What brings respectable scientists to falsify data, deceive their colleagues in the laboratories, and sometimes even endanger human lives?
Alex Doron
Although three months have passed since the "big bomb" was dropped, the world's scientific community is still in shock. The man in it has no satisfactory explanation for the intriguing questions: "Why did he do this?", "What pushed him to lie?"
A nuclear scientist, the renowned physicist Viktor Ninov, was removed from his high position as one of the seniors of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. The reason: he was suspected of fabricating data from experiments he conducted that contributed significantly to an important scientific publication. At this point it is set to false. Another forgery in the series of forgeries and shameful acts of fraud with which global science is sometimes tarnished.
This is a highly publicized discovery of two new heavy elements, number 116 and number 118, which were supposed to join the "periodic table", the table of chemical elements
The famous one that every XNUMXth grade student gets to know in chemistry classes. According to the tradition, which was established in the last decades, almost every new chemical element that is discovered is given a name a few years later, which usually sounds like the name of the scientist who discovered it. There is a lot of respect in this process.
But in mid-July - as reported by the weekly newspapers "New Scientist" and "New York Times" - the director of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, one of the most famous research institutes in the world, distributed an internal circular, in which he informed thousands of employees, scientists, engineers and technicians, about the punitive measures he had taken against Nineveh.
This happened about two months after Ninov had already been suspended and vacated his room. The CEO's announcement ended the affair. For a whole year, a secret investigation into the suspicions raised about the nature of the experiments carried out by Ninov, along with 14 other scientists, continued. "This was improper conduct," said the CEO's circular.
Anyone who tries to get online today to the famous article that Ninov sent to the most important newspaper in the world of physics, the "Physical Review Letters", in which he reported in '99 on the discovery of the new elements - will see a strange message. Three lines, on behalf of the management of the laboratory in California, at the top of the page, with a bold note: "The article has been retracted". That is, it was removed and no one is standing behind it anymore.
A lengthy correspondence - also under a veil of secrecy - was conducted in connection with this article with the editorial board of the prestigious journal. In 99, the "Physical Review" boasted of the discovery, highlighting the Nineveh announcement: "We jumped (in the experiment, in the discovery) over a sea of instability, towards an island full of solid stability, and the theories about it have been predicted ever since."...1970 A refined way of patting oneself on the back . But now it turns out that already a year ago, the other 14 partners in writing the aforementioned article severed all ties to their original report "and walked away from their support for Beninov", as the message is distilled in this matter.
Nineveh continues to deny the accusations made against him. He started legal proceedings to cancel his dismissal and suspension from his duties and announced that he would fight for his name.
Electric fabric
The commotion started at the GSI research institute in Darmstadt, Germany. His scientists tried to repeat Ninov's experiment according to his detailed report to "Physical Letters" and failed to create two
The new foundations. Doubts began to pile up, and from here it was a short way to suspect fraud.
Ninov's experiment was carried out in a cyclotron - a spiral particle accelerator. High-energy ions of the noble gas krypton were "shot" at a lead target. In the "bomb", the experimenters reported, two new artificial elements were created for only a fraction of a second. Ninov and his friends were quick to announce their discovery.
However, the German scientists began to present different, quite annoying questions in the long correspondence they maintained with their American colleagues. When they did not receive satisfactory answers, they began to suspect two previous publications of Ninov, about his other discoveries, which were published while he was serving in a high-ranking position in Darmstadt. The Germans revealed the doubts in the "European Physical Journal".
Sigurd Hoffman wrote there that the results he obtained in the Nineveh experiments were "not real, 'cooked'".
The Nineveh affair (until it turns out otherwise, if at all) is not the first in which Fabrock and the falsification of scientific data made at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory have been alleged. The "New York Times" reported on July 24, 99 about an undercover federal investigation opened against Robert Liberdi, a cell biologist, according to which he falsified data he needed to prove that there was no connection between deadly cancers and between electromagnetic fields and electromagnetic radiation. In other words: that the electricity is safe. The topic is of great interest and has made quite a few people anxious, especially those who live near power plants.
Livardi, whose research was funded by grants totaling 3.3 million dollars from the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Departments of Defense and Energy, published two articles, "which included misleading and supplementary data", it was stated in the report regarding the suspicions against him.
The investigation, emphasized the science reporter of the "New York Times", William Broad, revealed that Livardi deleted the findings that contradicted the conclusions to which he was striving. When the conclusions of the investigation against him were presented to him, he immediately resigned from his position. Then he also agreed to delete the articles he wrote.
