About this item
From a laboratory in wartime Poland comes a fascinating story of anti-Nazi resistance and scientific ingenuity. Few diseases are more gruesome than typhus. Transmitted by body lice, it afflicts the dispossessed -- refugees, soldiers, and ghettoized peoples -- causing hallucinations, terrible headaches, boiling fever, and often death. The disease plagued the German army on the Eastern Front and left the Reich desperate for a vaccine. For this they turned to the brilliant and eccentric Polish zoologist Rudolf Weigl. In the 1920s, Weigl had created the first typhus vaccine using a method as bold as it was dangerous for its use of living human subjects. The astonishing success of Weigl's techniques attracted the attention and admiration of the world -- giving him cover during the Nazi's violent occupation of Lviv.
About the Author
Arthur Allen was born in Cincinnati, educated at UC-Berkeley, and began his career as a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press in Mexico and Central America. He later worked in Europe before moving to Washington where he has written about science, medicine and health for the past 20 years. He is currently an editor and reporter at POLITICO, where he writes about health and technology.
