Speaker 1: Pushkin. In early summer of nineteen ninety nine, there was
Speaker 1: a strange incident in Belgium. Products had been taken back
Speaker 1: from the market when it happened, but obviously it was
Speaker 1: already a bit too late. It began at a secondary
Speaker 1: school in a little town called Bornum, just outside Antwerp.
Speaker 1: A group of students got sick, abdominal distress, headaches, nausea, trembling, dizziness.
Speaker 1: Dozens of kids in the first wave all ended up
Speaker 1: in the hospital and the only commonality was that they
Speaker 1: had been eating together, but each had eaten their own sandwiches,
Speaker 1: so there was no possibility of a food borne problem.
Speaker 1: That's Benoui Memory. He's a medical toxicologist at the Universe
Speaker 1: of Luvin. He was part of the group that investigated
Speaker 1: the outbreak among the students. The only thing that they
Speaker 1: had in common is that they had drunk coca cola
Speaker 1: from bottles from a crate and allegedly there was a
Speaker 1: strange odor in the coke. And then the school teachers
Speaker 1: went in the different classrooms asking is anybody feeling unwell
Speaker 1: and drunk coca cola, which of course made sense at
Speaker 1: the time, but that led a few more children to
Speaker 1: report sick to be taken to hospital. The story went national.
Speaker 1: The evening news was a montage of ambulances and worried parents.
Speaker 1: The next day, four more schools reported outbreaks. I mean,
Speaker 1: it was really a state of panic. Every single Coca
Speaker 1: Cola product in Belgium was pulled from the shows and destroyed,
Speaker 1: thirty million cans and bottles, the largest recall in Coca
Speaker 1: Cola history. The company was in crisis, the stock price plummeted.
Speaker 1: I was transfixed by the Belgian coke crisis, not because
Speaker 1: I had any special interest in Coca Cola or Belgium,
Speaker 1: but because the whole affair reminded me of another panic,
Speaker 1: something I'd lived through years before that left me baffled
Speaker 1: and frustrated. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to
Speaker 1: Revisionist History, my podcast about things forgotten and misunderstood. The
Speaker 1: next two episodes are about a panic that swept the
Speaker 1: United States a quarter century ago, an outbreak of insanity.
Speaker 1: I was in the middle of it, covered it as
Speaker 1: a young reporter for the Washington Post, but it took
Speaker 1: the Belgian coke crisis a few years later for me
Speaker 1: to understand why it happened it because you know what
Speaker 1: poisoned all those Belgians. Nothing. The best explanation Coca Cola
Speaker 1: could come up with was that some of the carbon
Speaker 1: dioxide at their local bottling plant had been contaminated with
Speaker 1: sulfur compounds enough to cause a slight odor, but trace
Speaker 1: amounts orders of magnitude below what is necessary to cause illness.
Speaker 1: No major toxins detected, nothing that would suggest true poisoning,
Speaker 1: and so epidemiologically, it made no sense that there was
Speaker 1: poisoning by a single same agent. After looking into it,
Speaker 1: Memory and his colleagues concluded that the crisis was an
Speaker 1: example of what's known as a mass sociogenic illness, what
Speaker 1: used to be called mass hysteria. People had real symptoms.
Speaker 1: They were nauseated and vomiting and dizzy, and the initial
Speaker 1: batch of cokes served at the school bornem was a
Speaker 1: bit off, but the coke didn't poison them. There was
Speaker 1: no actual connection between their sickness and the thing they
Speaker 1: thought made them sick. Memory says that he saw another
Speaker 1: sociogenic outbreak firsthand in Soviet Georgia in nineteen eighty nine.
Speaker 1: Soviet troops had sprayed a group of protesters with chemical agents,
Speaker 1: a terrible incident. The strange thing, though, was that the
Speaker 1: children of the protesters had the same symptoms as their parents,
Speaker 1: even though they weren't the ones who were sprayed. In
Speaker 1: the medical literature, there are countless cases like this, a
Speaker 1: group of people linked by some shared anxiety come to
Speaker 1: believe they had been exposed to something malevolent. And the
Speaker 1: scary thing is that when you're in the middle of
Speaker 1: a sociogenic outbreak, when you're vomiting and running a fever
Speaker 1: after drinking your can of coke, you have no idea.
