by Ann Wroe
The next year, penicillin became an effective treatment for syphilis. It was not given to the Tuskegee subjects unless they asked for it. By 1948 the Nuremberg Code, inspired by revelations of experiments in the Nazi death camps, set standards for medical studies on human subjects. In Tuskegee, things went on as before.
No serious questions were asked until 1972, when a whistle-blower from the phs talked to the Associated Press. Once exposed, the study was ended immediately. That very year, the surviving subjects filed a lawsuit against all the individuals and institutions involved. The government agreed to pay out almost $10m, of which Mr Hendon’s share was $37,500, with free health care for life.
He had confounded expectations by living so long. More than 100 of the subjects died of the disease or related complications, together with at least 40 unwitting wives, and 19 children contracted syphilis at birth. A longer-lasting legacy was black distrust, which continues, of government doctors and clinical trials.
Mr Hendon was too ill to go to Washington when President Bill Clinton apologised, in 1997. Instead, he watched by satellite. But five years later he was in smiling form when Alabama said sorry. “I survived,” he said. “That’s good.”
María Julia Hernández
María Julia Hernández, fighter for human rights, died on March 30th 2007, aged 68
WHEN forensic teams from Argentina dug in 1992 into the earth at El Mozote, in the mountains of eastern El Salvador, they first came upon a reddish rubble, mixed up with the roots of thorn-plants and weeds. A little deeper they uncovered small, thin skulls, some of them blackened by fire. Underneath these were bundles of what seemed to be brown rags: the blood-soaked cotton dresses, trousers and socks of what had once been children, killed more than a decade before. The pockets of some still held their lucky plastic toys.
The forensic work at this, the most dreadful killing-field of modern Latin America, was memorably reported by Mark Danner in the New Yorker. But it might never have been carried out, and the massacre of 794 people, overwhelmingly civilians, in December 1981 might never have been forced to the world’s attention, if María Julia Hernández had not been on the case. She was in charge of the Socorro Jurídico, later the Tutela Legal, which during El Salvador’s murderous civil war of 1980–92 kept track of human-rights abuses for the archdiocese of San Salvador. She was therefore the person to whom Rufina Amaya Márquez first told her story.
Rufina had been the sole survivor of the massacre. When the troops of the elite Atlacatl battalion of the Salvadoran army had come to the village to flush out leftist rebels, she had been locked up with the other women. She had seen her husband beheaded with a machete; her baby daughter had been torn from her breast. But as the women were led away Rufina managed to hide beside a crab-apple tree, and the screaming of the others distracted the soldiers from seeing that she had gone. When night fell she crawled away into the maguey plants, her skirts knotted up so as not to hamper her, and dug a little hole into which she could press her face to weep without being heard.
Miss Hernández took all this down. She was a homely, sympathetic sort, who in her old-fashioned print dresses looked much like a priest’s housekeeper; but she had been a professor of law at the University of Central America in San Salvador, and would fix those who tried to deceive her with a stony, intellectual stare. Since 1978, as El Salvador slid into disorder, she had been compiling for the archdiocese a book of the dead. These were the corpses left by right-wing death squads in the city streets most nights, their faces dissolved by battery acid and their backs or chests scored with the tags of their killers. Her colleagues would take photographs, and relatives of the missing would come to her office to leaf through the portfolio in the hope, or fear, of finding them. But El Mozote was an atrocity beyond any of this.
For years, with a lawyer’s thoroughness and steely determination, Miss Hernández amassed the evidence. The government would not help; it denied that anything had happened, and dismissed Tutela Legal as a guerrilla front. The Reagan administration, intent on stamping out communist infection, agreed that Miss Hernández was a trouble-maker. She was undeterred. In 1989 six Jesuits were shot dead at her old university; Tutela Legal did the first investigation, and found that the army had ordered it. In 1991 her office published the first investigation into El Mozote, including the names of all the
dead.
