Brain Food

Snake bites, lion bites, underground mosquitoes that bite. Plus: the surprising uniformity of finger wrinkles, detecting forgeries, and the history of the pineapple.

2nd quarter of the 13th century; British Library, Harley MS 4751, f. 61r.

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Venom in the Veins

Humans, in general, are most afraid of animals that have either:

1. Not enough legs

2. Too many legs

If you were a normal person, therefore, you would probably not deliberately choose to be bitten 200 times by venomous snakes. You would, presumably, also shy away from the opportunity to inject yourself with snake venom an additional 450+ times, give or take a few due to shoddy record keeping (who can be expected to keep perfect tallies after the first 300 venom injections?).

Tim Friede, it’s safe to say, is not a normal person.

You always remember your first snakebite. Or so I’m reliably told. (I’ve been bitten by a lemur, but never a snake). Friede’s first snakebite happened when he was five years old—a common garter snake lurking in his childhood neighborhood in Milwaukee. Rather than putting him off our distant slithering cousins, Friede developed a lifelong love for snakes.¹

This fascination was, I gather, a sort of strange quirk worthy of perplexed discussion when Friede was a Milwaukee window-washer or construction worker, but his snake interest was about to get much weirder.

At the age of 30, he enrolled in what Wikipedia helpfully describes as a “venom extraction class,” in which you can learn how to “milk venom from spiders and scorpions.” (This is, apparently, an activity popular enough to support a formal education process for it, complete with financial remuneration, ironclad proof that humanity is a strange bunch).

So enthused was Friede by this learning opportunity that he decided to proceed to the logical next step. After milking a scorpion, there is but one obvious choice: to start injecting yourself with snake venom. So that’s what Friede did, as he began to collect and house dozens of the world’s deadliest snakes in his basement (much to the delight of his wife).² For a time, it was all going according to plan.

It may have been a bad plan, sure, but it was being properly executed. Friede was injecting himself with snake venom—and seemed to be doing okay. That is, until September 12, 2001, when, “crazed by the terrorist attack of the previous day and by the death of a friend a few days earlier, he let himself be bitten by two cobras. They were his first bites by live snakes, and he had not built up enough immunity. He was fine after the first bite, but after the second, he felt cold, his eyes started to droop and he couldn’t talk. He blacked out and woke up from a coma in a hospital four days later.”

Tim Friede + Snake. Image Courtesy: Centivax.

Friede, rather than take the obvious lesson from that brush with death—such as, I don’t know, just spitballing here, maybe it’s a bad idea to become an amuse-bouche for deadly snakes or to willingly inject their venom into your body?—decided that the real lesson was that he hadn’t been systematic enough with his venom training. He made it his main hobby, squeezing in venom injections and snake bites around his family life. As he told The New York Times:

“I’d work all day, come home, play with the kids and the family, and go downstairs and do my stuff all night long, wake up and do it again,” he said.

(The phrase “my stuff” is doing a lot of work in that quote).

Now is the time —ahem! — where we must get serious. The World Health Organization says that between 81,000 to 138,000 people die each year from snake bites. That’s enough to fill Yankee Stadium between two and three times over, their lives cut short by venom coursing through their veins. But if you look to the larger number of people who are “envenomed” (WHO jargon for “getting bit by a deadly snake”), the figure is estimated to be around 5.4 million people per year.

Antivenom treatments exist, but they’re often out of reach in time. Then, there’s an additional two problems that those of us who live in the deadly-snake-free zones of idyllic Britain need not often consider:

1. Antivenoms are usually specific to a snake species, so you can’t just mix-and-match. You need a bunch of different ones on hand since you don’t know which snake will bite.

2. Antivenoms can themselves be deadly. That’s because they are synthesized by injecting an unfortunate animal (usually “a horse, camel, or sheep”) with a little bit of snake venom and then extracting the antibodies. But the proteins from those animals in the antivenoms can cause allergic reactions in humans, sometimes putting people into shock.

Jacob Glanville, who had founded a company hoping to try to solve these problems, was on the lookout for a “clumsy” snake scientist who had accidentally gotten bit a few times (“oopsie, how silly of me to let that Black Mamba get me again!”) thereby building up some natural antibodies in their blood. So, you can imagine Glanville’s utter delight when he came across the story of Tim Friede, a living laboratory of antivenom antibodies.

Now, Friede is a hero. He will likely help to save the lives of quite literally hundreds of thousands of people. In the journal Cell, scientists have reported that they were able to use Friede’s unique blood combined with existing treatments to synthesize an astonishingly universal antivenom that, in trials with mice, provided substantial protection against 19 deadly snake venoms.

Some science killjoys who much enjoy harumphing have objected to the ethics of the research since it relies on a human subject who experimented on himself. Fair enough. But he did so of his own weirdo volition, and I, for one, think the truly unethical decision would have been to not use his superbizarro magically protective blood that already exists to save the lives of countless children in the developing world.

