Die Once Live Twice (33 page)

By May 25 there was enough crystallized penicillin to conduct the critical test in mice. In the morning, Florey selected eight white mice and injected them with streptococcus bacteria. Four mice were controls, so they received nothing in addition. Two mice received a single dose of penicillin, and the two others received multiple doses over six hours.

No one left the lab even though it was Saturday. In the evening, Florey left for home knowing the four control mice were near death and the penicillin treated mice were healthy. Jonathan stayed with Danny Heatley to be sure all four control mice died. He had to be sure. This was his lifetime dream. A few hours without sleep were a small penalty for seeing his unshakable belief in bacterial antagonism fulfilled.

As nighttime enveloped the laboratory, Jonathan and Heatley huddled around the radio. The radio’s message was troubling.

“Two-hundred and fifty thousand British soldiers are stranded on the beach of Dunkirk. They are not alone. One-hundred and fifty thousand French and Norwegian troops are isolated from escape. The Luftwaffe is bombing the beaches. If you have a seaworthy boat of any kind—fishing boat, pleasure boat, rowboat—please take it to the Dunkirk shore and bring our boys home.”

Heatley’s face was tense. “Ironic, Jonathan. We’re sitting here in anticipation of death to signify hope for life and the country is hoping for life in the face of death.”

“England has to keep Germany off its shores. If England falls, Europe is conquered. But if that happens, Danny, you must escape with this powder.”

“Will America defend us?”

“You can bet on it.”

By midnight two control mice were dead and the mice treated with penicillin were healthy. Jonathan dozed off. It was well past the bedtime of a man in his seventies. At three a.m. Heatley woke him. “The last control mouse is in the throes of death. I’ve got a spot of scotch for you here.” Heatley poured from a bottle of eighteen-year-old Macallan. “Let’s toast this historic moment.”

Jonathan swirled the scotch in his glass. Memories flashed through his brain of how much he had wanted this moment to happen and how many times he had been so disappointed in his own research. His brother was dead so he could not see this. Marion was dead so he could not celebrate it with her. It was just him and Heatley. He lifted his glass to Danny’s and said “I don’t think scotch will ever taste so good.” They clinked glasses.

At four a.m., as Jonathan rode his bicycle back to the hotel, a policeman stopped him. There was a curfew, he advised. When Jonathan explained he had been up all night watching mice die, the policeman released him. “Not even the smartest spy could think up an alibi that preposterous,” shrugged the policeman as he rode off on his horse.

In the laboratory at noon on Sunday, Florey and Chain recognized the clinical implications of their laboratory success. They needed to test penicillin against many other bacteria species to determine its spectrum of action. If it was only effective against streptococcus, it would have limited value, like Erlich’s Salvarsan against syphilis. And who knew if it worked in humans just because it did in mice? There was work to do and what they needed most of all was to find a way to produce more penicillin.

The war was a threat to their work too. Florey instructed Chain and Heatley and the lab technicians to smear the mold juice on the inside of their coats when they went home at night in case the Germans overran England. One of them surely would get out and get to America. The brown smudges on the lining of their coat, which contained penicillin spores, would not be noticed.

“Jonathan, you need to go home,” Florey insisted. “This war is too close. You know what we have now. I will keep in close contact with you.” If the Germans overran them Florey did not want to answer to Rockefeller Institute about Jonathan’s safety.

Jonathan hitched a ride home with a United States Army transport plane out of London. He left England exhilarated over the success of bacterial antagonism and anticipating the upcoming tests on other bacteria. Ultimately, the relevance of penicillin would be learned from the test on patients. He worried about his new friend Ernest Chain if Germany conquered England. He knew about Kristallnacht in 1938 and the rumors about Hitler’s plan to exterminate Jews. He also worried about penicillin falling into German hands instead of being an allied “weapon.”

Nonetheless, Jonathan was excited to be going home. It would be good to see Jackson, who had decided to study internal medicine at Harvard in an accelerated program necessitated by the prospect of the United States going to war. What a story he had to tell his colleagues at Rockefeller Institute. He must remember to thank Warren Weaver!

