LICE, LIFE, AND LEAFHOPPERS: HOW WEIGL’S VACCINE CREATION INFLUENCED MY VIROLOGY RESEARCH

Abstract

This paper is dedicated to the memory of my brother Alfred who worked as a physician in the ghetto of Kolomyya. On September 1, 1942 my father was shipped with 8 000 Jews to be gassed in Belzec. Two weeks later my brother was arrested and his dead body returned to the ghetto a few hours later. On October 14 my mother was shipped to the Belzec extermination camp with the remaining 7 000 ghetto inhabitants.My wife and I survived the holocaust in refugee camps in Romania, but 138 closest relatives in Nazi occupied Europe perished in Treblinka, Belzec, and Auschwitz.

In 1928, when I was 13 years old, my brother Alfred, who was a medical student in Lviv , told me that his biology professor, Rudolf Weigl, developed during World War I the first vaccine against exanthematic typhus. Weigl, who was a young officer in the Austrian army, got the brilliant idea how to prepare a vaccine to protect people from the deadly disease that killed thousands of soldiers and civilians. Weigl infected healthy body lice individually, giving them enemas containing typhus rickettsiae. The inoculated lice were maintained for 5 days in batches of 140, in cages carried on the bodies ofWeigl’s assistants, because they only fed on human blood. After 5 days the typhus-carrying lice were dissected and from 140 intestines, crushed in a glass micro mortar with a few drops of phenol solution, a single dose of the protective vaccine was produced. I listened fascinated to my brother’s description of Weigl’s procedure and I decided to study medicine, become a researcher, and do similar experiments when I grow up. Twenty years after hearing about Weigl I got the opportunity to follow his steps, not with human lice but with leafhoppers and plant pathogens. Daily contacts with scientists at Cold Spring Harbor, who years later became Wolf Price and Nobel Prize winners greatly influenced me and helped in my own scientific career.