Science Goes Viral: Captivating Accounts of Science in Everyday Life

Science Goes Viral

Captivating Accounts of Science in Everyday Life

Dr. Joe Schwarcz

Contents

Praise

Also by Dr. Joe Schwarcz

Introduction

Part I: The Virus Strikes

Down the Toilet

Charlie Chaplin, Dr. Tuttle, and the Spanish Flu

Pangs about the Pangolin

The Science of Epidemiology

Singing Happy Birthday Is No Longer Only for Birthdays

Oh My, Miasma

Boosting Immunity

From Variolation to Vaccination

A Vaccination Triumph

COVID Vaccines, Here We Come!

Here Is the Message about Messenger RNA

Musing about Mutation

Sharks and Vaccines

The Dry Ice Story Is Anything but Dry

The Bitter Saga of Quinine

Throwing Light on Ultraviolet Light

Hyperbaric Chambers and COVID

Corona Aerosols

The Fascinating History of Dexamethasone

Brazilian Pit Vipers, Blood Pressure, and COVID-19

Zapping COVID with Copper?

Nonsense Was Quick to Emerge as Virus Gripped the World

Seinfeld and the Coronavirus

Part II: There Is Science Beyond COVID

Chemistry — The Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Science

Good Science Is No Laughing Matter

A Musical Memory of Plexiglas

There Is More to the Placenta Than the Mother-Embryo Connection

Science Fiction, Science Fact

The Legend of Johnny Appleseed

Treading Gingerly on Ginger

Gorilla Glue Makes for a Bad Hair Day

Brushing Up on Hair Dyes

Jean Harlow’s Hair

Oh, the Dread of Red M&Ms

Mysteries, Magic, and Thyroid Disease

Lice, Typhus, and Napoleon

Navalny and Novichok

Natural or Synthetic?

Time to Smell the Roses

Lego Chemistry

Cheers to the Discoverer of Wine Disease

Dirty Bombs and Prussian Blue

A Shocking Catastrophe in Beirut

The Story of Vodka

Graduating to Bioplastics

Spirits of Salt

Unearthing a Giant Hoax

Bisphenol A and My Socks

Turning Up the Heat on Thermal Paper Receipts

Shining a Light on the Importance of Darkness

A Biblical Dye

Intermittent Fasting

Recycling Polystyrene

Superabsorbent Polymers Really Suck It Up

Arsenic, the King of Poisons, Poison of Kings

Arsenic in Fact and Fiction

Wig Power

Plants and Hospitals

Chalk It Up

Omega-3 Questions

The Spy Who Went Out into the Cold

Elderberry Plusses and Minuses

Tarantulas and the Dancing Plague

Powering Your Cell Phone

Lincoln’s Magician

Slowing Down the Clock

King Tut’s Tomb

Up in Smoke

Kambo

Mustard Gas and Chemotherapy

Want a Date?

Fluoride and IQ

The Science and Pseudoscience of Essential Oils

Bug Juice

The Crazy Story of Locoweed

Toxicity of Nicotine Is Nothing to Sneeze At

Trehalose and C. Difficile

Seaweed and Its Surprising Subplots

The Power of Lycopodium

Burgers from Plants

Can Fluorinated Compounds Shrink Penises?

From Dry Cleaning to Saran Wrap

Chlorinated Chicken

Quack Quack

Alpha Spin Makes Your Head Spin

False Claims and Conspiracy Theories

Turning the Tables on the Table Turners

Finale: Always Wear Underwear

Index

About the Author

Copyright

Praise

Praise for A Grain of Salt

Schwarcz’s light touches of humor make the scientific information feel accessible and ensure that it’s entertaining. With enough facts to soothe anxious, health-conscious individuals as well as some good tidbits to share, this enlightening collection offers every reader something new to learn and marvel over.

— Booklist

Praise for A Feast of Science

Huzzah! Dr. Joe does it again! Another masterwork of demarcating non-science from science and more generally nonsense from sense. The world needs his discernment.

— Dr. Brian Alters, Professor, Chapman University

Praise for The Fly in the Ointment

Joe Schwarcz has done it again. In fact, he has outdone it. This book is every bit as entertaining, informative, and authoritative as his previous celebrated collections, but contains enriched social fiber and 10 percent more attitude per chapter. Whether he’s assessing the legacy of Rachel Carson, coping with penile underachievement in alligators, or revealing the curdling secrets of cheese, Schwarcz never fails to fascinate.

