Has the time come to use osteoporosis drugs for Ebola? To quote Mary McCarthy’s Pokey, “Who would have thunk it?”
3.
Zika, Kale, and Calligraphy: Ricky Jay and Matthias Buchinger
Phocomelia (from Gr. phōkē ‘seal’ + melos ‘limb.’) = limbs reduced to a very small volume and hidden under the integument like seals’.
—Isidore Geoffroy Sainte-Hilaire (1836)
Dr. Schuler-Faccini [is] now focused on [describing] the specific brain abnormalities of [Zika-]affected babies, as well as other associated defects, including neurological outcomes, joint abnormalities, and face characteristics.
—Teratology Society (June 2016)
FETAL ABNORMALITIES CAUSED by the mosquito-borne Zika virus first came to public attention in January 2016, the same month that many of us learned of a “29-inch-tall phocomelic overachiever” named Matthias Buchinger (1674–1739). For this we can thank Ricky Jay, a popular magician of our day who found his avatar in decades of “Peregrinations in Search of the ‘Little Man of Nuremberg.’” Ricky Jay paid a fitting tribute to his hero in an exhibit of his collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which accompanied a richly illustrated, companion volume. Jay has assembled a cabinet of graphic curiosities by and about this phocomelic overachiever, replete with portraits, broadsides, family trees, and coats of arms. Several advertise the Buchinger feats of skill at magic, musketry, skittles, and musical performance; most bear the telltale signature, “Matthias Buchinger born without hands or feet.” Jay has the credentials to make Buchinger matter: Charles McGrath wrote in the New York Times that many consider Jay the “greatest sleight-of-hand artist alive, as well as a scholar, a historian, a collector of curiosities.”
JAY HAS WRITTEN ABOUT BUCHINGER BEFORE, as one in a gallery of curious historical characters. In his 2016 volume Jay addresses Buchinger’s mastery of micrography—the art of writing texts almost invisible to the naked eye—and explains how he accumulated a treasury of calligraphy by this tiny conjurer who had “two excrescences growing from the shoulder-blades, more resembling the fins of a fish than arms of a man.” A connoisseur’s passion convinced Jay that there was always more Buchinger material to be collected. His quest led him to dealers, print experts, and fans of micrography on both sides of the Atlantic. At one auction, Jay and Nicolas Barker of the British Museum competed for a grand collection but, because of its cost, were forced to divide the material. Jay tells us, “This proved surprisingly easy, as I took all the materials of armless calligraphers and Nicolas received the work of calligraphers conventionally digited.”
Enlarged images in Jay’s book show how Buchinger cunningly wove miniature texts into the crannies of calendars, portraits, and coats of arms. Two high-resolution images are exemplary. In Buchinger’s posthumous portrait of Queen Anne (1718), limned in ink on vellum, the curls of the queen’s hair are formed by micrographic letters that painstakingly spell out three chapters from the Book of Kings. In a stippled engraving from a 1724 self-portrait, Buchinger used micrographic lettering to form his florid wig: the text spells out seven complete psalms and the Lord’s Prayer!
Jay tells us that viewers “respond to Buchinger’s micrography as they do to the performance of magic: when they are stunned, or stumped, they seek an explanation.” Biologists will not be surprised that Robert Hooke’s name pops up here; Buchinger lived in the golden age of the microscope. Hooke’s novel images of cellules in Micrographia (1675) and Antonj van Leeuwenhoek’s pictures of “animalcules” in semen (1677) may well have prepared Buchinger’s patrons for a new world of magic in magnification.
JAY WAS DRAWN TO BUCHINGER not only for the little man’s skill at micrographics but also by the story of a fellow conjurer who performed sleight-of-hand without hands: “magical tricks, performances on a variety of musical instruments, trick shots with pistols and swords, and bowling.” From his childhood in Bavaria, where he was called a “thimble,” Buchinger became increasingly famous over Western Europe as a skilled performer. He was a whiz at card play, swordplay, and even at dancing the hornpipe in a Scottish kilt. He entertained audiences at street fairs and manor houses, public inns and royal seats; he appeared in venues ranging from Leipzig to Dublin, the Tuileries in Paris to the Court of Saint James’s in London. A 1726 broadside described him as “The Greatest German Living”—this in the reign of the Hanoverian George I.
