Meanwhile the searchers, believing, are busy with other things—and I can only hope, if another wave of the dreadful diphtheria of the eighties sweeps over the world again, I can only hope that Roux was right.
But even if the diphtheria antitoxin is not a sure cure, we already know that the experiments of Roux and Behring have not been in vain. It is a story still too recent, too much in the newspapers to be a part of this history—but to-day, in New York under the superb leadership of Dr. Park, and all over America, and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of babies and school-children are being ingeniously and safely turned into so many small factories for the making of antitoxin, so that they will never get diphtheria at all. Under the skins of these youngsters go wee doses of that terrible poison fatal to so many big dogs—but it is a poison fantastically changed so that it is harmless to a week-old baby!
There is every hope, if fathers and mothers can only be convinced and allow their children to undergo three small safe pricks of a syringe needle, that diphtheria will no longer be the murderer that it has been for ages.
And for this men will thank those first crude searchings of Loeffler and Roux and Behring.
7. METCHNIKOFF:
The Nice Phagocytes
1
Microbe hunting has always been a queer humpty-dumpty business.
A janitor with no proper education was the first man to see microbes; a chemist put them on the map and made people properly afraid of them; a country doctor turned the hunting of them into something that came near to being a science; to save the lives of babies from the poison of one of the deadliest of them, a Frenchman and a German had to pile up mountains of butchered guinea-pigs and rabbits. Microbe hunting is a story of amazing stupidities, fine intuitions, insane paradoxes. If that is the history of the hunting of microbes, it is the same with the story of the science, still in its babyhood, of why we are immune to microbes. For Metchnikoff, the always excited searcher who in a manner of speaking founded that science—this Metchnikoff was not a sober scientific investigator; he was more like some hysterical character out of one of Dostoevski's novels.
Elie Metchnikoff was a Jew, and was born in southern Russia in 1845, and before he was twenty years old, he said: “I have zeal and ability, I am naturally talented—I am ambitious to become a distinguished investigator!”
He went to the University of Kharkoff, borrowed the then rare microscope from one of his professors, and after peering (more or less dimly) through it, this ambitious young man sat himself down and wrote long scientific papers before he had any idea at all of what science was. He bolted his classes for months on end, not to play, but to read; not to read novels mind you but to wallow through learned works on the “crystals of Proteic Substances” and to become passionate about inflammatory pamphlets whose discovery by the police would have sent him to the mines in Siberia. He sat up nights, drinking gallons of tea and haranguing his young colleagues (all of them forefathers of the present Bolsheviki) on atheism until they nicknamed him “God-Is-Not.” Then, a few days before the end of the term, he crammed up the neglected lessons of months; and his prodigious memory, which was more like some weird phonograph record than any human brain, made it possible for him to write home to his folks that he had passed first and got a gold medal.
Metchnikoff was always trying to get ahead of himself. He sent papers to scientific journals while he was still in his teens; he wrote these papers frantically a few hours after he had trained his microscope on some bug or beetle; the next day he would look at them again, and find that what he had been so certain of, was not quite the same now. Hastily he wrote to the editor of the scientific journal: “Please do not publish the manuscript I sent you yesterday. I find I have made a mistake.” At other times he was furious because his enthusiastic discoveries were turned down by the editors. “The world does not appreciate me!” he cried, and he went to his room, ready to die, dolefully whistling: “Were I small as a snail, I would hide myself in my shell.”
But if Metchnikoff sobbed because his vivid talents were underestimated by his professors, he was also irrepressible. He forgot his contemplated suicides and his violent headaches in his incessant interest in all living things, but he was constantly spoiling his chances to do a good steady piece of scientific work by getting into quarrels with his teachers. Finally he told his mother (who had always spoiled him and believed in him): “I am especially interested in the study of protoplasm. . . but there is no science in Russia,” so he rushed off to the University of Würzburg in Germany, only to find that he had arrived there six weeks ahead of the opening of school. He sought out some Russian students there, but they gave him the cold shoulder—he was a Jew—then, tired of life, he started back home, thinking of killing himself but with a few books in his satchel—and one of these was the just-published “Origin of Species” of Darwin. He read it, he swallowed the Theory of Organic Evolution with one great mental gulp, he became a bigoted supporter of it—from then on evolution was his religion until he began founding new scientific religions of his own.
He forgot his plans for suicide; he planned strange evolutionary researches; he lay awake nights, seeing visions—huge panoramas they were, of all beasts from cockroaches to elephants, as the children of some one remote and infinitely tiny ancestor. . .
