by Lewis, Dan
And others turn our stomachs into breweries.
Well, once at least.
Sometime in the late summer or early fall of 2013, a sixty-one-year-old Texas man walked into an emergency room drunk out of his mind. Nurses administered a Breathalyzer exam and determined that the patient’s blood-alcohol level was 0.37 (which can lead to serious impairment). Normally he’d be given some time to sober up. But there was one weird variable in this case: the man hadn’t been drinking. To make sure that he wasn’t sneaking a shot or two, doctors searched him for booze and, finding none, stuck him in a hospital room, alone, for twenty-four hours. He was given food like any other patient as medical professionals kept monitoring his blood-alcohol level. While people who had stopped drinking and eaten some food would sober up, the man actually got drunker. His blood-alcohol level went up 12 percent.
The cause was a microbe known as Saccharomyces cerevisiae, more commonly known as “baker’s yeast” or “brewer’s yeast.” As the Environmental Protection Agency notes, not only is the microorganism typically harmless, but it’s also particularly useful. It has been used for centuries as a leavening agent for bread and a fermenting agent for alcohol. Saccharomyces cerevisiae infections are unheard of, as the microbe almost always passes through the human body without issue.
In this case, though, something was amiss. As NPR reported, a significant amount of Saccharomyces cerevisiae had taken residence in the patient’s gut. The reasons why were unclear, but the result—termed “auto-brewery syndrome”—was striking. Whenever the man ate anything starchy—“a bagel, pasta, or even soda” are the examples NPR gave—the man was also feeding the Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The microbe churned through the carbohydrates and released ethanol as a byproduct. The man was brewing beer in his own stomach and getting drunk from it.
The two doctors who discovered this curiosity published a paper on the topic in the International Journal of Clinical Medicine, but as others have pointed out, the doctors didn’t perform a controlled study nor did they have more than one person—and therefore more than one data point—to work from. Why the Saccharomyces cerevisiae took root in the man’s stomach remains unknown, but it’s treatable—an antifungal medicine called fluconazole will kill off the intrusive microbes. (Sorry—despite this, fluconazole probably won’t help you sober up after a night out.)
BONUS FACT
Craft brewing is apparently of particular importance to the people of the state of Oregon. How do we know this? Because in May 2013, the Oregon legislature passed a law making Saccharomyces cerevisiae the state’s official microbe, in light of the microbe’s work in creating beer. (Every state needs an official microbe, right?)
LIQUOR, SICKER
THE NEFARIOUS PLOT TO ENFORCE PROHIBITION
The Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution went into effect in 1919, and early the next year Prohibition began when the Volstead Act became law. The sale, manufacture, or transportation of alcohol became unlawful and would remain illegal until 1933, when the Twenty-First Amendment repealed the Eighteenth. During the interim, however, alcohol-related illnesses and deaths were common. These maladies were the byproduct of speakeasies and moonshine, both of which were cloaked from the law, and therefore the injured were out of the reach of legal remedy.
There was another cause of alcohol-related death during Prohibition: poisoning by the U.S. government.
With alcohol illegal, Prohibition created a huge opportunity for organized crime to enter the market. The lucrative business of bootlegging (the transport of illegal alcohol) created an economic foundation for Al Capone and his gang in Chicago as well as other notorious criminals. Because the sale of all alcohol was illegal, it made good business sense for criminals to focus on hard liquor, which could be made from (legal) industrial ethyl alcohol and therefore had a large profit margin. The problem: industrial alcohol was basically grain alcohol mixed with a solvent or two, making it undrinkable.
The bootleggers hired chemists to fix that, and the chemists succeeded. Before long, illegal but barely palatable booze, derived from industrial alcohol, was flowing throughout speakeasies and the like all across the United States.
The Department of the Treasury, which was charged with enforcement of the Volstead Act, had a solution: They added even more poison to the mix. The bootleggers were unable to make the alcohol entirely safe for drinking, but of course, many bootleggers were murderous criminals—and they sold the liquor anyway. The Treasury’s plan failed to stem the tide of alcohol flowing in the streets but did sadly manage to claim the lives of as many as 10,000 people.