Some time later, Liberdi said that he does not deny his research, but had to agree to the settlement that was offered to him, "to end the affair, since I am unable to raise a million dollars for the defense
the legal required to prove my righteousness".
"There was no fabric. There is only a matter of interpretation regarding the data", he continues to claim even today.
The temptation and its punishment
What is the scope of the phenomenon of forgeries and fabrications in science in the world? Why are researchers - even those who gain prestige and reputation over long years of work - tempted to lend a hand to frauds and scams? Why do they act like this even nowadays, when it is already known that it is impossible to hide such acts and when they are discovered - and they are discovered in the end - the result is one thing: a crash?
Quite a few people find it difficult to digest the fact that there are frauds in science and research. In the eyes of many, the concept of "science" carries a distant aura, surrounded by majesty and splendor. The active in this arena are considered
"Elitist": highly educated, genius, special, original thinking, creative.
They are valued as those who would not dare to get their hands dirty with mud.
But it turns out that's not how things are. Not always, not everywhere.
As in many other fields of activity in human culture, it's all about money. and how much
countries, especially in the United States - even a lot of money. Quite a few are also involved here
political intrigue; brutal competition between rival scientists; Crazy run for glory
No matter what - as fast as possible, as much as possible, while being willing to run over any factor
and get rid of any threat.
Last week, in a stormy chat between dozens of scientists from three continents, shock was expressed
Deep from the latest scandal that rocked the scientific community in Australia: it was discovered that Lt
Rector of Monash University in Melbourne, the largest in the country (42 thousand students, budget
annual of more than half a billion dollars), climbed to his lofty position thanks to articles he wrote about
Social aspects of the problem of alcoholism. It turned out, that very considerable parts of four
Research works he attributed to himself were stolen, just like that, from the works of other scientists. when discovered
This forced David Robinson to resign.
"Forgeries and fraud in science is a serious problem, and in too many cases it is swept under the rug
to the carpet", recently wrote Michael Farthing, editor of the scientific medical journal "Gut"
and chairman of the British Committee on Ethics in Scientific Publications (COPE). Last year she studied
The committee 30 cases of suspected forgery, and stated: "There was improper conduct in 80 percent
of the cases that were brought to her attention." The committee also ruled that the British medical establishment had failed
In his war on scientific fraud "and there are quite a few cases where the failures put people in danger."
at risk of life".
The editor of the important medical journal "Lancet", Richard Horton, said that in the United States
And in Scandinavia, special agencies work, apart from institutional ones, to monitor a problem
The forgeries and frauds in science. “In Britain, the leaders of the medical and scientific establishment have sown
In terms of promises and very little, said Horton to the science weekly "New Scientist".
The last sensational case handled by the British Medical Council involved the scientist doctor
Anjan Kumar Banerjee from King's College London. He was suspended as it turned out - after an investigation
which has lasted since the mid-nineties - because for the purpose of writing an article about his research dealing with the system
Digestion and Urine He did not hesitate to fill several test tubes with his own urine samples, but related them
to 12 healthy adults, supposedly an experimental group.
"Statistics reveal that between five and ten percent of scientific research in the life sciences,
In medicine and biology in the world, we are infected with Pabruk", answered Dimitri Yuriev by email
from Moscow, who runs a website dedicated to the analysis of forgeries and frauds in science.
"This is a political problem - very similar to the forgeries and fraudulent acts that exist in sports
(use of drugs to achieve highs and the like); As in the recent accounting scandals
that agitated the world of business and industry in the United States; as in art; as in the parables
who exposed bribes taken by senior government officials in Moscow," he wrote.
Another well-known researcher who tracks the falsifications in science is Dr. Mark Wronsky, a physician and researcher
Known in Poland. It focuses on affairs involving Polish scientists, in their homeland
And away from her.
One of the latest cases he uncovered involves a well-known linguist at a Polish university
Bebidgosh, who was accused of plagiarism, i.e. copying an article by another researcher, who lives in the United States
United States. The affair ended, Vronsky wrote to me, not only with his highly connected removal from office
at the university, but also in eight months of probation for two years.
In the XNUMXs, the United States tried to fight with great determination against science falsifiers. You
The "tips" about the fraudulent acts gave the authorities "warnings" of sorts, reports say
unknowns
For five years Dr. Ned Feder, a physician by profession, and his colleague Walter Stewart, a specialist
To detect distortions in science, close monitoring of fraud in studies done in the United States. they
Be an official appointment of the National Institutes of Health in Washington. They called them "mowers".