Speaker 1: None of the cause of your illness is all in
Speaker 1: your imagination. So she spoke, I mean her native tongue
Speaker 1: was German, and then she spoke Hebrew, and she learned English,
Speaker 1: and she learned French, and she learned Latin. This is mom, Yeah, French.
Speaker 1: She knew Aramaic very well. Yes, she spoke with a
Speaker 1: private teachers in a high school conversational of Latin. This
Speaker 1: folk lay each other. I'm at the house of Ottahamash
Speaker 1: just outside of Baltimore, on her porch. She's a professor
Speaker 1: of medicine at Johns Hopkins. Next to her is her
Speaker 1: sister Tamar, professor of medicine at Yale University, and next
Speaker 1: to Tamar their father Paul, retired professor of medicine at
Speaker 1: Georgetown University. Otta and Tamar are talking about their mother, Marghite,
Speaker 1: also a professor of medicine at Georgetown University until she
Speaker 1: died of cancer in two thousand and eleven. And then
Speaker 1: when she had cancer, she's like, Oh, it's a little inconvenient,
Speaker 1: but it's gonna be fine, just the way she did
Speaker 1: her whole idea, and she was very, very positive. She
Speaker 1: had an amazing ability to make whoever she was talking
Speaker 1: to think that they were the single most important person
Speaker 1: in the room with the most interesting story. Marguite Hamish
Speaker 1: was born in Germany, then raised in Bucharest after her
Speaker 1: family fled the Nazis in nineteen thirty six. She met
Speaker 1: her husband Paul in Israel after the war. She was
Speaker 1: the star. He was the protector, He was the cook.
Speaker 1: He was the come out of school and make sure
Speaker 1: you don't have ningitis when you can't move your neck.
Speaker 1: He came to the plays, he came to the games.
Speaker 1: He cheered us on. He took a backseat to her.
Speaker 1: He always did. For sixty years. They were a team.
Speaker 1: They would have breakfast in bed together. They would drive
Speaker 1: to work together. They would work in the same office,
Speaker 1: they would drive home together, they would make dinner together,
Speaker 1: they would go and do whatever they were doing for
Speaker 1: the evening together, and they would go in the same bed.
Speaker 1: And my mother would say, Man, I just don't see
Speaker 1: any of your father all the time. I just don't
Speaker 1: see enough. Yeah, which right, Yeah, and that's what you
Speaker 1: would say. It's like, I don't know where he is.
Speaker 1: I'm like, I think you went to the bathroom, mom. No,
Speaker 1: I mean they were crazy, like yeah, even when they
Speaker 1: were in their sixties. You know, they always read the
Speaker 1: paper on a Sunday morning and we had a big window. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so they would read the paper and they would
Speaker 1: literally chase each other around, like I mean, like kids
Speaker 1: in law. I mean like I'm like, okay, guys, like
Speaker 1: you're sixty five, we've had enough fer to come on
Speaker 1: all right. Yeah. It's it was bizarre. It's very bizarre.
Speaker 1: Marguite Hamash discovered an enzyme critical for newborn digestion, became
Speaker 1: an expert on human milk and nutrition, lectured all over
Speaker 1: the world, ran a major laboratory at Georgetown, funded by
Speaker 1: millions in research grants from the National Institutes of Health.
Speaker 1: An intellectual, elegant and cultured. Even when she had three children,
Speaker 1: a full time job and everything else, they went out
Speaker 1: at least east three times a week to a play
Speaker 1: or a concert or performance every week. One weekend day
Speaker 1: was a museum, so the other weekend they was cooking
Speaker 1: for the week. On Saturday afternoon, the opera was on.
Speaker 1: Anything made a sound, you were dead, So you took
Speaker 1: a nap from two Live from Lincolnside. In the late
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, Marguite Hamish had a small problem in her lab,
Speaker 1: nothing major. A disagreement with one of her researchers. The
Speaker 1: researcher quit, Then she changed her mind wanted her job back.
Speaker 1: The Hamishes rehired her. The second time around, the researcher
Speaker 1: grew even more disgruntled. She ended up making a series
Speaker 1: of accusations. Georgetown launched an investigation. Hamish was cleared, but
Speaker 1: the researcher then appealed her case to the National Institutes
Speaker 1: of Health, the institution that funded Hamish's research. Because the
Speaker 1: NAH gives out billions of dollars in research grants, they
Speaker 1: have a mechanism to ensure their money is used appropriately.
