7/30/2023 0 Comments Lone wolf world war 2![]() ![]() Venter did soldier on, but like the Manhattan Project, the ultimate success in mapping the human genone was the product of thousands of scientists in hundreds of institutions, in this case scattered around the world. Here was the perfect hero - a lone individualist.īut the project proved too costly, too intensive, too complex and - when President Bill Clinton declared that genes could not be patented - too unprofitable for a lone wolf to do it all by himself. At the time, the news media focused on former National Institutes of Health scientist Craig Venter, who formed a company named Celera to compete to map the genome. This effort to map the entire human DNA chain was launched by the government - an origin too impersonal to satisfy the entrepreneurial myth we cherish, and a process too slow for some of the researchers. More recently, the Human Genome Project showed this sort of collective innovation at work. No eureka moment, no lone hero, no one person challenging fate, science and bureaucracy. The truth? Dozens of physicists worked collectively, collaboratively and pretty much anonymously. government’s effort to create an atomic weapon during World War II might have put Albert Einstein or Robert Oppenheimer in the role of hero, scribbling equations for weeks at a blackboard before arriving, sweaty and fatigued, at the eureka moment. The new paradigm might have begun at the dawn of the nuclear age with the Manhattan Project. Even our movies celebrate lone wolves, whether Dirty Harry or Superman.īut while the idea of individual agency may have great appeal, innovation is increasingly coming from groups, not solitary heroes. Capitalism as a communal enterprise - dare we call it collective capitalism? - is the new engine of innovation, in America and beyond, but it doesn’t seem to square with our culture. We have long prided ourselves on self-reliance Americans subscribe to a national story that the country was created through the pluck and guts and brains of superlative individuals. ![]() At least as early as Benjamin Franklin, who wrote about his rise from meager means to American gentility, there was a cult of the self-made individual - especially in contrast to Europe, where success seemed inherited rather than earned. ![]() ![]() The roots of entrepreneurial reverence run deep in American consciousness and history. In our global, networked economy, the lone wolf is rapidly becoming an anachronism, one that threatens to impede innovation rather than fostering it. There is only one problem with this notion. Think Eli Whitney, Samuel Morse, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs - individualists and heroes all. Henke’s confrontation with the Gestapo and a detailed account of the sinking of the passenger liner Ceramic further add to the story, revealing the complex reality behind an image too long dominated by propaganda stereotypes.For all of our supposed no-nonsense pragmatism, Americans are romantics, and one of the things we love most is the idea of the lone-wolf capitalist: the intrepid, solitary genius who toils in a lab or workshop or office, and suddenly comes up with some startling invention or new way of doing business. The story of U-515 is also closely correlated to the overall conduct of the U-Boat war, including assessments of Karl Donitz’s strategy, the influence of technological innovations, and the contributions of Allied signal intelligence. Though the story Mulligan relates is engrossing and action-packed, it is also a carefully documented study that breaks new ground in uncovering the sociological background of Henke and his crew in short, it is a study in German history as well as a biography of a U-Boat Commander.Įxamining the backgrounds and attitudes of the crew, including their views on Hitler and the treatment of the Jews, Mulligan sheds new light on the men who constituted an elite in Hitler’s Wehrmacht. The story of Werner Henke–and a narrative outlining the history of his boat, U-515, and its crew–forms the basis for a biography of a man who defies the stereotypes of German character, who never fit in as a career officer in the German Navy, but who chose a suicidal death in acceptance of the code of the military service whose rules he continually bent and broke. This book relates the life and the death of the rebel German seaman who became one of the most successful U-Boat commanders of World War II. ![]()
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