The near full Moon creeps toward zenith on the West Coast, and somewhere over the lonely Pacific Ocean, Midnight Breaks: The Witching Hour is at hand. Halloween is just around the corner, and soon homemade ghoulish gals and junior ghosts will prowl US streets seeking a sugary or salty snack. All in fun, all for show. What a delightful tradition Halloween is. In that spirit, gather thee round Kossacks, dim the lights, and hear a true Dark Tale from the DarkSyde.
Way back in the 'good ole days' of 1347, those carefree times of wanton slaughter, religious torture, and massive infant mortality, another abomination arose far more gruesome than any mere manmade method of killing. It swept across Eurasia, smothering it like a thick blanket, leaving many of the dark, foreboding icons we’ve come to associate with All Hallow’s Eve still hidden and lurking in its deadly wake. Make no mistake: this thriller is not the modern costumed version of a fake fright night; children adorned with made up faces highlighted in dark eye shadow with blackened glossy fingernails. Oh no, that is all just a game my friends.
This was a real Horror Show premiering in the Middle Ages written by Mother Nature gone mad. At its crescendo, entire communities were abandoned to the afflicted and dying; some burned to the ground intentionally or by accident. Leaving animated quasi-zombies oozing dark blood through cracked, blistered skin, stumbling hopelessly through the ruins and streets in mobs, dying en masse, with chunks of dead meat dropping off their disfigured bodies, flies buzzing around them, maggots already crawling through the flesh of the barely living. At times, useless eyes bulged or dangled from bleeding sockets escorted by clouds of gnats. If a team of demented bioweapons researchers led by Stephen King possessed by the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe had set out to conjure up a more terrifying apocalyptic vision, they would have been hard pressed to spin a more macabre fiction, than this sickening historical reality: The Black Death.
No one knew from whence it came or when it might depart. And while science can now explain the basics of infectious disease, what few people understand is, it’s only a theory ...
In ancient Greece, the precursors of science first flowered. But the best of these deep thinkers, while successful at resolving many puzzles, made a crucial error in their methodology. Many of them, caught up in the beauty of formal systems and symbolic logic, sensed that the profound truths of nature could be deduced simply by thinking carefully about them. Whether that is possible or not remains a robust field of study in modern philosophy. But around the time the Black Death was tearing across Europe and Asia, the groundwork was already being laid for a shortcut to innovation that bypassed the purely abstract. The new way of approaching mysteries and formulating solutions was an unlikely marriage between the hands on craftsman and the elite intellectual thinker. Today we call it the Scientific Method.
The first step in the method was to propose a hypothesis. A proposal carried with it implications or predictions. Those predictions would then be tested by controlled experiment. Over time, as a particular hypothesis made predictions that were confirmed again and again, eventually it would be accepted that some degree of "truth" was represented by the hypothesis and it would graduate to a theory.
In the case of disease, around the time of the Black Death, there were three basic explanations: supernatural, spontaneous generation, and tiny animals. Supernatural explanations amount to magic and as such, they aren‘t testable. If for instance the universe was created with magic, and made to appear ancient when it fact it was created last Wednesday, complete with intact memories and past monthly water bills in the mail, there is no test that could differentiate it from a universe that really was ancient.
Disease caused by spores, first referred to as germs hundreds of years ago, was based on the hypothesis that life came in forms so small they could not be seen. And maybe, such invisible entities could infest living tissue and bring sickness to the healthy body. Like tiny worms crawling, wiggling, and growing in stale bread. But how could it be tested when the first decent instruments for directly observing such organisms, and the whole of microbiology, lay years in the future?
Early researchers figured that by boiling beef broth or other potential growth media, they would kill anything that lived therein. And so, by allowing some samples of sterilized material exposure to the open air, while keeping others isolated, comparisons could be made. And, if growth did occur in the experimental samples, further tests could be done using filters of various sizes to protect the samples from the tiniest creatures then known, like gnats or fleas, thus eliminating all but the smallest critters as a source of infection.
Not long after, the microscope was refined, and peering through those first crude lenses, scientists were astonished to find entire ecosystems. The scope and breadth of microbial ecologies were as rich as any found in a rain forests or coral reef. The study of the new diminutive organisms, called microorganisms, exploded onto the scientific stage like an atomic bomb.
For decade after decade, scientific literature was rife first with new sketches of creatures of dazzling diversity and complexity, and then photographs. After millions of man hours, thousands upon thousands of experiments, the new micro-biologists built up a data base of germs. And slowly, specific microorganisms were found in association with certain diseases. The Germ Hypothesis of Disease became the Germ Theory. Contrary to popular misunderstanding, it remains a theory to this day. In light of the new theory, many scientists thought back to the dark days of plague still infamous in scientific history. It was clear the Germ Theory best explained the stomach churning signs and horrific symptoms reported during the great plagues of London. But what germ specifically caused the Black Death?