Speaker 1: In those days, it was an investigative unit called the OSI,
Speaker 1: the Office of Scientific Integrity. When universities could not resolve
Speaker 1: disputes on their own, the OSI would step in and
Speaker 1: take the case. That's what happened with Hamish. The OSI
Speaker 1: investigated and wrote a report. Several people ask me what
Speaker 1: is this all about? And the truth is that I
Speaker 1: really didn't know what it was all about, in the
Speaker 1: sense that you know, there was a lot of ranting
Speaker 1: and raving going on. Now, let me ask you this,
Speaker 1: When was the last time you heard about an internal
Speaker 1: laboratory dispute between medical researchers working in some esoteric corner
Speaker 1: of human physiology. Unless you're a scientist, I'm going to
Speaker 1: guess never. People in academic laboratories work long hours in
Speaker 1: close quarters. The pay is low. You can spend years
Speaker 1: on an experiment with little to show for. You might
Speaker 1: see the person next to you get a job, or
Speaker 1: publish a paper, or win an award that you think
Speaker 1: you deserved. Competition for funding is intense. Labs are stressful places,
Speaker 1: so what That's why scientists published their results to work
Speaker 1: out disagreements among themselves. Fights rarely go public, except during
Speaker 1: a brief period in the early nineteen nineties, the Window
Speaker 1: of Insanity, when everything went public. Back then, I was
Speaker 1: on a team of science writers at the Washington Post.
Speaker 1: We call ourselves the Pod. We wrote about medicine and
Speaker 1: physics and psychology, and covered the health bureaucracy, the NIH
Speaker 1: the Food and Drug Administration, the CDC and what were
Speaker 1: we obsessed with? Not just us but our counterparts at
Speaker 1: other newspapers as well. Science fraud. There was the Baltimore case,
Speaker 1: an insanely complicated allegation against the Nobel Prize winner David Baltimore.
Speaker 1: The Gallow case, an unbelievable tale of the AIDS virus
Speaker 1: and a lab theft. The Cleveland Clinic case It never ended, leaks, lawsuits,
Speaker 1: page one stories, big headlines. A science writer at the
Speaker 1: Chicago Tribune, a reporter named John Crudzen, wrote eighty thousand
Speaker 1: words on the Gallow case. Eighty thousand words for a newspaper.
Speaker 1: I have written books that aren't eighty thousand words. There
Speaker 1: was a nine hour Congressional hearing entirely devoted to a
Speaker 1: scientific paper entitled Altered Repertoire of Endogenous immunoglobulin gene expression
Speaker 1: in transgenic mice containing a rearranged MEW heavy change gene,
Speaker 1: nine hours during which Congressman attempted to sound intelligent on
Speaker 1: the subject of transgenic MW products. Then in the middle
Speaker 1: of all of this Marguite Hamish. I never met her,
Speaker 1: But for some reason, out of all the cases that
Speaker 1: bubbled up in the great Science Panic, hers was always
Speaker 1: the case that affected me the deepest. It made me
Speaker 1: angry in ways that will take the better part of
Speaker 1: this episode and the next to explain. Why did Marguite
Speaker 1: Hamish choose to spend her life in a laboratory out
Speaker 1: of all the things she could have done. It's not
Speaker 1: hard to imagine she was a refugee from Nazi Germany. Now,
Speaker 1: there were times when I remember vividly. I interrupted my
Speaker 1: mother because I don't know, I was in sixth grade
Speaker 1: and a boy dumped me or something. I said, Nikki
Speaker 1: dumped me, And she looked at me and she said,
Speaker 1: you know, at your age, I was in an area shelter,
Speaker 1: you know, wondering what I was going to eat. A
Speaker 1: laboratory offered order and certainty and safety. After all she
Speaker 1: had been through what happens outside the laboratory doesn't matter,
Speaker 1: and then, out of the blue, the outside world does matter.
Speaker 1: A routine disagreement with someone in her lab turned into
Speaker 1: a national story. Marguite Hamish has been forced to defend
Speaker 1: herself against charges of falsifying data, plagiarism, and mismanaging research
Speaker 1: in her laboratory. Washington Post, January twenty second, nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 1: Written by one of my colleagues. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: say who, because I think that any of us back
Speaker 1: then could have written it. It was what we did.