— Curt Supplee, former science editor, Washington Post

Praise for Dr. Joe and What You Didn’t Know

"Any science writer can come up with the answers. But only Dr. Joe can turn the world’s most fascinating questions into a compelling journey through the great scientific mysteries of everyday life. Dr. Joe and What You Didn’t Know proves yet again that all great science springs from the curiosity of asking the simple question . . . and that Dr. Joe is one of the great science storytellers with both all the questions and answers."

— Paul Lewis, president and general manager, Discovery Channel

Praise for That’s the Way the Cookie Crumbles

Schwarcz explains science in such a calm, compelling manner, you can’t help but heed his words. How else to explain why I’m now stir-frying cabbage for dinner and seeing its cruciferous cousins — broccoli, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts — in a delicious new light?

— Cynthia David, Toronto Star

Praise for Radar, Hula Hoops, and Playful Pigs

It is hard to believe that anyone could be drawn to such a dull and smelly subject as chemistry — until, that is, one picks up Joe Schwarcz’s book and is reminded that with every breath and feeling one is experiencing chemistry. Falling in love, we all know, is a matter of the right chemistry. Schwarcz gets his chemistry right, and hooks his readers.

— John C. Polanyi, Nobel Laureate

Also by Dr. Joe Schwarcz

A Grain of Salt: The Science and Pseudoscience of What We Eat

A Feast of Science: Intriguing Morsels from the Science of Everyday Life

Monkeys, Myths, and Molecules: Separating Fact from Fiction, and the Science of Everyday Life

Is That a Fact?: Frauds, Quacks, and the Real Science of Everyday Life

The Right Chemistry: 108 Enlightening, Nutritious, Health-Conscious and Occasionally Bizarre Inquiries into the Science of Everyday Life

Dr. Joe’s Health Lab: 164 Amazing Insights into the Science of Medicine, Nutrition and Well-Being

Dr. Joe’s Brain Sparks: 179 Inspiring and Enlightening Inquiries into the Science of Everyday Life

Dr. Joe’s Science, Sense and Nonsense: 61 Nourishing, Healthy, Bunk-Free Commentaries on the Chemistry That Affects Us All

Brain Fuel: 199 Mind-Expanding Inquiries into the Science of Everyday Life

An Apple a Day: The Myths, Misconceptions and Truths About the Foods We Eat

Let Them Eat Flax: 70 All-New Commentaries on the Science of Everyday Food & Life

The Fly in the Ointment: 70 Fascinating Commentaries on the Science of Everyday Life

Dr. Joe and What You Didn’t Know: 177 Fascinating Questions and Answers About the Chemistry of Everyday Life

That’s the Way the Cookie Crumbles: 62 All-New Commentaries on the Fascinating Chemistry of Everyday Life

The Genie in the Bottle: 64 All-New Commentaries on the Fascinating Chemistry of Everyday Life

Radar, Hula Hoops, and Playful Pigs: 67 Digestible Commentaries on the Fascinating Chemistry of Everyday Life

Introduction

These are turbulent times. During the past year, terms like pandemic, spike protein, viral particles, variants, mRNA vaccines, viral vectors, antibodies, hydroxychloroquine, social distancing, immune response, convalescent plasma, aerosol transmission, viral load, and of course, face coverings, have become part of normal conversation. The truth is that our life these days is anything but normal. I now lecture online, our staff meetings are via Zoom, restaurant meals are a distant memory of the past, my gym is closed, sports are played without fans, theaters sit empty, curfews are in place, travel is out of the question, and I can only see my daughters and grandchildren on FaceTime. Thank goodness for that and for Netflix!

Ask someone to describe what the world has gone through since January 2020 when we first heard about some strange cases of pneumonia in Wuhan, China, and we are likely to hear surreal, unbelievable, mind-boggling, unthinkable, or unimaginable. As we were cruising through our more or less contented lives, who could have imagined that such a curse would befall the world, upsetting every proverbial apple cart in existence? Actually, there were scientists who not only imagined it but were certain that such a global scourge was inevitable. After all, there had been plenty of plagues, epidemics, and pandemics in the past, and there was no reason to think that the world had become immune to such calamities. Indeed, the film Contagion, produced in 2012 with consultants from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), portrays a fictional pandemic that eerily resembles our current reality.

