Microbe Hunters

Little is known about him from twenty to forty, but there is no doubt that he passed in those days for an ignorant man. The only language he knew was Dutch—that was an obscure language despised by the cultured world as a tongue of fishermen and shop-keepers and diggers of ditches. Educated men talked Latin in those days, but Leeuwenhoek could not so much as read it and his only literature was the Dutch Bible. Just the same, you will see that his ignorance was a great help to him, for, cut off from all of the learned nonsense of his time, he had to trust to his own eyes, his own thoughts, his own judgment. And that was easy for him because there never was a more mulish man than this Antony Leeuwenhoek!

Leeuwenhoek had a sound instinct about the infinite complicatedness of everything.

Tak jak Pasteur napełnili butelki, ale w przeciwieństwie do niego użyli pożywki z siana a nie z drożdży. [Gotowali je, a potem] odessali powietrze z nich i pospieszyli do wysoko położonej Maladetty w Pirenejach. Wspięli się wyżej niż Pasteur na Mont Blanc. I tu […] włożyli butelki do improwizowanego inkubatora - i po kilku dniach, ku ich wielkiej radości, odkryli, że w każdej butelce roiło się od bakterii. Czyżby Pasteur kłamał!

[…] Pasteur był wściekły, nazwał Poucheta kłamcą i domagał się publicznych przeprosin. Wydawało się, że o tym kto ma rację zadecyduje rozlew krwi, a nie spokojny eksperyment.

[Po kilku latach okazało się, że] obie strony miały rację. Pouchet i jego przyjaciele używali siana zamiast drożdży, a wielki Anglik, Tyndall, odkrył, że siano zawiera małe, bardzo odporne zarodki drobnoustrojów, których nie zabija nawet wielogodzinne gotowanie! Tak naprawdę to dopiero Tyndall odkrył prawdziwą prawdę.

Nothing could convince these enemies of Pasteur [M. Pouchet, director of the Museum of Rouen, Professor Joly and Mr. Mussel, famous naturalists of the College of Toulouse] that microscopic beasts did not come to life without parents. They were sure there was such a thing as life arising spontaneously; they decided to beat Pasteur on his own ground at his own game. Like Pasteur they filled up some flasks, but unlike him they used a soup of hay instead of yeast. They [boiled them, then] made a vacuum in their bottles and hastened to high Maladetta in the Pyrenees, and they kept climbing until they had got up many feet higher than Pasteur had been on Mont Blanc. Here […] they put their flasks in an improvised incubating oven—and in a few days, to their joy, they found every one of their bottles swarming with little creatures. Pasteur was wrong! […] Pasteur was furious, denounced Pouchet as a liar and bawled for a public apology. It seemed, alas, as if the truth were going to be decided by the spilling of blood, instead of by calm experiment. [Years later it turned out that] both sides happened to be right. Pouchet and his friends had used hay instead of yeast soup, and a great Englishman, Tyndall, found out years later that hay holds wee stubborn seeds of microbes that will stand boiling for hours! It was really Tyndall that finally settled this great quarrel.

The microbes which change wine to vinegar actually eat up and turn into vinegar ten thousand times their own weight of alcohol in a few days. What gigantic things these infinitely tiny beings can do—think of a man of two hundred pounds chopping two millions of pounds of wood in four days! It was by some such homely comparison as this one that he made microbes part of these humble people's lives, it was so that he made them respect these miserably small creatures; it was by pondering on their fiendish capacity for work that Pasteur himself got used to the idea that there was nothing so strange about a tiny beast, no larger than the microbe of vinegar, getting into an ox or an elephant or a man—and doing him to death.

There are no fewer shady fellows in science than in any other human activity.

Koch wysłał mu próbówkę z przecinkowcami cholery. A Pettenkofer – ku wielkiemu zdziwieniu wszystkich badaczy mikrobów – połknął całą jego zawartość. A były w niej miliardy tych bakterii zdolnych do powalenia całego pułku. Potem z pogardą wycedził przez swoją wspaniałą brodę: „Teraz zobaczmy, czy dostanę cholery!” Dziwne, ale nic się nie wydarzyło, a odporność szalonego Pettenkofera na cholerę po dziś dzień pozostaje całkowitą zagadką.

Pettenkofer, który był na tyle nieroztropny, by podjąć się tego potencjalnie samobójczego eksperymentu, był również wystarczająco pewny siebie, aby uwierzyć, że jego wpicie tej zupy z cholery rozstrzygnęło pytanie na jego korzyść. „Przyczyną cholery nie są zarazki!” krzyknął stary lekarz. „Ważne jest stan (cokolwiek to oznacza) osoby!”

„Nie można zachorować na cholerę jeśli nie ma przecinkowców!” odpowiedział Koch.

„Ale właśnie połknąłem miliony twoich rzekomych śmiertelnych przecinków i nawet mi się nie odbiło!” odparł Pettenkofer.

Jak to często bywa, niestety, w gwałtownych dysputach naukowych obie strony po części miały rację, a po części nie. Dalszy rozwój wypadków pokazał, że Koch miał rację, mówiąc, że ludzie nie zachorują na cholerę bez połknięcia przecinkowca. Lata, które minęły, ujawniły, że eksperyment Pettenkofera ujawnił nieznaną tajemnicę, której nawet rąbka nie są w stanie uchylić współcześni mikrobiolodzy. Mordercze zarazki są wszędzie, wkradają się do nas wszystkich, ale są w stanie zabić tylko niektórych z nas, a pytanie o dziwną odporność części z nas jest nadal tak samo nierozwiązaną zagadką, jak było w tamtych czasach, gdy ludzie byli gotowi ryzykować śmiercią, aby udowodnić, że mieli rację.

Koch sent him on a tube that swarmed with wee virulent comma microbes. And so Pettenkofer—to the great alarm of all good microbe hunters—swallowed the entire contents of the tube. There were enough billions of wiggling comma germs in this tube to infect a regiment. Then he growled his scorn through his magnificent beard, and said: “Now let us see if I get cholera!” Mysteriously, nothing happened, and the failure of the mad Pettenkofer to come down with cholera remains to this day an enigma, without even the beginning of an explanation.

Pettenkofer, who was foolhardy enough to try such a possibly suicidal experiment, was also sufficiently cocksure to believe that his drinking of the cholera soup had settled the question in his favor. “Germs are of no account in cholera!” shouted the old doctor. “The important thing is the disposition (whatever that means) of the individual!”

“There can be no cholera without the comma bacillus!” said Koch in reply.

“But I have just swallowed millions of your alleged fatal bacilli, and have not even had a cramp in my stomach!” came back Pettenkofer in rebuttal.

As it is so often the case, alas, in violent scientific controversies, both sides were partly right and partly wrong. Every event of the past forty years has shown that Koch was right when he said that people can never have cholera without swallowing his comma bacillus. And the years that have gone by have revealed that Pettenkofer's experiment pointed out a mystery behind the curtains of the unknown, and these obscuring draperies have not now even begun to be lifted by modern microbe hunters. Murderous germs are everywhere, sneaking into all of us, yet they are able to assassinate only some of us, and that question of the strange resistance of the rest of us is still just as much an unsolved puzzle as it was in those days of the roaring eighteen-eighties when men were ready to risk dying to prove that they were right.