By the time I reached the eighth and final grade of gymnázium I needed to make a decision about my university studies. The European system is different from the American. High school graduates are usually a year older in Europe, but there is no equivalent of the liberal arts college and a decision about what specific field of studies to pursue generally has to be made by age eighteen or nineteen.
About a year before graduation from the gymnázium, my school offered all students a professional counseling service to help with career choices. Included was an IQ test and some other tests that were supposed to determine whether we were more suited for the humanities or for a science-related field. After my testing was done I met with a professional counselor. He told me that I had the second-highest IQ in my class. He also said that my tests did not indicate a clear propensity for a humanities-or science-oriented career. I remember him saying that he thought I would do well in almost any field. That may have been reassuring, but not very helpful for my career choice.
Career options in the Socialist system were limited. First of alI, I could not be sure that with my “bourgeois” background I would be admitted to the university because applicants from working-class families were given preference. I always had a predilection for writing and for many years I had been thinking of becoming a journalist. I wrote my first poem at age eleven. At age fourteen, I had a small essay published in a Bratislava daily newspaper—for which they even paid me an honorarium—and my passion for creative writing continued throughout my gymnázium studies. However, I knew that journalism in Communist Czechoslovakia was a profession reserved to party loyalists and not a good fit for me. Law and economics were also highly politicized fields and therefore not right for me. Even though languages and literature were among my favorite subjects, I never considered becoming a linguist or a philologist.
Then there was medicine. My parents wanted me to become a doctor all along. For a long time I resisted the idea of following in my mother’s footsteps and choosing a career that would please my parents. But finally, having ruled out other options, just one day before the deadline I completed my application to the Comenius University School of Medicine in Bratislava. To my surprise, I was accepted. My parents were delighted.
Medical school in most European countries takes six years, and Communist Czechoslovakia was no exception. The curriculum in my first two years of studies included courses that in America are taught at the undergraduate level, such as chemistry, biology, and physics, in addition to the usual medical school basic science courses of anatomy, biochemistry, microbiology, and physiology.
Even though most aspects of our studies could not be greatly influenced by politics, some elements did bear the stamp of Communist ideology. One was the field of genetics. A Soviet agronomist and influential Communist ideologist, Trofim Lysenko, trumpeted the view that theoretical genetics based on the widely accepted principles of Mendelian inheritance was wrong, and that the inheritance of acquired traits was much more important than hereditary transfer of stable genetic properties. Today his views about genetics have been widely discredited.
Stalin listened to Lysenko because he believed the theories advocated by Lysenko, unsophisticated as they were, would help increase crop yields and alleviate widespread famine in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. What had endeared Lysenko to Stalin was that early in his career Lysenko was apparently successful in preventing the loss of wheat seedlings to the frosty Russian springs by first treating wheat seeds with cold and moisture. Lysenko then went on to claim that the increased resistance of the wheat would be transferred to the progeny of the cold-and moisture-treated wheat seedlings—a claim doubted by most experts.
Stalin’s support of Lysenko’s theories was responsible for the fact that “Lysenkoism” started to be extended to human genetics and was accepted as the official theory applicable to much of biology in all countries of the Communist bloc. When I entered medical school, the terms “gene” and “genetics” were practically banned, except when referred to in official propaganda as “bourgeois pseudoscience of Mendelism-Morganism.” The main individuals targeted by Lysenkoists were Gregor Mendel, a nineteenth-century Augustinian friar who worked in the Moravian capital of Brno, considered the founder of the science of genetics, and Thomas Hunt Morgan, an influential American geneticist active in the first half of the twentieth century.
Another Soviet pseudoscientist whose name we heard cited much too often was Olga Lepeshinskaya, a protégé of both Lenin and Stalin. Lepeshinskaya was trained as a feldsher (a Russian term for a medical professional roughly equivalent to a nurse-practitioner) before the Bolshevik Revolution. For her participation in the October Revolution she was elevated to the post of a professor at the Medical University in Moscow, finally becoming a leading member of the Institute of Experimental Biology of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences. She received the Stalin Prize and many other honors for purportedly showing that live cells could be generated from subcellular components, for example from egg yolk.
