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unheard-of compounds of arsenic, without spoiling the combination of benzene and arsenic at all!
"I can change Atoxyl!" Without his hat or coat Ehrlich hurried out of this dingy room to the marvelous workshop of Bertheim, chief of his chemist slaves. "Atoxyl can be changed—maybe we can change it into a hundred, a thousand new compounds of arsenic!" he exclaimed. . . . "Now, my dear Bertheim," and he poured out a thousand fantastic schemes. Bertheim? He could not resist that "Now my dear Bertheim!"
For the next two years the whole staff, Japs and Germans, not to mention some Jews, men and white rats and white mice, not to mention Miss Marquardt and Miss Leupold—and don't forget Kadereit!—toiled together in that laboratory which was like a subterranean forge of imps and gnomes. They tried this, they did that, with six hundred and six—that is their exact number—different compounds of arsenic. Such was the power of the chief imp over them, that this staff never stopped to think of the absurdity and the impossibility of their job, which was this: to turn arsenic from a pet weapon of murderers into a cure which no one was sure could exist for a disease Ehrlich hadn't even dreamed might be cured. These slaves worked as only men can work when they are inspired by a wrinkle-browed fanatic with kind gray eyes.
They changed Atoxyl! They developed marvelous compounds of arsenic which—hurrah!—would really cure mice. "We have it!" the staff would be ready to shout, but then, worse luck, when the fell trypanosomes of the mal de Caderas had gone, those marvelous cures turned the blood of the cured mice to water, or killed them with a fatal jaundice. . . . And—who would believe it?—some of those arsenic remedies made mice dance, not for a minute but for the rest of their lives round and round they whirled, up and down they jumped. Satan himself could not have schemed a worse torture for creatures just saved from death. It seemed ridiculous, hopeless, to try to find a perfect cure. But Paul Ehrlich? He wrote: