The Great Influenza (65 page)

Lewis's presence fitted perfectly into Flexner's own plans. Flexner explained, 'I have always believed that our departments should not be one man affairs.' In New York a dozen or more extraordinary investigators led groups of younger researchers, each group working on a major problem. The Princeton location had not developed similarly; beyond Smith's own operation, it had not filled out. Flexner told Lewis, 'Your coming' [offers] the first chance to make a second center there.'

Further, Smith would turn sixty-five that year. Flexner and Smith and even Welch hinted to Lewis that he might succeed Smith when he retired. Flexner suggested that Lewis stay one more year under a temporary arrangement, and then they would see.

Lewis told Flexner, 'I am secure as I never was before.' He believed he was home. It would be his last home.

* 

If Lewis was going to build a department, he needed a young scientist - someone with more than just laboratory skills, someone with ideas. His contacts in Iowa urged him to try a young man they thought would make a mark.

Richard Shope was the son of a physician who was also a farmer. He had gotten his medical degree at the University of Iowa, then spent a year teaching pharmacology at the medical school and experimenting on dogs. An outstanding college track athlete, tall, a man's man at ease with himself (something Lewis never quite seemed to be) Shope always maintained contact with the wild, with the forest, with hunting, not only in the laboratory but with a gun in his hands. His mind had a certain wildness, too, like a small boy playing with a chemistry set hoping for an explosion; he had more than an inquiring mind, he had an original one.

Years later Thomas Rivers, the virologist who not only succeeded Cole as head of the Rockefeller Institute Hospital but served as president of four different scientific associations, said, 'Dick Shope is one of the finest investigators I have ever seen' . A stubborn guy, and he is tough,' Dick would no sooner start to work on a problem than he would make a fundamental discovery. It never made one bit of difference where he was.' In World War II, Rivers and Shope landed on Guam soon after combat troops secured it (in Okinawa they would come under fire) to investigate tropical diseases that might threaten soldiers. While there, Shope occupied himself by isolating an agent from a fungus mold that mitigated some viral infections. Ultimately he was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences.

Yet even with Shope's help, Lewis's work did not go well. It was not for lack of intelligence on Lewis's part. Shope knew Welch, Flexner, Smith, Avery and many Nobel laureates well, yet he considered Lewis a notch above; like Aronson, the prize-winning scientist who had worked at the Pasteur Institute and knew Lewis at Penn, Shope considered Lewis the smartest person he ever met.

Lewis had reached some tentative conclusions in Philadelphia about tuberculosis. He believed that three, and possibly four, inherited factors affected the natural ability of guinea pigs to produce antibodies - i.e., to resist infection. He had planned to unravel precisely what the nature of these factors was. This was an important question, one that potentially went far beyond tuberculosis to a deep understanding of the immune system.

But when he and Shope repeated the Philadelphia experiments they got different results. They examined every element of the experiments to see what might explain the differences and repeated them again. Then they repeated the process and the experiments again. Again they got differing results, results from which it was impossible to draw a conclusion.

Nothing in science is as damning as the inability of an outside experimenter to reproduce results. Now Lewis himself could not reproduce the results he had gotten in Philadelphia, results he had depended upon. Much less could he build upon and expand them. He had run into a wall.

He began plugging away at it. Shope too plugged away at it. Both of them had the tenacity to stay after a thing. But they made no progress.

More distressing to Smith and Flexner, who watched closely, was the way Lewis was approaching the problem. His failures seemed to confuse him. Unlike Avery, who broke his problems down into smaller ones that could be solved and who learned from each failure, Lewis seemed simply to be applying brute force, huge numbers of experiments. He sought to add other scientists with particular expertise to his team, but he did not define what precise role new people would play. Unlike Avery, who recruited people with specific skills to attack a specific question, Lewis seemed simply to want to throw resources at the problem, hoping someone would solve it.

He seemed desperate now. Desperate men can be dangerous, and even feared, but they are rarely respected. He was losing their respect, and with that would go everything.

