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ОглавлениеWhat’s in a (Scientific) Name?
From a lone example of a trilobite in Hunan, China named Han solo to a butterfly pea flower, reminiscent of a Georgia O’Keefe painting, called Clitoria ternatea, the naming of species offers almost as much in the way of entertainment as it does scientific classification. The animals we call by a single name, like horses, actually have a two-part name, Equus caballas. The official rules for naming species, set down by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, are surprisingly simple. Scientific names must be spelled with the Latin alphabet and cannot be overtly offensive. That’s basically it. The name can even be a nonsense string of arbitrary letters. In contrast, the naming of astronomical bodies (planets, stars, asteroids, etc.) is overseen by committees in accordance with strict naming conventions. While there is an enormous wealth of fascinating names to report on, from plants to drugs to telescopes, we’ll confine ourselves to animals this time.
For as long as we have had records, and probably longer, mankind has sought to classify the world around us in an effort to understand it. This is called taxonomy, the study of the general principles of scientific classification, from the Greek words for “order” or “arrangement” and “science.” Three centuries before the common era, Aristotle grouped animals first by similarities, like where they live, and then hierarchically, with humans naturally at the top. Not every animal fit well into that system. Ducks posed a particular problem, as they had an annoying habit of living in water, on the land, and spending time in the air. It would be 1800 years before another “natural philosopher,” as scientists were called, would try his hand—Andrea Cesalpino, an Italian physician and botanist, sorted plants by the structure of their fruits and seeds. The first scientist to use a binomial, or two-name, system that we would recognize was Swiss botanist Gaspard Bauhin, who grouped some six thousand plants by genus and species in 1623.
There were several inconsistent and sometimes conflicting systems of classification in use when Carl Linnaeus wrote his influential Systema Naturae in 1735, laying down the system we use to this day. Linnaeus was the first taxonomist to list humans as a primate, though he did also classify whales as fish. All living things were sorted into kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. A house cat, for example, is in kingdom Animalia, phylum Chordata (meaning it has a spinal cord), class Mammalia, order Carnivora, family Felidae, genus Felis, and species catus. A lion diverges from a house cat at genus Panthera (which awesomely means “reaper of all”); its species leo gives it the scientific name Panthera leo. This system can be visualized as an enormous branching tree, with its trunk being broad and its branches becoming increasingly specific.
We still name some animals according to their appearance, with a little poetic license thrown in for good measure. The tiniest and most pastel of the armored mammals is the pink fairy armadillo. As advertised, the star-nosed mole has a burst of delicate sensory tendrils on the tip of its snout. Osexax mucofloris is an unappealing worm who lives off the bones of dead whales, which would explain its name “bone-eating snot-flower.” A bacterium that was taken to the international space station and exposed to cosmic radiation earned the Latin name for “traveler of the void.” Central and Eastern areas of the US boast a salamander species that can grow to a whopping two and a half feet long called the hellbender. The internet’s favorite ichthus, which can’t maintain its body shape out of water and collapses into a rather dour-looking puddle, is the blob fish.
Even with the Linnaean taxonomy in place, we still call some animals things that they simply are not. We all know that a seahorse isn’t a horse and koala bears aren’t bears, but most people don’t realize that a jackrabbit isn’t a rabbit but a hare. Both animals come from the Leporidae family, but part ways when it comes to genus. Hares tend to live alone and not in burrows, and their young are born sighted with full coats of fur. Jackrabbits get their name from have exceptionally long ears, like a donkey or jackass. If you have ever found yourself watching Go! Diego, Go! after your preschooler has left the room, you’ve probably seen the lanky maned wolf. It should come as no surprise that this awkward-looking creature isn’t from the genus Canis, like gray wolves, jackals, and dogs, but has the genus Chrysocyon all to itself. Red pandas are pandas, but giant pandas are not. Take a moment with that one. The adorable raccoon-like Ailurus fulgens were the first to be called “panda,” which is believed to derive from the Nepali word ponya. When the black and white Ailuropoda melanoleuca were discovered later, it was assumed that the two species were related, so they were dubbed “giant pandas.” They are from the family Ursidae, which includes all bears, but the giant panda is the only living species in its genus. What Americans call a buffalo is actually a bison by genus, whereas the cape buffalo from Africa and the water buffalo from Asia are not even in the same genus as each other.
The slimy hellbender.
Never let it be said that scientists have no sense of humor. Slime mold is the primary food for a beetle discovered in 2004, so their genus was labeled Gelae, pronounced “jelly.” The species are Gelae baen, Gelae belae, Gelae donut, Gelae fish, and Gelae rol. There are beetles of the Agra genus named Agra phobia and Agra vation. There’s a wasp whose genus is Heerz and species is lukenatcha. A species of tiny mollusk is called ittibitium, a parrot is named Vini vidivici, a water beetle is Ytu brutus, a syrphid fly is called Ohmyia omya, and there is the Pacific island snail Ba humbugi.
Scientists are more than the stereotype of stuffy old men in thick glasses and lab coats, poring over dry data sets. They’re people, with interests and hobbies outside their work. When arachnologist Peter Jager discovered a new species of spider in Malaysia that was covered with flamboyant red, orange, and yellow hair, he could think of no better name than Heteropoda davidbowie. A frog, two types of flies, and an isopod found near Zanzibar have been named after Freddie Mercury. A species of horsefly with a conspicuous hind end was name Scaptia beyonceae. Likewise, a mustache-shaped pattern on a Cameroonian spider earned it the name Pachygnatha zappa, after rock legend Frank Zappa. The pistol shrimp Synalpheaus pinkfloydi makes a noise louder than a rock concert at over two hundred decibels, simply by snapping its one oversized claw shut. The gall wasps have left the building, at least if they are the variety Preseucoila imallshookupis. The wasp Metallichneumon neurospastarchus’s genus honors the band Metallica while its species, neurospastarchus, Greek for “master of puppets,” alludes to the weak and mindless nature of its hosts.
The pistol shrimp.
