Microbe Hunters
Page 23
When—and this happened often too and so made his theory perfect—the phagocytes failed to go out to battle against the deadly yeast needles, these invaders budded rapidly into swarming yeasts, which in their turn ate the water flea, poisoned him—and that meant good-by to him!
Here Metchnikoff had peeped prettily into a thrilling, deadly struggle on a tiny scale, he had spied upon the up till now completely mysterious way in which certain living creatures defend themselves against their would-be assassins. His observations were true as steel, and you will have to grant they were devilishly ingenious, for who would have thought to look for the why of immunity in such an absurd beast as the water flea? Now Metchnikoff needed nothing more to convince him of the absolute and final tightness of his theory, he probed no deeper into this struggle (which Koch would have spent years over) but wrote a learned paper:
“The immunity of the water flea, due to the help of its phagocytes, is an example of natural immunity. . . for, once the wandering cells have not swallowed the yeast spore at the moment of its penetration into the body, the yeast germinates. . . secretes a poison which drives the phagocytes back not only, but kills them by dissolving them completely.”
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Then Metchnikoff went to see if this same battle took place in frogs and rabbits, and suddenly, in 1886, the Russian people were thrilled by Pasteur's saving of sixteen of their folk from the bite of the mad wolf. The good people of Odessa and the farmers of the Zemstvo round about gave thanks to God, hurrahs for Pasteur, and a mighty purse of roubles for a laboratory to be started at once in Odessa. And Metchnikoff was appointed Scientific Director of the new Institute—for had not this man (they forgot for a moment he was Jewish) studied in all the Universities of Europe, and had he not lectured learnedly to the doctors of Odessa, telling about the phagocytes of the blood, which gobble microbes?
“Who knows?” you can hear the people saying. “Maybe in our new Institute, Professor Metchnikoff can train these little phagocytes to gobble up all microbes?”
Metchnikoff accepted the position, but told the authorities, shrewdly: “I am only a theoretician; I am overwhelmed with researches—some one else will have to be trained to make vaccines, to do the practical work.”
Nobody in Odessa knew anything about microbe hunting then, so Metchnikoff's friend, Doctor Gamaléia, was sent to the Pasteur Institute in Paris posthaste. The citizens were anxious to begin to be prevented from having diseases; they bawled for vaccines. So Gamaléia, after a little while in Paris, where he watched Roux and Pasteur and learned a great deal from them, but not quite enough—this Gamaléia came back and started to make anthrax vaccines for the sheep of the Zemstvo, and rabies vaccines for the people of the town. “All should now go very well!” cried Metchnikoff (he knew nothing of the nasty tricks virulent microbes can play) and he retired to his theoretical fastnesses to grapple with rabbits and dogs and monkeys, to see if their phagocytes would swallow the microbes of consumption and relapsing fever and erysipelas. Scientific papers vomited from his laboratory, and the searchers of Europe began to be excited by the discoveries of this strange genius in the south of Russia. But he began to have troubles with his theory, for dogs and rabbits and monkeys—alas—are not transparent, like water fleas. . .
Then the shambles began. Gamaléia and the other members of Metchnikoff's practical staff began to fight among themselves and mix up vaccines; microbes spilled out of tubes; the doctors of the town—naturally a little jealous of this new form of healing—started to snoop into the laboratory, to ask embarrassing questions, to start whispers going through the town: “Who is this Professor Metchnikoff—he hasn't even a doctor's certificate. He is only a naturalist, a mere bug-hunter—how can he know anything about preventing diseases?”
“Where are those cures?” demanded the people. “Give us our preventions!” shouted the farmers—who had gone down into their socks for good roubles. Metchnikoff came out of the fog of his theory of phagocytes for a moment, and tried to satisfy them by sowing chicken cholera bacilli among the meadow mice which were eating up the crops. But, alas, a lying, inflammatory report appeared in the daily paper, screaming that this Metchnikoff was sowing death—that chicken cholera could change into human cholera. . .
