Unsettling May Have Occurred: Occasionally Uncomfortable Obscure True Stories from Human History

by Damn Interesting Editors, The

  Originally published 03 July 2006

  http://dam.mn/not-your-average-summer-camp/

  The Unfortunate Sex Life of the Banana (1955 AD)

  The humble banana almost seems like a miracle of nature. Colourful, nutritious, and much cherished by children, monkeys and clowns, it has a favoured position in the planet's fruitbowls. The banana is vitally important in many regions of the tropics, where different parts of the plant are used for clothing, paper and tableware, and where the fruit itself is an essential dietary staple. People across the globe appreciate the soft, nourishing flesh, the snack-sized portions, and the easy-peel covering that conveniently changes colour to indicate ripeness. Individual fruit—or fingers—sit comfortably in the human hand, readily detached from their close-packed companions. Indeed, the banana appears almost purpose-designed for efficient human consumption and distribution. It is difficult to conceive of a more fortuitous fruit.

  The banana, however, is a freakish and fragile genetic mutant; one that has survived through the centuries due to the sustained application of selective breeding by diligent humans. Indeed, the "miraculous" banana is far from being a no-strings-attached gift from nature. Its cheerful appearance hides a fatal flaw— one that threatens its proud place in the grocery basket. The banana's problem can be summed up in a single word: sex.

  The banana plant is a hybrid, originating from the mismatched pairing of two South Asian wild plant species: Musa acuminata and Musa balbisiana. Between these two products of nature, the former produces unpalatable fruit flesh, and the latter is far too seedy for enjoyable consumption. Nonetheless, these closely related plants occasionally cross-pollinate and spawn seedlings which grow into sterile, half-breed banana plants. Some ten thousand years ago, early human experimenters noted that some of these hybridized Musa bore unexpectedly tasty, seedless fruit with an unheard-of yellowness and inexplicably amusing shape. They also proved an excellent source of carbohydrates and other important nutrients.

  Despite the hybrid's unfortunate sexual impotence, shrewd would-be agriculturalists realised that the plants could be cultivated from suckering shoots and cuttings taken from the underground stem. The genetically identical progeny produced this way remained sterile, yet the new plant could be widely propagated with human help. An intensive and prolonged process of selective breeding—aided by the variety of hybrids and occasional random genetic mutations—eventually evolved the banana into its present familiar form. Arab traders carried these new wonderfruit to Africa, and Spanish conquistadors relayed them onwards to the Americas. Thus the tasty new banana was spared from an otherwise unavoidable evolutionary dead-end.

  Today, bananas and their close relatives, the starchy plantains, grow in a number of different varieties or cultivars. Among temperate palates, the most familiar is the Cavendish, a shapely and sweet-tasting dessert banana. This is the banana found in the supermarkets, splits, and milkshakes of the developed world. It is exported on an industrial scale from commercial plantations in the tropics. Every Cavendish is genetically identical, possessing the same pleasant taste (which is somewhat lacking in more subtle flavours according to banana aficionados). They also all share the same potential for yellow curvaceousness and the same susceptibility to disease.

  Although there are numerous other banana and plantain varieties cultivated for local consumption in Africa and Asia, none has the same worldwide appeal as the Cavendish. While these other varieties display more genetic variability, all come from the same sterile Musa hybrids which so delighted our forebears thousands of years ago. Likewise none of them have enjoyed the benefits of the frenzied gene-shuffling facilitated by sexual congress.

  Stuck with the clunky, inefficient cloning of asexual reproduction, the sterile banana is at a serious disadvantage in the never-ending biological arms race between plant and pest. Indeed, it is a well-established fact that bananas are particularly prone to crop-consuming insects and diseases. A severe outbreak of banana disease could easily spread through the genetically uniform plantations, devastating economies and depriving our fruitbowls. Varieties grown for local consumption would also suffer, potentially causing mass starvation in tropical regions.

  This scenario may seem preposterous, but researchers all over the world are earnestly exploring the possibility. The custodians of the beloved banana are all too aware of the potential for a banana apocalypse— because it has already happened in the fruit's past. And the next time could be much worse.

  Until the middle of the twentieth century, most bananas on sale in the developed world belonged to the Gros Michel cultivar. These bananas were sweet and tasty and didn't spoil too quickly, making them eminently suitable for commercial export. Old-timers contend that in flavour and convenience, the Gros Michel outshone even the current top-banana, the Cavendish. Yet from the early twentieth century, large plantations of ‘Big Mike' proved increasingly fertile ground for a fungal leaf affliction known as Panama disease. Affected crops would soon deteriorate into rotting piles of unprofitable vegetation. As the century progressed, commercial growers found themselves in a desperate race against time, making doomed attempts to establish new plantations in disease-free areas of rainforest before the fungus arrived.

  In the 1950s the Vietnamese Cavendish came to the rescue. Banana companies delayed switching from Big Mike for as long as possible due to the necessary changes in growing, storage, and ripening infrastructure, and many producers teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. As Big Mike started pushing up daisies, banana plantations frantically reconfigured, and by the mid 1960s the changeover was largely complete. The distinct—and now extinct—taste of Big Mike was quickly lost to the fickle public memory. Cavendish was king.

