It began with a rumour. Years after the war ended, stories started circulating about a Polish doctor who had supposedly saved thousands of Jews from the gas chambers by inventing a false epidemic. Newspapers repeated it. A documentary crew went looking for it. A myth formed around the idea that one man and one clever medical trick had preserved a large Jewish population from certain death. The truth is more nuanced, grounded in the very specific nature of life in occupied Poland, in the habits of the German authorities, and in the slow and sometimes uncomfortable way historical memory evolves. Eugene Lazowski did save people. Many of them. But not in the precise way the legend later claimed. What he did manage was extraordinary in its own right. It simply deserves to be told as it really happened. He learned that patients injected with a harmless strain of Proteus bacteria would test positive for typhus. (via Utterly Interesting)
He built an exoskeleton and an artificial stomach so he could blend in with a herd of goats
Building an exoskeleton of a goat and a prosthetic stomach to digest grass before attempting to cross the Alps on all fours must rank as one of the weirder research projects funded by the Wellcome Trust. But London designer Thomas Thwaites has turned his bizarre mission to bridge the boundary between Homo sapiens and other species by becoming “GoatMan” into an enlightening and funny book. Informed by advice from a Danish shaman, neuroscientists, prosthetists, animal behaviourists and Swiss goat herders, it explores what connects and separates us from other animals. Thwaites found the physical challenges of becoming a creature that moved on all fours almost insurmountable. Primates are “weird”, Thwaites says, for putting almost all their weight on their back legs; he required prosthetics to put 60% of his weight on his “front legs”. His pelvis was also 135 degrees out of alignment. “I was sort of shocked at how bad a goat I was,” he says, “and I was really trying.” (via The Guardian)
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He got a kidney transplant that saved his life but the donor had undiagnosed rabies
According to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Michigan patient received a kidney transplant at an Ohio hospital in December 2024. Around five weeks later, he began experiencing tremors, lower extremity weakness, confusion and urinary incontinence. He was soon hospitalized and ventilated, then died. Postmortem testing confirmed rabies, the CDC report said, baffling authorities because the recipient’s family had said he had not had any exposure to animals. Doctors then reviewed records about the kidney donor, a man in Idaho, and discovered that in the Donor Risk Assessment Interview (DRAI) questionnaire he said he had been scratched by a skunk. When asked, the family explained that a couple of months before, in October, while he was holding a kitten in a shed on his country property, a skunk approached, showing “predatory aggression toward the kitten”. (via Boing Boing)
Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either through my Patreon or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called The Torment Nexus.
Biographer says Crick and Watson didn’t steal a colleague’s research on DNA
Working in Cambridge, James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double helix in early 1953, while Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, researchers at King’s College London, were also trying to crack the structure. It’s widely believed that Watson and Crick stole Franklin’s data and that this enabled them to make their breakthrough. The idea can be traced back to Watson’s page-turning but unreliable memoir, The Double Helix, in which he describes seeing X-ray diffraction images at King’s in January 1953 and feeling excited about them. He does not say who made those images (although he does say that Wilkins had been repeating some of Franklin’s observations), but most people believe that this was one of Franklin’s images. Interviews with Crick from the 1960s and a close reading of the Watson and Crick research papers show that the actual process of making the breakthrough did not involve using any of Franklin’s data. She continued to share her data and ideas with both men and subsequently became very close friends with Crick and his wife, Odile. (via Nautilus)
A freak diving accident caused his body to swell up and doctors don’t know how to fix it
Alejandro “Willy” Ramos Martínez suffers from a condition known as decompression sickness, also called “chamber sickness,” which occurs when a person experiences a sudden drop in ambient pressure. This type of illness is common among divers who perform deep dives and do not follow proper decompression protocols. In 2013, Willy was diving to a depth of over 30 meters off the coast of Pisco, Peru, in search of seafood, when a passing boat ruptured his oxygen hose, forcing him to surface quickly. The sudden rise caused nitrogen bubbles to form in his chest and arms, resulting in a medical problem that left his torso and arms hugely extended. Doctors could only help him by administering oxygen in a pressurised chamber to eliminate the nitrogen bubbles. At the time, they had managed to eliminate about 30% of the enormous nitrogen bubbles in his body and were optimistic that, in time, he would recover, but eight years later, the Peruvian man is still looking for a cure. (via Oddity Central)
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as “serendipity engines,” such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg’s Curious About Everything, Dan Lewis’s Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton’s The Browser, Clive Thompson’s Linkfest and Why Is This Interesting by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy. If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com