The Fevers of Reason. Gerald Weissmann

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 Germany 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,