More than a century ago, my Opa learned how to cure syphilis, without resorting to mercury, which was as bad as the disease. It happened like this.
Julius B. Kahn was a young chemist when The Great War — World War I — began. At the time, the only effective cure for syphilis was Arsphenamine 606, better known as Salvarsan.
It was called Arsphenamine 606 because it was the 606th extract of arsenic that a German chemist had produced, seeking a cure for syphilis that would not kill or debilitate the patient. Syphilis then was a leading “morbidity factor” in the United States and around the world, though death statistics from that era are hard to come by.
Paul Ehrlich, a German citizen, patented the drug in 1910, and sold it as Salvarsan. (This was not the Paul R. Ehrlich born in 1932 in the U.S., author of the best-selling “The Population Bomb”; it was Nobel laureate Paul Ehrlich, 1854-1915.)
Then the Great War interrupted commerce between the United States and Germany — interrupted it for cause, not the way we do it now, on a lark. With our German source of Salvarsan cut off, a U.S. drug company hired Opa to make the drug from the patent.
Should have been easy, right? Just follow the patent. But no. Turned out that Ehrlich had lied on the patent. Opa tried for months to make the drug from the patent, but at a certain point the process broke down.
Then one day, Opa told me, he threw another useless batch of Petri dishes into the sink, “and there was the white precipitate I’d been looking for.”
Turned out that Ehrlich had patented the process almost honestly, but at one point he wrote “concentrate 10 times,” when the actual process was to dilute 10 times. So by throwing a useless batch of chemicals into a sink, Opa rediscovered the cure for syphilis. (Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, but it was not found to be a cure for syphilis until 1943.)
But hold; this story has not ended.
After months of experiments with arsenic, Opa was covered with rashes all over his body.
Everyone’s allergic to arsenic, right?
So Opa read up on allergies. He decided that the best thing for him to do was to get the hell away from arsenic. So he did.
And as Opa read up on allergies, in whatever scientific journals there were before 1918, he found that millions of women were allergic to cosmetics and couldn’t use them, though they wanted to.
A little more reading and Opa deduced that many of these women were allergic to lanolin, an oil or fat in sheep’s wool, which helps keep sheep warm in sleety Scottish winters.
So Opa figured if he could make cosmetics without lanolin, women would flock to it. Thus he invented hypoallergenic cosmetics, which he produced and sold through his company, Ar-Ex Cosmetics, until he died.
And that’s why, after my Dad died young, I got to go to college, and graduate school, because Opa sent me there. And that’s why you’re listening to me yap now.
And now if I may, allow me one more reminiscence.
My favorite memory of Opa is the day I visited him at his longtime home, the Sherry Hotel, by the lake on the South Side of Chicago. I was home from college and Opa asked me to listen to a business offer he said he’d just been sent. He read it to me from a letter.
The gist of it was that women have a hard life, tidying up the home, swiping dust out of the slats of Venetian blinds. So this guy’s proposal was to catch street cats and cut off their tails into four or five parts — all of this for free, except the labor — and glue the tails onto sticks and sell them to housewives to dust the slats of their Venetian blinds. “And we could sell them for five bucks apiece.”
Outraged, I heard these words angrily, unbelieving, until Opa delivered the coup de grace: “And you’ve got to admit that five bucks is a good deal for a piece of tail.”