Equally surprising was Buchinger’s private life. Jay has quipped that this dwarf without arms and feet had at least one operating appendage: he managed to wed four wives and claim fatherhood of fourteen children. Buchinger’s somewhat Freudian drawing of his family tree is neatly reproduced in Jay’s book. Dated 1734, the two-page cutout depicts the artist’s children—eight living, six dead; born in Zurich, London, or Dublin—as fruit hanging from the branches of a tall, thick paternal trunk. The tree is solidly planted on rootless lumps of soil atop the steles of four women, three dead and one living. Tiny flowers sprinkle the field, micrographic gametes in a pictorial autobiography. That “Greatest German” broadside described it thus:
Great Trunk of Man be not ashamed
That Nature has thy Body maim’d
The Oak could not the Trophy bear
Till that the branches cropped were,
Nor would thy fame hae been so great,
Had Nature formed thee quite compleat.
As for that “Greatest German” claim of fourteen seminal trophies, his contemporary Johann Sebastian Bach (1785–1850) had Buchinger beat. Formed “quite compleat” and conventionally digited, Bach fathered twenty children with two wives and had time left over for the Mass in B Minor. But Buchinger over his lifetime entertained audiences far more diverse in rank and geography than did the composer—and with neater penmanship to boot.
Readers figuring out how this “Body maim’d” became a paterfamilias will also wonder how Buchinger mastered miniscule calligraphy without the aid of optical gadgets. Ricky Jay was also puzzled by this and posed the question to several eminent artists. Their verdict came out on the side of lenses: Art Spiegelman, Erich Fischl, David Hockney, and Ed Ruscha guessed that Buchinger used magnifying lenses, possibly fixed to a ring-stand apparatus not uncommon at the time. Jay, writing “as a magician” concludes that Buchinger probably did ordinary lettering in public—a stunt in itself without digits—but worked out micrography in private, with magnifying lenses.
“Sure he did,” Jay concludes skeptically, while remaining a fan of a fellow magician and author whose fame far exceeded his phocomelic bodily form.
RICKY JAY PAYS MORE THAN PASSING ATTENTION to that bodily form, another reason why biologists will want to read the book. Evolution dictates that in phylogeny, fins come before limbs: in phocomelia, limb ontogeny stops cold. Jay quotes eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authorities who supposed that phocomelia results from “maternal imprinting,” then defined as “a traumatic stimulus encountered by any pregnant woman.” Local officials even banned Buchinger from performing at fairgrounds, worried that women frightened by his appearance might bear children similarly malformed. It turns out that the idea of maternal imprinting isn’t all that far-fetched. Zika, rubella, and other viruses linger in the tissues of the fetus and cause permanent, if not fatal, deformities. But I’d bet it wasn’t Zika but a teratogen that did Buchinger in.
Epigenetic effects of thalidomide and vitamin A on our inner fish serve as a model of what happened to the little man from Nuremberg. Sainte-Hilaire’s phocomelia was an anomaly for over a century after its description, but in 1957 along came thalidomide. Soon after the drug was approved in Europe to treat morning sickness in pregnancy, reports began to appear in medical journals of babies born with flipper-like limbs; the tabloids went wild. The drug was finally banned for pregnant women worldwide in 1961, thanks mainly to the courageous Frances Kelsey of the Food and Drug Administration, who had blocked its approval in the United States. Unfortunately, by then more than ten thousand children, mostly in Ge
rmany and Britain, had been born with drug-induced defects of their extremities; those who reached adulthood look very much like twenty-first-century Buchingers (an image of the German filmmaker Niko von Glasow is on Wikipedia). Work on the molecular pharmacology of thalidomide by Neil Vargesson has implicated a metabolite of the drug as a possible culprit and permitted discovery of the way its partner in tissues, the protein cereblon, acts to blunt limb development.
