The Pleomorphic Strep versus The Mecanno Set

Readers of my various blogs probably already know the names Robert Solow and Trevor Swan.

They are the two economists who first came up with today's simple, precise, predictable, lucid explanations why human society is always going to keep on getting richer and richer and richer: the endless growth theory.

(Sic ---- very very Sic....)

Solow actually got the so called 'Nobel Prize in Economics' for his version, but even he admits Swan should have got one too, for his earlier version.

These theories are 'simple' for orthodox economists anyway --- the best I can do to describe these theories is to say that they turn on a quasi-religious Faith in the total interchangability of  things like capital and labour and resources.

So no surprise that Solow is best known for using his theory to explain why the world can,  in effect, "get along without any natural resources".

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But Trevor Swan's my Target for Tonight.

He quite accurately used Mecanno Sets as his metaphor to describe the Modern Orthodox viewpoint on the interchangability of units of capital.

I, myself, actually date the rise and fall of Modernity from the rise and fall of those once popular construction kids for kids that Modernist parents gave their children to explain how the world worked.

That is how much I agree with Swan that , to misquote William Safire, they served as the "Mecannonic Metaphors of Modernity".

When the parents started having doubts about this explanation - during the mid 1960s - they stopped giving the kits as gifts and most of the companies went bankrupt.

There were dozens of established brands worldwide : in the English speaking world, Mecanno,Erector,Lego and Dinky are usually considered the most popular.

They first emerged about the time (around 1910) that Ernest Rutherford modified John Dalton's explanation that the 100 or so different elements are made of indivisible tiny objects, unique to each element, that he called atoms.

That meant if your nation had no atoms of something vital like chromium, you couldn't have military armour or be a superpower.

Not so, said Rutherford - the truly elemental objects are a few things like electrons, neutrons and protons.

An element is simply an unique ratio of these three objects - take some atoms of something dirt-common like carbon apart and then reassemble the sub atomic bits into a different ratio and hey presto : chromium metal till the cows come home.

Transmutation of atoms: instant superpower status.

Similarly, Mecanno sets can be cars one day and houses the next: a perfect way to prepare Modernist children to become grownup chemists or physicists.

This fairy tale should have unravelled when Physics discovered that far from there being just three stable indivisible lumps of Mecanno Magic, there were actually hundreds of sub atomic bits and they almost all seemed to have very short and very changable existences.

Rather than being stable Lego blocks, these sub atomic particles were more like the fabled Universal Solvent which transmuted and dissolved any container built to hold it.

But you already knew this intutively, didn't you ?

All those multi-billion dollar containers we call nuclear reactor buildings have a very short life, as the uncontrollable sub atomic particles transmute and weaken anything and everything wrapped around them.

This is the real - economic - reason why nuclear energy would be a total flop out in the real world if we taxpayers no longer subsidized them to the tune of billions and trillions of dollars because we believed the big lies Bad Faith Science has told us for 75 years.

But Bad Faith Science remains bloody but unbowed --- the internal science world moved on but the external public metaphor lives on: that ultimately Reality is simple, stable and predictably controllable - just as long as we scientists got lots of funding (and lots of prestige and respect as the controllers of this controllable world).

Martin Henry Dawson was a minor scientist, but he was a good faith scientist: when he saw that the evidence under his microscope didn't fit the theories he had been taught, he changed his theories.

He collected variants on commensal oral strep the way that some pre-war physicists collected sub-atomic particles.

But unlike the physicists, this physician altered his social behavior as a scientist, as a result of this new evidence he collected.

His wildly pleomorphic Strep bacteria, dissolving any straitjacket that medicine tried to put them in, was the microbiological Life-oriented equivalent of the chaotic, unpredictable world that sub atomic particles reveal at the micro level of Matter.

Dawson saw penicillin has coming out of this disorderly dynamic pleomorphic (aka shape-changing/morphing) world of competing fungi and bacteria struggling just to survive; his opponents saw it as just something one could quickly assemble in a factory, out of interchangable chemical parts , just like Mecanno sets....

Who was right?

In truth, Dawson ---- in myth, high technology science brought us penicillin.

Like I always sing, " Charles Manson stole penicillin from the penicillium - I'm here to steal it back..."

PS: Some might argue that Mecanno bits - or electrons and protons - are pretty pleomorphic themselves: they can be made into a car or a house or a bird.

But Dawson's bacterial transformations did not change one of a hundred trillion trillion strep bacteria into one of a hundred trillion trillion staph bacteria .

Any even if he did - why should we care - do really need one more staph bacteria and one less strep bacteria ????

 Rather his cars, in effect, became like a house while remaining a car, ie they were hybrids - something truly new.

They had many (pleo) shapes (morphs), ie diferent shapes with different biological effects, while still remaining bacteria.

So, for example, they could become part bacteria and part fungi.

 As when some fungi took up, via HGT, the bacteria genes to make a penicillin-like antibiotic , adapted it into today's penicillin and then turned it against bacteria...

4Fs, Women and the Grace of God

Con Mensa is Latin for 'at' 'a table'.

In time this led to Middle Age Latin's term commensalis and hence to English as commensal, meaning "dining at (sharing) a common table."