The counterfeiters".
But, after "stepping on too many warts" and under pressure from some scientists - mainly very senior ones
who filled positions of honor, with influence at the top of the administration whose "nakedness" was exposed in no less than 15
Studies on which their name is emblazoned - the two researchers zealous for the truth were removed from their positions.
This despite the fact that no one doubted their skills and the importance of their work. Investigations Unit
the special one that they operated from a small room in the Institute for Research on Diabetes, Kidney Diseases and Digestive Disorders -
was closed
Stewart responded with a hunger strike that lasted a month and was only stopped under pressure from doctors and family members.
Those concerned then tried to hide the affair, until the "New York Times" exposed it with noise
A large.
It was reported then, that the straw that broke the camel's back was their discovery about research into the history of
The diseases, which was published in the early nineties and claimed to indicate for the first time the discovery based on which
There is a possibility that President Abraham Lincoln was sick with "Marfan" - a hormonal disease in which
The body organs are lengthening. Ned and Stewart determined that there was nothing but shameful plagiarism in this matter.
The race for AIDS
Today, the investigation method regarding suspicions of scientific forgeries has changed. It is less noisy, at least at the stage when initial suspicions are raised, some of which dissipate over time. Only the very, very spicy exposés end up in the media or find their way into books.
In March of this year, the book "Science Fictions" hit the shelves in the United States. Its author, Pulitzer Prize winner John Crewdson, focused on the case that at the time stirred up the world: who really discovered the AIDS virus first: the American cancer researcher Prof. Robert Gallo, currently head of the Institute of Human Viruses at the University of Maryland, or the French Prof. Luc Montagnier, from the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Gallo then claimed: "I am". Montagnier responded in an interview to "Le Monde": "I - or one of us is lying."
The book, based on hundreds of interviews and a comprehensive investigation, was defined as "one of those that the reader learns rather quickly to admire more than he enjoys". Crewdson rips the veil off a long series of omissions and concealment of data, findings and facts. Among other things, it is told how Gallo - one of the scientists connected to the media in the world and controversial in the research community - rejected every other study presented to him by his colleagues just to promote his theory, according to which the virus that causes AIDS is nothing but "a very, very rare cancer virus".
His laboratory has stuck to this claim since the XNUMXs. When Gallo accidentally learned, in the mid-XNUMXs, that Montagnier was "very close to completing the absolute and true identification of the virus" - he began to manipulate himself into a position where he could claim from then on that he was the first in the world to isolate the virus. He rushed to government officials in the United States to get them to back up this argument.
Crewdson writes: "My friend used to say about this: 'So what? Even at the McDonald's across the street corner, there is competition and competition among the employees as to who will manage the pot of chips'... the rivalry between the American and the French only seemingly increased the pace of research that led to this important discovery."
The book reveals the fact that Gallo's run to fame also had ugly aspects. Crewdson writes that people's lives were destroyed or put in danger because of wrong conclusions from the blood tests they took from them, and because of the misunderstanding about the nature of the virus because the tests were done in a hurry at the Gallo laboratory (then still at the US National Cancer Institute). Many died because various tests passed failed to identify the blood infected with the AIDS virus, HIV. Government officials also participated in this pursuit, "because they were imbued with an uncontrollable zeal to win as much as possible, and as quickly as possible, in royalties for a patent that should have been registered and related to this discovery... all this happened , when the laboratory in Paris already had, in fact, a test that proved its superiority for the purpose of identifying the virus".
By the way, in recent years, the hostility between Gallo and Montagnier faded, and they began to cooperate.
The conscience, the conscience
When and how to report "misconduct" in science? The science magazine "De Scientist" grappled with this not long ago. It described the case of Charlene Mathias, from Oklahoma State University, Tulsa. Mathias was a research partner for the development of a vaccine against skin cancer (melanoma), and her conscience tormented her at the sight of forgeries and unethical acts she witnessed.
Before reporting to the university administration and administration, Mathias went to consult her parish priest. For a long time she talked about her mental anguish and then the priest asked her in a soft voice: "Daughter, what would be the worst thing they could do to you if you report?"
"I will be fired, I will lose my license to engage in research, I will go bankrupt, I will have to sell my house, all my savings in the bank will be wiped out."
"And if you don't turn them in?"
"I can't continue to live with this," she replied.