  It has done a sterling job in the intervening years, yet now the Cavendish is starting to struggle in its own contest against contagion. In the 1970s a disease named Black Sigatoka was beaten back with enthusiastic applications of pesticide, but more recently a new strain of the original bane of the banana has threatened the plantations. Since 1992 a vigorous, pesticide-tolerant strain of Panama disease has been wiping out bananas—including previously resistant crops of Cavendish—in Southeast Asia. It has yet to reach the large commercial plantations in Latin America, but most banana-watchers believe that this is only a matter of time.

  Opinions differ on how long the Cavendish can survive the new onslaught, and on the best way to tackle the threat. This time, unfortunately, there is no obvious back-up variety waiting in the wings. So far, banana science has provided scant few approaches for improving disease resistance. One method involves the traditional techniques of selective breeding: although banana plants are clones, very occasionally they can be persuaded to produce seeds through a painstaking process of hand pollination. Only one fruit in three hundred will produce a seed, and of these seeds only one in three will have the correct chromosomal configuration to allow germination. The seeds are laboriously extracted by straining tons of mashed fruit through fine meshes. Research stations in commercial banana growing countries, such as Honduras, engage large squads of banana sex workers for such tasks, and to screen the new plant varieties for favourable characteristics.

  Another fruit subject to such human-assisted reproduction is the ubiquitous navel orange. It, too, was the result of a serendipitous mutation, this one from an orange tree in Brazil in the mid-1800s. Each orange on this particular tree was found to have a tiny, underdeveloped twin sharing its skin, causing a navel-like formation opposite the stem. These strange siamese citruses were much sweeter than the fruit of their parent trees, and delightfully seedless. Since the new tree was unable to reproduce naturally, caretakers amputated some of its limbs and grafted them onto other citrus trees to produce more of the desirable fruit. Even today navel oranges are produced through such botanical surgery, and all of the navel oranges everywhere are direct descendants—essentially genetic clones—of those from that original tree.

  As for the Cavendish, its last best hope may lie in
genetic modification (GM). The University of Leuven in Belgium is a world centre in banana research due to its colonial connections with Africa. Belgian banana scientists have become skilled in using DNA-transfer to introduce disease-resistance genes directly into the plant's genome. These less labour-intensive methods promise a way to develop stronger, fitter, happier and more productive bananas.

  In 2007, Ugandan field trials of the first Leuven uber-banana were announced, although public distaste of the idea of GM foods may impede its long term success. And in Honduras, researchers have developed a banana cultivar named ‘Goldfinger' through traditional selective breeding methods. Although it has enjoyed some public acceptance in Australia, it suffers from the drawbacks of a distinctly different, non-Cavendish flavour, and a longer maturation time. If nothing else, these advances offer hope that science will one day overcome the unfortunate sexual inadequacies of the banana. Let us hope so, otherwise the resulting bananageddon will ensure that the Cavendish goes the way of Big Mike, and future generations of fruit lovers will have to find some other curved yellow food to complement their ice cream.

  Originally published 24 August 2009

  http://dam.mn/the-unfortunate-sex-life-of-the-banana/

  The Gay-Detecting Fruit Machine (1955 AD)

  During the 1950s and 1960s, some otherwise freedom-loving governments waged secret wars against suspected homosexuals within their borders. During those years, Canada's campaign to eliminate all homosexuals from the military, police, and the civil service was particularly broad and unforgiving, with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) compiling files on over 9,000 suspected homosexuals. Reports indicate that the RCMP created Security Service subsection A-3 in the 1950s, whose sole purpose was the identification and dismissal of every gay person in public service.

  Perhaps the most disturbing element of their campaign was a government-owned device known only as the "Fruit Machine." It resembled a dentist's chair, but it also had various sensors, a camera to monitor the pupils, and a black box situated in front of the subject to display pictures. Subjects were told that the machine was used for measuring stress, yet its purpose was something else entirely; it was intended to identify whether the subject was gay.

  A series of images would display on the monitor as the subject's pupils, perspiration level, and heart rate were monitored for involuntary "erotic response." Some images were mundane, while others were sexually explicitly photos of men and women. If the machine detected erotic response to certain images, the subject was assumed to be a homosexual.

  In Britain, the term "fruit machine" is another term for the slot machines used in gambling. Given the questionable science and unreliability at work in Canada's sinister fruit machine, theirs had more in common with its British namesake than it did with any actual scientific measuring devices. Yet the results of the fruit machine tests were used to fire thousands of people over the years.

  The fruit machine was in use until the late 1960s when the government pulled all funding for the project. However that did not mark the end of the efforts to remove homosexuals from government service, and the RCMP continued to compile dossiers on suspected gays for years. A similar device called a plethysmograph, which connected directly to the subject's genitals, was used for similar purposes after the fruit machine was retired, but the Canadian government eventually put a halt to the RCMP's anti-homosexual activities. Plethysmographs are still in use today in investigating suspected pedophiles, but their accuracy is highly controversial.

