Microbe Hunters

by Paul De Kruif

  At once Pasteur told this new triumph to the Academy of Sciences—he had left off going to the Academy of Medicine after his brawl with Guérin—and he held out purple hopes to them that he would presently invent ingenious vaccines that would wipe out all diseases from mumps to malaria. “What is more easy,” he shouted, “than to find in these successive viruses a vaccine capable of making sheep and cows and horses a little sick with anthrax without letting them perish—and so preserving them from subsequent maladies?” Some of Pasteur's colleagues thought he was a little cocksure about this, and they ventured to protest. Pasteur's veins stood out on his forehead, but he managed to keep his mouth shut until he and Roux were on the way home, when he burst out, speaking really of all people who failed to see the absolute truth of his idea:

  “I would not be surprised if such a man were to be caught beating his wife!”

  Make no mistake—science was no cool collecting of facts for Pasteur; in him it set going the same kind of machinery that stirs the human animal to tears at the death of a baby and makes him sing when he hears his uncle has died and left him five hundred thousand dollars.

  But enemies were on Pasteur's trail again. Just as he was always stepping on the toes of physicians, so he had offended the high and useful profession of the horse doctors, and one of the leading horse doctors, the editor of one of the most important journals of horse doctoring, his name was Doctor Rossignol, cooked up a plot to lure Pasteur into a dangerous public experiment and so destroy him. This Rossignol got up with a great show of scientific fairness at the Agricultural Society of Melun and said:

  “Pasteur claims that nothing is easier than to make a vaccine that will protect sheep and cows absolutely from anthrax. If that is true, it would be a great thing for French farmers, who are now losing twenty million francs a year from this disease. Well, if Pasteur can really make such magic stuff, he ought to be willing to prove to us that he has the goods. Let us get Pasteur to consent to a grand public experiment; if he is right, we farmers and veterinarians are the gainers—if it fails, Pasteur will have to stop his eternal blabbing about great discoveries that save sheep and worms and babies and hippopotamuses!” Like this argued the sly Rossignol.

  At once the Society raised a lot of francs to buy forty-eight sheep and two goats and several cows and the distinguished old Baron de la Rochette was sent to flatter Pasteur into this dangerous experiment.

  But Pasteur was not one bit suspicious. “Of course I am willing to demonstrate to your society that my vaccine is a life-saver—what will work in the laboratory on fourteen sheep will work on sixty at Melun!”

  That was the great thing about Pasteur! When he prepared to take the rabbit out of the hat, to astonish the world, he was absolutely sincere about it; he was a magnificent showman and not below some small occasional hocus-pocus, but he was no designing mountebank. And the public test was set for May and June, that year.

  Roux and Chamberland—who had begun to see animals that were strange combinations of chickens and guinea-pigs in their dreams, to drop important flasks, to lie awake injecting millions of imaginary guinea-pigs, these fagged-out boys had just started off on a vacation to the country—when they received telegrams that brought them back to their exciting treadmill:

  COME BACK PARIS AT ONCE ABOUT TO MAKE PUBLIC DEMONSTRATION THAT OUR VACCINE WILL PROTECT SHEEP AGAINST ANTHRAX—L. PASTEUR.

  Something like that read these wires.

  They hurried back. Pasteur said to them: “Before the Agricultural Society of Melun, at the farm of Pouilly-le-Fort, I am going to vaccinate twenty-four sheep, one goat and several cattle—twenty-four other sheep, one goat and several other cattle are going to be left without inoculation—then, at the appointed time, I am going to inject all of the beasts with the most deadly virulent culture of anthrax bacilli that we have. The vaccinated animals will be perfectly protected—the not-vaccinated ones will die in two days of course.” Pasteur sounded as confident as an astronomer predicting an eclipse of the sun. . .