Actors get naming nods, too. Dominic Monaghan has a one-centimeter ginger spider named for him, Ctenus monaghani, after it was discovered during the filming of the nature documentary he hosted, Wild Things. After “shamelessly begging on national television” to have something named after him, late-night host and satirist, Stephen Colbert became namesake to a dune-dwelling spider in Southern California, Aptostichus stephencolberti. A fluffy lemur on the island of Madagascar shares its name with fierce creature and Monty Python John Cleese, Avahi cleesei. The hosts of Top Gear each have a wasp in the genus Kerevata named after them: clarksoni, hammondi, and jamesmayi.
Former First Lady of Argentina and well-traveled corpse Eva Peron has a moth named for her whose scientific name is simply evita. A single genus of fish honors Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, and Teddy Roosevelt. The neck plate of a leaf-dwelling Madagascan praying mantis earned it the name Ilomantis ginsburgae, in honor of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Sirindhorn, the second daughter of the monarch of Thailand, commonly referred to as “princess angel” has been honored with a number of plants, several crustaceans, a butterfly, a bee, and a prehistoric tarsier. Similarly, Barack Obama’s name was stamped on several spider species, a few different fish, a blood fluke, bird, lichen, beetle, extinct reptile, horsehair worm, and a bee. He and wife Michelle were dually honored with the fish Teleogramma obamaorum.
Terry Pratchett, whose Discworld books described the world as resting on the back of a giant turtle, is the namesake of the turtle species Psephophorus terrypratchetti. Shakespeare has a wasp named for him, while Henry David Thoreau has two. The author of Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift, is the namesake of a fly that’s naturally quite tiny, while Herman Melville’s name was given to a whale. Gene Roddenberry has a true bug, Arthur C. Clarke has a dinosaur, Neil Gaiman has a beetle, and H.P. Lovecraft has a wasp. An extinct crab was named for Ray Harryhausen, the man who brought stop-motion movie monsters to life. J. R. R. Tolkien has gotten a great deal of scientific love, in the form of a beetle, a crustacean, two wasps, and a clam. In addition to the false-headed moth Erechthias beeblebroxi, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams has an ant named for himself and a triple-finned fish named after a character, Fiordichthys slartibartfasti.
Jonathan Swift, the author, not the fly.
It should go without saying that there is great overlap between the lovers of science and the lovers of science fiction and all things geeky. Tolkien appears again with a shark named for Gollum, a cyclopic shark named for Sauron, an ancient croc called balrogus, and an entire genus of cordylid lizards name Smaug. A tiny armored catfish from South America was christened Otocinclus batmani; no word on if it fights crime at night. Harry Potter fans will want to steer clear of the Ampulex dementor wasp, which turns cockroaches into zombies. Science has given us Spongiforma squarepantsii, but it’s not a sponge, it’s a highly porous mushroom. A trilobite that reminded the discoverer of the faces of the two old curmudgeons in the Muppet Theater box was dubbed Geragnostus waldorfstatleri. A newly discovered genus of wasp has each of its species named for a different house in Game of Thrones: Laelius arryni, baratheoni, lannisteri, martelli, targaryeni, tullyi, and starki.
Scientists not only honored cartoonist Gary Larson with the scientific name of a chewing louse that feeds on owls, they also borrowed a name from him. A 1982 Far Side cartoon showed a caveman leading a lecture on the dangers of dinosaurs, pointing to a slide of a stegosaurus’s spiked tail and saying, “Now this end is called the thagomizer, after the late Thag Simmons.” The term became an informal but widely used anatomical term, being used by the likes of the Smithsonian and the BBC. And no, they don’t care that humans and stegosauri lived sixty million years apart, and neither do we.
Sometimes, scientists plain run out of ideas. After finding nine other species of cicada-like leafhopper, their discoverer dubbed the next one he found Erythroneura ix, or nine in Roman numerals. Another scientist found so many species of olethreutid moths that he eventually opted for an alphabetical ascension to come up with names, i.e. Eucosma bobana, e. cocana, e. dodana, e. fofana, and so on.
Dating sucks and 41 percent of first marriages end in divorce, but humans have it easy compared to many things that walk, swim, slither, or fly. If you worry about losing your sense of self in a relationship, be grateful you are not an angler fish. “Angler fish” refers broadly to those slightly horrifying aquatic creatures with as much mouth as body, who lure their prey in with wormy or glowing bits of flesh at the end of an antenna-like appendage. When nineteenth century scientists began to catalog the members of the suborder Ceratioidei, which contains such pleasantly named creatures as sea devils, devilfish, and deep-sea anglerfish, all the specimens they could find were female, and scientists had no idea what the males even looked like. They sometimes found fish that seemed to be related, but they were much smaller and lacked the frightening jaws and lure typical of ceratioids, so they were placed into different taxonomic groups. In 1922, almost a full century after the first ceratioid was recorded, an Icelandic biologist discovered a female ceratioid with two of these smaller fish with their faces attached to her body, which he assumed was a mother and her babies in a puzzling configuration. An ichthyologist at the British Museum of Natural History also found a smaller fish attached to a female ceratioid. When he dissected it, it became clear that the smaller fish was not the larger fish’s offspring; it was her mate.
She’ll take care of you.
Scientists soon figured out why the “missing” male ceratioids looked so different. They aren’t built to hunt and devour prey because they don’t hunt. They nourish themselves by attaching to a female. Male angler fish are parasites as much as they are mates. A male ceratioid finds his mate by following species-specific pheromones to a female. The female will guide the males in by flashing her bio-luminescent lure, like a ground crew waving on an airplane with their orange flashlights. Once the male reaches her, he bites into the female’s abdomen and latches on. His body then fuses with hers. They now share a circulatory system, which allows the male to get the nutrients he needs from the female’s blood. Since the male has no further need of eyes for seeing or fins for swimming, those body parts( and others including organs) wither away. The relationship isn’t completely one-sided, though. While the male is taking blood, he also provides sperm when the female is ready to spawn.
