The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (12 page)

As the vaccine passed from an experimental to a manufacturing phase, Weigl’s staff in the early 1930s grew to about a dozen scientists with an equal number of technicians and assistants, and more and more louse feeders. The expansion of the Weigl lab and the growing demand for his vaccine required technical innovation. To raise millions of healthy lice, one needed improved systems to breed, infect, and harvest the lice. In the system devised by Weigl and his staff, larvae hatched in temperature-controlled cabinets were put in matchbox-size cages to feed on human blood twice a day for about 10 days. The next step was to inject a diluted, typhus-contaminated slurry of louse guts into the rectums of the healthy lice. Initially, Weigl injected each louse by hand, placing it on a slide or a paper card and injecting a pipette attached to a piece of tubing taped over the end of a syringe. Gradually, he mechanized the technique, attaching the pipettes to a hydraulic, foot pedal–controlled pump that squirted a microdroplet of the emulsion into the louse rectum once the pipette had been moved into place.
A device known as
the Weigl clamp held as many as 50 lice at a time immobile, with their rear ends presented for injection.

Putting lice into a Weigl clamp. (Courtesy of Emil-von-Behring-Bibliothek, Philipps-Universität Marburg.)

After the artificially infected lice had fed on blood again for about five days, they swelled and turned ruby red. This signified that the growing bacterial population in the cells lining the louse intestines had caused them to leak or even burst, which rendered the creatures incapable of digesting the fresh blood they fed upon. At this point, the cages were removed and the lice taken to the
preparatorzy
(dissectors), who used a small lancet to remove the blood-filled intestines, which were crushed and homogenized in a mortar, centrifuged to remove cellular debris, and diluted in saline solution with enough phenol to kill the bacteria. The dead bacteria could no longer infect a person, but the intact proteins in the dead bugs stimulated a person’s immune system to protect against typhus.

Vaccination of a large population required mind-boggling amounts of lice nourished on the blood of patient human feeders. Weigl estimated in 1924 that each infected louse intestine contained 10 to 100 million bacteria, and that each individual required the neutralized contents of about 5 billion of these germs to be fully immunized.
The first vaccination series
Weigl designed contained the ingredients of 350 louse intestines, split into three shots spaced over two- to three-week intervals.
The total was reduced
to 175 intestines after a few years, and by 1935 Weigl recommended a total of 90 intestines per three doses. The vaccine could be preserved in a refrigerator for three years; immunity lasted at least a year after the third vaccination.

The need for lice feeders was enormous as demand for vaccine grew.
By the end of 1933
, there were 50 people feeding lice at least once a day in the lab. Many were staff members, others hired to perform this very exotic form of blood donation. It was one of the creepiest jobs one could imagine, but Weigl and his staff were rather matter-of-fact about it. An associate provided the following job description: “
Lice feeders must be
chosen with care. We recommend the choice of mature men, with calm temperaments and skin that is healthy and smooth. They must have no predisposition to skin conditions such as eczema or uticarias. They must be capable of great patience and self-control—in order to resist the desire to scratch. They must be well behaved and assiduous about cleanliness. Their workplace must have a shower that they make regular use of.” Adam Finkel, a hematologist working in the Weigl lab, noted in a 1933 publication that 100 lice—about enough to make a three-dose vaccine series—typically sucked up to 40 milligrams of blood in 15 minutes; they had to feed twice a day for eight days before they were ready to harvest. A typical louse feeder nourished 30,000 lice at a time, meaning that the blood of one person feeding lice for a little over a week could provide vaccine for 300 people. Longtime feeders often developed allergic reactions that forced them to stop feeding.
They also had to be
careful about their own nutrition. Feeding 30,000 lice twice a day resulted in the loss of about 720 grams (a pound and a half) of blood in one month.

A louse feeder. (Courtesy of National Museum of Health and Medicine.)

If the work was perilous, the mood was often playful. Weigl was curious about the private lives of his young employees, and enjoyed occasionally visiting art studios and bars with them. He allowed his staff to make amateur films in the institute. One shows a “Louse Theater” production put on by the epidemiologist Piotr Radło, featuring such titles as “Heroic Expeditions of the Horsemen of Death” and “Work Is No Dishonor.”
Weigl was an idiosyncratic
boss. Writing was torture and a waste of time as far as he was concerned. His lack of interest angered assistants, because it reduced the number of publications they could put on their résumés. His style was to allow junior scientists to develop their own questions and experimental designs. He approved of independence, but when unimpressed by a person or idea, did not hide his displeasure.

Whatever Weigl was doing involved a certain degree of obsessive perfectionism. He always had the latest mechanical devices—though he never owned a car—and often made small improvements on them. For instance, he insisted that pots be set on a medium flame for most efficient heating, and that phosphorescent matches be struck at a certain angle in order to have the best chance of lighting. In his laboratory, Weigl designed microscope lens adjustment knobs adopted by the German companies Reichert and Zeiss.
He neither requested nor received
royalties. Weigl’s employees learned not to approach him while he was walking in the Botanical Garden, where he elaborated his thought. He usually addressed them with a familiar “you,” or “my child,” or
dziecinko
, roughly translatable as “kiddo.”
If he used the formal
pan
(Mr.), it meant something was wrong, or important.

