The Curse of the Pharaoh
Plus 100 years of the BCG vaccine. Why fungal diseases will get worse. How Japan is making medals from recycled devices. And if we replayed the tape of life would we get humans again?
Ask anyone to name an Egyptian pharaoh and you are most likely to hear the name of the boy king Tutankhamun. Long steeped in mystery, aided by science we are learning more about this legendary figure.
Tutankhamun became pharaoh at the age of ten in 1333 BCE. He died a few years later at the age of 18 or 19. He has captivated interest since the discovery of his tomb in Egypt’s Valley of Kings by Howard Carter.
Was Tutankhamun’s tomb cursed? For anyone who has not seen The Mummy or it’s various sequels, the curse of the pharaohs is a curse that is allegedly cast on anyone who disturbs the tomb of a mummy. Stories of curses cast on those who disturb tombs had circulated since the 19th century, but they gathered steam after Carter’s discovery. Even Zawi Hawass, a prominent Egyptologist believed in the curse. But is it true?
Probably the earliest account of the curse of the pharaohs was the mysterious death of Lord Carnarvon, after entering the burial chamber of the pharaoh. Carnarvon had funded the expedition. His death had resulted from a series of unfortunate events: first he was bitten by a mosquito. Later, he slashed the bite by accident while shaving. The cut then became infected and resulted in blood poisoning compounded by pneumonia.
Overall, around twenty other people met with "untimely deaths" from various causes often attributed to the pharaoh’s curse. If you read through the chronology of events, the various symptoms of those who died, and when and how they died (as I have), it’s very difficult to draw any strand connecting them to opening the pharaoh's burial-chamber. And even if you could, correlation isn't causation.
However, Carnarvon probably didn’t die of anything in the tomb at all.
Writing in The Lancet, Ann Cox notes that four months had passed from entry until Carter noted that his benefactor was sick. The article concludes— “That Carnarvon's death had anything to do with Tutankhamen's tomb is, therefore, unlikely”.
But now I want to shift from the realm of history to science, and more specifically a mathematical calculation using the “curse of the pharaoh” as a metaphor.
The author is not suggesting that there is actually a curse, or even that Lord Carnarvon died because of an unnatural cause, but is using this story as a colorful story for a set of hypotheses.
Let’s say a bunch of explorers open a crypt that has been dormant for thousands of years. Or a group of scientists go to an isolated polar station where they discover viruses in ice cores. And then in an X-Files sort of way many of them die horribly. What’s the premise?
Could the curse be a pathogen? One of the most tantalizing stories involves disease-causing bacteria or molds that grow in isolation and once released kill everyone. Sylvain Gandon certainly seems to think so.
Infectious diseases are caused by parasites such as bacteria and viruses. Viruses in particular need hosts to replicate. Outside of hosts, they resemble non-living matter. In order to spread, a parasite needs to keep its host alive until its progeny can find new hosts. But what if the parasite can also survive in a dormant state outside the host?
And this is the basic concept here. The longer a disease causing bacteria or virus can survive in isolation outside of a host, the more deadly it gets when it is exposed to one.
Typically a highly virulent pathogen that cannot survive outside a host will die along with the host without spreading. But if the pathogen can lie dormant (say in in an ice core or a tomb for years) then it can tide through a longer time in the absence of an immediate host. That’s the explanation in Gandon’s paper on the curse of the pharaoh hypothesis and there’s some beautiful mathematics in it.
“If you’re not a climate reporter yet, you will be.”
Over at the Nieman Lab there’s a thoughtful story about how all reporters need to brush up on climate change because it resembles the pandemic in many ways. Climate change is no longer a topic for only reporters who cover science, politics, or the economy.
Male dragonflies are losing their wing-color because of climate change.
More bad news.
New research published in PNAS finds that male dragonflies are adapting to a warming climate by shedding more of their darker wing patterns. Females may no longer recognize their male counterparts. CNN has an accessible story about which you can read here.
Mucormycosis is only the tip of the (fungal) iceberg. Expect more fungal diseases.
