The Malaria Project by Karen M. Masterson

Author:Karen M. Masterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2014-09-25T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 21

Malaria and the Madmen

Publicly, the War Department had no malaria problem. Details of the shocking malaria rates for troops were in “blackout”—kept secret.1 As such, the work of the Malaria Project received little press, and the War Department forbade publication of study results. Chief investigators received travel budgets for monthly meetings in Washington, where they were sworn to secrecy and agreed to quietly exchange information, all of which was to be held in confidence. They argued that study results should be published in medical journals to share information and inspire insights from scientists in all fields. But the War Department controlled the decision, and the answer always came back, “No.”

Lowell Coggeshall understood this. But he had a hard time keeping quiet when confronted with blatant misinformation about their situation, as was the case with a Reader’s Digest article by the famous Paul de Kruif, a biologist turned writer and author of Microbe Hunters, an international bestseller about the first microbiologists (still in print today, assigned by university professors as a must-read). De Kruif’s Reader’s Digest article carried the headline “Enter Atabrine—Exit Malaria,” and declared that a five-day course of atabrine cured malaria.2 Cured malaria!

The piece appeared on December 1, 1942, in this broadly read periodical, two weeks before Lowell arrived home from Africa. In lyrical cadence—which made de Kruif’s work readable and immensely popular—the opening lines said: “American scientists have triumphantly opened a front against a sinister enemy that must be whipped before we can defeat the Japs and Nazis. . . . It was a prewar mistake of the Germans that their dye trust I.G. Farbenindustries, underestimating the ingenuity of American chemists, let us in on a hint of atabrine’s secret. . . . Their Nazi masters knew that no bid for world conquest could be made without a substitute for quinine, because malaria soldiers are just too sick to fight. With the chemical cunning for which they are renowned, German test-tube wizards fashioned more than a thousand dye compounds, tested them out with appalling patience on malaria sick canaries and rice finches, till they arrived at Atabrine’s yellow magic in 1932. The results were epochal.”3

Lowell and his peers understood de Kruif’s hyperbole. This was his art. He punched up the science to sell books and magazines. He used a doctorate in microbiology from the University of Michigan and experience working at the world-famous Rockefeller Institute to help the public understand science, and help other writers do the same (for example, he ghost cowrote Sinclair Lewis’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Arrowsmith).4

But he sometimes painted too colorful a picture of his subjects (the British version of Microbe Hunters omitted de Kruif’s depiction of Ronald Ross to avoid libel suits). He was an old-school scientist harboring naive notions of magic bullets. These tendencies gummed up his article on atabrine, especially one line that, to malariologists, must have sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard. It said that just “15 little pills of atabrine, given over five days, were all that was needed to cure the great majority of malaria victims.

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