Got You Under My Skin
On your next Mediterranean holiday, go for a dive and see if you can spot something that looks like a sausage casing full of green gelatin undulating gracefully in the water. That is a female Bonellia viridis, the green spoon worm. You will know you are looking at a female because only they have the bright green coloration and because the two-millimeter long male Bonellia viridis are more likely to be found inside the female.
The largest penis relative to body size in the animal kingdom belongs to the barnacle at ten times the length of its body. The smallest relative penis belongs to the gorilla. A four hundred pound (or 181 kilogram) adult male gorilla has a penis only two inches (or five centimeters) when erect.
Green spoon worms can determine the sex of other green spoon worms. They begin life as genderless larvae, drifting on the ocean current. If the larva lands on a bit of ocean floor not currently claimed by an adult green spoon worm, it will develop into a female and begin secreting a toxin called bonellin. Bonellin makes the adult green spoon worms green but has an even more dramatic effect on their larvae. If a larva comes in contact with the bonellin toxin, it will turn into a male. The female then sucks the newly made male into her body through her feeding proboscis. He now exists for the sole purpose of providing the female with sperm. It’s a one-way trip for the male, but at least he won’t be alone. A few dozen males may find themselves living in a chamber in the female’s body where they absorb nutrients from the fluid they are bathed in. Like the male anglerfish, male green spoon worms exist to provide sperm, so they only need the organs associated with that task and have few organs otherwise.
Use It and Maybe Lose It
You may think there are no more boring animals in the world than slugs, but mollusk mating is action-packed. Take for instance the mascot of UC Santa Cruz, the banana slug. Like all snails and slugs, banana slugs are hermaphrodites, possessing both male and female sex organs. Things are evenly matched when banana slugs mate—each slug produces eggs and each one has a penis. Their penis can grow to be longer than their body, hence the species name, dolichophallus, or “long penis.” Mating starts off a bit rough, with the slugs striking at each other like snakes and even taking bites out of one another. Then, they arrange themselves head-to-tail, like a yellow yin-yang, and achieve intromission. Mating can last for hours, during which the slugs may exchange sperm and fertilize each other’s eggs equally, or one may fertilize the other. Breaking up can be hard to do, especially when one slug’s penis gets stuck in its partner. If mutual thrashing around can’t dislodge it, the other slug may chew the offending member off. This apophallation (“penis removal” for non-limacologists) renders the slug female, as penises don’t regenerate.
Go, Santa Cruz!
Being female is more resource-demanding than being male, what with having to nourish and support eggs. Most animals have no choice but to accept their assigned role. Flatworms, however, take a proactive approach to avoiding motherhood by trying to stab the other with their penis in an act called “penis fencing.” When two potential mates meet, they rear up, which makes room for them to strike with their two-headed penis on the offense, but defensively leaves their body vulnerable. Penis fencing can last an hour, with the flatworms being stabbed multiple times, until one manages to deposit sperm into the other. The victor swims away, his paternal duties complete. The losing flatworm begins to search for the extra food required for making eggs. Flatworms practice “traumatic insemination” and they are not the only ones. Bedbugs, thorny-headed worms, microscopic roundworms, wheel animalcules, fruit flies, sea slugs, and spiders in the genus Harpactea also prefer to go through their mate’s abdomen rather than through their genital tract.
Firm Handshake
The argonaut, or paper nautilus, is a small octopus found in the open ocean. Argonauts are one of the most sexually dimorphic octopodes, meaning the females are considerably larger than the males, about eight times larger and six hundred times heavier. The females secrete a thin, white, brittle shell, which had been thought for centuries to be for egg storage. More recently, argonauts have been observed using their shells to trap air from the surface so they will be neutrally buoyant at their preferred depth. Like many octopodes, the male argonaut’s third left arm develops into a hectocotylus, the cephalopod version of a penis, which the male can detach for copulation. What makes the argonaut’s hectocotylus different is that, once detached, it can swim over to the female on its own, where it attaches itself inside her pallial cavity (octopus vagina). One mark in the “pro” column for this approach is that the male argonaut can pass on his genetic information while staying a safe distance from the larger female so that he does not become part of her egg-nourishing meal plan. The hectocotylus regenerates, so he who mates and runs away may live to mate another day.
Gender Roles
Males typically benefit from mating as much as possible, in part because they can, while the females, who actually raise the offspring, have to be choosy about their partners. In a cave in Brazil lives a species of tiny louse who did not get the memo. For Neotrogla curvata, females seek out multiple mates and the males are the choosier sex. Also, the female has a penis, and the male has the equivalent of a vagina, so they did not get that memo, either. There are four species of tiny three-millimeter Neotrogla, and the females all have penises.
During mating sessions that can last for two to three nonstop days, the female penetrates the male and uses her genitals to collect sperm rather than deliver it. The female’s erect, curved protrusion is called a gynosome. During sex, the male still ejaculates, but inside his own body instead of hers. When the female penetrates the male, he delivers sperm into a duct in her gynosome, which leads to a storage organ. Because Neotrogla sex is a marathon, the mating pair have to anchor themselves. The female inflates the base of her gynosome, which is covered with tiny spines, inside the male, and it’s impossible to separate a mating pair without killing the male.
The multi-national team that discovered the Neotrogla won the Ig Nobel Prize for biology in 2017 for their paper, Female Penis, Male Vagina, and Their Correlated Evolution in a Cave Insect.
Who Runs the World?
Shaking up traditional gender roles isn’t exclusive to insects but can also be seen in the committee-assembled critter that is the spotted hyena. Unlike with most mammals, the top tier of the social order is held by females, by dint of being significantly more muscular and aggressive than the males. Males rank below all the females and even the cubs. Their social standing can only change if a male above them dies or if another male joins their pack, as the newbie is automatically assigned the lowest rank, but they can never rise above the females. Female spotted hyenas are so masculine that they develop a pseudo-penis, complete with false testicles and scrotum, which makes them notoriously difficult for researchers to sex, even when the animal is tranquilized. This unique genital transformation comes from a prenatal infusion of androgen, a male sex hormone. Not every female gets the same hormone boost, though.
