14 highlights
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The noted evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould famously said that if we replayed the tape of life we wouldn’t get the same results.
-
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.”
-
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.
-
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.