Futility Closet - 195-A Case of Musical Plagiarism

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 10,000 quirky curiosities from a misplaced whale boat to a dog-killing bridge. This is episode 195. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. When the English concert pianist Joyce Haddo died in 2006, she was remembered as a national treasure for the brilliant playing on her later recordings. But then doubts arose as to whether the performances were really hers.

Starting point is 00:00:38 In today's show, we'll review a surprising case of musical plagiarism, which touched off a scandal in the polite world of classical music. We'll also spot foxes in London and puzzle over a welcome illness. Joyce Haddo was born in 1928 and grew up in a family that loved music. She said that the only time she saw her father weep was when Rachmaninoff died in 1943. She became a devoted student of the piano and spent countless hours studying and practicing. In fact, during the Blitz in World War II, she said, we lived near a munitions factory that was often a target. When the warden sounded the signal, I would crawl under the piano to hide. She made her debut as a concert pianist in London in the early 1950s and began to play throughout Britain. In 1951, she met the concert promoter William Barrington Co concert pianist in London in the early 1950s and began to play throughout Britain.

Starting point is 00:01:29 In 1951, she met the concert promoter William Barrington Coop, known as Barry in the industry. He became her agent, and in 1956, the two of them were married. All this seemed promising enough. She gave recitals throughout Britain and Europe, notably visiting Poland in 1958, and in the 1970s, she made many appearances playing popular concertos with the London Symphony and other orchestras. And she was also active as a teacher, both privately and at schools. And because her husband operated several record labels, she began to make recordings with him in England, Germany, and France. Her playing was competent, but never spectacular, and in 1976, after some unflattering reviews, she withdrew to Hertfordshire with Barry and stopped performing in public.

Starting point is 00:02:03 She could still teach and record, since Barry ran his concert artist label out of a studio near their home. But in 1992, she was diagnosed with inoperable ovarian cancer, and she passed out of the public eye for 10 years. In 2002, though, she began to make a stunning re-emergence. Her husband's record label began to release recordings she had made with him, showing masterly technique, a huge breadth of styles, and an almost unprecedented depth of insight. She played Liszt, Bach, all the Mozart and Beethoven sonatas, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Prokofiev, and on and on, including many of the most difficult piano pieces ever written. They released more than 100 CDs in all, making Hadda one of the most prolific classical recording artists of her time. And though she had recorded these discs in

Starting point is 00:02:43 her 60s and 70s, and while suffering from cancer, they were astonishingly good. Word started in internet forums and passed on to record review magazines and websites. One critic said discovering her music was like finding the holy grail. The CDs were notoriously hard to get, but fans sought them out eagerly. By 2005, Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe was calling Joyce Haddow the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of. She kept working through the acclaim right up to the end of her life. It was said she recorded Beethoven's Sonata No. 26, Les Jeux Jus, from a wheelchair in her final days.

Starting point is 00:03:16 James Invern, the editor of classical music magazine Gramophone, wrote, By the time she died in June 2006, Joyce Haddo was not only a sudden widespread success, she was a cause celeb. To love Haddo recordings was to be in the know, a true piano aficionado who didn't need the hype of a major label's marketing spend to recognize a great thing when they heard it. Her obituaries praised her as a national treasure. The Guardian called her one of the greatest pianists Britain has ever produced. In the Boston Globe, Richard Dyer quoted the American pianist Ivan Davis, I will go out on a limb and say that Joyce Haddo seems to me as completely satisfying a pianist as anyone in the history of recorded music. I dare anyone to listen to any of the 80 Scarlatti

Starting point is 00:03:54 sonatas she left us and not think this is the most perfect playing possible. That reputation seemed secure until a few months after her death when a curious thing happened. In Mount Vernon, New York, a financial analyst named Brian Ventura got Hato's recording of Liszt's Transcendental Etudes and put the disc into his computer, and iTunes tried to identify it by consulting an online database of four million CDs. It identified the disc not as a recording by Joyce Hato, but as one by Laszlo Simon, a little-known Hungarian pianist who had recorded the Transcendental Etudes in 1987. Ventura looked up online samples of Simon's recordings and found them to be remarkably similar to Hato's. He wrote to Jed Disler, a composer and music critic who had praised Hato's

Starting point is 00:04:33 recordings, and Disler found that 10 of the 12 tracks on that CD showed remarkable similarities to Simon's performances, the same tempi, accents, dynamics, and balances. He contacted some other editors and critics, and James Invern engaged Andrew Rose, a former sound engineer for the BBC, to study the tracks. Rose said he knew the result before even listening. He could tell just by looking at the waveforms. He wrote, No pianist who's ever lived could replicate a performance to anything like the degree of accuracy heard here. It's simply not humanly possible, whatever the degree of Ms. Haddo's claimed virtuosity. He found that in 10 of Joyce Haddo's list etudes, the sound waves were identical with

Starting point is 00:05:10 those of Laszlo Simon. Distler said, what really made me smell a rat was the 10th etude. The C above middle C, I remember, was out of tune in both the Haddo and the Simon recordings. More duplicates came to light. A CD of two Rachmaninoff concertos, matched one by Yefim Bronfman, released on Sony in 1992. Haddo's recording of Brahms' Second Piano Concerto was credited to the National Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra under a conductor named René Kohler, but the track matches a well-known recording by Vladimir Ashkenazi and the Vienna Philharmonic under Bernard Heiting. Rose said he could see that someone had tried to disguise the origins of the borrowed tracks, sometimes by changing the speeds.