“I am overwhelmed with my researches,” muttered Metchnikoff. “I am a theoretician—my researches need a peaceful shelter in which to be developed. . . ” So he asked for a vacation, got it, packed his bag, and went to the Congress of Vienna to tell everybody about phagocytes, and to look for a quiet place in which to work. He must get away from that dreadful need to prove that his theories were true by dishing out cures to impatient authorities and peasants who insisted on getting their money's worth out of research. From Vienna he went to Paris to the Pasteur Institute, and there a great triumph and surprise waited for him. He was introduced to Pasteur, and at once Metchnikoff exploded into tremendous explanations of his theory of phagocytes. He made a veritable movie of the battle between the wandering cells and microbes. . .
The old captain of the microbe hunters looked at Metchnikoff out of tired gray eyes that now and then sparkled a little: “I at once placed myself on your side, Professor Metchnikoff,” said Pasteur, “for I have been struck by the struggle between the divers microorganisms which I have had occasion to observe. I believe you are on the right road.”
Although the struggles Pasteur mentioned had nothing to do with phagocytes gobbling up microbes, Metchnikoff—and this is not unnatural—was filled with a proud joy. The greatest of all microbe hunters really understood him, believed in him. . . Olga's father had died, leaving them a modest income, here in Paris his theory of phagocytes would have the prestige of a great Institute back of it. “Is there a place for me here?” he asked. “I wish only to work in one of your laboratories in an honorary capacity,” begged Metchnikoff.
Pasteur knew how important it was to keep the plain people thrilled about microbe hunting—it is the drama of science that they can understand—so Pasteur said: “You may not only come to work in our laboratory, but you shall have an entire laboratory to yourself!” Metchnikoff went back to Odessa, getting a dreadful snubbing from Koch on the way, and wondered whether it would not be best to give up his tidy salary at the Russian Institute, to get away from these people yelling for results. . . But he began to take up his work again, when suddenly something happened that left no doubt in his mind as to what he had better do.
In response to the farmer's complaints of “Where are your vaccines, our flocks are perishing from anthrax!” Metchnikoff had told Dr. Gamaléia to start giving sheep the anthrax vaccine on a large scale. Then, one bright morning, while the Director was with Olga: in their summer home, in the country, a fearful telegram came to him from Gamaléia: “many thousands of sheep killed by the anthrax vaccine.”
A few months later they were safely installed in the new Pasteur Institute in Paris, and Olga (who enjoyed painting and sculpture much better—but who would do anything for her husband because he was a genius, and always kind to her) this good wife, Olga, held his animals and washed his bottles for Metchnikoff. From then on they marched, hand in hand, over a road strewn with their picturesque mistakes, from one triumph to always greater victories and notorieties.
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Metchnikoff bounced into the austere Pasteur Institute and started a circus there which lasted for twenty years; it was as if a skilled proprietor of a medicine show had become pastor of a congregation of sober Quakers. He came to Paris and found himself already notorious. His theory of immunity—it would be better to call it an exciting romance, rather than a theory—this story that we are immune because of a kind of battle royal between our phagocytes and marauding microbes, this yarn had thrown the searchers of Europe into an uproar. The microbe hunters of Germany and Austria for the most part did not believe it—on the contrary, tempted to believe it by its simplicity and prettiness, they denied it with a peculiar violence. They denounced Metchnikoff in congresses and by experiments. O
ne old German, Baumgarten, wrote a general denunciation of phagocytes, on principle, once a year, in an important scientific journal. For a little while Metchnikoff wavered; he nearly swooned, he couldn't sleep nights, he thought of going back to his soothing morphine; he even contemplated suicide once more—oh I why could not those nasty Germans see that he was right about phagocytes? Then he recovered. Something seemed to snap in his brain, he became courageous as a lion, he started a battle for his theory—it was a grotesque, partly scientific wrangle—but, in spite of all its silliness, it was an argument that laid the foundations of the little that is known to-day about why we are immune to microbes.
“I have demonstrated that the serum of rats kills anthrax germs—it is the blood of animals not their phagocytes that makes them immune to microbes,” shouted Emil Behring, and all the bitter enemies of Metchnikoff sang Aye in the chorus. The scientific papers published to show that blood is the one important thing would fill three university libraries.