My latest column for Hindustan Times deals tangentially with climate change. Mucormycosis has emerged as an epidemic within the COVID-19 pandemic in India. But even after the pandemic ends we will face threats from fungal diseases.
Fungi decimate insects such as bees. They infect plants in large numbers. Amphibians such as frogs are also susceptible. But humans and other mammals have been (mostly) spared until now because of our higher body temperature. All that may be changing due to climate change.
Two years ago, Arturo Casadevall (at Johns Hopkins) proposed that a new fungal disease that had only been discovered a decade prior and had since exploded simultaneously on three continents was caused by climate change. He outlined his hypothesis in mBio. But there was no proof at the time. Earlier this year, an environmental source of this fungal was found.
As I write in my piece:
Among fungal species, there are only a few variants that can tolerate warm mammalian core temperatures. This thermal gap has protected us.
But on the flipside, with global temperatures rising, heat tolerant variants are expected to flourish. As the difference between environmental temperatures and body temperature diminishes, we may face fungi that have the potential to cause new diseases in humans.
Casadevall hypothesized that Candida auris “may be the first example of a fungal species that has jumped the thermal barrier due to adapting to global warming,”
If the climate crisis selects fungal strains that thrive in the higher core temperatures of humans, the rise of fungal diseases is all but certain. Unfortunately, the mucormycosis epidemic is only the tip of the iceberg.
Japan is making Olympic medals from mobile phones
Japan is making 5,000 gold, silver, and bronze medals for the Olympics and Paralympics from obsolete electronic gadgets. You get 3-4 grams of gold for each ton of ore extracted from mines, and up to 350 grams from a ton of mobile phones. This is an extremely innovative solution and residents will be able to say that part of their old phones contributed to Olympic medals.
Replaying the tape of life
The noted evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould famously said that if we replayed the tape of life we wouldn’t get the same results. In other words, in this thought experiment, if we could go back in evolutionary time and then move forward again, we would turn out with vastly different life forms. Humans wouldn’t exist either because so many random events had to happen- such as the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs 65 million years ago- for us to evolve to our current state. Gould’s idea is known as evolutionary contingency, because outcomes are contingent on specific events.
The other idea is that of evolutionary determinism. Outcomes are determined in advanced based on the environmental constraints. This idea says, “sure if you replayed the tape again, you wouldn’t get the exact same organisms. But you might get similar ones.” This is because evolutionary space isn’t infinite there are enormous pressures to conform. A bird, bat, and insect wing aren’t the same, but they perform the same function. Nature finds a way to do the same thing over and over again.
Which is true? A review in Science a few years ago said both- we are both the outcome of random events and the invisible guiding hand of evolution.
Clearly, evolution can be both contingent and deterministic, and often in complicated and fascinating ways. Recognizing this mixed nature will allow future research to investigate how contingency and determinism interact.
Now, there’s research published in eLife that seems to tip the balance further in the direction of randomness. The research shows (on a small scale) that life processes are “unique products of a particular, unpredictable course of history set in motion by ancient chance events”.
100 years of the BCG vaccine
It has been a 100 years since the first person was vaccinated with the BCG vaccine (a vaccine that I and many others also received since then.) On July 18, 1921, at the Charité Hospital in Paris, doctors gave an oral dose of BCG to an infant whose mother had died of tuberculosis only hours after giving birth. No one knows who made the decision. The child had been exposed from many people, but never developed TB.
Calmette and Guérin started with a disease-causing bacterium. They found that passing it through ox bile and glycerol soaked potato slices weakened it. They would continue to pass it through potato slices, refreshing cultures every three weeks for around 10 years.
Even 100 years later, the vaccine developed by French bacteriologists Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin at the Pasteur Institute in Lille remains the primary means of preventing TB globally (even though it is not 100% effective). New vaccines may be on the way.
Will Computers Ever Think Like Human Beings?
This is a very engaging and funny lecture by Vint Cerf, one of the pioneers of the tech era. It touches on what AI applications can and can't do. I recommend it very highly.
Very interesting.