(This essay is from the Wenner-Gren Institute site, at http://www.wgi.su.se/.
The page is undated. Saved on August 3, 2000)
My first memory of the Wenner-Gren Institute is an example hereof. A friend of my mother's family, the physicist Wilhelm von Krasny-Ergen, brought me to the then brand new Wenner-Gren institute and showed me the animal house with its rats and mice. He was the author of one of the first publications from the Wenner-Gren Institute, a paper in Nature entitled "Separation of uranium isotopes." After the war he dropped von Krasny from his name, moved to Oak Ridge National Laboratory to work in atomic physics, and is known among others from having invented the term 'the China syndrome'.
I presume that John Runnström employed Wilhelm Ergen because of his ability to separate isotopes to be used in studies of metabolic events, a revolutionary method that had been introduced a few years earlier by another refugee, the Hungarian-born Georg de Hevesy. The isotope separation method left another mark in Runnström's new building at Norrtullsgatan 16 in Stockholm: At the far end of the long central corridor there was a ventilated hood, which extended throughout all the five stories of the building; this unusual hood was built to contain a long distillation column for the isolation of C14. Gösta Ehrensvärd used it successfully and was even able to destroy the 100 kg of cyanide that remained after the isotope separation without causing an environmental disaster.
Part of the floor of the basement rested directly on the granite rock. On this solid foundation stood some unusually large centrifuges. These had solid-looking centrifuge tubes with a volume of about one litre. The centrifuge enabled Olov Lindberg and Lars Ernster to isolate various enzymes and co-enzymes and Hans Borei to isolate cytochromes. Chemicals, which nowadays are ordered with a phone call and that arrive in the laboratory within one or a few days, then had to be prepared from baker's yeast or animal tissues, if obtainable at all. Needless to say the preparatory methods were time-consuming and needed skill and experience, but the acquisition of the isolated compounds gave the executors a marked advantage to other investigators of the intermediary metabolism of the cell.
Twenty years later the solid floor came to good use as a foundation for a Siemens Elmiskop I electron microscope. Neither the elevator in the house, nor the street cars on the street outside it, could affect the stability of the microscope. The even more sensitive Sjöstrand ultramicrotome was put on a specially designed concrete foundation and worked well until new microtome models made it outdated and inconvenient to work with. It was then given to the Technical Museum that accepted the donation mainly because the concrete fundament was regarded to be a useful one.
The Wenner-Gren Institute at Norrtullsgatan was one of the last houses in Stockholm to be built with bricks, giving the wall a rather beautiful yellowish colour. Also many of the inner walls were brick-built in order to minimize the dangers at fire, always a consideration in a house containing many inflammables. As far as I know, there was only one incidence of fire. It occurred during the night and was caused by an electric hot plate that had not been turned off. Luckily the doors of the room where this happened were properly closed and the fire died out by itself when oxygen in the room was consumed. The reek of burned plastic petri-dishes could be felt long after this nearly-to-be-accident.
Much can also be said of the windows of the institute. The first impression of beginning students was favourable; windows in the laboratory of the introductory course in animal physiology were large and facing south. These courses were in the 50s given in the late spring, a period when the Swedes starve for sunshine. In the summer, the light and heat was, however, too much, in particular so during the later half of the 60-year existence of the institute, when the awnings were permanently out of order. Rooms on the northside of the house were then usually preferred.
The windows were of a British type, hardly found any where else in Sweden, difficult to open and close, always draughty and letting soot into the rooms. Another concern was that the windows in most rooms were the only possible escape route in case of fire and seemed not to be easy to pass through, in particular not for staff working in the basement. Luckily, we never had to try to escape this way.
So much for the building at Norrtullsgatan 16, evacuated in 1985 and now torn down. What about the person behind the name? Axel Wenner-Gren claimed that "in 1934, after many years of intensive industrial activities, I decided to withdraw gradually from business and to consider how best my resources could be used to promote science, social improvement and general progress." This text and many more interesting facts can be read in a document that I obtained when visiting the Wenner-Gren Aeronautical Laboratory in Lexington, Kentucky.
The document is a defence document and its background is as follows. During the years when The Wenner-Gren Institute was planned and built, Axel Wenner-Gren was much concerned with the impending risks of a coming large war. He believed that he could persuade the Nazi regime not to start a war. For this reason he met with Hermann Göring (number two in the Nazi hierarchy) the month when his Institute was inaugurated. In that meeting Göring stated that a war perhaps could be avoided if he, Göring, could sit down and talk matters over alone with Chamberlain. Wenner-Gren proposed that he should go to London as a middleman and to present Göring's view points to Chamberlain.
"The result of our discussions was a short outline of vital questions and their possible solution, which appeared reasonable enough for me to proceed the matter." Chamberlain's response was more cold and the only result of this mission might have been a suspicion that Wenner-Gren had an interest to defend the German viewpoints. Wenner-Gren also met with Mussolini and the Japanese foreign minister, as well as with president Roosevelt and other political leaders in the democratic countries.
Wenner-Gren left Sweden in August 1939, when "it was apparent that nothing could prevent the clash of arms. " He sailed on his yacht 'Southern Cross' to Nassau, Bahamas, where he owned land and a house. En route to the Bahamas he came to witness one of the first marine acts of wars. The British passenger vessel 'Athena' with 1103 passengers and a crew of 415 was hit by a German torpedo on September 3rd, the first week of the war. Several ships noted the SOS signals and headed toward 'Athena', among them 'Southern Cross'. Wenner-Gren's crew managed to rescue 376 person, mostly Americans and British subjects.
Axel Wenner-Gren had not given up the aspiration to be the negotiator bringing peace to the world. Hence he sent a telegram from his yacht to President Roosevelt asking for a meeting (which was not granted) and another one to his brother in Berlin with the request to forward the same question to Göring. The head of the American FBI agency, J.Edgar Hoover, became utterly suspicious of Wenner-Gren's motives and acted to make the Secretary of State place Axel Wenner-Gren on the Proclaimed List, a list of persons regarded as enemies to the United States. Axel Wenner-Gren tried in various ways to be taken off the list, among others with a petition, which is the document that I received in Lexington. Nevertheless he remained on the list until the system of a black list was terminated in mid-1946. More information on these events can found in a book by Leif Leifland: Svartlistningen av Axel Wenner-Gren, En bok om ett justitiemord. (Askelin _gglund, Stockholm, 1989.) As the subtitle of the book says, black-listing Wenner-Gren was a grave miscarriage of justice.
A personal memory of Axel Wenner-Gren is from an occasion, when he invited the scientists at the Wenner-Gren Institute to a dinner at Solliden, Skansen in Stockholm, and gave a dinner speech, which in spite of all participants being Swedish was given in English, even though with a heavy Swedish accent. Later I was also asked by John Runnström to attend Wenner-Gren's funeral in Engelbrektskyrkan in Stockholm, mainly on the ground that I would be another head there carrying a doctoral hat. I thought then and I still think that the money that Axel Wenner-Gren had donated for creating and supporting the Wenner-Gren Institute has been very well spent indeed.
| Purpose
of my personal Web pages
my e-mail address: kborei@mail.millikin.edu |
 |
This
page was updated on August 6, 2002
Copyright (C) 1997 + |