That conversion was Metchnikoff's real start in life, for now he set out (and kept at it for ten years), quarreling and expostulating his way from one laboratory to another, from Russia through Germany to Italy, and from Italy to the island of Heligoland. He worked at the evolution of worms. He accused the distinguished German zoologist Leuckart of stealing his stuff; incurably clumsy with his fingers, he clawed desperately into a lizard to find the story of evolution its insides might tell him—and when he could not find what he wanted, he threw what was left of the reptile across the laboratory. Unlike Koch or Leeuwenhoek, who were great because they knew how to ask questions of nature, Metchnikoff read books on Evolution, was inspired, shouted “Yes!” and then by vast sloppy experiments proceeded to try to force his beliefs down nature's throat. Strange to say, sometimes he was right, importantly right as you will see. Up till now (it was in the late eighteen seventies) he knew nothing about microbes, but all the time his mania to prove the survival of the fittest was driving him toward his fantastic theory—partly true—of how mankind resists the assaults of germs.
Metchnikoff's first thirty-five years were a hubbub and a perilously near disastrous groping toward this event—toward that great notoriety that waited for him on the Island of Sicily in the Mediterranean Sea. At twenty-three he had married Ludmilla Feodorovitch, who was a consumptive and had to be carried to the wedding in an invalid's chair. Then followed a pitiful four years for them. They dragged about Europe, looking for a cure; Metchnikoff trying in odd moments snatched from an irritatedly tender nursing of his wife, to do experiments on the development of green flies and sponges and worms and scorpions—trying above all to make some sensational discovery which might land him a well-paid professorship. “The survivors are not the best but the most cunning,” he whispered, as he published his scientific papers and pulled his wires. . .
Finally Ludmilla died; she had spent her last days solaced by morphine, and now Metchnikoff, who had caught the habit from her, wandered from her grave through Spain to Geneva, taking larger and larger doses of the drug—meanwhile, his eyes hurt him terribly, and what is a naturalist, a searcher, without eyes?
“Why live?” he cried, and took a dose of morphine that he knew must kill him, but the dose was too large, he became nauseated and threw it up. “Why live?” he cried again and took a hot bath and rushed out in the open air right afterwards to try to catch his death of pneumonia. But it seems that the wise witty gods who fashion searchers had other purposes for him. That very night he stopped, agape at the spectacle of a cloud of insects swirling round the flame of a lantern. “These insects live only a few hours!” he cried to himself. “How can the theory of the survival of t
he fittest be applied to them?” So he plunged back into his experiments.
Metchnikoff's grief was terrific but it did not last long. He was appointed Professor at the University of Odessa, and there he taught the Survival of the Fittest and became respected for his learning, and grew in dignity, and in less than two years after the death of Ludmilla, he had met Olga, a bright girl of fifteen, the daughter of a man of property. “His appearance is not unlike that of the Christ—he is so pale and seems so sad,” whispered Olga, Soon after they were married.
From then on Metchnikoff's life was much less disastrous; he tried far less often to commit suicide; his hands began to catch up with his precocious brain—he was learning to do experiments. Never was there a man who tried more sincerely to apply his religion (which was science) to every part of his life. He took Olga in hand and taught her science and art, and even the art and science of marriage! She worshipped the profound certainties that science gave him, but said, long afterwards: “The scientific methods which Metchnikoff applied to everything might have been a grave mistake at this delicate psychological moment. . .”
2
It was in 1883, when the discoveries of Pasteur and Koch had made everybody mad about microbes, that Metchnikoff turned suddenly from a naturalist into a microbe hunter. He had wrangled with the authorities of the University of Odessa, and departed for the Island of Sicily with Olga and her crowd of little brothers and sisters, and here he set up his amateur laboratory in the parlor of their cottage looking across the magic water to the blue Calabrian shore. His intuition told him that microbes were now the thing in science and he dreamed about making great discoveries of new microbes—he was sincerely interested in them as well, but he knew nothing about the subtle ways of hunting them, indeed he had hardly seen a germ. He stamped about his parlor-laboratory, expounding biological theories to Olga, studying starfish and sponges, telling the children fairy stories, doing everything in short that was as far as possible removed from those thrilling researches of Koch and Pasteur. . .
Then, one day, he began to study the way sponges and starfishes digest their food. Long before he had spied out strange cells inside these beasts, cells that were a part of their bodies, but cells that were free-lances, as it were, moving from place to place through the carcasses of which they formed a part, sticking out one part of themselves and dragging the rest of themselves after the part they had stuck out. Such were the wandering cells, which moved by flowing, exactly like that small animal, the ameba.
Metchnikoff sat down before his parlor table, and with that impatient clumsiness of a man whose hands seem unable to obey his brain, he got some little particles of carmine into the insides of the larva of a starfish. This was an ingenious and very original trick of Metchnikoff's, because these larvae are as transparent as a good glass window; so he could see, through his lens, what went on inside the beast; and with excited delight he watched the crawling, flowing free-lance cells in this starfish ooze toward his carmine particles—and eat them up! Metchnikoff still imagined he was studying the digestion of his starfish, but strange thoughts—that had nothing to do with such a commonplace thing as digestion—little fog-wraiths of new ideas began to flutter through his head. . .
The next day Olga took the children to the circus to see some extraordinary performing monkeys. Metchnikoff sat alone in his parlor, tugging at his biblical beard, gazing without seeing them at his bowls of starfish. Then—it was like that blinding light that bowled Paul over on his way to Damascus—in one moment, in the most fantastical, you would say impossible flash of a second, Metchnikoff changed his whole career.
