Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [59]
It’s not the way we normally think of scientists going about their work. But it is, to Pritchard, the best way forward in a field of research that could have a major impact on more than a billion people. The fact that the hookworm larvae can burrow into the airspaces in his lungs without triggering an immune response shows that they can do something we can’t: somehow, they damp down the immune response. There is tentative evidence that they desensitise those prone to allergic reactions. In Papua New Guinea, people with a faecal egg count corresponding to around twenty-five worms in their duodenum were less wheezy in the neighbourhood of known allergens.
A couple of dozen worms, it turns out, is a tolerable level of infection that produces no adverse reaction. Pritchard tried doubling it to fifty, and it gave him diarrhoea and vomiting. Doubling it again, it turns out, is a disaster: a hundred hookworms living in your duodenum is an entirely unpleasant experience. It is worth noting (and Pritchard has noted it) that the tolerable level of hookworm infection not only seems to reduce asthma. Blood samples taken from volunteers with this level of infection contain antibodies, which means that a mild case of hookworm infection stimulates the immune system in a way that might be harnessed to produce a vaccine, radically improving billions of lives across the world.
It is still too soon to say whether this line of research will ultimately bear fruit, and further experiments are required. But that’s fine: there is nothing about Pritchard’s work that is considered to be underhand these days. Once he had experimented on himself, Pritchard was able to persuade his university’s ethics committee to approve further experiments involving people recruited from the local area. Some are asthmatics, some have Crohn’s disease, and some have multiple sclerosis – a disease caused by a self-destructive attack by the body’s immune system. There is no known cure for MS, and treatment options are few and problematic. It may be that an answer will be found in the hookworm larvae that Alan Brown scoops from his poop and hands to David Pritchard, ready for that epic journey from Pritchard’s arm to his stomach, via his lungs and throat. Disgusting? Yes. Anarchic? Yes. Worth it? Definitely.
We will leave the last word on the extraordinary recklessness of scientific researchers to the nineteenth-century German scientist Max von Pettenkofer. He was a contemporary of Robert Koch, whose postulates about bacterial infection are still followed by medical researchers. When Koch suggested that cholera was caused by a bacterial infection, Pettenkofer was so contemptuous of the suggestion that he drank – Marshall-style – a spoonful of broth laden with the suspect bacteria.
He experienced stomach pain and diarrhoea that lasted a week, but no full-blown cholera. His luck is enviable. But so, somehow, is his reckless courage. ‘Even if I had deceived myself and the experiment endangered my life, I would have looked Death quietly in the eye,’ Pettenkofer said, ‘for mine would have been no foolish or cowardly suicide; I would have died in the service of science like a soldier on the field of honour.’
Of course, some scientists don’t just put a single human at risk. Instead – according to some, at least – they endanger our entire way of life. That is because, to the secret anarchists, society’s taboos are there to be broken.
SACRILEGE
Breaking taboos is part of the game
T
o onlookers, it seemed like just another comical academic feud that was coming to a head. It was the morning of 13 September 1973, and on the sixteenth floor of New York’s Columbia-Presbyterian hospital a bespectacled, red-faced fertility researcher called Landrum Shettles was hurrying towards his laboratory. Trying to retain his dignity, and intermittently looking over his shoulder, he was half walking, half running. A few seconds later a second figure came bounding down the corridor in pursuit.