BONUS FACT
Prohibition turned many citizens into everyday criminals, many by way of homemade wine. Grocers could sell grape concentrate, an item that in and of itself lacked any alcohol. However, if treated in a certain way, grape concentrate would ferment, turning it into wine. In order to “avoid” this outcome, many grape concentrate packages were labeled with a warning—outlining exactly what not to do in order to ensure that your grape concentrate did not ferment.
VODKA AND COLA
HOW TO SMUGGLE COKE INTO SOVIET RUSSIA
In 1992, with an incredible amount of fanfare, Pepsi announced Crystal Pepsi, a clear cola beverage aimed at revolutionizing the soft-drink world. The drink did well initially and even spurred Coca-Cola to come out with its own clear cola product, called Tab Clear. Neither beverage would survive commercially for very long. Crystal Pepsi was off shelves in the United States by the end of 1993; according to Fast Company, one of the executives behind the concept later admitted that the product just didn’t taste good. Tab Clear, somehow, persevered into the middle of 1994. Its marketing was suspect—for some reason, it was only sold in a can, a curious choice for a beverage whose main selling point was the fact that it was translucent.
Given these failures, one would assume that these massive soft-drink companies had never before attempted to make a cola that wasn’t caramel-colored. But well before Crystal Pepsi and Tab Clear came another different-colored cola, informally called White Coke.
In the 1940s, the Marshal of the Soviet Union (the de facto highest rank in the Soviet military), a man named Georgy Zhukov, took a liking to Coca-Cola. However, Coke was symbolic of America, of capitalism, etc., and Zhukov—given his position of prominence—couldn’t be seen drinking the stuff. Through his American counterpart General Mark W. Clark (who in turn took the question to President Truman), Zhukov asked that the Coca-Cola Company develop a cola that visually resembled vodka. This way, the New York Times reported, he could be seen drinking it whenever he liked, without risking the ire of Joseph Stalin. (Apparently, it was okay for Soviet military leaders to have a vodka.) Coke complied.
For years, Coke provided the cola to Zhukov and somehow managed to avoid most of the red tape that defined importations into the USSR during that period. The cola was never introduced to consumers in the States.
BONUS FACT
In 1990, the Mars candy company introduced PB Max, a cookie topped with peanut butter, and the whole thing covered in milk chocolate. Like Crystal Pepsi and Tab Clear, PB Max did not last very long—it was discontinued a few years later. Unlike the colas, though, PB Max was a commercial success. Why was it discontinued? According to an anonymous executive cited by Joël Glenn Brenner in his bestselling book The Emperors of Chocolate, the Mars family has a distaste for peanut butter and opted to take PB Max out of their product line, despite its substantial contributions to the family’s coffers. (This makes sense; Mars’s peanut butter M&M’s, while common now, are relatively new compared to Reese’s Pieces.)
OUTSIDE THE UNION
THE SOVIET FAMILY LOST TO HISTORY
In 1978, a team of Soviet geologists were scanning the Siberian wilderness a hundred miles or so north of the Mongolian border. The area was an undeveloped wilderness—no roads, no electricity, no reservoirs or running water. Like most of Siberia, it was also uninhabited. Which made the geologists’ discovery rather unex
pected. While flying above the taiga, they saw, below them, a house.
An inhabited house.
During the reign of Peter the Great, a group of fundamentalist members of the Russian Orthodox Church known as Old Believers were oppressed by the tsarist government. Many fled eastward to the edges of Siberia, hoping that isolation would buy them a respite from persecution. For two centuries, this worked well, but when the Bolsheviks took power, the few remaining Old Believers scattered, many going to Bolivia.
