Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [47]
What happened next shows just how anarchic – perhaps ‘subversive’ is a better word here – a scientist can be. Forssmann knew that the experiment would require sterile surgical equipment that was kept locked in the operating theatre. He tracked down someone who had the key, and proceeded to charm them into submission. Chief nurse Gerda Ditzen didn’t stand a chance.
‘I started to prowl around Gerda like a sweet-toothed cat around the cream jug.’ That was how Forssmann described his first move in the astonishing sequence of events that led to his Nobel Prize. Ditzen was passionate about medicine, and Forssmann exploited her passion: he plied her with textbooks, he talked about surgery with her for hours on end, and eventually, when he thought the time was right, he mentioned the experiment he longed to do. Ditzen eventually agreed to give him access to the necessary equipment – and to her own body as the first experimental subject.
One evening, after the theatre had closed, the pair embarked on their forbidden quest. Forssmann loosely tied Ditzen’s arms and legs to the operating table. Then he rubbed her arm, where they’d agreed to make the incision, with iodine to make it sterile. Then he disappeared. Ditzen waited for him to return – somewhat nervously, it can be imagined – but he didn’t come back. Access to the equipment was all Forssmann had wanted: he had no intention of putting Ditzen’s life at risk. Out of her sight, he made a cut in his own brachial vein and catheterised himself, pushing a length of narrow rubber tubing through the vein, up towards his heart.
The procedure produced a ‘burning sensation’, he said. Once the tube had reached his shoulder, Forssmann went back to Ditzen and showed her what he had done. She was furious at his deception, but he calmed her down and asked her to help him down the stairs to the X-ray department. Now Forssmann could watch the progress of the tube as he pushed it towards his heart. Nurse Ditzen held up a mirror so he could see what he was doing.
The radiography technician had slipped out of the room, and now he returned with Dr Peter Romeis, one of Forssmann’s colleagues. Romeis’s first reaction was to attempt to remove the catheter. Forssmann resisted the attempt by kicking Romeis hard in the shins. Eventually, and suffering more pain than the man with the rubber tube in his right auricle, Romeis relented. The catheter had reached the heart; there was nothing to be lost now by taking the X-ray picture as proof of this medical milestone.
The picture was published in Forssmannn’s breakthrough paper, which appeared in Klinische Wochenschrift. It was accompanied by a barefaced lie about how the research was done. Forssmann’s boss, Richard Schneider, had advised him to say that he had tried the technique on cadavers first; in the end, Forssmann supplemented this invention with an imaginary colleague who had started the operation but become too disturbed to continue, leaving Forssmann alone to finish the procedure by himself. It was a fittingly fraudulent finale to the anarchy.
The truth did eventually come out, and Forssmann’s colleagues and superiors at the Eberswalde hospital were impressed. They were so impressed, in fact, that they sent him to work with the esteemed German surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch.
There is a bitter irony to what happened next. When Sauerbruch found out what Forssmann had done, he dismissed it with a brusque, ‘You can’t begin surgery like that!’ But within a decade Sauerbruch was promulgating some anarchy of his own – and of a distinctly darker hue. He eventually became Hitler’s Surgeon General to the Army, a role in which he performed and sanctioned medical research on concentration camp prisoners for the SS. The series of experiments – which included exposing prisoners