Chapter Thirty-three

J
onathan fumbled for his seatbelt in the dark, hearing the sounds of two other belts being buckled. As he clasped his belt together the propellers went to life and the plane began to taxi. He gripped the armrests of his seat tightly and glanced to his right, but could see nothing in the pitch dark. It was his first time flying in a plane at night with no lights allowed. The windows were even painted black. He decided he never would do it again.
The daytime landing in London was a treat compared to this exit flight.

He had returned to England in a military transport plane a week ago, sixteen days after D-Day. In Oxford, Florey’s entire laboratory had greeted him as part of the team, since he had suffered with them through the validation stage of the penicillin mold juice. In his office, Florey summarized the clinical trials for Jonathan. “The first patient was terminally infected and the penicillin infusion actually worsened her.” She suffered convulsions and rigor with fever and chills. They decided that pyrogen impurities were the cause of the problem, so they ran penicillin liquid made from the brown powder through chromatography. “When the mixture passed through the long glass tube filled with absorbent alumina powder, it was like a chemical rainbow as the impurities separated out at the upper levels. Finally the cleansed penicillin powder appeared at the bottom and lo and behold—penicillin was now a yellow powder!”

The purified yellow penicillin liquid was injected into each of the Oxford lab team and their excitement was subdued all afternoon as each person waited for someone to convulse. Florey took each person’s temperature and Chain tried to lighten the mood by telling jokes about dying. One very tense team member silenced him with “Enough of your gallows humor.”

“Was there a Jesse Lazear, Howard?”

“No, Jonathan. By evening we were all in that euphoric mood of dodging a bullet. I broke out champagne for everyone.”

In mid-February they treated a policeman dying from infection by both streptococcal and staphylococcal bacteria. Within twenty-four hours he was miraculously improved but they ran out of penicillin. Chain collected the patient’s urine and filtered the penicillin from it to continue to treat him, but after five days they ran out completely. The policeman remained improved for ten more days, but his infection relapsed and he died. Florey concluded the time for infusion had to be prolonged to at least a week, better if ten days.

With so little penicillin and so much needed for each patient, they began to treat children. Because they weighed so much less, they needed much less drug per dose. This brilliant idea allowed them to cure six straight pediatric patients. Florey knew now this penicillin was an antibiotic and ready for the big test—clinically treating a large number of patients to convince all skeptics. But in order to do that they would need a large volume.

“There are only two or three companies in Britain that consider themselves pharmaceutical companies,” Howard said to Jonathan. “I went to each of them and although they believed our research results, they professed that with the war raging on our doorstep they had neither the money nor the personnel to devote to production. That is when I contacted you, Jonathan, to help me bring penicillin to the United States for production.”

Jonathan had received a wire from Florey in late May with a request for help. He immediately contacted his nephew Jimmy, who was commissioned as a civilian pilot in the Air Force. Jimmy had flown missions in unmarked planes over war zones in Europe—even over Germany—to spy on German positions and troop strength. His friend, Jimmy Doolittle, who would fly a secret bombing raid over Tokyo a year later, enlisted Jimmy because he was one of the first, and now most accomplished, pilots in the United States.

That was why, at the end of June, the two Jimmys were flying Jonathan, Florey, and Danny Heatley out of England in a blacked-out plane in the black night. “The Germans fly air raids every night,” Jimmy Sullivan explained to his uncle, “and we will be shot down if they see us.”

“How are you going to fly?”

“Once we’re in the air we’ll use a compass. Major Doolittle pioneered that. There aren’t any lighted structures on the ground to follow either. We’ll head to the sea and fly over water to Portugal. We will have daylight to land in Lisbon.”

Jonathan felt the plane lift off and then the wheels were stored with a thud. No one spoke for several minutes as the plane banked toward the sea. As it leveled somewhat, Jonathan said to Howard, “Are you scared?”

“Yes.”

“Be confident. We have the best pilots we could have. Couldn’t choose two better.”

“Oh, Jonathan, I’m not so afraid of the plane going down. I’m afraid the penicillin I have with me will deactivate during the trip. It will be at least two weeks before I get the spores into fresh medium and it is hot in July, especially in the United States.”

