“We are all animated with a superior passion, the passion for progress and for truth!” he shouted—but unhappily he said no word about those numerous occasions when his vaccine had killed sheep instead of protecting them.
At this meeting Robert Koch sat blinking at Pasteur behind his gold-rimmed spectacles and smiling under his weedy beard at such an unscientific inspirational address. Pasteur seemed to feel something hanging over him, and he challenged Koch to argue with him publicly—knowing that Koch was a much better microbe hunter than an argufier. “I will content myself with replying to Mr. Pasteur's address in a written paper, in the near future,” said Koch—who coughed, and sat down.
In a little while this reply appeared. It was dreadful. In this serio-comic answer Dr. Koch began by remarking that he had obtained some of this precious so-called anthrax vaccine from the agent of Mr. Pasteur.
Did Mr. Pasteur say that his first vaccine would kill mice, but not guinea-pigs? Dr. Koch had tested it, and it wouldn't even kill mice. But some queer samples of it killed sheep!
Did Mr. Pasteur maintain that his second vaccine killed guinea-pigs but not rabbits? Dr. Koch had carefully tested this one too, and found that it often killed rabbits very promptly—and sometimes sheep, poor beasts! which Mr. Pasteur claimed it would guard from death.
Did Mr. Pasteur really believe that his vaccines were really pure cultivations containing nothing but anthrax microbes? Dr. Koch had studied them carefully and found them to be veritable menageries of hideous scum-forming bacilli and strange cocci and other foreign creatures that had no business there.
Finally, was Mr. Pasteur really burning so with a passion for truth? Then why hadn't he told of the bad results as well as the good ones, that had followed the wholesale use of his vaccine?
“Such goings-on are perhaps suitable for the advertising of a business house, but science should reject them vigorously,” finished Koch, drily, devastatingly.
Then Pasteur went through the roof and answered Koch's cool facts in an amazing paper with arguments that would not have fooled the jury of a country debating society. Did Koch dare to make believe that Pasteur's vaccines were full of contaminating microbes? “For twenty years before Koch's scientific birth in 1876, it has been my one occupation to isolate and grow microbes in a pure state, and therefore Koch's insinuation that I do not know how to make pure cultivations cannot be taken seriously!” shouted Pasteur.
The French nation, even the great men of the nation, patriotically refused to believe that Koch had demoted their hero from the rank of God of Science—what could you expect from a German anyway?—and they promptly elected Pasteur to the Academic Française, the ultimate honor to bestow on a Frenchman. And on the day of Pasteur's admission this fiery yes-man was welcomed to his place among the Immortal Forty by the skeptical genius, Ernest Renan, the author who had changed Jesus from a God into a good human being, a man who could forgive everything because he understood everything. Renan knew that even if Pasteur sometimes did suppress the truth, he was still sufficiently marvelous. Renan was not a scientist but he was wise enough to know that Pasteur had done a wonderful thing when he showed that weak bugs may protect living beings against virulent ones—even if they would not do it one hundred times out of one hundred.
Regard these two fantastically opposite men facing each other on this solemn day. Pasteur the go-getter, an energetic fighter full of a mixture of faiths that interfered, sometimes, with ultimate—and maybe ugly—truth. And talking to him loftily sits the untroubled Renan with the massiveness of Mount Everest, such a dreadful skeptic that he probably was never quite convinced that he was himself alive, so firmly doubting the value of doing anything that he had become one of the fattest men in France.
Renan called Pasteur a genius and compared him to some of the greatest men that ever lived and then gave the excited, paralyzed, gray-haired microbe hunter this mild admonition:
“Truth, Sir, is a great coquette; she will not be sought with too much passion, but often is most amenable to indifference. She escapes when apparently caught, but gives herself up if patiently waited for; revealing herself after farewells have been said, but inexorable when loved with too much fervor.”
Surely Renan was too wise to think that his lovely words would ever change Pasteur one jot from the headlong untruthful hunter after truth that he was. But just the same, these words sum up the fundamental sadness of Pasteur's life, they tell of the crown of thorns that madmen wear whose dream it is to change a world in the little seventy years they are allowed to live.
