What would Henry do ?

We all have our own very good reasons for not helping suffering humanity:

• We are so overworked on the job that we simply lack the time and energy.
• Our bosses are really tightening down on us - or our all-powerful government is.
• There are restrictions on where we can travel, what we can write, what we can do.
• We have a lot of little kids to raise - or a handicapped spouse.
• Or maybe we're dying of a painfully debilitating disease

Or maybe 'all of the above' : like WWII's Dr Martin Henry Dawson.

Still believe that just one person --- one overworked, over-burdened, over-censored, over-restricted and over-dying person --- can't possibly change our whole world, for the better, forever ?

Pure Modernity becomes Diverse Modernity : Dawson's legacy ?

The original Modernity (Pure Modernity) had very high hopes indeed for 'purifying' all of Life's gene pools, though to judge by their 'success' with the English Bulldog, that would only have resulted in pure-breeding Humanity and Nature into rapid extinction.

By contrast, scientist Martin Henry Dawson's study of bacterial diversity had convinced him that the most successful lifeforms throughout history, the microbes, had survived four billion years because they evolved to support the widest possible amount of diversity.

In particular, the microbes survived dire change because they deliberately sustaining even those strains judged by scientists to be useless degenerate defective failures.

Dawson's Unwashed Penicillin for the Great Unwashed or Florey's Pure Penicillin for the Pure & Fit ?

Wars, externally, may involve the clash of guns, but inside, they're really about the clash of ideas

You may think that the seventy five year old conflict over how best to make and distribute wartime penicillin was simply not capable of being freighted with the key clash of ideas and values behind WWII, but I am here trying to convince you that it was.

The greater evolutionary success, circa 1944 : Microbial diversity or Aryan uniformity ?

To Dr Martin Henry Dawson, after two decades of research into the astonishing and under-travelled scientific world of four billion years of microbial diversity, versatility and survival, the scientific answer to the secret of long term evolutionary success seemed perfectly clear.

This is not to say he did not also oppose Eugenics (Axis, Neutral & Allied) on purely moral grounds.

But in 1944, he stood almost alone in the scientific world in strongly opposing all attempts at perfecting, purifying and reducing the human gene pool.

For he saw it as positively harmful rather than helpful to humanity's future prospects.

he based this simply upon the great evolutionary success of the tiny, weak, simple, diverse bacteria versus the equally great survival failure of the much larger, stronger, smarter carnivores ---- and Nazis.....

Wartime penicillin : Patented for some or PD for all ?

For the young Black and Jewish men receiving those historical first needles (October 1940) of Dr Henry Dawson's "Impure Manhattan" brew. it is very important to note that this impure naturally grown penicillin were not at all dangerous, medically speaking.

As any 1940 era medical scientist or doctor, literate enough to read past medical journal articles on penicillin, knew well.

the ALLIED HOLOCAUST : pure penicillin, for only some

The Nazis never fully carried out their original Hunger Plan and the Allies never carried out their original Penicillin plan.

So the Holocaust of Jews and Romas remains the outstanding horror of WWII, in terms of lives snuffed out prematurely and total suffering induced.

But it was a close run thing : because both the Nazi Hunger Plan and the planned shortage of pandemic-preventing Allied penicillin at war's end had the potential to kill far far more than 'The Holocaust' actually achieved.

Teddy Roosevelt vs the Persister bacteria

Though 'persister' bacteria existed long before Teddy Roosevelt was born, they were not discovered until about twenty five years after he died, so he never lived long enough to see one of his many pet certitudes about 'Nature' being questioned by Nature.

Teddy Roosevelt campaigned long and hard against men and women who refused to have lots of children, or even no children at all.

He labelled them all as weaklings and defectives, traitors to the race and said their behavior was an affront to Nature and sure to lead to race suicide. But was he scientifically accurate in saying so ?

Teddy Roosevelt : 4F &1A, fit and unfit, defective, degenerate --- and heroic

When Theodore Roosevelt was a young adult, he was told by his doctors that because of his many serious chronic diseases, he should take up a soft indoor occupation if he wished a normal lifespan.

Instead, Teddy self-consciously took up his famous 'vigorous life'.

(However, partly due to his excessive vigour, he in the end only lived to age sixty, which he might also have reached if he had taken up the soft life !)

He lived in an age when most scientists considered that humans had a very, very, limited ability to alter the health their genome gave them at birth ------ except to drive it downhill and then inevitably pass that bad health on to their descendants.

Racial purity hedges assets, Racial diversity hedges risks

The two geographies of pure Auschwitz and impure Manhattan (those opposing antidotes to each other) nevertheless shared the concept of 'hedging', in its metaphorical sense.