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of imprisonment, she smuggled Ehrlich’s private letters, scientific papers, and original manuscripts out of Germany at the height of Hitler’s regime, thus saving them from certain destruction.) In point of fact, Marquardt wrote two versions of her memoir: the original, a slim volume of reminiscences from 1924, and a substantially revised, English-language edition from 1951, incorporating the documents she’d rescued. In this latter work, the additional material allowed her to write more of a full-fledged biography. But there was another compelling reason for the new edition. As Marquardt noted in the preface, all but a few copies of the original were burned by the Nazis.

The moment she entered the lab first thing in the morning, she wrote, Ehrlich would nod courteously then start rattling off correspondence. Midsentence, though, he’d often abruptly halt, as if listening for something just out of range of human hearing, and then begin rummaging through the cork-stoppered bottles atop his immense worktable. Not finding what he sought on top, he’d open the cupboards underneath. Here were still more bottles—“innumerable they seemed, filled with rare and precious chemical substances.”

Marquardt recalled that the doctor might remain squatting for a good quarter of an hour, his knees pressed to his chest. The sound of his rifling was the tinkling of a tea service. He’d then pick up with both hands a particular bottle, turn it around and around, and smile as he read the label. With the grunts and groans of repositioning, he again stood. At such moments, she remembered, “All written work was forgotten for the time being and he would begin experimenting. Test tube after test tube was taken out of the little box near the Bunsen burner, and minute quantities of various chemical compounds were put into them, solutions were made and heated, alkalis and acids added. Now a delightful violet-blue resulted from the experiment, then it was a bright red; now green, then orange. If he found an interesting reaction he called out: ‘Wonderful! Wonderful!’ and showed it to me as though I understood all about it.”

In Marquardt’s affectionate work as well as in the drier tomes of Ehrlich’s fellow scientists, a telling quirk surfaces: The man loved colors. He was “emotionally swayed” by them, one gentleman wrote. What spring is to a parfumeur, colors were to Paul Ehrlich. Though always a busy, busy man, Marquardt revealed, the doctor would still stop to extol the roar of yellows and reds in a bouquet of flowers. They “would make him quite ecstatic,” Marquardt admitted. This quirk carried over into his work habits as well. He wrote daily notes to himself and his staff on precut squares of different-colored construction paper, using various colored pencils. He kept this stationery in his coat pocket and, while he rarely lost his temper, he’d become terribly agitated if his supply ran out. (A similar response arose regarding his stock of Havana cigars, one of which was ever present, a sixth digit on his right hand.) Though surrounded by colors, none were more eye-popping to Dr. Ehrlich than those produced by his chemicals—the pure blues of cobalt compounds, glowing like the core of a torch flame, the delicate sea greens of iron-infused solutions. Far more than a source of pleasure, though, color was the prism through which he viewed and attempted to unravel biological mysteries. Color is the thread that links his disparate scientific achievements.

Born in 1854 in a small village 150 miles southeast of Berlin (an area that’s now part of Poland), Paul Ehrlich was the only son of prosperous Jewish parents who operated an inn. During his midteens, he pursued his keen interest in science under the watchful eye of a cousin on his mother’s side, Carl Weigert, who was nine years older than Paul. Weigert, a famous pathologist, had discovered that aniline dyes—synthetic dyes developed in Germany around 1860 for use in the textile industry—were unexpectedly well suited for staining human and animal tissue. Rather than obscuring details, these intense dyes instead