Microbe Hunters
Page 37
“Is it safe?”
Arsenic is the favorite poison of murderers. . . “But how wonderfully we have changed it!” Paul Ehrlich protested.
What saves mice and rabbits might murder men. . . “The step from the laboratory to the bedside is dangerous—but it must be taken!” answered Paul Ehrlich. You remember his gray eyes, that were so kind.
But, heigho! Here was the next morning, the brave light of the bright morning. Here was the laboratory with its cured rabbits, here was that wizard, Bertheim—how he had twisted that arsenic through all these six hundred and six compounds. That man could not go wrong. So many of them had been dangerous that this six hundred and sixth one must be safe. . . Bravo! Here was the mixed good smell of a hundred experimental animals and a thousand chemicals. Here were all these men and women, how they believed in him! So, let's go! Let us try it!
At bottom Paul Ehrlich was a gambler, as who of the great line of the microbe hunters has not been?
And before that sore on the scrotum of the first rabbit had shed its last scab, Paul Ehrlich had written to his friend, Dr. Konrad Alt: “Will you be so good as to try this new preparation, 606, on human beings with syphilis?”
Of course Alt wrote back: “Certainly!” which any German doctor—for they are right hardy fellows—would have replied.
Came 1910, and that was Paul Ehrlich's year. One day, that year, he walked into the scientific congress at Koenigsberg, and there was applause. It was frantic, it was long, you would think they were never going to let Paul Ehrlich say his say. He told of how the magic bullet had been found at last. He told of the terror of the disease of the loathsome name, of those sad cases that went to horrible disfiguring death, or to what was worse—the idiot asylums. They went there in spite of mercury—mercury fed them and rubbed into them and shot into them until their teeth were like to drop out of their gums. He told of such cases given up to die. One shot of the compound six hundred and six, and they were up, they were on their feet. They gained thirty pounds. They were clean once more—their friends would associate with them again. . . Paul Ehrlich told, that day, of healings that could only be called Biblical! Of a wretch, so dreadfully had the pale spirochetes gnawed at his throat that he had had to be fed liquid food through a tube for months. One shot of the 606, at two in the afternoon, and at supper time that man had eaten a sausage sandwich! There were poor women, innocent sufferers from the sins of their men—there was one woman with pains in her bones, such pains she had been given morphine every night for years, to give her a little sleep. One shot of compound six hundred and six. She had gone to sleep, quiet and deep, with no morphine, that very night. It was Biblical, no less. It was miraculous—no drug nor herb of the old women and priests and medicine men of the ages had ever done tricks like that. No serum nor vaccine of the modern microbe hunters could come near to the beneficent slaughterings of the magic bullet, compound six hundred and six. Never was there such applause. Never has it been better earned, for that day Paul Ehrlich—forget for a moment the false hopes raised and the troubles that followed—that day Paul Ehrlich had led searchers around a corner.
But, to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. What is true in the realm of lifeless things is true in the lives of such men as Paul Ehrlich. The whole world bawled for salvarsan. That was what Ehrlich—we must forgive him his grandiloquence—called compound six hundred and six. Then, in the laboratory of the Georg Speyer House, Bertheim and ten assistants—worn these fellows were before they started it—turned out hundreds of thousands of doses of this marvelous stuff. They did the job of a chemical factory in their small laboratory, in the dangerous fumes of ether, in the fear that one little slip might rob a hundred men and women of life, for it was two-edged stuff, that salvarsan. And Ehrlich? Now he was only a shell of a man, with diabetes—and why did he keep on smoking more cigars?—now Ehrlich burned the candle in the middle.
He was everywhere in the Georg Speyer House. He directed the making of compounds that would be still more wonderful—so he hoped. He chased around so that even Kadereit couldn't keep track of him. He dictated hundreds of enthusiastic letters to Martha Marquardt, he read thousands of letters from every corner of the world, he kept records, careful records they were too, of every one of the sixty-five thousand doses of salvarsan injected in the year 1910. He kept them—this was like that strangely systematic man!—on a big sheet of paper tacked to the inside of the cupboard door of his office, from the top to the bottom of that door in tiny scrawls, so that he had constantly to squat on his heels or stretch up on tiptoe and strain his eyes to read them.
As the list grew, there were records of most extraordinary cures, but there were reports it was not pleasant to read, too, records that told of hiccups and vomitings and stiffenings of legs and convulsions and death—every now and then a death in people who had no business dying, coming right after injections of the salvarsan.
