Homage to Gaia (14 page)

The English by that time of the war had entered a state of grace that had not existed earlier and certainly has not existed since. Bourdillon
was an old Tory, yet he told me that I must publish my lactic acid experiments as a Letter to the famous science journal,
Nature.
The reason for publication was not to help our reputations but to block the possibility that someone might patent the discovery and make money from it. So, my first paper to
Nature
was ‘Lactic acid as an aerial disinfectant’, and published in 1944. Later I synthesized a series of acids similar to lactic acid to see if one of them was a better aerial disinfectant. I published this also as a patent-blocking
Nature
Letter. The English distrust of entrepreneurs and of successful businessmen is much older than socialism. In the complex hierarchy of England the middle classes, professionals, and office workers looked comfortably down on the working classes but angrily disliked those in business—trade as they called it—who bypassed the normal routes to
preferment
. They saw it as queue-jumping and therefore wholly amoral. Continentals and Americans find this trait difficult to understand, but then their societies have not enjoyed the long period of internal peace that England had, during which there was time for social structures to evolve. Looking back, I find this refusal to market our inventiveness and so help establish advanced industries post-war in Britain, both perverse and unrealistic.

The Londoners were surprisingly non-tribal. Whatever Churchill, the old war horse, might say otherwise, many of us viewed German aircrews, especially when caught by the searchlights, with more
compassion
than anger. They were clearly targets, but few of us regarded the bombs they dropped as personally intended. The war was against the Nazis, we said, not against the German people. Lunchtime talk at the National Institute in Hampstead often involved the war, but usually in a strategic sense, such as the victories and reverses in North Africa, for example, and it was rarely about air-raids—they were too close at hand. M Van den Ende, a virologist, was the exception. He was an Afrikaner and a committed nationalist. He would often tease the more stolid Englishmen by taking a pro-German stance. I well remember two bruising rows over lunchtime. Van den Ende and his English opponent, a physical chemist named Elford, almost came to blows. We had few doubts about Van den Ende’s commitment to the war against the Nazis, but equally we knew he disliked the English as a tribe.

Perhaps because I was twenty-two, young compared with the other staff members, or perhaps because he knew I was a Quaker, Van den Ende became for me a confidant and a friend. I grew to respect him
and soon discovered that he had the cool bravery of a professional warrior. At this time, the Institute became involved in an
extraordinary
and dangerous project. The war had progressed to a point where the allies contemplated the invasion of Southeast Asia and there was not just the enemy to consider; some parts of that vast region carried a high risk of infection with scrub typhus, an often-fatal disease. The government ordered the virology department of the Institute to develop a vaccine against the scrub typhus organism. In the 1940s, there was no Health and Safety Executive to oversee dangerous experiments and, in any event, the daily risk to life of the war itself made us all less finicky about risk-taking. In fact, the scrub typhus project started with a rehearsal using murine typhus, a comparatively mild disease in humans.

Because of the deadly nature of the organisms, the virologists took unusual precautions. All work was in sealed chambers through which air was drawn and vented through disinfectant-laden filters. Here they inoculated experimental animals, rats, with the virus by pipetting a small quantity of a virus suspension into their nostrils. In spite of the precautions, several members of the virology department caught the mild infection of murine typhus. There was a post mortem on the experimental procedures and they made all apparent steps at which infection could have occurred virus-proof. The team now decided to do a second rehearsal, this time with human typhus, a serious but rarely fatal disease, before going on to scrub typhus. Again, several virologists, including Van den Ende and the
departmental
head, Christopher Andrewes, were infected and were seriously ill, and the prospect of moving on to work with scrub typhus was daunting. An unknown leak of virus existed somewhere and it placed the whole team in hazard. At this stage, they began to wonder about the risk to all of us in the Institute, and to those living nearby, because the Institute was an old hospital building with no ventilation, other than by air movements from open doors and windows, and there was no way to isolate the virology department. In peacetime they would have moved the experiments to an isolated safe unit in the
countryside
, but the pressures of war gave no chance to do this. Instead, our group—Bourdillon, Lidwell, and I, now joined by Frank Raymond—were given the task of finding the source of the infection. We
suggested
that they try inoculating their animals with a suspension of the organism
Serratia
marcescens,
a more or less harmless bacterium, but one that we could grow on agar culture plates. Its bright red colonies
distinguish it from other naturally occurring bacteria and a single bacterium collected from the air will grow on the culture plate into billions of organisms and become a colony—bright red—visible to the eye. By this means, we could detect the escape of even a small number of potentially infective organisms. The virologists ran through their rehearsal again using our scarlet bacteria. We soon found that these organisms were in the air of the lab and the corridor outside that led to the rest of the Institute and to the animal house. We found that the recently inoculated rats sneezed as they sat in their open cages
awaiting
transfer to the animal isolation unit. Their sneezes spread the organisms through the air. The virologists then constructed sealed cages and repeated their rehearsal. This time they found no organisms in the lab or Institute air.