The evidence Lepeshinskaya had presented was later shown to be fraudulent, but, in the meantime, we were taught that Virchow’s (the famous nineteenth-century German scientist’s) concept that only a living cell can produce another living cell was a bourgeois lie to be replaced with the correct dialectical-materialistic-Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist theory on the origin of all living cells from nonliving matter. Lepeshinskaya’s final scientific contribution was to contend that baking soda baths promoted rejuvenation, resulting in a shortage of baking soda in Eastern Bloc countries. The soda baths may have worked for Lepeshinskaya; she died in 1963 at age ninety-two.
A postscript is in order here. Lepeshinskaya’s experiments were primitive and fraudulent, making her a laughing stock for me and my fellow medical students as early as the 1950s, but the idea that it might be possible to artificially create a living cell is one day likely to be proven correct. One important step in the quest to create synthetic life was taken in 2010 by J. Craig Venter—the scientist who headed a team that sequenced the entire human genome—when he synthesized a large piece of bacterial DNA, inserted it into a bacterial cell, and showed that the synthetic DNA could act as a substitute for the cell’s own DNA, thus creating a cell “whose parent was a computer.”
When I entered medical school in 1951, a general atmosphere of fear and suspicion permeated life at the university. Teachers and students suspected of insufficient devotion to the Communist regime were investigated by specially appointed lustration committees. These committees included students loyal to the Communist Party, whose judgment about their professors often would be influenced not only by the professor’s political views, but also by the students’ personal experiences. It could be dangerous for a professor to fail a student lest that student might turn his wrath against the professor, accusing him of being opposed to working-class students—a verdict that almost certainly would lead to dismissal.
One professor who refused to be intimidated by the Communist activists was our anatomy teacher, Eugénia Štekláčová, who remained strict and uncompromising in her academic standards. In those days in Czechoslovakia, anatomy was taught a full four semesters, compared to two semesters in most medical schools in the US then. Today the teaching of anatomy in the US is generally completed in less than one semester. We had to memorize the name of every single little bone in the body, every aperture in the skull, every nerve, in fact every structure in the body contained in the most detailed anatomical atlases. We also had to spend many hours dissecting cadavers under the watchful eye of Dr. Štekláčová.
At the start of my medical studies, nearly five hundred students were enrolled in my class, a truly staggering number. By the end of the second year there were about 250 students left. The majority of the students who did not make it into the third year had to drop out because they had failed anatomy. It is not surprising that Dr. Štekláčová was fired from the university shortly after my completion of the anatomy course, a victim of her refusal to compromise her academic standards along with the fact that she refused to kowtow to the Communist Party members.
Another memorable teacher was František Klein, chairman of the Department of Pathology. Klein was a Holocaust survivor. As students we heard this widely circulated anecdote about him: During the Second World War he was stopped in the street in Bratislava by members of the Slovak Fascist militia. “What do you have in your briefcase?” they asked. “Shit,” Klein answered. The militiamen became enraged. “You dirty Jew, we’ll teach you a lesson. Open the briefcase!” When Klein complied, the militiamen found vials filled with specimens of—feces. I don’t guarantee the authenticity of the anecdote, but as the Italian saying goes, Se non è vero è ben trovato (Even if it isn’t true, it makes for a good story).
Professor Klein was a popular teacher, and during his lectures the auditorium always filled to capacity. He had a high-pitched voice, which he raised further if he wanted to make an important point. So revered was Professor Klein that—despite his lack of socialistic ideological vigor—the Communists were unable to fire him. He stayed on until his regular retirement. Here is a tidbit from one of Klein’s lectures I still remember: “When you see a patient with a one-sided inflammation of the knee, always think gonorrhea!” In addition to legitimate medical school courses, we also were required to take courses on Marxism-Leninism (meaning primitive Communist political propaganda), usually one to two hours of lectures or seminars per week throughout the six years of medical school. Attendance at these classes was compulsory, and we had to take exams showing our understanding and (faked) appreciation of Communist ideology.