Speaker 1: I remember vividly when the paper came out and one
Speaker 1: of my friends said, have you seen this paper? Have
Speaker 1: you seen this article? And I said what article? And
Speaker 1: I'm like you did your mom commit scientific prad I'm like, no,
Speaker 1: what are you talking about? And I read it and
Speaker 1: I was like, gosh, this is bad. It was bad.
Speaker 1: The Hamishes didn't want to talk at first. They told
Speaker 1: me they didn't want to dig up all those memories
Speaker 1: her fifty seven years it's a long time. And I
Speaker 1: was I was sort of protector relationship, and he couldn't
Speaker 1: protect her from us. It was really bad, and that's
Speaker 1: I couldn't protect her in this particular case, Paul Hamish
Speaker 1: could not protect Margit anymore. She had been swept up
Speaker 1: in a panic. Would you knowing we allow yourself to
Speaker 1: be treated by a doctor with AIDS. It's been just
Speaker 1: over a year since Dennis David Aser died of age
Speaker 1: in Florida, and he left five of his former patients
Speaker 1: with the disease of AIDS. The Oprah Winfrey Show, September
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety one. Oprah's guest is twenty three year old
Speaker 1: Kimberly Bergalis, one of five patients infected by doctor Acer.
Speaker 1: Has there been any clarification, Kimberly on how you contracted
Speaker 1: the disease? Was there a cut or was the doctor cut?
Speaker 1: Or was it transmitted through the instrument? Or have you
Speaker 1: been clarified on that as yet? No, I haven't, you don't,
Speaker 1: And I suppose at this point it doesn't really matter
Speaker 1: that much matter. The AIDS epidemic was then at its height,
Speaker 1: there was no effective treatment. The epidemic had started with
Speaker 1: the gay community and IVY drug users and people who
Speaker 1: had received contaminated blood transfusions. But Kimberly Brigalis wasn't gay
Speaker 1: or a drug user or someone who had gone through
Speaker 1: a major medical procedure. She was just a college student
Speaker 1: in Florida, a virgin from a religious family who had
Speaker 1: done nothing more than Gosie the dentist. If you were
Speaker 1: to chart public fear of HIV over time, that summer
Speaker 1: of nineteen ninety one, during Kimberly Bergalis's slow and very
Speaker 1: public death, was the peak. Bergalis's parents took her on
Speaker 1: a train from their home in Florida to Washington, d C.
Speaker 1: To testify before Congress. They wanted mandatory HIV testing for
Speaker 1: all healthcare providers. An army of reporters from around the
Speaker 1: country climbed on board to document her journey. I was
Speaker 1: one of them. Kimberly Bergalis's Ride of Rage September twenty sixth,
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety one, Washington Post. She was down to seventy
Speaker 1: pounds by that point. When she spoke to reporters, her
Speaker 1: father would carry her in his arms. There was a
Speaker 1: sixty minutes episode about her, a long running controversy over
Speaker 1: whether her dentists deliberately infected her. Interviews Headlines and then
Speaker 1: Oprah twice. Now in a recent letter to Florida health officials,
Speaker 1: Kimberly Bergalos makes it clear who she thinks responsible for
Speaker 1: her having this disease. In an excerpt, Kimberly states, who
Speaker 1: do I blame? Do I blame myself? I sure don't.
Speaker 1: I never had a blood transfusion. I blame doctor Aser
Speaker 1: and every single one of you, bastard. She says, I'm dying, guys, goodbye. Really,
Speaker 1: we all just are interested in knowing, first of all,
Speaker 1: how how you are feeling, and how are you doing well.
Speaker 1: I'm walking with assistance right now, and I'm eating a lot.
Speaker 1: I'm so pretty weak, but I feel better. A few
Speaker 1: months later, she was going The great anxiety of the
Speaker 1: early AIDS epidemic was that science and the medical establishment
Speaker 1: had failed us. They hadn't protected us. And the Regalles
Speaker 1: case embodied that fear had a lot of abuse from
Speaker 1: your medical establishment. I think that's one of the most
Speaker 1: frustrating things. When Kimberly appeared on OPRAH the final time,
Speaker 1: her mother Anna was by her side, you know, my
Speaker 1: daughter dying. They realized that she is dying. They realized
Speaker 1: that she is dying because of the medical establishment, the
Speaker 1: civil liberties, the gay activist groups, and they're not doing anything.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm not emotional. I'm not hysterical, I am enraged.