Van den Ende and his team immediately went on to work with scrub typhus and soon had developed a vaccine, but there were casualties. An Australian scientist, Dora Lush, died after accidentally injecting herself with the virus, and a technician named Joyner also died from the disease. We all felt that this brave man and woman who had given their lives in this cause, who had spent their days in the company of so deadly an agent, should have received more
acknowledgement
. The authorities rewarded Van den Ende by making him responsible for the safe manufacture of scrub typhus vaccine on a scale sufficient to inoculate the troops who would invade South-East Asia. He had the awesome task of setting up a plant in the village of Frant near Tunbridge Wells to grow this deadly organism in cotton rats on a near industrial scale. They called us in again to help design a safe procedure and building. Bourdillon and Lidwell did some pioneering research on the air temperature needed to destroy all organisms, including this virus. They discovered that heating the air to a
temperature
above 120° C was effective, and from this information, they designed a ventilation unit for the Frant operation. It drew air from the building through a furnace that heated the air to over 120° C and then passed it through a heat exchanger so that the heat was not wasted. The air, now free of infectious organisms, escaped to the countryside. Women soldiers who had no previous virology training were taught to handle the virus and the rats by Van den Ende and his team and they made the vaccine without a single casualty. They never used the vaccine in military operations: the atom bomb ended the war and there was no invasion of South-East Asia. With today’s morbid fears of pollution, we would never have attempted this dangerous
project, but then we obeyed orders and faced the risks of war, whatever form they took.

There was a series of dining rooms on the top floor of the Institute. One for members of the scientific staff, which included all qualified staff from the Director, Sir Henry Dale, down to the youngest and newest, a bottom-second graduate from Manchester. We were the officers and our dining room was the best. There was a dining room for the administrative staff, which included the librarian, the office staff, and the Director’s secretary; and there were dining rooms for the technicians and maintenance workers. The social apartheid of those days was as intense and unbreakable as was the racial segregation of South Africa. Few among the socialist majority of the scientific staff, even Marxists, complained about or suggested changing the dining arrangements. My seniors and I gathered in the coffee room after lunch and were unrestrained in our conversations. Socially and politically incorrect it may have been to have no women or other ranks present, but for me it was fulfilling. We freely discussed good things and terrible things without thought of the needs for security. I first heard of the Manhattan Project, the source of the first atom bombs, in 1944 from a biologist who had just returned from an operational research posting. Soon it was all round the Institute. The idea
fascinated
Robbie Bourdillon, who had the idea that atom bombs were small things about the size of a pea but with the explosive power of a blockbuster. We did not have detailed information about design or critical masses but we did know that neutrons and uranium-235 were involved. One of the more awful things discussed was a suggestion from an Anglo-American source to use Arabs in the North African desert as experimental animals in the testing of the scrub typhus vaccine. Fortunately, it was never more than a suggestion. There were strange things also. The after-lunch coffee was diluted with bull’s milk. Yes, under wartime conditions of scarcity we feminized experimental bulls and turned them into milk producers. Then there was the suggestion that we should use stilbestrol, the synthetic female hormone, as a chemical warfare agent. The proposer of this idea wanted stilbestrol powder dropped from the air over German troop concentrations. The conversion of tough soldiers into quasi women, he said, would sap their morale. Moreover, its effects were reversible and it would therefore be a most humane weapon. This idea also never flew. I do not know why, but guess that the idea was discarded because it could have been seen as chemical warfare.

