The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis

358 Pages·2014·3.64 MB·English

by  Arthur Allen

THE
FANTASTIC
LABORATORY
OF
DR.
WEIGL
HOW TWO BRAVE SCIENTISTS BATTLED TYPHUS
AND SABOTAGED THE NAZIS
ARTHUR ALLEN
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
New York | London
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To Margaret, Ike, and Lucy
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CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
Chapter One: Lice/War/Typhus/Madness
Chapter Two: City on the Edge of Time
Chapter Three: The Louse Feeders
Chapter Four: The Nazi Doctors and the Shape of Things to Come
Chapter Five: War and Epidemics
Chapter Six: Parasites
Chapter Seven: The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Wiegl
Chapter Eight: Armies of Winter
Chapter Nine: The Terrifying Clinic of Dr. Ding
Chapter Ten: “Paradise” at Auschwitz
Chapter Eleven: Buchenwald: Rabbit Stew and Fake Vaccine
Chapter Twelve: Imperfect Justice
Afterword
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
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5
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THE
FANTASTIC
LABORATORY
OF
DR. WEIGL
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PREFACE
A
few years ago I found myself in a dim corridor at the Institute of
Epidemiology and Hygiene in Lviv, Ukraine, trying to persuade Dr.
Oleksandra Tarasyuk, the institute’s polite but recalcitrant director, to let
me watch the feeding of the lice.
Why, one might ask, would anyone come all the way to Ukraine to
look at lice? They are, after all, common loathsome insects, synonymous
everywhere with disease and filth, wretchedness and neglect. To the
naked eye, Dr. Tarasyuk’s lice were no different from the ones that I and
millions of other parents combed from the scalps of our children during
elementary school infestations. I had once or twice examined my
children’s cohabitants under a microscope and found them to be
surprisingly intricate, greasy-brown creatures whose guts contained tiny
but distinct canals of blood.
But the lice of 12 Zelena Street, Lviv, were not quite ordinary
creatures. For one thing, they were body lice (Pediculus humanus
humanus) rather than head lice (Pediculus humanus capitis) . The two
insects, varieties of a single species, are remarkably similar; even
geneticists have trouble parsing their essential difference. Both nourish
themselves by poking an exoskeletal needle into the warm skins of
humans and employing the musculature of their tiny proboscides to
extract our blood. But for reasons that biologists have yet to understand,
there is one fundamental distinction between head lice and body lice:
head lice are a nuisance, but only body lice transmit one of humankind’s
most fearsome diseases, typhus. Body lice are thus players, in a way that
head lice have never been, in some of the great tragedies and most
horrendous pages of history. Few organisms have been as deadly to
doctors and medical researchers as typhus. This is perhaps not surprising,
because the sick shed lice, which are fussy about heat and cold and
abandon the body once temperatures fall below 98 degrees Fahrenheit or
rise above 102 degrees, desperately searching for a new home. Each
laboratory in the fight against typhus had its martyrs, and publications
about the disease were inevitably dedicated to fallen colleagues. This
explains why the lice of Lviv led such a charmed existence, spending most
of their lives swarming together in the comfort of heated wooden
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cabinets, unlike the rootless lumpen proletarians that burrow, for a brief
while, in the hair of schoolchildren.
Like many scientists who spend careers in close proximity to lab
animals, Dr. Tarasyuk felt quite protective of hers. “It’s very difficult to
keep this population alive,” she told me in a remorseful tone. “They need
particular temperature levels at different stages of their lives. They feed
only once a day. And we have to make sure that the feeders are healthy.”
And what do these lice eat? Human blood, of course. And how do they
procure it? Why, by being placed in cages on the legs of human beings.
The feeders at the institute, each paid a small sum for their sacrifice and
blood donation, were mostly lab technicians. The idea of letting me, a
stranger who didn’t even speak Ukrainian, into the lab filled Dr. Tarasyuk
with horror. I could give the lice a disease! I could threaten the survival of
the colony! She could lose her job! “Come back the next time you are in