As Lewis approached the end of his third year in Princeton, Smith confided his disappointment to Flexner: 'He is perhaps aiming higher than his training and equipment warrant and this results in a demand to surround himself with technically trained chemists, etc. This is what Carrel' (Alexis Carrel at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, who had already received the Nobel Prize) 'is doing but Carrel has another type of mind and gets results from his organization. A closely-knit group requires that the ideas come from the head man.'

Nor did Lewis seem to recognize as worth pursuing potentially promising side questions his experiments raised. His explanation for his failures, for example, was that the diet of the guinea pigs was different in Princeton than it had been in Philadelphia. This was potentially significant, and it was possible he was correct. The relationship between diet and disease had been noted before but chiefly in terms of outright diet deficiencies that directly caused such diseases as scurvy and pellagra. Lewis was thinking about far more subtle and indirect linkages between diet and disease, including infectious disease. But instead of pursuing this line of inquiry, Lewis continued to pound away at his old one. He did so without result. He reported to the Board of Scientific Directors, 'I have planned no change in my line of work for the coming year.'

Flexner wanted to hear something different. Lewis was making himself a marked man, marked in no good way. It wasn't Lewis's failures that did so; it was the manner in which he was failing - dully, without imagination, and without the gain of knowledge elsewhere. Lewis had shown enough, or failed to show enough, that Flexner had already made one judgment. When Smith retired, Lewis would not replace him.

Flexner wrote him a chilling letter. In a draft Flexner was brutal: 'There is no obligation expressed or implied in the Institute's relation to you, or your relation to the Institute, beyond this service year period' . As the Iowa chair is still open and you are very much wanted to fill it, and the University of Iowa would make a supreme effort to secure you, I believe it due you to be minutely informed just what the position the Board of Scientific Directors has taken with reference to you' . There was doubt expressed about your future in general.'

Flexner did not send that letter. It was too harsh even for him. Instead he simply informed Lewis that the board was 'unequivocally opposed to the appointment of one primarily a human pathologist' (which Lewis was) 'to the directorship of the Department of Animal Pathology,' and that therefore he would not replace Smith. But he also warned Lewis that the board would not elevate him to the rank of a 'member' of the institute, the equivalent of a tenured full professor. He would remain only an associate. His appointment expired in six months, in mid-1926, and the board would give him a three-year appointment into 1929. Perhaps he should accept the Iowa offer after all.

* 

In
Faust,
Goethe wrote, 'Too old am I to be content with play, / Too young to live untroubled by desire.'

Lewis was too old to play, too young to be untroubled by desire. Reading Flexner's letter had to have been a crushing blow. He had expected to be told he would succeed Smith. He had been certain he would be elevated to the rank of 'member' of the institute. From the laboratory, he drew his identity, and yet now the laboratory gave him not sustenance but cold rebuff. The two men he most admired in the world, two men he had thought of as scientific fathers (one of whom he regarded as almost a father) had judged that he lacked something, lacked a thing that would entitle him to join their brotherhood, to become a member.

By now Lewis's family had moved to Princeton, but his marriage was no better. Perhaps the fault lay entirely within him, within what was now not so much a failing ambition as a failing love.

He declined the Iowa job once again. He had always been willing to gamble. Now he gambled on proving himself to Flexner and Smith.

For the next year and a half, he worked, at first feverishly but then' Something in him made him withdraw. His son Hobart, then fourteen years old, was having difficulties emotionally and difficulties in school, although a change of schools seemed to help. And Lewis had a car accident that broke his concentration.

He accomplished little. Again his failures were not like those that Avery would confront for nearly a decade. Avery was attacking the most fundamental questions of immunology and, ultimately, genetics. From each failed experiment he learned, perhaps not much but something. And what he was learning went beyond how to fine-tune an experiment. What he was learning from his failures had large ramifications that applied to entire fields of knowledge. One could argue that none of Avery's experiments failed.

Lewis was simply foundering. He had spent hour after hour in the laboratory. It had always been his favorite place, his place of rest, of peace. It gave him no peace now. He began to avoid it. His marriage was no better; his wife and he barely communicated. But he found other things to do, gardening, carpentry, things he had never attended to before. Perhaps he hoped getting away would clear his mind, allow him to see through the fog of data. Perhaps he thought that. But his mind never seemed to go back to the problem.