A week later, Mathias sent a registered letter to the unit dealing with the protection of human research at the Federal Ministry of Health. She reported in it that the vaccine trials were conducted improperly from a scientific point of view; that the patients in the trial were not followed closely as required, who deceived them into believing in the benefits they would enjoy in the future thanks to the innovative treatment. This research was done with federal funding.
At the end of an undercover investigation, the head of the project, Michael McGee, was forced to resign and together with him, several other senior officials at the university "flew" because they were covering for him. Mathias was called in April of this year to testify before a Senate committee in Washington and did not return to her work in the laboratory.
The case revealed interesting data. In 2001, no fewer than 61 research institutes in the United States were forced - according to a law from 97 - to conduct 72 new investigations into 127 suspicions of fraud and falsification in research. Compared to 103 reports of similar suspicions that were investigated in 60 scientific institutions in 2000. The explanation for this increase: the researches are becoming more sophisticated, using more sophisticated equipment and with them the suspicions of improper actions are growing.
In an investigation carried out by "New Scientist" in 77 on the dimensions of the phenomenon - through a questionnaire sent to a sample group of 204 scientists - 197 answered that they were "aware of the problem, which is quite common among their colleagues". 58 percent decided that "cheats are done deliberately and knowingly", but "only ten percent of the knowingly cheaters are actually dismissed. Most of them get promoted."
If a similar referendum were held today, a generation later, the results would probably not be much different. Some say, maybe even harder to digest. The reason: the big money, very tempting, lurking at the door of the various science institutes.
The loose link for the dubious title "scam of the century" - still the 20th century is contested by several juicy cases. But none of them come close to the "Filtdown man scam", which quite a few writers and researchers make a living from. Even the creator of Sherlock Holmes, the writer Arthur Conan Doyle, "matched" her.
The late Dr. Alexander Cohen, a virologist from Tel Aviv University, wrote a key book on falsifications in science in the late seventies called "False Prophets". He also included the Piltdown affair in it - even though he did not know who the "guilty" were. These were discovered only 88 years after the affair was born and 40 years after it was defined as a "shameful scam".
In that so-called "scientific discovery", fossilized bone remains of a bipedal creature were discovered in Piltdown, England. The scientists who reported this said at the time that this was the "missing link" for understanding the evolutionary process in the development of man from ape. Only in the XNUMXs was the fact that it was all a fake revealed. It took several more decades to point to the culprit.
It all began in 1908 when an amateur geologist, attorney Charles Dawson, entered one day the office of Smith Woodward, head of the geology department at the British Museum, and solemnly placed five remains of human bones on his desk. According to him, they were found by a worker who dug a pit for mining Zip Zip in Piltdown, Sussex County, in the south of England. Dawson hypothesized that these were the remains of an ancient man.
Woodward hastened to Piltdown and found in the pit the remains of a jaw reminiscent of an orangutan monkey, and a complete set of teeth. But he was generally an expert in fish biology and not in human anatomy. With the help of his assistant he recovered the findings and assembled a skull from the parts of the bones.
Then the scientific discussion phase began. His participants said that such a form of an ape had never been seen before. Very quickly, as is customary, a proper scientific name was affixed to the skull: "Aanthropus" - that is, man of the dawn (an allusion to the dawn of humanity). It is claimed to be the missing link in the chain of development of the human species, from the great apes to man, which was developed by Charles Darwin, the father of the theory of evolution and natural selection.
In 1912, the British Royal Geological Society boasted of the Piltdown findings and its members disdainfully dismissed the voices of the skeptics, and the "Piltdown Man" was honorably inducted into the pantheon of discoveries dealing with prehistory.
In 50, a young scientist at the Natural History Museum decided to perform a new type of chemical analysis (for the first time they began to use the dating method using radioactive carbon 14). He discovered to his astonishment that the famous skull was indeed that of a very modern man, and that the bones had been treated to make them appear to be from an ancient era. They included clear traces of iron and a manganese compound.
Woodward and Dawson were then already among the dead and the charge of fraud was laid upon them. Then they added the philosopher, paleontologist and French Jesuit priest Teilhard Descharden. The person responsible for the scam was still alive, but silent.
The scientific journal "Nature" reported only in June 96 that the paleontologist Prof. Brian Gardiner from "King's College" in London found that the thermal thinker was none other than Martin Hinton, a brilliant student at the National Museum of Natural History and Science in London. Hinton decided to "drive" his boss crazy, and succeeded beyond expectation. He treated, with chemical means, mainly oil paint, the bones of a fossil's skull, giving it the appearance of being much older than its actual age.
