The Prize

‘Why did you not leave Germany?’

‘I could not. I am a Jew.’

‘We all met Dr. Fritz Lipmann, the biochemist, when he came here to receive the Nobel Prize in medicine during 1953. He was at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, and he also was a Jew. He got out to Copenhagen, and later to Boston. He did not work for Hitler. It is a matter of curiosity to many of us why so many of you Jewish scientists stayed behind.’

Stratman sat very quietly. He was tempted to say to the Swedish journalist: So many of my American colleagues fought Hitler, why not you? But it was foolish. The man was a journalist. He wanted a story. You provoked, and this way, you obtained a story. ‘I do not know Dr. Lipmann’s circumstances at the time,’ said Stratman slowly. ‘I know my own. Those dearest to me were in concentration camps. As long as I co-operated, they were kept alive. That is all I wish to say on that subject.’

A new voice, rather loud from the rear row, was heard. It was the Tass Agency man speaking. ‘Is it not true, Professor, that you were kidnapped by the Americans in Berlin, and taken to the United States at gunpoint?’

‘It is not true,’ said Stratman forcefully. ‘What is true is that I had been coerced into working for one totalitarian state, and I did not wish to be coerced into working for another. I went with the Americans voluntarily, and I have never been sorry.’

He wondered if they would publish that statement in Pravda or lzvestia. His heart hammered with old resentments. Control, he told himself, control. He must remember Dr. Ilman. He must think of Emily. He thought of Emily, and waited for the next question.

With an air both curious and troubled, Count Bertil Jacobsson stood inside the door of the confined reading- room and watched and listened to the third press conference taking place, now half over.

After eight minutes in the room, what bothered Jacobsson was this: if an innocent bystander had stood in his place, and seen what he had seen, he would surely have believed that only one person had won the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine, and not two, and he would have been convinced that one laureate was being interviewed, instead of a pair.

The group of journalists in the room, a smaller group than those in the previous two sections of the hall because both winners had already been so widely publicized for their dramatic discovery, had been aiming almost all of their questions at Dr. Carlo Farelli, of Rome, while Dr. John Garrett, of Pasadena, California, sat beside him like an inanimate piece of sculpture that needed the dustcloth.

Jacobsson asked himself why this was so, but the question was purely rhetorical. Dr. Farelli’s presence, as he leaned forward from the sofa, intimately addressing his audience, made the answer obvious. He was an attractive, dynamic human being. Dr. Farelli was a large man, not in height, but in width of face, and neck, and shoulders, and chest, and in the breadth of his gestures. Dr. Farelli conveyed the confidence of raw power. From some depth of academic memory, Jacobsson resurrected an image of the twenty-seventh Emperor of Rome, Maximinus I (A.D. 235-238), a giant of eight feet who was half Goth, half Alan, a giant who wore his wife’s bracelet on his thumb as a ring and consumed forty pounds of meat and ten gallons of wine daily. The comparison was inaccurate, even absurd, but it came to mind, nevertheless.

Spoken in a resounding basso, Dr. Farelli’s phrases seemed to be slung at his cowed listeners as if thrown by a catapult. His damp, black locks hung over his forehead, shaking as his head moved. His dark eyes sparked, his hook nose quivered, his white teeth gleamed, and his protruding jaw dared all disbelief. Beside him, as unremarkable as a slight blemish, sliding lower and lower into the sofa as if sinking into a quicksand patch of inadequacy, was Dr. John Garrett, brown hair and rimless spectacles and lack-lustre countenance slowly fading into the wan beige of the sofa, until both were one, and Farelli seemed quite alone.

Yet Jacobsson tried to judge the phenomenon fairly. This dominance was not of Farelli’s doing. It was invited, nay, desired, by the dozen journalists. In the Italian they sensed excitement, and they wanted to draw upon it and inject it into their routine accounts, so that their stories would be as alive as their subject.

Jacobsson pondered the possible results of this group interview. Did Dr. Garrett realize that he was being made as extinct as the dodo bird? Did he realize what was happening to him?

On the sofa, melted into the fabric, nearly vanished, Dr. John Garrett felt no pain. From the second that he had been introduced to Farelli, his immediate surface anger and antagonism had been blotted up and absorbed by the Italian’s overpowering charm. Thus drained of righteous indignation, he was less man than automaton.

