Microbe Hunters Read online

  Many times in his long years of looking at the animalcules he had wondered how they multiplied. Often he had seen two of the wee beasts stuck together, and he wrote to Bonnet: “When you see two individuals of any animal kind united, you naturally think they are engaged in reproducing themselves.” But were they? He jotted his observations down in old notebooks and made crude pictures of them, but, impetuous as he was in many things, when it came to experiments or drawing conclusions—he was almost as cagy as old Leeuwenhoek had been.

  Bonnet told Spallanzani's perplexity about the way little animals multiplied to his friend, the clever but now unknown de Saussure. And this fellow turned his sharp eye through his clear lenses onto the breeding habits of animalcules. In a short while he wrote a classic paper, telling the fact that when you see two of the small beasts stuck together, they haven't come together to breed. On the contrary—marvelous to say—these coupled beasts are nothing more nor less than an old animalcule which is dividing into two parts, into two new little animals! This, said de Saussure, was the only way the microbes ever multiplied—the joys of marriage were unknown to them!

  Reading this paper, Spallanzani rushed to his microscope hardly believing such a strange event could be so—but careful looking showed that de Saussure was right. The Italian wrote the Swiss a fine letter congratulating him; Spallanzani was a fighter and something of a plotter; he was infernally ambitious and often jealous of the fame of other men, but he lost himself in his joy at the prettiness of de Saussure's sharp observations. Spallanzani and these naturalists of Geneva were bound by a mysterious cement—a realization that the work of finding facts and fitting facts together to build the high cathedral of science is greater than any single finder of facts or mason of facts. They were the first haters of war—the first citizens of the world, the first genuine internationalists.

  Then Spallanzani was forced into one of the most devilishly ingenious researches of his life. He was forced into this by his friendship for his pals in Geneva and by his hatred of another piece of scientific claptrap almost as bad as the famous Vegetative Force. An Englishman named Ellis wrote a paper saying de Saussure's observations about the little animals splitting into two was all wrong. Ellis admitted that the little beasts might occasionally break into two. “But that,” cried Ellis, “doesn't mean they are multiplying! It simply means,” he said, “that one little animal, swimming swiftly along in the water, bangs into another one amidships—and breaks him in half! That's all there is to de Saussure's fine theory.

  “What is more,” Ellis went on, “little animals are born from each other just as larger beasts come from their mothers. When I look carefully with my microscope, I can actually see young ones inside the old ones, and looking still more closely—you may not believe it—I can see grandchildren inside these young ones.”

  “Rot!” thought Spallanzani. All this stuff smelled very fishy to him, but how to show it wasn't true, and how to show that animalcules multiplied by breaking in two?

  He was first of all a hard scientist, and he knew that it was one thing to say Ellis was feeble-minded, but quite another to prove that the little animals didn't bump into each other and so knock each other apart. In a moment the one way to decide it came to him—“All I have to do,” he meditated, “is to get one little beast off by itself, away from every other one where nothing whatever can bump into it—and then just sit and watch through the microscope to see if it breaks into two.” That was the simple and the only way to do it, no doubt, but how to get one of these infernally tiny creatures away from his swarms of companions? You can separate one puppy from a litter, or even a little minnow from its myriads of brothers and sisters. But you can't reach in with your hands and take one animalcule by the tail—curse it—it is a million times too small for that.

  Then this Spallanzani, this fellow who reveled in gaudy celebrations and vast enthusiastic lecturings, this hero of the crowd, this magnifico, crawled away from all his triumphs and pleasures to do one of the cleverest and most marvelously ingenious pieces of patient work in his hectic life. He did no less a thing than to invent a sure method of getting one animalcule—a few twenty-five thousandths of an inch long—a living animalcule, off by itself.

  He went to his laboratory and carefully put a drop of seed soup swarming with animalcules on a clean piece of crystal glass. Then with a clean hair-fine tube he put a drop of pure distilled water—that had not a single little animal in it—on the same glass, dose to the drop that swarmed with microbes.

  “Now I shall trap one,” he muttered, as he trained his lens on the drop that held the little animals. He took a fine dean needle, he stuck it carefully into the drop of microbe soup—and then made a little canal with it across to the empty water drop. Quickly he turned his lens onto the passageway between the two drops, and grunted satisfaction as he saw the wriggling cavorting little creatures begin to drift through this little canal. He grabbed for a little camel's-hair brush–– “There! there's one of the wee ones—just one, in the water drop!” Deftly he flicked the little brush across the small canal, wiping it out, so cutting off the chance of any other wee beast getting into the water drop to join its lonely little comrade.

  “God!” he cried. “I've done it—no one's ever done this before—I've got one animalicule all by himself; now nothing can bump him, now we'll see if he'll turn into two new ones!” His lens hardly quivered as he sat with tense neck and hands and arms, back bent, eye squinting through the glass at the drop with its single inhabitant. “How tiny he is,” he thought—“he is like a lone fish in the spacious abysses of the sea.”

