The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (11 page)
Authors: Arthur Allen
A
s Fleck developed his private laboratory practice in the early 1930s, Rudolf Weigl’s work also began to take on a more routinized rhythm. Weigl had assembled a team of talented investigators, among them Zbigniew Stuchly, Jan Starzyk, and Henryk Mosing, a farsighted epidemiologist with spiritual inclinations who organized expeditions to the remotest Carpathian villages.
The public health authorities
of Poland had taken a growing interest in Weigl’s vaccine, but he was in no hurry to test it, let alone push the vaccine into production. He insisted on carrying out hundreds of passages of typhus from louse to louse to various animals and back to lice again. He even tried adapting pigs as lice feeders. Weigl was extremely mindful of past experiences in which pathogens kept alive via serial passage through different animals underwent a genetic shift and a change in virulence—becoming either weaker or more dangerous.
One could say that Weigl dithered on the next step, which was human testing of the vaccine. More charitably, one could say that he was conscious of his lack of a medical degree and metabolically inclined to great deliberation. Whatever the case, Weigl never conducted a clinical trial of his vaccine, and until 1930 did not even vaccinate his staff. Weigl’s hesitation on this step is striking and contrasts sharply with the histories of more ambitious or fame-hungry investigators who pushed for human testing in order to establish themselves as scientific leaders.
The first human
experiment with the Weigl vaccine was published not in Lwów but in Tunisia, where the Pasteur Institute had taken a great interest in the vaccine.
The labs in Lwów
and Tunis had developed a strong bond, mediated through the scientist Hélène Sparrow, a Russian-born, half-Polish, half-British scientist who fled to Warsaw in 1920 and spent the next 13 years working on public health and vaccination campaigns under Ludwik Hirszfeld at the National Institute of Hygiene. She also spent time in Paris, in Mexico, and in Weigl’s laboratory, before joining the Pasteur Institute in Tunis, where she introduced Charles Nicolle to Weigl’s louse-inoculating techniques. In 1928, Nicolle and Sparrow vaccinated four children, ages three to seven, with vaccine that Weigl had provided them during a visit to his institute. Several months to a year later, the children were injected with live typhus germs from an infected guinea pig brain. While certainly unethical by modern standards, this experiment had behind it a kind of logic. Typhus and some other pathogens, particularly viruses, are rarely fatal to children, in whom they produce less serious disease.
The trial was a success
in that the children remained well. The Pasteur Institute subsequently vaccinated all of its typhus specialists with the Weigl vaccine.
Shortly afterward, Weigl’s earliest collaborator, the lab technician Michał Martynowicz, decided to take things into his own hands in Lwów. Weigl had organized the laboratory so that only staff who had previously suffered typhus, and thus were presumably immune, could feed typhus-infected lice or work on other lab problems involving live typhus germs. Martynowicz, who had suffered a bout during World War I in Serbia, fed infected lice, while his wife, Rozalia, fed healthy ones. Without Weigl’s permission, Martynowicz vaccinated his wife repeatedly, and she then began feeding cages of typhus lice. “When I learned of this experiment I stopped it immediately,” Weigl wrote, “but by that time she had already been bitten hundreds of times.”
Rozalia, to everyone’s
satisfaction, did not become ill. She was permitted to continue feeding the lice. And gradually, Weigl was pushed to allow the vaccine to transition from an experimental phase to public use.
Weigl, Sparrow, and the Nobelist Charles Nicolle, Lwów, 1938. (Courtesy of National Museum, Przemy
l. Photograph of original by S. Kosiedowski.)
By the late 1920s, Weigl’s lab had become a mecca for serious typhus researchers. The endless supply of typhus germs he could offer visiting scientists was well worth the eight-hour train ride from Warsaw or the two-day trip from Vienna. And come they did—French researchers from the Pasteur Institute, Germans from the Koch Institute in Berlin and the Institute for Naval and Tropical Diseases in Hamburg, Americans from Columbia and Harvard, Russians and Romanians, Britons, Czechs, and Danes.
One of the visitors
was Hilda Sikora, a self-taught, Madagascar-born parasitologist who had been trained by Rocha Lima in Hamburg. Sikora was a talented artist who drew extremely detailed anatomical sketches of lice and continued to work with them even after developing a severe asthmatic reaction. She observed every habit and preference of the tiny vermin with an attentiveness that tottered perversely on the border of love. (
She was not alone
in her passion: Zinsser once wrote, “One cannot carry pill boxes full of these little creatures under one’s sock for weeks at a time without developing what we may call, without exaggeration, an affectionate sympathy; especially if one has taken advantage of them for scientific purposes and finds each morning a corpse or two, with others obviously suffering—crawling languidly, without appetite, and hardly able to right themselves when placed on their backs.”)
Sikora’s personality was
perhaps fitting for this arcane field; she was single and ran a cat shelter in her home and sometimes came to the office with a pet snake, which would pop out of her lab coat pocket as she spoke with colleagues, testing the air with its forked tongue. Yet she knew as much about typhus as anyone in the field. The Nazis at the Hamburg institute fired her in 1943 because of her independent attitudes, and she spent the rest of her life as a painter in Vienna.
Weigl’s reluctance to test his vaccine on people may have stemmed from the series of terrible accidents that occurred in his laboratory.
Over a decade
, the lab saw at least 10 typhus outbreaks, including one that claimed the life of Edmund Weil of Prague, co-inventor of the Weil-Felix diagnostic test. Weil had come to Lwów, in search of typhus germs, in May 1922. He dreamed of creating a typhus vaccine and thought he might do this by keeping
R. prowazekii
alive in small mammals. While inoculating a rabbit at Weigl’s side, Weil accidentally splashed his eye with an emulsion of louse intestines.
