Dr Martin Henry Dawson and his wife Marjorie Granger Dawson, together with leading industrialist Floyd Odlum and doctors Thomas Hunter and Dante Colitti were - socially - 'insiders' of a sort in the Anglo-American establishment running the Allied side of WWII.
But all five were also physically handicapped in some significant way and so had an empathy for what others - establishment outsiders with physical and intellectual handicaps - were experiencing as the Allies took on aspects of the Nazis' harshly utilitarian approach to winning a Total War.
Physical and more importantly moral misfits to the civilized world's eugenic consensus , they agitated and acted up on behalf of those judged as unfit and unworthy by Allied and Axis alike.
But as 'insiders' their 'outsider' criticisms was distinctly harder to refute than if they had been social outsiders as well.
It would make a better story to paint them as total outsiders and totally selfless but the facts don't allow it - they were selfless insiders and that is good enough...
My forthcoming biography "The OTHER Manhattan Project" celebrates the 75 years since Dr Dawson birthed Antibiotics in Manhattan on October 16th 1940. This project was more from Venus than Mars, more Emma Lazarus than Gordon Gekko. Defying governments, defying Allied/Axis eugenics, even defying the team's physical disabilities. But in the end, Manhattan beaconed the right of EVERYONE to receive life-saving penicillin out to a world tired, huddled and wretched.
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