  “But, master, you know this work is so delicate—we cannot be absolutely sure of our vaccines—they may kill some of the sheep we try to protect—”

  “What worked with fourteen sheep in our laboratory will work with fifty at Melun!” Pasteur roared at them. For him just then, there was no such thing as a mysterious tricky nature, an unknown full of failures and surprises—the misty Infinite was as simple as two plus two makes four to him just then. So there was nothing for Roux and Chamberland to do but to roll up their sleeves and get the vaccines ready.

  The day for the first injections came at last. Their bottles and syringes were ready, their flasks were carefully labeled—“Be sure not to mix up the first and second vaccine, boys!” shouted Pasteur, full of a gay confidence, as they left the Rue d'Ulm for the train. As they came on the field at Pouilly-le-Fort, and strode toward the sheds that held the forty-eight sheep, two goats and several cattle, Pasteur marched into the arena like a matador, and bowed severely to the crowd. There were senators of the Republic there, and scientists and horse doctors and dignitaries, and hundreds of farmers; and as Pasteur walked among them with his little limp—it was however a sort of jaunty limp—they cheered him mightily, many of them, and some of them snickered.

  And there was a flock of newspaper men there, including the now almost legendary de Blowitz, of the London Times.

  The sheep, fine healthy beasts, were herded into a clear space; Roux and Chamberland lighted their alcohol lamps and gingerly unpacked their glass syringes and shot five drops of the first vaccine—the anthrax bacilli that would kill mice but leave guinea-pigs alive, into the thighs of twenty-four of the sheep, one of the goats, and half of the cattle. The beasts got up and shook themselves and were labeled by a little gouge punched out of their ears. Then the audience repaired to a shed where Pasteur harangued them for half an hour—telling them simply but with a kind of dramatic portentousness of these new vaccinations and the hopes they held out for suffering men.

  Twelve days went by and the show was repeated. The crowd was there once more and the second vaccine—the stronger one whose bacilli had the power of killing guinea-pigs but not rabbits—was injected, and the animals bore up beautifully under it and scampered about as healthy sheep, goats and cattle should do. The time for the fatal final test drew near; the very air of the little laboratory became finicky; the taut workers snapped at each other across the Bunsen flames. Pasteur was never so appallingly quiet—and the bottle washers fairly jumped across the room to fill his growled orders. Every day Thuillier, Pasteur's new youngest assistant, went out to the farm to put his thermometer carefully under the tails of the inoculated animals to see if they had fever—but thank God, every one of them was standing up beautifully under the heavy dose of the vaccine that was not quite murderous enough to kill rabbits.

  While the heads of Roux and Chamberland turned several hairs grayer, Pasteur kept his confidence, and he wrote, with his old charmingly candid opinion of himself: “If success is complete, this will be one of the finest examples of applied science in this country, consecrating one of the greatest and most fruitful discoveries.”

  His friends shook their heads and lifted their shoulders and murmured: “Napoleonic, my dear Pasteur,” and Pasteur did not deny it.

  4

  Then on the fateful thirty-first of May all of the forty-eight sheep, two goats, and several cattle—those that were vaccinated and those to which nothing whatever had been done—all of these received a surely fatal dose of virulent anthrax bugs. Roux got down on his knees in the dirt, surrounded by his alcohol lamps and bottles of deadly virus, and awed the crowd by his cool flawless shooting of the poisonous stuff into the more than sixty animals.

  With his whole scientific reputation trusted to this one delicate test, realizing at last that he had done the brave but terribly rash thing of letting a frivolous public judge his science Pasteur rolled and tossed around in his bed and got up fifty times that night. He said absolutel
y nothing when Madame Pasteur tried to encourage him and told him, “Now, now everything will come out all right”; he sulked in and out of the laboratory; there is no record of it, but without a doubt he prayed. . .

  Pasteur did not fancy going up in balloons and he would not fight duels—but no one can question his absolute gameness when he let the horse doctors get him into this dangerous test.

  The crowd that came to judge Pasteur on the famous second day of June, 1881, made the previous ones look like mere assemblages at country baseball games. General Councilors were here to-day as well as senators; magnificoes turned out to see this show—tremendous dignitaries who only exhibited themselves to the public at the weddings and funerals of kings and princes. And the newspaper reporters clustered around the famous de Blowitz.