The signing of peace accords the next year ended the civil war, set up a Truth Commission and led to the dig at the site of the massacre. Miss Hernández had the names of those responsible; but in 1993 the new government declared an amnesty for all of them. She kept going, campaigning to overturn the amnesty and to bring the killings before the Inter-American Court of Justice. On her death the case had been reopened and, with her help, evidence was slowly being gathered again. She was also publicising corruption and brutality in El Salvador’s police force.
Her life was full of risks, cheerfully faced. Each day, settling to her work in a room as bare as a nun’s cell, she began with a prayer: “Well, God, will I see you today, or will you leave me a bit longer, fighting?” Papers carrying death-threats were often pushed through the door. She drew strength from her dearest friend, Oscar Romero, who in 1977 had become archbishop of San Salvador and had set up the human-rights office. Like Christ calling the disciples, as she liked to remember it, he had summoned her from the university, “and I didn’t really know how to [followhim], but I said yes.” Once she went searching for the archbishop, out into the countryside, and found him saying mass for the campesinos under a tree. From him she learned to love and defend the poor; and when he too was murdered by a death squad, at the altar, in 1980, she felt bound to continue the work he had begun.
She died relatively young, from a heart attack, in the same month that Romero had been killed and on the very day of his burial. Salvadorans found a fascinating symmetry in that. Miss Hernández had liked to show visitors where he was buried and to tell the story that, though he had been shot in the chest, his heart had been undamaged. She was sure it was still whole under the earth, evidence of his continuing power to encourage her, just as the reddish soil at El Mozote had preserved, in blood and bones, the truth.
Charlton Heston
Charlton Heston, America’s prophet, died on April 5th 2008, aged 84
SOME said it was the nose: high, majestic, aquiline, magnificently broken in a high-school football game. Some said it was the jaw, rugged as Mount Rushmore and packed almost too full of white, clenched teeth. Or the eyes, blue and far-seeing, as if they measured out panoramas of Western mountain and desert. The body matched: tall, muscled, buffed, bronzed. In Charlton Heston, a whole American landscape seemed to have heaved itself into human shape, stretched out its arm, and received from God the tablets of the Law:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The National Rifle Association was never so lucky as when it elected as its president, in 1998, a man who, barefoot on the real Mount Sinai, had led his people out of bondage; or who, up to his waist in the freezing Colorado river, had baptised Jesus Christ; or who, at the end of “The Planet of the Apes”, had rolled in the surf bewailing the sight of the Statue of Liberty shipwrecked in the sand. Moses, John the Baptist and the Last Man Alive were all rolled up in one, together with El Cid propped dead on his horse, Gordon falling at Khartoum and Michelangelo, flat on his back, painting the Sistine Chapel. All these towering figures had, in the scope and restlessness of their ambition, something American about them. In a cable network series of 1992, Mr Heston even played the voice of God; and God, he believed, had plans for His country, once the right side had triumphed in the culture wars.
Long before the nra, however, it was Cecil B. DeMille who had the luck to chance on Mr Heston, and vice versa. There was never so good a face, especially in a black fedora, to play the circus-manager in “The Greatest Show on Earth” in 1952. And there was n
o other director, Mr Heston thought, who could so definitively have rescued him from his round of TV dramas and failed Broadway shows, of cold-water tenements and tinned-macaroni suppers, in post-war New York. DeMille offered glorious wide-frame spectacle, and Mr Heston was exactly the type for it. In drawing-room comedies he was clumsy as a giant; but put him in the desert in “The Ten Commandments”, staff in hand, and 8,000 extras would part for him like the waves of the Red Sea itself.
This would have gone to most actors’ heads. Occasionally it went to Mr Heston’s. The first chapter of his autobiography, “In the Arena”, opens with “In the beginning … the earth was without form, and void.” But for all his apparent command before that “mysterious black beast”, the camera, he was shy. Health, energy and good parts were the key to his success, he thought; not talent. He had always pretended to be people who were better than himself, starting in childhood with Tom Sawyer and Davy Crockett. Hollywood fed that compulsion. Painstakingly he taught himself chariot-racing, sketching (for Michelangelo) and long tracts of the Old Testament. He never learned to dance, as Ava Gardner found out the hard way in “55 Days at Peking”.