Researchers in Kenya who studied the spotted hyena for nearly two decades discovered that high-ranking females give their fetal pups higher levels of androgen in the final stages of pregnancy than lower-ranking females do. This means that the mother’s rank in the pack could directly affect her offspring’s physical traits beyond what her genes do. In packs of forty or more individuals who scavenge to survive, aggressiveness and muscle mass are good traits to have. The extra androgen helps increases the likelihood that the genes of a more aggressive female will survive. It comes at a cost, though. The androgen that the fetal females receive damages their ovaries, making it more difficult to conceive when they are mature. The androgen is also what causes the female spotted hyena’s genitals to change, a lot. The clitoris elongates to protrude anywhere from seven to twenty-three inches (or eighteen to fifty-eight centimeters) from her body, hanging down from her belly like a male penis. The only visual difference between the pseudo-penis and an actual penis is the shape of the tip—blunt on females and pointed on males. This pseudo-penis can become erect and female hyenas even urinate through them. The spotted hyena clitoris isn’t the same as the clitoris of a human; theirs also contains the birth canal.
Mating is a complex cluster of social protocol and acrobatics. Sex can only happen if the female retracts her pseudo-penis, meaning there is no way for a male to forcefully copulate, even if he somehow managed to physically overcome the female. In what is likely nature’s way of encouraging genetic diversity, female spotted hyenas almost exclusively choose males who have joined their pack from another pack. Her estrus, or “heat,” only lasts about three days, though female spotted hyenas show no outward signs, at least as far as human researchers can tell.
The female spotted hyena chooses her mate, then leads or chases the smaller male to a secluded spot. She needs safety more than privacy. Research on captive hyenas at the University of California, Berkeley, has shown that the glans of the male’s penis swells in the female’s reproductive tract after the male ejaculates, causing a “copulatory lock,” as happens with domestic dogs. This leaves the mating couple vulnerable to larger predators like lions, so, as in real estate, spotted hyena mating is all about location, location, location.
The female spotted hyena then stands still and lowers her head, her way of saying, “I promise I won’t bite you, for a few minutes…probably.” Cooperation only goes so far; the male still has the comparatively tricky task of getting his penis into the opening of the female’s retracted pseudo-penis. Careful positioning is required for the male to crouch behind her and, with a bit of hopping, somehow get his penis to point up and backward to enter her clitoris. It takes time and practice to get it right, and the inexperienced male can try the female’s patience.
As hard as mating might be for the male spotted hyena, the real difficulty comes four months later for the female. She must delivery her cubs, usually two or three in a litter, through her pseudo-penis. The birth canal is only about an inch in diameter and squeezing a two-pound cub through this narrow opening can result in significant tearing. It’s not uncommon for cubs to become trapped and die, tearing or no tearing. This often leads to the mother’s death as well. Between bleeding, infection, and the complications of trapped cubs, maternal mortality rates in spotted hyenas hover around 60 percent. For those who survive, things get a little easier as the resulting scar will actually stretch more than the surrounding tissue during the next delivery.
But the babies sure are cute!
When you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. This philosophy is okay when it comes to loading the dishwasher, but maybe not when you are trying find the cause of venereal disease. No one told that to John Hunter. Medical types in the eighteenth century medical believed gonorrhea and syphilis were caused by the same pathogen. Hunter injected himself with gonorrhea to test the theory. He contracted gonorrhea and syphilis, most likely from using the same needle to get the samples. His is just one of many sometimes-harrowing stories of doctors and scientists using themselves as test subjects.
Isaac Newton. That wig is working.
Better than a Poke in the Eye
Let’s start with one of the OGs of science, Isaac Newton. Newton had many areas of interest beyond fruit-based physics. For the sake of science, Newton stuck a needle in his eye. He thought that if he slid a long needle called a bodkin between his eyeball and eye socket, his vision would change. It did! He saw different colors and dots of light that appeared when he applied pressure. It’s the same lights that you see if you press on your eyes, called phosphenes. Newton also stared at the sun in a mirror, repeatedly, until the image of the sun stayed when he closed his eye. It stayed for months, in fact. He had to spend three days in a dark room until it faded enough for him to resume his daily life.
Huff-rey Davies
While at the Medical Pneumatic Institute of Bristol in the 1790s, Humphrey Davy studied gases. Studied by inhaling, in case the theme of this section was still in any way unclear. Davy would set up chemical reactions and inhale the resulting gas. One gas gave him a pleasant sensation and impulse to laugh at everything; he had discovered nitrous oxide, a.k.a. laughing gas. Though his efforts were meant to reproduce the pleasurable effects of things like alcohol and opium, Davy would ultimately recommend nitrous oxide for use as an anesthetic. Modern dentists use a blend of 50 percent nitrous and 50 percent oxygen, but Davy was huffing 100 percent nitrous, which is probably why he enjoyed it enough to start hosting parties where friends would inhale it from silk bags.
“Could You Patent the Sun?”
When it came time to test his polio vaccine, Dr. Jonas Salk decided the only suitable test subject was himself…and his family. In 1947, Salk was working on a vaccine for the crippling disease at the University of Pittsburgh. He needed a healthy volunteer to test it, and administered it to himself, his wife, and their three sons. It worked and the vaccine was soon tested nationwide and showed dramatic results. In two years, cases of polio decreased from about 29,000 to 6,000. Salk did not patent the vaccine and insisted that it remain free and available to everyone. Thus, he is often remembered as one of history’s great humanitarians.
Heart of the Matter
In 1921, Werner Forssmann was a German urologist who pioneered the technique of cardiac catheterization—the insertion of a catheter into the heart to measure the pressure inside to help determine if a patient needs surgery. Inspired by the work of scientists who had catheterized a horse in 1861, Forssmann wanted to test catheterization in humans but could not get permission for such a dangerous-sounding experiment. Deciding to take a different tack, he asked an operating room nurse to set up the necessary equipment and assist him. She agreed, but only on the noble condition that he perform the procedure on her rather than trying to experiment on himself. No sooner was the nurse prepped on the table than Forssmann anesthetized his own arm and made a cut, inserting the catheter twelve inches (or thirty centimeters) into his vein. He then calmly climbed two flights of stairs to the x-ray suite before threading it the rest of the way into his heart and getting an x-ray to check the placement. He was later forced to resign from that hospital, then hired back, then fired again.
