The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl; How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis
Anthony Marill (Author photograph) New York: W. W, Norton and Company, 2014. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. viii, [6], 384, [2] pages. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Index. Some page color variation noted at fore-edge. Arthur Allen (born 1959 in Cincinnati, Ohio) is an American author and journalist. Allen graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981 with an AB in development studies. Since 1995, Allen has mainly written about biology and medicine. He became a freelance writer in 1996, writing articles for a variety of publications, including the Washington Post, the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, Mother Jones, and Redbook. In 2007, his book Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver was published by W. W. Norton. Additional books he has written include Ripe: The Search For The Perfect Tomato (2011), and The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl (2014). In 2014, Allen joined the Staff of Politico as eHealth editor, writing and editing stories about heath IT. In March 2020 he left Politico and became an editor at Kaiser Health News. Rudolf Stefan Jan Weigl (2 September 1883 – 11 August 1957) was a Polish biologist, physician and inventor, known for creating the first effective vaccine against epidemic typhus. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine each year between 1930 and 1934, and from 1936 to 1939. Weigl worked during the Holocaust to save the lives of countless Jews by developing the vaccine for typhus and providing shelter to protect those suffering under the Nazis in occupied Poland. For his contributions, he was named a Righteous Among the Nations in 2003. From a laboratory in wartime Poland comes a fascinating story of anti-Nazi resistance and scientific ingenuity. Few diseases are more gruesome than typhus. Transmitted by body lice, it afflicts the dispossessed, refugees, soldiers, and ghettoized peoples, causing hallucinations, terrible headaches, boiling fever, and often death. The disease plagued the German army on the Eastern Front and left the Reich desperate for a vaccine. For this they turned to the brilliant and eccentric Polish zoologist Rudolf Weigl. In the 1920s, Weigl had created the first typhus vaccine using a method as bold as it was dangerous for its use of living human subjects. The astonishing success of Weigl's techniques attracted the attention and admiration of the world, giving him cover during the Nazi's violent occupation of Lviv. His lab soon flourished as a hotbed of resistance. Weigl hired otherwise doomed mathematicians, writers, doctors, and other thinkers, protecting them from atrocity. The team engaged in a sabotage campaign by sending illegal doses of the vaccine into the Polish ghettos while shipping gallons of the weakened serum to the Wehrmacht. Among the scientists saved by Weigl, who was a Christian, was a gifted Jewish immunologist named Ludwik Fleck. Condemned to Buchenwald and pressured to re-create the typhus vaccine under the direction of a sadistic Nazi doctor, Erwin Ding-Schuler, Fleck had to make an awful choice between his scientific ideals or the truth of his conscience. In risking his life to carry out a dramatic subterfuge to vaccinate the camp's most endangered prisoners, Fleck performed an act of great heroism. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with survivors, Arthur Allen tells the harrowing story of two brave scientists, a Christian and a Jew, who put their expertise to the best possible use, at the highest personal danger. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Rudolf Weigl, Ludwik Fleck, Erwin Ding-Schuler, Typhus, Lice, Anti-Semitism, Jews, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Concentration Camps, Hermann Eyer, Lwow, Lviv, Ghetto, Vaccine
ISBN: 9780393081015
[Book #83242]
Price: $37.50