7
And now Pasteur began—God knows why—to stick little hollow glass tubes into the gaping mouths of dogs writhing mad with rabies. While two servants pried apart and held open the jowls of a powerful bulldog, Pasteur stuck his beard within a couple of inches of those fangs whose snap meant the worst of deaths, and, sprinkled sometimes with a maybe fatal spray, he sucked up the froth into his tube—to get a specimen in which to hunt for the microbe of hydrophobia. I wish to forget, now, everything that I have said about his showmanship, his unsearcherlike go-gettings. This business of his gray eyes looking that bulldog in the mouth—this was no grandstand stuff.
Why did Pasteur set out to trap the germ of rabies? That is a mystery, because there were a dozen other serious diseases, just then, whose microbes had not yet been found, diseases that killed many more people than rabies had ever put to death, diseases that were not nearly so surely deadly to an adventurous experimenter as rabies would be—if one of those dogs should get loose. . .
It must have been the artist, the poet in him that urged him on to this most hard and dangerous hunting, for Pasteur himself said: “I have always been haunted by the cries of those victims of the mad wolf that came down the street of Arbois when I was a little boy. . . ” Pasteur knew the way the yells of a mad dog curdle the blood of every one. He remembered that less than a hundred years before in France, laws had to be passed against the poisoning, the strangling, the shooting of wretched people whom frightened fellow-townsmen just suspected of having rabies. Doubtless he saw himself the deliverer of men from such crazy fear—such hopeless suffering.
And then, in this most magnificent and truest of all his searchings, Pasteur started out, as he so often did, by making mistakes. In the saliva of a little child dying from hydrophobia he discovered a strange motionless germ that he gave the unscientific name of “microbe-like-an-eight.” He read papers at the Academy that hinted about this figure-eight germ having something to do with the mysterious cause of hydrophobia. But in a little while this trail proved to be a blind one, for with Roux and Chamberland he found—after he had settled down and got his teeth into this search—that this eight-microbe could be found in the mouths of many healthy people who had never been anywhere near a mad dog.
Presently, late in 1882, he ran on to his first clew. “Mad dogs are scarce just now, old Bourrel the veterinarian brings me very few of them, and people with hydrophobia are still harder to get hold of—we've got to produce this rabies in animals in our laboratory and keep it going there—otherwise we won't be able to go on studying it steadily,” he pondered.
He was more than sixty, and he was tired.
Then one day, a lassoed mad dog was brought into the laboratory; dangerously he was slid into a big cage with healthy dogs and allowed to bite them. Roux and Chamberland fished froth out of the mouth of this mad beast and sucked it up into syringes and injected this stuff into rabbits and guinea-pigs. Then they waited eagerly to see this menagerie develop the first signs of madness. Sometimes—alas—the experiment worked, but other very irritating times it did not; four healthy dogs had been bitten and six weeks later they came in one morning to find two of these creatures lashing about their cages, howling—but for months after that the other two showed no sign of rabies; there was no rime or reason to this business, no regularity, confound it! this was not science! And it was the same with the guinea-pigs and rabbits: two of the rabbits might drag out th
eir hind legs with a paralysis—then die in dreadful convulsions, but the other four would go on chewing their greens as if there were no mad-dog virus within a million miles of them.
Then one day a little idea came to Pasteur, and he hurried to tell it to Roux.
“This rabies virus that gets into people by bites, it settles in their brains and spinal cords. . . All the symptoms of hydrophobia show that it's the nervous system that this virus—this bug we can't find—attacks. . .
“That's where we have to look for the unknown microbe. . . that's where we can grow it maybe, even without seeing it. . . maybe we could use the living animal's brain instead of a bottle of soup. . . a funny culture-bottle that would be, but. . .
“When we inject it under the skin—the virus may get lost in the body before it can travel to the brain—if I could only stick it right into a dog's brain. . .!”
Roux listened to these dreamings of Pasteur, he listened bright-eyed to these fantastic imaginings. . . Another man than Roux might have thought Pasteur completely crazy. . . The brain of a dog or rabbit instead of a bottle of broth, indeed! What nonsense! But not to Roux!