  At two o'clock Pasteur and his cohorts marched upon the field and this time there were no snickers, but only a mighty bellowing of hurrahs. Not one of the twenty-four vaccinated sheep—though two days before millions of deadly germs had taken residence under their hides—not one of these sheep, I say, had so much as a trace of fever.

  They ate and frisked about as if they had never been within a thousand miles of an anthrax bacillus.

  But the unprotected, the not vaccinated beasts—alas—there they lay in a tragic row, twenty-two out of twenty-four of them; and the remaining two were staggering about, at grips with that last inexorable, always victorious enemy of all living things. Ominous black blood oozed from their mouths and noses.

  “See! There goes another one of those sheep that Pasteur did not vaccinate!” shouted an awed horse doctor.

  5

  The Bible does not go into details about what the great wedding crowd thought of Jesus when he turned water into wine, but Pasteur, that second of June, was the impresario of a modern miracle as amazing as any of the marvels wrought by the Man of Galilee, and that day Pasteur's whole audience—who many of them had been snickering skeptics—bowed down before this excitable little half-paralyzed man who could so perfectly protect living creatures from the deadly stings of sub-visible invaders. To me this beautiful experiment at Pouilly-le-Fort is an utterly strange event in the history of man's fight against relentless nature. There is no record of Prometheus bringing the precious fire to mankind amid applause; Galileo was actually clapped in prison for those searchings that have done more than any other to transform the world. We do not even know the names of those completely anonymous geniuses who first built the wheel and invented sails and thought to tame a horse.

  6

  But here stood Louis Pasteur, while his twenty-four immune sheep scampered about among the carcasses of the same number of pitiful dead ones, here stood this man, I say, in a gruesomely gorgeous stage-setting of an immortal drama, and all the world was there to see and to record and to be converted to his own faith in his passionate fight against needless death.

  Now the experiment turned into the likeness of a revival. Doctor Biot, a healer in horses who had been one of the most sarcastic of the Pasteur-baiters, rushed up to him as the last of the not-vaccinated sheep was dying, and cried: “Inoculate me with your vaccines, Mr. Pasteur—just as you have done to those sheep you have saved so wonderfully––Then I will submit to the injection of the murderous virus! All men must be convinced of this marvelous discovery!”

  “It is true,” said another humbled enemy, “that I have made jokes about microbes, but I am a repentant sinner!”

  “Well, allow me to remind you of the words of the Gospel,” Pasteur answered him. “Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons that need no repentance.”

  The great de Blowitz cheered and rushed off to file his telegram to the London Times and to the newspapers of the world: “The experiment at Pouilly-le-Fort is a perfect, an unprecedented success.”

  The world received this news and waited, confusedly believing that Pasteur was a kind of Messiah who was going to lift from men the burden of all suffering. France went wild and called him her greatest son and conferred on him the Grand Cordon of the Legion of Honor. Agricultural societies, horse doctors, poor farmers whose fields were cursed with the poisonous virus of anthrax—all these sent telegrams begging him for thousands of doses of the life-saving vaccine. And Pasteur, with Roux and Chamberland and Thuillier, responded to them with a magnificent disregard of their own health—and of science. For Pasteur, poet that he was, had more faith than the wildest of his new converts in this experiment.

  In answer to these telegrams Pasteur turned the little laboratory in the Rue d'Ulm into a vaccine factory—huge kettles bubbled and simmered with the broth in which the tame, the life-saving, anthrax bacilli were to grow. Delicately—but so frantically that it was not quite delicate enough—Roux and Chamberland worked at weakening the murderous bacilli just enough to make the sheep of France a little sick, but not too sick from anthrax. Then all of them sweat at pouring numerous gallons of this bacillus-swarming soup which was the vaccine, into little bottles, a few ounces to each bottle, into clean bottles that had to be absolutely free from all other germs. And they had to do this subtle job without any proper apparatus whatever. I marvel that Pasteur ever attempted it; surely there never has been such blind confidence raised by one dear—but Lord! it might be simply a lucky—experiment.

