1940 Report on bacterial “persisters” finally makes the news — in 2020, signalling a further defeat of Modernity...

In 1940, Dr Gladys Hobby noted not all of the STREP bacteria were dying from massive doses of her homebrew penicillin...

Dr Martin Henry Dawson’s scientific partner, Dr Gladys Hobby, noted in 1940 that perhaps 1% of susceptible bacteria fail to die when a colony is hit hard by a massive dose of penicillin : these survivors were soon called persisters.

Recent scientific articles confirm these persisters are often due to successful “quorum sensing” ——another bacteria behaviour that Dr Dawson’s team first reported upon, this time in 1930.

Individual bacteria communicate by releasing chemical signals when the local environment changes.

When those chemicals reach a high enough local concentration (gradient) , the entire bacterial colony responds.

The chemical ‘signal’ couples with other chemicals already existing at low levels within all bacteria to trigger a chain of events that leads to some gene activities being scaled back while others expand.

These new gene actions are a useful (almost ‘rational’) response to the threat posed by the new environmental circumstances.

So when bacteria on the outer surface of a colony start to rapidly die en masse from an antibiotic, the chemicals they give off warns bacteria in the interior to divert ‘growth energy’ activities towards ‘survival mode’ energy activities instead.

The medical implications of the 1940 discovery were instantly accepted : but the philosophical implications were rejected - for eighty years.

The hegemonic power of 1940s Modernity was based on most people believing the claim that the biggest European-based civilizations represented the very top of Life —— and that bacteria represented the very bottom.

Quorum Sensing (basically all bacteria in a colony obeying the Covid dictate to “wear masks to stay alive”), together with the actions of such great European civilizers as Hitler and Stalin and Trump, threw all of that into question....