Another distraction was defense education, taking up one full day per week and obligatory for all male students. In those days there was compulsory military service in Czechoslovakia; by taking the course in defense education and by attending military training camps during the summer, medical students were able to forego most of the two-year military service that graduates of other universities had to complete. (This was similar to the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps [ROTC] program in the US.) With all these distractions it is a miracle we managed to learn anything at all about medical science and medicine.
During my first year of medical studies I was approached by a fellow student with whom I was assigned to work together on the dissection of a cadaver and who, I knew, was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. Out of the blue she asked me whether I would like to join the Communist Party, adding that, based on the interactions she had with me, she thought I deserved the privilege of belonging to the party. I knew that I did not want to join the Communist Party, but was afraid to decline. I explained how surprised I was to have this generous offer extended to me. “Could I think about it?” I inquired. “Yes, of course,” my colleague replied. That bought me some time, but a few days later I had to come up with an answer. “I thought about it,” I said. “This is a very great honor, but I feel I am not yet completely worthy of Communist Party membership. I need to grow more ideologically and deepen my understanding of the theory of Marxism-Leninism.” I was left alone and never again asked to join the Communist Party.
My closest friend during the first two years of medical school was Dušan Šťastný. A native of Prague, Dušan came to Bratislava because he was not accepted by the Charles University Medical School in Prague. The reason he was not admitted had nothing to do with academic performance—Dušan was an excellent student—the problem was his bourgeois background and that his father had served in a political post prior to the Communist takeover. Dušan was luckier with his application to the Bratislava Medical School, perhaps because his family background was not well known outside his hometown. (Dušan told me that he thinks he was accepted because he had excelled in basketball and he was expected to play for the university team, which he then decided not to do.)
Because our medical school class was so huge, Dušan and I did not attend many lectures (except Marxism-Leninism, where attendance was required). Instead, when exam time approached, we would sit down and learn the material from textbooks and transcripts. Dušan had a formidable, photographic memory. When I asked, “Where did you find this information?” he would refer me to the page number in the textbook, recalling the exact position of the sentence or the paragraph in question. I truly admired how smart he was and, yes, I was a little envious of his superb memory.
Our close friendship ended after two years, when Dušan was able to transfer into the third year of medical school back in Prague. We did keep in touch until my emigration to America in 1964. Then we lost contact with one another for thirty-five years, until a colleague of mine tipped me off that Dušan worked as a psychiatrist for the public health authority in Leicester, England.
Our reunion after so many years was joyful. It turned out that Dušan got out of Communist Czechoslovakia by volunteering to take up a medical position in Zambia, years later moving to the United Kingdom. Now living in retirement in New Zealand with his wife, Dušan has certainly had an interesting life and built a good career. Yet I can’t help but think that given his terrific intelligence and talent that I had admired so much during our joint preparations for medical school exams, Dušan’s lifetime professional accomplishments would probably have been more exceptional under more settled circumstances.
During my first two years in medical school there was some time for fun. My classmates and I spent a great deal of time at the coffeehouse Metropol, conveniently located in the immediate vicinity of the medical school and university hospital, popular with both faculty and students. Affectionately referred to as Metropolka, one could sit in the coffeehouse for hours and order just one coffee. We took ample advantage of this liberal policy, often spending time sitting and talking at the Metropolka instead of going to lectures. One of our favorite pastimes was playing chess; another was playing cards, which was not permitted at the coffeehouse, but we did it anyway and the underworked but poorly paid waiters generally looked the other way.
When I started my studies of medicine, I had no idea what field I would end up choosing. Sometime after the beginning of year two of the six-year curriculum I saw a posted notice that listed research projects open to medical students. One of the topics mentioned concerned the mechanism of penicillin resistance in Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, a project sponsored by the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, then headed by Rudolf Sónak. (Later, Professor Sónak was fired from his position at the university because of his political views. In the late 1960s he defected and became a professor at the university in Münster, Germany.) The project sounded interesting—the word penicillin still had an aura of magic in those days. Besides, like most young people of my generation, I had read Paul de Kruif ’s Microbe Hunters and Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, and the idea of giving medical research a try appealed to me. I applied.
