Microbe Hunters quotes

He examined the cross-sections of the wood of a dozen different trees and squinted at the seeds of plants. He grunted “Impossible!” when he first spied the outlandish large perfection of the sting of a flea and the legs of a louse.

That man Leeuwenhoek was like a puppy who sniffs—with a totally impolite disregard of discrimination—at every object of the world around him!

There never was a less sure man than Leeuwenhoek. He looked at this bee’s sting or that louse’s leg again and again and again.

Beasts these were of a kind that ravaged and annihilated whole races of men ten million times larger than they were themselves. Beings these were, more terrible than fire-spitting dragons or hydra-headed monsters.

They were silent assassins that murdered babes in warm cradles and kings in sheltered places.

It was this invisible, insignificant, but implacable—and sometimes friendly—world that Leeuwenhoek had looked into for the first time of all men of all countries.

There were some beings that moved sluggishly and looked like wee bent sticks, nothing more, but that Dutchman squinted at them till his eyes were red-rimmed—and they moved, they were alive, no doubt of it!

There was a menagerie in his mouth!

There were creatures shaped like flexible rods that went to and fro with the stately carriage of bishops in procession, there were spirals that whirled through the water like violently animated corkscrews....

Astounded he watched the fishy stuff disappear from between their shells—it was being gobbled up by thousands of tiny microbes that were attacking the mussels greedily....

“Life lives on life—it is cruel, but it is God’s will,” he pondered.

“And it is for our good, of course, because if there weren’t little animals to eat up the young mussels, our canals would be choked by those shellfish, for each mother has more than a thousand young ones at a time!”

There might be some little detail he had missed those hundred other times! Friends came to him at eighty-five and told him to take it easy and leave his studies. He wrinkled his brow and opened wide his still bright eyes:

“The fruits that ripen in autumn last the longest!”

he told them—he called eighty-five the autumn of his life!

He heard all of these things—and didn’t believe them. He was prejudiced.

Great advances in science so often start from prejudice, on ideas got not from science but straight out of a scientist’s head, on notions that are only the opposite of the prevailing superstitious nonsense of the day.

Spallanzani had violent notions about whether life could rise spontaneously; for him it was on the face of things absurd to think that animals—even the wee beasts of Leeuwenhoek—could arise in a haphazard way from any old thing or out of any dirty mess.

so long as you only plug up your flasks with corks the little animals will get in from the air. You can heat your soups till you’re black in the face—the microbes will get in just the same and grow, after the broth has cooled.”

Spallanzani was triumphant, but then he did the curious thing that only born scientists ever do—he tried to beat his own idea, his darling theory—by experiments he honestly and shrewdly planned to defeat himself. That is science!

That is the strange self-forgetting spirit of a few rare men, those curious men to whom truth is more dear than their own cherished whims and wishes.

He hinted that Ellis wouldn’t have made his mistake if he’d read the fine paper of de Saussure carefully, instead of inventing preposterous theories that only cluttered up the hard job of getting genuine new facts from a stingy Nature.

A scientist, a really original investigator of nature, is like a writer or a painter or a musician. He is part artist, part cool searcher.

Spallanzani told himself stories, he conceived himself the hero of a new epic exploration, he compared himself—in his writings even—to Columbus and Vespucci.

The Greeks and Romans had their likenesses wrought into dignified statues. Paintings exist of a hundred other distinguished men. What is left for us to see of the marvelous Spallanzani?

In Pavia there is a modest little bust of him and in the museum near by, if you are interested, you may see—his bladder.

What better epitaph could there be for Spallanzani?

Conscientiously he memorized the names of several hundred bones and muscles, but the fancied moan of the whistles of steamers bound for the East chased this Greek and Latin jargon out of his head.

Koch wanted to be an explorer; or to be a military surgeon and win Iron Crosses; or to be ship’s doctor and voyage to impossible places.

But alas, when he graduated from the medical college in 1866 he became an interne in a not very interesting insane asylum in Hamburg.

Worst of all, when he came into the living room from his mice and microscope to tell Frau Koch about the new strange things he had discovered, this good lady wrinkled up her nose and told him:

“But, Robert, you smell so!”

Then he hit upon a sure way to give mice the fatal disease of anthrax.