When I first started thinking about what to include in this book, I had never heard of Wuhan. I thought I would feature my usual array of diverse and sometimes esoteric topics like intermittent fasting, placenta creams, biblical dyes, essential oils, Jean Harlow’s hair, Lincoln’s magician, bioplastics, along with assorted examples of quackery. Then the cursed plague hit. A giant elephant in the room! It could not be ignored. I had to address it, and I have. With difficulty. That’s because the situation is dynamic, and what was true yesterday is not true today, and what seems to be true today may not be true tomorrow. That calls for an apology in advance for sometimes being out of date by the time you read some of the COVID-related accounts, an inevitability in this crazy situation.

I also ran into another stumbling block. As I began to put this volume together in the summer of 2020, the horrific murder of George Floyd took the world by storm. Because of the emergence of COVID-19, and its tentacles ensnaring every facet of our lives, it already seemed frivolous to discuss elderberry extracts, the chemistry of Lego, or plant-based burgers. But how can one write about hair dyes or bisphenol A in socks after witnessing the last breath being squeezed out of a man in the most hideous fashion? How can one talk about hydrogen peroxide oxidizing para-phenylenediamine when millions are at the mercy of a society speckled with hatred and racism? You can’t.

So before launching into discussions of COVID-19, I feel a need to have a say about another plague that also threatens to unravel the fabric of our lives, racism. I am no expert on the subject, but being the son of a Holocaust survivor, I am very sensitive to prejudice, intolerance, and xenophobia of any kind. My mother was deported to Auschwitz in 1945, where she was actually saved from the gas chamber by Dr. Josef Mengele. When the Jews who had been rounded up like animals were unloaded from the cattle cars, Mengele was there to direct them left or right. The old, the infirm, and the very young went left to be eliminated, while those capable of work went to the right. My mother ended up as a slave laborer in a Nazi factory until liberated by the Russians, but my four grandparents met their end in the gas chambers. One of my mother’s sisters also was saved by Mengele, but only to be experimented upon. The Nazis carried out all sorts of vile experiments, often leaving the victims mutilated and in agony if they managed to survive. I don’t exactly know to what horrific experiment Dr. Mengele subjected my aunt because she never talked about it, but I know that she was never able to have children.

While I had been well educated about the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, growing up in Montreal, I didn’t encounter much dialogue about anti-Black racism. Being a baseball fan, I knew about the problems encountered by Jackie Robinson with the Brooklyn Dodgers, but I had also read that he did not face the same kind of prejudice when he played for the Montreal Royals.

Then came an eye-opening road trip through the U.S. in 1964 with a couple of friends. We had just gotten our driving licenses and one of my friends had bought a used car with his bar mitzvah money. One evening, we somehow managed to end up on a back road in Alabama and our attention was drawn to what looked like a brush fire in a field. We stopped to look. It was an astounding sight. A large cross was aflame, surrounded by a bunch of men in white cloaks and hoods. We had chanced upon a KKK rally! I can still hear the speech ringing in my ear. You can dress ’em up, send them up North, give ’em a college education and they will still . . . We didn’t wait around to hear the rest, quickly deciding that this was not a place for us to be. I knew that the KKK existed, and I knew about slavery and the Civil War, but witnessing this organized exhibit of pure racism left an indelible mark.

My favorite subject in high school was actually history, and the Alabama experience prompted me to look more deeply into the saga of Black people in America and the rise of racism. It is a bitter story with a sweet angle. It was the appetite for sugar by white Europeans that spawned the slave trade and led to some twenty million Africans being ripped from their homeland and deposited in the Americas, where they were often treated like animals, being whipped, beaten, and branded. To the plantation owners who lived lavish lives, they were no more than property. Sickening.

The remnants of that dreadful era still haunt African Americans today, and while no longer literally enslaved, they still live with the yoke of discrimination around their neck. As we have seen, sometimes that yoke can literally squeeze out a last breath. Maybe this particular last breath will breathe life into a movement that does more than serve up pious platitudes about equality. The time has come to unleash and enforce laws against intolerance, bigotry, and overzealous police actions. The U.S. Declaration of Independence got it right with all men are created equal. Those were just words. Forty-one of the men who signed the Declaration owned slaves. Words don’t mean much unless they are acted upon.

With that being said, let’s get down to science. Given how the pandemic has dominated both the scientific literature and the popular media, I do feel a need to contribute to the discourse. However, I do not want to forsake discussion of other matters, because life does go on, and there’s lots of fascinating science to explore. Indeed with the scientific literature exploding, websites multiplying, and blog posts increasing exponentially, one could say that Science Goes Viral in more ways than one.