“These wandering cells in the body of the larva of a starfish, these cells eat food, they gobble up carmine granules—but they must eat up microbes too! Of course—the wandering cells are what protect the starfish from microbes! Our wandering cells, the white cells of our blood—they must be what protects us from invading germs. . . they are the cause of immunity to diseases. . . they are what keep the human race from being killed off by malignant bacilli!”
Without one single bit of evidence, without any research at all, Metchnikoff jumped from the digestions of starfish to the ills of men. . .
“I suddenly became a pathologist,” he wrote in his diary (and this was not much more strange than if a cornet player should suddenly announce himself as an astrophysicist!) “. . . Feeling that there was in this idea something of surpassing interest, I became so excited that I began striding up and down the room, and even went to the seashore to collect my thoughts.”
Now Koch, precise microbe hunter that he was, would hardly have trusted Metchnikoff with the wiping of his microscope, but his ignorance of germs was nothing to this wild Russian.
“I said to myself that, if my theory was true, a sliver put into the body of a starfish larva. . . should soon be surrounded by wandering cells. . . ” And he remembered that when men run splinters into their fingers, and neglect to pull them out, those splinters are soon surrounded by pus—which consists largely of the wandering white cells of the blood. He rushed out into the garden back of the cottage, pulled some rose thorns off a little shrub which he had decorated as a Christmas tree for Olga's brothers and sisters; he dashed back into his absurd laboratory and stuck these thorns into the body of one of his water-clear young starfish. . .
Up he got, at dawn the next morning, full of wild hopes,—and he found his guess had come true. Around the rose-slivers in the starfish were sluggish crawling masses of its wandering cells! Nothing more was necessary (such a jumper at conclusions was he) to stamp into his brain the fixed idea that he now had the explanation of all immunity to diseases; he rushed out that morning to tell famous European professors, who happened then to be in Messina, all about his great idea. “Here is why animals can withstand the attacks of microbes,” he said, and he talked with such enthusiastic eloquence about how the wandering cells of the starfish tried to eat the rose thorns (and he could show it so prettily too) that even the most eminent and pope-like Professor Doctor Virchow (who had sniffed at Koch) believed him!
3
Metchnikoff was now a microbe hunter. . .
With Olga and the children flapping along and keeping up as best they could, Metchnikoff hurried to Vienna to proclaim his theory that we are immune to germs because our bodies have wandering cells to gobble germs up; he made a bee-line for the laboratory of his friend, Professor Glaus—who was a zoologist, and knew nothing about microbes either, and so was properly amazed:
“I would be greatly honored to have you publish your theory in my Journal,” said Claus.
“But I must have a scientific name for these cells that devour microbes—a Greek name—what would be a Greek name for such cells?” cried Metchnikoff.
Claus and his learned colleagues scratched their heads and peered into their dictionaries and at last they told him: “Phagocytes! Phagocyte is Greek for devouring cell—phagocytes is what you must call them!”
Metchnikoff thanked them, tacked the word “phagocyte” to the head of his mast, and set sail on the seas of his exciting career as a microbe hunter with that word as a religion, an explanation of everything, a slogan, a means of gaining a living—and, though you may not believe it, that word did result in something of a start at finding out how it is we are immune! From then on he preached phagocytes, he defended their reputations, he did some real research on them, he made enemies about them, he doubtless helped to start the war of 1914 with them, by the bad feeling they caused between France and Germany.
He went from Vienna to Odessa, and there he gave a great scientific speech on “The Curative Forces of the Organism” to the astonished doctors of the town. His delivery was superb; his sincerity was undoubted—but there is no record of whether or not he told the amazed doctors that he had not, up till then, so much as seen one phagocyte gobble up a single malignant microbe. Everybody—and this includes learned doctors—will stop to watch a dog fight; so this idea of Metchnikoff's, this story of our little w
hite blood cells rushing to an endless series of Thermopylae to man the pass against murderous germs—this yarn excited them, convinced them. . . But Metchnikoff knew he would have to have real evidence, and presently he found it, beautifully clear, in water fleas. For a time he forgot speeches and began fishing water fleas out of ponds and aquariums; here he was deucedly ingenious again, for these small animals, like starfish larvae, were transparent so that he could see through his lens what went on inside them. For once he grew patient, and searched, like the real searcher that he so rarely was, for some disease that a water flea perchance might have. This history has already made it clear that microbe hunters usually find other things than they set out to look for—but Metchnikoff just now had different luck; he watched his water fleas in their aimless daily life, and suddenly, through his lens he saw one of these beasts swallow the sharp, needle-like spores of a dangerous yeast. Down into the wee gullet went these needles, through the walls of the flea's stomach they poked their sharp points, and into the tiny beast's body they glided. Then—how could the gods favor such a wild man so!—Metchnikoff saw the wandering cells of the water flea, the phagocytes of this creature, flow towards those perilous needles, surround them, eat them, melt them up, digest them. . .
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