The Demon Under the Microscope by Thomas Hager

Author:Thomas Hager [Hager, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307352286
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2006-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

AS SOON AS it appeared, the first paper by the Pasteur Institute team was translated into German and circulated within Bayer. According to one of the German chemists, it “struck like a bombshell . . . . The excitement caused by this paper can only be appreciated by those who witnessed it.” The revelation that the sulfa side chain was the active ingredient in Prontosil rather than the dye set off a string of responses that started with denial: Certainly there had to be something wrong with the French results. After Klarer and Mietzsch provided Domagk with pure sulfanilamide and his tests showed that it worked—not only worked but, on a gram-for-gram basis, was twice as effective as Prontosil—the Bayer team moved to confusion: Mietzsch and Klarer in particular were stunned. How could the medicine work if it was not a dye? This undid everything Ehrlich had taught. Then came recrimination: How, after three years of research, had they missed a critical discovery that the French had made within a few weeks? Then finger-pointing: At least one observer within Bayer noted a “confrontation between Mietzsch and Klarer on the one hand and Domagk on the other,” in which, presumably, each side tried to assign responsibility for the embarrassing French finding.

Finally the Germans found their way to acceptance. Something had gone wrong, their group had executed a major scientific pratfall, but it was done, and they had to deal with the results. Who was to blame? No one and everyone. The chemists had provided Domagk with hundreds of sulfa-containing chemicals, almost all of which worked. Within three months of discovering Prontosil, they had sent him Kl-820 and Kl-821, molecules in which sulfa was not attached to an azo dye. Domagk, for his part, believed that he had run his tests flawlessly. Almost every time they tested an azo dye with a sulfa side chain, it killed strep; almost every time it did not, the effect was absent or greatly reduced.

Perhaps there were enough confounding results—tests in which an occasional azo dye without sulfa proved somewhat effective, usually on bacteria other than strep; tests in which, for no apparent reason, a sulfa-containing azo dye that should have worked did not—to throw them off, keep them focused on azo dyes instead of sulfa.

Because many documents at Bayer (including all records of upper-level administrative deliberations) are not publicly available, it is impossible to know exactly what happened. In hindsight it appears that the German laboratory data pointed clearly toward the French results and that the Germans, at least to some degree, knew it. The Bayer chemists had followed their intuition and, just like the French, within months of discovering Prontosil had developed molecules like Kl-820 and Kl-821, compounds that contained sulfa but no azo dye. They gave the molecules to Domagk, Domagk tested them, and a confirmed, positive set of results from at least one of these non-dye molecules was ignored, dismissed, or buried within the company. The team seemed well on their way to finding what the French found.

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