seemed then - and seem to most now - far too small to consider posing alongside the grander epic themes of WWII.
But one person's hill of beans is another's monumental ground changer and I guess I am just one of those guys.
The physical bullets may have stopped flying but I think World War Two's real battle - which I think was an intellectual battle - goes on as strong as ever.
Did I actually say 'intellectual battle' ?
Silly me - I of course meant a battle between scientists - with scientists like Heinrich Himmler on the much bigger side.
That battle was all about confronting the messy,untidy,unequal variety one finds in Nature and in human society: it was all about whether we should celebrate it or should we seek to eliminate it.
We all think we know the relatively few who sought to tame and eliminate variety and diversity during World War Two, but is this actually true - or is it simply the propaganda of the victors talking ?
The story of 'Doctor D' (Doctor Martin Henry Dawson) should make us question the easy division of the participants in World War Two into two neat piles of the good guys and the bad guys.
The world is still divided between those scientists (and citizens) who think reality is fundamentally, at its base, simple, predictable and hence perfectible - and those who see it as irreductibly unpredictable and hence endlessly variegated.
The big battle today is over humans' ability to change the climate for better or for worse .
Back then, the big battle was over whether we want to create, at the point of a syringe, a volk democracy of equally healthy and strong people or whether we can learn to accept a messy hierarchy of differing talents and healths among human kind.
I hope Dawson's story will not merely seem like ancient history but rather will move people to look again at our current environmental disputes in a different light....
Set along the mean hospital corridors of an America almost as much at war with itself as it was with the Axis, these problems seemed then - and seem to most now - far too small to consider posing alongside the grander epic themes of WWII.
But one person's hill of beans is another's monumental ground changer and I guess I am just one of those guys.
The physical bullets may have stopped flying but I think World War Two's real battle - which I think was an intellectual battle - goes on as strong as ever.
Did I actually say 'intellectual battle' ?
Silly me - I of course meant a battle between scientists - with scientists like Heinrich Himmler on the much bigger side.
That battle was all about confronting the messy,untidy,unequal variety one finds in Nature and in human society: it was all about whether we should celebrate it or should we seek to eliminate it.
We all think we know the relatively few who sought to tame and eliminate variety and diversity during World War Two, but is this actually true - or is it simply the propaganda of the victors talking ?
The story of 'Doctor D' (Doctor Martin Henry Dawson) should make us question the easy division of the participants in World War Two into two neat piles of the good guys and the bad guys.
The world is still divided between those scientists (and citizens) who think reality is fundamentally, at its base, simple, predictable and hence perfectible - and those who see it as irreductibly unpredictable and hence endlessly variegated.
The big battle today is over humans' ability to change the climate for better or for worse .
Back then, the big battle was over whether we want to create, at the point of a syringe, a volk democracy of equally healthy and strong people or whether we can learn to accept a messy hierarchy of differing talents and healths among human kind.
I hope Dawson's story will not merely seem like ancient history but rather will move people to look again at our current environmental disputes in a different light....
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
The problems of three little people ...
... at the height of WWII --- and how their solution changed our whole world for the better, forever.
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Don't let my modest manner fool ya
Intellectually, I am damned immodest.
I don't think of us greens/ environmentalists as alternatives at all.
We hold the only accurate view of Reality -- it is our opponents that have a delusional scientific grasp on Reality.
This has been true since the 1920s, at least ; does it need a century to go by before they acknowledge this ?
We can only blame the teaching professions for the fact that kids in the 21st century still leave school stuffed full of the non-truths of the 19th century, by-passing the insights of 20th century science altogether.
If the human species is to survive, teachers must change - or go....
This post came from an old deleted blog called
I don't think of us greens/ environmentalists as alternatives at all.
We hold the only accurate view of Reality -- it is our opponents that have a delusional scientific grasp on Reality.
This has been true since the 1920s, at least ; does it need a century to go by before they acknowledge this ?
We can only blame the teaching professions for the fact that kids in the 21st century still leave school stuffed full of the non-truths of the 19th century, by-passing the insights of 20th century science altogether.
If the human species is to survive, teachers must change - or go....
This post came from an old deleted blog called
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