So my verdict is this: Hats off to you, Tim Friede; we know not why you have turned your body into an all-you-can-poison snake buffet, but we who are not about to die of a snakebite salute you!

Lions and Gladiators and Bite Marks, Oh My!

This edition of Brain Food is, by accident, bite themed. And that’s partly because of a wonderful research finding that validates a fact about the ancient world that, at times, was dismissed as mere mythology. It turns out gladiators in ancient Rome really did fight—and get killed by—lions.

But this story begins on a quiet little road in a leafy little development in York, in the north of England. If you were to stroll past the bland property pictured below, your heart would likely not begin to race with the invigorating palpitations that inevitably come with being in the presence of history.

Driffield Terrace in York. Image: Google Maps Street View.

But that would be a grievous mistake. Palpitate it must, because the image above is, somewhat improbably, the location of one of the more significant ancient archaeological finds of recent memory.

When buildings are planned in areas of likely historic significance in Britain, an excavation often takes places before construction. In this way, the wondrous London Mithraeum, a devotional site to the “mystery god” Mithras, was discovered during excavations on a construction site in 1954. (The Mithraeum is now housed below Bloomberg’s London headquarters).

When excavations began in York’s Driffield Terrace, archaeologists uncovered roughly 80 skeletons, which, upon further testing, were deemed to be a mass grave for Roman-era gladiators. (The bones showed severe injuries, and further analysis found “a tentative identification of the use of a plant ash beverage recorded in texts to have been imbibed by gladiators”).

Then, there was another rather convincing telltale sign that these were not run-of-the-mill burials: 46 of the buried bodies had been decapitated, a frequent final act of gladiatorial combat. At least one skeleton was still in shackles. Almost all of the skeletons, when tested, were determined to be of “well-built” men between the age of 18 and 45. The remains were all dated from the 1st to the 4th century.

One body stood out, named with the memorably endearing nickname of “Individual 6DT19.” He was between 26 and 35 years old, just over 5’7” tall, and likely originally came from a warmer climate than Britain. But what really stood out—and gave 6DT19 an opportunity for scientific resurrection nearly two thousand years after his death—was a series of unusual indentations on his hip bone. These were “peri-mortem” marks, meaning they likely caused—or at least occurred around the same time as—his death.

Here’s the best bit: the researchers, working on the hypothesis that the indentations could be bite marks from a large predator, examined previous research. Lo and behold, other scientists had recently conducted bite mark experiments with lions in captivity in Britain, collecting bones after scavenging feeding.

When combined with samples of bite marks from London Zoo, it was a convincing match: 6DT19 was bitten by a lion. (“Hello, is that the London Zoo? Excellent. I’m wondering if you have any lion bite marks on hard objects just lying around that you could share with us for our gladiator research?”).

Modern science being as amazing as it is, the lion bite wasn’t all the researchers could infer from the 1,800 year-old skeleton. Because big cats would normally attack toward the neck, and because the gladiator had been decapitated, it’s highly likely that the lion bit and dragged the combatant by the hip after he was dead. Analysis supported this hypothesis as the bite marks weren’t as deep as would be expected from an attack wound.

Here was definitive proof: gladiators did fight lions.

Since moving to Britain nearly 14 years ago, the historical riches of this country never cease to amaze me. When I was a kid in Minnesota, I went on a school field trip to an “historic house.” It was built in 1891. I spent lockdown living in a highly impractical cottage built in 1578. And whenever you live in a place that’s been continuously inhabited for thousands of years, as I do, you’re always left wondering: what would turn up if I just start digging?³

The following cultural maxim is correct: in America, 100 years is a long time; in Britain, 100 miles is a long distance.

The Evolutionary Origins of the Tube Mosquito

During the Blitz, Londoners had to adjust to bombs falling, at random, from the skies. Some took shelter underground. Safe from the explosions above, they met a less dangerous foe: the wonderfully named Culex pipiens f. molestus, colloquially known as the “London Underground Mosquito.”

“They're quite voracious biters,” Richard Nichols, of Queen Mary, University of London, told Natural History Magazine back in 2001. “It's not that any one bite is all that bad, it's just that they all seem to want to get a bit of you.”

These skeeters, which were believed to live exclusively in the tunnels of London’s Underground—the city’s subway system—thrived in polluted water puddles that researchers described as ranging from “pretty nasty” to “hideous.” They enjoyed the blood, as the 2001 article put it, not just of rats, but of those involved in commuting as part of London’s rat race.

There is, it turns out, a veritable feast of detritus in the Tube network—so much so that there are dedicated “defluffers” who vacuum the tracks of debris, often sucking up vast clumps of human skin flakes and hair. Yum-yum!

