Microbe Hunters

by Paul De Kruif

  Spallanzani held immense correspondences with half the doubters and searchers of Europe. By mail he was a great friend of that imp, Voltaire. He complained that there were few men of talent in Italy, the air was too humid and foggy—he became a leader of that impudent band of scientists and philosophers who unknowingly prepared the bloodiest of revolutions while they tried so honestly to find truth and establish happiness and justice in the world. These men believed that Spallanzani had spiked once for all that nonsense about animals—even the tiniest ones—arising spontaneously. Led by Voltaire they cracked vast jokes about the Vegetative Force and its parents, the pompous Buffon and his laboratory boy, Father Needham.

  “But there is a Vegetative Force,” cried Needham, “a mysterious something—I'll admit you can't see it or weigh it—that can make life arise out of gravy or soup or out of nothing at all, perhaps. Maybe it can stand all of that roasting that Spallanzani applies to it, but what it needs particularly is a very elastic air to help it. And when Spallanzani boils his flasks for an hour, he hurts the elasticity of the air inside the flasks!”

  Spallanzani was up in arms in a moment, and bawled for Needham's experiments. “Has he heated air to see if it got less elastic?” The Italian waited for experiments—and got only words. “Then I'll have to test it out myself,” he said, and once again he put seeds in rows of flasks and sealed off their necks in a flame—and boiled them for an hour. Then one morning he went to his laboratory, and cracked off the neck of one of his bottles. . .

  He cocked his ear—he heard a little wh-i-s-s-s-t “What's this,” he muttered, and grabbed another bottle and cracked off its neck, holding his ear close by. Wh-i-s-s-s-t! There it was again. “That means the air is coming out of my bottle, or going into it,” he cried, and he lighted a candle and ingeniously held it near the neck of a third flask as he cracked the seal.

  The flame sucked inward toward the opening.

  “The air's going in—that means the air in the bottle is less elastic than the air outside, that means maybe Needham is right!”

  For a moment Spallanzani had a queer feeling at the pit of his stomach, his forehead was wet with nervous sweat, his world tottered around him. . . Could that fool Needham have made a lucky stab, a clever guess about what heat did to air in sealed up flasks? Could this windbag knock out all of this careful finding of facts, which had taken so many years of hard work? For days Spallanzani went about troubled, and snapped at students to whom before he had been gentle, and tried to comfort himself by reciting Dante and Homer—and this only made him more grumpy. A relentless torturing imp pricked at him and this imp said: “Find out why the air rushes into your flasks when you break the seals—it may not have anything to do with elasticity.” The imp woke him up in the night, it made him get tangled up in his masses. . .

  Then like a flash of lightning the explanation came to him and he hurried to his work bench—it was covered with broken flasks and abandoned bottles and its muddled disarray told his discouragement—he reached into a cupboard and took out one of his flasks. He was on the track, he would show Needham was wrong, and even before he had proved it he stretched himself with a heave of relief—so sure was he that the reason for the little whistling of air had come to him. He looked at the flasks, then smiled and said, “All the flasks that I have been using have fairly wide necks. When I seal them in the flame it takes a lot of heat to melt the glass till the neck is shut off—all that heat drives most of the air out of the bottle before it's sealed up. No wonder the air rushes in when I crack the seal!”

  He saw that Needham's idea that boiling water outside the flask damaged the elasticity of the air inside was nonsense, nothing less. But how to prove this, how to seal up the flasks without driving out the air? His devilish ingenuity came to help him, and he took another flask, put seeds into it, and filled it partly with pure water. Then he rolled the neck of the bottle around in a hot flame until it melted down to a tiny narrow opening—very, very narrow, but still open to the air outside. Next he let the flask cool—now the air inside must be the same as the air outside—then he applied a tiny flame to the now almost needle-fine opening. In a jiffy the flask was sealed—without expelling any of the air from the inside. Content, he put the bottle in boiling water and watched it bump and dance in the kettle for an hour and while he watched he recited verses and hummed gay tunes. He put the flask away for days, then one morning, sure of his result, he came to his laboratory to open it. He lighted a candle; he held it dose to the flask neck; carefully he broke the seal—wh-i-s-s-s-t! But the flame blew away from the flask this time—the elasticity of the air inside the flask was greater than that outside!

