THE INVISIBLE VICTORY
Richard Gordon
Richard Gordon
THE INVISIBLE VICTORY
First Published in 1977
Author's Note
Who discovered penicillin? Fleming or Florey? Would either have seen its possibilities, had not the sulpha drugs come from Nazi Germany? And who was the sulpha drugs' begetter? Gerhard Domagk, awarded the Nobel Prize? Or an unknown German professor, at the same time on trial for his life at Nьrnberg for complicity with Hitler's SS?
My research in London, Oxford and Wuppertal gave fresh knowledge about the discoverers of these drugs, which have benefited almost everyone alive today. This is a novel, but its historical and medical facts stay close to the truth. The scientists Colebrook, Wright, Hopkins, Freeman, Raistrick and Hцrlein all lived. Chain, Fletcher and Heatley happily still do.
A note about microbes. The sulpha drugs and penicillin kill the dangerous germ streptococcus in the body. The equally deadly staphylococcus is killed by penicillin, but not by the sulpha drugs.
1
You could see the whole of Wuppertal from the Schwebebahn. That was the famous overhead railway, its green-painted girders bestriding ten miles of the River Wupper like an angular centipede. Its neat red-and-white aerial tramcars, suspended from their monorail, gave the entrancing feeling of floating in the gondola of a low-flying Zeppelin. The first ride had been taken on October 24, 1900 by Kaiser Wilhelm II, wearing his field-grey military cape and spiked helmet. The only accident in its history, as everyone in Wuppertal told you sooner or later, was a baby elephant involved in a circus stunt falling through the floor into the water.
Wuppertal was a snake of a town, twisting along a steep wooded valley in places barely quarter of a mile across, lined with narrow slate-roofed tenement houses rising on each other's shoulders. Its headlong outdoor staircases suggested Old Edinburgh, the abuttal everywhere of man's ugliness on Nature's beauty reminded me of the mining towns in South Wales where I had gone bicycling during the Cambridge vacations. The river banks were settled by weavers in the eighteenth century, their linen yarn covering the green fields like snow, and its only event to impinge on the outside world was the birth there in 1820 of Friedrich Engels. Wuppertal was synthetic, like the compounds which I created from elements in my chemist's test-tubes. It had been formed from six Rhineland towns breathing the same acrid air-Elberfeld, Barmen, Cronenberg, Ronsdorf, Beyenburg and Vohwinkel-like Arnold Bennett's Potteries. That was three years before my arrival. I came to work there on January 1, 1933, a perfectly ridiculous moment for a particle of the British Empire to settle on the feverish face of Germany.
In Elberfeld-everyone of course still used the old names-which formed the north-west corner of Wuppertal, the Schwebebahn bisected the factory of I. G Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft, the huge chemical combine which made dyes and anything else profitable to come out of a test-tube. It was a vast, straggling disarray of red-brick buildings the size of warehouses and long wooden sheds, the river a squalid ditch canalized by the factory walls, rain-bowed with oil and overhung with a web of cables and pipes, smoke pouring from a dozen tall brick chimneys and steam escaping from myriad valves. The conscience of the world had not yet stepped so inconveniently between a manufacturer and the cheap disposal of his waste. I worked at the far side of Wuppertal in the old district of Barmen, but that morning I had an appointment at I G Farben. The Schwebebahn was crowded. It was eight-thirty on the last Saturday of January, in an age when men got up six days a week for work-if they could find it. From the factory station, a floorless shed suspended in mid-air, I retraced my route to the gates off the main road leading west towards Dusseldorf. It was a bitter day, the grey sky threatening imminent reinforcement for the black-speckled, iron-hard snow swept into gutters and corners.
I was directed across a triangular yard cut by railway tracks, where a gang of workmen in leather aprons and shiny-peaked caps were loading a dray with carboys of chemicals in straw nests, every man's breath a cloud, the four horses pawing the icy cobbles and smoking like dragons. As I crossed the river by a footbridge of railway sleepers I caught the familiar smell of phenol. All Wuppertal stank. Any town making its living from chemicals in those days suffered its nose to be corroded. The factory was the pharmaceutical division of I G Farben, the works strung along the river in the 1880s by the old Bayer drug company, which still gave its name to the medicaments. From phenol, the Germans were making aspirin to soothe the headaches of the world.
