Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [118]
Now Richard was writing to faraway doctors again. It seemed that Arline was pregnant. After ending the celibacy of their marriage, she had immediately missed her menstrual period. Was it possible? They were frightened and jubilant at once. Richard did not tell his parents, but he told his sister, now a college student. Joan was dazzled at the prospect of becoming an aunt. They talked about names and began making new plans. Yet to Richard it still seemed that Arline was wasting away. He thought he saw symptoms of starvation. Perhaps no rational observer could have construed the cessation of menses at this stage of the disease as a sign of pregnancy, but that was how they construed it. The alternative was so grim. Their doctors saw little reason for hopefulness. The chief physician from the sanatorium in Browns Mills, New Jersey, advised urgently that any pregnancy must be “interrupted”—“have it done by a specialist.” Then a pregnancy test gave a negative result after all. They did not know what to think. A doctor at Los Alamos told Richard that the tests were notoriously unreliable but that they could try again at an Albuquerque laboratory. He thought the laboratory had the necessary rabbits for the Friedman test.
The same doctor said he had heard of a new substance made from mold growths—“streptomicin”?—that seemed to cure tuberculosis in guinea pigs. If it worked, the doctor thought it might soon become widely available. Arline refused to believe the negative pregnancy result. She wrote cryptic remarks about “P.S. 59-to-be.” The same day a nurse wrote Feynman from the sanatorium to say that Arline had been spitting blood. He opened his encyclopedia yet again. Nothing. He drifted through the pages: tuberculosis, tuff, tularemia … Tuff was a kind of volcanic rock; Tunicata an animal group. He wrote Arline another letter. “Tumors you know about & Turkey, the country, also.” Some days she was now too weak even to write back. He grasped his uncertainty. Not knowing was frustration, anguish, and finally his only solace.
“Keep hanging on,” he wrote. “Nothing is certain. We lead a charmed life.”
In the midst of their private turmoil came V-E day and then Richard’s twenty-seventh birthday. Arline had prepared another mail-order surprise: the laboratory was flooded with newspapers—handed about and tacked to walls—proclaiming with banner headlines, “Entire Nation Celebrates Birth of R. P. Feynman!” The war in Europe, having provided so many of the scientists with their moral purpose, had now ended. The bloody circle was closing in the Pacific. They needed no threat of a German or Japanese bomb to urge them onward. Uranium was arriving. There would be one test—one last experiment.
At the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota another kind of experiment was under way, the first clinical trial of streptomycin, a substance that had been discovered nearly two years before, in August 1943. The population participating in the trial: two patients. Both had been near death from tuberculosis when the experiment began in the fall of 1944; both were improving rapidly. Even so, it was not until the next August that the Mayo trial had expanded to as many as thirty patients. The doctors could see lesions healing and lungs clearing. A year after that, the study of streptomycin as an antitubercular agent had become the most extensive research project ever devoted to a drug and a disease. Researchers were treating more than one thousand patients. In 1947 streptomycin was released to the public.
Streptomycin’s discovery, like penicillin’s a few years earlier, had been delayed by medicine’s slow embrace of the scientific method. Physicians had just begun to comprehend the power of controlled experiments repeated thousands of times. The use of statistics to uncover any but the grossest phenomena remained alien. The doctor who first isolated the culture he named Streptomyces griseus, by cultivating some organisms swabbed from the throat