The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.55 (939 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0393351041 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 400 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-04-21 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
. Arthur Allen has written for the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, the Associated Press, Science, and Slate. He lives in Washington, where he writes about health for Politico. His books include Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver
Instead, Weigl, Fleck and their vaccines illuminate the inherent social complexities of science and truth and reinforce the overriding good of man. Unforgettable.” (George Makari, author of Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis)“A combination of Microbe Hunters, Schindler’s List, and The Twilight Zone. Considering all the energy channeled into mere survival, Allen’s book makes you wonder what pinnacles of research might have been achieved
For this they turned to the brilliant and eccentric Polish zoologist Rudolf Weigl. Weigl hired otherwise doomed mathematicians, writers, doctors, and other thinkers, protecting them from atrocity. His lab soon flourished as a hotbed of resistance. Allen writes without sanctimony and never simplifies the people in his book or the moral issues his story inevitably raises.”Wall Street Journal Few diseases are more gruesome than typhus. The astonishing success of Weigl’s techniques attracted the attention and admiration of the worldgiving him cover during the Nazi’s violent occupation of Lviv. In the 1920s, Weigl had created the first typhus vaccine using a method as bold as it was dangerous for its use of living human subjects. The team engaged in a sabotage campaign by sending illegal doses of the vaccine into the Polish ghettos while shipping gallons of the weakened serum to the Wehrmacht.Among the scientists saved by Weigl, who was a Christian, was a gifted Jewish immunologist named Ludwik Fleck. Condemned to Buchenwald and pressured to re-create the typhus vaccine under the direction of a sadistic Nazi doctor, Erwin Ding-Schuler, Fleck had to make an awful choice between his scientific ideals or the truth of his conscience. The disease plagued the German army on the Eastern Front and left the Reich desperate for a vaccine. Transmitted by body lice, it afflicts the dispossessedrefugees, soldiers, and gh
"WWII heroes in a lab coat" according to Wulfstan. During WWII many deaths were caused by disease. One of the worst killers was Typhus, spread by lice. Typhus was worse when people were dirty, exhausted and poorly nourished, so it hit particularly hard on the Eastern Front and among the Jews in the camps and ghettos.Rudolf Weigl was a Polish biologist, who was forced by the Nazis to work on a Typhus Vaccine. Weigl developed a sort of vaccine that needed many human victims for the lice to feed on. Weigl was able to protect many Jews who were sent to him for this distasteful task by giving them the vaccine and also smuggling the vaccine int. "A must read" according to Camp Runamok. We always hear that disease kills more soldiers than bullets, and the king of battlefield diseases was typhus, passed along by body lice. Weigl was a Pole of German descent. Fleck was an imprisoned Jewish scientist. Both were working on vaccines for typhus. The book describes the work they did on vaccines for the Nazis, and how they risked their lives to save those interned in the Nazi Ghettos and camps - primarily Buchenwald and Auschwitz. And we learn how Fleck fooled the Nazis by producing a vaccine he knew did nothing, while at the same time making a real vaccine for laboratory worker. Fascinating story Nora Moreira This Book relates a not so well-known story about Nazi German. Although it mostly is concerned with the typhus epidemic, and the life of a polish and a Jewish scientist, it also touches on concentration camps lives, terrible human cruelty and on the other hand some redeeming stories