A Few Drops of Iodine

C. A. Whitney, April 13, 2004

Not long ago a doctor told me that by adding a tiny amount of iodine to cooking salt it was possible to prevent a prevalent form of mental retardation and physical disability in literally millions of children -- for less than 4 cents per child per year. Unless they were given such supplements, these children would suffer from hypothyroidism because they lived in regions of the globe that lacked sufficient iodine in the soil where their food was grown, places such as Central Africa, India, South Asia and Canada.

This news jarred me, because this dependence on a iodine supplement seemed to contradict everything I had read about Darwinian evolution. I understood that, given time for natural selection to work, the deleterious effects of such dependencies have usually killed off the species or have promoted alterations which remove the dependency. In other words, an evolving organism usually adapts itself to the conditions it faces. The mechanism is not difficult to describe in general terms. Random variations in our genes lead to alterations in the characteristics of the descendents of the affected individuals. If those alterations are beneficial to the propagation of the next generation , they will gradually become more prevalent. If they inhibit propagation, they will die out. More than one wag has said that the fertilized egg is the genes' way of making more genes.

In any case, survival of the fittest should lead to the elimination of inhibiting characteristics. So I asked myself how did humans evolve so that we are afflicted by a defficiency of a chemical element that we presumably have been ingesting since Day One? I decided to see what I could learn about iodine and hypothyroidism, because I needed a theory that would let me square this striking dependency with what I knew about evolution. I wasn't going to be stopped by the fact that I had not excelled in chemistry and I had never aken a course in biology.

I remembered that when I was a young boy in Wisconsin, I was startled to see a woman who seemed to have a grapefruit struck in her throat. My mother said it was a "goitre" and it was caused by lack of iodine. Goitres were prevented, she told me, by adding iodine to our table salt.

I also knew a little about a first aid medicine called "tincture of iodine." I used it to treat minor cuts by spreading it from a small bottle with a glass rod. It stung fiercely and left a brown stain on my finger. I have read that tincture of iodine is a 5% solution of elemental iodine and potassium iodide in approximately equal parts of alcohol and water, so I suppose it was the alcohol that had the teeth.

We often took iodine on camping trips. In addition to using it as an antiseptic, we aded a few drops to water we had dipped from streams and lakes and let it sit a half hour beforfe drinking.

So I knew iodine was active stuff. But I had no idea just how active it was or how crucial to our bodies. We only need a teaspoonful in our lifetime, but much of the body's iodine is flushed out when we pee, and there are dire consequences when we don't replenish it in regular small doses. Too much iodine is bad for us too, but not as bad as too little.

The thyroid gland is the body's main consumer of iodine. It has a shape vaguely resembling a butterfly and it resides in the front of the throat. Normally, the thyroid acts as a chemical manufacturing plant, soaking up iodine and usisng it to build hormones that control the activity of cells throughout the body. These hormones are built on little frameworks built of iodine and when there is a shortage of iodine in the body, the hormone production decreases and tehe whole body seems togo into a slump. When this happens, the body senses the shortage, and the thyroid gland itself begins to enlarge so that it can produce more hormones. When the enlargement is dramatic, a goitre is the result. A goitre is little more than an enlarged thyroid gland and its name comes from the French word for throat.

Now that doctors know what causes a goitre, the obvious remedy is to feed the body more iodine. The connection to iodine was not discovered until the 19th century, after iodine was first extracted from seaweed in the process of making gunpowder. But the Chinese have known how to treat goitres for at least forty centuries -- since about 2000 BCE -- even though they knew nothing about iodine. They knew that if you feed seaweed to the sufferer the goitre will shrink.

But the truly disastrous result of hormone defficiency, known as hypothyroidism, is not merely a goitre, which is usually considered to be little more than a cosmetic affliction and a benign nuisance. Far worse are the reduced metabolism which leads to a debilitating lack of pep and, in more severe cases, to a developmental failure of the victim's brain and body known as cretinism. The name cretin has an odd origin that speaks of sub-human qualities of the sufferer. The word is derived from a dialectic French-Swiss word for Christian, which in its informal usage, is occasionally used as a label for human being. When we speak these days of a "good christian community," we do not mean to be taken literally. We mean merely to imply that its members are civilized human beings. In this sense, the label christian, or cretin, was a reminder that the afflicted beings are, after all, not brutes. It is therefore somewhat ironic that we use cretin today as a perjorative term similar to dolt.