In August 1927, he confessed to Flexner, 'I feel I have not been very productive (certainly I feel that I have had a meager return for a lot of hard work) but some way everything I have touched in the hope it would go faster than the very slow jobs I have been on for so long has either been a wash-out or turned into some other big [problem].'

Then he said something even more striking. He was no longer going to the laboratory: 'I am spending most of my time on an old house and garden I have gotten hold of.'

Flexner replied, for him, gently. Lewis was now more than a year into his three-year contract extension. Flexner warned that his tuberculosis work 'has been under way as your major problem for four years. The outcome, even if continued many years longer, is uncertain and the yield of side issues, often the most fruitful of all, has been small. I do not believe in sticking to a rather barren subject. One of the requisites of an investigator is a kind of instinct which tells him quite as definitely when to drop, as well as when to take up a subject. Your time can be more promisingly employed along another major line.'

Lewis rejected the advice.

* 

On September 30, 1918, J. S. Koen, a veterinarian with the federal Bureau of Animal Industry, had been attending the National Swine Breeders Show in Cedar Rapids. Many of the swine were ill, some of them deathly ill. Over the next several weeks he tracked the spread of the disease, the deaths of thousands of swine, and concluded they had influenza - the same disease killing humans. Farmers attacked his diagnosis; it could cost them money. Nonetheless, a few months later he published his conclusion in the
Journal of Veterinary Medicine:
'Last fall and winter we were confronted with a new condition, if not a new disease. I believe I have as much to support this diagnosis in pigs as the physicians have to support a similar diagnosis in man. The similarity of the epidemic among people and the epidemic among pigs was so close, the reports so frequent, that an outbreak in the family would be followed immediately by an outbreak among the hogs, and vice versa, as to present a most striking coincidence if not suggesting a close relation between the two conditions.'

The disease had continued to strike swine in the Midwest. In 1922 and 1923, veterinarians at the Bureau of Animal Industry transmitted the disease from pig to pig through mucus from the respiratory tract. They filtered the mucus and tried to transmit the disease with the filtrate. They failed.

Shope observed swine influenza during a trip home to Iowa. He began investigating it. Lewis helped him isolate a bacillus virtually identical to
B. influenzae
and named it
B. influenzae suis
. Shope also replicated the experiments by the veterinarians and began to move beyond them. He found this work potentially very interesting.

* 

Lewis's own work, however, continued to founder. Flexner and Smith had kept their assessments of it confidential. As far as the rest of the world (even including Shope) knew, they held him in the highest regard. In June 1928, for the fourth time, the University of Iowa made Lewis still another offer, an outstanding offer. Flexner urged him to accept. Lewis replied that his 'compelling' interest remained at Princeton.

Flexner called Smith to discuss 'our future Lewis problem.' They could not understand him. Lewis had produced nothing in five years. They in fact did have the highest regard for him - just no longer for his laboratory skills. Flexner still believed that Lewis had true gifts, broad and deep vision, an extraordinary ability to communicate and inspire. Flexner still believed that Lewis could become a dominant figure in medical teaching and research. Of that field, he could still be master.

Lewis had shown at least some of what Welch had. Perhaps he had much of it. And perhaps in the end he also lacked what Welch lacked, the creativity and organizational vision to actually run a major laboratory investigation.

Two days after Flexner and Smith talked, Flexner sat down with Lewis. He was blunt. But he assured Lewis the bluntness 'was a conclusion placed before [you] in all kindness.' The prospect of Lewis's becoming a member of the institute was a distant dream. His research had been 'sterile' for the past five years. Unless it yielded something solid and important in the next year, he would not be reappointed even to a temporary position. He was approaching fifty years of age and Flexner told him, 'The chances of [your] changing in the direction of more fertile ideas [are] small.' He also said Lewis had not acted with 'energy and determination.' He had not
fought
. Then, most painfully, Flexner said he was 'not essentially of the investigator type.'