My senior colleagues were wonderfully kind to me. I think now they saw me as their personal graduate student, for as an apprentice I was always eager to learn and would listen and sometimes help them by inventing something for their own problems. I spent a lot of time with M Van Den Ende and he unstintedly completed my bacteriological education. Whenever there was spare time, I would go to his lab for a tutorial on topics such as Koch’s Postulates, the scientific criteria used by bacteriologists to confirm that an organism and a disease are causally connected. The physiologists, led by GL Brown, soon took me to their bosom also, as a fixer of electronic apparatus and an inventor. One day Hank McIntosh of that department, a Canadian physiologist over in Britain during the war, came to me and asked, ‘Can you make something to measure mercury vapour in the air by this evening?’ It was quite a challenge. It meant parts-per-billion analyses and I could think of no chemical way to do it in this short time. Then suddenly I remembered that we had made and used an ultraviolet absorption instrument for measuring ventilation rates. It used
ultraviolet
-absorbing tracer substances. I knew that mercury vapour is the strongest absorber of ultraviolet coming from a mercury vapour
discharge
lamp. So I asked my colleague, Lidwell—who had actually constructed the apparatus, although the suggestion to make it was mine—if it was still working. It was and Hank McIntosh took it into their diving chamber to see if it was safe to spend hours there in a simulated deep-dive experiment. Our equipment found the chamber air saturated with mercury vapour. It came from a broken manometer, which had spilled liquid mercury on the floor. To breathe this air for several hours could have led to irreversible brain damage, if not death. It was a joy when in Canada, forty years later, Hank McIntosh, by now Professor of Physiology at McGill University, greeted me with the words, ‘Here is the man who saved my life.’ During the war, Hank and I spent time making a thumb sphygmomanometer to measure
continuously
the blood pressure of divers. I discovered using it that my own blood pressure at age twenty-three was high, 150/70, something that seemed to worry McIntosh, who was medically qualified. He said I ought to do something about it. It increased over the years until the onset of angina nearly thirty years later convinced my reluctant GP that something indeed should be done about it. He then prescribed anti-hypertensive medicine, which I have taken ever since.

Towards the end of the war, there was an open day at the Institute where we showed off our inventions. My bacteriologist friends were
always complaining of the difficulty of writing with coloured wax pencils on cold damp glassware. They often needed to write on the glass of culture plates and tubes, which came straight from the
refrigerator
. In the damp air of England, a film of water immediately condensed on the cold surface. It was almost as difficult to write on these cold wet plates as it would be to strike a match on a piece of soap. I made a batch of special wax pencils which would write on cold wet glassware. They were a roaring success, and I could have spent the rest of my time at the Institute making these pencils for the staff and their friends in hospitals around London. The new Director, Sir Charles Harington, suggested that I publish the formula in a Letter to
Nature.
This I did and within a month received a letter from a pencil firm in the United States asking if I would sell the patent to them. Of course, I had to reply that there was no patent.

Hampstead is hilly and anyone living as far down the hill as we did in Gayton Crescent enjoyed aerobic exercise walking up the narrow steep streets to the Institute. One of the joys of wartime was the absence of cars. All streets were pedestrian precincts and life conformed to this pattern. It was not so easy, though, on dark moonless nights as I stumbled my way upward to my weekly firewatch duty at the Institute, where all staff were required to spend one night a week. Our main task was to be ready to extinguish the small but numerous incendiary devices dropped by German aircraft. When off watch, we slept in a room on the ground floor, which had about eight bunks in it. On watch, we either patrolled the building or spent time on an upper balcony looking south towards central London. There was a button on this balcony connected to the fire alarms of the building. It was on firewatch duty here that I enjoyed some of the most valuable teaching of my apprenticeship. Old and senior scientists did their firewatch duty, and when bombs or missiles came close by, they would in their relief afterwards turn to me and do what I can only call a brain dump. Taciturn, uncommunicative scientists in their post-fear relief would start talking to me as if I were a combination of an old friend and a father confessor. They seemed to feel a need to pass on the secrets of their scientific craft to the nearest young scientist. Once a VI flying bomb passed by so close that I could see the rivets that held it together. It passed on and I was vastly relieved. Just being there on the balcony was enough; in the aftermath my distinguished companion told me those essential parts of his scientific life, and it was those revelations that prepared me for a life as a cross-disciplinary scientist.