The most likely primary culprit is a bacteria called Yersinia pestis carried by fleas clinging to rats. But Bubonic Plague alone cannot explain the recorded data. The pandemic that rolled across and flattened the Old World showed similarities at times with anthrax, smallpox, typhus, tuberculosis, and maybe even ebola. It is now thought that the Black Death was a nightmarish nexus of several endemic human pathogens that worked together in various combinations. Yersinia likely weakened the human immune system, and then other bugs flooded in, free to evolve into more virulent strains in their sick hosts. At least half a dozen diseases operating in synergistic concert best explain the geographical patterns and symptoms of the Black Death. As with any plague, some people were resistant. And those lucky few, possessing the prized genes conferring that immunity or resistance were enough to ensure survival of the human race.
Whatever the cause, between a quarter and half the population was wiped out in just a couple of years with large European cities especially hard hit. This had profound effects on the structure of feudal society which echo into our own era. Some argue that the middle class rose as a direct result of common labor suddenly commanding a premium in the aftermath. Cultural icons reach well into our high-tech antiseptic world today: the robed spectre of the Grim Reaper, zombie movies, the Goth subculture with pasty faces and painted on bruises, and Monty Python's "Bring out your Dead," being just a few notable examples that can trace at least some of their roots back to the Great Plagues.
The role this all too real horror story may have played in recent history goes well beyond cheesy sci-fi movies or local fashion trends. Populations that developed resistance to the spooky brew of the Black Death were also resistant to other disease. Improved sailing ships opened up the world to exploration and cultures began clashing, globally. The era of the great European wars began in earnest. But the most decisive battles may have occurred at the microscopic level, carried out by tiny bacteria and viruses in the blood streams of combatants who had no idea what they were carrying, or why they were dying.
Europeans in particular with their hard won protection from the Black Death may have dominated the Old World and the New not just with tactics, technology, or steel cannon, but because after diseases they carried and were immune to swept through less fortunate populations, they were literally the last ones left standing. That immunity may left another, fascinating calling card that wouldn’t be read by modern researchers for hundreds of years, until a new plague struck mankind in our own time.
Early in 1981, emergency rooms in New York City and San Francisco California began seeing an unusual spike in several rare diseases commonly associated with a weakened immune system. Young men, mostly gay or IV drug users, were developing rare forms of skin cancer and suffering from a puzzling pulmonary condition resembling pneumonia. Despite aggressive antibiotics the infection never went completely away. Left untreated the condition progressed rapidly. The hodgepodge of symptoms were eventually called "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome" or AIDS.
The pathogen that caused AIDS was finally isolated, and dubbed Human Immuno-virus or HIV. HIV reduces the number of one of the most important types of leukocytes called T-killer Cells. When the T-count declines drastically, otherwise fairly innocuous pathogens overwhelm the patient leading to eventual collapse of the immune system and deadly opportunistic infections such as the lung fungi. It first appeared to be 100% fatal. But after a while infectious disease researchers noticed there was something strange going on with some patients. They tested positive for the virus, but they never seemed to developed the symptoms or the disease progressed very slowly.
Viruses are nasty sons of bitches. They invade loyal cells and take over the replication machinery to make new viruses. Some land on a target cell like a spacecraft and extend a drill bit and burrow right through the cell wall. But HIV is an even more clever bastard, especially considering it's amazingly simple even for a virus. The agent is part thief and part camo artist; it has to be to fool your cellular security. To get into the T-cells, it picks a lock on door on the surface of a cell called CCR-5. But it turns out some people don't have that particular door, they lack the genetic instructions to make it, and thus there is no lock to pick, no doorman to trick!
A heritable defect that prevents the formation of that receptor confers resistance to HIV. If you have this feature in only one copy of your chromosomes, you have heightened resistance because you have fewer receptors or doors. Two copies and you're (virtually) immune to HIV.
Thing is, lacking a CCR-5 receptor could conceivably cause problems unrelated to AIDS. And yet the mutation is present in fairly high frequencies in certain populations. If you're a northern European, there's a roughly thirteen percent chance you have at least one copy and about a two percent chance you have both. If you're a full blooded Swede, Brit, or German, if you can reliably trace that ancestry back for a dozen generations, the odds are higher still.