  In moments snatched from this making of vaccine Roux and Chamberland and Thuillier scurried up and down the land of France, and even to Hungary. They inoculated two hundred sheep in this place and five hundred and seventy-six in that—in less than a year hundreds of thousands of beasts had got this life-saving stuff. These wandering vaccinators would drag themselves back into the laboratory from their hard trips, they would get back to Paris probably wanting to get a few drinks or spend an evening with a pretty girl or loaf over a pipe—but Pasteur could not stand the smell of tobacco smoke, and as for wine and women, were not the sheep of France literally baa-ing to be saved? So these young men who were slaves of this battler whose one insane thought was “find-the-microbe-kill-the-microbe”—these faithful fellows took off their coats and peered at anthrax bacilli through the microscopes until their eye rims got red and their eyelashes fell out. In the middle of this work—with the farmers of France yelling for more vaccine—they began to have strange troubles: contaminating germs that had no business there began to pop up among the anthrax bacilli; all at once a weak vaccine that should have just killed a mouse began to knock off large rabbits. . . Then, just as the scientific desperadoes got these messes straightened out, Pasteur would come in, nagging at them, fuming, fussing because they took so long at their experiments.

  He wanted to try to find the deadly virus of hydrophobia.

  And now at night the cluttering of the guinea-pigs and the scurrying fights of the buck-rabbits in their cages were drowned by the eerie noise of mad dogs howling—sinister howls that kept Roux and Chamberland and Thuillier from sleep. . . What would Pasteur ever have done—he surely would never have got far in his fight with the messengers of death—without those fellows Roux and Chamberland and Thuillier?

  Gradually, it was hardly a year after the miracle of Pouilly-le-Fort, it began to be evident that Pasteur, though a most original microbe hunter, was not an infallible God. Disturbing letters began to pile up on his desk; complaints from Montpothier and a dozen towns of France, and from Packisch and Kapuvar in Hungary. Sheep were dying from anthrax—not natural anthrax they had picked up in dangerous fields, but anthrax they had got from those vaccines that were meant to save them! From other places came sinister stories of how the vaccine had failed to work—the vaccine had been paid for, whole flocks of sheep had been injected, the farmers had gone to bed breathing Thank-God-For-Our-Great-Man-Pasteur, only to wake up in the morning to find their fields littered with the carcasses of dead sheep, and these sheep—which ought to have been immune—had died from the lurking anthrax spores that lay in their fields. . .

  Pasteur began to hate to open his letters; he wanted to
stop his ears against snickers that sounded from around corners, and then—the worst thing that could possibly happen—came a cold terribly exact scientific report from the laboratory of that nasty little German Koch in Berlin, and this report ripped the practicalness of the anthrax vaccine to tatters. Pasteur knew that Koch was the most accurate microbe hunter in the world.

  There is no doubt that Pasteur lost some sleep from this aftermath of his glorious discovery, but, God rest him, he was a gallant man. It was not in him to admit, either to the public or to himself, that his sweeping claims were wrong.

  “Have not I said that my vaccines made sheep a little sick with anthrax, but never killed them, and protected them perfectly? Well, I must stick to that,” you can hear him mutter between his teeth.

  What a searcher this Pasteur was, and yet how little of that fine selfless candor of Socrates or Rabelais is to be found in him. But he is not in any way to be blamed for that, for those two last were only, in their way, looking for truth, while Pasteur's work carried him more and more into the frantic business of saving lives, and in this matter truth is not of the first importance. . .

  In 1882, while his desk was loaded with reports of disasters, Pasteur went to Geneva, and there before the cream of disease-fighters of the world he gave a thrilling speech, subject: “How to guard living creatures from virulent maladies by injecting them with weakened microbes.” Pasteur assured them that: “The general principles have been found and one cannot refuse to believe that the future is rich with the greatest hopes.”