Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy (26 page)

• In 2008
an 18-year-old Seattle woman made an ATM deposit into her bank account. But she put the wrong envelope into the machine—instead of one filled with money, she accidentally “deposited” one that was full of methamphetamine. A bank employee found the meth the next morning. The woman was arrested.

• A 40-year-old
Silverdale, Washington, man was pulled over for erratic driving in 2008. When he handed the officer his wallet, some white powder fell out of it. The man told the officer it was cocaine, but it was okay because he only used it when he was with prostitutes, and he’d been with one that evening. He was arrested.

• Police raided
the house of a suspected drug dealer in Joliet, Illinois, in 2009 and found three marijuana plants in his back yard. The man’s explanation: The plants were for his dog, who was learning to sniff out marijuana for law-enforcement officers. He was arrested. (The dog was not.)

• A man
flagged down a police car on a Philadelphia street late one night in 2009 and told the officers that he’d lost his car…while he was trying to buy drugs. To compound the problem, his six-year-old stepson was in the car. The boy was found two hours later and taken to his mother. And though the man scored points for helping the police find his son, he was arrested.

• A police
officer in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, was in a convenience store when he noticed something odd about 29-year-old Cesar Lopez. What caught his eye? Lopez had a baseball cap in his hand, and a small plastic bag of marijuana stuck to his forehead. He was arrested.

A strand of spider silk the width of a pencil could stop a Boeing 747 airplane in flight
.

REAL FRANKENSTEINS

Mary Shelley’s fictional doctor who screamed “It’s alive, it’s alive!” wasn’t purely an imaginary figure. Lots of scientists over the years have attempted to bring the dead back to life
.

J
OHANN DIPPEL (1673–1734)

This theologian, alchemist, and natural-born troublemaker was born in the real Castle Frankenstein in Germany, and may have served as the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel
Frankenstein
. He dabbled in many disciplines—and his religious views got him imprisoned for heresy. Why was he so controversial? Working in his lab, Dippel whipped up a concoction of human bones, blood, and bodily fluids that he called the “Elixir of Life”—the drinker, he claimed, would live forever. (He also discovered that his elixir, when combined with potassium carbonate, made a useful dye known today as Prussian blue.) There’s no evidence that Dippel tried to stitch body parts together, but he was fond of putting legs, arms, heads, and torsos—both animal and human—into huge vats and boiling them down in the hope of, as he called it, “engendering life in the dead.” According to some accounts, the resulting stench caused the townspeople to demand that he end the grotesque experiments or risk being expelled from the country. Dippel wouldn’t give in, so he was exiled. He was rumored to have been later poisoned in Sweden.

LAZZARO SPALLANZANI (1729–1799)

Another possible inspiration for Shelley’s mad doctor was this well-respected 18th-century Italian scientist, who decapitated snails to see if their heads would grow back and blinded bats to prove that they navigated by echolocation. While a professor at Pavia University, Spallanzani reported to the Royal Society in London that he had attained “resurrection after death” by sprinkling water on seemingly dead microbes. One of his contemporaries, the writer Voltaire, wrote, “When a man like him announces that he has brought the dead back to life, we have to believe him.” But Voltaire was wrong—Spallanzani later realized the organisms were merely dehydrated, which led him to conduct further experiments proving that microbes could be killed by boiling (information that Louis Pasteur later put to great use). Italian researcher Paolo Mazzarello claims that Spallanzani was the inspiration for “Der Sandmann,” a short story written in 1815 by E.T.A. Hoffman about a scientist who builds an artificial human. Written a year before Mary Shelley started
Frankenstein
, the story was a huge success in Europe and could well have planted the seed for Shelley’s book.

Highest rate of homosexuality of any mammal: male bats
.

GIOVANNI ALDINI (1762–1834)

At the turn of the 19th century, scientists first experimented with
galvanism
—using electrical currents to stimulate nerves and muscles. The pioneer was Luigi Galvani, who discovered that a dead frog’s legs would kick when zapped with electricity. His nephew, Giovanni Aldini, took that work to a new level by galvanizing larger creatures. Huge crowds turned out to see the mad puppeteer manipulate the dead. According to a witness account:

    Aldini, after having cut off the head of a dog, makes the current of a strong battery go through it: the mere contact triggers terrible convulsions. The jaws open, the teeth chatter, the eyes roll in their sockets; and if reason did not stop the fired imagination, one would almost believe that the animal is suffering and alive again!

In 1803 Aldini released the book
An Account of the Late Improvements in Galvanism
, full of illustrations showing the results of his experiments in graphic detail. He was also the first person to apply the use of electrical impulses to treat the mentally ill—a procedure later known as electroshock therapy.

ANDREW URE (1778–1857)

This Scottish scientist was convinced that electrical stimulation of the
phrenic nerve
, a nerve that runs between the neck and the abdomen, could restore the dead to life. In 1818 he caused a sensation in Glasgow when he attempted to prove his theory by zapping the body of murderer John Clydesdale shortly after he was hanged. Although Ure was able to make the dead man appear to breathe and kick his legs, as well as open his eyes and make horrific faces, he was unable to resuscitate the corpse. However, the event is notable for what Ure suggested afterward: Successful resuscitation might have been achieved, he said, if the body had been shocked by two “moistened brass knobs” placed over the phrenic nerve and diaphragm—an early description of what we now know as a defibrillator.