By the end of my second year in medical school I was hooked. I knew right then and there that what I really wanted to do in life was medical research. I enjoyed all aspects of the process, but what I liked best was immersing myself in every single publication in what I considered “my field.” In those days there were only about a dozen journals important to a budding microbiologist, and I made sure to examine them all when they arrived at the Bratislava medical library, housed in an eighteenth-century building that had once served as a summer palace of Empress Maria Theresa. There were weekly research seminars sponsored by the local medical society that I attended regularly. I met famous visiting scientists from abroad, among them Hans Selye, a Canadian endocrinologist of Hungarian extraction known for his studies on the origin of biological stress, the organism’s complex response to an environmental challenge.
As a third-year student I was chosen to present the results of my research on penicillin resistance of Staphylococcus aureus at a national conference of microbiologists. During my final two years in medical school I became interested in immunology, and I spent the summer after the fifth year of my studies working in Prague at the laboratory of Jaroslav Šterzl, a prominent Czech researcher in those days. With Šterzl’s encouragement, I attended an international immunology conference in Czechoslovakia, where I listened to lectures by Australian scientist Macfarlane Burnet, the future Nobel Prize winner, and other giants in the field of immunology. These experiences reinforced my conviction that this was the world I wanted to belong to for the rest of my life. I would do everything to make this dream become reality.
When I graduated from medical school I had a choice: I could become a medical intern at a small provincial hospital in central Slovakia or join the Institute of Virology, a research center of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, dedicated to the investigation of viruses. For me it was no-brainer. Virology was part of the science of microbiology that I had fallen in love with as a medical student. Like bacteria, fungi, and protozoa, viruses are disease-causing infectious agents. In fact, viruses are responsible for approximately one-half of all lifetime occurrences of infectious diseases in the average human being. Among the best-known infections caused by viruses are influenza, the common cold, measles, mumps, different forms of hepatitis, chicken pox, cold sores, genital herpes, and—as demonstrated in the 1980s—AIDS. Although not understood at the time I was starting my career in virology, virus infections are also thought to be responsible for about one-fifth of all human cancers, often by promoting chronic inflammation that eventually leads to cancerous growth.
Although the roots of virology go back to the nineteenth century, when Louis Pasteur investigated the origin of rabies and speculated that the disease might be caused by an agent too small to be seen under an ordinary light microscope (it can be visualized by electron microscopy, invented in the 1930s), the scientific concept of a virus as a submicroscopic infectious agent that requires living cells for its reproduction was not formulated until the 1920s. The golden age of virus research had only begun in the early 1950s, and I was entering the field at a fortuitous time as it was being firmly established.
Since I had no prior experience with laboratory techniques used in virus research, I spent my first two months at the Institute of Virology observing other scientists carrying out experiments. On completing my short apprenticeship, I was given a small laboratory of my own in the department of Dr. Helena Libíková, one of the established investigators at the institute who was focusing her studies on tick-borne encephalitis virus, or TBE virus for short. As the name implies, this virus is transmitted by deer ticks and causes a serious disease indigenous to Central and Eastern Europe, whose main characteristic is an inflammation of the brain. The disease can be fatal, and a significant percentage of patients who survive the infection end up with permanent neurological damage. Soon, I was assigned a full-time laboratory technician and a project. The goal of my project was to develop a tissue culture test to demonstrate the presence of TBE virus.
Let me explain what that means. In order to detect and identify a virus, for example from a sick patient, one needs a method that makes it possible to propagate the virus. Since viruses grow only inside living cells, the virus-containing material has to be inoculated either into a laboratory animal or into live cells grown artificially in test tubes. When I was beginning this project, it was known that inoculation of TBE virus into laboratory mice would cause an infection of the brain—encephalitis—that would eventually kill the mouse. However, inoculating mice is laborious, and there is a danger that the virus can be transmitted from the animals to laboratory personnel. In fact, several colleagues at the Institute of Virology contracted the disease while working with the virus and some ended up with serious neurological damage. A simpler system relying on test tube–grown cells would be safer.
