0:15

Pushkin. In

0:20

early summer of nineteen ninety nine, there

0:23

was a strange incident in Belgium.

0:28

Products had been taken back

0:30

from the market when it happened, but

0:33

obviously it was already a bit too late.

0:36

It began at a secondary school in

0:38

a little town called Bornum, just

0:40

outside Antwerp. A group of students

0:43

got sick, abdominal distress,

0:46

headaches, nausea, trembling, dizziness.

0:48

Dozens of kids in the first wave all

0:51

ended up in the hospital and the only

0:54

commonality was that they had been eating together,

0:57

but each had eaten their own sandwiches,

0:59

so there was no possibility

1:02

of a food borne problem.

1:05

That's Benoui Memory. He's a

1:07

medical toxicologist at the Universe of

1:09

Luvin. He was part of the group that

1:11

investigated the outbreak among the students.

1:14

The only thing that they had in common is that they

1:16

had drunk coca cola from bottles

1:19

from a crate and allegedly

1:22

there was a strange odor in

1:25

the coke. And then the

1:27

school teachers went in

1:29

the different classrooms asking

1:32

is anybody feeling unwell

1:35

and drunk coca cola, which

1:38

of course made sense at the time,

1:41

but that led a few more children

1:43

to report sick to

1:45

be taken to hospital. The

1:48

story went national. The evening news

1:50

was a montage of ambulances and worried

1:52

parents. The next day, four

1:54

more schools reported outbreaks. I

1:57

mean, it was really a state of panic.

2:05

Every single Coca Cola product in

2:07

Belgium was pulled from the shows and destroyed,

2:10

thirty million cans and bottles, the

2:12

largest recall in Coca Cola history. The

2:15

company was in crisis, the stock

2:17

price plummeted. I was

2:19

transfixed by the Belgian coke crisis,

2:22

not because I had any special interest in Coca

2:25

Cola or Belgium,

2:27

but because the whole affair reminded me of

2:29

another panic, something I'd

2:31

lived through years before that left me

2:33

baffled and frustrated. My

2:39

name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening

2:41

to Revisionist History, my podcast

2:43

about things forgotten and misunderstood.

2:48

The next two episodes are about

2:50

a panic that swept the United States a quarter

2:53

century ago, an outbreak

2:55

of insanity. I

2:59

was in the middle of it, covered it as

3:01

a young reporter for the Washington Post, but

3:03

it took the Belgian coke crisis a few

3:05

years later for me to understand

3:08

why it happened it because

3:10

you know what poisoned all those Belgians.

3:14

Nothing. The

3:16

best explanation Coca Cola could come up

3:18

with was that some of the carbon dioxide

3:21

at their local bottling plant had been

3:23

contaminated with sulfur compounds enough

3:26

to cause a slight odor, but trace

3:28

amounts orders of magnitude below

3:30

what is necessary to cause illness. No

3:33

major toxins detected, nothing that

3:35

would suggest true poisoning, and

3:37

so epidemiologically, it made no sense

3:40

that there was poisoning

3:42

by a single same agent.

3:45

After looking into it, Memory and his

3:47

colleagues concluded that the crisis was

3:49

an example of what's known as a

3:51

mass sociogenic illness,

3:54

what used to be called mass hysteria.

4:01

People had real symptoms. They

4:04

were nauseated and vomiting and dizzy,

4:06

and the initial batch of cokes served at the school

4:09

bornem was a bit off, but

4:11

the coke didn't poison them. There

4:14

was no actual connection between

4:16

their sickness and the thing they thought

4:18

made them sick. Memory

4:21

says that he saw another sociogenic

4:23

outbreak firsthand in Soviet Georgia

4:26

in nineteen eighty nine. Soviet

4:28

troops had sprayed a group of protesters

4:30

with chemical agents, a terrible incident.

4:33

The strange thing, though, was that the children

4:35

of the protesters had the same symptoms

4:38

as their parents, even though

4:40

they weren't the ones who were sprayed. In

4:43

the medical literature, there are countless

4:45

cases like this, a group of

4:47

people linked by some shared

4:49

anxiety come to believe they

4:51

had been exposed to something malevolent.

4:55

And the scary thing is that when you're

4:57

in the middle of a sociogenic outbreak, when

4:59

you're vomiting and running a fever after drinking

5:02

your can of coke, you have no idea.

