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By Root 1094 0

returned to Berlin in the spring of 1889, Paul was a new man—free of TB, hale and hearty, raring to jump back into full-time work. Just one snag: Nobody was hiring. Though far from his dream scenario, he made the best of the situation. With the financial backing of his father-in-law, the thirty-five-year-old opened his own research laboratory, which may sound more glamorous than it was. In truth, it was a rented apartment, close to where he and his family lived. And his staff rounded out to a whopping one, a valet named Fritz, although Paul’s nephews, Felix and Georg, did pitch in now and then. Picking up where he’d left off the year before, Ehrlich resumed his experiments with vital staining and began creating new histological dyes. He christened Stieglitz blue and Lutzow blue for nearby streets. A more informal term—exploders—arose to describe a common mishap: the bursting of the dye-filled glass flasks that were heated on the apartment’s kitchen stove, leaving indigo spattered about the room.

Elsewhere in the small apartment, Ehrlich launched into what was for him a new line of research, work that was related to a larger “hot theory” being addressed by scientists in Berlin, as elsewhere: that all infectious diseases were caused by toxins, a by-product of foreign microorganisms. Scientists had just concluded that this was the case in diphtheria, for instance; the diphtheria bacterium secreted a toxic substance that attacked the walls of the throat, producing the blockage that left its victims, mostly children, choking to death. Soon after, it was found that a toxin was also the culprit in tetanus. Scientists then cast a suspicious eye on TB (although, eventually, no toxin was implicated). Ehrlich, a man who “approached research like a detective on a trail,” as the distinguished American hematologist Maxwell Wintrobe wrote in 1980, began focusing on one small aspect of the whole. He mounted his own quantitative study of a toxin, but rather than something infectious, Ehrlich chose something addictive: cocaine.

At the time, cocaine was legal and readily available, whether in pure form from a pharmacist or, as was the case in Anytown, USA, at the corner drugstore as the extra little kick in a glass of Coca-Cola. Coincidentally, the second Sherlock Holmes story, The Sign of Four (1890), had just been published, and it opened with Holmes casually injecting himself with a syringe of cocaine, the influence of which, he confessed to Watson, he found “transcendentally stimulating and clarifying.” Its popularity notwithstanding, Ehrlich knew that at certain levels cocaine had toxic effects. But what levels caused what effects? For answers, Ehrlich enlisted mice as his guinea pigs. Rather than injecting the cocaine into their bloodstreams, he instead found it easier and safer to feed it to them. He soaked biscuits with varied but precise quantities of a cocaine solution. Satisfied with this methodology, Ehrlich shifted to a series of experiments using a much deadlier plant derivative, the toxin ricin. Derived from castor plant beans, ricin is more potent than cobra venom, even in minuscule amounts. Today it is regarded as one of the most dangerous weapons of bioterrorism.

Although Ehrlich would end up with a lot of dead mice, he eventually produced survivors that were immune to not just normally lethal amounts of ricin but also doses hundreds of times stronger. Within the bloodstream of these supermice, Ehrlich had triggered circulating “antitoxins” (a type of antibody) that would “paralyze” the poison the next time the mice ingested it. In short, they’d been vaccinated. With this, Ehrlich was not, however, introducing into the world a new concept. A hundred years earlier one of his scientific heroes, the British physician Edward Jenner, had demonstrated an effective but far cruder instance of induced immunity. He’d found that a human being deliberately exposed to a mild form of smallpox, by way of scrapings from sores, would survive exposure to the deadly form of the disease. Although the how and why were unclear, Jenner had proven,