However, one family pressed further into Siberia. They were the people discovered by the helicopter pilot scanning the landscape below. Living in a ramshackle, hand-built wooden house was a family of five—a father and four children—and they had been there a long, long time. In 1936, Karp Lykov, his wife, Akulina, and their two children, Savin and Natalia, fled after Karp’s brother was killed by Communists. They began a new life for themselves in the middle of nowhere. Akulina gave birth to two more children, son Dmitri and daughter Agafia, in the 1940s (yes, while alone in the taiga).
The family survived on a diet mostly consisting of pine nuts, wild berries, and some rye and potatoes harvested from what they brought with them, but those were meager even during good times. In the 1950s and into the early 1960s, weather and wildlife seemed to conspire against the Lykovs, and they endured a famine. Akulina died from starvation in 1961. Incredibly, all four children were literate and relatively knowledgeable about the outside world. They even knew how to write; as Smithsonian magazine reported, their mother taught them the skill “using sharpened birch sticks dipped into honeysuckle juice as pen and ink.”
The Lykovs lasted four decades in the wilderness before encountering another human being. While most of the world was struggling with war in Europe, the Lykovs were entirely unaware of the deaths of millions of their countrymen and others. They knew nothing of the Cold War, the Space Race, or of the other scientific, cultural, or political changes throughout the Soviet Union. Karp did, however, show a surprisingly strong appreciation for how technology had advanced. He noticed in the heavens something he attributed to people sending star-like fires into space. What he actually saw were satellites moving across the evening sky.
After being discovered by the geologists in 1978, the Lykovs decided to accept some assistance from the outside world but otherwise chose to remain in their log cabin more than 100 miles away from another human home. In 1981, three of the children—Dmitri, Savin, and Natalia—died from unrelated causes, leaving Karp and his daughter Agafila. Karp passed in 1988, then in his late eighties. Agafila, as of 2013, lives alone, still at the only home she’s ever known.
BONUS FACT
Peter the Great really hated beards, seeing them as a throwback to Russia’s antiquated history. His solution: a beard tax. Pay it, and you got to keep your beard; otherwise, you had to shave. To help enforce the tax, bearded men (who paid up) were issued a coin as a receipt, which unshaven men had to produce to avoid further fines and harassments. But the tax was short-lived—it proved unpopular and resulted in riots as many refused to either pay or shave.
THE HOLLOW NICKEL
THE SPY WHO CAUGHT HIMSELF
In May 1957, a Finnish man named Reino Häyhänen walked into the United States embassy in Paris. He was there to surrender himself and, ultimately, request amnesty. He was on his way to Moscow but did not want to go there. He claimed he was a Soviet spy and that he was being recalled to the Soviet Union—but he wanted to go back to America, where he had worked as a KGB agent for the previous five years. After U.S. authorities spent a few days checking into his story, he was sent back to the United States. On May 10, 1957, he arrived in New York where he underwent an intense examination by the FBI.
After verifying Häyhänen’s identity, the FBI looked to him to solve a puzzle that had been befuddling the agency for four years. According to the Bureau’s website (which has a collection of “famous cases and criminals”), one day a newspaper delivery boy discovered a strange-feeling nickel during the course of his daily business. When he dropped it on the ground, the nickel split open. It was hollow. Inside it was a tiny photograph of a list of five-digit numbers. The paperboy, suspecting something fishy (this was the height of the Cold War, after all), brought the coin to the Feds.
The Bureau was baffled. Hollow coins were commonly used by illusionists, but this one was different from anything the FBI or novelty shop owners had seen before. The coin was made from opposite sides of two real coins, somehow connected together. There was a pin-sized hole in front, which the intended recipient could use to pop the halves apart, but the hole was designed to avoid detection and would not have allowed an illusionist easy access to the item held within. Besides, one novelty store shopkeeper told agents, the hollowed-out area was too small for any magic trick. This seemed to be an encoded message, and the intended recipient wasn’t the paperboy.
The good news for the FBI? The Bureau, with information given to them by Häyhänen, was able to decode the message. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very helpful. It was a letter from the KGB to a Soviet spy who was placed in New York, welcoming him to the United States and explaining some early details of his mission, including where he could get some money to start a new life in America. But it did not help the FBI identify who wrote the note nor its intended recipient.