5:04

None of the cause of your illness

5:07

is all in your imagination. So

5:12

she spoke, I mean her native tongue was

5:14

German, and then she spoke Hebrew,

5:17

and she learned English, and she learned

5:19

French, and she learned Latin. This

5:22

is mom, Yeah, French.

5:25

She knew Aramaic very well. Yes,

5:28

she spoke with a private teachers

5:31

in a high school conversational

5:33

of Latin. This folk lay

5:36

each other. I'm at the house of

5:38

Ottahamash just outside of Baltimore,

5:41

on her porch. She's a professor

5:43

of medicine at Johns Hopkins.

5:45

Next to her is her sister Tamar, professor

5:48

of medicine at Yale University, and

5:51

next to Tamar their father Paul, retired

5:53

professor of medicine at Georgetown University.

5:57

Otta and Tamar are talking about their

5:59

mother, Marghite, also a

6:01

professor of medicine at Georgetown University

6:04

until she died of cancer in two thousand

6:06

and eleven. And then when she had cancer,

6:08

she's like, Oh, it's a little inconvenient, but it's gonna be

6:10

fine, just the way she did

6:12

her whole idea, and she was very, very positive.

6:15

She had an amazing ability to make

6:17

whoever she was talking to think that they

6:19

were the single most important person in the room with

6:21

the most interesting story. Marguite

6:24

Hamish was born in Germany, then

6:26

raised in Bucharest after her family fled

6:28

the Nazis in nineteen thirty six. She

6:30

met her husband Paul in Israel after

6:33

the war. She was the star.

6:36

He was the protector, He was the cook.

6:38

He was the come out of school and make sure you don't

6:40

have ningitis when you can't move your

6:42

neck. He came to the plays,

6:45

he came to the games. He cheered us on. He

6:48

took a backseat to her. He always

6:50

did. For sixty years. They

6:52

were a team. They would have breakfast in bed

6:54

together. They would drive to work together. They would work in

6:56

the same office, they would drive home together, they would make dinner

6:59

together, they would go and do whatever they were

7:01

doing for the evening together, and they would go in the same bed.

7:03

And my mother would say, Man, I just don't see any of your father

7:09

all the time. I just don't see

7:10

enough. Yeah, which right, Yeah,

7:14

and that's what you would say. It's like, I don't know where he

7:16

is. I'm like, I think you went to the bathroom, mom. No,

7:18

I mean they were crazy, like yeah, even

7:20

when they were in their sixties. You know, they always

7:23

read the paper on a Sunday morning and we

7:25

had a big window. Yeah,

7:28

and so they would read the paper

7:31

and they would literally chase each other around,

7:33

like I mean, like kids in law. I

7:35

mean like I'm like, okay, guys, like you're sixty five,

7:37

we've had enough fer to come on all right. Yeah.

7:40

It's it was bizarre. It's very bizarre.

7:45

Marguite Hamash discovered an enzyme critical

7:48

for newborn digestion, became

7:50

an expert on human milk and nutrition, lectured

7:53

all over the world, ran a major laboratory

7:55

at Georgetown, funded by millions

7:57

in research grants from the National Institutes

8:00

of Health. An intellectual,

8:02

elegant and cultured. Even

8:05

when she had three children, a full time job and everything

8:07

else, they went out at least east three times

8:10

a week to a play

8:12

or a concert or performance every

8:14

week. One weekend day was a museum, so the other weekend

8:16

they was cooking for the week. On Saturday

8:19

afternoon, the opera was on. Anything made

8:21

a sound, you were dead, So you took a nap

8:23

from two Live from Lincolnside. In

8:31

the late nineteen eighties, Marguite

8:33

Hamish had a small problem in her lab,

8:36

nothing major. A disagreement with

8:38

one of her researchers. The researcher

8:40

quit, Then she changed her mind wanted

8:43

her job back. The Hamishes

8:45

rehired her. The second time around,

8:48

the researcher grew even more disgruntled.

8:50

She ended up making a series of accusations.

8:53

Georgetown launched an investigation. Hamish

8:56

was cleared, but the researcher then appealed

8:58

her case to the National Institutes of

9:00

Health, the institution that funded

9:02

Hamish's research. Because

9:05

the NAH gives out billions of dollars in

9:07

research grants, they have a mechanism

9:09

to ensure their money is used appropriately. In

9:12

those days, it was an investigative

9:14

unit called the OSI, the Office

9:16

of Scientific Integrity. When

9:18

universities could not resolve disputes

9:20

on their own, the OSI would step

9:23

in and take the case. That's

9:25

what happened with Hamish. The

9:27

OSI investigated and wrote

9:29

a report. Several people ask

9:31

me what is this all about? And

9:33

the truth is that I really didn't

9:36

know what it was all about, in the sense that you

9:38

know, there was a lot of ranting and raving going on.

