Natural penicillin's unexpected triumph --- against Synthetics' 1939-1945 war against Nature

Big Science - Synthetic Science - had a lot of triumphs during WWII, the war that its promises , not Hitler's megalomania, actually started.

Synthetic Oil, Synthetic Rubber, Synthetic Silk, Synthetic Quinine , Synthetic Man , Synthetic Penicillin all sought to replace 'unreliable' natural products with new improved Man-perfected 'predictable' substitutes.

Synthetic Plutonium (sic) , Synthetic DDT, Synthetic Zyklon-B , Synthetic Freon, and Synthetic Napalm went one step further when Man was considered to have created new products that Nature could never have dreamed up.

Thank God for Nature then !

And as for Man-made predictability , it is worth recalling that human chemists only make a tiny minority of all chemical compounds.

Chemists usually stumble on a compound with useful properties and then go to work on replacing its side chains until even better properties emerge.

But so too the environment and biological beings do the same to the sidechains of Man-made chemical compounds such as Freon and DDT.

 In the process Nature created massive un-natural disasters Scientific Man could never have predicted precisely but human humility might have considered a distinct possibility .

1945's apogee of Modern science , Big science, Synthetic science : Zyklon-B, Plutonium, Napalm , DDT , Freon and leaded gas

Wow ! Quite a lot for Big Science (particularly chemists and synthetic scientists) to celebrate in 1945.

Set against that , a bit of a minor and undoubtedly temporary disappointment.

For there was (also in 1945) the totally unexpected failure by a thousand of the smartest guys in the room - nay the entire universe - to quickly synthesize the simple small molecule made by some small and extremely simple beings : penicillin.

Flash forward Gordon to 2015.