As it turned out, the G-men didn’t have to. Upon further investigation, the FBI declared that it not only knew who the intended recipient was, but it also knew exactly where to find him. In a strange coincidence, the note was intended for Häyhänen himself.
With Häyhänen’s continued assistance, the FBI identified a Soviet spy named Rudolf Ivanovich Abel still living in the States. Abel was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison and was ultimately shipped back to Russia in 1962, in exchange for an American pilot who was being held as a prisoner of war.
BONUS FACT
Over a two-week period in 2010, U.S. authorities arrested ten Russian spies. After about ten days, the spies were sent back to Russia in exchange for Americans captured abroad. Why didn’t the FBI prosecute instead? According to Slate, doing so would require the FBI to disclose, to the courts and therefore the public, the tactics used by these spies. In doing so, the Russian spy agency would know which tactics were no longer viable, and could adjust accordingly. Returning the spies allows the FBI to maintain the secrets to its secrets.
ACOUSTIC KITTY
THE PURR-FECT COLD WAR SPY
For most of the latter half of the twentieth century, the United States and the Soviet Union were leading adversaries in the political and military struggle known as the Cold War. Neither side wanted to overlook a potential advance in technology or espionage, and in the 1960s the CIA found a marriage of the two that could have been a potential game-changer.
That innovation? A bionic spy cat named the Acoustic Kitty.
According to former CIA agent turned author Victor Marchetti, the CIA had developed a way to, literally, wire a cat so that it could be used in espionage missions. The CIA surgically implanted a power supply into the cat, as well as inserting wires going into its brain and its ears. A microphone was layered into its ears and an antenna through its tail. The implanted device was able to determine when the cat was aroused or hungry and suppress those urges, allowing it to carry out its mission—cuddle up to some Soviet officials and listen to their conversations. The entire operation, from start until its end, cost the government somewhere in the ballpark of $20 million and took about five years to develop.
To test Acoustic Kitty, a surveillance van drove up to the test subjects and released the cat, which, again according to Marchetti, made its way across the street unnoticed. Unnoticed, that is, by an oncoming taxi cab, which struck the cat, killing it immediately.
Soon thereafter the CIA decided to drop the spy cat program.
BONUS FACT
In 1995, the United States issued a patent to a pair of Virginia inventors for a “method of exercising a cat.” That method, as drafted in pa
tent number 5,443,036, is by playing with the cat with a laser pointer. The patent expired in 2007.
DOGMATIC CATASTROPHES
THE DANGERS OF PET OWNERSHIP
Cats and dogs are popular house pets in the United States. Roughly 35–45 percent of U.S. households own at least one dog (data from several sources varies), and a similar range of households own at least one cat. There are probably well more than 100 million Americans who have a Whiskers or Fido (with hopefully more interesting names) living in their homes, providing affection and companionship.
And an omnipresent source of danger.
When you live with these types of pets, your floors aren’t entirely your domain. There’s always a chance that your puppy will run through your legs on her way to fetch a ball, that your cat will curl up in the middle of the floor and take a nap, that either will leave a toy or food bowl somewhere other than where it is supposed to be. Foreign objects or four-legged friends hanging out by your feet can lead to stumbles, trips, and in some cases, bad falls.
That’s an obvious risk—but how much of one? It may be worse than you’d think.
In the mid-2000s, epidemiologists at the Centers for Disease Control realized that while these pets were “always underfoot,” in the words of the lead researcher, Dr. Judy Stevens, no one had tried to quantify the associated dangers. Dr. Stevens and team looked at emergency-room reports from 2001 to 2006. They found that, over the course of that five-year period, more than 86,000 ER visits were due to pets or pet-related causes. That’s two visits every hour, twenty-four hours a day, over five years. This number doesn’t include less serious injuries that do not require outside medical assistance, at least not immediately, suggesting that the number of everyday, commonplace incidents is significantly higher.