The six-storey research block was modern, a cleanly contrast to the industrial jungle. I was making for the pathology department on the fourth floor, where I found a door to the left of the short corridor ajar, and walked in. I discovered myself in an amazingly luxurious laboratory. It was light and airy on the corner of the building, with white-tiled walls, white desks and swivel chairs, a telephone, even a refrigerator. The bench was separated from a huge window by a shelf of plants in pots, the elaborate microscope was far beyond the pocket of the Sir William Dunn Laboratories at Cambridge, which I had just quit. Its only occupant was a girl in a white coat, busy over conical flasks with cotton-wool stoppers. She was pretty, round faced and dark-haired, her eyes murmuring a hint of the Slav.
'Yes? What do you want?' she asked sharply.
I must have appeared a freak. At Cambridge I had learned, like Michael Arlen's Gerald, to despise the genteel habit of wearing an overcoat, whether it blew, rained, snowed or froze. My twenty-two-year-old frame was hung with grey flannel 'bags' and a brown Harris tweed jacket, a long knitted blue-red-and-gold Trinity College scarf tucked into the lapels. My fair hair was disarrayed. I was red-nosed and raw-handed. One fist carried a brown cardboard attachй case from Woolworth's, which contained principally rye bread and sliced sausage for my lunch, the other clasped a flapping umbrella. God knows why I perpetrated the image of a typical Cambridge undergraduate going about his business in an obscure Rhineland industrial town. Perhaps it was patriotic bravado, or insularity, or 'bohemianism'. Or perhaps I couldn't afford a change of clothes.
'I have an appointment this morning to see Professor Dr Domagk,' I replied in German.
'I'm sorry, mein Herr, but it is strictly forbidden to enter the laboratories.'
My English accent made her more agitated, and I thought prettier. At that age I had a pressing interest in women. (Perhaps it persisted. I have had more wives than usually allowed a Professor of Biochemistry.)
_'Streng verboten,'_ she repeated, torn between duty and courtesy. In the Europe of those days, even neighbouring foreigners enjoyed the rarity and mystery of Turks to the Elizabethans. 'Please wait outside.'
This was strange. The Dunn Labs were as open to visitors as Cambridge railway station, and far more convenient than those famously remote platforms. I was about to comply when a door in the far corner opened to admit two men in white linen lab coats.
The first struck me as a younger copy of the Republic's President, Field-Marshal von Hindenburg. He was fiftyish, square-built, bull-necked, bushy eyebrowed, his hair iron grey, his moustache close-clipped, wearing circular horn-rimmed glasses (but everyone's glasses were circular then). The other's lab coat was too long in the sleeves, unbuttoned to display brown trousers badly in need of a press. I recognized him at once from my German host's description as Professor Gerhard Domagk.
'Quite obviously, you are Herr Elgar,' said Domagk in German, taking in my appearance.
Domagk was in his late thirties, tall and spare, with thinning dark hair cropped so close that the sides of his head appeared shaven. He had a neat triangle of clipped moustache and a pin through his soft white collar under the knot of his tie, American style. The little I knew of him suggested that he might begrud
ge spending even the small change of his time on me. He was a bacteriologist, a doctor specializing in germs, a study initiated by the Germans themselves in the 1870s. He held the title of Professor from the University of Munster-the nation which makes much of such labels has the pleasant custom of applying them without the accompanying trials of office. He had been Director of Experimental Pathology and Bacteriology at I G Farben for the past five years. I needed to dig my youthful fingers deep into my pockets of self-confidence to announce, 'Sir Frederick Hopkins asked me to pay you his respects, Herr Professor. Until last summer I was one of his students in the Biochemistry Department at Cambridge.'
'So Dr Dieffenbach explained, when he telephoned. Well, I'm sure we're honoured to welcome Sir Frederick's emissary.' I sensed no tinge of sarcasm. 'Had there been no Hopkins, our babies might still be misshapen from rickets and our sailors still dying from scurvy.'
Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins-'Hoppy'-was President of the Royal Society, great-grandson of a captain at Trafalgar and a relation of the Jesuit priest whose poems combine subtle conciseness with eccentric metre. He was the doctor who in 1898 attended the unexpectedly early arrival of Ramsay Macdonald's firstborn in the flat downstairs at Lincoln's Inn Fields. He was also the man who discovered vitamins.
