Medicine: Marie & the Microbes

By her own account, Alice Novial was “a real devil” during her teens. Slim, bright-eyed daughter of a comfortable French bourgeois family, she got into hair-pulling fights at convent school, shamelessly flaunted her pretty legs. When she said she wanted to join the Missionary Sisters of the Society of Mary, the nuns and her family thought it was just another escapade. But join she did. In 1911, as Sister Marie Suzanne, she was ordered to Makongai, a tiny islet in the faraway Fijis. There she began a quarter-century of uncomplaining duty and a lifetime of battle against leprosy.

Last week Rome’s prestigious Istituto Superiore di Sanita* issued a report indicating that the hellion-turned-nun had succeeded where the medical profession had failed: she produced vaccines and related preparations which are highly effective in both the treatment and prevention of leprosy. Said a colleague: “Her work represents man’s best hope yet for the treatment of leprosy patients and eventual eradication of the disease.”

The Best Was No Good. In her 23 years on Makongai. when she rode horseback on her daily rounds of the dozen scattered hamlets where 700 leprosy victims lived in segregated communities. Sister Marie’s only medicine was chaulmoogra oil. Everybody knew that it did little good, but there was nothing else. Sister Marie knew that Hansen’s bacillus (Mycobacterium leprae), found in leprosy sores and presumably the cause of the disease, had been isolated in 1874, but no bacteriologist had succeeded in growing it in the test tube, let alone making a vaccine from it. She dreamed of doing just that. In 1934 she got her chance to try.

Back in Paris, caring for leprosy patients in the mornings, she was allowed to spend her afternoons at the famed Pasteur Institute. During World War II, Sister Marie was transferred to Lyon. and there, in 1949, she sliced leprous tissue from a nodule on the left knee of a new patient: gaunt Father Chavire, who had contracted the disease from victims on the Ivory Coast. As she had done thousands of times before to no avail, Sister Marie ground up the fragment, kept it sealed for six months, then tried to grow its bacilli in various solutions. As usual, batch after batch died, but after four months Sister Marie was rewarded with a one-inch circle of golden growth in one of her solutions. “I knew,” she said, “that was it.” Since it was probably not typical Hansen’s bacillus but a variant, it was named Mycobacterium marianum in honor of her order and the Virgin.

Success at Nden. Before that, no ephemeral growth of Hansen’s bacilli would “take” in animals. But Mycobacterium marianum did. Sister Marie sent samples to Rome’s Istituto Superiore, followed them there to pursue her work. She made eight potential vaccines, ranging from a suspension of live germs to an antiserum taken from rabbits. Soon samples were sent overseas to be tried on thousands of the world’s estimated 10 million leprosy victims.

At Nden in the Cameroons, 459 patients got an antigen preparation and were studied for four years: 29 showed no benefit. 96 got no worse though their cases “surely would have been aggravated otherwise,” and 334 (73%) showed remarkable improvement—they regained strength, appetite and skin tone, “spots vanished and lesions disappeared,” and general health improved “to the point of definitive cure.” To test a killed vaccine, 3,311 children got three shots, while 2,866 were left unvaccinated for comparison. Of the unvaccinated. 7% developed leprosy, but of the vaccinated only i%—and some of these may have had the disease, undetected, before their injections. Despite such promising, results, the Istituto Superiore last week claimed no universal cure or even preventive for leprosy. It will take at least a decade to decide which Mycobacterium marianum preparation is best and how lasting are its results.

For last week’s announcement the Istituto arranged a floodlit (for TV) press conference at which Sister Marie Suzanne, 69, wrinkled and stout but still bustling, was to be the star. In Lyon. making preparations for the trip to Rome, she collapsed. After emergency surgery for a brain tumor, she was in a coma when the success of her life work was proclaimed. Next morning she died.

*Which currently has on its staff two Nobel Prizewinners: Ernst Boris Chain (TIME, Nov. 5, 1945), Daniel Bovet (TIME, Nov. 4).