Most viruses that cause diseases in humans or animals can be propagated in laboratory-grown cells called tissue cultures. Usually, when a virus multiplies in a tissue culture, the cells become sick and eventually die—a process that can be observed under an ordinary microscope. To the investigator, the appearance of a characteristic change in cell morphology serves as an indication of the presence of a virus.
TBE virus multiplied readily in many different types of cultured cells. The problem was that the virus—unlike many other viruses—did not produce visible damage to the cells, so that the virus-infected cells under the microscope were indistinguishable in their shape and appearance from the uninfected cells. Without a morphological change visible under the microscope, it was impossible to tell whether cells were infected with TBE virus or not. In my search for a cell culture system in which TBE would produce a “cytopathic effect”—meaning a change in the appearance of the cells caused by the harmful effect of the virus—I tried a variety of test tube–grown cells under different conditions. Nothing worked. I became increasingly disillusioned and frustrated.
Frustration with the lack of progress in my laboratory work almost drove me to quitting research and becoming a medical practitioner. About a year-and-a-half after joining the Institute of Virology I thought to myself, “Why am I wasting my time here? I have a medical degree, I could be doing something productive.” I contacted the head of the Department of Internal Medicine, whom I remembered from my medical student days. I explained the frustration with my laboratory research and asked if there might be a clinical trainee position available for me in his department. But it was the middle of the academic year and there were no openings. The head of the department advised me to come back in the spring when there might be an opening available.
I often think back to this moment and ask myself where I would be today if a position had been offered to me in the Department of Internal Medicine. Would I have started a career in clinical academic medicine? Become a practicing internist? I did not have the chance to find answers to these questions. By spring the tide had turned, my experiments started to work, and I continued my work at the Institute of Virology.
The Institute of Virology had been established in the early 1950s, largely as the brainchild of its founder and director, Dionýz Blaškovič. In the majority of countries, most scientific research is conducted within the walls of universities, but this was not the case in Czechoslovakia and other Communist countries. The Institute of Virology was part of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, a structure built in Communist Czechoslovakia along the lines of a similar organization existing in the Soviet Union. After all, the Soviet Union was our “shining example,” or so the official slogan of the time would have had us believe.
In the immediate post–World War II years, Blaškovič studied virology in the US with Jonas Salk, a prominent physician-scientist who—like Albert Sabin—later played a key role in the development of a vaccine against polio. Upon returning home, Blaškovič’s ambition was to build an institute that would be highly regarded, not only in Czechoslovakia and the Communist bloc, but also in the West. He was a good organizer and a skilled politician, and to accomplish his goals he hired the best young scientific talent he could find in Czechoslovakia. Indeed, a large proportion of scientists recruited to the institute were from the Czech lands, not Slovakia—an unusual feature among establishments in Slovakia in those days.
But Blaškovič was also a pragmatist and he knew that he needed the support of the Communist authorities. Not only did he personally join the Communist Party, but in order to protect himself he also hired a handful of people with mediocre scientific credentials who had close connections to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. These highly visible Communist staff members served as a shield that protected the majority of his non-Communist scientists, like me, from excessive political scrutiny by the authorities. As a result, most of us were able to devote ourselves to professional work without having to worry whether our loyalty to the ideals of the “peoples’ democracy” was under constant surveillance.
The science of virology was just beginning to take off; almost nothing was known yet about the molecular details of the structure of viruses and their mode of reproduction. There was so much to discover. We had the feeling, perhaps rightly so, that the quality of our research at the institute was not too far behind that of our colleagues in Western Europe or even in the US. What did hamper our work was the lack of some specialized equipment, and, in particular, shortages of reagents that had to be imported from Western countries.
Then there were the idiosyncrasies of working within the Communist system, such as the insistence that scientists should report to work at seven a.m.—the same time as factory workers—or that every morning we were required to attend a compulsory meeting (referred to as desaťminútovka, literally a ten-minute event) devoted to the review of domestic and world political news; naturally, their interpretation had to reflect the official views. There were also compulsory meetings of the official trade union organization and of the ubiquitous Society for Czechoslovak-Soviet Friendship. We learned to keep our mouths shut in front of the few Communist fanatics and people who we suspected of being secret police informers.