Great Balls of Science
In the early ‘30s, Doctors Herbert Woollard and Edward Carmichael observed that patients sometimes experienced pain in unrelated parts of their body when an internal organ was damaged. To learn more about that phenomenon, they decided to deliberately damage one of their own organs. But what organs were both noncritical and easily damaged? Perhaps an organ, or a pair of organs, that were outside the body. Yes, they chose to experiment with their gentlemen’s bits to study pain. In their notes, Woollard and Carmichael recorded that “the testis was drawn forward” and placed under a pan, though they did not note whose testis nor who did the drawing forward. They then added weights to the pan and recorded the resulting sensations. The pair performed the experiment multiple times, eventually concluding that testicular pain often came with generalized torso pain. If only one testicle was harmed, only one side of the torso would feel its effects. Was their bravery worth it? Doctors still note the “referred pain” that comes along with testicular trauma, so they helped advance medical knowledge in their own way.
After chemist Albert Hoffman first synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in 1941, he famously rode his bicycle home while under the influence of the drug. The date, April 19, became a pseudo-holiday in recreational pharmaceutical circles, called Bicycle Day.
Skin Deep
What would it take for you to willingly let parasitic hookworms burrow through your skin, live in your intestines, and feed off your blood? That’s precisely what immunologist and biologist David Pritchard did in 2004. Auto-immune diseases like asthma and Crohn’s disease are relatively uncommon in areas where hookworms are prevalent. Pritchard had a hypothesis that hookworm infections reduce allergy and asthma symptoms by modifying the body’s immune response, but he needed human subjects to test. In order to appease his ethics committee, he agreed to be the guinea pig, along with volunteers from his team. “They itch quite a bit when they go through the skin,” said Pritchard, but they became truly troublesome when they reached his stomach, causing pain and diarrhea. Fifty hookworms turned out to be too many; ten hookworms was a better number. The experiment later allowed for wider testing on humans, who reported miraculous relief of allergy symptoms. As of the date of publication, clinical trials are underway to evaluate hookworms as a treatment for various conditions, including multiple sclerosis.
Slapstick for Science
In 1898, German surgeon August Bier figured out that a dose of cocaine injected into the spinal fluid could serve as an effective anesthesia. In order to prove it this, he had his assistant, Augustus Hildebrandt, attempt to inject him, but Hildebrandt messed it up and Bier ended up leaking spinal fluid from a hole is his neck. Rather than abandon the experiment, the two men traded places. The injection went correctly this time. Bier proceeded to hit, stab, hammer, and even burn his assistant. He also pulled Hildebrandt’s pubic hair and squashed his testicles. Both men suffered terribly for days after the cocaine wore off and they were able to feel pain again. While Bier took time off work to recover, Hildebrandt had to fill in for Bier. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hildebrandt subsequently fell out with Bier, becoming one of his fiercest critics.
Sick Burn, Bro
In front of a full house at the Royal Institution in the United Kingdom in June 1903, physicist Pierre Curie, husband of two-time Nobel Prize winner Marie, displayed a burn on his arm caused by radium salts, which he had taped to his arm for ten hours more than fifty days prior. During the demonstration, Curie dropped some radium on the desk. The resulting contamination was still detectable half a century later. The Curies hoped that radium’s burning effect might prove useful in the treatment of cancer. Ironically, the radiation from that the sample, as well as other chemicals the Curies routinely exposed themselves to, had a catastrophic effect on their health. Both Pierre and Marie persevered though constant sickness, fatigue, and pain to continue their experiments, which set the course for the use of radium in medicine.
The Ffirth and Hopefully Last
A special place in science heaven must be reserved for Stubbins Ffirth, who, as a medical student in the early nineteenth century, conducted a series of potentially lifesaving but definitely stomach-turning experiments to prove that yellow fever was not contagious. Yellow fever is a viral disease that causes fever, chills, loss of appetite, nausea, muscle pains, and headaches, and can be fatal. At the time, doctors believed yellow fever passed from person to person, like the flu, but Ffirth disagreed. He began by taking “fresh black vomit” from a yellow fever patient and pouring it onto cuts in his arm. He did not come down with yellow fever. Emboldened, Ffirth collected a patient’s vomit and put it in his eyes. He smeared himself with all manner of bodily fluids, including blood, saliva, sweat, and urine. He sat in a “vomit sauna,” an enclosed space full of heated vomit fumes, which caused him “great pain in [his] head,” but did not otherwise affect his health. Finally, he took to eating the vomit, first in pill form, then straight from a patient’s mouth. Satisfied with his thoroughness, Ffirth published his 1804 book A Treatise on Malignant Fever; with an Attempt to Prove Its Non-Contagious Nature, in which he declared categorically that yellow fever not contagious. Yellow fever is in fact contagious, but only through blood transmission via mosquito bite. This was proven by another self-experimenter, US Army surgeon Jesse Lazear, a century later, when he allowed himself to be bitten by mosquitoes carrying yellow fever. Lazear would ultimately die of a mosquito-borne disease, not from one of the mosquitoes he bred for his experiments, but from a wild mosquito who happened by.
These ladies are the worst.
