crawling out of it.' As he spoke, Jeff was swilling out a laboratory beaker under the tap of my square sink. 'I want you to try this gin.'
'It's too early.'
'Only a sip. Take it neat.' He handed me the beaker.
'God, how foul!' I spat the mouthful into the sink. 'It tastes like petrol.'
Jeff was amused. 'Maybe it is. I got it off one of your countrymen. It
Times were hard for bootleggers, like everyone else. Jeff's father had bought the Red Crown Brewery in May 1931, and a fair share of the brew went by dray to Rotterdam and Hamburg then Toronto or Tampico, bribery greasing a path for it across the frontiers. A bottle of Red Crown in New York must have cost more than a bottle of good claret in Wuppertal, but Americans relished a wholesome German beer. It amuses me in America today seeing imported Red Crown advertised in the colour supplements as indicating the educated taste of its drinkers.
'You know my old man's permitted to handle alcohol by the United States Government, because he runs a chemical plant,' Jeff continued, while I rubbed my smarting lips with a handkerchief. 'A lot of it's on the level, he sells his products dirt cheap just to keep the Federal permits going. Of course, the Government puts all sorts of crap in the alcohol to make it undrinkable. You've heard of 'boiling'?' I shook my head. 'You redistill the industrial alcohol, but it doesn't always work out. I want you to find a way of redistilling what's in this gin bottle, so we can get ninety per cent pure alcohol from it.'
'You've a delicate consideration for the health of your customers.'
'Oh, bull!' He laughed. 'We make better gin, we charge double price. I can pick up these bottles and forged labels anywhere.'
I objected. I told him I wasn't a bootlegger. There was always the chance of blindness or death from drinking impure alcohol, a possibility I did not want on my conscience. Jeff coloured, his thick bar of eyebrow drawn into a scowl. I always felt nervous of courting his anger. But he unexpectedly gave a nod and said, 'You're right, I guess. I pay you. Hitler pays the S.A. But it's no excuse for them giving him value for his money.' He stared at the deceptive bottle in his hand, ending from the doorway, 'Anyway, it's a sure bet they're going to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment, Roosevelt's saying it's a cause of the Depression.'
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