So the key to prevention is iodine, and the mystery to me was, why do so many of us need something that Mother Nature appears unable to provide for a large fraction or our population?

Have we changed recently, so that our evolution is now taking us down a blind alley? Or has the world's iodine supply changed so recently that humans have not had time to respond? In other words, does this apparent mis-match between us and our environment originate in an unfortunate development of our biology or in the nature of the Earth's surface.

Looking at our environment raises the question of the supply of iodine, and this takes us back into astronomy -- perhaps farther back than we really need to go. We know that iodine did not originate in the initial Big Bang, which produced a universe of hydrogen and helium. The more complex atoms, including iodine, were cooked up in supernovae explosions and were spread into space. They entered the earth's makeup at the time the Sun and its planets were formed. Iodine holds the 53th position on the Periodic Table of the Elements, and it is a relatively well-behaved cousin to its light-weight fluourine. Most of the atoms of iodine lying near the surfact of the Earth are trapped in sea water. From sea water, iodine escapes into the air by evaporation and is carried by the wind to the continents, where it is dropped by rainfall onto the soil where it gradually accumulates and is absorbed by plants.

A small amounts of radioactive iodine have been created in nuclear blasts or power plant accidents, and these have been locally important in causing thyroid cancers, but they have not affected the global balance of iodine as yet. So the total amount of iodine on Earth has not changed since the Earth was formed. On the other hand, its distribution over the globe may have been altered by geological processes.

I decided tha the best clue to the mystery of iodine defficiency may be found in today's global distribution of goitre and cretinism. Where do they occur and where are they very rare?

Given the medical importance of hypothyroidism, much effort has been spent in mapping its occurrence. It is now known to be particularly rare along seacoasts, while it is relatively prevalent in mountainous regions. Goitres and cretinsim are also prevalent in areas that were buried under moving ice flows during the last glaciation, such as Canada and the British Isles.

Our planet has undergone numerous ice ages when a substantial fraction of the ocean waters are locked in glaciers so that coastal land that was previously under water becomes exposed and available for habitation. It is estimated that the ocean level drops several hundred feet during an Ice Age, and depending on the topography, this can expose a strip many miles wide.This land will be rich in iodine.

Glaciers also have another effect which produces iodine-poor land. As the glacial ice pushes overland away from its sources, it will scour the soil and its nutrients and dump them in the ocean or pile them in terminal moraines, leaving behind bare rocky land. The state of Maine is an example. Today, its soil is shallow, and the old fertile dirt that used to cover it is at the bottom of the ocean off the shore, where it was pushed by the glaciers. New soil is developing on Maine but for a long time it will be poor in nutrients such as iodine.

These types of events lead to areas that are either rich or poor in iodine, depending on their relationship to the sea and the glaciers, and I built the following picture in my mind. Suppose that much of the early growth of human population occured in regions where agriculture and hunting are favored. These regions are likely to have been in the lowlands and coastal areas and there the early humans (or prehumans) would find soils that are rich in iodine. So our predecessors would have been able to exploit the special properites of iodine atoms for building their thyroid hormones. They would become dependent on having iodine in their food. As time passed, these early humans would spread out over the globe carrying their dependency with them, and the unlucky ones who lived in iodine-poor regions would occasionally develop hypothyroidism in its various forms.

And I also imagined a more extreme version of this theory. Suppose our human biology can be traced back to the four legged fish that left the ocean and gradually evolved into mammals and then us. They might have carried with them the biological memory of the iodine-rich ocean. Far-fetched? A fossil fish has recently been discovered that was a link on the way to walking fish. I can only wonder if he had a thyroid gland.