9:43

Now, let me ask you this, When

9:46

was the last time you heard about an internal

9:48

laboratory dispute between medical

9:51

researchers working in some esoteric

9:53

corner of human physiology. Unless

9:56

you're a scientist, I'm going to guess never.

10:00

People in academic laboratories work

10:02

long hours in close quarters. The

10:04

pay is low. You can spend years

10:07

on an experiment with little to show for.

10:09

You might see the person next to you get a job,

10:11

or publish a paper, or win an award

10:14

that you think you deserved. Competition

10:17

for funding is intense. Labs

10:19

are stressful places, so what That's

10:22

why scientists published their results to

10:24

work out disagreements among themselves.

10:27

Fights rarely go public, except

10:31

during a brief period in the early

10:33

nineteen nineties, the Window

10:36

of Insanity, when

10:38

everything went public. Back

10:42

then, I was on a team of science writers

10:44

at the Washington Post. We call ourselves

10:47

the Pod. We wrote about medicine

10:49

and physics and psychology, and covered the health

10:51

bureaucracy, the NIH the

10:53

Food and Drug Administration, the CDC and

10:56

what were we obsessed with? Not just us

10:59

but our counterparts at other newspapers as

11:01

well. Science fraud. There

11:05

was the Baltimore case, an insanely

11:08

complicated allegation against the Nobel

11:10

Prize winner David Baltimore. The

11:13

Gallow case, an unbelievable

11:15

tale of the AIDS virus and a lab

11:17

theft. The Cleveland Clinic

11:20

case It never ended, leaks,

11:22

lawsuits, page one stories, big

11:24

headlines. A science writer at

11:26

the Chicago Tribune, a reporter named

11:28

John Crudzen, wrote eighty

11:30

thousand words on the Gallow case. Eighty

11:33

thousand words for a newspaper.

11:36

I have written books that aren't eighty thousand

11:38

words. There was a nine hour

11:40

Congressional hearing entirely devoted to

11:43

a scientific paper entitled Altered

11:45

Repertoire of Endogenous immunoglobulin

11:47

gene expression in transgenic mice containing

11:50

a rearranged MEW heavy change

11:52

gene, nine hours

11:55

during which Congressman attempted to sound

11:57

intelligent on the subject of transgenic

12:00

MW products. Then

12:03

in the middle of all of this Marguite Hamish.

12:06

I never met her, But for some

12:09

reason, out of all the cases that bubbled

12:11

up in the great Science Panic, hers

12:14

was always the case that affected me the deepest.

12:17

It made me angry in ways

12:20

that will take the better part of this episode

12:22

and the next to explain. Why

12:25

did Marguite Hamish choose to spend

12:27

her life in a laboratory out of all

12:29

the things she could have done. It's

12:32

not hard to imagine she was

12:34

a refugee from Nazi Germany. Now,

12:36

there were times when I remember vividly.

12:38

I interrupted my mother because

12:41

I don't know, I was in sixth grade and a boy dumped

12:43

me or something. I said, Nikki dumped

12:45

me, And she looked at me and she said, you know, at

12:48

your age, I was in

12:50

an area shelter, you know, wondering

12:52

what I was going to eat. A

12:55

laboratory offered order and certainty

12:57

and safety. After all she

12:59

had been through what happens

13:02

outside the laboratory doesn't

13:04

matter, and then, out

13:06

of the blue, the outside world does

13:09

matter. A routine disagreement

13:11

with someone in her lab turned

13:13

into a national story. Marguite

13:16

Hamish has been forced to defend herself

13:19

against charges of falsifying data,

13:21

plagiarism, and mismanaging research

13:23

in her laboratory. Washington Post,

13:26

January twenty second, nineteen ninety

13:28

one. Written by one of my colleagues.

13:30

I'm not going to say who, because I think that

13:32

any of us back then could have written it.

