The Curse of Constantine Rafinesque

It's an unfortunate fact that if you excel in too many fields at the same time, the net effect is that people's minds will shut down trying to take it all in. There have been many modern-day renaissance men in the last 100 years, whose genius overlaps into many different subjects, from botany to electronics to philosophy to religion, and they rarely get their deserved due from the public, who tend to prefer that you pick one realm of research and stick to that.

(It can be even more of an annoyance for someone such as myself, who frankly excels at no one particular practice, but nevertheless enjoys dabbling in painting, writing, science, theatre, astronomy, computers, music, photography, gardening, microbiology, and the culinary arts. It's hard to tell someone that you do all these things without sounding like the world's biggest B.S.-er and/or someone with delusions of grandeur. Hey, I never said I was good at any of these things - I just don't let that stop me from doing them!)

Take Constantine Rafinesque for example. He was a self-educated polymath and a polyglot who made great breakthroughs in the fields of zoology, meteorology, geology, anthropology, linguistics, and more - but was officially honored by academia for none of his accomplishments during his lifetime.

In 1819 Rafinesque became professor of botany at Transylvania University in Lexington, and also tutored in French and Italian. His erratic personality and ahead-of-his-time views, however, kept him in constant trouble with the University and with his peers in the scientific community. In 1826 he and Transy parted ways after a heated argument with its president, Horace Holly. Some versions of the story say he was fired, others say he walked out. Either way, Rafinesque announced he had placed a curse on Transylvania University and Mr. Holly, a threat which no doubt elicited little more than droll chuckles around the faculty lounge.

But then Holly himself was ousted from power by his own board, and soon thereafter died of Yellow Fever. And two years later, the Transy administration building was destroyed in a fire. Some may have, at that point, asked themselves if there wasn't something to the mad professor's curse.

Perhaps in a move to pacify Rafinesque posthumously, it was arranged after his death to bring his remains back to Transy to be interred in a crypt room inside Old Morrison Hall. For many years having his remains here was a point of pride for the school. But then, even in death, Rafinesque messed with them once more: it was recently discovered that they got the wrong body. A campus secret society known as "The Hemlock Society" had been charged with the task and mistakenly exhumed the corpse of a woman named Mary Ann Passamore from a pauper's graveyard in Philadelphia instead of Rafinesque's.

Oops.

"Head Transplant a Success"

I saw a Louisville Courier-Journal headline reading "Head Transplant A Success" on Mojo's local news RSS feed. Excited, I clicked through to find it was a deceptive bit of humor on someone's part - the story's actually about a marble statue in Clarksville, TN whose damaged head got a replacement. Hmph.

I noticed a commenter on the story, who was also duped and disappointed, had expressed hope that the story was going to be about "science fiction come alive." But in fact, there's nothing sci-fi about head transplants - we have the technology right now to perform them, and we have for many years. The only reason scientists haven't done it (at least publicly) is because of ethical issues.

In 1908, Charles Guthrie succeeded in creating the world's first man-made two-headed dog. He grafted a dog's head onto the side of another dog's neck, with the arteries grafted together in such a way that the blood of the host dog flowed through the second head and then back into the original dog's neck. From there, it then proceeded to the brain and back into circulatory system. A photograph of it can be seen in Guthrie's book Blood Vessel Surgery and Its Applications.


In the 1940s, a short documentary called Experiments in the Revival of Organisms told of Sergey Bryukhonenko's research in keeping decapitated heads alive. Although many suspect today that the film was a staged re-enactment of Bryukhonenko's work rather than actual footage, the scientific proof of his work is well documented, and resulted in a Lenin Prize.

In the 1950s Soviet researcher Vladimir Demikhov transplanted twenty puppy heads. Additionally, the respiratory and partial digestive systems were brought along with the heads as well, with the esophagus expelling waste off the side of the dog. Because this exposed cavity left the dogs susceptible to infection, they didn't live long. The most successful one lasted 29 days.


In 1963, Dr. Robert J. White in Cleveland, Ohio successfully did a head transplant between monkeys. The animal was able to smell, taste, hear, and see. The nerves were left entirely intact, and connecting the brain to a blood supply kept it chemically alive. He repeated these experiments with even greater success in the 1970s and then again in 2001.

It's long been rumored that Walt Disney's severed head is kept in a cryogenically frozen container in some secret location, awaiting the day that he can be brought back to life. Unfortunately, cryonics was a new pursuit in those days, and virtually all cryonics labs froze their heads and bodies improperly. Too much time elapsed between the death and the freezing, the freezing process itself was too slow and gradual when it should be as instantaneous as possible, and the temperature should be far colder than what 1970s-era cryonics labs maintained in their freezers.


With cutting-edge advances in stem cell research, nanotechnology, and other innovations, there's no doubt we could be doing human head transplants today if we really, really, really wanted to - but the idea is still too horrifically Frankensteinish for most to even contemplate.

The Periodic Table of Comic Books

So why on Earth does the University of Kentucky host something called "The Periodic Table of Comic Books", which seeks to collect and log all instances in which comic books make mention of the elements? Well, hey, why not?


As one might surmise, the collection is weighted heavily towards DC's Metal Men, but the other entries range as far afield as 1941's Neon the Unknown to 2001's Star Trek: Divided We Fall.