  Then a strange sight startled him, not less dramatic for its unbelievable littleness. The beast—it was shaped like a small rod—began to get thinner and thinner in the middle. At last the two parts of it were held together by the thickness of a spider web thread, and the two thick halves began to wriggle desperately—and suddenly they jerked apart. There they were, two perfectly formed, gently gliding little beasts, where there had been one before. They were a little shorter but otherwise they couldn't be told from their parent. Then, what was more marvelous to see, these two children of the first one in a score of minutes split up again—and now there were four where there had been one!

  Spallanzani did this ingenious trick a dozen times and got the same result and saw the same thing; and then he descended on the unlucky Ellis like a ton of brick and flattened into permanent obscurity Ellis and his fine yarn about the children and the grandchildren inside the little animals. Spallanzani was sniffish, he condescended, he advised, he told Ellis to go back to school and learn his ABC's of microbe hunting. 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. He told of that mysterious world of microbes as a new universe, and thought of himself as a daring explorer making first groping expeditions along its boundaries only. He said nothing about the possible deadliness of the little animals—he didn't like to engage, in print, in wild speculations—but his genius whispered to him that the fantastic creatures of this new world were of some sure but yet unknown importance to their big brothers, the human species. . .

  7

  Early in the year 1799, as Napoleon started thoroughly smashing an old world to pieces, and just as Beethoven was knocking at the door of the nineteenth century with the first of his mighty symphonies, war-cries of that defiant spirit of which Spallanzani was one of the chief originators—in the year 1799, I say, the great microbe hunter was struck with apoplexy. Three days later he was poking his energetic and irrepressible head above the bedclothes, reciting Tas
so and Homer to the amusement and delight of those friends who had come to watch him die. But though he refused to admit it, this, as one of his biographers says, was his Canto di Cigno, his swan song, for in a few days he was dead.

  Great Egyptian kings kept their names alive for posterity by having the court undertaker embalm them into expensive and gorgeous mummies. 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? What relic could more perfectly suggest the whole of his passion to find truth, that passion which stopped at nothing, which despised conventions, which laughed at hardship, which ignored bad taste and the feeble pretty fitness of things?

  He knew his bladder was diseased. “Well, have it out after I'm dead,” you can hear him whisper as he lay dying. “Maybe you'll find an astonishing new fact about diseased bladders.” That was the spirit of Spallanzani. This was the very soul of that cynical, sniffingly curious, coldly reasoning century of his—the century that discovered few practical things—but the same century that built the high clean house for Faraday and Pasteur, for Arrhenius and Emil Fischer and Ernest Rutherford to work in.

  3. PASTEUR:

  Microbes Are a Menace!

  1

  In 1831, thirty-two years after the magnificent Spallanzani died, microbe hunting had come to a standstill once more. The sub-visible animals were despised and forgotten while other sciences were making great leaps ahead; clumsy horribly coughing locomotives were scaring the horses of Europe and America; the telegraph was getting ready to be invented. Marvelous microscopes were being devised, but no man had come to squint through these machines—no man had come to prove to the world that miserable little animals could do useful work which no complicated steam engine could attempt; there was no hint of the somber fact that these wretched microbes could kill their millions of human beings mysteriously and silently, that they were much more efficient murderers than the guillotine or the cannon of Waterloo.

  On a day in October in 1831, a nine-year-old boy ran frightened away from the edge of a crowd that blocked the door of the blacksmith shop of a village in the mountains of eastern France. Above the awed excited whispers of the people at the door this boy had heard the crackling “s-s-s-s-z” of a white hot iron on human flesh, and this terrifying sizzling had been followed by a groan of pain. The victim was the farmer Nicole. He had just been mangled by a mad wolf that charged howling, jaws dripping poison foam, through the streets of the village. The boy who ran away was Louis Pasteur, son of a tanner of Arbois and great-grandson of a serf of the Count of Udressier.

  Days and weeks passed and eight victims of the mad wolf died in the choking throat-parched agonies of hydrophobia. Their screams rang in the ears of this timid—some called him stupid—boy; and the iron that had seared the farmer's wound burned a deep scar in his memory.

  “What makes a wolf or a dog mad, father—why do people die when mad dogs bite them?” asked Louis. His father the tanner was an old sergeant of the armies of Napoleon. He had seen ten thousand men die from bullets, but he had no notion of why people die from disease. “Perhaps a devil got into the wolf, and if God wills you are to die, you will die, there is no help for it,” you can hear the pious tanner answer. That answer was as good as any answer from the wisest scientist or the most expensive doctor in the world. In 1831 no one knew what caused people to die from mad dog bites—the cause of all disease was completely unknown and mysterious.