“It is the phagocytes that eat up germs and so defend us,” roared Metchnikoff in reply. And he published ingenious experiments which proved anthrax bacilli grow exuberantly in the blood of sheep which have been made immune by Pasteur's vaccine.
Neither side would budge from this extreme, prejudiced position. For twenty years both sides were so enraged they could not stop to think that perhaps both our blood and our phagocytes might work together to guard us from germs. That fight was a kind of magnificent but undignified shouting of “You're a liar—On the contrary, it's you that's the liar!” which blinded Metchnikoff and his opponents to the idea that it might be neither the blood nor the phagocytes which are at the bottom of our resistance to some diseases. If they had only stopped for a moment, wiped their brows and cleaned the blood from their mental noses, to remember how little they knew, how slowly they should go—considering what subtle complicated stuff this blood and those phagocytes are—if they had only remembered how foolish, in the darkness of their ignorance, it was to cook up any explanation at all of why we are immune! If Metchnikoff had only kept on, obscure in Odessa, with his beautiful researches on the why of the wandering cells of the water fleas eating up those terrible little yeasts. . . If he had only been patient and tried to get to the bottom of that!
But the stumbling strides of microbe hunters are not made by any perfect logic, and that is the reason I may write a grotesque, but not perfect story of their deeds.
In the grand days of Pasteur's fight with anthrax and his victory against rabies, he had worked like some subterranean distiller of secret poisons, with only Roux and Chamberland and one or two others to help him. In that dingy laboratory in the Rue d'Ulm he had been very impolite, even nasty, to all curious intruders and ambitious persons. He even chased adoring pretty ladies away. But Metchnikoff!
Here was an entirely different sort of searcher. Metchnikoff had an immensely impressive beard and a broad forehead that crowned eyes which squinted vividly—and intelligently—from behind his spectacles. His hair grew down over the back of his neck in a way that showed you he was too deep in thoughts to think of having it cut. He knew everything! He could tell—and it was authentic—of countless biological mysteries; he had seen the wandering cells of a tadpole turn it into a frog by eating the tadpole's tail, and he had built circles of fire around scorpions to show that these unhappy creatures, failing to find a way out, do not commit suicide by stinging themselves to death. He told these horrors in a way to make you feel the remorseless flowing and swallowing of the wandering cells—you could hear the hissing of the doomed and baffled scorpion. . .
He had brilliant ideas for experiments and was always trying to carry out these ideas—intensely—but at any moment he was ready to drop his science to praise the operas of Mozart or whistle the symphonies of Beethoven, and sometimes he seemed to be more learned about the dramas and the loves of Goethe than about those phagocytes upon which his whole fame rested. He refused to wear a high hat toward lesser men; he would see any one and was ready to believe anything—he even tried the remedies of patent medicine quacks on dying guinea-pigs. And he was a kind man. When his friends were sick he overwhelmed them with delicacies and advice and shed sincere tears on their pillows—so that finally they nicknamed him “Mamma Metchnikoff.” His views on the intimate instincts and necessities of life were astoundingly unlike those of any searcher I have ever heard of. “The truth is that artistic genius and perhaps all kinds of genius are closely associated with sexual activity. . . so, for example, an orator speaks better in the presence of a woman to whom he is devoted.”
He insisted that he could experiment best when pretty girls were close by!
Metchnikoff's workshop in the Pasteur Institute was more than a mere laboratory; it was a studio, it had the variegated attractions of a country fair; it radiated the verve and gusto of a three-ringed circus. Is it any wonder, then, that young doctors, eager to learn to hunt microbes, flocked to him from all over Europe? Their brains responded to this great searcher who was also a hypnotist, and their fingers flew to perform the ten thousand experiments, ideas for which belched out of the mind of Metchnikoff like an incessant eruption of fireworks.