“But why not put the virus right into a dog's brain, master, I can trephine a dog—I can drill a little hole in his skull—without hurting him—without damaging his brain at all. . . it would be easy. . . ” said Roux.
Pasteur shut Roux up, furiously. He was no doctor, and he did not know that surgeons can do this operation on human beings even, quite safely. “What! bore a hole right through a dog's skull—why, you'd hurt the poor beast terribly. . . you would damage his brain. . . you would paralyze him. . . No! I will not permit it!”
So near was Pasteur, by reason of his tender-heartedness, so close was he to failing completely in winning to the most marvelous of his gifts to men. He quailed before the stern experiment that his weird idea demanded.
But Roux—the faithful, the now almost forgotten Roux—saved him by disobeying him.
For, a few days later when Pasteur left the laboratory to go to some meeting or other, Roux took a healthy dog, put him easily out of pain with a little chloroform:, and bored a hole in the beast's head and exposed his palpitating, living brain. Then up into a syringe he drew a little bit of the ground-up brain of a dog just dead with rabies: “This stuff must be swarming with those rabies microbes that are maybe too small for us to see,” he pondered; and through the hole in the sleeping dog's skull went the needle of the syringe, and into the living brain Roux slowly, gently shot the deadly rabid stuff. . .
Next morning Roux told Pasteur about it—“What!” shouted Pasteur. “Where is the poor creature. . . he must be dying. . . paralyzed. . .”
But Roux was already down the stairs, and in an instant he was back, his operated dog prancing in ahead of him, jumping gayly against Pasteur, sniffing 'round among the old broth bottles under the laboratory benches. Then Pasteur realized Roux's cleverness—and the new road of experiment that lay before him, and though he was not fond of dogs, his joy made him fuss over this one: “Good dog, excellent beast!” Pasteur said, and dreamed: “This beast will show that my idea will work. . .”
Sure enough, less than two weeks later the good creature began to howl mournful cries and tear up his bed and gnaw at his cage—and in a few days more he was dead, and this brute died, as you will see, so that thousands of mankind might live.
Now Pasteur and Roux and Chamberland had a sure way, that worked one hundred times out of one hundred, of giving rabies to their dogs and guinea-pigs and rabbits. “We cannot find the microbe—surely it must be too tiny for the strongest microscope to show us—there's no way to grow it in flasks of soup. . . but we can keep it alive—this deadly virus—in the brains of rabbits. . . that is the only way to grow it,” you can hear Pasteur telling Roux and Chamberland.
Never was there a more fantastic experiment in all of microbe hunting, or in any science, for that matter; never was there a more unscientific feat of science than this struggling, by Pasteur and his boys, with a microbe they couldn't see—a weird bug of whose existence they only knew by its invisible growth in the living brains and spinal cords of an endless succession of rabbits and guinea-pigs and dogs. Their only knowledge that there was such a thing as the microbe of rabies was the convulsive death of the rabbits they injected, and the fearful cries of their trephined dogs. . .
Then Pasteur and his assistants started on their outlandish—any wise man would say their impossible—adventure of taming this vicious virus that they could not see. There were little interruptions; Roux went with Thuillier to fight the cholera in Egypt and there, you will remember, Thuillier died; and Pasteur went out into the rural pig-sties of France to discover the microbe and find a vaccine against a disease that was just then murdering French swine. But Pasteur stopped getting entangled in those vulgar arguments which were so often to his discredit, and the three of them locked themselves in their laboratory in the Rue d'Ulm with their poor paralyzed and dangerous animals. They sweat through endless experiments.
Pasteur mounted guard over his young men and kept their backs bent over their benches as if they were some higher kind of galley slave. He watched their perilous experiments with one eye and kept the other on the glass door of the workroom, and when he saw some of Roux's and Chamberland's friends approaching, to ask them maybe to come out for a glass of beer on the terrace of a near-by café, the master would hurry out and tell the interlopers: “No. No! Not now! Cannot you see? They are busy—it is a most important experiment they are doing!”