Christianity used  the term to describe Jesus's deliberate and very public breaking of traditional taboos against sharing one's own table with those people you deemed unworthy.

Biologists, at least some biologists, expanded this concept to mean that all life forms were interconnected and interdependent on each other for survival on Planet Earth.

But most biologists ( the modernists and atheists in particular) severely limit the meaning to  just those inferior beings that live on us and off of us, but who neither harm us or help us.

These small beings, in this harsh utilitarian view, are at best only tolerated, at least until we can find a way to eliminate them entirely, so we won't have to share anything with anyone.

But more and more biologists, heck more and more people, are coming to see that we will never succeed in being the only species on Earth.

They see that, like it or not, if we are to merely survive on this planet, we will need to struggle to get along with other beings, as best we can.

The intolerant Age of Modernity, constantly and fruitlessly seeking 100% perfect and purity, is every day relaxing its grip on our minds and more and more of us are comfortable slipping into the new Era of Commensality.

And not a minute too soon, if this planet is going to survive all that Modernity has done against it.

So it doesn't seem out of place to study and honor an early band of pioneers in "dining together at a common table" : Martin Henry Dawson's PEN "G" team of 4Fs, Women and the Grace of God.

(You might remember that this was originally intended as a cheap crack against Women and 4Fs, (and God !) by the historian of Vannevar Bush's in/famous OSRD, Dr Irvin Stewart, in his Official History, "Organizing Scientific Research for War" , bottom of Page 107.)

I quote: "Laboratories cannot be run by 4Fs or women or by the Grace of God alone." This is Stewart while talking about the OSRD committee devoted to medical research which had the public money and jackboot mentality, after the war and after Dawson was safely in his grave, to seize all the American credit for producing natural systemic penicillin .

In fact, the OSRD wasted the war fruitlessly seeking the Nirvana of man-made synthetic penicillin, while servicemen and civilians around the world were needlessly dying of infections natural penicillin could have cured.

It was the pushing and prodding of Dawson upon his citric acid-producing partner, Pfizer, that  produced the bulk of the wartime penicillin, not the OSRD's favorite Big Pharma, Merck.

George W Merck himself spent the bulk of the war creating ever more terrible diseases to kill people, while leading America's germ warfare program.

So it was left to little science, not Big Science, to give us PEN "G".

This little team of humans and tiny beings  brought us natural systemic penicillin, that great boon to humankind, against fierce resistance along the mean corridors of 1940s American Science, none meaner than down at the OSRD....

4Fs,Women & the Grace of God

Modernity, BIG MO, was soooo very big during the years of WWII.
It was supported by the vast majority of the world's middle classes
and by all sorts of elites, from low to high, left to right, everywhere.

 Above all, it was the value system of all the men running the world's governments and that mattered greatly, for at a time of Total War, no government burked any opposition.

But if it was big, it was big like a ballon and just as easily pricked and deflated.

Modernity finally had a war it could call its own and it was messing it up totally - in its own terms and certainly in the view of many ordinary individuals.

It might seem ready for a rebuke.

Still it does seem oddly poetic that BIG MO was able to be piqued by such as a small, sorry, odd of misfits as Dawson's little team was.

It does make for a sort of "the little project that could" ,come from behind, underdog, type story.

But, for once, all true ...

Helping MO go CO : 4Fs, Women and the Grace of God ...

In the short term,during his tragically short life, Martin Henry Dawson and his tiny band did nothing more than pique the supporters of Modernity.

Annoyed them, but nothing else.

But over the longer term, Dawson's Pen "G" team were in the first ranks of those easing Modernity, 'The Father Of All Evils' , off the global stage and replacing it with our new world of Commensality.

Their natural penicillin triumph was the first in a long series of blows that replace the hitherto dominant chemical cartels with today's biotech giants.

(A mixed blessing, admitably, but still a turn away from Man as the Be-all of all Knowledge to a recognition that we have much to learn from Nature.)

In the long run, it was Dawson's HGT DNA that was the fatal blow, coming from the direction of Science rather than  from post-Auschwitz morality, that finally did in (Social) Darwinism.

So, beyond saving the lives of a few World War II SBE patients and beyond finally kick-starting natural penicillin production worldwide during that war, Dawson's efforts had a far longer term, far wider, affect that is worth honoring...

Project "BIG" brought down by the smallest imaginable opponents...

Enraptured by Platonic delusions,the Modernity Project imagined Life to be basically stabilizable  and hence oriented to the K-selected and the Very Large.

Ironically,but appropriately, when Project "BIG" finally fell, it was brought down by the smallest imaginable of opponents.

Martin Henry Dawson was actually a rather typical scientist in his willingness to pique Peak Modernity.

He did so because of his faith that his new Science was a more accurate interpretation of the world than their old Science -- that's pretty conventional scientific behavior.

It was the steel of this new belief that added backbone to his Jello-like conventional morality.

This steel encouraged him not to be content to simply regret the wrongs done to the weak during the war as 'horrible but necessary' , as so many American do-gooders did.

It led him to fight, with his dying breath, to improve the plight of the weak -- even if that meant taking on all his colleagues and his all-powerful federal government.