Giving Me Agita
Just as Ffirth swam against the tide of yellow fever contagion, Dr. Barry Marshall was sure the medical establishment had the wrong idea about stomach ulcers. The accepted wisdom was that stomach ulcers were the result of stress and other lifestyle factors, but Marshall was sure the culprit was the Helicobacter pylori bacterium. To prove his hypothesis, Marshall and pathologist Robin Warren needed to examine the bacteria in a human body, but as Marshall explained to New Scientist in a 2006 interview, “I was the only person informed enough to consent.” Marshall did not tell his hospital’s ethics committee what he planned until after he had swallowed the bacteria. He did not even tell his wife. The first three days were unremarkable, then Marshall began vomiting; his wife complained that he had “putrid breath.” A biopsy at the two-week mark confirmed that he had gastritis, which can lead to ulcers. While it took some years for Marshall and Warren’s theory to gain traction, they were awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
Australia: Satan’s Aquarium
A jellyfish was to Queensland doctor Jack Barnes what Helicobacter pylori was to Marshall. A strange illness, now called Irukandji syndrome, had appeared in Australia in the mid-twentieth century, characterized by severe muscle aches, nausea, and blinding pain. It also had a truly bizarre symptom—patients would experience levels of anxiety so severe that some asked their doctors to kill them. The cause was unknown, but it seemed to come from the sea, as most patients had been swimming prior to the onset of symptoms. Barnes winnowed down the possible causes to a species of tiny, nearly transparent box jellyfish. To test this theory, the doctor stung himself with the tentacle of the Carukia barnesi. He was not alone, though. Probably losing his shot at “father of the year,” he also stung his nine-year-old son, as well as a young lifeguard. (It’s not documented how Barnes knew the lifeguard or how he talked the lifeguard into it.) Not long after being stung, all three had to be hospitalized for their excruciating pain. All three test subjects made complete recoveries, though there was no word on how the ordeal affected the Barnes’ father-son dynamic.
Once Bitten…
If you have ever been stung by a bee, you probably called it “painful.” If you have been bitten by a bullet ant, you might call it a “pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch nail embedded in your heel.” Thankfully, you do not need to be bitten by a bullet ant, because biologist Justin Schmidt already has. Schmidt has let himself been stung and bitten by nearly a thousand painful creatures, taking careful notes along the way. He created the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, a way of quantifying and describing the pain that insects inflict, which is both elucidating and entertaining, in a schadenfreude kind of way. Schmidt ranked each insect sting on a rising scale of one to four and described each incident rather lyrically. The sting of the sweat bee registered a one on the pain scale and felt “Light and ephemeral. Almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.” Garnering a score of two, a yellowjacket’s sting was described as being “hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.” At a three, the sting of the Maricopa harvester ant was described as “after eight unrelenting hours of drilling into that ingrown toenail, you find the drill wedged into the toe.” The description of the warrior wasp sting, which scored a four and lasted for hours, showed Schmidt’s realization of the absurdity of his bodily sacrifice: “Torture. You are chained in the flow of an active volcano. Why did I start this list?” The stand-out entry is the tarantula hawk, widely regarded as the most painful sting yet discovered by man: “Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair dryer has been dropped into your bubble bath. A bolt out of the heavens. Lie down and scream.”
The tarantula hawk. Stay away.
In the late 1990s, Kevin Warwick had a silicon chip transponder implanted into his forearm. According to his website, the neural interface allowed him to “operate doors, lights, heaters and other computers without lifting a finger.” The experiment was called Project Cyborg.
Negative Findings
Not everyone got a shiny medal or professional acclaim for their self-experimentation. Some merely got maimed or killed. Scottish inventor, scientist, and writer Sir David Brewster, had a particular interest in optics and light polarization, a field of study which requires good eyesight. Unfortunately for Brewster, he performed a chemical experiment in 1831 which nearly blinded him. His vision returned, but he was plagued with eye troubles for the rest of his life. His legacy in vision did not result from any experiment, but from his invention, the kaleidoscope. Also in the sacrificing-sight-for-science club was Robert Bunsen, best known giving his name to the Bunsen burner (and an under-appreciated Muppet). He began his scientific career in organic chemistry, but nearly died twice of arsenic poisoning. Soon thereafter, he lost the sight in his right eye to an explosion of cacodyl cyanide. These being excellent reasons to change fields, Bunsen moved to inorganic chemistry, where he developed the field of spectroscopy, which measures and examines light and radiation.
See Right Through You
Elizabeth Fleischman Ascheim was not a doctor herself, but worked in the office of her brother-in-law, Dr. Michael J.H. Woolf. Woolf was intrigued by the new discovery of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen: x-rays. Ascheim became equally interested and, with Woolf’s encouragement, gave up her job as a bookkeeper to study electrical science. In 1897, she bought an x-ray machine, the first in San Francisco, which she moved into the office. The duo spent nine years experimenting with the machine, using themselves as subjects. The effects of long-term exposure to x-rays was not understood at the time, and their protective measures in place were inadequate. Ascheim died of widespread, aggressive cancer.
New Blood
It may have been the quest for eternal youth that led Russian physician, economist, and science fiction writer, Alexander Bogdanov to experiment with blood transfusion in 1924. After performing eleven transfusions on himself, he declared that his balding had stopped and his eyesight had improved. Unfortunately, Boganov had not screened the blood he was using for infectious diseases, leading him to transfuse himself with blood infected with malaria and tuberculosis, which killed him.
When you think of world-saving heroes, obvious answers come to mind: Superman, Captain America, Randy Quaid’s character from Independence Day, the usual. But there are real life people who have saved thousands, millions, and arguably a billion lives in the real world, within living memory, and you probably never heard their names.
Maurice Hilleman
As someone who did not die as a child from a preventable disease, it is the author’s considered opinion that vaccines are the bee’s knees. Most of the vaccines that have kept us alive for the past two generations were created by one man, who did not even want credit for it. Eradicating childhood diseases through vaccination was the life work of virologist Maurice Hilleman. By the time of his death in 2005 at age eighty-five, he had developed vaccines for measles-mumps-rubella, chickenpox, meningitis, pneumonia, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and dozens more.
The fragility of life was with Maurice Hilleman from the day he was born in 1919, when both his twin sister and mother died. This was the same year the Spanish flu killed around 5 percent of the world’s population. After high school, Hilleman earned a full scholarship to Montana State University. Majoring in chemistry and microbiology, he graduated first in his class, going on to graduate school to earn his doctorate in microbiology from the University of Chicago in 1944.
