It wasn't a fair fight : the unknown dying doctor won.
It was a classic Hollywood-type story of powerless, selfless , agape-good triumphing over all-powerful evil of the most banal kind.
When the most powerful figure in wartime America, Vannevar Bush, silently reneged on FDR's promise to share the atomic energy secret with the British and resolved to keep the Bomb an America-only monopoly , he helped set in motion the Cold War that has burdened America with six trillion in extra nuclear weapon costs to date.
That was the Republican Vannevar Bush's greatest triumph and his enduring legacy for America.
He didn't tell the American public, or their elected representatives in Congress and the Senate - even FDR himself did not give "truly informed consent".
But when Bush tried to create a similar American-only commercial monopoly with patented synthetic penicillin and tried to keep wartime penicillin from the suffering public, he lost badly.
Here the dying doctor Martin Henry Dawson's vision won out instead.
Dawson believed the military effort against Hitler was competent, dutiful and uninspired - because the Allies were guilty of doing what Hitler's Nazis did , albeit in a highly diluted form.
He felt the Allies had to show its citizens, the neutral Nations and the nations occupied by Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo that the Allies' morality truly was different from that of the Axis.
Not by hollow promises set long in the future - but public, genuine, caring action, during the Total War itself .
If the Allies could be shown as going to extraordinary lengths to care for the "least of the these" , the "4Fs of the 4Fs" , the "weakest of the weak" , particularly at the height of a Total War, their much touted and much derided War Aims would finally have some real credibility.
That is why this twice wounded decorated war hero of the WWI trenches did not do any "war medicine" during the war but instead focused on growing penicillin in his hospital to save the least valued of American citizens during a war - young people dying of "invariably fatal" SBE - endocarditis.
His moral project , set uneasily along the mean corridors of wartime medical science , inspired many to do much better morally in this war.
Among those inspired by Dawson, none proved more effective than Italian-American surgical resident Dr Dante Colitti ,a president of a soda pop manufacturer John L Smith, and America's biggest capitalist (now working on behalf of the little guy), Floyd Odlum, special advisor to the head of the War Production Board.
Together they helped ensure that wartime penicillin was cheaply mass produced with non secret , public domain natural penicillin and shipped to the dying all over the world - soldier and civilian , allied, neutral and enemy alike.
Final Score : Good One - Evil Zero ....
It was a classic Hollywood-type story of powerless, selfless , agape-good triumphing over all-powerful evil of the most banal kind.
When the most powerful figure in wartime America, Vannevar Bush, silently reneged on FDR's promise to share the atomic energy secret with the British and resolved to keep the Bomb an America-only monopoly , he helped set in motion the Cold War that has burdened America with six trillion in extra nuclear weapon costs to date.
That was the Republican Vannevar Bush's greatest triumph and his enduring legacy for America.
He didn't tell the American public, or their elected representatives in Congress and the Senate - even FDR himself did not give "truly informed consent".
But when Bush tried to create a similar American-only commercial monopoly with patented synthetic penicillin and tried to keep wartime penicillin from the suffering public, he lost badly.
Here the dying doctor Martin Henry Dawson's vision won out instead.
Dawson believed the military effort against Hitler was competent, dutiful and uninspired - because the Allies were guilty of doing what Hitler's Nazis did , albeit in a highly diluted form.
He felt the Allies had to show its citizens, the neutral Nations and the nations occupied by Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo that the Allies' morality truly was different from that of the Axis.
Not by hollow promises set long in the future - but public, genuine, caring action, during the Total War itself .
If the Allies could be shown as going to extraordinary lengths to care for the "least of the these" , the "4Fs of the 4Fs" , the "weakest of the weak" , particularly at the height of a Total War, their much touted and much derided War Aims would finally have some real credibility.
That is why this twice wounded decorated war hero of the WWI trenches did not do any "war medicine" during the war but instead focused on growing penicillin in his hospital to save the least valued of American citizens during a war - young people dying of "invariably fatal" SBE - endocarditis.
His moral project , set uneasily along the mean corridors of wartime medical science , inspired many to do much better morally in this war.
Among those inspired by Dawson, none proved more effective than Italian-American surgical resident Dr Dante Colitti ,a president of a soda pop manufacturer John L Smith, and America's biggest capitalist (now working on behalf of the little guy), Floyd Odlum, special advisor to the head of the War Production Board.
Together they helped ensure that wartime penicillin was cheaply mass produced with non secret , public domain natural penicillin and shipped to the dying all over the world - soldier and civilian , allied, neutral and enemy alike.
Final Score : Good One - Evil Zero ....
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