These unpleasant elements were outweighed by the friendly, collegial spirit, especially among the younger staff members. We would passionately debate scientific problems, often long into the night. The most enthusiastic participant in these debates was Jan “Honza” Závada, a native of Prague, who at the end of the official working day would exhort me and a handful of other colleagues, “Come, let’s chat about viruses.” During these chats we let our imaginations loose as we tried to come up with ideas on how we could learn more about the nature of viruses as well as devise means to prevent and treat virus infections. Honza peppered the discussions with clever observations that he would introduce with, “What if . . .” As in, “What if this or that virus could be broken down into its constituents and then mixed with parts of some other virus to create a completely new virus?”—I am oversimplifying, of course. It was stimulating and a lot of fun!
After I graduated from medical school, I continued living with my parents in their apartment. This was a very common arrangement in those days, necessitated by the extreme shortage of housing. So scarce were rentable apartments that when young couples got married they almost inevitably had to continue living with one set of parents. There were waiting lists, and it could easily take five years or more for newlyweds to be assigned a government-owned rental. Single people were not even eligible to apply, and those who were from out of town could at best hope to rent a room in a shared apartment. My own situation was quite comfortable. In my parent’s apartment I had a spacious room, with separate access from the entrance hall, which meant that I had some privacy and I could come and go without inconveniencing my parents. At the time my parents were not awash in money, so I contributed a portion of my salary to pay for my “room and board.”
The nice plot of land overlooking Bratislava, where my parents had hoped to build a family villa, had been expropriated during the war. The new Aryan owners built a stone wall along the front of the property and a garage, but they ran out of time to build a house. Immediately after the war, my parents reclaimed the property, but then the Communist takeover once more thwarted my parents’ plans to build a family home. The land was small enough not to be confiscated. Larger tracts of land and apartment buildings with multiple dwellings were “nationalized,” while ownership of smaller plots, family gardens, and single-family homes was tolerated throughout the Communist era. Even though no one in our family was fond of gardening, we used the piece of land to plant vegetables and strawberries. There were also a dozen or so apricot and plum trees, and when the season was good, I would go to the farmers’ market to sell our fruit in order to make a few extra crowns.
As I neared the completion of medical school, I got too busy to tend to the garden, and my parents just got plain tired of the work. So we made the decision to sell the land to raise some cash and use it to make our lives more comfortable.
By the end of the 1950s, the regime—though certainly not turning into a democracy—was beginning to show signs of a slight political thaw. Stalin died in 1953. Nikita Khrushchev succeeded him as first secretary of the Communist Party, later becoming premier of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev initiated a gradual process of de-Stalinization culminating in his famous secret speech at the closed session of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956. Echoes of the de-Stalinization process reverberated in the satellite countries.
Accompanying the very slow and not always straightforward process of de-Stalinization was the emergence of a modest improvement in the standard of living, visible especially in the economically more advanced East Bloc countries including Czechoslovakia and East Germany. Some people in Czechoslovakia—still a very limited number—became moderately prosperous, at least when compared to the early 1950s. The people who lived a little better than the average citizen were a handful of artists and writers supported by the government, some professionals, especially physicians who accepted payments under the table, and individuals or families with relatives in the West who sent gifts of Western currency that could be used to buy special goods available only in officially sanctioned government-owned Tuzex stores. One sign of a modicum of newly found prosperity was that a few people were able to afford to buy a private car, something that was unheard-of in the early 1950s.
When my parents sold their piece of land they suddenly ended up with a significant amount of cash—a sum that in those days corresponded to about four annual salaries. Almost everyone—factory workers and professionals alike—were paid about the same meager wages. With very few exceptions, the ratio between the lowest salary of an unqualified worker and that of a director of a large enterprise was perhaps one to three. Holding on to cash was not considered a good idea lest the government introduce another forced “monetary reform” that could result in the loss of a significant chunk of one’s savings. So we decided to spend the cash on something concrete.
