Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl

<p>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.</p><p>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. His lab soon flourished as a hotbed of resistance. Weigl hired otherwise doomed mathematicians writers doctors and other thinkers protecting them from atrocity. The team engaged in a sabotage campaign by sending illegal doses of the vaccine into the Polish ghettos while shipping gallons of the weakened serum to the Wehrmacht.</p><p>Among the scientists saved by Weigl who was a Christian was a gifted Jewish immunologist named Ludwik Fleck. Condemned to Buchenwald and pressured to re-create the typhus vaccine under the direction of a sadistic Nazi doctor Erwin Ding-Schuler Fleck had to make an awful choice between his scientific ideals or the truth of his conscience. In risking his life to carry out a dramatic subterfuge to vaccinate the camp's most endangered prisoners Fleck performed an act of great heroism.</p><p>Drawing on extensive research and interviews with survivors Arthur Allen tells the harrowing story of two brave scientists--a Christian and a Jew-- who put their expertise to the best possible use at the highest personal danger.</p>