The two names are interconnected. The first one I discovered by chance, a little while ago. I knew a little about the other for a long time. First the chance. In the introduction of the book The evaluation game – how publication metrics shape academic communication[I], its author, the Polish Emanuel Kulczycki, chose a fellow countryman to illustrate the point: Rudolf Weigl (1883-1957), biologist and inventor of complex geopolitics. Born in a region that is now part of the Czech Republic, Weigl developed his career in Lviv, a city then located in Poland and now in Ukraine. Regarding the evaluation game, Kulczycki comments that Weigl, a brilliant scientist, was a perfectionist and skilled in the construction of his scientific instruments. His stance towards publishing articles would have been radical. He thought research was about doing science and seeking discoveries. Writing articles and publishing them would be torture and a waste of time. As a student, he was forced by his advisors to publish in order to maintain his scholarship. Later, in turn, he drove his students to despair, because his way of doing science reduced the number of publications on the apprentices' CVs. He called what is now known as “salami science” – that is, the division of a single job into several articles – “duck poop”, comparing that practice to the waste left by the bird while it roams around a plot of land.
What was the great discovery of this extraordinary scientist? Nothing less than the first effective vaccine against typhus, a disease that ravaged various parts of Europe at different times, particularly during the First World War, when Weigl began researching the disease on the battlefronts. The researcher completed the development of his vaccine in the 1920s, using procedures that are strange to today. Typhus is caused by bacteria of the genus rickettsiae, discovered by the Brazilian doctor Henrique da Rocha Lima, specifically the Rickettsia prowazeki, name given by the Brazilian scientist in honor of two researchers who died from the disease. Rocha Lima, however, is not the second character I mentioned above, but the reader deserves a pause to remember his story (in the link available in the footnote[ii]). Returning to the disease, the pathogen is known, the transmitter was also discovered, which are lice. And with them came the search for the vaccine. Weigl developed an unusual method, but it worked perfectly. The bacteria in question, like so many others, did not multiply vitro, only in living cells. How to cultivate these bacteria in sufficient numbers for vaccines, if the ideal place was the lice intestine? Simple(?): infecting lice and feeding them with human blood, so that they would multiply along with the bacteria, but using a trick so that the insects could ingest their food without contaminating the people who gave their blood to them. Weigl invented lice cages, attached to volunteers' thighs for an hour a day. The important thing was, just in case, not to scratch the bites, as then the feces deposited on the skin with the pathogens would infect the blood donor or the “lice feeder”, as they became known. The scientist tested this first on himself and his wife and then shared the procedure with many, many volunteers. Next, the feces from the intestines of the lice were collected and, from the bacteria present in them, the vaccine was obtained.
But, leaving aside the vaccine itself, let's get back to the character. Weigl worked at the University of Lviv, located on the Soviet side of Poland, according to the division established by Stalin and Hitler in 1939. In 1941, the area came under Nazi control. The researcher refused to join the Nazi Party, but even so, he had the freedom and authority to continue working, as the Germans knew the importance of the vaccine, widely and successfully tested in the 1930s, proving to be an element of strategic importance for the German troops. And Weigl didn't hesitate: if they want the vaccine, I need “lice feeders”, lots of them. And with that, thousands of intellectuals, members of the Polish resistance and Jews escaped the concentration camps. The scientist also managed to protect many colleagues, but not one of them enough: Ludwik Fleck (1896-1961), doctor and biologist, the second character in this story. Fleck, being Jewish, had few job opportunities due to anti-Semitism in 1920s Poland. Weigl, however, employed him for years as an assistant. With the arrival of the Nazis, Fleck ended up deported to the city's ghetto, but continued his research work under the yoke of the invaders. Later, together with his wife, he found himself in concentration camps, where he was kept alive so that he could continue to develop and produce vaccines, first in Auschwitz and then in Buchenwald, until the liberation of this place on April 11, 1945. Among other tasks, it produced two types of vaccine: one effective for prisoners and another, sabotaged and therefore ineffective, for members of the SS.[iii]
Fleck is not remembered for his role in biology, but for his other ideas about science, developed while studying bacteria in the 1930s. In 1935 he published the book Genesis and development of a scientific fact, little read for decades, until it was mentioned by Thomas Kuhn in his classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The natural scientist then became a reference for epistemology and sociology of science. As summarized in the article by Aurélio Bianco Pena and Cibelle Celestino Silva[iv], Fleck understood the “development of science as a social project of political actors involved in scientific communities. Fleck had established an epistemological model of understanding the functioning of science in which science cannot be separated from its social aspects and its history”. Ironically, when we discuss his contributions[v], your own story seems to remain in the background and is often not even remembered. Somewhat ironic, because his own research work on typhus was his humanistic laboratory.
Fleck, at the end of his life, emigrated to Israel, passing away before his “rediscovery” by Thomas Kuhn in 1962. Weigl continued working in Poland until he retired in 1951. Due to his vaccine, he was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize, but never contemplated. One of the nominations, in fact, he asked to be withdrawn, as he didn't think he deserved it that year. Another nomination, during the Second World War, he flatly refused, as it would be supported by the Nazis.
The intertwined stories of Rudolf Weigl and Ludwik Fleck should be part of the high school syllabus whether in science or history classes. I came across the first one in a text related to the scientific recognition game. With the second, through incursions into the sociology of science, incursions into writings always unrelated to its incredible history. As often happens, its importance only came to light due to an attentive reader. I can't help but remember Weigl's stance: research is doing science and seeking discoveries. We cannot let it simply become an evaluation game, that is, torture with duck poop, as the Polish scientist would say. Curious and attentive reading reveres history, which is always more important.
This text does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Unicamp.
[I] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/evaluation-game/4BF470C544D1E5BD2F293ECA6603860C
[ii] https://www.invivo.fiocruz.br/historia/rocha-lima-o-pai-das-rickettsias/
[iii] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/07/lice-doctor-lviv-nazi-germany-109255/
[iv] Published in the magazine Problemat, special edition referring to the Thomas Kuhn Colloquium, held in 2022. https://periodicos.ufpb.br/index.php/problemata/article/view/65615/38775