  All of the long boiling had not damaged the air at all—it was even more elastic than before—and elasticity was what Needham said was necessary for his wonderful Vegetative Force. The air in the flask was super-elastic, but fishing drop after drop of the soup inside, Spallanzani couldn't find a single little animal. Again and again, with the obstinacy of a Leeuwenhoek, he repeated the same experiment. He broke flasks and spilled boiling water down his shirt-front, he seared his hands, he made vast tests that had to be done over—but always he confirmed his first result.

  5

  Triumphant he shouted his last experiment to Europe, and Needham and Buffon heard it, and had to sit sullenly amid the ruins of their silly theory, there was nothing to say—Spallanzani had spiked their guts with a simple fact. Then the Italian sat down to do a little writing himself.

  A virtuoso in the laboratory, he was a fiend with his quill, when once he was sure his facts had destroyed Needham's pleasant myth about life arising spontaneously. Spallanzani was sure now that even the littlest beasts had to come—always—from beasts that had lived before. He was certain too, that a wee microbe always remained a microbe of the same kind that its parents had been, just as a zebra doesn't turn into a giraffe, or have musk-oxen for children, but always stays a zebra—and has zebra babies.

  “In short,” shouted Spallanzani, “Needham is wrong, and I have proved that there is a law and order in the science of animals, just as there is in the working of the stars.”

  Then he told the muddle that Needham would have turned the science of little animals into—if good facts hadn't been found to beat him. What animals this weird Vegetative Force could make—what tricks it could do—if it had only existed! “It could make,” said Spallanzani, “a microscopic animal found sometimes in infusions, which like a new Protean, ceaselessly changes its form, appearing now as a body thin as a thread, now in an oval or spherical form, sometimes coiled like a serpent, adorned with rays and armed with horns. This remarkable animal furnishes Needham an example, to explain easily how the Vegetative Force produces now a frog and again a dog, sometimes a midge and at others an elephant, to-day a spider and to-morrow a whale, this minute a cow and the next a man.”

  So ended Needham—and his Vegetative Force. It became comfortable to live once more; you felt sure there was no mysterious sinister Force sneaking around waiting to change you into a hippopotamus.

  Spallanzani's name glittered in all the universities of Europe; the societies considered him the first scientist of the day; Frederick the Great wrote long letters to him and with his own hand made him a member of the Berlin Academy; and Frederick's bitter enemy, Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria, put it over the great king by offering Spallanzani the job of professor in her ancient and run-down University of Pavia, in Lombardy. A pompous commission came, a commission of eminent Privy Councillors weighed down with letters and Imperial Seals and begged Spallanzani to put this defunct college on its feet. There were vast interminable arguments and bargainings about salary—Spallanzani always knew how to feather his nest—bargains that ended in his taking the job of Professor of Natural History and Curator of the Natural History Cabinet of Pavia.

  Spallanzani went to the Museum, the Natural History Cabinet, and found that cupboard bare. He rolled up his sleeves, he lectured about everything, he made huge public
experiments and he awed his students because his deft hands always made these experiments turn out successfully. He sent here and there for an astounding array of queer beasts and strange plants and unknown birds—to fill up the empty Cabinet. He climbed dangerous mountains himself and brought back minerals and precious ores; he caught hammer-head sharks and snared gay-plumed fowl; he went on incredible collecting expeditions for his museum—and to work off that tormenting energy that made him so fantastically different from the popular picture of a calm scientist. He was a Roosevelt with all of Teddy's courage and appeal to the crowd, but with none of Teddy's gorgeous inaccuracy.