Speaker 1: Ten years into the AIDS epidemic, people had found their
Speaker 1: culprit the medical establishment. Now, of course, just a few
Speaker 1: years later, the same medical establishment that everyone was blaming
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety one would figure out how to treat
Speaker 1: HIV and the thing that was so scary, infection by
Speaker 1: a healthcare provider would turn out to be a one off,
Speaker 1: incredibly rare. But no one knew that. In the summer
Speaker 1: of nineteen ninety one. All we had was fear and anger.
Speaker 1: And once you start seeing something dark in the motives
Speaker 1: of people in white coats, it doesn't end. Every disagreement,
Speaker 1: every anomaly, every mole hill becomes a scandal. Belcomi and
Speaker 1: detained a building ifs t the DeFi Hindi. That's exactly
Speaker 1: what happened with the Belgian cocusteria. A few months earlier,
Speaker 1: Belgium had been through a crisis. Chickens in farms across
Speaker 1: the country had fallen ill. Their feed had gotten contaminated
Speaker 1: with dioxin, one of the most toxic of all chemicals. No,
Speaker 1: it was major, it was it was amazing. It's probably
Speaker 1: one of the biggest food scares in I would say
Speaker 1: maybe in history Benouan memory, the toxicologist was in the
Speaker 1: middle of it. The Belgian government had to recall anything
Speaker 1: that might possibly have been in contact with the contaminated
Speaker 1: feed eggs, chicken beef. The news was filled with talk
Speaker 1: about how extraordinarily dang dioxins are, how even trace amounts
Speaker 1: can cause cancer. Every day on television you you could
Speaker 1: see animals that were being slaughtered and dumped into mass
Speaker 1: graves and vanitting open a specific un Then a few
Speaker 1: weeks later, a batch of coke smells a little funny
Speaker 1: and the panic starts, a panic born entirely in the
Speaker 1: imagination of terrified children and their parents and teachers, school
Speaker 1: children being poisoned by coca cola, which is again one
Speaker 1: of the biggest symbols of our modern food. And so
Speaker 1: that was really the sort of cherry on on that
Speaker 1: rotten cake. Epidemics of fear repeat themselves. You start with dioxin,
Speaker 1: you end up with coca cola, You start with Kimberly bergalis,
Speaker 1: you end up with marguite Hamish. First time its tragedy,
Speaker 1: second time is farce. On March twenty, nineteen ninety one,
Speaker 1: the Washington Post published its second article on a Hammish case.
Speaker 1: It began the way all the science fraud stories of
Speaker 1: that era began, with a call to authority. Quote. The
Speaker 1: National Institutes of Health has concluded that a top scientist
Speaker 1: at Georgetown University Medical Center committed scientific misconduct by knowingly
Speaker 1: submitting false information in applying for two federal research grants
Speaker 1: end quote. This is now two months after the first
Speaker 1: big piece on a Hamish case in the Washington Post.
Speaker 1: The Office of Scientific Integrity has finished its investigation and
Speaker 1: found her guilty. Maybe because this was a story written
Speaker 1: by someone else, and maybe because I could see it
Speaker 1: with fresh eyes, but I remember reading the piece and
Speaker 1: reading it again and wondering, what is this. Something's wrong.
Speaker 1: This was the point I became a skeptic first thing.
Speaker 1: So it sounds like there was some kind of formal
Speaker 1: hearing which ruled against Marguite Hamish. Right. Actually, no, here's
Speaker 1: the way things worked at the Office of Scientific Integrity.
Speaker 1: They would interview both parties to a disagreement, write up
Speaker 1: their findings, and then just lead them to the press.