Both before and after thalidomide, another culprit has been implicated in phocomelia—at least in the lab. Following the work of Honor B. Fell and her students at the Stangeways Research Laboratory in Cambridge, studies of how high doses of vitamin A affect embryonic limb development have moved to the molecular level, as I described in an early paper. Excess vitamin A affects “maternal imprinting,” but not by frightening expectant mothers. Recent studies, such as Sheikh et al., show that high doses of vitamin A produce changes in stem cell differentiation, acting in part by epigenetic modifications of pathways that dictate how fins become limbs in the course of evolution.
How would hypervitaminosis A account for limbless Buchinger? Prompted by the happily digressive tone of Ricky Jay’s book, I’ll make a bold suggestion. I doubt that Buchinger’s mother munched on too many carrots; I’d put my money on an overdose of Gruenkohl—green kale, cabbage, or kraut. Kale, a staple of the Bavarian diet, has the highest vitamin A content of any food available in Buchinger’s time. Could a Bavarian mother have been imprinted by an overdose of kraut? That notion seems as improbable as four wives and fourteen children fathered by a “little man from Nuremberg.” A trendy German website, facetiously named Krautkanal, celebrates Buchinger’s “improbable” exhibit in New York, linking kraut virally to the dwarf. There is, of course, another improbable link between viruses and sauerkraut, which requires lactic-acid bacteria for its fermentation. Bacterial strains that have survived phage infection are the fittest for the job: to no one’s surprise, CRISPR keeps the sauerkraut sour.
4.
Ike on Orlando: “Every Gun Is a Theft”
Every gun that is made . . . signifies, in the final sense, a theft from the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953)
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower (1961)
If there weren’t so many of these [handguns] around, why, maybe you could be a little more peaceful.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower (1958)
IN THE DECADE OF SANDY HOOK, San Bernardino, and Orlando, the warnings of our thirty-fourth president against gun violence have been all but forgotten. TV commercials have featured car ads urging us to “celebrate Dwight D. Eisenhower’s interstate highway system,” while a film, The Monuments Men, praised Eisenhower’s role in saving art treasures from Nazi plunder. Not to be outdone, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, and the Smithsonian Institution displayed documents and works of art honoring Eisenhower. The Metropolitan Museum made him a Fellow for Life, citing him as “soldier, diplomat and statesman, through whose wisdom and foresight irreplaceable art treasures were saved for future generations.” With all that attendant publicity, The Monuments Men posted the third-highest box-office results of its opening weekend, trailing only The Lego Movie and RoboCop. “President Eisenhower might have liked Robo-Cop,” the critic Mick LaSalle commented, “because its villain was the same as his—the military-industrial complex.”
Not a word about Ike’s warning about the “hopes of its children” in the Sandy Hooks and Orlandos to come: “Every gun is a theft!”
Ike targeted other villains as well, including Joe McCarthy and his gang of rabid anticommunists. Ike came to mind after a gun-toting director of the National Rifle Association accused President Obama of being a “communist-nurtured subhuman mongrel.” Ike had cautioned my graduating class of 1950 at Columbia College, “Let’s not be stupid enough to fall into that grave error. Let’s not call anybody a Communist who may be just a little bit brighter than ourselves.”
When Eisenhower was first elected, in 1952, Senator McCarthy was riding high. Biographer Jim Newton reported that two years later, after the Army–McCarthy hearings, which Ike quarterbacked, the president could quip, “It’s no longer McCarthyism. It’s McCarthywasm.”
SIX MONTHS AFTER HIS INAUGURATION IN 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower kept his election pledge by ending the Korean War. He had argued against any land war in Asia: “This world in arms is not spending money alone,” he explained. “The cost of one modern heavy bomber is a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. . . . It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.” Not only bricks and mortar were at stake: the Korean War had taken 54,246 American lives and cost 320 billion of today’s dollars. Ike would have appreciated a recent report from Brown University’s Eisenhower Research Project—a name chosen to honor Ike’s warning against a burgeoning military-industrial complex in the United States. The project reported that, in the first decade after 9/11, our wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan had killed at least 225,000 people overall, among them 6,000 U.S. military deaths. Those wars have cost the United States between $3.2 and $4 trillion, including medical care and disability for current and future war veterans.