Pasteur’s veins stood out on his forehead, but he managed to keep his mouth shut until he and Roux were on the way home, when he burst out, speaking really of all people who failed to see the absolute truth of his idea:

“I would not be surprised if such a man were to be caught beating his wife!”

Make no mistake—science was no cool collecting of facts for Pasteur;

“I would not be surprised if such a man were to be caught beating his wife!”

Make no mistake—science was no cool collecting of facts for Pasteur; in him it set going the same kind of machinery that stirs the human animal to tears at the death of a baby and makes him sing when he hears his uncle has died and left him five hundred thousand dollars.

But enemies were on Pasteur’s trail again.

The vaccinated animals will be perfectly protected—the not-vaccinated ones will die in two days of course.”

Pasteur sounded as confident as an astronomer predicting an eclipse of the sun....

“But, master, you know this work is so delicate—we cannot be absolutely sure of our vaccines—they may kill some of the sheep we try to protect——”

Finally, was Mr. Pasteur really burning so with a passion for truth? Then why hadn’t he told of the bad results as well as the good ones, that had followed the wholesale use of his vaccine?

“Such goings-on are perhaps suitable for the advertising of a business house, but science should reject them vigorously,” finished Koch, drily, devastatingly.

Then Pasteur went through the roof and answered Koch’s cool facts in an amazing paper with arguments that would not have fooled the jury of a country debating society. Did Koch dare to make believe that Pasteur’s vaccines were full of contaminating microbes?

It was to save babies that they killed so many guinea-pigs!

Émile Roux, the fanatical helper of Pasteur, in 1888 took up the tools his master had laid down, and started on searches of his own.

Roux looked at his syringes—did this serum really save life?

“Yes!” shouted Émile Roux, the human being.

“I don’t know—let us make an experiment,” whispered Émile Roux, the searcher for truth.

“Yes!” shouted Émile Roux, the human being.

“I don’t know—let us make an experiment,” whispered Émile Roux, the searcher for truth.

“But, to make an experiment, you will have to withhold the serum from half at least of these children—you may not do that.”

Microbe hunting has always been a queer humpty-dumpty business.

A janitor with no proper education was the first man to see microbes; a chemist put them on the map and made people properly afraid of them; a country doctor turned the hunting of them into something that came near to being a science;

to save the lives of babies from the poison of one of the deadliest of them, a Frenchman and a German had to pile up mountains of butchered guinea-pigs and rabbits.

Microbe hunting is a story of amazing stupidities, fine intuitions, insane paradoxes.

If that is the history of the hunting of microbes, it is the same with the story of the science, still in its babyhood, of why we are immune to microbes.

“It is the phagocytes that eat up germs and so defend us,” roared Metchnikoff in reply. And he published ingenious experiments which proved anthrax bacilli grow exuberantly in the blood of sheep which have been made immune by Pasteur’s vaccine.

Neither side would budge from this extreme, prejudiced position.

For twenty years both sides were so enraged they could not stop to think that perhaps both our blood and our phagocytes might work together to guard us from germs.

“The truth is that artistic genius and perhaps all kinds of genius are closely associated with sexual activity ... so, for example, an orator speaks better in the presence of a woman to whom he is devoted.”

He insisted that he could experiment best when pretty girls were close by!

Metchnikoff’s workshop in the Pasteur Institute was more than a mere laboratory; it was a studio, it had the variegated attractions of a country fair; it radiated the verve and gusto of a three-ringed circus.

He constantly tested his various juices and excretions. In those years he got down untold gallons of sour milk and swallowed billions of the beneficent bacilli of Bulgaria....

And he died at the age of seventy-one.

But in spite of all of his learning (and this was an arbitrary strange thing about him!)

Theobald Smith did not confuse fine buildings and complicated apparatus with clear thinking

—he seemed always to be distrusting what he got out of books or what he saw in tubes....

in the olive-green mimosa thickets and the jungle hummed and sizzled a hundred kinds of flies and ticks and gnats.... What a place for discoveries, for swashbuckling microscopings and lone-wolf bug-huntings Africa must be!

It was in the nature of David Bruce to do things his superiors and elders didn’t want him to do.

Just out of medical school in Edinburgh, he had joined the British Army Medical Service, not to fight, nor to save lives, nor (at that time) to get a chance to hunt microbes—not for any such noble objects.