My parents (with my active encouragement) decided to put their name on a waiting list for the purchase of a car, which cost about the same amount they netted from the sale of the land. After paying a deposit, the wait was around three years. In preparation for the day when we would be able to take possession of the car, both my mother and I took driving lessons and passed the required examination and road test. At the age of sixty-something, my father was not interested in learning how to drive. Then, one day in 1960, we were called to take possession of the car—a small, rather cheaply constructed Czech-made Škoda two-door coupe. It turned out that despite obtaining her driver’s license, my mother was too scared to drive the car, and I became the sole driver and de facto owner. This was to be the car in which I and my future wife, Marica, drove off into our new life.
During my years at the Bratislava Institute of Virology we quite frequently welcomed visiting scientists from Western countries. Foreign visitors would meet with members of the staff, including novices like myself. Parenthetically, meeting visitors from the West provided not only an opportunity to learn about the latest advances in virology, it also offered a chance to obtain firsthand information about life on the other side of the Iron Curtain—a term popularized by Winston Churchill in his 1946 speech that denounced the creation of a Soviet-dominated bloc of Eastern European countries. Though the Iron Curtain, marking the border between Czechoslovakia and Austria, was located right across the Danube, merely a few miles away from the center of Bratislava, crossing it was virtually impossible for the vast majority of citizens.
Together with some of my colleagues, I often volunteered to entertain foreign visitors after working hours. I don’t think our relatively prosperous Western visitors realized that we had no expense account and paid for all the entertainment from our own meager resources. Our salaries were indeed quite low, and we would regularly run out of cash before the end of each month, often borrowing small amounts of money from our more disciplined friends or parents to tide us over till our next payday. Yet the money we spent entertaining Western visitors was a good investment, well worth the financial sacrifice, because of the contacts we made and the opportunity to broaden our horizons.
One visitor who very much influenced the course of my work was Alick Isaacs, a prominent British virologist. Alick came to Bratislava in 1957, the same year he published his first papers on the newly identified protein called interferon, authored jointly with his Swiss coworker, Jean Lindenmann. This also happened to be the year I graduated from medical school and joined the Institute of Virology.
I still remember Alick’s lecture in Bratislava and his vivid description of interferon. The full significance of his discovery would not become appreciated until many years later. Had Alick not died at a young age, he almost certainly would have received the Nobel Prize.
At the time I met him in Bratislava, Alick, though already well known among virologists for his studies on influenza virus, was a youthful-looking man, bubbling with energy, wit, and personal charm. Unlike many other visitors from the West, Alick did not hesitate to ask pointed questions unrelated to science. When the two of us were out of other people’s earshot he inquired how I felt about the Communist system. I did not conceal my lack of enthusiasm for the “workers’ paradise.”
Another relatively frequent visitor to the Bratislava Institute of Virology was Albert Sabin, the American scientist famous for developing the live oral polio vaccine. The Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia were among the first countries to adopt the Sabin vaccine. I remember especially well Albert’s visit to our Institute in 1959. During the thirty minutes or so I spent with him, I told him about my unsuccessful struggle with the development of a cell culture–based assay for TBE virus. Could he suggest some trick that would prod TBE virus into producing a visible morphological change in cell cultures?
Albert advised me to try a different approach. Rather than attempting in vain to find ways to get the cells damaged or killed by the virus, I could inoculate cultures with TBE virus, wait two to three days, and then infect the same cells with another virus that is known to kill cells. Chances are, Albert said, TBE virus will induce a state of interference so that the second virus will fail to kill the cells. The presence of TBE virus could then be inferred from the absence of cell killing. Albert mentioned that a similar strategy had been used for the detection of some other viruses that, like TBE virus, would not damage and kill infected cells.