13:35

It was what we did. I

13:39

remember vividly when the paper came out

13:41

and one of my friends said, have you

13:43

seen this paper? Have you seen this

13:45

article? And I said what article? And

13:47

I'm like you did your mom commit scientific

13:49

prad I'm like, no, what are you talking about? And I

13:52

read it and I was like, gosh, this is bad. It

13:55

was bad. The

13:58

Hamishes didn't want to talk at first. They

14:00

told me they didn't want to dig up all those memories

14:05

her fifty seven years it's

14:08

a long time. And I was I

14:11

was sort of protector relationship,

14:17

and he couldn't protect her from us. It was really bad,

14:19

and that's I couldn't protect her in this particular

14:22

case, Paul

14:25

Hamish could not protect Margit anymore.

14:28

She had been swept up in

14:30

a panic. Would

14:53

you knowing we allow yourself to be treated

14:55

by a doctor with AIDS. It's

14:57

been just over a year since Dennis David

14:59

Aser died of age in Florida,

15:02

and he left five of his former patients

15:05

with the disease of AIDS. The

15:07

Oprah Winfrey Show, September nineteen

15:09

ninety one. Oprah's guest is

15:11

twenty three year old Kimberly Bergalis,

15:14

one of five patients infected by doctor

15:16

Acer. Has there been any clarification,

15:19

Kimberly on how you contracted

15:22

the disease? Was there a cut

15:24

or was the doctor cut?

15:27

Or was it transmitted through the instrument? Or

15:29

have you been clarified on that as

15:31

yet? No, I haven't, you

15:34

don't, And I suppose

15:36

at this point it doesn't really matter that

15:38

much matter. The

15:41

AIDS epidemic was then at its height, there

15:44

was no effective treatment. The epidemic

15:46

had started with the gay community and IVY drug

15:48

users and people who had received contaminated

15:51

blood transfusions. But Kimberly

15:53

Brigalis wasn't gay or

15:55

a drug user or someone who had

15:57

gone through a major medical procedure. She

16:00

was just a college student in Florida,

16:02

a virgin from a religious family who

16:04

had done nothing more than Gosie the dentist.

16:07

If you were to chart public fear of HIV

16:09

over time, that summer of nineteen

16:12

ninety one, during Kimberly Bergalis's

16:14

slow and very public death, was

16:16

the peak. Bergalis's

16:19

parents took her on a train from their home in Florida

16:22

to Washington, d C. To testify before

16:24

Congress. They wanted mandatory

16:26

HIV testing for all healthcare providers.

16:29

An army of reporters from around the country

16:32

climbed on board to document her

16:34

journey. I was one of them. Kimberly

16:37

Bergalis's Ride of Rage September

16:40

twenty sixth, nineteen ninety one,

16:42

Washington Post. She

16:44

was down to seventy pounds by that point. When

16:47

she spoke to reporters, her father would

16:49

carry her in his arms. There

16:51

was a sixty minutes episode about her, a

16:54

long running controversy over whether

16:56

her dentists deliberately infected her.

16:58

Interviews Headlines and

17:00

then Oprah twice. Now

17:03

in a recent letter to Florida health officials,

17:05

Kimberly Bergalos makes it clear

17:07

who she thinks responsible for

17:10

her having this disease. In an excerpt,

17:12

Kimberly states, who do I blame? Do I

17:14

blame myself? I sure don't. I

17:17

never had a blood transfusion. I

17:19

blame doctor Aser and every single one

17:21

of you, bastard. She says, I'm

17:23

dying, guys, goodbye. Really,

17:26

we all just are interested in knowing, first

17:28

of all, how how you are feeling,

17:31

and how are you doing well.

17:36

I'm walking with assistance

17:38

right now, and

17:41

I'm eating a lot. I'm

17:45

so pretty weak, but

17:49

I feel better. A

17:52

few months later, she was going

17:56

The great anxiety of the early AIDS

17:59

epidemic was that science and the medical

18:01

establishment had failed us. They

18:04

hadn't protected us. And the

18:06

Regalles case embodied that fear had

18:09

a lot of abuse from your

18:11

medical establishment. I think that's one of the

18:13

most frustrating things. When

18:16

Kimberly appeared on OPRAH the final time,

18:18

her mother Anna was by her side, you

18:20

know, my daughter dying. They realized

18:22

that she is dying. They realized

18:25

that she is dying because of the

18:28

medical establishment, the civil liberties,

18:31

the gay activist groups, and

18:34

they're not doing anything. You know, I'm not

18:36

emotional. I'm not hysterical, I am enraged.

