And what of the others? Time is too short to deal with those others--and besides I do not know what has become of them. So it is that this strange crew has made rendezvous, each one with his special and particular fate--this strange crew who put the capstone on that most marvelous ten years of the microbe hunters, that crew who worked together so that now, in 1926, there is hardly enough of the poison of yellow fever left in the world to put on the points of six pins.... So it is that the good death fighter, David Bruce, should eat his words: “It is impossible, at present, to experiment with human beings.” FOOTNOTE: 1 A spiral-shaped microbe has recently been brought forward as the cause of yellow fever, but this discovery has not yet been confirmed. CHAPTER XII PAUL EHRLICH THE MAGIC BULLET I Two hundred and fifty years ago, Antony Leeuwenhoek, who was a matter-of-fact man, looked through a magic eye, saw microbes, and so began this history. He would certainly have snorted a contemptuous Dutch sort of snort at anybody who called his microscope a magic eye. Now Paul Ehrlich--who brings this history to the happy end necessary to all serious histories--was a gay man. He smoked twenty-five cigars a day; he was fond of drinking a seidel of beer (publicly) with his old laboratory servant and many seidels of beer with German, English and American colleagues; a modern man, there was still something medieval about him for he said: “We must learn to shoot microbes with magic bullets.” He was laughed at for saying that, and his enemies cartooned him under the name “Doktor Phantasus.” But he did make a magic bullet! Alchemist that he was, he did something more outlandish than that, for he changed a drug that is the favorite poison of murderers into a saver of the lives of men. Out of arsenic he concocted a deliverer from the scourge of that pale corkscrew microbe whose attack is the reward of sin, whose bite is the cause of syphilis, the ill of the loathsome name. Paul Ehrlich had a most weird and wrong-headed and unscientific imagination: that helped him to make microbe hunters turn another corner, though alas, there have been few of them who have known what to do when they got around that corner, which is why this history has to stop with Paul Ehrlich.