Deeply immersed in work, Weigl often seemed oblivious to his surroundings. On one occasion, goes a story that circulated in the lab, Weigl was staying at the Bristol Hotel in Warsaw and after a meeting at the health ministry asked the taxi driver to take him to the best restaurant in town, which turned out to be in the Bristol itself. After lunch he forgot where he was staying, but the waiters called around until they found him reserved at the Bristol.
By then, however, Weigl
had forgotten where he was, so he left the restaurant, got into a taxi, and asked the puzzled driver to take him to the Bristol.

In 1935, Weigl’s family had moved to new digs, a spacious five-bedroom house at Poni
ski 31, with one side looking out over the grounds of the Eastern Trade Fair at Stryj Park, the other on undeveloped hills with orchards and meadows. Weigl took the trolley car the two miles to work each day. Once he boarded without any money and explained to the driver that he was Rudolf Weigl and would pay twice when he returned the next day. “Sure, you’re Weigl—and I’m Napoleon,” the conductor said. The tabloids presented him as the mad professor of Lwów, keeping lice and feeding them on himself. Once Wiktor and his father were in an outdoor market in the Jewish quarter, and his father selected some items from the stall of an old man, then walked off absent-mindedly without paying. When he returned apologetically, the man said, “Oh, I knew you’d be good for it, Professor.”
As they walked away
, Weigl turned to his son and said, “You see, I can’t even steal anything anymore.’”

As vaccine production grew, the institute started to have space problems. Weigl had a certain feline sensitivity to his surroundings, and he didn’t want to abandon the basement offices where he worked. So he decided to raise their ceilings by digging, at great cost, huge holes in the ground to incorporate new sewage, gas, and electric lines. Once the new rooms were finished, Weigl went into the studio, sat down on a chair, got up, and sat down again. He told a laboratory assistant to sit in the chair and asked him, “What do you feel?” The assistant looked puzzled, but then another aide came in and said the ceiling was still too low. At Weigl’s command, the floor was again broken up, and the entire installation rebuilt.
The rooms were painted gold
and silver. The money Weigl spent on his finicky feng shui came from an award he’d won, and it would have been enough, a tut-tutting aide noted, to build an entirely new, modern facility with good biosecurity.

That the new Polish state had an anti-Semitism problem became clear to the world in late November 1918, with the worst pogrom in Lwów’s history. The slaughter followed a three-week battle for control of the city between Polish and Ukrainian soldiers, a conflict in which Jewish authorities stayed on the sidelines.
Armed Poles repaid
what they viewed as Jewish disloyalty by allowing the massive destruction of the Jewish quarter. Three days of brutality left 73 dead, 463 injured, and thousands homeless. In 1919, when an American delegation visited Poland to investigate anti-Semitism on behalf of President Woodrow Wilson, none of the Polish newspapers published the statement of goodwill they drew up on arrival. Poles were angry that Wilson had dictated to them the requirement to give minorities equal rights. Both Zionists and Polish nationalists the delegates met described Judaism as a race, not simply a religion. The mixture of optimism and cynicism the delegation detected among Jews, the aggression and grievance of the Poles, were perhaps typical for this time.
In Lwów, the delegates found
that “the best Poles did not try to excuse the pogrom, but said it was a blot on the name of their city; in other places which we had visited there was always an attempt to deny that anything had taken place, or else it was excused on the ground that the Jews were Bolsheviks.”

In the interwar years, there seemed to be as many facets to Jewish-Polish relations as there were Jews and Poles who lived through them. Wacław Szybalski, the son of a wealthy businessman from an old noble family, said that assimilated Jews were an accepted part of his universe. “I personally didn’t know whether anyone was Polish or Jewish,” he told me during an interview at his lab in Wisconsin in 2010. “We bought our groceries from Friedman. They were Jewish, but my parents never said so, and I didn’t know it. Of course, the working-class people, who spoke Yiddish and had beards and so on, were unknown to me.” Venturing into the Jewish ghetto, beyond the Opera House, “was like visiting a foreign country.”

There were many places in Lwów where Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians assembled together—drinking coffee at the Szkocka and the Załewski, guffawing in the theater, or roaring with laughter by their radios every Sunday over the schlocky slapstick of To
ko and Szczepko. In April 1936, during days of riots sparked by the funeral procession of Ukrainian laborers in which police killed eight protesters, the workers marched 10 abreast with militant slogans painted on banners in Polish, Ukrainian, and Yiddish. The violence of that day in central Lwów made a powerful impact on the young people who witnessed it as a harbinger of things to come.
Yet the demonstrations were
unified across ethnic lines.