Geneticists began looking into this mutation, tracking its spread through extant populations, establishing points of origin and time frames. Surprise, surprise, it turned out to stem from northwestern Europe about 700 years ago! Right around the time that bubonic plague, small pox, tuberculosis, and anthrax were ganging up on folks and killing them by the hundreds of millions. This rare, mildly disadvantageous trait was suddenly selected for aggressively. And for century after century it conferred resistance to other diseases, which may have aided those groups in everything from warfare to foreign conquest to business.
A textbook example of evolution, "A change in the frequency of alleles within a population over time". It also turns out this process is intimately bound up in other pathologies.
As grim as the Black Death was, the wave upon wave of microscopic horror that flowed over the world and wiped indigenous people from the face of the earth during the heady days of European expansion was as bad as or worse than any Halloween movie or science-fiction thriller ever produced in Hollywood. And if it happens again, in any form, our best hope of survival will be science. It behooves us to humor any beliefs which seek to destroy that which holds the only real promise of future salvation.
Lay out the current US political axis on scientific topics to the equivalent of conservatives or progressives in any other developed nation, and they may respond with bewildered expressions. Explain to them that to be a loyal Republican in the US means you should reject climate science, evolutionary biology, the promise of embryonic stem research, or any number of less visible but equally perplexing examples, and the reaction is the same as if a foreigner told members of the the GOP base that being conservative in his country carries with it the obligatory denial of any link between cigarettes and cardio-pulmonary disease. How on earth, they wonder, in a free, educated, and open society, could denial of empirical facts or reasonable inference enable a major political party‘s platform?
But in the US, the two do indeed collide head on. And despite the fact that Americans are critically dependent on the applications that flow from scientific research for our very day-to-day survival, one Grand Old Party has established itself firmly as the party of anti-reason, and they’ve ridden that counter-intuitive vehicle to what even the harshest critics would agree is some degree of political success. It is that very success, itself perhaps the scariest if faceless part of this article in its own way, which drove me from the moderate conservative caucus, into the progressive arms of Daily Kos. It is that very Party, or more precisely some of the less lucid and mega-maniacal members in it, which may yet prove our downfall, especially if they’re at the helm the next time the Reaper calls, with no last minute, Hollywood happy ending.
It’s always the darkest just before Dawn, that’s true at this late hour figuratively as well as literally. And so, before finding the sweet black embrace of sleep, I lie awake here in the dark, caught in the distorted nether-world between REM and reality, musing over mankind’s next, inevitable appointment with the Grim Reaper. For this Halloween Tale has a sequel coming to a town near you.
There is a ghastly war raging even now in every tissue of our bodies. The legions number in the billions, each recruit is an automated serial killing robot, every one of them set permanently on search and destroy. The meanest of these combatants, a miniature cross between a mobile WMD factory and an agile version of The Blob, charges headlong into battle at the first sign of invasion, launching nanoprobes followed by living machines; pseudopodia greedily foraging for the first taste of their target. Friendly forces surround and eat the enemy's twitching remains. There is no quarter given, no mercy shown. The soldiers on every side are utterly dedicated, single-minded; they cannot be reasoned with or intimidated or water-boarded into submission. For everyone of them, failure means death: They're locked in eternal combat fighting for the very right to exist. Sooner or later, when our troops do lose, a new disease will arise from the ashes of the old. And then it's Night of the Living Dead again, for you and I and everyone we love.
What will it be next time? Bird flu? Resistant Staph? Super TB? A microbial horror designed by bioweapons experts and unleashed by shortsighted control freaks, or perhaps a new concoction cooked up in the boiling organic kettles by Mother Nature? A deadly cocktail of all the above? Mankind is more ripe for a pandemic than we have ever been in all our long, bloody history. Billions are packed like sardines in third-world urban squalor the world over, their immune systems already weakened by starvation, dysentery, and HIV. And while to one another we are lovers, strangers, friend or foe, to germs we’re nothing but walking meat markets: you and I are food.
Thank you for staying up with me through this brief, haunted vision. Soon the dawn skies will blaze and chase away my fears with morning sun's reflection. Thoughts of billions dying from epidemic will appear remote and deranged in the sobering light of a bright new day. But that day, too, will end. And every day thereafter will shorten the time when this nightmare leaps from the pages of history or the fossil record to begin anew. The only question is what will lead the charge, when will it strike, and have we garnered enough hard fought scientific knowledge and political competence to combat it. I suspect we'll soon know the answer to all those questions, for the hour of reckoning is drawing near.
Until that dark day, sweet dreams and Happy Halloween my friends from DarkSyde Manor. Good night. Sleep tight. And don't let the microscopic bed bugs bite.