A generation knew him as Judah Ben-Hur, whipping four white horses into a frenzy
round a Roman arena. But his tunic-and-loincloth roles, though they made his name (and won him an Oscar for “Ben-Hur” in 1960), sometimes annoyed him. He preferred to be explicitly American: wearing buckskins, making Westerns, handling a six-gun, or playing President Andrew Jackson, that “giant figure in American memory”. He delighted in his childhood in the north woods of Michigan, when, “seriously overgunned”, he had hunted rabbits, fished through ice and, like Lincoln and Reagan, chopped logs. There in a one-room schoolhouse he had learned his lessons, in the days before the destruction of the public-school system.
His politics were not always so right-wing. He was active in the civil-rights movement, and a paid-up Democrat until the Robert Bork debacle of 1987. But there was something inevitable about his rightward slide. It was not just the rise of Reagan, his friend from the Screen Actors Guild, or the growing blight of political correctness, which he called “tyranny with manners”. It went deeper than that.
Mr Heston’s favourite of his film characters was no genius or prophet, but the taciturn, determined cowboy in “WillPenny” (1968). His favourite scene was where Penny, carrying a dead cowboy, rode through the rain to apply for the dead man’s job, only to be mocked. Mr Heston saw this as the plight of every white, rural, Protestant, god-fearing, gun-owning male in America. Their voices, too, went unheard. But they would knock the water from their hats and carry on.
He knew where that “blood-call” would take them. He had been there himself for “The Big Country” in 1958. On some mountain-top, as the sun rose, they would look west into a shining place where freedom and greatness still invited them: “where you could pray without feeling naive, love without being kinky, sing without profanity, be white without feeling guilty”. To that mythical America, the Promised Land, he would stretch out his bronzed arm and lead his kind.
Thor Heyerdahl
Thor Heyerdahl, the Kon-Tiki man, died on April 18th 2002, aged 87
The first publishers that were offered Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki thought there would be little public interest in a scientific voyage on a raft across the Pacific. “Did anyone drown?” one publisher asked hopefully. Mr Heyerdahl said that he and his five companions had felt a bit tired when they landed on a Polynesian reef after 101 days at sea, but were otherwise fit. Well, in that case…
Eventually Mr Heyerdahl did find a publisher brave enough to take on his saga. The book sold more than 30m copies and was translated into 67 languages. A triumph, and a satisfying smack in the eye for those who had turned him down. But the most important result for Mr Heyerdahl was that money from his writing allowed him to spend a vastly interesting life pursuing a number of unorthodox notions, some of them plausible, some of them cranky, all of them infuriating to those whose theories he was challenging.
Kon-Tiki, while a success with the general public, was knocked by some anthropologists who disputed Mr Heyerdahl’s claim that many Pacific islands had received their first people from South America. The orthodox view was that they had been first settled from Asia as part of the slow drift eastwards of humans from Africa; everyone knew that. Everyone except, it seemed, Thor Heyerdahl. He saw cultural and genetic links between South Americans and Polynesians, and set out to show that such a voyage between the two territories would have been possible in ancient times. Using balsa wood and other materials that would have been available in antiquity, Mr Heyerdahl built the Kon-Tiki, named after a mythical South American king said to have been fleeing for his life, and launched her from Peru. As he had predicted, she was carried by currents and wind to Polynesia 4,300 miles away. The raft stood up to Pacific storms and Mr Heyerdahl and his friends supplemented their diet with algae strained through cloth.
The voyage showed only that contacts had been possible among the ancients across vast stretches of ocean, not that they had happened. But Mr Heyerdahl was well satisfied. He had in mind a Big Idea. The Kon-Tiki expedition was just the start of his efforts to shape it.
Thor Heyerdahl’s mother ran a museum in his hometown Larvik, a port city in southern Norway. Helping her, he said, he first became interested in what he called “natural things”. At Oslo University he studied zoology and geography. In 1936 his indulgent parents provided him and his new bride with enough money to spend a year in the Pacific, partly as a honeymoon, partly so that Mr Heyerdahl could gather material for a doctorate on Pacific life. In fact the couple chose to live as a modem Adam and Eve on the island of Fatuhiva in the Marquesas. But modern stomachs turned out to be unsuited to roots and berries. His bride became seriously ill and discovered that modern medicine had its charms.
