The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (24 page)

Vaccine production began
when lice in a petri dish deposited eggs on small squares of cloth, usually cut from Wehrmacht uniforms. Each square was put into a specially designed test tube, where it was held midway down by a partial constriction in the glass and a piece of cotton. After incubation, the lice larvae hatched after three to eight days, fell off the cloth squares, and dropped to the bottom. Each tube yielded some 800 larvae, which formed a pulsating yellowish ball about the size of a hard candy that workers transferred to 4 x 7 x 5 centimeter wooden cages. One wall of the cage consisted of a screen that Weigl had adapted from sifting screens used by Polish flour mills. The sesame seed–sized lice could feed through the screens but not escape. Each cage had a smaller square of woolen fabric on which the lice could deposit the next generation of eggs.

The cages were closed, sealed with paraffin to keep the lice from escaping, and strapped to the legs of the feeder with wide elastic bands. As many as 44 cages could be attached to a single feeder’s legs with four separate bands. The lice sucked bood for about 45 minutes every day for 12 days. Men usually attached the cages to their calves, while women placed them on their thighs, where the reddish bite marks could be hidden under a skirt. A person on average fed 25,000 lice a month from hatching until maturity.

Each day the feeder removed his or her cages of lice when the creatures were swollen and shiny with blood, and placed the cages screen down in boxes. The next day, the feeder would retrieve “his” lice for another feeding, until the cycle was over. Lice were periodically transferred to clean, heat-sterilized cages. During the transfers, the technicians collected eggs laid on the fabric and removed dead or sluggish-looking lice, molted skins, body parts, and feces.

When the healthy lice had reached 12 days of age, they were sent to be infected with
Rickettsia
. It was the job of the injectors—the
strzykacze
—to infect each louse manually. Two injectors worked together—one, using a small forceps, placed each louse in a slot in the clamp with its rear in the air. His partner, while viewing the rear of the louse under a 32X binocular microscope, inserted a glass pipette into the anus and used a foot pedal to release a valve that pumped a microdroplet of rickettsial solution into the louse. Each injection cycle required about a second. Two highly skilled operators could inject up to 2,000 lice in an hour. The infected lice were then loaded into cages and fed five more days on the blood of the injectors themselves.

Injecting typhus culture into the louse by hand. (Courtesy of National Museum, Przemy
l. Photograph of original by S. Kosiedowski.)

When the population of
Rickettsia prowazekii
reached 10 million per louse gut cell, the cells burst. Undigested human blood leaked into the abdomen, and the lice turned deep ruby red. At this point, the lice were shaken out of the cages into jars filled with 0.5 percent phenol. Thus killed, they were transferred to the dissectors—
preparatorzy
—who harvested the louse guts to make the vaccine. This was also a highly meticulous activity. The dissector used a scalpel to make an incision between the thorax and abdomen under a binocular microscope at 16X power, where everything appeared backwards and upside down. She pulled the infected gut out with the needle and tip of a scalpel, taking care not to damage the gut so that the entire rickettsial harvest could be transferred into a jar. The apprenticeship for the dissector lasted two weeks and was unpaid. A supervisor with a stopwatch monitored the trainees as they gradually increased their speed. A good dissector could harvest 300 louse midguts per hour, or one louse every twelve seconds. It was the kind of activity that would cause blindness in short order, and shifts were limited to six hours. The infected midguts were ground in a special mortar with a phenol solution that killed the
Rickettsia
. This mixture, the vaccine, was taken to a filling room and prepared at three different strengths. At the height of production, the Lwów and Kraków labs each produced thousands of doses every day.

Much of what we know about the wartime structure of the Weigl lab comes from Wacław Szybalski, whose career in genetics—an interest spurred by Weigl—later took him to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Rutgers University, and the University of Wisconsin. Though only 19 years old in 1941, Szybalski was a remarkably self-possessed and determined young scientist. As a young teenager, he attended the lectures of famous Lwów professors, and while studying chemistry at Lwów Polytechnical, from 1939 to 1941 (when not making bombs in the basement), he attended the mathematics lectures of Banach, Antoni Łomnicki, Sto
ek, and Kazimierz Bartel. The latter had been prime minister of Poland on three occasions in the late 1920s, and Szybalski was the star pupil in his class, “Descriptive Geometry and Perspective.” The Nazis arrested Bartel shortly after the invasion. When he refused to head a puppet government, they murdered him, on July 26, 1941.

A louse dissected for removal of its typhus-rich intestines. (Courtesy of National Museum, Przemy
l. Photograph of original by S. Kosiedowski.)

In the first days of the Nazi occupation, Weigl asked Szybalski to gather a group of men and women, including as many senior professors as possible, and to supervise them as lice feeders. His “breeding unit” was one of scores or perhaps hundreds of teams at the institute, each consisting of a leader and 12–15 feeders, or
karmiciele
. Szybalski’s group included the famous mathematicians of the Lwów school who had not been murdered or driven into exile: Banach, Jerzy Albrycht, Feliks Baranski, Bronisław Knaster, Władysław Orlicz. Their Scottish Book had been buried under a soccer field, where it was retrieved after the war. Szybalski’s group also included the chemist Tadeusz Baranowski; the former university rector Seweryn Krzemieniewski and his wife, Helena, both biologists; and the composer Stanisław Skrowaczewski, who would later conduct the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. Szybalski selected the mathematicians, particularly Banach, partly for selfish reasons. “I thought I would learn from being in their company and listening to their discussions every day. As a former Boy Scout and diehard Lwów patriot, I imagined I could somehow protect them from the dangers of war.” The German invasion caught Banach in Kiev. Rather than retreat with the Red Army, he took the last train back to Lwów to return to his child and wife, who was Jewish.
The Gestapo arrested
Banach, but he was released after a few weeks; his family fled to Kraków, where they lived out the war in hiding.

Weigl at work during the war. (Courtesy of National Museum, Przemy
l. Photograph of original by S. Kosiedowski.)

Szybalski’s routine changed following the occupation. Weigl had given his family a radio, and he awoke each morning at six to listen to the BBC. After breakfast, he pushed his bicycle up St. Mark’s Street, past the cast iron fence of the Botanical Garden, and coasted to the heavy wooden doors of the Weigl institute, which even by then was humming with activity. For two hours, he would prepare the lice for the day’s feeding. The louse cages, cleared of molted skins and feces, went into a high-pressure sterilizer, and Szybalski put the healthy lice into new, clean cages. “It was easy,” he recalled. “The lice didn’t run fast.” His feeders would come in before noon. This was the hour the Lwów’s professoriat had traditionally gathered in the city’s cafés, but only Nazis, spies, and
Volksdeutsche
visited cafés now. The Weigl institute had become the center of intellectual life. And nearly the entire university of Lwów was in attendance, broken into seminar-sized groups. “There was a huge table in the center of the room, and people sat around it,” Szybalski recalled. “They brought in books, sometimes, or something to eat. And they talked.”