News Item followed by Op-Ed piece in New York Times:

Plane Wreck of the Author of 'Prince' Is Discovered
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

New York Times, Published: April 7, 2004

MARSEILLE, France, Wednesday, April 7 - A French underwater salvage team has discovered the remains of the plane of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of "The Little Prince," six decades after his disappearance, government researchers said Wednesday.

The pieces of the Lockheed Lightning P38 aircraft, which vanished July 31, 1944 during a wartime reconnaissance mission, were found off the coast of the Mediterranean city of Marseille, the Culture Ministry's Department of Subaquatic and Submarine Archaeological Research said.

The discovery is a galvanizing moment for France, which had long speculated as to the fate of Saint-Exupéry, an aristocratic adventurer whose life and books turned him into one of the country's biggest heroes.

"The Little Prince," his edifying tale about a little interstellar traveler who recounts his experiences to an aviator he meets in the Sahara, brought him posthumous international fame. The book, first published in New York in English in 1943 and since translated into more than 100 languages, is one of the best-selling titles on the planet, after the Bible and Marx's Das Kapital.(more...)

.......

New York Times, April 11, 2004

Saint-Exupéry Lands at Last
By STACY SCHIFF

Stacy Schiff, the author of "Saint-Exupéry: A Biography," is writing a book about Benjamin Franklin's years in Paris.

For nearly 60 years the legend of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the aviator and author of "The Little Prince," has largely eclipsed the life. More substantial and more valuable items have gone missing — Atlantis, the Holy Grail, 18 1/2 minutes of a White House tape — but few have generated the romance enduringly attached to the writer who, borrowing a trick from his best-known creation, neatly vanished into thin air.

At 8:45 a.m. on July 31, 1944, Saint-Exupéry took off from Corsica for a reconnaissance mission over occupied France. He was due back at 12:30 p.m., but did not return. At 1 o'clock his commanding officer began biting his nails; at 3:30 Saint-Exupéry was officially reported missing. In April 1945, a funeral Mass was finally held for him.

He never exactly died, however. On reading of his disappearance, Anne Morrow Lindbergh put her finger on the special ache it caused. There is a terrible difference, wrote a woman supremely qualified to know, between "lost and dead." There is also a not-so-secret recipe for what becomes a legend most.

Increasingly we live in a world in which objects cannot disappear from view, and on Tuesday wreckage of an aircraft hauled up from the Mediterranean was positively identified as Saint-Exupéry's. It had been clear for some time that the Lockheed P-38 was probably a few miles off the coast of Marseille, where in 1988 a local fisherman plucked the pilot's silver identity bracelet from his net. The discovery resolves one mystery about Saint-Exupéry's end: he was — by no means a given — where he was supposed to be. His instructions that day would have taken him over Lyon, and it was evidently on the return to Corsica that his P-38 dove vertically, at high speed, into the ocean.

The question of why the plane crashed is unlikely to be resolved by the scattered debris; that it crashed could not be said to have been unexpected. Saint-Exupéry was his squadron's record-holder of near-disasters. Having waged a campaign to talk his way back into active service, he was piloting a plane into which he did not fit and which he could not comfortably fly. He was unable to communicate with the control tower in English. The operation of hydraulic brakes defied him. Routinely, he confused feet and meters.

The French pilots in Corsica knew Saint-Exupéry as a prize-winning author and a pioneer of aviation. The Americans knew him only as an outsized, overaged, undertrained wreck of a man, one who only eight weeks into his time with them mangled an $80,000 aircraft. For that mishap he was unceremoniously grounded. He begged for leniency; he was, he protested, willing to die for his country. "I don't give a damn if you die for France or not," Col. Leon Gray informed Saint-Exupéry, "but you're not going to do so in one of our airplanes." It was a case of one national treasure against another.

It was also a case in which Saint-Exupéry got his way. He had long outlived the era in which he felt comfortable; he could imagine himself nowhere but in the cockpit of a plane. He had all his life dreamed of escape, pined for broader horizons, threatened to change planets. More and more he felt alienated from his own countrymen, whose infighting he had criticized; fiercely anti-Nazi, he supported neither de Gaulle nor the Communists. He predicted that liberation would not put France out of its misery. "Many people," he warned in 1944, "are going to be shot next year." In a particularly bleak mood he imagined himself to be one of them.