In the early 2000s, researchers believed that the Tube mosquito evolved underground in this rich environment, making it exclusive to the Tube network. They even proved genetic divergences depending on the Tube line; there were differences whether the mosquito was based on the Victoria, Bakerloo, or Central lines. In one genetic analysis, they found that a Tube mosquito was more closely related to another underground mosquito several miles away than one that was a few hundred meters away but up a flight of stairs from the tracks.

The Underground Mosquito differs in key ways from its aboveground compatriots. According to recent research summarized in Nature:

The mosquito looks like the common house mosquito, Culex pipiens, but behaves very differently. For example, C. pipiens lives and breeds above ground, mates in swarms, bites birds and requires a blood meal before laying eggs. The molestus form breeds underground, can mate in confined spaces, bites mammals and can lay eggs without having dined on blood.

Now, the evolutionary origins of this unusual species have been uncovered, and they’re far more ancient than previously imagined. According to the fresh research, the divergence from normal mosquitoes happened roughly 2,000 years ago (though perhaps as much as 10,000 years ago) in ancient Egypt.

In that dry, harsh environment, most mosquitoes would have struggled to survive—unless they set up shop around people and their water supplies. The timing fits perfectly into the rise of larger-scale irrigation and agriculture. This drove the mosquitoes to evolve to become dependent on people, which persisted as the Tube mosquito colonized the London Underground.

Your Fingers Always Wrinkle the Same Way

In a recent Substack post,

Adam Mastroianni

writes about what he calls “naive research,” where you just sort of test stuff, without any broader theory to guide you.

On the one hand, some proportion of your research should be naive, because there’s always a chance you stumble onto something interesting. If you’re locked into a paradigm, naive research may be the only way you discover something that complicates the prevailing view.

On the other hand, you can do naive research forever without making any progress. If you’re trying to figure out how cars work, for instance, you can be like, “Does the car still work if we paint it blue?” *checks* “Okay, does the car still work if we...paint it a slightly lighter shade of blue??”

Well, some recent research conducted by Guy German from SUNY—Binghamton⁴ examined the nature of our finger wrinkles. It turned out that nobody really knew why finger wrinkles happen on a biomechanical level. Maybe the water just sort of swells your skin and it gets all wrinkly! Sounds plausible, let’s go with that.

But that wasn’t good enough for Guy German.

So, he sprung into scientific action, and proved that the real reason for finger wrinkles is that your blood vessels under the skin contract, creating the wrinkly patterns we all know from swimming and bathing. Armed with that fresh discovery, he shared it with kids. And, as kids so often do, one child stumped German with a simple question: do they always wrinkle the same way? Or do you only wrinkle just that way once?

In the excellent tradition of naive but fun research, German and one of his students tested the hypotheses by submerging lots of fingers in water and measuring them. It turns out your blood vessels don’t move much, so your fingers wrinkle in pretty much exactly the same way every time, meaning we have a relatively static wet fingerprint too. (Fingerprints, according to unrelated research, are possibly a lingering adaptation to improving grip on wet wooden surfaces, a vestige of our primate ancestors living in the trees).

Quick Links

Vikings on the Silk Roads: We all know about the Vikings and their longships, but what about their trade to the Far East? (Aeon)

AI Slop Syndicated in Newspapers: This article from The Atlantic covers a case in which newspapers syndicated material that turned out to be AI slop riddled with errors. We are already in a new kind of dystopian digital era. (The Atlantic, gift link).

King of Fruits: A fascinating look at the history of pineapples. (Works in Progress)

How to Spot a Fake Masterpiece: A BBC deep dive on how to detect art forgeries. (BBC Culture)

The Status Cheats update: If you missed my recent essay about “the status cheats”—and why ordinary people are engaging in deceitful behavior for social clout—well, the marathoner who rides her bike around courses that I mentioned at the start of the article apparently cannot help herself. She’s back at it again, complete with absurdly implausible split times.

The Status Cheats

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1. The world is an interesting place. I wrote this sentence using the word “cousins,” then realized I had no idea how distantly related we were to snakes, so I looked into it. Our last common ancestor was a lizard-like reptile probably around 128 million years or so ago. But even more interesting is the fact that humans and snakes are byproducts of co-evolution. Recent research shows that African and Asian primate lineages (including us) have developed some resistance to snake neurotoxins precisely because as our ancestors left the trees and became bipedal, they encountered deadly snakes way more often. Other primate lineages, such as lemurs—including the one that bit me—is more vulnerable to snake venom because it didn’t evolve alongside deadly venomous snakes. Additionally, according to Snake Detection Theory, our excellent visual acuity for detecting movement comes from an evolutionary mechanism to rapidly spot and avoid deadly snakes.

2. They have, it may not surprise you to note, since divorced.

3. This is another opportunity for another plug for my favorite TV show that I’ve watched in the last five years: Detectorists, which I wrote about here.

4. I primarily know Binghamton as one of the fictional locations of Dunder Mifflin branches from The Office, but now I also know it as the scientific hub for finger wrinkle research, two good reasons to put it on the map!