In 2003 a British fan who claimed Paul McCartney gave him the flu tried to sell his germs on eBay
.

ROBERT E. CORNISH (1894–1963)

In 1932 this scientific wunderkind (he graduated from the University of California at age 18 and earned his Ph.D. by 22) became obsessed with the idea that he could bring the dead back to life, not be electricity but through the use of a teeter-totter, or seesaw. Inspired by the work of George Washington Crile on blood transfusion, Cornish believed that placing a recently deceased patient on a seesaw and moving him or her up and down rapidly, combined with an injection of epinephrine and oxygen, would get the blood circulating again. For over a year, he tried to revive victims of heart attack, drowning, and other sudden deaths with his seesaw therapy but had no success. Then, in 1934, Cornish was able to resurrect two dogs, Lazarus IV and V, for a short time (no word on the fates of Lazauruses I through III). He later played himself in the 1935 movie
Life Returns
, about a doctor who attempts to revive the dead.

VLADIMIR DEMIKHOV (1916–1998)

Russian physician Demikhov is credited with groundbreaking work in organ transplant surgery. However, his notoriety stems from some grotesque experiments with dogs. A surgeon in the Red Army in World War II, Demikhov honed his surgical technique while amputating the shattered limbs of wounded soldiers, skills he put to use later when he grafted the head of one dog onto the body of another. Demikhov made 20 of these two-headed creatures, none of which survived more than a month after surgery. His work was reported by
National Geographic
and
Time
magazine in the 1950s as part of a bizarre Cold War race between the United States and the U.S.S.R. to be the first to successfully transplant a human brain. So far, no one has been able to accomplish that feat.

But all of these men were nothing more than mad scientists from a bygone area. Right? Surely modern scientists don’t try the same kinds of experiments…like creating part-human, part-animal creatures. Actually, they do. Turn to
page 376
for “Manimals.”

On a roll: Americans use five times more paper for wiping body parts than for writing
.

SITTIN’ IN A TREE, PART I

On December 10, 1997, Julia “Butterfly” Hill climbed to a platform 180 feet above the ground in a giant redwood tree she called “Luna.” She didn’t come down for two years. Here’s why she did it
.

T
HE GOOD
For 118 years, the Pacific Lumber Company logged the largest privately owned old-growth redwood grove in the United States, a stand of ancient trees up to 360 feet tall, 15 feet in diameter and up to 2,000 years old. P.L., as the locals in Scotia, California, called the company, began in 1863 with 6,000 acres of timberland. By the 1920s, the company had 65,000 acres and, with 1,500 employees, was the biggest employer in Humboldt County. By the time Stanwood Murphy became company president in 1931, the Save the Redwoods League of San Francisco was already very vocal about the need for preserving the ancient redwoods. Murphy listened and made a revolutionary change to his business: P.L. would no longer clear-cut its holdings (standard practice at the time), but would adopt a “selective-cut” system of logging. This meant that the company would cut no more than 70 percent of the mature trees in a stand, leaving enough younger trees to hold the soil and to seed a new generation. Murphy never allowed more trees to be cut than the forest could replace in a year.

Murphy and his heirs were hailed for their sustainable logging practices, as well as for their treatment of P.L. employees. The company provided the loggers affordable housing, health and life insurance, a pension plan, and, by the 1960s, scholarships for their children. According to Warren Murphy, the last Murphy to run Pacific Lumber Company, “We were the good guys. It was fun, it was easy—it was a great life.”

THE BAD

In 1985 a Texas billionaire and corporate raider named Charles Hurwitz attempted a hostile takeover of the family-owned Pacific lumber. On September 27, the takeover became official: P.L. was now a subsidiary of Hurwitz’s company, Maxxam Inc. of Texas…and life in Scotia changed forever.

New York City has more Italians than Rome, more Jews than Tel Aviv & more Irish than Dublin
.

THE UGLY

Maxxam Inc. now had a massive amount of acquisition debt: $800 million. New CEO Hurwitz decided to make some radical changes of his own. After announcing to P.L. employees his version of the Golden Rule—“He who owns the gold, rules”—he sold off the company assets, drained the $60 million pension fund and adopted a new logging policy: Clear-cut the redwoods as quickly as possible. Hurwitz made no secret of his plan to eliminate
all
of the ancient redwoods on P.L. property within 20 years. As the 1,000-year-old trees began to fall at an alarming rate, environmental groups protested. When they filed suits to stop the logging, Hurwitz responded by speeding up his operations, resorting to illegally clear-cutting hundreds of trees in an old-growth grove known as Owl Creek. He only had a permit for thinning the grove, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials maintained a presence there to ensure that Hurwitz stayed within the law. But the government agents only worked on weekdays, so Hurwitz’s loggers went into the forest on weekends and holidays and took down as many trees as they could…as fast as they could.