“Mr. Saltykoff!” he would cry. “This student of Professor Pfeiffer in Germany claims that the serum of a guinea-pig will keep other guinea-pigs from dying of hog-cholera. Will you be so good as to perform an experiment to see if that is so?” And the worshiping Saltykoff rushed off—knowing what the master wanted to prove—to show that the German claims were nonsense. For a hundred other intricate tests, for which his own fingers were too impatient, Metchnikoff called upon Blagovestchensky, or Hugenschmidt, or Wagner, or Gheorgiewski, or the now almost forgotten Sawtchenko. Or when these were all busy, then there was Olga to be lured away from her paints and clay models—Olga could be depended upon to prove the most delicate points. In that laboratory there were a hundred hearts that beat as one and a hundred minds with but a single thought—to write the epic of those tiny, roundish, colorless, wandering cells of our blood, those cells, which, smelling from afar the approach of a murderous microbe, swam up the current of the blood, crawled strangely through the walls of the blood vessels to do battle with the germs and so guard us from death.
The great medical congresses of those brave days were exciting debating societies about microbes, about immunity, and it was in the weeks before a congress (Metchnikoff always went to them) that his laboratory buzzed with an infernal rushing to and fro. “We must hurry,” Metchnikoff exclaimed, “to make all of the experiments necessary to support my arguments!” The crowd of adoring assistants then slept two hours less each night; Metchnikoff rolled up his sleeves, too, and seized a syringe. Young rhinoceros beetles, green frogs, alligators, or weird Mexican axolotls were brought from the animal house by the sweating helpers (sometimes the ponds were dredged for perch and gudgeon). Then the mad philosopher, his eyes alight, his broad face so red that it glowed like some smoldering brush-fire under his beard, his mustaches full of bacilli spattered into it by his excited and poetic gestures—this Metchnikoff, I say, proceeded to inject swarms of microbes into one or another of his uncomplaining, cold-blooded menagerie. “I multiply experiments to support my theory of phagocytes!” he was wont to say.
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It is amazing, when you remember that his brain was always inventing stories about nature, how often these stories turned out to be true when they were put to the test of experiment. A German hunter had claimed: “There is nothing to Metchnikoff's theory of phagocytes. Everybody knows that you can see microbes inside of phagocytes—they have undoubtedly been gobbled up by the phagocytes. But these wandering cells are not defenders, they are mere scavengers—they will only swallow dead microbes!” The London Congress of 1891 was drawing near; Metchnikoff shouted for some guinea-pigs, vaccinated them with some cholera-like bacilli that his old friend, the unfortunate Gamaléia, had discovered. Then, a week or so later, the big-bearded philosopher shot some of these living, dangerous bacilli int
o the bellies of vaccinated beasts. Every few minutes, during the next hours, he ran slender glass tubes into their abdomens, sucked out a few drops of the fluid there, and put it before the more or less dirty lens of his microscope, to see whether the phagocytes of the immune beasts were eating up Gamaléia's bacilli. Presto! These roundish crawling cells were crammed full of the microbes!
“Now I shall prove that these microbes inside the phagocytes are still alive!” cried Metchnikoff. He killed the guinea-pig, slashed it open, and sucked into another little glass tube some of the grayish slime of wandering cells which had gathered in the creature's belly to make meals off the microbes. In a little while—for they are very delicate when you try to keep them alive outside the body—the phagocytes had died, burst open, and the live bacilli they had swallowed galloped out of them! Promptly, when Metchnikoff injected them, these microbes that had been swallowed, murdered guinea-pigs who were not immune.
By dozens of brilliant experiments of this kind, Metchnikoff forced his opponents to admit that phagocytes, sometimes, can eat vicious microbes. But the pitiful waste of this brainy Metchnikoff's life was that he was always doing experiments to defend an idea, and not to find the hidden truths of nature. His experiments were weird, they were often fantastically entertaining, but they were so artificial—they were so far away from the point of what it is that makes us immune. You would think that his brain, which seemed to be able to hold all knowledge, would have dreamed of subtle tests to find out just how it is that one child can be exposed to consumption and never get it, while some carefully and hygienically raised young girl dies from consumption at twenty. There is the riddle of immunity (and it is still completely a riddle!). “Oh! it is doubtless due to the fact that her phagocytes are not working!” Metchnikoff would have exclaimed, and then he might rush off to flabbergast some opponent by proving that the phagocytes of an alligator eat up typhoid fever bacilli—which never bother alligators anyway.