When the interviewing had begun, Garrett had been offered his fair share of questions, and had answered them simply, but then there had been fewer questions, and finally none, as if the audience had made a choice as to the player they preferred. Now all questions were being directed at Farelli, and all replies were being given by him. Oddly, Garrett experienced apathy, not rebellion. To join Farelli, to participate, would seem to be intruding on an enchanting Pirandello play. Gradually, Garrett had become so mesmerized by the Italian’s words and histrionics that he felt he no longer shared the laureate sofa with him, but rather belonged apart, to the press audience, logically listening with them.

Even now he listened, still bound helplessly in the same hypnotic trance of inferiority, as if his contribution to their great work had been a minor accident, and now he wished to make amends through apologetic silence.

‘One asks oneself, after all, what is this organ, the heart, that it is so difficult to replace?’ Farelli was saying. ‘It is a simplified pump, a hollow muscular bag somewhat larger than a tennis ball or my fist, weighing no more than ten ounces. Seventy-two times a minute it beats, perpetually beats, and through it, each minute, pass six quarts of blood. One sees that in its design the heart is simple to duplicate, yes? Though, do not be fooled by its simplicity. For sixty or seventy or eighty years, it pumps with no rest. Where can one buy a machine guaranteed to pump for sixty-seventy-eighty years without failing once?

‘Both Dr. Garrett and I fell into the error of trying to find such a man-made machine to use as a model, a machine that would equal or surpass the living heart. There were many models, of course. For several decades, scientists have been constructing artificial hearts to perform outside the body. One remembers the year 1935, when Dr. Alexis Carrel admitted that he and Colonel Charles Lindbergh had kept alive an animal organ with the first artificial heart made of a pump and coiled glass tube. One remembers Dr. John H. Gibbon, of Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, who was among the first, possibly the first, to employ an artificial heart-and-lung machine on a living patient, to keep the patient alive forty-five minutes, while surgery was being done. One remembers Dr. Leland C. Clarke, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, who kept a fireman alive seventy-five minutes with a heart-and-lung machine, while chest surgery was completed.

‘In the world, there have been thirty or forty such artificial heart devices. And other remarkable cardiac devices, too, such as the recent electronic pacemaker. One saw the brilliance of these efforts, and the progress made, but still one-who was a perfectionist-despaired. For all of these machines were temporary devices outside the human body. They could not, in any form, be trusted inside the body-and will not be trusted, until we have discovered perpetual motion. Dr. Garrett and I saw that the practical heart, the one that might prolong or even double longevity, must be alive and mammalian and in the image of the human heart. Here was a goal for a Dr. Frankenstein-but where, my friends, where in the medical profession, was there a Mary Shelley?’

Farelli had spread his broad palms in a gesture of helplessness, and the audience, almost collectively, sighed in distressed understanding of his problem, as a theatre audience might sigh at the dilemma of the beset hero. Farelli cast a friendly glance at Garrett, who sat agape, like a boy child waiting for Father to turn the page.

Farelli met the attention of his audience again. He would not let slack the communicative bond between them. ‘The goal was clear, but so, also, were the steep hurdles. What kept us from grafting lower mammalian hearts into human bodies? Preliminary attempts had been made on dogs, in England, in America, and the animals had survived three weeks. Why not men and women? The hurdles were these-to find an animal heart of similar structural design to the human heart, to find a means of storing this organ, to find a workable operative technique, to find a way of preventing irreversible ischemic damage to the transplanted heart-yes, I could go on and on. These were hurdles, but they were not the largest. The largest was the one I speak of last-to find means of preventing the rejection mechanism of the cells from marching out to attack and crush all invading material trying to enter the body.

‘Those of us who dreamed of an eternal body spent our long nights of lonely strategy devising means to overcome these hurdles. In the Istituto Superiore di Sanita, in Rome, I did my research and experiments. In the Rosenthal Medical Centre, in Pasadena, my admirable colleague, Dr. Garrett, did his research and experiments. We met our difficulties, one by one through the years, and we overcame them. Blood for the brain during surgery?