Richard Gordon: THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

'Quite obviously, you are Herr Elgar,' said Domagk in German, taking in my appearance.

Domagk was in his late thirties, tall and spare, with thinning dark hair cropped so close that the sides of his head appeared shaven. He had a neat triangle of clipped moustache and a pin through his soft white collar under the knot of his tie, American style. The little I knew of him suggested that he might begrudge spending even the small change of his time on me. He was a bacteriologist, a doctor specializing in germs, a study initiated by the Germans themselves in the 1870s. He held the title of Professor from the University of Munster-the nation which makes much of such labels has the pleasant custom of applying them without the accompanying trials of office. He had been Director of Experimental Pathology and Bacteriology at I G Farben for the past five years. I needed to dig my youthful fingers deep into my pockets of self-confidence to announce, 'Sir Frederick Hopkins asked me to pay you his respects, Herr Professor. Until last summer I was one of his students in the Biochemistry Department at Cambridge.'

'So Dr Dieffenbach explained, when he telephoned. Well, I'm sure we're honoured to welcome Sir Frederick's emissary.' I sensed no tinge of sarcasm. 'Had there been no Hopkins, our babies might still be misshapen from rickets and our sailors still dying from scurvy.'

Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins-'Hoppy'-was President of the Royal Society, great-grandson of a captain at Trafalgar and a relation of the Jesuit priest whose poems combine subtle conciseness with eccentric metre. He was the doctor who in 1898 attended the unexpectedly early arrival of Ramsay Macdonald's firstborn in the flat downstairs at Lincoln's Inn Fields. He was also the man who discovered vitamins.

'My correspondence with Hopkins was a couple of years back, when we synthesized vitamin B1 here in these laboratories,' Domagk explained to his companion. The girl with the Slav eyes was concentrating on her flasks. She seemed of slight importance. I judged her a technician, not a chemist. 'Some people in Germany said that Hopkins was forestalled in his discovery by the Dutchman Christian Eijkman. You know, when he observed that natives eating polished rice went down with beri-beri. I wanted to tell Hopkins how I disagreed with that view. Anyway, he was always generous in his praise for Eijkman's work. _Fair play,'_ he added in English.

The Hindenburg-like man grunted. 'Didn't the gateman send a porter up with you?' he enquired of me. When I shook my head he remarked resignedly, 'Oh, they're too comfortable drinking coffee in their lodge this weather. Visitors aren't supposed to come unescorted,' he added as an apology. 'We are a commercial undertaking, not a university, and a company must guard its secrets like its marks in the bank. Where did you learn your German?'

'There were lectures at Cambridge for scientists. A knowledge of German is of course essential to keep up with modern chemistry.'

'I am a chemist, so I savour your compliment.'

I became aware while we talked of the unmistakable smell emitted by laboratory mice. Somewhere beyond the door which they had left ajar would be an animal house, its shoebox-sized cages stacked the height of a man, each floored with straw and sawdust on which scurried, in various states of ill health, lapping their cunningly doctored bowls, the invaluable and involuntary martyrs to man's easeful supremacy on earth. Through the opening I glimpsed something like an oversized biscuit tin on legs, which from my earlier days working in the Inoculation Department of St Mary's Hospital in London I recognized as an incubator for growing bacteria. For all their secrecy, I gathered from the combination that something was going on involving the experimental infection of living beings with germs.

'If Professor Hцrlein will excuse me for a moment,' said Domagk affably, turning to the other, 'I shall install our Englishman across the corridor.'

'You are lodging with Dr Dieffenbach?' remarked Hцrlein. I enjoyed the hospitality of Dr Dieffenbach's chalet-like roof in Elberfeld-literally, my freezing bedroom being under the rafters. He had made my appointment. Domagk lived in the same smart residential area near the Zoo, at No 11 Walkьrenallee, but it appeared seemly for one of my insignificance to be received in his laboratory. 'We all know him well. A very agreeable man, and an excellent doctor.'

'How did you come across him?' asked Domagk with a look of curiosity. I noticed a habit of inclining his head to one side as he spoke. 'To my knowledge he has never visited England, except as an involuntary guest during the War.'

'He is an acquaintance of a family friend, Sir Edward Triplady-'

'Ah! The physician who attends your King?' Hцrlein exclaimed, recognition in his eye.

I nodded. I had mentioned two knights in almost as many breaths. They must have thought me splendidly connected, the Germans taking the English aristocracy completely seriously.

I concluded from his spacious Arbeitszimmer, in which Domagk left me alone on the other side of the building, that all the facilities provided by I G Farben compared with those of the Cambridge Dunn Labs as the Ritz to the Little Rose pubs in Trumpington Street. The furniture was plentiful, though with the unrelated look of institutional buying. The flat roll-topped desk was piled high with typewritten papers, coloured cardboard folders and neat piles of scientific journals, and against the four tall windows were more of those indoor plants which attract such quaint English names, like mother-in-law's tongue or busy lizzie. Outside was a bare cherry tree, the grey sky and the Schwebebahn.

Decorating the white walls were framed photographs of middle-aged or elderly gentlemen, mostly looking down microscopes. I recognized Professor Paul Ehrlich from Frankfurt-on-Main, bushy haired, neatly bearded, unaccustomedly smart in wing collar and spotted tie and broadcloth cutaway, with his soft mouth and his glasses halfway down his nose, looking up amiably from some chemical tome as though surprised at someone snatching the habitual box of cigars from under his arm and taking his portrait. In 1909, Ehrlich exploited the German genius for systematic chemistry by testing 605 compounds of arsenic before discovering 'Salvarsan' or '606', which killed the treacherous spirochaete _Treponema pallidum._ He cleared syphilis from the veins of the world, many of them blue-blooded.

On a table against the window a microscope stood tilted for the eye. I idly turned the knurled fine-adjustment screw, focusing the fuzzy blue circle on the glass slide.

I am a biochemist, a student of the molecular mechanism of life, but I had worked on bacteria and recognized a specimen of human pus. I saw the globular scavengers of the blood, resembling the pond amoeba, the simplest of God's creatures, which expresses the mystery of existence in a single cell. Among them were twisted minute, dark, exactly similar dots, some in chains of twenty or more, some in fives and sixes, others in pairs, like broken beads on a ballroom floor. They were _Streptococcus pyogenes,_ an enemy of mankind only less deadly than man himself. Some of the chains had penetrated the blood cells, to lie against the blobs of a nucleus deep stained by the blue dye. The streptococcus germs were winning this complex and subtle battle. They were killing the body's scavengers, on their way to killing the body itself.

I straightened up, noticing with surprise that the colourful, bold landscape which had already caught my eye on the wall above was an original painting. It was an unusual find in the study of a scientific professor.

'You like my picture?' Domagk entered unexpectedly, still in his white coat. From the warmth of his greeting I had been caught at a fortunate moment. I politely asked the artist.