  I am not going to try to make believe that this terrible event made the nine-year-old Louis Pasteur determine to find out the cause and cure of hydrophobia some day—that would be very romantic—but it wouldn't be true. It is true though that he was more scared by it, haunted by it for a longer time, brooded over it more, that he smelled the burned flesh and heard the screams a hundred times more vividly than an ordinary boy would—in short, he was of the stuff of which artists are made; and it was this stuff in him, as much as his science, that helped him to drag microbes out of that obscurity into which they had passed once more, after the gorgeous Spallanzani died. Indeed, for the first twenty years of his life he showed no signs at all of becoming a great searcher. This Louis Pasteur was only a plodding, careful boy whom nobody noticed particularly. He spent his playtime painting pictures of the river that ran by the tannery, and his sisters posed for him until their necks grew stiff and their backs ached grievously; he painted curiously harsh unflattering pictures of his mother—they didn't make her look pretty, but they looked like his mother. . .

  Meanwhile it seemed perfectly certain that the little animals were going to be put permanently on the shelf along with the dodo and other forgotten beasts. The Swede Linnaeus, most enthusiastic pigeonholer, who toiled at putting all living things in a neat vast card catalogue, threw up his hands at the very idea of studying the wee beasts. “They are too small, too confused, no one will ever know anything exact about them, we will simply put them in the class of Chaos!” said Linnaeus. They were only defended by the famous round-faced German Ehrenberg who had immense quarrels—in moments when he wasn't crossing oceans or receiving medals—futile quarrels about whether the little animals had stomachs, strange arguments about whether they were really complete little animals or only parts of larger animals; or whether perchance they might be little vegetables instead of little animals.

  Pasteur kept plugging at his books though, and it was while he was still at the little college of Arbois that the first of his masterful traits began to stick out—traits good and bad, that made him one of the strangest mixtures of contradictions that ever lived. He was the youngest boy at the college, but he wanted to be a monitor; he had a fiery ambition to teach other boys, particularly to run other boys. He became a monitor. Before he was twenty he had become a kind of assistant teacher in the college of Bezançon, and here he worked like the devil and insisted that everybody else work as hard as he worked himself; he preached in long inspirational letters to his poor sisters—who, God bless them, were already trying their best—

  “To will is a great thing, dear sisters,” he wrote, “for Action and Work usually follow Will, and almost always Work is accompanied by Success. These three things, Work, Will, Success, fill human existence. Will opens the door to success both brilliant and happy; Work passes these doors, and at the end of the journey Success comes to crown one's efforts.”

  When he was seventy his sermons had lost their capital letters, but they were exactly the same kind of simple earnest sermons.

  His father sent him up to Paris to the Normal School and there he resolved to do great things, but he was carried away by a homesickness for the smell of the tannery yard and he came back to Arbois abandoning his high ambition. . . In another year he was back at the same school in Paris and this time he stuck at it; and then one day he passed in a tear-stained trance out of the lecture room of the chemist Dumas. “What a science is chemistry,” he muttered, “and how marvelous is the popularity and glory of Dumas.” He knew then that he was going to be a great chemist too; the misty gray streets of the Latin Quarter dissolved into a confused and frivolous world that chemistry alone could save. He had left off his painting but he was still the artist.

  Presently he began to make his first stumbling independent researches with stinking bottles and rows of tubes filled with gorgeous colored fluids. His good friend Chappuis, a mere student of philosophy, had to listen for hours to Pasteur's lectures on the crystals of tartaric acid, and Pasteur told Chappuis: “It is sad that you are not a chemist too.” He would have made all students chemists just as forty years later he tried to turn all doctors into microbe hunters.

  Just then, as Pasteur was bending his snub nose and broad forehead over confused piles of crystals, the sub-visible living microbes were beginning to c
ome back into serious notice, they were beginning to be thought of as important serious fellow creatures, just as useful as horses or elephants, by two lonely searchers, one in France and one in Germany. A modest but original Frenchman, Cagniard de la Tour, in 1837 poked round in beer vats of breweries. He dredged up a few foamy drops from such a vat and looked at them through a microscope and noticed that the tiny globules of the yeasts he found in them sprouted buds from their sides, buds like seeds sprouting. “They are alive then, these yeasts, they multiply like other creatures,” he cried. His further searchings made him see that no brew of hops and barley ever changed into beer without the presence of the yeasts, living growing yeasts. “It must be their life that changes barley into alcohol,” he meditated, and he wrote a short clear paper about it. The world refused to get excited about this fine work of the wee yeasts—Cagniard was no propagandist, he had no press agent to offset his own modesty.

  In the same year in Germany Doctor Schwann published a short paper in long sentences, and these muddy phrases told a bored public the exciting news that meat only becomes putrid when sub-visible animals get into it. “Boil meat thoroughly and put it in a clean bottle and lead air into it that has passed through red-hot pipes—the meat will remain perfectly fresh for months. But in a day or two after you remove the stopper and let in ordinary air, with its little animals, the meat will begin to smell dreadfully; it will teem with wriggling, cavorting creatures a thousand times smaller than a pinhead—it is these beasts that make meat go bad.”

  How Leeuwenhoek would have opened his large eyes at this! Spallanzani would have dismissed his congregation and rushed from his masses to his laboratory; but Europe hardly looked up from its newspapers, and young Pasteur was getting ready to make his own first great chemical discovery.