'My correspondence with Hopkins was a couple of years back, when we synthesized vitamin B1 here in these laboratories,' Domagk explained to his companion. The girl with the Slav eyes was concentrating on her flasks. She seemed of slight importance. I judged her a technician, not a chemist. 'Some people in Germany said that Hopkins was forestalled in his discovery by the Dutchman Christian Eijkman. You know, when he observed that natives eating polished rice went down with beri-beri. I wanted to tell Hopkins how I disagreed with that view. Anyway, he was always generous in his praise for Eijkman's work. _Fair play,'_ he added in English.
The Hindenburg-like man grunted. 'Didn't the gateman send a porter up with you?' he enquired of me. When I shook my head he remarked resignedly, 'Oh, they're too comfortable drinking coffee in their lodge this weather. Visitors aren't supposed to come unescorted,' he added as an apology. 'We are a commercial undertaking, not a university, and a company must guard its secrets like its marks in the bank. Where did you learn your German?'
'There were lectures at Cambridge for scientists. A knowledge of German is of course essential to keep up with modern chemistry.'
'I am a chemist, so I savour your compliment.'
I became aware while we talked of the unmistakable smell emitted by laboratory mice. Somewhere beyond the door which they had left ajar would be an animal house, its shoebox-sized cages stacked the height of a man, each floored with straw and sawdust on which scurried, in various states of ill health, lapping their cunningly doctored bowls, the invaluable and involuntary martyrs to man's easeful supremacy on earth. Through the opening I glimpsed something like an oversized biscuit tin on legs, which from my earlier days working in the Inoculation Department of St Mary's Hospital in London I recognized as an incubator for growing bacteria. For all their secrecy, I gathered from the combination that something was going on involving the experimental infection of living beings with germs.
'If Professor Hцrlein will excuse me for a moment,' said Domagk affably, turning to the other, 'I shall install our Englishman across the corridor.'
'You are lodging with Dr Dieffenbach?' remarked Hцrlein. I enjoyed the hospitality of Dr Dieffenbach's chalet-like roof in Elberfeld-literally, my freezing bedroom being under the rafters. He had made my appointment. Domagk lived in the same smart residential area near the Zoo, at No 11 Walkьrenallee, but it appeared seemly for one of my insignificance to be received in his laboratory. 'We all know him well. A very agreeable man, and an excellent doctor.'
'How did you come across him?' asked Domagk with a look of curiosity. I noticed a habit of inclining his head to one side as he spoke. 'To my knowledge he has never visited England, except as an involuntary guest during the War.'
'He is an acquaintance of a family friend, Sir Edward Triplady-'
'Ah! The physician who attends your King?' Hцrlein exclaimed, recognition in his eye.
I nodded. I had mentioned two knights in almost as many breaths. They must have thought me splendidly connected, the Germans taking the English aristocracy completely seriously.
2
I concluded from his spacious Arbeitszimmer, in which Domagk left me alone on the other side of the building, that all the facilities provided by I G Farben compared with those of the Cambridge Dunn Labs as the Ritz to the Little Rose pubs in Trumpington Street. The furniture was plentiful, though with the unrelated look of institutional buying. The flat roll-topped desk was piled high with typewritten papers, coloured cardboard folders and neat piles of scientific journals, and against the four tall windows were more of those indoor plants which attract such quaint English names, like mother-in-law's tongue or busy lizzie. Outside was a bare cherry tree, the grey sky and the Schwebebahn.
Decorating the white walls were framed photographs of middle-aged or elderly gentlemen, mostly looking down microscopes. I recognized Professor Paul Ehrlich from Frankfurt-on-Main, bushy haired, neatly bearded, unaccustomedly smart in wing collar and spotted tie and broadcloth cutaway, with his soft mouth and his glasses halfway down his nose, looking up amiably from some chemical tome as though surprised at someone snatching the habitual box of cigars from under his arm and taking his portrait. In 1909, Ehrlich exploited the German genius for systematic chemistry by testing 605 compounds of arsenic before discovering 'Salvarsan' or '606', which killed the treacherous spirochaete _Treponema pallidum._ He cleared syphilis from the veins of the world, many of them blue-blooded.
On a table against the window a microscope stood tilted for the eye. I idly turned the knurled fine-adjustment screw, focusing the fuzzy blue circle on the glass slide.
