The wartime chemists went back to their labs to devise new chemicals for other battles, and the inheritors of Ehrlich’s legacy went hunting elsewhere for his specific chemicals. They were looking for a magic bullet that would rid the body of cancer, not a toxic gas that would leave its victims half-dead, blind, blistered, and permanently anemic. That their bullet would eventually appear out of that very chemical weapon seemed like a perversion of specific affinity, a ghoulish distortion of Ehrlich’s dream.