When Hilleman started his first job at the pharmaceutical company E. R. Squibb & Sons in 1944, American soldiers deployed in Japan had been contracting Japanese encephalitis-B from infected mosquitoes. As chief of what is today the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Hilleman studied pandemics. He was able to recognize patterns in the type and severity of pandemics and could predict with stunning accuracy when they would hit. When Hilleman and a colleague saw signs of an impending flu pandemic spreading through Hong Kong in 1957, they raced against the clock to produce and distribute forty million vaccines. About 69,000 Americans died from that flu, but the toll would have been far worse without the vaccine.
American Samoa was one of the only places not to see a single Spanish flu death, because the governor took the reports he was hearing seriously and blocked all incoming ships from making port.
Can we all go to American Samoa now?
Hilleman moved to the Merck pharmaceutical company and continued his laser-focused attention on the prevention of other diseases. Some hit close to home. When his daughter Jeryl Lynn came down with the mumps in 1967, he swabbed her throat and collected the virus specimens to take back to his lab. His other daughter, one-year-old Kirsten, was among the first to take the experimental vaccine. “There was a baby being protected by a virus from her sister, and this has been unique in the history of medicine, I think,” Hilleman remembered in an interview. The strain that Hilleman collected from his daughter reduced the incidence of mumps from 186,000 cases a year to fewer than 1,000 cases. For perspective, that’s equivalent of reducing the capacity of Rose Bowl Stadium twice-over to half the capacity of a suburban high school.
In the early 1960s, measles killed more than five hundred American children annually. Hilleman and pediatrician Joseph Stokes found that they could minimize the side effects of the measles vaccine by giving a gamma globulin shot in one arm and the vaccine in the other, which helped to quell parental concerns and improve the rate of immunization. Hilleman continued to refine the vaccine, eventually producing the much safer strain that is still in use today. Rather than put his name on it, Hilleman named it “Moraten,” short for “more attenuated enders.” “Attenuated” means weakened, and much of the work had been done in John F. Enders’ laboratory at Boston Children’s Hospital.
In the spring of 1963, a rubella epidemic began in Europe and quickly swept around the globe. In the US alone, around 11,000 newborns died and 20,000 suffered birth defects, including deafness, heart disease, and cataracts. Hilleman was already testing a vaccine he had developed, but agreed to work with a vaccine from federal regulators, which he later described as “toxic, toxic, toxic.” By 1969, he had cleaned it up enough to obtain FDA approval and prevent another rubella epidemic. In 1971, he combines the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines to make the MMR vaccine, replacing a series of six shots with two.
In 1978, having found a better rubella vaccine than his own, Hilleman asked its developer if he could use it in the MMR. The developer, Dr. Stanley Plotkin of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, was speechless. It was an expensive choice for Hilleman’s employer and might have been a painful one for anyone other than Dr. Hilleman. According to Plotkin, “It’s not that he didn’t have an ego. He certainly did, but he valued excellence above that. Once he decided that this strain was better, he did what he had to do,” even if it meant sacrificing his work.
It’s impossible to know how many lives Maurice Hilleman’s work has saved. By one estimate, it is eight million per year. Though he was forced to retire at age sixty-five, he continued to work for the greater good, serving as an adviser to the World Health Organization. He never won a Nobel Prize, but Hilleman did receive the National Medal of Science from President Ronald Reagan in 1988.
Youyou Tu
When it comes to deadly animals, sharks, cobras, and anything native to Australia, all pale in comparison to the mosquito, courtesy of its tiny passenger, malaria. For example, in 2008, plasmodia, the parasite that causes malaria, infected 247 million people and caused almost one million deaths. Symptoms include fever, headache, and vomiting. Malaria can quickly become life-threatening by disrupting the blood supply to vital organs. The disease strikes children hard, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Thanks in part to traveling humans, malaria affects more than a hundred countries, from Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, to parts of Europe.
The single greatest arrow in our quiver in the fight against malaria was discovered by a doctor looking not only to the future, but also to the wisdom of the past. The drug, called artemisinin, was found in the 1970s by Chinese scientist Youyou Tu and her team, who discovered ancient references to a fever-easing plant in traditional Chinese medical texts. Because of their work, malaria death rates have decreased 47 percent worldwide; the rate of infection in children has dropped 46 percent.
Tu was born in Zhejiang, China in 1930. A tuberculosis infection interrupted her high school education but inspired her to go into medical research. Tu graduated from Beijing Medical University School of Pharmacy in 1955 and attended the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences to continue her research on Chinese herbal medicine.
While teaching and researching in 1969, Tu was suddenly appointed head of a group of chemists and pharmacologists for a top-secret military program. Project 523 was established by Chairman Mao with the goal of finding ways to prevent and cure malaria. For two years, the project had focused on developing Western-style antimalarial drugs, but synthetic compounds bore no fruit, so Project 523 turned to traditional herbal medicine for answers. This was a surprising turn of events, considering one of Mao’s objectives with the Cultural Revolution was to promote communist ideology by purging China of traditional literature and art. Because of this, scholars were considered the lowest caste of society, and scientific research was only sanctioned if the Communist Party decided the purpose was sufficiently practical. Tu was told she had been chosen because of her unique combination of skills—she had a degree in Western pharmacology, yet she could differentiate thousands of traditional herbs. Tu felt deeply honored to be appointed to the post, especially as a woman and relatively young, but she knew the task before her was a difficult one. Malaria can develop resistance to drugs faster than new ones can be created, and nearly a quarter-million compounds had already been tested by scientists around the world. Not making things any easier for Tu was the fact that her husband had been “sent down to the countryside” on a mandatory exchange program for “reeducation,” leaving her a single parent; she would often be separated from her daughter for long periods of time.
Tu and her team traveled from village to village to talk to traditional medicine practitioners and scoured libraries for every medical text they could find. In the end, they collected over 2,000 recipes for herbal, animal, and mineral-based compounds, choosing from these 640 with the most potential. Back in Beijing, her team began distilling those best bets into 380 herbal extracts they could test on mice. One challenge was overcoming the primitive conditions of their own lab, which was poorly ventilated against the harsh solvents the team used and had only household pots and pans as equipment.