I tried the strategy suggested by Albert Sabin. My technician and I inoculated cells derived from chick embryos with TBE virus and, after waiting two or three days, we added another virus, the Western equine encephalomyelitis (WEE) virus. The experiment was instantly successful! One day after WEE virus inoculation, cells infected with WEE virus alone were killed, but cells inoculated first with TBE and then with WEE virus looked healthy. As Albert Sabin had predicted, TBE interfered with the multiplication of WEE virus and protected cells from killing caused by WEE virus. After only a few more weeks of work I wrote my first independent paper entitled “Interference between tick-borne encephalitis virus and Western equine encephalomyelitis virus in chick embryo tissue cultures,” published in 1960.
I did not know—nor would I have appreciated the knowledge at the time—that Albert was a graduate of New York University School of Medicine in New York City, where, some six years after our conversation, I would join the faculty, and where I would spend no less than fifty years. Forty-five years after my brief, illuminating conversation with Albert, I endowed the Albert B. Sabin Professorship at NYU School of Medicine to honor the memory of the great scientist who played such an important role in my own scientific beginning.
I don’t remember when it first occurred to me that a factor similar to Alick Isaacs’s interferon could be responsible for the inhibition of WEE virus multiplication by TBE virus in my chick embryo cell cultures. Why did I not think of this possibility right away? At the time, in mid-1959, the role of interferon in virus interference was not yet widely recognized. Alick himself initially considered interferon to be a specific product of cells exposed to influenza virus. That most viruses could induce the synthesis of interferon in a wide variety of cells was not even suspected.
I started to think about the mechanism of the interference between TBE and WEE viruses toward the end of 1959, as I was writing my paper describing the application of this interference phenomenon for the assay of TBE virus. One observation I made suggested that TBE virus itself was not responsible for the establishment of interference. I found that it took two to three days from the time of inoculation with TBE virus for the cells to become resistant to WEE virus. Yet fluids from TBE-infected cultures, when transferred onto fresh chick cells, induced resistance to WEE virus much faster—within hours.
To prove more directly that interference was produced by a factor different from TBE virus, I collected fluids of infected chick embryo cell cultures that contained TBE virus, then got rid of the virus by the addition of specific antibodies that inactivated the virus. Inactivation of the virus did not diminish the ability of the culture fluids to make cells resistant to inoculation with WEE virus. Clearly, something produced by the cells in response to TBE virus, but not TBE virus itself, mediated the interference. Was it interferon?
I can still recall my excitement when I realized that I was in pursuit of a new and interesting story. I hardly slept for several weeks. When I thought I had enough data to write another paper I sat down and prepared the first draft in only two days. Then, after some additional polishing, I took the manuscript to Blaškovič, the director of the Institute, and told him I wanted to submit it to the prestigious British journal Nature.
A few days later Blaškovič called me to his office. “I like your paper,” he said, “but instead of submitting it to Nature, wouldn’t it be more appropriate to publish it in Acta Virologica, our own journal?” Acta Virologica was a journal edited by Blaškovič and printed right there in Bratislava. Well, I didn’t want to publish the article in a local journal where it would be much less likely noticed by the international science community. I no longer remember how I convinced Blaškovič to let me send the paper to Nature. In any case, some months later, in July of 1960, Nature printed the report, titled “An interferon-like substance released from tick-borne encephalitis virus-infected chick embryo fibroblast cells.” The article contained two tables, one figure, a total of only four references, and a byline listing the name of a single author—me.
This is how a few weeks after my twenty-seventh birthday and only three years after graduation from medical school, I had my own paper published in Nature—then, as now, considered the most prominent international science journal. Such were the romantic days of biomedical research, when common sense and a little good luck were more important than access to the latest technological advances. I should add that in the US I would not have been able to publish a paper at this early stage of my career without including my mentor as coauthor. But in the anomalous situation of Czechoslovakia such rules did not apply.
The work published in Nature also served as the nucleus for my PhD thesis. I had enrolled in the PhD program in 1958 (then still known under the Soviet-inspired name “Candidate of Sciences” program), thinking that my thesis would deal with the assay of TBE virus. So new was the field of interferon research that my dissertation, which I defended in 1962, earned the distinction of being the very first PhD dissertation in the world devoted to interferon. Thousands of PhD degrees have since been granted to students working in this field.