Part I

The Virus Strikes

Down the Toilet

One of the first signs of impending doom presented by the appearance of COVID-19 was the disappearance of toilet paper from store shelves. People panicked at the possibility of their bottoms being assaulted by rough paper ripped from paper bags or magazines. Actually, there was never any need to be so spooked because even during the lockdown, paper producers were deemed to be an essential service and toilet paper was being rolled out at a normal rate. The perceived shortage did have an effect though. It focused the spotlight on this commodity as well as on the various methods to which people historically resorted in pursuit of eliminating remnants of nature’s call.

In ancient times, the handiest solution was, well, the hand. Usually the left. That’s why in some cultures, eating, or even just touching someone with the left hand, is still regarded as a sinister practice. The ancient Greeks used stones, while the Romans favored a xylospongium, a natural sponge on a stick inserted through a vertical opening on the front of a stone toilet seat. There was no need to stand up to finish the job. Interestingly, a modern incarnation of this device is available for overweight people, but instead of a sponge, the gadget holds a piece of toilet paper.

In Africa, the large feathery leaves of the Peltophorum africanum tree, also known as the toilet tree, have a long history of use. Medieval monks used cut-up pieces of habits that had become too threadbare to wear. They referred to these as anitergium, from the Latin ani for anus, and tergeo, to scrape. In the sixteenth century, there were apparently enough rumblings about various wiping options for the Renaissance writer Rabelais to satirize them in his classic Gargantua and Pantagruel, a work that has a whole chapter devoted to different methodologies. His conclusion was that the best results were achieved with the head of a well-downed goose held between the legs. Rabelais claimed a further benefit in that you will feel in your rear a most wonderful pleasure. As far as I know, no corroborating evidence is available to demonstrate the benefits of such goosing.

Henry VIII wasn’t keen on taking the matter into his own hands, so he appointed a Groom of the King’s Close Stool whose job was to unsoil the royal rear. The close stool was a throne with a hole and a chamber pot. It was equipped with a lid that could be locked to ensure that only the king’s bottom would enjoy the upholstered seat. Henry’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, followed her father’s practice but changed the name of the attendant to the more delicate, First Lady of the Bedchamber. Over in France, Louis XV’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, used only the finest French lace while Madame de Maintenon, Louis XVI’s second wife, favored the ultrasoft wool of Merino sheep.

In America, the large velvety leaves of the mullein plant were popular, but the most significant American contribution was the corn cob. With the kernels removed, this proved to be so effective that even up to the 1940s it was common to find corn cobs in outhouses along with catalogues from which pages could be torn. Farmlands in Middle America were sometimes referred to as the cob and catalogue belt.

There are Chinese references to wiping with paper as early as the sixth century, and evidence that special tissues were produced on a large scale for the imperial court by the fourteenth century. In North America, though, toilet paper did not appear until 1857 when Joseph Gayetty introduced paper for the water closet. Given that pages from free catalogues were readily available, he needed a marketing gimmick. The health gambit fit the bill. Gayetty claimed that Americans were ruining their physical and mental health by wiping with printed paper that had death-dealing chemicals such as lampblack, oxalic acid, oil of vitriol, and chloride of lime. His Medicated Paper was pure as snow. Unlike catalogue paper, it wouldn’t cause hemorrhoids and would cheat physicians out of their fees. When flush toilets became more common, he cleverly changed the pitch to this paper will dissolve so that it will not like ordinary paper choke the water pipes.

The next breakthrough came with engineer Seth Wheeler patenting the perforated toilet paper roll in 1877. Then Clarence and Irvin Scott took sales to new heights with an emphasis on softness. An ad from 1941 featured a woman’s complaint to a doctor that her husband was becoming abusive. Perhaps, the doctor suggested, he may be irritated by bad bathroom tissue. The paper was too rough, which he demonstrated by showing it was opaque to light, while the light passed right through Scott’s Waldorf paper. Switching to this they became the happiest couple in town.

Today, in this unhappy COVID era, at least some happiness is to be found in not having to worry about running out of toilet paper. We can even have it formaldehyde-free, chlorine-free, BPA-free, unscented, and recycled. We can even squeeze the Charmin without Mr. Whipple interfering as he did in the famous ads from years ago.

