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Transcript:
In a perfect world, scientists could do their research based upon what topics interest them, and if they find something cool, they should be recognized–celebrated, even!–for their discovery. Maybe they even get a raise. (In this perfect world, all scientists make enough money to live a good life but who doesn’t like a little extra?) And in this perfect world, it shouldn’t really matter whether the general public fully understands the discovery, or has some personal connection to the discovery or even to future applications.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in that world. We live in a world where we need headlines like “King Tut’s killer tomb fungus redeems itself as a powerful cancer fighter” to describe research that found that a compound extracted from a fungus stopped leukemia cells from replicating.
I gotta say, I can’t blame anyone here, really. Whichever public relations intern got handed “A class of benzofuranoindoline-bearing heptacyclic fungal RiPPs with anticancer activities,” published last week in Nature, was truly facing an uphill battle, and good on them for coming up with a hook so good it showed up in several mainstream news outlets, including Forbes, who announced “The Prototype: King Tut’s Curse Might Kill Leukemia.”
I’m not going to downplay the research itself: even though the compound failed to have any effect on any other cancers, and even though it was only demonstrated in petri dishes, and even though it performed about as well as current treatments, it’s always cool when scientists find a new potential medicine. Maybe this will end up being cheaper, or better for particular people, or have some way to make it even more powerful! This research is good, and it’s good that their next step will be trying it in animal models. Fuck leukemia.
But would Forbes have covered this story, were it not for the “King Tut” tie in? Eh. Probably not. I mean, I know I wouldn’t. So well done to the PR hacks. Ya got me.
So. What’s the deal with King Tut? What does a 3,000-year old dead pharaoh have to do with Aspergillus flavus, the fungus that provided the compound the researchers extracted?
Short answer? Nothing.
Long answer? Get in, losers, we’re headed down another classic Rebecca Watson Rabbit Hole (™).
As a kid, I did learn about “the mummy’s curse.” Cartoons, comics, jokes, movies, and TV shows taught me that King Tut was a pharaoh who was mummified and placed in a tomb full of riches, with a curse placed on the door warning all thieves to stay away. When archaeologists in the 1930s opened it up, they died horrible deaths.
I can’t believe that cartoons, comics, jokes, movies, and TV shows lied to me but it turns out that that was not true. Tutenkahmen’s tomb had no such warning carved in the door, nor was there any other evidence of a curse being placed upon it at all. Ancient Egyptians didn’t really seem to do a lot of cursing, but you know who did? Early to mid-19th century European writers, who couldn’t get enough of mummies that they were seeing coming from Napoleon’s invasion into Egypt. Fun fact: the first known English-language story about a reanimated mummy was written by Jane Loudon in 1827, and in her story the mummy came back to life in the year 2126, where there are automatons and balloon travel and women wearing pants, just like today!
Anyway, lots of writers took a crack at stories involving mummy curses, including Louisa May Alcott. Not many people remember that Beth died because she swiped a scarab necklace from an ancient tomb discovered beneath Plumfield. Just kidding, but she really did write a book called Lost in a Pyramid, or The Mummy’s Curse, which you can read in full online.
So, by the time a group of archaeologists found the relatively untouched tomb of King Tut in the 1920s, mummies and their curses were already a known threat amongst Western literary circles. It was inevitable that people would apply the idea of a curse to the tomb, especially since it was rare to find a tomb in such pristine condition, as it had generally been left alone and safe from graverobbers throughout its history, until Howard Carter and his team came along. Their excavation was financed by Lord Carnarvon, who was one of about 25 Westerners present when the tomb was first breached. Carnavon died five months later, and the gossip took off, with people like Arthur Conan Doyle throwing fuel on the fire with speculation about spirits protecting the tomb.
How did he die? Was he found with a cobra around his neck, or his throat full of beetles? No. Lord Carnovon had already been an invalid thanks to a car accident twenty years prior, suffering from frequent infections. At his death, authorities determined he had died from sepsis following a mosquito bite that he had raked open while shaving, plus pneumonia.
And the other two dozen grave robbers who violated the supposed curse? Well, THEY ALL DIED. I mean, eventually. It was 100 years ago, after all. But did they die soon after they plundered the tomb? No. A comparison between them and another 20 Westerners who were in Egypt at the time but NOT present at the tomb found no difference between their lifespans, though it also found that women tended to live much much longer. Make of that what you will.
