He left me to work. My job was to analyse samples of beer for sugars, chlorides, contaminants like copper or iron from the pipes and vats, for acidity and of course for the degree of alcohol. I usually started my morning by lighting the pair of Bunsen burners to reinforce the sluggish central heating, but the weather had turned mild overnight and everything was dripping. 'Hitler's weather,' Gerda had observed on the Schwebebahn. 'It's always fine when he wants to make a big speech. People will think he can order that about, too.'
That morning I had something more important in mind than the analysis of beer. I pulled up a tall stool and sat at the lab bench, spreading on the heavily stained wood the sheet of paper I had taken from Magda. It was headed in Gothic type, _Nr. des untersuchenden Laboratoriums Prof. Dr. Domagk._
Scribbled figures gave the reference number of the experiment. Underneath came a printed table.
_Giftigkeit pro 20g Maus a) intravenous % lebt tot b) subkutan % lebt tot c) per os % lebt tot._
More figures had been scribbled to show the percentage living and dying after Domagk had dosed his infected twenty-gram mice-either intravenously, subcutaneously, or through a minute stomach-tube, as I had seen performed in the labs at Cambridge. Below was a list of twenty-five common bacteria, the causes of diseases like pneumonia, TB, gonorrhoea or meningitis. Top of the list was the streptococcus, the germ in beadlike chains which I had seen down the microscope in Domagk's study. A pencilled note against its name said in German, _Organisms taken from patient dying of septicaemia. Given in dilution 1:1000 in broth. All twelve treated mice alive!!_ At the bottom came _Wuppertal-Elberfeld,_ 24 Dez 1932, the Unterschrift a large scrawled initial _D._
It was a jotted laboratory note, intended for eyes which had read a thousand similar, discarded after incorporation in the report on a string of experiments. I doubted if anyone had missed it. So the mice in Domagk's cages, suffering the equivalent of fatal human blood-poisoning, were being saved by the red azo-sulphonamide dye mentioned by Magda. I was getting to know more that was going on inside I G Farben than any inhabitant of Wuppertal.
There were some reference books left by my predecessor, an elderly chemist with Franz Josef mutton-chop whiskers who had dropped dead in the laboratory two years previously. I was not hopeful of finding much to brush up my knowledge of the sulphonamide compounds. Oppenheimer's _Der Fermente ihre Wirkungen,_ published in 1928 at Leipzig, yielded only the pleasant discovery of Frederick Gowland Hopkins writing about _Das Schwefel-System_-Hoppy on sulphur. Then I opened a book I had hardly noticed. It was a lucky find. It bore an inscription on the flyleaf to my predecessor from a brother-chemist working across town at the Farbenfabriken, and was on the chemistry of dyes.
I translated to myself a section headed _The Sulphonamide Group,_ which started, _P Gelmo of Vienna in 1908 synthesized 4-aminobenzine-sulphonamide_ (J. prakt. Chem. 77,372).
There followed the formula. This was basically a benzine ring, the familiar six-sided lozenge. At its north point, hydrogen and nitrogen combined as a 'radical', written in chemist's shorthand H2N. At the south, hydrogen and nitrogen were combined with oxygen and sulphur as a 'sulphamino radical', SO2NH2. The reference was to the German _Journal of Practical Chemistry, _which I could easily look up at Cambridge-if I ever got back there. I had never heard of the Austrian chemist Gelmo. But now I knew that he had invented sulphonamide when Gerhard Domagk was still a child.
A familiar name illuminated the next paragraph.
_In 1909, H Hцrlein of I G Farbenfabriken patented the first azo dyestuffs, which contained the sulphonamide group. These dyes showed remarkable fastness in the repeated washing and milling of the material. Hцrlein attributed this to a strong affinity between the sulphonamide dye and the protein of the wool._
No wonder the Hindenburg-like Professor Hцrlein had been in Domagk's lab, watching over the progress of his protйgй launched on a new career. The article continued about chrysoidin, a reddish dye popular at the time in gargles and for cleaning up wounds. A Dr Eisenberg in 1913 had shown that it might kill bacteria on the surface of the body, like carbolic or any other disinfectant. But not inside it, as quinine killed the parasite causing malaria.
The section ended,
_In 1919, the Americans M Heidelberger and W A Jacobs independently found that azo compounds could be effective against bacteria _in vitro. (J. Amer. chem. Soc., 41, 2145)_ Their paper noted that azo compounds were being further tested for their action against bacteria by their co-worker Wollstein, whose report would be published later._
It never was. Scientific enthusiasm is as volatile as many of its products.
I straightened up on my stool. Now I had a chain of facts. The obscure Viennese chemist Gelmo had invented sulphonamide in 1908. The following year Professor Hцrlein turned it into a red dye of laundry-defying tenacity. A German scientist just before the Great War and a pair of American ones just after it had half-heartedly tried sulphonamide to kill germs in test-tubes. And now Professor Domagk was using it to kill germs inside living mice.
If there is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune, there is an ebb which must be philosophically faced as final. Had I seen the significance of those twelve mice-had I also seen the significance of a spore which my own carelessness once left growing on a plate of bacteria-I should have been acclaimed for the benefaction of both sulphonamide drugs and penicillin, noosed by my Sovereign with the blue and crimson ribbon of the Order of Merit, and presented with the blue and gold folder of the Nobel Prize, which resembles the menu of a de luxe restaurant. I did not see Domagk's mountains towering on the horizon. I thought it simply a clever experiment to show that dyes could kill bacteria. The concept of everyday 'chemotherapy' was then as difficult to grasp as everyday flights into space. That Christmas Eve of 1932, when Gerhard Domagk saw his mice were alive and jotted down double exclamation marks, was a day God shifted a piece upon the chess board of the world. On January 30th, it was the move of the Devil.
I was certain that I G Farben would have patented the drug derived from their dye. Or rather, all possible processes of its manufacture, German patent law protecting neither our beer nor I G Farben's chemicals in themselves. Before leaving for the day, I found the list of newly registered patents which Jeff kept in his office. I ran my finger down the columns until struck by the word 'Wuppertal'.
_Nr. 607537, Patentiert im Deutschen Reich vom 25 Dezember 1932. Dr Fritz Mietzsch in Wuppertal-Barmen unde Dr Josef Klarer in Wuppertal-Elberfeld. I G Farbenindustrie Akt.-Ges._
They had patented sulphonamide, but this told nothing to me or the rest of the world. I G Farben patented every brainchild born in a fragmentary caul of exploitation.
I joined the crowd flooding from the brewery, lunch tins over their shoulders, starting through the gathering darkness on foot or bicycle, lighting their pipes and cigarettes-smoking at work being forbidden on pain of instant dismissal. The newsboys were yelling. On my way to the Schwebebahn I paid my fifteen pfennigs for a special edition of the Wuppertaler Zeitung. There were big black headlines.
There seemed to be big black headlines every day in Germany at the time. They announced that President Hindenburg had signed a decree to defend the Reich against Communism. The German people were to be saved from this peril by suspending those sections of the constitution which guaranteed their civil liberties. Germans were henceforward forbidden to express any opinion they cared to, and so were their newspapers. Meetings of any kind were banned. Letters could be opened, telephones tapped. The police could arrest and search as they wished, the courts could condemn to decapitation any armed disturber of the peace. After the night's outrage of the Reichstag fire, these measures were pressed upon the President as essential by his new Chancellor, Adolf Hitler.