Disregarding the accident
, he finished his work and returned home, but fell sick and died two weeks later. Weigl’s son Wiktor also got typhus, while playing in the laboratory. Yet rather than keeping researchers away, the risk of typhus seems to have attracted them. “The Weigl laboratory was surrounded with an aura of secrets and anxiety, partly because the work there was dangerous,” said Władysław Wolff, who joined the lab in 1928. “
A young person was attracted
to that—because it was dangerous, and because of the strange things people were doing there. It was romantic, an adventure.”
Around this same time, Rajchman and Hirszfeld at the Hygiene Institute began to press Weigl to release supplies of his vaccine for cleanup efforts against typhus in Poland. Some 300 Polish doctors died fighting typhus between 1915 and 1929, and it was not easy to enroll unprotected medical staff in these campaigns. There is no record of communications between Weigl and the health authorities regarding this matter, but the Weigl lab began to increase production, to about 30 doses per day by the end of 1930, and to more than 100 per day a few years later. In 1931 and 1932, Polish authorities vaccinated a total of 2,794 people, mostly medical staff and others who came into close contact with typhus patients. Only one case of typhus was reported in the vaccinated group, with the exception of a few instances in which typhus had been incubating in patients prior to vaccination. The campaign lacked scientific rigor: vaccines were distributed on the basis of perceived need, and no effort was made to randomize the results or provide placebo to staff in dangerous areas. Yet the anecdotal evidence offered a powerful suggestion that the vaccine worked. And the news of its success began to trickle out of Lwów and into the wider world.
In the summer of 1931, in a clearing near the family’s house at Ilemnia, young Wiktor Weigl looked up from his mud pies and saw a curious figure—a tall man in flowing dark robes and a ridiculously wide-brimmed black hat.
The visitor, crossing
the stream toward the house in the company of two local mountain men, was Josef Rutten, a Belgian priest resident in China. He had been trying to track down Weigl for a year. Rutten led the Scheut missionaries, who worked in some of the poorest villages of Mongolia and northern China, barren areas, freezing cold in the winter, where lice were plentiful and typhus rife. Since 1908, Rutten explained to Weigl, the disease had killed 84 of his priests—nearly half. The mission was spread across vast, desolate areas, and there was no way to avoid lice infestations. Could Weigl help him? Weigl immediately provided 600 doses of the vaccine to Rutten, who returned to Beijing and called together his 200 priests for three rounds of vaccination over a month. During the next several years, the only member of the Scheut order to die of typhus had not been present for the vaccinations.
Elated by the vaccine’s
efficacy, Rutten sent Zhang Hanmin, a student from the microbiology department at Fu Jen Catholic University, to Lwów, where he spent several months learning Weigl’s technique before returning to establish a louse-vaccine production facility in China.
Vaccination and delousing campaigns were also organized in various typhus-endemic regions of Poland, in particular south of Lwów.
Piotr Radło, a Hygiene
Institute officer, Weigl confidante, and district physician in the town of Jaworow, traveled frequently with public health scientists to the isolated mountain towns. In the 1930s, they fought outbreaks of the disease around two small Carpathian towns, to prevent it from spreading to Skole, a prosperous summer resort, and to nearby ski areas.
By 1938, about 68,000 Poles
had been vaccinated; by March 1940, the number had increased to 160,000. Among the vaccinated there were only 30 recorded cases of typhus, and no deaths. Weigl’s vaccine contributed to a dramatic decrease in typhus in Poland, though most of the decline was probably due to other public health measures like louse control.
Overall, the number
of cases sank from 44,000 in 1919 to 8,500 in 1922 and to 400 in 1929. There were never more than 1,000 per year from 1930 until the beginning of the war.
As Weigl’s fame grew, lab administration and the entertainment of visiting dignitaries chewed up more and more of his time, which he did not appreciate. When he got a chance, he’d skip town and head for the Carpathians to join his boys. “
When he came to our
field lab he became himself again,” recalled one of his assistants. “They’d call him from Lwów, saying he had an important visitor, but he preferred to stay with us and look through our microscopes, and in the afternoons we’d go fishing and he’d tell us anecdotes from his life, the happy and jovial professor. When his train left the station in Slawsko, he’d wave out the window a long time.” A grainy film that Radło produced in the early 1930s shows the Lwów physicians and technicians driving a Red Cross panel truck over mountain roads to mud-and-thatch dwellings where women washed clothes by beating them on rocks in the river, and families harvested wheat with scythes. The sight of a motor vehicle was rare enough to bring whole villages out to have a look. The public health men set up delousing tents and fumigated houses with hydrogen cyanide while vaccinating peasant leaders and caregivers. Some of the people in the region were religious Jews; many others were Hutsuls—an isolated highland people who spoke their own dialect of Ukrainian. Entire villages surrendered their clothes and entered large white field tents, naked, while their clothes were disinfected in large steam kettles. Young boys happily bathed in cauldrons of hot water provided by the fieldworkers.
If there were no
roads to the afflicted towns, the doctors brought their gear on horseback over rough and muddy trails.
The fieldwork gave Weigl’s team new insights into the survival of typhus in nonepidemic periods. They noted that when a Hutsul man died, his clothes were kept in the family attic.
Louse feces in these
clothes, it turned out, could still infect a guinea pig several months after their wearer had died. Lice lived comfortably in the folds of the peasants’ gaily colored sheepskins, protected by the ill repute in which their wearers held bathing. In many rural parts of Poland, peasants put on their jackets in the fall, fastened them with wire, and took them off in the spring.
The hygiene teams found
that, vaccination aside, the best way to combat typhus was to encourage village elders to buy a few extra shirts and nightgowns, and to wash them regularly throughout the winter.