Still, the Pacific had Mr Heyerdahl in its grip. After the second world war (when Norway was occupied by Germany and Mr Heyerdahl served with the Allies) he mulled over how the islands had been settled. After his Kon-Tiki experience he posed the
question: if such voyages took place in the Pacific might there have been similar voyages elsewhere in the ancient world? Were the oceans less a barrier isolating people, more an avenue connecting them? Mr Heyerdahl became convinced that this is what had happened. “The ocean is a conveyor and not an isolator,” he said. He rejected the assumption that Europeans were the first to discover distant lands. Columbus was not the first to sail to America; nor even Mr Heyerdahl’s fellow countryman Leif Ericsson.
We Europeans are so one-track minded when it comes to our own history that we say to the world that Europe discovered the whole world. I say that no European has discovered anything but Europe.
Mr Heyerdahl was intrigued by the number of step pyramids found in different parts of the world. These tend to be smaller and of more ancient origin than true pyramids with their smooth sides. Did the knowledge of their construction spread from Egypt to Mexico, Peru and the Canary Islands? To show that an Atlantic crossing was possible with the technology that existed in ancient times, in 1969 hebuilt a ship of reeds called Ra based on an Egyptian design and launched her from the former Phoenician port of Safi, in Morocco. The ship survived in the Atlantic for 56 days before she became dangerously leaky. A second reed ship reached Barbados safely.
Mr Heyerdahl’s surmise that the old civilisations were linked by sea, exchanging ideas and materials, remains a matter of debate, if not scepticism, for many anthropologists. Similarities between ancient cultures are assumed to be coincidences. Nevertheless, Thor Heyerdahl extended the role of anthropology. He was a marvellous stimulant: everyone who met him came away with their head buzzing with ideas. In Norway he was simply a hero. In 1999 he was voted Norwegian of the century. So there.
Albert Hofmann
Albert Hofmann, chemist, died on April 29th 2008, aged 102
HIS first experience was “rather agreeable”. As he worked in the Sandoz research labora
tory in Basel in Switzerland on April 16th 1943, isolating and synthesising the unstable alkaloids of the ergot fungus, Albert Hofmann began to feel a slight lightheadedness. He could not think why. His lab was shared with two other chemists; frugality and company had taught him careful habits. And this was a man whose doctoral thesis had revolved around the gastrointestinal juices of the vineyard snail.
Perhaps, he supposed, he had inhaled the fumes of the solvent he was using. In any event, he took himself home and lay down on the sofa. There the world exploded, dissolving into a kaleidoscope of colours, shapes, spirals and light. It seemed to have something to do with lysergic acid diethylamide, lsd-25, the substance he had been working on. He had synthesised it five years before, but had found it “uninteresting” and stopped. Now, like some prince in faery, he had got the stuff on his fingertips, rubbed it into his eyes and seen the secrets of the universe.
The next Monday, ever the good scientist, he deliberately took 0.25 milligrams of lsd diluted with 10cc of water. It tasted of nothing. But by 5 o’clock the lab was distorting, and his limbs were stiffening. The last words he managed to scrawl in his lab journal were “desire to laugh”. That desire soon left him. As he cycled home with a companion, perhaps the most famous bike ride in history, he had no idea he was moving. But in his house the furniture was ghoulishly mutating and spinning, and the neighbour who brought him milk as an antidote was “a witch with a coloured mask”. He realised now that lsd was the devil he couldn’t shake off, though in his senseless body he screamed and writhed on the sofa, certain that he was dying.
After six hours it left him. The last hour was wonderful again, with images “opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in coloured fountains.” Each sound made colours. His doctor found nothing physically wrong with him, except for extremely dilated pupils. The substance evidently left the body quickly, and caused no hangover. But the mind it flung apart, reassembled and profoundly changed, leaving him the next morning as fresh as a newborn child.