Charlie Chaplin, Dr. Tuttle, and the Spanish Flu

Avoid public gatherings. Close churches and theaters. Don’t shake hands. Don’t spit. Wear masks. Sounds like Dr. Anthony Fauci in 2020. But those words were spoken by Dr. Thomas Tuttle in 1918 when the Spanish flu, which did not originate in Spain, was sweeping across the globe. Countries involved in the First World War censored stories about the flu so as not to create even more panic than that sparked by the war. Spain was neutral, and newspapers published extensively about the flu in that country, forever linking the disease with Spain.

Dr. Tuttle was a specialist in infectious diseases and had been appointed health commissioner in the state of Washington. Although viruses had not yet been discovered, he was convinced that the disease was spread through human contact, particularly by the coughs and sneezes of people who had been infected. He even raised the prospect of individuals transmitting the disease without being sick themselves, a situation now termed asymptomatic transmission. Tuttle had learned of an outbreak of flu on a steamship traveling from Nome, Alaska, to Seattle and wondered how that could have happened given that no cases of flu had been reported in Nome. The conclusion was that someone had boarded the ship and spread the infection despite having experienced no symptoms. Based on his observations, Dr. Tuttle advocated what today is being called social distancing and even managed to convince the mayor of Seattle to impose fines for not wearing a mask on a streetcar and for spitting on the sidewalk. Not unlike today, there was opposition to the severe measures, especially the closing of churches. The mayor responded by suggesting that religion which won’t keep for two weeks is not worth having.

With the implementation of Tuttle’s recommendations, the spread of the flu in Seattle slowed significantly, and other cities took note. San Francisco imposed a five-dollar fine, heavy at the time, for disturbing the peace by not wearing a mask in public. St. Louis banned public gatherings and closed schools with results that sharply contrasted with cities that did not take severe measures, such as Philadelphia. The City of Brotherly Love went ahead with a parade to raise money for the war effort, which led to the flu spreading like wildfire. In just one month, over 11,000 Philadelphia residents died, including 759 on the worst day of the outbreak. Special wagons drove around the city with drivers hollering, Bring out your dead! The collected corpses were then buried in mass graves.

In New York, with the pandemic in full swing, opening night of a new Charlie Chaplin movie, Shoulder Arms, was for many film buffs too hot to resist, despite the city’s discouraging of public gatherings. The Little Tramp kidnapping the Kaiser sounded like a welcome relief from wartime news. Many of the attendees got relief alright — they were relieved of their lives. The manager of the theater, Harold Edel, on seeing the large opening-night crowd, exclaimed, "We think it is a most wonderful appreciation of Shoulder Arms that people should veritably take their lives in their hands to see it." He probably did not think that one of those lives would be his. Edel died of the Spanish flu soon after mingling with the opening night crowd.

Although Seattle was successful in temporarily curbing the pandemic, Dr. Tuttle warned that once restrictions were eased, a second wave would follow, and indeed it did. He became disenchanted with how various levels of government were interested only in dealing with the problems at hand and not in preparing for the next pandemic, which he believed was inevitable. He wrote that owing to the inclination of our government (city, county, state, and national) to provide funds for operating only when sickness is present, and to absolutely cut off any support whatsoever for the study of the epidemiology of the disease after an epidemic has passed, renders it very probable that we will meet our next epidemic (probably 20 or 30 years hence) with as little knowledge of the true nature of the disease as we had when we confronted the epidemic in the fall of 1918.

In terms of time, he wasn’t off by much. In 1957, the Asian flu spread from China to the rest of the world, causing some 1.1 million deaths globally with about 116,000 in the U.S. But Dr. Tuttle was wrong about scientists having as little knowledge as in 1918. The electron microscope had been introduced in the 1930s, making viruses visible. By 1940, experiments were underway to produce antiviral vaccines eventually leading to one that would be successful in containing the Asian flu pandemic. There was of course no vaccine to curb the Spanish flu of 1918–19. That plague eventually abated when infected people either developed immunity or died.

And what happened to Dr. Tuttle? Even though he was a visionary in terms of the effectiveness of physical distancing, masks, and quarantine, his advocacy for essentially shutting down the city made him a very polarizing figure and resulted in him losing his job as health commissioner.

The Spanish-born philosopher George Santayana put it well in his classic assertion that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. So let’s remember the Shoulder Arms disaster, and let’s be very careful with rushing back to public gatherings. Luckily, technology now allows us to watch Chaplin’s films without having to go to the theater. In these Modern Times, we can watch The Great Dictator in the comfort of home. Think twice about sharing the popcorn though.

Pangs about the Pangolin

In 1820, Lord Francis Rawdon-Hastings, the Governor-General of Bengal from 1813 to 1823, presented King