Gardiner went down to the basement of the museum in London and found there a dusty box containing many documents and items of Hinton, including samples of the bones he handled and a detailed prescription of the chemical substance. Human teeth treated with the same substance were found in the box.
Hinton, it turned out, had done all kinds of painting jobs in his youth, with different chemicals, on Dawson's order and for a fee. What motivated him to cook the "hoax" that got out of control? A debate about the wages he deserved. He demanded an advance, Woodward and Dawson turned him down. The penniless student decided to take revenge on his employers.
Six years before Gardiner published his article in "Nature", the New York anthropologist Frank Spencer's book "Filtdown: Scientific Forgery" appeared in the fall of 90, published by the British Museum of Natural History and the University of Oxford. In this book, the accusing finger was pointed against Sir Arthur Keith, the number one anatomical researcher in Britain at the beginning of the last century.
Spencer claimed that Keith cooked up the scam in a burst of nationalist sentiment. He was jealous of the late 19th century discovery of the remains of a primitive man on the island of Java in Indonesia, and the discovery of the first remains of a primitive man in a cave in the Neander Valley, near Heidelberg, Germany (hence the name: Neanderthal man). "Keith felt deprived in front of his colleagues; He could not stand the idea that there were no British scientists among those involved in such a large study," the book says. Dawson joined him only later.
By the way, Keith, who probably knew about the forgery, because he enjoyed the results of the so-called "discovery" for decades, rejected any hint of fraud and deception. He came back and claimed that the bones corresponded to his theory about the evolution of man from ape. Because of her, he was accepted as a fellow of the British Royal Society of Sciences, was the president of several prestigious organizations, was honored with the title "Sir", and then gathered within himself.
The fish that never were Another affair related to the ancient man is closer to the present day. In August '72, remains of the skull of a human-like creature were discovered near Lake Turkana in Kenya. The researcher behind the discovery was Richard Leakey, son of the well-known and controversial paleontologist, Lewis Leakey. He then determined that these were the most ancient human remains ever discovered, which he estimated lived 2.6 million years ago.
Doubts soon surfaced about the nature of the findings and the way Leakey's research was conducted. It was almost 20 years before it became clear that he had done everything to distort the real findings to suit his plans.
The use of dating technology with radioactive materials once again "knocked out" an entire study: the skull from Kenya, it turned out, was only 1.9 million years old - "very unimpressive, in the paleontologists' terms of time."
If this affair is a great shame for Leakey - what do you say about the discovery of Douglas Markle, from the Department of Wildlife and Fish Research at the University of Oregon in the United States? He revealed about three years ago what he called a "sophisticated act of fraud", some prefer to call it a "peppered hoax", of which the multidisciplinary researcher Konstantin Samuel Rapinsk fell victim.
In 1818, Rapinsk, born in Galac, Romania, went on a research and expedition trip in the United States and decided to sail along the Ohio River to discover, document and catalog, in a detailed guide he designed, the fauna and flora of the area.
Arriving in the town of Kentucky, he decided to visit his friend, the naturalist and artist John James Audubon. In a conversation the two had over a bottle of whiskey, Audubon revealed that his friend was eager for publicity and was willing to go "too far" to discover new species of animals and add them to his guide.
They went out to have fun hunting bats. Rapinsk tried to glue some of his strings onto the strings of Audubon's prized violin, the Cremona violin. What started as fun ended in a big fight, because the strings snapped and the violin worth millions was damaged. An enraged Audubon sought revenge. He decided to hide a tin for Rapinsk and volunteered to help him in his work. He showed him some of his illustrations, of fish species that he had discovered himself, he said, in the Ohio River. There were very, very strange creatures there, to say the least.
Rapinsk did not check twice and hastened to include some of Audubon's illustrations (given to him for free, of course) in his scientific guide that was once defined as "the cornerstone of American fish science (ichthyology)".
It was only years later that it became clear that Audubon's illustrations included in the Scientific Fish Guide were nothing but a forgery. They are all figments of his fertile imagination and Rapinsk, in his enthusiastic innocence, is captured
in his network.
Even in Israel, how widespread is the phenomenon of forgeries and acts of cheating in science in Israel? The Israeli Academy of Sciences said in an official response to "Safshevu": "Very rare." the events? "Mainly claims about the authors of scientific articles consciously evading/ignoring the citation of previous works and studies that served as a basis or starting point for them".