From his personal frustrations and his inability to make his political positions understood came "The Little Prince," the modest volume under which has swelled a great grassy knoll of literature. Published in 1943 but a best seller only later, the text read eerily as a death foretold, its mystique enhanced by the parallel between author and subject: imperious innocents whose lives consist of equal parts flight and failed love, who fall to earth, are little impressed with what they find here and ultimately disappear without a trace.

Naturally it is easier to predict your own death if you are willing to commit suicide, and for those inclined to such readings there is the mystical matter of the sunsets. The little prince lives on a planet so small that he is able to watch the sun set precisely 44 times in a day — case-clinchingly, the age of Saint-Exupéry at his death. (For some inexplicable reason, the prince witnesses 44 sunsets only in the English translation. In the original, he watches 43.) That Saint-Exupéry had no desire to go on living was clear; that he meant to kill himself is not.

With the discovery of his aircraft, however, that theory has been dredged up again in the French press. It has been to protect him from the indignity of that charge — and to sustain a valuable myth — that Saint-Exupéry's family has long opposed all searches for his aircraft. Presumably too they would prefer to avoid appropriating statements like that offered up by the mayor of Marseille. He greeted the news with the pronouncement that "Saint-Exupéry's disappearance has become the symbol of the Resistance and the Liberation of Provence." Saint-Exupéry's fate remains constant. It seems the myth will always be cultivated at the expense of the man.

What does change is "The Little Prince," restored at last to what it was in its author's lifetime: a work of fiction. It has long carried a heavy load, more than any book should have to; no one ever expected P. L. Travers to be carried off by the west wind. Saint-Exupéry's fairy tale is free again to tangle not with its author's enigma, but with the mysteries that so befuddled him: it is lonely among men; language remains the source of misunderstandings; more than ever, we rush around recklessly, recklessly uncertain of what we're looking for. It may be more difficult to lose an aircraft in the Mediterranean than once it was, but some riddles endure.

As do a few truths about Saint-Exupéry's end. His was a noble death, made in the name of the greater good to which all of his literature returns. As his widow noted, the exit was custom-made, a meteoric fall at the end of a star-chasing life. (It was also an advantageous death. The French author who dies for France finds his copyrights extended for 30 years beyond the norm.)

The end shows every sign as well of having been the one Saint-Exupéry wanted. In the 1930's he was asked if, given an already impressive catalog of close calls, he had come to prefer one death to another. Stipulating that his answer was not for publication until he was "truly dead," he opted for water. "You don't feel yourself dying," he reported, on uncomfortably good authority. "You feel simply as if you're falling asleep and beginning to dream." And there, surely, we can leave him.

Let me tell you…
The Pleasures of Illness

Feb. 4, 2002

Having a disease, or a broken leg or twisted ankle, seems to be taking a bad rap among the healthy these days. In opera, a disease is still considered ennobling and occasionally charming, but not in our prosaic daily lives. These days, heart disease, glaucoma, arthritis, even a broken hip -- admittedly not a disease but serving the same purpose -- have fallen from favor among my acquaintances. To hear them tell it, you would think all illnesses are to be avoided like the plague.

But, by and large, they are not the plague, and their benefits seem to have been forgotten. The primary trouble with the plague was not that it was fatal -- although that was a marked inconvenience -- but the inescapable fact that everyone in the neighborhood had it, and everyone's experience was the same as everyone else's. In other words, it was as common as trees, and therefore it was boring. As soon as you announced to your neighbor that you, too, had the plague, you were subjected to a condescending look and a comment to the effect, "Oh, how dull. I have had that for days."

No, I am not speaking of common diseases that your neighbor can equally claim. We must be more selective. The advantage of sickness comes from having a disease that few others have had. But it is not good to choose one that is so rare that no one in the neighborhood will have experienced it or even heard of it. The highest benefit comes from the pleasure that your neighbor will feel in knowing that you, and not he, have contracted it. This is dependent on a knowledge, however slim, of what the "it" actually is. So, a rare tropical disease will bring you less pleasure that, say, heart disease, which everyone over the age of 40 has heard of.