“Well, that fear I understand. How are the specimens kept now?”

“They are freeze-dried. But I haven’t ever taken freeze-dried organisms in the rarefied air of a plane, or traveled two weeks with them or subjected them to the heat of the United States.”

Jonathan nodded his head, forgetting Howard couldn’t see him. “As soon as we reach the United States, I will find out where the government wants to perform the research necessary to increase production.”

In the inky blackness of the cabin, Jonathan felt disconnected from the world—like he was in a tomb, which he hoped he wasn’t. His only consolation was the excitement of being part of penicillin’s success. Of realizing his life’s dream. Any discomfort was worth that.

The darkness promoted sleep and all three of the passengers dozed. “If this penicillin cures infection it will win the war,” Doolittle declared. “Wars are won by manpower and if the Allies can get their troops back into battle after injuries, rather than into the hospital with infection, they will win. In every previous war there have been more men lost to infectious disease than to battle injuries.”

“I just want to be sure that the Krauts don’t get this secret,” Jimmy answered.

Jonathan wasn’t sure how long they flew, but with the rising sun throwing sunlight into the cabin through the cockpit windows, he knew they were near Lisbon. He felt the thump of the landing gear and then the wheels were bouncing on the runway in Lisbon.

It was three days before they received clearance to leave Portugal and Florey paced the hotel halls the whole time, checking the glass tubes with the penicillin every day. The visible viability of the spores gave him a little relief each time. Their flight plan to the United States took them first to the Azores, then to Bermuda, and then finally to New York City, and each stop made Florey more nervous.

It was July third when the plane landed on United States soil. As Florey disembarked, he turned to Heatley, “Oh great! Hot as Hades!” They stood baking on a blacktop tarmac to say thank you and goodbye to Doolittle and then climbed into a car for the ride to Jonathan’s Park Avenue apartment. The Fifth Avenue mansion had been sold after Marion’s death. Though Florey and Chain were eager to get to work, Jonathan said, “Tomorrow is a national holiday and we won’t accomplish anything, Howard. I’ll make the necessary phone calls to determine where we go for the research work to increase production.”

The next morning Jonathan phoned Ross Harrison, the director of the National Research Council—the same Ross Harrison whom he had visited at Yale to learn how to use tissue cultures. “I suppose you’re calling to rub in the Harvard-Yale football score last fall,” Harrison said.

“You guys were easy, 28 to 0. In fact, my Harvard team has won three of the last four games. Maybe Yale should give up football!”

“We’ll see. What do you need?”

Jonathan’s short version of the penicillin story roused Harrison’s enthusiasm, and he agreed to arrange a meeting for Florey with Charles Thom, a mycologist. In fact, Harrison was certain Thom had already done some work with the penicillin mold.

That evening, Jonathan, Jimmy and Sarah took Florey and Heatley for a picnic in Central Park so that they could enjoy the fireworks illuminating the sky over the park. “We’re celebrating our independence from you Brits,” Jonathan explained. “Ironic, isn’t it, that you’re here to bring us independence from an enemy mightier than the British Army was under Lord Cornwallis!”

Sarah popped a champagne cork behind Danny Heatley and he jumped five feet in the air. “Damn, I thought one of those fireworks just blew up next to me!” Everyone howled at his discomfiture as Sarah poured them bubbly joy.

As Jonathan touched glasses with Jimmy he said, “Thank you, Jimmy. That was a flight for history. A flight for glory in man’s battle against infection. I thank you for all Mankind.”

“If we can produce penicillin in volume...” Florey trailed off, needing to say no more.

Jimmy flew Jonathan, Florey and Heatley to Washington, D.C. to meet Thom on July 9. Thom had confirmed the identity of the mold as
penicillin notatum
ten years earlier, so he was enthusiastic about Florey’s work. He walked the visitors to the Department of Agriculture to see Doctor Percy Wells, who had made the decision to develop penicillin production at the Department of Agriculture’s facility in Peoria, Illinois, where a new fermentation lab, which was necessary for the production of penicillin, had just been built.