18:41

Ten years into the AIDS epidemic, people

18:43

had found their culprit the medical

18:46

establishment. Now, of course, just

18:48

a few years later, the same medical

18:50

establishment that everyone was blaming in nineteen ninety

18:52

one would figure out how to treat HIV

18:55

and the thing that was so scary, infection

18:58

by a healthcare provider would turn out to

19:00

be a one off, incredibly rare.

19:03

But no one knew that. In the summer of nineteen

19:05

ninety one. All we had was

19:07

fear and anger. And once

19:09

you start seeing something dark in the motives

19:12

of people in white coats, it doesn't

19:14

end. Every disagreement,

19:17

every anomaly, every mole hill becomes

19:19

a scandal. Belcomi

19:23

and detained a building

19:25

ifs t the DeFi Hindi.

19:30

That's exactly what happened with the Belgian cocusteria.

19:34

A few months earlier, Belgium had been

19:36

through a crisis. Chickens

19:38

in farms across the country had fallen ill.

19:41

Their feed had gotten contaminated with dioxin,

19:44

one of the most toxic of all chemicals. No,

19:47

it was major, it was it was amazing. It's

19:49

probably one of the biggest food scares

19:51

in I would say maybe in history Benouan

19:54

memory, the toxicologist was in

19:56

the middle of it. The Belgian government

19:58

had to recall anything that might possibly

20:00

have been in contact with the contaminated feed

20:03

eggs, chicken beef. The

20:06

news was filled with talk about how extraordinarily

20:08

dang dioxins are, how

20:10

even trace amounts can cause cancer. Every

20:14

day on television you you could

20:16

see animals that were being slaughtered

20:18

and dumped into mass

20:20

graves and vanitting open a specific

20:25

un

20:29

Then a few weeks later, a batch

20:31

of coke smells a little funny and the

20:33

panic starts, a panic

20:36

born entirely in the imagination of terrified

20:38

children and their parents and teachers,

20:41

school children being poisoned

20:44

by coca cola,

20:46

which is again one of the biggest

20:48

symbols of our modern food.

20:51

And so that was really the sort of cherry

20:54

on on that rotten cake. Epidemics

20:57

of fear repeat themselves. You

21:00

start with dioxin, you end up

21:02

with coca cola, You start

21:04

with Kimberly bergalis, you end

21:06

up with marguite Hamish. First

21:08

time its tragedy, second time is

21:10

farce. On

21:13

March twenty, nineteen ninety one, the

21:15

Washington Post published its second

21:18

article on a Hammish case. It

21:20

began the way all the science fraud stories

21:23

of that era began, with a call to

21:25

authority. Quote. The

21:27

National Institutes of Health has

21:30

concluded that a top scientist at

21:32

Georgetown University Medical Center committed

21:35

scientific misconduct by

21:38

knowingly submitting false information

21:40

in applying for two federal research

21:42

grants end quote. This

21:45

is now two months after the first big piece

21:47

on a Hamish case in the Washington Post. The

21:50

Office of Scientific Integrity has

21:52

finished its investigation and

21:55

found her guilty. Maybe

22:00

because this was a story written by someone

22:02

else, and maybe because I could see it

22:04

with fresh eyes, but I remember

22:06

reading the piece and reading it again

22:09

and wondering, what is this.

22:12

Something's wrong. This

22:14

was the point I became a skeptic

22:18

first thing. So it sounds

22:20

like there was some kind of formal hearing

22:23

which ruled against Marguite Hamish. Right.

22:26

Actually, no, here's

22:28

the way things worked at the Office of Scientific

22:30

Integrity. They would interview both

22:33

parties to a disagreement, write up

22:35

their findings, and then just lead them

22:37

to the press. Some one in the office

22:39

would slip his or her favorite reporter

22:41

a package of documents stamped

22:44

something like confidential or

22:46

for internal use only, or simply draft

22:49

put inside plain brown envelopes.

22:52

I got them. We all got them. Now,

22:55

if you scroll down to the second to last

22:57

paragraph in the Washington Post piece, you'll

23:00

come to this Hamish,

23:02

who is chief of the Division of Developmental

23:04

Biology and Nutrition in Georgetown's

23:07

Pediatrics department. We'll

23:09

have an opportunity to review the report

23:11

and submit a written rebuttal. End

23:14

quote will have an

23:16

opportunity she hadn't seen it, and

23:19

also submit a written rebuttal.