Yes he was a 'good person', a very good person --- but he also was a good scientist.

His chosen pique , ie Old French for  prick/ needle/syringe, was only about .002 microns wide, the width of a strand of his transformation material (aka HGT DNA).

But while it was very small, it also went very deep; deep into the heart of Charles Darwin's predictable biological world of
Vertical Gene Transfers that fueled the certitudes of Social Darwinism and Eugenics & Biopolitics.

Equally small were the Anti-Matter fragments of Paul Dirac's
Sea that did so much to toss out the bland certitudes of John Dalton's vision of a predictable world.

Dawson and Dirac were basically ignored by mainstream science when they announced their discoveries in the early 1930s.

Neither, frankly, was the sort of charismatic personality that fire up a scientific audience with soaring phrases and visions.

But by 1945, Modernity - once given its oats in a war it could finally call its own - found that its predictable world was not in fact very predictable at all.

Slowly, for Science really only changes when enough Professors Emeritus die; slowly, slowly scientists began to see that Dawson and Dirac had better described Reality than Darwin and Dalton had ever done.

To today's leading-edge scientists, MO (Modernity) has indeed gone CO (Commensality) .

 Our world is not something we can predict and control by Big exclusive projects, but it is something we can survive in, if we display the flexibility and inclusivity of the small.

HGT is the model Humankind must emulate if we are to survive and endure on this planet that Modernity's projects have so messed up.

We can all help MO go CO.....

Peaked Modernity or Piqued Modernity ?

Both, actually.

World War Two, 1939-1945, was both the Apogee and the Nadir of the Enlightenment-Modernity Project.

In '21st Century-Speak', 1945 saw Peak Modernity staring down at a long, slow, slide into oblivion.

In the early 1940s, most middle class members of world civilization supported the Modernity project, almost without question.

But the war wasn't going as predicted, on any side.

And while 'Power Over Others' isn't really intrinsic to Modernity ( Pol Pot did pretty good in that department with pre-modern shovels and sticks), Precision is truly intrinsic to Modernity.

Put simply:

   "Modernity without Precision is not Modernity".

The flustered Modernity supporters had enough self-created problems of imprecision of their own, without needing a dying doctor and his tiny team flaunting their own defiance of Modernity in everyone's face.

Martin Henry Dawson piqued Peak Modernity.

 In return, Peak Modernity supporters, when it came to write the official and semi-official histories of World War Two, never forgave him.

But our world, today, looks a lot more like his than it does theirs, so I guess he got the last laugh....

PS: a note to grammarians : I look forward to explanations to flustered writers not to confuse 'Peking Modernity' with 'Piquing Modernity'. Puns, you gotta love 'em ---- at least if you read me !

Wartime Manhattan's OTHER 4F project...

Dr Martin Henry Dawson 's PEN project (producing natural
penicillin systemics to save the lives of  tossed-aside SBE patients) was only one of the two projects in wartime Manhattan that was centred upon the 4Fs.

No one, then or now, would disagree that Dawson was focused upon trying to save the lives of certain neglected 4Fs,above all else.

But my argument that the MED project, aka Leslie Groves Manhattan Engineering District project to build and drop an atomic bomb upon civilians,was focused on 4Fs will produce a hot disagreement among most.

I intend to demonstrate that the bloody mano-a-mano combat in the trenches of WWI, between the 1As of the world's civilized powers, led to the view among the eugenically-oriented majority of the civilized middle class that such warfare was extremely dysgenic for the 'race'.

'If war must happen,and sometimes it must', they reasoned,' it must be waged by our sides' 1As safe inside big machines'.

And it must waged upon the enemy's figurative 4Fs of the 4Fs : those too old, too young or too sickly to fight and living safely ,well behind the frontlines.

Clouds of gas, or of germs, or of radiation or of fire would descend upon the cities of the enemy and kill enough of these 4Fs until their frontline 1A relatives surrendered, without our frontline 1As having to fire a shot.

And our homefront 4Fs would also assume an unwitting combat role - the sickly poor, seeking charity medical care, would instead be experimented upon with prototypes of these deadly clouds, so we perfect them before we tried them upon the enemy 4Fs.

Ellen Welsome's THE PLUTONIUM FILES details these chilling medical experiments inflicted upon some of America's weakest, by the MED project.

Aktion T4, the Nazi war upon their Aryan weak, was the testing ground for their later war upon Jews, Poles,Gypsies et all in the Holocaust.

Just as the Nazis invoked a collective punishment upon innocent 4F civilians for the deaths of their 1A troops by the Resistance , killing 100 4F civilians for every one 1A soldier killed, so too America vowed to revenge the 2800 1As killed at Pearl Harbor a 100 times over by bombing Japanese civilians.

John Dower's WAR WITHOUT MERCY details that revenge against rather than fighting for life-sustaining values was what motivated most of America (from top leaders down to ordinary citizens) during World War Two.

And at least 280,000 Japanese civilians did die in the two atomic bomb blasts --- collective punishment indeed.

I won't claim to be telling a wholly new tale - just presenting it in a light rarely seen before....