  Originally published 28 November 2005

  http://dam.mn/the-gay-detecting-fruit-machine/

  The Whereabouts of Dr. Einstein's Brain (1955 AD)

  Einstein's brain shortly after his death.

  Dr. Albert Einstein died on April 18, 1955 at Princeton Hospital in Trenton, New Jersey. In accordance with his wishes, he was cremated without ceremony on the same day, and his ashes scattered at an undisclosed location. But the body that arrived at the cremation oven was not quite complete... it was lacking its brain.

  That's because Einstein's brain was sitting in a jar of formaldehyde in Dr. Thomas Harvey's office. Dr. Harvey was the pathologist who performed Einstein's autopsy, and while doing so, he removed and kept the brain for his own study. Some say that Einstein volunteered his brain for research, but the executor of his estate denies this, saying that it was Einstein's son Hans who made the decision to have it preserved. But the press soon learned that Einstein's brain had been set aside for study, and antagonized Einstein's family with unwanted attention.

  Dr. Harvey became very protective of the brain, and divided it into 240 sections, which he kept in jars at his house. Despite being in possession of the organ for years, he never published any findings, saying that he was unable to find anything unusual about it. But over the years he gave away samples of the brain to various researchers, and one such recipient, Dr. Marian Diamond from UC Berkeley, studied the brain and discovered some interesting features.

  A brain's network of neurons are fed and nourished by cells called glial cells. Dr. Diamond compared the percentage of glial cells in Einstein's brain to that of other men who died at the age he did, and found that his contained about 73% more than the average. This indicated that Einstein's neurons probably had a greater metabolic need; they needed and used more energy.

  For years, Dr. Harvey toted the rest of the brain with him every time he relocated, until in 1996 when he moved back to New Jersey. There, Dr. Harvey surrendered the remaining pieces of Einstein's brain to Dr. Elliot Krauss, the chief pathologist at Princeton Hospital. Soon the brain was subjected to some serious scientific scrutiny. Scientists from McMaster University were given access to it, and they discovered that Einstein's brain was remarkable in several other ways.

  The researchers found that Einstein's brain was 15% wider than average, due to the fact that the inferior parietal regions on both hemispheres were much more developed than most. This would have given Einstein some powerful visualization skills, given that these regions of the brain are largely responsible for visuospatial cognition, mathematical thought, and imagery of movement. They also found that Einstein's brain lacked the groove which usually runs through part of this area, which suggests that the neurons might have been able to work together more easily given their proximity.

  During his life, Einstein was quick to downplay his own intellect, being heard to remark, "The contrast between the popular assessment of my powers ... and the reality is simply grotesque." On another occasion, he said, "I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious." But his achievements during his life and the examination of his brain after his death have indicated that he possessed a mind capable of great leaps of insight and visualization.

  These days, Einstein's brain spends most of its time sitting in jars of formaldehyde at Princeton Hospital, no doubt waiting to unlock even more insight into the mysterious construction of a genius mind. "The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious," Albert Einstein once said. "It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science."

  Smart lad.

  Originally published 21 November 2005

  http://dam.mn/the-whereabouts-of-dr-einsteins-brain/

  The Windscale Disaster (1957 AD)

  In the wake of World War 2 the United States government enacted legislation which prohibited any other nations from receiving the scientific bounty derived from the Manhattan Project. This meant that despite the participation of British scientists in the project, Britain recieved none of the benefits of the research. The year after the United States' first successful nuclear bomb test in July of 1945, the British government decided that they too must develop a nuclear program in order to maintain their position as a world power. This pilot project eventually developed into the Windscale Nuclear plant.

  In October 1957, after several years of successful operation, the workers at Windscale noticed some curious readings from their temperat
ure monitoring equipment as they carried out standard maintenance. The reactor temperature was slowly rising during a time that they expected it to be falling. The remote detection equipment seemed to be malfunctioning, so two plant workers donned protective equipment and hiked to the reactor to inspect it in person. When they arrived, they were alarmed to discover that the interior of the uranium-filled reactor was ablaze.

  Windscale's two nuclear piles had been constructed in concrete buildings just outside of the small village of Seascale, Cumbria to produce Britain's bounty of weapons-grade plutonium. The fission reactors had a straightforward air-cooled configuration which allowed each one to exhaust its excess heat through a tall chimney. Breeder reactors such as those at Windscale create plutonium by bombarding the most common isotope of uranium (uranium-238) with neutrons. Any uranium atoms which happen to absorb a neutron briefly become uranium-239, an unstable element which rapidly decays into neptunium-239. Having a half-life of only 2.355 days, this element also soon decays, resulting in the desired plutonium-239.

  Each of the heavily shielded Windscale reactors was comprised of a stack of massive graphite bricks. A series of vertical boreholes through these blocks acted as channels for the reactor's control rods which were used to absorb loose neutrons and thereby govern the fission rate. Hundreds of horizontal channels were carved into the blocks in a octagonal pattern for inserting canisters filled with whatever substances the scientists wished to bombard with neutrons. Many contained uranium to convert into plutonium, but others were special isotope cartridges for producing radioisotopes.