Infamy Haunts a Top Award

By Claudia Wallis

A research prize is canceled because of a Nazi connection

The honor has been called the "Nobel Prize of liver research." Given every three years since 1970 by the Falk Foundation of Freiburg, West Germany, the Eppinger Prize carries an award of $5,000, and among hepatologists (liver specialists), a generous measure of international prestige. But last spring, when Dr. Howard Spiro, 60, a Yale gastroenterologist, first heard of the Eppinger Prize, his reaction was one of horror. He clearly remembered reading about a pioneering Viennese liver specialist named Hans Eppinger who had planned vicious experiments on inmates of Nazi concentration camps. He recalled that the doctor had committed suicide when summoned to the Nuremberg war-crimes tribunal in 1946. Research showed that the award's namesake and the Nazi physician were the same man, and Spiro launched a protest to publicize the truth about Eppinger. Says he: "This is a matter I could not let rest."

Last week, in response to the international outrage stirred up by Spiro, the Falk Foundation announced that it would no longer award the Eppinger Prize. "We founded the prize to encourage research, not to elicit political controversy," declared Dr. Herbert Falk, 60, head of the foundation and president of Dr. Falk GmbH, a firm specializing in drugs to treat disorders of the gall bladder and liver. "I will do anything to counter the impression that I am promoting a Nazi war criminal." Falk's firm decided to create a hepatology prize in the late '60s. Says Falk: "I asked professors I knew whom we should name it after, and all of them said Eppinger." At the time, he admits, he knew that "Eppinger's ethical standards didn't measure up to what is demanded today." But, he says, he and his prize-committee members felt that Eppinger's accomplishments overshadowed questions about his past.

Spiro and a number of other observers find such justifications hard to accept. "Would they suggest that the world should forget the most criminal period in history?" asks Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, which helped Spiro investigate the Viennese doctor's past.

Documents and testimony from the Nuremberg trials offer damning evidence. They show that Eppinger helped plan a series of human experiments conducted at Dachau in 1944. The research sought to find a way of making saltwater potable for pilots stranded at sea. In Eppinger's experiments, 44 gypsies were kept for up to a week on a diet consisting of sea water. Some were given seawater containing a chemical called berkatite, which disguised the salty taste. Though earlier research had shown that berkatite treatment was dangerous and ineffective, Eppinger had apparently insisted that further tests were needed. Prisoners became severely dehydrated and delirious. According to one witness, they were so tortured by thirst that some sucked cleaning water from the floor.

At least one member of Falk's award committee was familiar with tales of Eppinger's past. Dr. Hans Popper, 80, former dean of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City and a pre-eminent hepatologist, was a student of Eppinger's in Vienna in the 1930s. Popper's feelings toward his former mentor are ambiguous. On one hand, he says, Eppinger was a "cold, unapproachable man" who, throughout his career, was "ruthless as far as human life was concerned." On the other hand, Popper, who is Jewish, feels he owes his life to Eppinger, who warned him to flee just hours before the Gestapo came to arrest him. Popper says that in 1970 he informed his colleagues on the prize-selection committee that Eppinger was "morally objectionable" but, he says, "they didn't pursue the issue." Popper has nonetheless occasionally presented the awards.

The fall of the Eppinger Prize came as a shock to past recipients of the award, a number of whom are Jewish. "If someone had told me that the award honored a man who had this past, I would not have accepted it," says former Prizewinner Baruch Blumberg of Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. But little was said about Eppinger, according to Blumberg, when he was awarded his prize in 1973. Apparently, even less was asked. --By Claudia Wallis. Reported by James Graff/Freiburg and Laura Lopez/ New York

With reporting by James Graff, Laura L