Lviv, but give us more warning,” she told me with a frown. “We would
love to see you again.”
Afterwards I stood outside the rather plain, five-story, Bauhaus-
influenced building for a few moments and tried to conjure up a picture of
its past. The lice of 12 Zelena Street are the descendants of a colony bred
seven decades ago by the zoologist Rudolf Weigl, who crossed lice picked
from the bodies of Russian prisoners of World War I with those nestled in
the robes of Ethiopian highlanders. With these lice and a lot of ingenuity,
Weigl in the 1920s created the first effective vaccine against typhus, a
disease that terrorized the world, inspired the creation of Zyklon B gas,
and provided a pretext for the worst human crimes in history. Weigl’s
discovery drew global notice. Nobel laureates trod the corridors of his
institute to study his techniques and pay homage to him. Agents from the
Nazi SS and the Soviet NKVD sniffed around the halls of his institute;
Nikita Khrushchev, later the Soviet premier, and Hans Frank, the Nazi
governor of Poland, appeared at his doors, soliciting Weigl’s services.
The lice were all that remained of a fantastic research laboratory where
Weigl had devised his vaccine with an almost surrealistic series of
manufacturing techniques. During World War II, Weigl’s laboratory
became the spiritual center of the city, protecting thousands of vulnerable
people who worked in it. Weigl was a bit like Oskar Schindler, the real-
life hero of Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List, except that to get on
Weigl’s list, you had to strap many matchbox-size cages to your leg with a
thick rubber band. In each cage, there were hundreds of lice that fed on
your blood. The survivors of Weigl’s laboratory became famous
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mathematicians and poets, orchestra conductors and underground
fighters.
The one who most captured my imagination was Ludwik Fleck, a
biologist in his own right, and also a philosopher of science. While
working as Weigl’s assistant, Fleck had incubated a captivating theory of
scientific knowledge and laid it out in a 1935 book, Genesis and
Development of a Scientific Fact. Today, Fleck is well known to sociologists
and historians of science. Thomas Kuhn, the famous theoretician of
knowledge who gave us the term “paradigm shift,” borrowed heavily from
Fleck’s thought in writing his 1962 classic, The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions.
Fleck’s writing drew me because of his penetrating analysis of the
human at work, his observations enlivened by clarity, humor, and
earthiness. He showered empathy upon his subjects, whether they were
medical researchers, women besotted with Parisian fashions, or medieval
astrologers. Reading Fleck gave me a sudden sense of intimacy with the
thought patterns of ancient and otherwise inscrutable people. He made
the past bubble to life by showing the integrity of its thought systems,
however wrong or bizarre they seemed to us. And he made me realize
that although we live in a world separated by an almost infinite number
of different mindsets, recognition of this fact can enable us to understand
one another. In his day job, Fleck practiced traditional scientific
reductionism, limiting the variables in order to resolve diagnostic
problems. His job was to detect the invisible particles that lurked behind
the familiar events of everyday life—the bacteria and antibodies that
helped explain a cough, a fever, a sickly child. His philosophy, by contrast,
did just the opposite: it cast a familiar light on the arcane thought
patterns of the strangers who surround us in the present and the past.
Fleck’s anthropological observations of science had allowed him to
rise above tragedy, to gain an almost spiritual perspective amid a storm-
tossed life. He had served the Habsburg Empire as a medical officer
during the Great War, endured anti-Semitic discrimination in the 1920s
and 1930s, then survived the Holocaust, the intrigues of postwar
communism, and the hush-hush of a Cold War bioterrorism lab in Israel.
Fleck’s medical specialty was immunology, or, as it was known in the
first part of the 20th century, serology—the changes in the blood that
helped doctors diagnose and treat infections. Blood had always been a
mysterious and therefore a symbolic substance—“a humor with
distinctive virtues,” as Mephistopheles says in Goethe’s Faust. That book
intrigued Fleck, who believed that the immunological paradigm of his
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