I am a biochemist, a student of the molecular mechanism of life, but I had worked on bacteria and recognized a specimen of human pus. I saw the globular scavengers of the blood, resembling the pond amoeba, the simplest of God's creatures, which expresses the mystery of existence in a single cell. Among them were twisted minute, dark, exactly similar dots, some in chains of twenty or more, some in fives and sixes, others in pairs, like broken beads on a ballroom floor. They were _Streptococcus pyogenes,_ an enemy of mankind only less deadly than man himself. Some of the chains had penetrated the blood cells, to lie against the blobs of a nucleus deep stained by the blue dye. The streptococcus germs were winning this complex and subtle battle. They were killing the body's scavengers, on their way to killing the body itself.
I straightened up, noticing with surprise that the colourful, bold landscape which had already caught my eye on the wall above was an original painting. It was an unusual find in the study of a scientific professor.
'You like my picture?' Domagk entered unexpectedly, still in his white coat. From the warmth of his greeting I had been caught at a fortunate moment. I politely asked the artist.
'Otto Dix. I was going to say that he's one of our younger painters, but of course now he's about forty. He teaches at Dresden. He's a disciple of "The New Objectivity"'-Domagk repeated _Die Neue Sachlichkeit_ in English. 'That's an artistic movement derived from the 'Bridge Group" formed early this century in Dresden,' he continued in an explanatory way, 'but after the War some rather crazy people joined it. His work is taken to express a realistic disillusionment with life in Germany today-or by that do we mean a disgust?'
He waved me to a low chair, sitting behind the roll-top desk, crossing his long legs. Unwinding my Trinity scarf, I handed him from my breast pocket a glossy pamphlet entitled,
_LES PRIX NOBEL EN 1929_
_The Earlier History of Vitamin Research_
_Sir Frederick Cowland Hopkins F R S_
On the day I had packed up my luggage, my ambitions and my illusions to leave Cambridge for good, I had taken a self-consciously sentimental breakfast-time walk along the river. It was a Decem
ber morning which sharply reminded the University that it was but an intruder in the Fens. The Backs wore their midwinter splendour, trees ghostly with frost under the bleary eye of a newly awakened sun, even the incorrigible mallards dulled with cold on the steely waters of the Cam. On Trinity bridge I encountered 'floppy', long moustache covering the angles of his mouth to bestow a look of everlasting pondering, his eyes mirrors of infinite shrewdness. When I disclosed I was disappearing to Wuppertal he was amazed and shocked. 'Going over to the enemy,' he called it. But with his usual kindness he suggested that I carried the signed reprint as an introduction to Domagk, who might perhaps be useful to me.
Domagk offered a packet of Juno cigarettes-_Berlin raucht Juno,_ said the advertisements-but I have never smoked. 'The vitamins may be a simple idea,' he said, turning Hoppy's few pages, 'but simple ideas need genius to see them. I have often to remind myself that a scientist must view the world through a telescope as well as a microscope. Though sometimes even a telescope is unnecessary, because the most useful ideas stand on the horizon like mountains and we never see them.'
There was a silence. The conversational possibilities between us seemed swiftly exhausted. Perhaps thinking it churlish to evict me so promptly, Domagk added, 'I understand from Dr Dieffenbach that you're working for the Red Crown brewery across at Barmen. That's the American concern, isn't it? Do you find the job interesting?'
'Not in the slightest.'
Domagk gave his shy smile, tossing the spent match into a large glass ashtray. 'Well, I prefer wine myself. And so does Dr Dieffenbach.' I had already found the cellar no disadvantage in my lodgings. 'We don't see many Englishmen or Americans in Germany. It's understandable. The war was hardly a tennis match. You were lucky to go through it as a child, Herr Elgar. I had to leave Kiel University after my first semester to join the colours as a grenadier. I celebrated my nineteenth birthday in a dugout on the Belgian coast at Nieuport, fighting the Tommies. The Tommies wounded me in 1915, so I was posted to the Medical Corps.' He imparted all this with his usual quiet voice. 'In a most lowly capacity. The upshot was my qualifying in medicine at Kiel five years later than I expected. Well, I shouldn't complain. Most of my academic brothers lost their lives.'
THE INVISIBLE VICTORY Page 1
