The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis
Authors: 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
To Margaret, Ike, and Lucy
CONTENTS
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 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
THE
FANTASTIC
LABORATORY
OF
DR. WEIGL
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 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 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 time—blood as a battleground in which cells and antibodies fought off germs—was only the latest, culturally influenced understanding, one that reflected the period’s nationalistic quarrels. He predicted that more nuanced insights would open the way to calmer metaphors in the future. He was right, as demonstrated by recent studies of the multifaceted role of bacteria in our individual “microbiomes,” which show that we are walking superorganisms whose life processes depend on interactions with trillions of bacteria inside of us.
In short, more than just lice had drawn me to Lviv. So much decision and thought and sacrifice had taken place here in this far-off corner of Europe near the Carpathian Mountain chain. The city had been occupied by ten different powers during eight decades. Its population had been murdered and expelled by the hundreds of thousands in the 1940s, and the remarkable accomplishments of these forgotten people had faded along with their bones. Now I watched its streets fill with buses and trams and with Ukrainian citizens, each individual possessing a feeling of belonging, no doubt, though they inhabited a city formed by people of languages and faiths that were absent now. It was as if Lviv’s human population was fungible, its lice the only permanent colony.