In fact, heart disease seems to me to be an excellent example, although I may be prejudiced by a form of nepotism because I have, during the last few months, derived considerable satisfaction from having a regurgitating mitral valve, which donates a heart murmur to the symphony of my interior and, from time to time, calls forth a flutter of my heart, which we affectionately call A-Fib.

Part of the pleasure comes when you adopt this disease into your personality, the way a family might adopt an adolescent criminal or an ill-behaved dog, for the sheer pleasure of adding color to one's life. One quickly becomes dependent on these new colorations and one learns to derive new pleasures in an otherwise gray life. Once adopted, the thought of purging them, through an inadvertent healing of the disease by a zealous doctor, seems like a mild tragedy. Better to keep the disease than be diminished by giving it up.

Another part of the pleasure of illness comes from knowing how to share its presence with unsuspecting acquaintances who have no idea how much pleasure you derive from seeing in their eyes the faint glimmer of a new-found respect . This respect seems to emerge from the gloomy news like a mushroom from woodland soil, and they try to hide it beneath a cover of naïve optimism ("Surely you will be better soon.") or friendly nonchalance ("Have you heard about Mary? She is really sick") which they imagine capable of quenching your impending doom.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of illness comes after the news, which you have slyly released with apparent reluctance, has sunk in and your neighbor realizes that, despite all indications to the contrary, there is something about you that is worth discussing. In short, the two of you have something to talk about, and the thought of spending a quarter-hour alone with you is no longer quite so likely to produce mild depression.

The ensuing conversation, if you choose to join it rather than taking advantage of the opportunity to get even for an old snub, can be particularly invigorating if it focuses on a shared disease. The thrust and parry of comparative symptomology is rather like a fencing match and, in like fashion, one soon learns to avoid overwhelming the fencing partner, lest he retreat into a cloud of shame generated by the conviction that he has not lived up to the potential of the disease at hand.

My wife and I have recently entered our eighth decades, and one afternoon a few weeks ago we took each other to the outpatient department of the local hospital -- she for a sprained foot and I for a blood test to monitor one of my medications. At the hospital we went our separate ways and when I mentioned this joint venture to the nurse as she plunged a needle into my arm, her reply, accompanied by a bright smile, was "It is nice to see older people finding new ways to have fun together."

Now, let me tell you about my cardioversion. Then my wife can tell you about her foot.

Nov. 17, 2001; Jan. 1, 2002

Proof, A Drama of Indirection

Proof, the play by David Auburn now appearing in New York City, is described by John Simon as "a play about scientists whose science matters less than their humanity." Matters to us, we presume he means to say, and this seems to be one way today’s popular writers approach science for the general public. The approach the problem slyly, starting from the human perspective.

And there is a reason for this. We may admire the devoted practitioner of any art or science -- and we award shining prizes for achievements only their peers can pretend to understand -- but there is a limit to our own devotion learning science, and there is even a limit to how much devotion we can stand to witness in the practitioners. When we are pushed to the limit, we scorn and feel sorry for the person who puts devotion to vocation above devotion to fellow humans.

Proof is a deceptively simple play, with meanings at many levels, and its author not only makes us care about the characters, but he makes us care because they are mathematicians. So, on the surface, Proof is a play about mathematicians, not about mathematics. But it calls upon our feelings about mathematics -- our feelings that mathematicians are possessed by a sensibility that separates them from the rest of us.

Another recent example is the Ron Howard movie, A Beautiful Mind, about the Princeton mathematician (still living), John Nash. An article in the Jan. 1, 2002, Boston Globe, by Nicholas Thompson, a Fellow of the New America Foundation, writes "It's a film about a revolutionary mathematician; but the film-goers will be hard pressed to describe the rvolution after the credits roll. And that's unfortunate." Thompson then sets out to describe some elementary aspects of game theory, which was central to Nash's work.

"Of course," you say, "What we care about is the human being, not the science. What moves us is human dilemma."

