If Modernity’s science beat the Germans when our troops couldn’t, why was it abandoned right after it won in 1945?

As a young student watching postmodern thinking’s rise to domination at our universities, I never could quite understand or accept the standard chronology of how it exactly came about.

I felt a bit like Disraeli’s wife, half-convinced that now the Romans came before the Greeks.

It is an almost unchallenged consensus that the Germans were so much better at fighting than the much larger Allied side such that it was only our civilized  modern science that enabled us to finally, after six long and bloody years, to defeat the much smaller but far more barbaric Nazi regime.

Fair enough.

But if 1945’s victory was the high point of the Modernity Project, why were we so quick to “drop the pilot” that very same year ?

Because after all, there is at least as big a consensus that POST modernity began in 1945.

And perhaps because I am a Green, I never totally bought the academic account of what postmodernity was : it seemed to be too much about what academic postmodernity was —— well then, what about the 99% of the world without academic yearnings ?

I saw a world of the 99% almost turn on a dime to repute the “living better chemically” world  that I grew up in.

Anything and everything had suddenly become Natural —— the anti matter version of chemistry’s matter.

But as I began digging deeper and deeper into the early history of  penicillin, I realized I had seen the world change  myself, because it happened within myself.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, we school kids picked up some scientific tropes, as much from sci fi movies as from NFB films in school.

Two tropes in particular : one of middle aged, middle class men in white lab coats gravely turning dials before huge machines in large pristine looking factories cum labs : Atomic Power (and Atomic Bomb making) in the Atomic Age.

The other was of young girls tending beakers of slimy green mould as if they were babies and of sweaty men scoping up jungle muck and sewage run-off — searching for the invisibly tiny factories that produced the antibiotics that might save kids like ourselves from infectious diseases.

I was a messy child, small, always new in town and inclined to be bullied and I worried about a world-ending atomic war.

I was definitely on the side of the tiny messy living factories that were trying to save my life, not end it.

I don't think I was the only Baby Boomer to pick sides in this manner, because when I became an adult I found many, many Boomers who felt the same way.

It wasn’t supposed to come out that way.

During the war years, it was a near universal consensus that Man could inevitably best anything Mother Nature could do —- and yes the gender distinctions were very evident and deliberate.

Pure artificial penicillin would soon be cleanly made by male chemists in clean white laboratory factories and slimy stinky impure crude fungus-made penicillin would disappear, like the legions of young women temporarily lured away from their barefoot posts in the kitchen to tend the slime.

Yet another triumph for Synthetic Autarchy, as Man set about quietly replacing everything natural and wild with a more efficient & tamed man-made version.

The Allied elites put much scarce money and resources behind the efforts to create artificial penicillin and right to moments before the D-Day public launch of penicillin, it seemed a certainty.

So much so that I actually began to wonder if Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey were originally set to receive the Nobel Prize for CHEMISTRY, but when Martin Henry Dawson slash Pfizer’s natural penicillin suddenly succeeded when all their efforts to create synthetic artificial penicillin failed, they had to settle for the Nobel in Medicine as a consolation prize.

If a postmodern scholar actually put their eyes about their own universities they might notice that Chemistry Departments are being closed or greatly reduced (nor is Physics in such great shape either) while entire new campuses are being build for the burgeoning Life Sciences.

Almost as hard to find are the Zoology and Botany departments within those Life Science campuses : everything second Life Science seems to be called Micro this or Micro that : much of Life Science today is focused upon creatures about the size of Dawson’s penicillin fungus.

Penicillin Post Modernity was on the ascendancy long before  worries about Climate Change and the idea that Nature Bites Back arrived in town but it had well tilled the ground in advance of these ideas.

Post Modernity’s Return of the Natural is a lot lot bigger than just wartime Natural Penicillin, but it must continue to be studied because wartime Natural Penicillin was Post Modernity’s Ground Zero....

Return of the Natural

Quite possibly the biggest impact of Natural Penicillin is to be found at your local supermarket

One can be astounded/delighted/offended by the 180 degree turning in the marketing of the store bought loaf of bread, before and after the unexpected 1945 triumph of NATURAL penicillin, and yet never sense it had anything at all to do with that antibiotic.

As Aaron Bobrow-Strain explains in his highly readable “WHITE BREAD”, before 1945, our daily bread was marketed as if it could only rendered healthy if it was made out of bleached flour by professional chemists in equally bleached white labs coats —- working in pristine white laboratories.

However, by the end of the 20th Century, it was now only regarded as truly healthy if it was made out of natural whole wheat, stone ground fresh before our eyes by sweaty honest artisans with funny ethnic names, before being baked over the coals of a cheery wood hearths.

Everything possible and many things impossible are being marketed today as NATURAL —— an marketing position that would have been regarded as absolutely perverse before 1945.

This blog will argue that we should view the concepts of Post-Modernity and The Return of the Natural as being one and the same.

And as my blog posts will show, it unexpectedly happened as a result of one dying doctor’s brave efforts to give public domain NATURAL penicillin as least a “fair go” as the Allied governments were giving it purely artificial patented rival...