  In the intervals of this hectic collecting and lecturing he shut himself in his laboratory with his stews and his microscopic animals, and made long experiments to show that these beasts obey nature's laws, just as men and horses and elephants are forced to follow them. He put drops of stews swarming with microbes on little pieces of glass and blew tobacco smoke at them and watched them eagerly with his lens. He cried out his delight as he saw them rush about trying to avoid the irritating smoke. He shot electric sparks at them and wondered at the way the little animals “became giddy” and spun about, and quickly died.

  “The seeds or eggs of the little animals may be different from chicken eggs or frog's eggs or fish eggs—they may stand the heat of boiling water in my sealed flasks—but otherwise these little creatures are really no different from other animals!” he cried. Then just after that he had to take back his confident words. . .

  “Every beast on earth needs air to live, and I am going to show just how animal these little animals are by putting them in a vacuum—and watching them die,” said Spallanzani to himself, alone one day in his laboratory.

  He cleverly drew out some very thin tubes of glass, like the ones Leeuwenhoek had used to study his little animals. He dipped the tube into a soup that swarmed with his microbes; the fluid rushed up into the hair-fine pipe. Then Spallanzani sealed off one end of it, and ingeniously tied the other end to a powerful vacuum pump, and set the pump going, and stuck his lens against the thin wall of the tube. He expected to see the wee animals stop waving the “little arms which they were furnished to swim with”; he expected them to get giddy and then stop moving. . .

  The pump chugged on—and nothing whatever happened to the microbes. They went nonchalantly about their business and did not seem to realize there was such a thing as life-maintaining air! They lived for days, for weeks—and Spallanzani did the experiment again and again, trying to find something wrong with it. This was impossible—nothing can live without air—how the devil do these beasts breathe? He wrote his amazement in a letter to his friend Bonnet:

  “The nature of some of these animalcules is astonishing! They are able to exercise in a vacuum the functions they use in free air. They make all of their courses, they go up and down in the liquid, they even multiply for several days in this vacuum. How wonderful this is! For we have always believed there is no living being that can live without the advantages air offers it.”

  Spallanzani was very proud of his imagination and his quick brain and he was helped along in this conceit by the flattery and admiration of students and intelligent ladies and learned professors and conquering kings. But he was an experimenter too—he was really an experimenter first, and he bent his head humbly when a new fact defeated one of the brilliant guesses of his brain.

  Meanwhile this man who was so rigidly honest in his experiments, who would never report anything but the truth of what he found amid the smells and poisonous vapors and shining machines of his laboratory, this superbly honest scientist, I say, was planning low tricks to increase his pay as Professor at Pavia. Spallanzani, the football player, the climber of mountains and explorer, this Spallanzani whined to the authorities at Vienna about his feeble health—the fogs and vapors of Pavia were like to make him die, he said. To keep him the Emperor had to increase his pay and double his vacations. Spallanzani laughed and cynically called his lie a political gesture! He always got everything he wanted. He got truth by dazzling experiments and close observation and insane patience; he obtained money and advancement by work—and by cunning plots and falsehoods; he received protection from religious persecution by becoming a priest!

  Now, as he grew older, he began to hanker for wild researches in regions remote from his little laboratory. He must visit the site of ancient Troy whose story thrilled him so; he must see the harems and slaves and eunuchs, which to him were as much a part of natural history as his bats and toads and little animals of the seed infusions. He pulled wires, and at last the Emperor Joseph gave him a year's leave of absence and the money for a trip to Constantinople—for his failing health, which had never been more superb.

  So Spallanzani put his rows of flasks away and locked his laboratory and said a dramatic and tearful good-by to his students; on the journey down the Mediterranean he got frightfully sea-sick, he was shipwrecked—but didn't forget to try to save the specimens he had collected on some islands. The Sultan wined and dined him, the doctors of the seraglios let him study the customs of the beauteous concubines. . . and afterward, good eighteenth century European that he was, Spallanzani told the Turks that he admired their hospitality and their architecture, but detested their custom of slavery and their hopeless fatalistic view of life. . .