Speaker 1: Some one in the office would slip his or her
Speaker 1: favorite reporter a package of documents stamped something like confidential
Speaker 1: or for internal use only, or simply draft put inside
Speaker 1: plain brown envelopes. I got them. We all got them. Now,
Speaker 1: if you scroll down to the second to last paragraph
Speaker 1: in the Washington Post piece, you'll come to this Hamish,
Speaker 1: who is chief of the Division of Developmental Biology and
Speaker 1: Nutrition in Georgetown's Pediatrics department. We'll have an opportunity to
Speaker 1: review the report and submit a written rebuttal. End quote
Speaker 1: will have an opportunity she hadn't seen it, and also
Speaker 1: submit a written rebuttal. The OSI had concluded Marguite Hamish
Speaker 1: was a fraud without showing her the evidence or letting
Speaker 1: her respond. I remember once, not long before this, doing
Speaker 1: another story on a science fraud case. I called the
Speaker 1: attorney for the accused, and he said, well, I can't
Speaker 1: comment because I have no idea what my client is
Speaker 1: accused of. I took my leaked OSI report out of
Speaker 1: its plain brown wrapper, photocopied it, and sent it over
Speaker 1: to him. No part of that transaction had seemed weird
Speaker 1: to me at the time. Now, the most important question
Speaker 1: of all, what was it that Marguhite Hamish did? What
Speaker 1: was her alleged fraud? I have been going on and
Speaker 1: on about this case for a good four now, and
Speaker 1: I haven't told you you know why, because we didn't know.
Speaker 1: You won't find a good explanation in the Washington Post
Speaker 1: story of March twenty second, nineteen ninety one, just vague
Speaker 1: mentions of an experiment involving rabbits. Well, let me tell
Speaker 1: you the final accusation against Marguite Hamish. At the end
Speaker 1: of a twenty thousand word NIH grant application, in a
Speaker 1: section that was completely peripheral to the subject of her
Speaker 1: grant request, Marguite Hamish wrote the following sentence, last, but
Speaker 1: not least, we are presently using the newborn rabbit as
Speaker 1: an animal model for total perenthal nutrition. After scrutinizing every
Speaker 1: word of her grant application, the OSI said that's wrong
Speaker 1: because at the time Marguhite Hamish wrote the grant, she
Speaker 1: didn't actually have the animal model up and running. She
Speaker 1: wasn't presently using newborn rabbits. Their understanding of the word
Speaker 1: presently was it stands as a synonym for currently. Hamish's
Speaker 1: defense was she had designed the rabbit experiments, she had
Speaker 1: received the money to conduct those experiments, she had obtained
Speaker 1: the special surgical equipment to run the rabbit experiments, and
Speaker 1: she had begun collecting the necessary preliminary data on the
Speaker 1: rabbits prior to the experiment. She was going to do
Speaker 1: the rabbit experiments presently. She was using presently as a
Speaker 1: synonym for shortly, which is the way that it is
Speaker 1: often used in British English. The doctor will be with
Speaker 1: you presently. That's it. Her crime was not writing the
Speaker 1: more conventional we will shortly be using the newborn rabbit
Speaker 1: as an animal model, or maybe shifting the word presently
Speaker 1: to the end of the sentence, which is the one
Speaker 1: place where in American English we will accept the British
Speaker 1: definition of presently, we will be using the newborn rabbit
Speaker 1: as an animal model for total perenthal nutrition presently. But
Speaker 1: I don't know. She was born in Germany, she was
Speaker 1: educated in Israel. English is her seventh language. Okay, now
Speaker 1: you might say this is ridiculous. Still ridiculous cases sometimes happen,
Speaker 1: so what. But after Hamish it dawned on me that
Speaker 1: they were all like this, all the science fraud cases
Speaker 1: that we had become obsessed with, Like the case of
Speaker 1: Mika Popovic, a virologist at the NIH. The scientists who
Speaker 1: figured out how to grow the AIDS virus in the laboratory,
Speaker 1: without which nothing, no subsequent research on HIV would have
Speaker 1: been possible. Here he is as a big character in
Speaker 1: the film adaptation of and the band played on Yes
Speaker 1: At a time when people knew nothing about HIV except
Speaker 1: that it was the most or as virus anyone had
Speaker 1: ever seen. Popovic's slaved away in the laboratory hours on end,
Speaker 1: working with samples of HIV infected blood with his hands. Anything.
Speaker 1: How can I How can I isolates virus? If I
Speaker 1: just can't keep the settles alive? Popovic was also accused
Speaker 1: of fraud. Why because in a chart in the paper
Speaker 1: where he first described growing the AIDS virus, Popovic eight
Speaker 1: times used the initials n D in the place of
Speaker 1: a number. The charts legend said n D meant not done.
