Antidote to Auschwitz : Manhattan 'impure'

Modernity's parents & grandparents could have dismissed Auschwitz as simply the work of a few misguided modernist zealots.

In fact, that is what they did do.

But their own kids weren't buying it.

Dawson's nano-complexity vs Modernity's nano-simplicity

What truly makes one a Post-modernist and not a modernist is a strong acceptance that nanotechnology-sized objects (alive or not) can be extraordinarily complex, despite their very small size in relationship to the largest modern human civilizations.

As in 'sometimes able to do things that objects the size of humans (a billion times bigger) just can not do'.

Nothing spurs public interest like govt taking over civilian supplies : see Nylons & Penicillin

The mid July 1943 takeover by the US government of the distribution of penicillin, to give most of it to the military, resulted in intense sudden public interest (aka moral panic) in a hitherto little known and even lesser valued medicine.

No one then - or now - bothered to note that the American public, post July 1943, was actually receiving far more, not less, actual penicillin after the government takeover.

Science for '50s kids : little 'microbe made' life-savers and manmade 'Big Science' life-takers

Science for kids in elementary school at anytime is - well - pretty elementary.

My science memories as an elementary student (September 1956 - June 1963) were probably as much derived from my home life as from my teachers.

Synthesis not "more important than Hitler" : Adolf was ALL about synthesis

In 1942, in the worst days of WWII, William Haynes, an American economist and the world's leading expert on the history of plastics, dared to claim that synthesis would be seen as far more important than Hitler or Stalin ----- at least to our future great-grandchildren !

But Haynes was terribly wrong in thinking that then current global total war was somehow totally separated from the ongoing human efforts to synthesize and replace everything flawed in Nature and in Human Nature.

That was all that Hitler and the Nazi ideology was actually about - and one could claim it was much the same with Communism and Fascism.

The liberal capitalist nations followed at a distance in terms of the violence they were willing to commit to forcing the change --- but leading the way intellectually.

Eugenic science, after all, can be best be explained in terms common to the scientific world of plastic research - thermosetting plastic being the goal of the utopian eugenists....

OSRD synthesizes up a simulacra of penicillin success

Why settle for producing actual - lifesaving - wartime penicillin when you can offer up to generations of gullible academics and journalists the simulacra of faked wartime penicillin success instead ?

Touting microbial intelligence -- against a hegemony that required them to be stupid

Henry Dawson was a very early (1920s -1940s) pioneer in demonstrating - and then promoting - the claim of microbial intelligence against a fearful Modernity hegemony dependent on disbelieving all such claims.