Perhaps, but as one who writes as a scientist, I must confess that when I tackle the task of popularizing my chosen field of astronomy, I tend to jump right into the subject, because I find it sufficiently seductive to carry me along without the trappings of human drama. I get out my magnifier or my telescope, and, so to speak, invite the public to look over my shoulder. That is my way, but I have no best-sellers to my credit to prove my success. Carl Sagan succeeded by sheer charisma, and Sir Arthur Eddington and Einstein and Hubble succeeded by literary skill.

Reading Proof I was struck by the power of a little indirection – a little of the hiding of science behind a screen of drama -- a method that may work for those of us with more typical talents.

Let me summarize the play briefly:

It opens late at night. A girl in her twenties is sitting in a living room and is surprised by the sudden appearance of her father. He is a mathematician, and she has evidently inherited a talent for mathematics but is not pursuing it.

We discover that her father’s funeral is the next day. She was day-dreaming his visit.

A male student of her father’s appears from the study, saying that someone must examine the dead man’s notebooks. When the girl discovers he has pilfered one, she is furious and calls the police. They arrive as the curtain falls.

During the next few scenes – which jump back and forth between the present and the past – we learn that the girl had left her classes at the university to take care of her father, while he gradually sank into delusion.

The student is back, and he finds a wonderful mathematical proof in the notebooks. The daughter tells him that she wrote it.

He and the girl’s older sister are skeptical. The sister, who lives in New York City, has arranged to sell their father’s house and to move the girl to New York, where she can find psychiatric care.

The sisters fear the young mathematician is going to take after her father.

We are given evidence that the father could not have written the proof. The student returns, having become convinced that the proof is valid and that the girl did, indeed, write it.

In the last scene, the girl seems ready to quit mathematics and follow her sister to New York, but the student entreats her to talk him through the proof. And as the final curtain falls, she picks up the notebook and begins to describe what remains to be done before the proof will be publishable.

This drama seems to end in ambiguity. The father’s role, and his life, have been defined, but the girl and the student, still very much alive, are wrapped in a web of uncertainty. We are convinced that the girl wrote the proof, and therefore has much talent, but we have no idea what she will make of it—nor are we convinced that she should pursue it if this entails the risk of following her father into delusion. (Does the playwright expect us to believe such a risk exists? Such questions abound.)

Mathematics has provided the context for their lives, but it offers no clues to their fate.

This play is a gem of intellectual suspense. Frayn has not given us a lesson in mathematics but, more importantly, he has given us a glimpse of what it is like to be a mathematician.

© C. A. Whitney

Oct. 23, 2001; Dec. 23, 2001

Verisimilitude in Art - Reflections on Copenhagen and Starry Night on the Rhone

The dictionary defines "verisimilitude" as the appearance of truth. But I could not have titled this essay "Truth in Art," even though it would be much easier on the ear. Truth is quite another matter -- it is much more difficult. It is not mere verisimilitude.My thesis is that there are advantages to leaving extreme verisimilitude out of art, as long as truth is retained.

Harvard historian of science, Gerald Holton, has reminded us in no uncertain terms that Michael Frayn’s play, Copenhagen, is not history. In an essay presented at a symposium on the play, Holton says we would be ill-advised to look to it for a historical record. And yet, despite this warning, and despite the theatrical setting for the performance, most of the discussion on this play focuses on the question, "What really happened?"

Whatever Frayn’s intention may have been in writing this play, for me the greatest interest lies in its use of drama to comment on our views of each other, our communication with each other, our reactions to each other, and the relationships of these views to our scientific theories. Little has been written about these deeper, human truths as revealed in Frayn's play. I find this disappointing. (But see the essay by Jonothan Logan which does delve into these topics.)

We can, of course, discuss these artistic aspects without regard to the historical accuracy of the play. This would be exactly parallel to viewing a van Gogh painting without worrying whether the painting is a literal depiction of nature. The real subjects of the paintings (as we gather from reading van Gogh’s letters), are not the geographical locations, but the imaginary scenes and people we find if we allow ourselves to join with the artist and suspend our disbelief.