But it’s not only guns abroad that kill Americans and rob us of our treasure. Would that Ike were around today to warn us against the non–military-industrial complex! Deaths and injuries due to gun violence have been estimated to cost our economy $40 billion annually. Meanwhile, ammunition manufacturers made a projected $993 million in profits on sales of $11.7 billion in 2013. That’s over $400 billion for the decade on sales of $10 trillion, at a cost of 320,000 lives per year. Every gun is a theft: there have been more deaths from gun violence in the United States since 9/11 than all civilian and military deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran combined. This level of violence, unique to the United States, constitutes a major public health hazard.
IN 1955, IKE HONORED JONAS SALK for sparing countless thousands of American parents from the “agonizing fears of the annual epidemic of poliomyelitis.” Kids were mainly at risk. There had been 38,741 cases of polio with 1,620 deaths in the previous year and an estimated death rate of 1 per 100,000. The White House established an advisory committee that was given broad executive power to assure fair, nationwide distribution of vetted lots of the scarce vaccine.
Well, these days we have an annual epidemic of gun violence, with a death rate ten times that of polio in 1954 and with twenty-fold more people killed each year. But in terms of public health, we are still at the pre-Salk level when it comes to gunshot violence. We know what causes the disease (bullets), we know the vector (guns, rifles, assault weapons, etc.), and we know where in the body the injuries lodge (watch any episode of NCIS). We actually know more about this condition than we know about threats such as cancer of the prostate or leukemia.
We also know some of the scoial factors involved. In the United States, kids are at risk: think Columbine and Sandy Hook. The death rate of blacks in the Unites States from firearms violence is twice that of the general population, with black youngsters ages15–24 particularly susceptible. Britain has a death rate from gun violence of 0.23; in the Bahamas, it’s 22.2. If one compares two cities, Seattle and Vancouver, which have similar populations and overall crime rates, the Washingtonians were 4.8 times more likely to be killed with a handgun than their neighbors to the north. The Canadians have strict handgun control laws. We have a few clues to what might blunt the epidemic here in the United States: it’s clear that the more gun dealers there are in any city, the more firearm deaths are recorded. It’s also well documented that the more rigorous firearm laws are in any given state, the lower the rate of firearm fatalities. Conclusion: stay away from places with lots of guns, lots of gun dealers, and weak gun control laws. Avoid gun-toting Rocker/NRA bullies who still
call President Obama a mongrel. But that advice is on a par with 1954 public health warnings to avoid E. coli–infested swimming pools during a polio epidemic.
EVEN BEFORE HIS NAMING OF THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX, Ike had a solid history of spotting bullies in the act of plunder. On May 26, 1944, eleven days before D-day, General of the Armies Dwight D. Eisenhower issued an unusual proclamation, quoted in full in Robert Edsel’s The Monuments Men. Hoping to avoid the destruction of cultural heirlooms in the battle for Hitler’s Fortress Europe, Ike gave his troops a clear command: “Inevitably, in the path of our advance will be found historical monuments and cultural centers which symbolize to the world all that we are fighting to preserve. It is the responsibility of every commander to protect and respect these symbols whenever possible.” Eisenhower’s command was widely respected; it also served as the marching order for the Monuments Men. Ike and his crew of GI monument wardens knew that they were dealing with art-hoarding Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and that amateur dauber, Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler. In consequence, as Allied troops fought their way from the Channel beaches to the doors of Berlin, the Monuments Men paid attention not only to monuments but also to portable treasures filched from occupied countries and Germany’s own citizens. Thanks to that D-day order, and to the devotion and service of the Monuments Men, thousands of treasures were saved from destruction.
The Fevers of Reason Page 3