How he worked to explain them! How he wore himself to a shred to avoid them, for Paul Ehrlich was not a hard-boiled man. He made experiments; he conducted immense correspondences in which he asked minute questions of just how the injections had been made. He devised explanations, on the margins of the playing cards he used for his games of solitaire each evening, on the backs of those blood-and-thunder murder mysteries that were the one thing he read—so he imagined—to rest. But he never rested! Those disasters pursued him and marred his triumph. . .
The wrinkles deepened to ditches on his forehead. The circles darkened under those gray eyes that still, but not so often, danced with that owlish humor.
So this compound six hundred and six, saving its thousands from death, from insanity, from the ostracism worse than death that came to those sufferers whose bodies the pale spirochete gnawed until they were things for loathing, this 606 began killing its tens. Paul Ehrlich wore his too feeble body to a shadow, trying to explain a mystery too deep for explanation. There is no light on that mystery now, ten years after Ehrlich smoked the last of his black cigars. So it was that this triumph of Paul Ehrlich was at the same time the last disproof of his theories, which were so often wrong. “Compound six hundred and six unites chemically with the spirochetes and kills them—it does not unite chemically with the human body and so can do no damage!” That had been his theory. . .
But alas! What is the chemistry of what this subtle 606 does to the still more subtle—and unknown—machine that is the human body? Nothing is known about it even now. Paul Ehrlich paid the penalty for his fault—which may be forgiven him seeing the blessings he has brought to men—his fault of not foreseeing that once in every so many thousands of bodies a magic bullet may shoot two ways. But then, the microbe hunters of the great line have always been gamblers: let us think of the good brave adventurer Paul Ehrlich was and the thousands he has saved.
Let us remember him, trail-breaker who turned a corner for microbe hunters and started them looking for magic bullets. Already (though it is too soon to tell the whole story) certain obscure searchers, some of them old slaves of Paul Ehrlich, sweating in the great dye factories of Elberfeld, have hit upon a most fantastical drug. Its chemistry is kept a secret. It is called “Bayer 805.” It is a mild mysterious powder that cures the hitherto always fatal sleeping sickness of Rhodesia and Nyassaland. That was the ill, you remember, that the hard man, David Bruce, fought his last fight, in vain, to prevent. It does outlandish things to the cells and fluids of the human body—you would say they were fibs and fairy tales if you heard the queer things that drug can do! But what is best, it slaughters microbes! It kills them beautifully, precisely, with a completeness that must make Paul Ehrlich wriggle in his grave—and when it doesn't kill microbes it tames them.
It is as sure as the sun following the dawn of to-morrow that there will be other microbe hunters to mold other magic bullets, surer, safer, bullets to wipe out for always the most malignant microbes of which this history has told. Let us remember Paul Ehrlich, who broke this trail. . .
This
plain history would not be complete if I were not to make a confession, and that is this: that I love these microbe hunters, from old Antony Leeuwenhoek to Paul Ehrlich. Not especially for the discoveries they have made nor for the boons they have brought mankind. No. I love them for the men they are. I say they are, for in my memory every man jack of them lives and will survive until this brain must stop remembering.
So I love Paul Ehrlich—he was a gay man who carried his medals about with him all mixed up in a box never knowing which ones to wear on what night. He was an impulsive man who has, on occasion, run out of his bedroom in his shirt tail to greet a fellow microbe hunter who came to call him out for an evening of wassail.
And he was an owlish man! “You say a great work of the mind, a wonderful scientific achievement?” he repeated after a worshiper who told him that was what the discovery of 606 was.
“My dear colleague,” said Paul Ehrlich, “for seven years of misfortune I had one moment of good luck!”
Footnotes
[1] A spiral-shaped microbe has recently been brought forward as the cause of yellow fever, but this discovery has not yet been confirmed.
Books by Paul de Kruif
OUR MEDICINE MEN
MICROBE HUNTERS
HUNGER FIGHTERS
SEVEN IRON MEN
MEN AGAINST DEATH
WHY KEEP THEM ALIVE?
THE FIGHT FOR LIFE
HEALTH IS WEALTH
KAISER WAKES THE DOCTORS
THE MALE HORMONE
LIFE AMONG THE DOCTORS
A MAN AGAINST INSANITY
THE SWEEPING WIND