"In the last ten years," says a senior official at the Ministry of Science, "there has been perhaps one case: a medical researcher who wooed himself, that is, published a report on a study he carried out, in several versions, each time from a different angle, so to speak. The articles appeared in several scientific journals. His goal: to accumulate credit points among his colleagues at the institution that employed him, to assist in his promotion and also to establish an application for grants.
"We had a bad feeling about him, and the flow of money into research was stopped. But this is perhaps a single case, among more than 400 studies in which financial support is provided by the ministry every year."
An Israeli woman who was employed in the XNUMXs in a research laboratory of the blood bank at a university hospital on the West Coast in the United States said that her project focused on developing a test for rapid detection of hepatitis B. "The idea was that the result would be obtained immediately, like dipping a thermometer in a liquid to measure temperature."
The head of the research project and the professor who directed it knew very well that the experiments they conducted with their method failed. Still, they decided to falsify the results, and rushed to publish the word of the innovative development in a reputable scientific journal. Even though nothing worked.
The most well-known case in recent years was concluded in the Jerusalem Supreme Court in the summer of 2000. It was then determined that Prof. Elisha Kimron has full copyright on his research work, in which he spent 11 years deciphering one of the scrolls of the Yehudah desert, known as "Mazatz Maase Torah" (from the collection of scrolls the hoards).
This assertion came after it was discovered that the work of Prof. Kimron was published without his permission in a book that appeared in the United States, without even mentioning his name.
At that time, three American scientists had a long struggle that was even defined as political. They were ordered (in a court that ended seven years before and which they appealed), to compensate Kimron with NIS 150, "an amount unprecedented in scope in this issue", it was noted at the time. The Supreme Court put an end to the case, and imposed compensation on the defendants.
Judge Dalia Dorner then ruled: "The infringement of copyright was done knowingly and not in good faith... scientific research work is not wasteful".
The scam that saved lives
There are also scams in science that deserve fame. One such, the story of "Proatus, OX" 19, the bacteria that did not exist, and of two Polish doctors who traveled with the Nazis.
The affair was first revealed in the early nineties in a British medical scientific journal. From where she came to the book "Power Unseen" by Dr. Bernard Dixon, who deals
In microorganisms (bacteria, viruses, parasites), which, and not man, are the "rulers of the world".
When a bacterium attacks the body produces antibodies for protection. An unusual phenomenon occurs in the Proteus bacterium: when it enters the body (and is not harmful), the body "misidentifies" and produces antibodies to the type. When these antibodies are noticed in a blood sample, it is a sign of typhus. The idea to use it to deceive the Nazis came from two village doctors, Dr. Eugenius Lazowski and Dr. Stanislaw Matulwicz, who worked in distant villages about 200 kilometers west of Warsaw.
One day a prisoner arrived at the rural clinic who had gone on a short vacation from a concentration camp in Germany.
He begged that they would do everything so that he would not be forced to return. The bold idea that came up was to fabricate a medical document according to which the man was terminally ill so that he would stay at home. If the fraud was discovered, the fake patient and his doctors would be sent to an extermination camp.
Dr. Lazovsky and Dr. Metul Beach injected their friend with the proteus bacteria, and his body did produce antibodies to typhoid. His blood sample and medical documents were rushed to a government laboratory in Germany. The German authorities in that area decided: danger of an epidemic, and the "sick" was left at home. The Germans feared that the "epidemic" would spread to Germany and prisoners who came from the region and arrived at Auschwitz in those days were sent to isolation.
The two doctors realized that they had an opportunity to save many. They injected their acquaintances with the Proteus, and sent more and more blood samples to the German laboratory. The answers that came from her convinced the occupation authorities that the area was infected with typhus, and the German forces were forbidden to approach it.
Some time later, a local informant informed the Nazis that the blood sample taken from one patient had actually been sent under many different names. His report was riddled with errors and the Germans did not get over it. The main laboratory in Germany determined again: a serious fear of a typhoid epidemic.
A former British military doctor, John Bennett, investigated the affair in the XNUMXs, and concluded that the Germans had fallen victim to themselves. They relied only on their laboratory tests and for fear of contracting the disease they distanced themselves from any direct contact and any suspicious medical examination. An elderly specialist doctor and his two young and inexperienced assistants were sent to the "infected area". They visited the clinic of the Polish village doctors, and were welcomed there with vodka and delicacies. The old doctor preferred to enjoy life. His assistants went to visit several houses, but did not go inside, for fear of infection. In one house they were shown, through the window, a dying man of pneumonia, but it was said that he had typhus. The Germans refused to touch him, and hurried away from the place.
That small rural community was almost entirely saved from destruction.