23:21

The OSI had concluded Marguite

23:24

Hamish was a fraud without showing

23:26

her the evidence or letting her respond.

23:30

I remember once, not long before this, doing

23:33

another story on a science fraud case. I

23:35

called the attorney for the accused, and he

23:38

said, well, I can't comment because

23:40

I have no idea what my client is accused

23:42

of. I took my leaked OSI

23:45

report out of its plain brown wrapper,

23:47

photocopied it, and sent it over to

23:50

him. No part

23:52

of that transaction had seemed

23:54

weird to me at the time. Now,

23:58

the most important question of all, what

24:00

was it that Marguhite Hamish did? What

24:03

was her alleged fraud? I

24:06

have been going on and on about this case for a

24:08

good four now, and I haven't told

24:10

you you know why, because

24:13

we didn't know. You won't find

24:15

a good explanation in the Washington Post story of

24:17

March twenty second, nineteen ninety one, just

24:19

vague mentions of an experiment involving

24:22

rabbits. Well, let

24:24

me tell you the final accusation against

24:26

Marguite Hamish. At the end

24:28

of a twenty thousand word NIH

24:31

grant application, in a section

24:33

that was completely peripheral to the

24:35

subject of her grant request, Marguite

24:38

Hamish wrote the following sentence,

24:41

last, but not least, we are presently

24:43

using the newborn rabbit as an animal

24:45

model for total perenthal nutrition.

24:51

After scrutinizing every word

24:53

of her grant application, the OSI

24:56

said that's wrong because

24:58

at the time Marguhite Hamish wrote the grant,

25:01

she didn't actually have the animal model

25:03

up and running. She wasn't presently

25:06

using newborn rabbits. Their understanding

25:08

of the word presently was it

25:10

stands as a synonym for currently.

25:15

Hamish's defense was she

25:18

had designed the rabbit experiments,

25:20

she had received the money to conduct those

25:22

experiments, she had obtained the special

25:24

surgical equipment to run the

25:26

rabbit experiments, and she had begun collecting

25:29

the necessary preliminary data on the

25:31

rabbits prior to the experiment.

25:33

She was going to do the rabbit experiments

25:36

presently. She was using

25:38

presently as a synonym for

25:41

shortly, which is the way that it is often

25:43

used in British English. The

25:45

doctor will be with you presently.

25:51

That's it. Her crime

25:54

was not writing the more conventional we

25:56

will shortly be using the newborn rabbit

25:59

as an animal model, or maybe

26:01

shifting the word presently to

26:03

the end of the sentence, which is the one place

26:06

where in American English we will accept the British

26:08

definition of presently, we

26:10

will be using the newborn rabbit as an animal

26:13

model for total perenthal nutrition presently.

26:16

But I don't know. She was born in Germany,

26:18

she was educated in Israel. English

26:21

is her seventh language. Okay,

26:26

now you might say this is ridiculous.

26:29

Still ridiculous cases sometimes

26:31

happen, so what. But after

26:33

Hamish it dawned on me that

26:35

they were all like this, all

26:37

the science fraud cases that we had become obsessed

26:40

with, Like the case of Mika

26:42

Popovic, a virologist at the NIH.

26:45

The scientists who figured out how to grow the AIDS

26:47

virus in the laboratory, without which

26:50

nothing, no subsequent research

26:52

on HIV would have been possible.

26:55

Here he is as a big character in

26:58

the film adaptation of and the

27:00

band played on Yes

27:05

At a time when people knew nothing about HIV

27:07

except that it was the most or as virus

27:09

anyone had ever seen. Popovic's

27:11

slaved away in the laboratory hours

27:13

on end, working with samples of HIV

27:16

infected blood with his hands. Anything.

27:21

How can I How can I

27:23

isolates virus? If I just can't keep the

27:25

settles alive? Popovic

27:29

was also accused of fraud. Why

27:32

because in a chart in the

27:34

paper where he first described growing the

27:36

AIDS virus, Popovic eight times

27:38

used the initials n D in

27:41

the place of a number. The charts

27:43

legend said n D meant

27:45

not done. The OSI said,

27:48

wait, you did do those experiments.

27:50

That's fraud, Except Popovic's

27:54

English is bad. Somebody

27:56

helped him write the paper, and that person put

27:59

in the footnote about ND meaning not

28:01

done. What Popovic actually

28:03

meant by end was not determinable,

28:06

meaning the results were inconclusive.