Just out of medical school in Edinburgh, he had joined the British Army Medical Service, not to fight, nor to save lives, nor (at that time) to get a chance to hunt microbes—not for any such noble objects.

He had joined it because he wanted to marry.

They hadn’t a shilling, neither Bruce nor his sweetheart; their folks called them thirteen kinds of romantic idiots—why couldn’t they wait until David had established himself in a nice practice?

He had joined it because he wanted to marry. They hadn’t a shilling, neither Bruce nor his sweetheart; their folks called them thirteen kinds of romantic idiots—why couldn’t they wait until David had established himself in a nice practice?

So Bruce joined the army, and married on a salary of one thousand dollars a year.

In certain ways he was not a model soldier. He was disobedient, and, what is much worse, tactless. Still a lieutenant, he one day disapproved of the conduct of his colonel, and offered to knock him down....

They were commanded to find out everything about the disease called nagana—the pretty native name for an unknown something that made great stretches of South Africa into a desolate place, impossible to farm in, dangerous to hunt big game in, suicidal to travel in.

Nagana means “depressed and low in spirits.”

Nagana steals into fine horses and makes their coats stare and their hair fall out; while the fat of these horses melts away nagana grows watery pouches on their bellies and causes a thin rheum to drip from their noses;

“Why, it’s easy to get animals through the fly belt so long as you don’t let them eat or drink!” answered the Zulus.

Bruce listened, and then proceeded to try out both ideas.

He took good healthy horses, and tied heavy canvas bags round their noses so they couldn’t eat nor drink; he led them down the hill to the pleasant-looking midday hell in the mimosa thickets; here he kept them for hours.

Lady Bruce as usual went with him, and they found new epidemics of sleeping sickness flaring up in unwonted places. It was a miserable discouraging business.

Bruce was a modest man, who had no foolish vanity to tell him that his own theories were superior to brute facts.

“My plan has been a washout,” you can hear him grumbling. “Somewhere, aside from the human being, those tsetses must get the trypanosomes—maybe it’s like the nagana—maybe they can live in wild beasts’ blood too....”

“Can young tsetse flies, bred in the laboratory, inherit the sleeping-sickness trypanosome from their mothers?” Surely there was a chance of it (you remember that strange business of Theobald Smith’s mother-ticks bequeathing the Texas fever microbe to their children).

But analogies are for philosophers and lawyers.

“Are artificially hatched young tsetses dangerous?” asks Bruce. “No!” he can answer. “For two members of the commission” [modestly he does not say which two members] “allowed hundreds of tsetse flies, bred in the laboratory, to bite them. And the result was negative.”

In vast excitement he wrote a long letter to Manson, telling of a strange fight between a whip that had shaken itself free, and a white blood cell—a phagocyte.

He was a vivid man, was Ronald Ross.

“He [Ross called that whip “he”] kept poking the phagocyte in the ribs (!) in different parts of his body, until the phagocyte finally turned and ran off howling ... the fight between the whip and the phagocyte was wonderful....

that nature is everlastingly full of surprises and annoying exceptions, and if there are laws and rules for the movements of the planets, there may be absolutely no apparent rime and less reason for the meanderings of the microbes of malaria....

Searchers, the best of them, still do no more than scratch the surface of the most amazing mysteries, all they can do (yet!) to find truth about microbes is to hunt, hunt endlessly.... There are no laws!

So Patrick Manson was stern with Ronald Ross. This nervous man, feeling he could stand this cursed India not one moment longer, must stand it months longer, years longer! He had made a brilliant beginning, but only a beginning.

But that failure started ideas stewing in his head while he worked at other things—and how he worked! Grassi detested people who didn’t work.

“Mankind,” he said, “is composed of those who work, those who pretend to work, and those who do neither.”

He was ready to admit that he belonged in the first class, and it is entirely certain that he did belong there.

He ruled out two dozen different kinds of gray mosquitoes and brindled mosquitoes, that he found anywhere—in saloons and bedrooms and the sacristies of cathedrals, biting babies and nuns and drunkards.

“You are innocent!” shouted Battista Grassi at these mosquitoes.

“For where you are none of these nuns or babies or drunkards suffers from malaria!”

The boys brought boxes full of these she-zanzarone from towns where malaria rages. Grassi took these boxes to his bedroom, put on his night shirt, opened the boxes, crawled into bed—but curse it! not one of the zanzarone bit him.