By 1971, the researched began to zero in on the herb quinghao, or sweet wormwood. It first appeared in a silk scroll from the Han Dynasty two thousand years ago entitled Prescriptions for 52 Kinds of Diseases and was mentioned frequently in texts throughout the centuries as a remedy for intermittent fevers, a symptom of malaria. That still left the team with many questions: Which species of quinghao did the texts refer to? Where did it grow? Which part of the plant do you use and how should it be prepared? Other research groups joined the quest and after an exacting process of elimination, Artemisia annua L. was found to be the only variety of quinghao containing antimalarial properties. Despite this, disappointingly, no extract of it had produced a consistent effect on the lab mice.
The miraculous sweet wormwood.
Frustrated, Tu began rereading the ancient texts, searching for clues. A medical manuscript from the East Jin Dynasty, written in 340 CE, advise, “A handful of quinghao immersed in two liters of water, wring out the juice, and drink it all.” It was so simple! The team had been boiling samples and the heat had damaged the active ingredients. Tu immediately modified their methods and on October 4, 1971, they found a formulation that proved 100 percent effective in curing malaria-infected mice, though it would take an additional six years to isolate the drug’s molecular structure. Tests in infected monkeys were also successful. The next step was testing humans. To move the process along as quickly as possible, Tu and her team volunteered themselves as test cases. By August of 1972, Tu was able to perform clinical trials of artemisinin on thirty malaria patients. Tu presented the drug at a World Health Organization meeting on malaria in 1981 and the Chinese Ministry of Health finally officially approved artemisinin in 1986, fifteen years after Project 523 began.
In the 1990s, artemisinin gradually began replacing previous generations of medicines that had lost their effectiveness. Artemisinin was effective against even the most stubborn strains of malaria. In severe cases where patients were hospitalized, artemisinin cut the mortality rate in half. World Health Organization statistics for 2013 showed that malaria deaths had fallen from about two million per year a decade earlier to an estimated 584,000.
There was some controversy attached to Tu’s 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, as hundreds of scientists had been involved. However, it was Tu herself who brought in the sweet wormwood plant and created a method for extracting the active ingredient, as well as leading the first human trials.
Frances Oldham Kelsey
A medical crisis need not be germ-based to spread dangerously. Beginning in 1960, tens of thousands of babies were born with improperly developed limbs, and, in some cases, malfunctioning eyes, ears, or other organs. It was a tragedy as had never been seen before, catastrophically striking families in more than forty countries, including Germany, Japan, and England. The cause of these birth defects was a new sedative called thalidomide, which had been approved to treat pregnant women for morning sickness. It seemed like a godsend, especially for women with hyperemesis gravidarum, which is like morning sickness gone nuclear, and can become a serious health problem. The studies done on this drug were limited in scope and did not reveal its devastating side effects. It was quickly taken off the market, but for the many babies who were hurt or killed, the damage was done.
So why were thalidomide birth defects rampant in Europe but rare in America? It was largely because of one woman, new drug reviewer Frances Oldham Kelsey. Born in 1914 in British Columbia, Kelsey earned both a bachelor and master of science from McGill University. In the mid-1930s, Kelsey wrote to Eugene Geiling, a researcher at the University of Chicago, asking to work in his lab and study for a doctorate. Dr. Geiling replied with an offer of a scholarship for “Mr. Oldham.” Thankfully, he still honored his offer when Ms. Oldham arrived.
In 1938, Oldham earned her PhD from the University of Chicago and would later join the faculty there. She married Dr. Fremont Ellis Kelsey, a fellow professor, in 1943 and the couple had two daughters, all while Frances Kelsey earned her medical degree. Kelsey moved to Washington, DC, to begin her long, distinguished career with the Food and Drug Administration, where she became chief of the Division of New Drugs, director of the Division of Scientific Investigations, and deputy for Scientific and Medical Affairs Office of Compliance.
Kelsey was assigned to review applications from pharmaceutical companies for drug approval. It was a job she was well-suited to, have already proven herself to be masterful detective. While earning her PhD in pharmacology, Kelsey helped pinpoint a toxic ingredient in another drug called elixir sulfanilamide. Elixir sulfanilamide was marketed as something of a cure-all, which should always raise an eyebrow. The drug was very bitter, so the manufacturer added a sweetener. That sweetener, Kelsey discovered, was antifreeze. The drug had already killed more than a hundred people by the time the FDA got it off the market.
Do not drink this.
While it’s imperative to keep antifreeze away from children and pets, it’s a wives’ tale that cats will drink it because of its sweet taste. Cats can’t taste sweet at all.
When the paperwork for thalidomide, sold under the brand name Kevadon, hit Kelsey’s desk in the fall of 1960, she was expected to approve it automatically, since it was already popular in Europe. Her critical eye, however, quickly spotted holes in the data “proving” that thalidomide was safe, and she rejected the application. The “results” in their application were more testimonials than quantifiable science, and the developers had failed to do a placental barrier test to show whether the drug would reach the fetus when taken by a pregnant woman. A chemist working under Kelsey who spoke German also pointed out a higher-than-acceptable number of translation errors in the English copy of the application. In something of a baptism by fire, the thalidomide application was the first Kelsey handled in her new position. There was significant push-back as the drug company lodged complaints against Kelsey with her superiors. Nevertheless, for the next fourteen months, she did not budge. In November 1961, Dr. Kelsey’s careful vigilance was vindicated when Kevadon was taken off the market in its native West Germany and in other countries soon after.
In the aftermath of thalidomide’s European release, thousands of children in Europe were born with partial limbs, blindness, deafness, and/or cognitive impairment. Those who did not die in utero, that is, which is thought to be four times as many. Thalidomide’s effects on fetal development are so dramatic and predictable that doctors can pinpoint in which week of pregnancy the mother took it by which fetal body system was affected. Kelsey’s steadfastness prevented the same from happening in the US. Sadly, this does not mean there were no “children of thalidomide” in the States. Drug reps had given out samples without FDA approval, but the US had only about 1 percent the number of cases seen abroad.