If you, unlike me, have an attention span greater than 45 seconds, you may be wondering what this has to do with a fungus. I literally had to pause here in my research to remind myself why I was reading all these mummy stories.
Okay, so there wasn’t really any curse for the people who opened King Tut’s tomb, but they myth continued to spread. In May of 1973, a dozen conservationists in Poland decided to open up the tomb of a King who had been buried there in the late 15th century. By September they had finished restoring the tomb and reinterred the corpse with no issue. But! In April of 1974, nearly a year after opening the tomb, one of the men died. Then another died in June, and another in August, and then another in April of 1975. What was the cause of death? I do not know. All I know is that in total, 15 members of the 12-person crew died prematurely.
Look, when you’re dealing with supernatural curses things get mixed up. When it’s in a language you don’t speak, it becomes nearly impossible to figure out.
Anyway, at some point thereafter, a microbiologist named Boles?aw Smyk had a non-supernatural hypothesis: he suspected that maybe those people died by chance, because sometimes a few people happen to die within two years of working on a project together. Just kidding, he suspected the cause was microbiology.
When searching for his name, I found several sources claiming that Smyk was the “sole survivor” of the original 12-person conservation team, but according to online translators, this article says otherwise: How Microbiologists Revive Bacteria from the Royal Crypt at Wawel. In it, he describes going into the tomb with another toxicologist and a microbiologist, where they collected samples to examine in a lab. He said that after just 20 minutes in the tomb, “I felt a very strong headache, combined with a distinct weakening of the heart. Involuntarily, I had the impression that I was poisoned. In turn, after a dozen or so hours, the next day, my body’s balance was clearly disturbed. While walking, I felt that I could fall to the ground at any moment. I had never had such sensations before! So I was very concerned about the state of my health. Insomnia also appeared – I could not work intensively as usual. After more than two weeks of suffering unknown to me, the constant headache subsided and I could finally sleep at least two, three hours a day. However, the balance disorders tormented me for almost five more years.”
Sure enough, they found several types of microbes, though none of them were active and needed some hardcore sciencing to bring them back to life. Eventually, he succeeded, which is a cool thing for a microbiologist to do. However, it does not prove that this inactive fungus caused the deaths of the conservators, nor does it suggest that his own symptoms were anything other than just being scared of a curse. I can’t even find anywhere where Smyk himself claimed anything like that.
However, now the internet, and even Wikipedia, says that yep, those people probably died from A. flavus.
So that was in the ‘70s. Fast forward to 1998, when French researcher Sylvain Gandon published a paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society called “The curse of the pharaoh hypothesis,” which was referenced in many places online as being a study that suggests that this same fungus, A. flavus, is also what killed Lord Carnovon, the delicate invalid with persistent lung infections, when he opened King Tut’s tomb. But I found a full PDF of that paper and in fact that is NOT what it is about. “The curse of the pharaoh hypothesis” was proposed a few years earlier by microbiologists to describe a way in which a particular pathogen like a fungus with very long-lived spores might evolve very high virulence, or ability to damage or kill a host. So if you were to imagine a fantasy scenario, it might be a fungus that is trapped in a tomb for thousands of years with no possible host to infect, and how it might be very deadly to the first humans to open the tomb and have contact with it.
I swear to god, I read so many microbiology studies about this topic and that’s what all of them were about: just good, nerdy microbiologist talk about possibilities and mathematical models and “could this work?” and “how might this apply to things like HIV?” It literally has nothing to do with King Tut, or Lord Carnovon. As best I can tell, some microbiologists thought they were being cute with “the pharaoh hypothesis” and the general public just saw the title and said, “Aha! It’s real and the cause is fungus.” No!
And so outlets like the Lancet decided to weigh in to point out basic facts like “Lord Carnovon got sick four months after he went in the tomb so it probably wasn’t toxic mold.” Which is great, because we do need scientists rebutting popular opinion when popular opinion is wrong, but I can’t believe it took me several days of research and translation just to learn that there was never any scientific basis to even suggest that it was mold in the first place. All there we have are a number of microbiologists discovering cool things and tossing out a mummy’s curse as a little easter egg, which is exactly what has happened here with the lovely researchers at University of Pennsylvania, who have discovered a possible new treatment for leukemia. I officially retract all my eye-rolling. You guys are simply carrying on a long tradition.