  “We Westerners, through this new science of ours, are going to conquer the seemingly unavoidable, the apparently eternal torture and suffering of man,” you can imagine him telling his polite but stick-in-the-mud Oriental friends. He believed in an all powerful God, but while he believed, the spirit of the searcher, the fact finder, flashed out of his eye, burdened all his thought and talk, forced him to make excuses for God by calling him Nature and the Unknown, compelled him to show that he had appointed himself first assistant to God in the discovery and even the conquering of this unknown Nature.

  After many months he returned overland through the Balkan Peninsula, escorted by companies of crack soldiers, entertained by Bulgarian dukes and Wallachian Hospodars. At last he came to Vienna, to pay his respects to his boss and patron, the Emperor Joseph II—it was the dizziest moment, so far as honors went, of his entire career. Drunk with success, he thought, you may imagine, of how all of his dreams had come true, and then—

  6

  While Spallanzani was on his triumphant voyage a dark cloud gathered away to the south, at his university, the school at Pavia that he had done so much to bring back to life. For years the other professors had watched him take their students away from them, they had watched—and ground their tusks and sharpened their razors—and waited.

  Spallanzani by tireless expeditions and through many fatigues and dangers had made the once empty Natural History Cabinet the talk of Europe. Besides he had a little private collection of his own at his old home in Scandiano. One day, Canon Volta, one of his jealous enemies, went to Scandiano and by a trick got into Spallanzani's private museum; he sniffed around, then smiled an evil grin—here were some jars, and there a bird and in another place a fish, and all of them were labeled with the red tags of the University museum of Pavia! Volta sneaked away hidden in the dark folds of his cloak, and on the way home worked out his malignant plans to cook the brilliant Spallanzani's goose; and just before Spallanzani got home from Vienna, Volta and Scarpa and Scopoli let hell loose by publishing a tract and sending it to every great man and society in Europe, and this tract accused Spallanzani of the nasty crime of stealing specimens from the University of Pavia and hiding them in his own little museum at Scandiano.

  His bright world came down around his ears; in a moment he saw his gorgeous career in ruins; in hideous dreams he heard the delighted cackles of men who praised and envied him; he pictured the triumph of men whom he had soundly licked with his clear facts and experiments—he imagined even the return to life of that fool Vegetative Force. . .

  But in a few days he came back on his feet, the center of a dreadful scandal, it is true, but on his feet with his back to
the wall ready to face his accusers. Gone now was the patient hunter of microbes and gone the urbane correspondent of Voltaire. He turned into a crafty politician, he demanded an investigating committee and got it, he founded Ananias Clubs, he fought fire with fire.

  He returned to Pavia and on his way there I wonder what his thoughts were—did he see himself slinking into the town, avoided by old admirers and a victim of malignant hissing whispers? Possibly, but as he got near the gates of Pavia a strange thing happened—for a mob of adoring students came out to meet him, told him they would stick by him, escorted him with yells of joy to his old lecture chair. The once self-sufficient, proud man's voice became husky—he blew his nose—he could only stutteringly tell them what their devotion meant to him. Then the investigating committee had him and his accusers appear before it, and knowing Spallanzani as you already do, you may imagine the shambles that followed! He proved to the judges that the alleged stolen birds were miserably stuffed, draggle-feathered creatures which would have disgraced the cabinet of a country school—they had been merely pitched out. He had traded the lost snakes and the armadillo to other museums and Pavia had profited by the trade; not only so, but Volta, his chief accuser, had himself stolen precious stones from the museum and given them to his friends. . .

  The judges cleared him of all guilt—though it is to-day not perfectly sure that he wasn't a little guilty; Volta and his complotters were fired from the University, and all parties, including Spallanzani, were ordered by the Emperor to stop their deplorable brawling and shut up—this thing was getting to be a smell all over Europe—students were breaking up the classroom furniture about it, and other universities were snickering at such an unparalleled scandal. Spallanzani took a last crack at his routed enemies; he called Volta a perfect bladder full of wind and invented hideous and unprintably improper names for Scarpa and Scopoli; then he returned peacefully to his microbe hunting.