Months—gray months went by during which it seemed to all of them that there was no possible way of weakening the invisible virus of rabies. . . One hundred animals, alas, out of every hundred that they injected—died. You would think that Roux and Chamberland, still youngsters, would have been the indomitable ones, the never-say-die men of this desperate crew. But on the contrary!
“It's no go, master,” said they, making limp waves of their hands toward the cages with their paralyzed beasts—toward the tangled jungles of useless tubes and bottles. . .
Then Pasteur's eyebrows cocked at them, and his thinning gray hair seemed to stiffen: “Do the same experiment over again—no matter if it failed last time—it may look foolish to you, but the important thing is not to leave the subject!” Pasteur shouted, in a fury. So it was that this man scolded his monkish disciples and prodded them to do useless tests over and over and over—with no reasons, with complete lack of logic. With every fact against him Pasteur searched and tried and failed and tried again with that insane neglect of common sense that sometimes turns hopeless causes into victories.
Indeed, why wasn't this setting out to tame the hydrophobia virus—why wasn't it a nonsensical wild-goose chase? There was in all human history no single record of any man or beast getting better from this horrible malady, once the symptoms had declared themselves, once the mysterious messengers of evil had wormed their unseen way into the spinal cord and brain. It was this kind of murderous stuff that Pasteur and his men balanced on the tips of their knives, sucked up into their glass pipettes within an inch from the lips—stuff that was separated from their mouths by a thin little wisp of cotton. . .
Then, one exciting day, the first sweet music of encouragement came to these gropers in the dark—one of their dogs inoculated with the surely fatal stuff from a rabid rabbit's brain—this dog came down with his weird barkings and portentous shiverings and slatherings—and then miraculously got completely better! Excitedly, a few weeks later, they shot this first of all recovered beasts with a deadly virus, directly into his brain they injected the wee murderers. The little wound on his head healed quickly—anxiously Pasteur waited for his doomful symptoms to come on him, but these signs never came. For months the dog romped about his cage. He was absolutely immune!
“Now we know it—we know we have a chance. . . When a beast once has rabies and gets better from it, there will be no recurrence. . . We must find a way to tame the virus now,” said Pasteur to hi
s men, who agreed, but were perfectly certain that there was no way to tame that virus.
But Pasteur began inventing experiments that no god would have attempted; his desk was strewn with hieroglyphic scrawls of them. And at eleven in the morning, when the records of the results of the day before had been carefully put down, he would call Roux and Chamberland, and to them he would read off some wild plan for groping after this unseen unreachable virus—some fantastic plan for getting his fingers on it inside the body of a rabbit—to weaken it.
“Try this experiment to-day!” Pasteur would tell them.
“But that is technically impossible!” they protested.
“No matter—plan it any way you wish, provided you do it well,” Pasteur replied. (He was, those days, like old Ludwig van Beethoven writing unplayable horn parts for his symphonies—and then miraculously discovering hornblowers to play those parts.) For, one way or another, the ingenious Roux and Chamberland devised tricks to do those crazy experiments. . .
And at last they found a way of weakening the savage hydrophobia virus—by taking out a little section of the spinal cord of a rabbit dead of rabies, and hanging this bit of deadly stuff up to dry in a germ-proof bottle for fourteen days. This shriveled bit of nervous tissue that had once been so deadly they shot into the brains of healthy dogs—and those dogs did not die. . .
“The virus is dead—or better still very much weakened,” said Pasteur, jumping at the latter conclusion with no sense or reason. “Now we'll try drying other pieces of virulent stuff for twelve days—ten days—eight days—six days, and see if we can't just give our dogs a little rabies. . . then they ought to be immune. . .”
Savagely they fell to this long will o' the wisp of an experiment. For fourteen days Pasteur walked up and down the bottle and microscope and cage-strewn unearthly workshop and grumbled and fretted and made scrawls in that everlasting notebook of his. The first day the dogs were dosed with the weakened—the almost extinct virus that had been dried for fourteen days; the second day they received a shot of the slightly stronger nerve stuff that had been thirteen days in its bottle; and so on until the fourteenth day—when each beast was injected with one-day-dried virus that would have surely killed a not-inoculated animal.
Microbe Hunters Page 18