28:09

So why did Popovic miss the error

28:11

in the not done footnote. Maybe

28:14

because the article in question was published

28:16

in nineteen eighty four, when

28:18

AIDS was in its first terrifying stages,

28:21

and maybe he was in just a little

28:23

bit of a hurry to publish the most important

28:25

advance to that point against the epidemic.

28:32

The battle over n D went

28:35

on for years. The

28:37

o SI conducted more than seven thousand

28:40

hours of interviews and deliberations.

28:43

Popovic sued lost ran

28:45

through his savings, got chased out of Nih

28:48

over a dispute over the correct interpretation

28:50

of two initials n D. Presently

28:55

it was like the Spanish Inquisition, staffed

28:57

by a mob of angry copy editors

29:03

in the face of a panic. It is the job

29:05

of those who know better to stand

29:08

and say, like Benoa Memory

29:10

did, wait, it isn't the coke.

29:13

The coke is harmless. This is

29:15

misplaced anxiety.

29:17

It is the job of those who know better to

29:20

deliver the difficult truth. But

29:22

those of us who were science writers in that era

29:25

didn't do that. We lapped

29:28

up the leaks from the OSI,

29:30

We wrote our sensational stories,

29:32

and we tore apart the lives

29:35

of innocent people. No

29:38

one remembers Marguite Hamish today, she's

29:41

a footnote one scientist,

29:43

longone who worked away quietly

29:45

in a lab on a problem that most of us have

29:47

never heard of. First

29:49

of all, the amount of material that this

29:51

case generated was no

29:54

less than three hundred pounds of paper. Okay, I

29:56

mean, I would say, in their

29:58

house, right in their house. So and you didn't

30:00

see the part that was downstairs, now that you talk,

30:02

me an entire falcom, entire farcom. And

30:04

then up in the cellar there were boxes and boxes

30:07

full of binders, eat

30:09

hamish. Shouldn't be a footnote.

30:11

Her case should be a warning. This

30:14

is what happens when we let our fears

30:16

consume us. But I

30:18

opened a binder, and I mean her annotations

30:21

were she annotated

30:23

every every binder

30:25

had her handwriting in it. This isn't true. I didn't

30:27

say that, you know. I think this is misinterpreted.

30:30

Tiny mom handwriting everywhere,

30:33

yellow pages, legal pages, stuck

30:35

in I disagree with this. This isn't

30:37

right. Every binder she annotated. Every

30:40

mom Mom annotated every

30:42

binder of everything with this case. So think about

30:45

what she could have been doing at that time. Then

30:51

one day it stopped. How

30:53

that happened is the subject of the next

30:56

episode, how all the cases that

30:58

obsessed us just went away

31:00

and the fever passed. It

31:04

aged her. I think a lot. I mean when I think

31:06

of my mother and how she aged,

31:09

she was a woman who likes true. In

31:11

her late forties early fifties,

31:14

was still very beautiful, but by

31:16

the time she had sixties, she looked every bit

31:18

of sixty, and that decade was probably

31:20

hard for her. She was always g four

31:23

with me, and

31:25

I didn't know that she's suffering, and

31:29

to what extent she's suffering. This

31:31

whole saying I don't think, well, I take. I

31:34

talked to Mom a lot about it, and she what she

31:36

said was, I

31:39

pretend it's not happening until

31:41

unless I have to speak with the lawyer, and then

31:43

I get a migraine, and then the next day I'm fine. One

31:48

last question, and um, because

31:50

I don't want to keep you guys, Forember. Did anyone

31:53

from an AH ever apologize?

31:57

No? No? Who? Yeah,

31:59

No, I don't think anyone ever apologized. The

32:04

insanity passes, then

32:07

everyone pretends it ever happened,

32:11

except for those who don't have the luxury

32:13

of pretending I

32:16

was angry about it, then I'm

32:19

angry about it still Revisionist

32:29

History is a panoply production. The

32:32

lead producer is mil LaBelle with Jacob

32:34

Smith and Camille Baptista. Our

32:36

editor is Julia Barton. Flawn

32:39

Williams is our engineer. Fact checking

32:41

by Beth Johnson, Original music

32:43

by Luis Guerra. Special thanks

32:45

to Andy Bowers and Jacob

32:48

Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.

32:56

Even when she was dying, I

32:58

took her in a wheelchair to the

33:00

Kennedy Descenter. As much

33:02

as I called the she needed to see

33:04

art.