Speaker 1: The OSI said, wait, you did do those experiments. That's fraud,
Speaker 1: Except Popovic's English is bad. Somebody helped him write the paper,
Speaker 1: and that person put in the footnote about ND meaning
Speaker 1: not done. What Popovic actually meant by end was not determinable,
Speaker 1: meaning the results were inconclusive. So why did Popovic miss
Speaker 1: the error in the not done footnote. Maybe because the
Speaker 1: article in question was published in nineteen eighty four, when
Speaker 1: AIDS was in its first terrifying stages, and maybe he
Speaker 1: was in just a little bit of a hurry to
Speaker 1: publish the most important advance to that point against the epidemic.
Speaker 1: The battle over n D went on for years. The
Speaker 1: o SI conducted more than seven thousand hours of interviews
Speaker 1: and deliberations. Popovic sued lost ran through his savings, got
Speaker 1: chased out of Nih over a dispute over the correct
Speaker 1: interpretation of two initials n D. Presently it was like
Speaker 1: the Spanish Inquisition, staffed by a mob of angry copy
Speaker 1: editors in the face of a panic. It is the
Speaker 1: job of those who know better to stand and say,
Speaker 1: like Benoa Memory did, wait, it isn't the coke. The
Speaker 1: coke is harmless. This is misplaced anxiety. It is the
Speaker 1: job of those who know better to deliver the difficult truth.
Speaker 1: But those of us who were science writers in that
Speaker 1: era didn't do that. We lapped up the leaks from
Speaker 1: the OSI, We wrote our sensational stories, and we tore
Speaker 1: apart the lives of innocent people. No one remembers Marguite
Speaker 1: Hamish today, she's a footnote one scientist, longone who worked
Speaker 1: away quietly in a lab on a problem that most
Speaker 1: of us have never heard of. First of all, the
Speaker 1: amount of material that this case generated was no less
Speaker 1: than three hundred pounds of paper. Okay, I mean, I
Speaker 1: would say, in their house, right in their house. So
Speaker 1: and you didn't see the part that was downstairs, now
Speaker 1: that you talk, me an entire falcom, entire farcom. And
Speaker 1: then up in the cellar there were boxes and boxes
Speaker 1: full of binders, eat hamish. Shouldn't be a footnote. Her
Speaker 1: case should be a warning. This is what happens when
Speaker 1: we let our fears consume us. But I opened a binder,
Speaker 1: and I mean her annotations were she annotated every every
Speaker 1: binder had her handwriting in it. This isn't true. I
Speaker 1: didn't say that, you know. I think this is misinterpreted.
Speaker 1: Tiny mom handwriting everywhere, yellow pages, legal pages, stuck in
Speaker 1: I disagree with this. This isn't right. Every binder she annotated.
Speaker 1: Every mom Mom annotated every binder of everything with this case.
Speaker 1: So think about what she could have been doing at
Speaker 1: that time. Then one day it stopped. How that happened
Speaker 1: is the subject of the next episode, how all the
Speaker 1: cases that obsessed us just went away and the fever passed.
Speaker 1: It aged her. I think a lot. I mean when
Speaker 1: I think of my mother and how she aged, she
Speaker 1: was a woman who likes true. In her late forties
Speaker 1: early fifties, was still very beautiful, but by the time
Speaker 1: she had sixties, she looked every bit of sixty, and
Speaker 1: that decade was probably hard for her. She was always
Speaker 1: g four with me, and I didn't know that she's suffering,
Speaker 1: and to what extent she's suffering. This whole saying I
Speaker 1: don't think, well, I take. I talked to Mom a
Speaker 1: lot about it, and she what she said was, I
Speaker 1: pretend it's not happening until unless I have to speak
Speaker 1: with the lawyer, and then I get a migraine, and
Speaker 1: then the next day I'm fine. One last question, and um,
Speaker 1: because I don't want to keep you guys, Forember. Did
Speaker 1: anyone from an AH ever apologize? No? No? Who? Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: I don't think anyone ever apologized. The insanity passes, then
Speaker 1: everyone pretends it ever happened, except for those who don't
Speaker 1: have the luxury of pretending I was angry about it,
Speaker 1: then I'm angry about it still Revisionist History is a
Speaker 1: panoply production. The lead producer is mil LaBelle with Jacob
Speaker 1: Smith and Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn
Speaker 1: Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson, Original
Speaker 1: music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to Andy Bowers and
Speaker 1: Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Even when she was dying,
Speaker 1: I took her in a wheelchair to the Kennedy Descenter.
Speaker 1: As much as I called the she needed to see art.