Instead they flew out of his room and bit Grassi’s mother, “fortunately without ill effect!”

Then Grassi went back to Rome to his lectures, and on September 28th of 1898, before ever he had done a single serious experiment, he read his paper before the famous and ancient Academy of the Lincei:

(Imagine young Italians making love in heavy cotton gloves and veils.) So there was a good deal of sniggering at this professor who had become a violent missionary against the zanzarone.

But Battista Grassi was a practical man! “One family, staying free from the tortures of malaria—that would be worth ten years of preaching—I’ll have to show them!” he muttered.

So, in 1900, after his grinding experiments of 1898 and ’99, this tough man set out to “show them.” He went down into the worst malaria region of Italy, along the railroad line that ran through the plain of Capaccio. It was high summer.

in a few years there may not be a single speck of that virus left on earth—it will be as completely extinct as the dinosaurs—unless there is a catch in the fine gruesome experiments of Reed and his Spanish immigrants and American soldiers....

It was a grand coöperative fight, that scotching of the yellow jack.

It was fought by a strange crew, and the fight was begun by a curious old man, with enviable mutton chop whiskers—his name was Doctor Carlos Finlay—who made an amazingly right guess, who was a terrible muddler at experiments, who was considered by all good …

To-day? Well, to-day there are no microbe hunters who look you solemnly in the eye and tell you that two plus two makes five.

Paul Ehrlich was that kind of a man.

Born in March of 1854 in Silesia in Germany, he went to the gymnasium at Breslau, and his teacher of literature ordered him to write an essay, subject: “Life is a Dream.”

“Certainly, Herr Doktor! That I can do right off!” Never for a moment does Ehrlich stop talking, but grabs a piece of chalk, gets down on his knees, and scrawls huge diagrams of his ideas over the laboratory floor—“Now, do you see, is that clear?”

There was no dignity about Paul Ehrlich!

Neither about his attitudes, for he would draw pictures of his theories anywhere, with no more sense of propriety than an annoying little boy, on his cuffs and the bottoms of shoes, on his own shirt front to the distress of his wife, and on …

Nor could you properly say Paul Ehrlich was dignified about his thoughts, because, twenty-four hours a day he was having the most outrageous thoughts of why we are immune or how to measure immunity or how a dye could be turned into a magic bullet.

He left a trail of fantastic pictures of those thoughts behind him everywhere!

Just the same he was the most exact of men in his experiments.

it was like primitive blacksmiths clawing among metals for the best stuff from which to forge swords. It was, in short, the oldest of all the ways of man to get knowledge.

It was the method of Trial and Sweating!

Ehrlich tried; Shiga sweat. Their mice turned blue from this dye and yellow from that one, but the beastly finned trypanosomes of the mal de Caderas swarmed gayly in their veins, and killed those mice, one hundred out of every hundred!

he read in more books, and he threw books at the head of poor Kadereit—who heaven knows could not be blamed for not knowing what dye would kill trypanosomes. He said Latin phrases; he propounded amazing theories of what these dyes ought to do.

Never had any searcher coined so many utterly wrong theories.

But then, in 1903, came a day when one of these wrong explanations came to help him.

That day is a day of fate for Paul Ehrlich, it is the day the god of chance is good, for, like snows before the sun of April, so those fell trypanosomes melt out of the blood of that mouse!

Away they go, shot down by the magic bullet, till the last one has perished.

And the mouse? His eyes open. He snouts in the shavings in the bottom of his cage and sniffs at the pitiful little body of his dead companion, the untreated one.

And the mouse? His eyes open. He snouts in the shavings in the bottom of his cage and sniffs at the pitiful little body of his dead companion, the untreated one.

He is the first one of all mice to fail to die from the attack of the trypanosome.

Paul Ehrlich, by the grace of persistence, chance, God, and a dye called “Trypan Red” (its real chemical name would stretch across this page!) has saved him! How that encouraged this already too courageous man!

to turn arsenic from a pet weapon of murderers into a cure which no one was sure could exist for a disease Ehrlich hadn’t even dreamed might be cured.

These slaves worked as only men can work when they are inspired by a wrinkle-browed fanatic with kind gray eyes.

They changed Atoxyl! They developed marvelous compounds of arsenic which—hurrah!—would really cure mice. “We have it!”