July 12, 2019 Friday
Bedtime Story
Medical Explanation for Bewitchment
There were witnesses then who claimed that
people behaved oddly on consuming rye bread.
The story then shifts three hundred years
later to the present with a young nurse by the name of Kimberley Stewart
inheriting a family fortune (the house that belonged to the convicted “witch”
Elizabeth Stewart) and moving into it.
The book besides everything else introduces
one of the several medical explanations of bewitchment which is ergot
poisoning.
Ergot is a group of fungus of the genus
Claviceps that in its evolutionary course evolved as a plant parasite almost 100
million years ago though then its host were most likely simple grasses.
This is not a guess work but based on evidence
obtained from fossilized amber that has in it grass along with ergot-like
parasitic fungus (they were different from now).
There are about 50 species of this fungus
belonging to the genus Claviceps of which the one that is of medical relevance
and to our bedtime story and used in the fiction “Acceptable Risk” is the
species purpurea.
It’s medical relevance comes from the fact
that over the course of evolution through natural selection as grasses evolved
into cereal grasses such as wheat and rye and humans using the method of artificial
selection to use and cultivate more of them this specific species of the fungus
Claviceps made rye its most common or favorite host.
Rye of course is its favorite host but not
its only host as it also learned to exploit different variants of grasses used
by humans such as wheat, barley and sometimes oats.
Of course, it must have constantly needed
to battle with the artificial selection techniques of humans since last 12,000
years as any grass species that would have been easily poachable by this
species of fungus would have been discarded by us apes (our ancestors and
fellow cousins) for strains that were resilient to such poaching.
The most interesting part of this fungus is
the sclerotium or its compact and hard mycelium (vegetative part of fungus that
contains the entire mass of branching, thread-like hyphae which acts as the
mouth of the organism through which it acquires nutrients from the surroundings
just the way we do).
When times are hard and there is a lack of
freely available nutrition in the environment the organism saves it energy by
shrinking all these hyphae through dehydration, accumulating the reserves in a
compact form and then surrounding it with a thick dense shell.
If you care to think about it this is
exactly the way any species including us would store reserve food or nutrients
when expecting calamities or even a lean season.
A nation going to war – which is no
different from a massive colony of dense hyphae that make up this very
interesting organism – almost mirrors the activity that this organism comes out
with when it food and water reserves run dry.
The American mycologist Paul Stamets who
like our Bill Watterson also comes from a small town of Columbiana in the state
of Ohio in his 2005 book titled “Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save
the World” writes:
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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