Starting point is 00:05:47 Invern wrote, One pianist even told Rose that one of the doctored recordings is played at a speed that no human hands could manage. Within a week, plagiarized sources had been identified for 20 of Joyce Haddo's CDs. As her star fell, the classical world began to recall some oddities that had come to light even before her death. In May 2005, one musicologist had noticed that in one recording she'd misread a chord in exactly the same way that Carlo Grante had done in a 1993 recording, but no one had pursued that at the time. During her concert career, Haddow had received mixed notices. In October 1953, a Times critic had written, Joyce Haddow grappled doggedly with too hasty tempi in Mozart's D minor piano concerto and was impeded from conveying significant feelings

Starting point is 00:06:30 toward the work, especially in quick figuration. A gramophone reviewer wrote in August 1961, one wonders whether her technique is really on top of the difficulties of this music. She shows a musical sense of give and take with the orchestra, but it remains a small, rather pallid performance. She'd been away from the public for 13 years before she supposedly began recording these brilliant CDs, and by then she was in her 60s and 70s and suffering from ovarian cancer. If she hadn't been a virtuoso in the concert hall, how would she become one on disc, and how could she have produced such a wide variety of excellent recordings? To add to the doubts, it was hard to confirm the identities of the orchestras, conductors,

Starting point is 00:07:04 and venues that Berry had listed on the recordings. They bore names that no one recognized and seemed oddly mismatched. For example, she was said to have recorded the second Brahms piano concerto with an orchestra in a church that would have been too small to accommodate it. In the face of all these questions, the critic Jeremy Nicholas pushed back. He invited anyone who has any evidence whatsoever of fraud, deception, or similar activity related to Ms. Haddo and her record company to come forward, with the proviso that such evidence must stand up in a court of law. No one did, and Radio New Zealand even rebroadcast an hour-long program of glowing praise for the CDs,

Starting point is 00:07:43 including a recording of an April 2006 telephone interview in which Hato never contradicted the interviewer's assumption that she was the sole pianist on the recordings. And some of her fans hated to believe the recordings were fraudulent. Brian Ventura, the financial analyst who had noticed the first oddity in iTunes, said, If she was the one that was copying, part of me didn't want it to come out. The whole Joyce Haddo story seems so terrific, you just wanted it to be true. I didn't want to bring down the story. But the tide continued to turn against her. In the New York Times, the philosopher of art Dennis Dutton reported that Haddo's entire output after 1989 appeared to have been stolen from the CDs of other pianists. Andrew Rose said,

Starting point is 00:08:12 We have yet to investigate a Haddo recording that has not proved to be a hoax. Invern told the Telegraph, It's just the most amazing scandal in the polite world of classical music. Its ramifications are potentially huge, as one would think there are a lot of recording companies involved, and they're notoriously picky about copyright issues. There have been similar things in art and theater, but it's the first scandal of this kind in classical music. Since Joyce Hadda was dead, the spotlight fell on William Barrington Coop, Barry, her husband, who ran the record company that had released all these recordings. At first, he said he was

Starting point is 00:08:41 puzzled by the whole affair. He said, She was the sole pianist on those recordings. I was there at all the important sessions. I was the engineer on the jobs, and I take full responsibility for everything released on my label, Concert Artist. Twelve months ago, she wasn't very well known. If it was all a fake, why would I put my wife's name on it? I would have put someone else, some Russian name, and we would have sold ten times as many. James Invern, the editor of Gramophone, said, We stand by our evidence.

Starting point is 00:09:05 We're not accusing anyone. We're just stating that these recordings are identical to others. If anyone can provide an explanation, we'd be happy to listen. Barry's position wasn't helped when the Daily Mail discovered that in 1966 he'd been imprisoned for tax fraud. He'd been importing radios from Hong Kong and selling them without paying the purchase tax. The judge in that case had told Barry and four co-defendants, These were blatant and impertinent frauds carried out, in my opinion, rather clumsily, but such was your conceit that you thought yourself smart enough to get away with it.

Starting point is 00:09:33 Barry had spent eight months in prison. As the pressure increased, Barry finally admitted some doctoring in a letter to Robert von Bar, who was the head of the Swedish record label that had originally issued some of the recordings that had been plagiarized. Barry admitted that he'd taken parts of recordings by other artists and released them under Joyce's name on his own label, sometimes speeding them up or slowing them down. He said that as Haddo's health grew worse late in life, she refused to take her medicine, and her recordings had been marred by whimpers of pain. He had taken to masking those by splicing in short sections of other recordings, and over time, these spliced sections got longer and longer.

Starting point is 00:10:05 He told reporters, I was never trying to steal someone else's work. I took performances that fitted tonally and changed them, but I didn't change Joyce's performances on the CDs. It was all about getting things to sound right. What I've done is completely wrong, but I didn't go in for a wholehearted piracy. It wasn't a question of putting other people's performances out, but covering little involuntary noises. She had so much pain. He said that the CDs hadn't made much money and that he'd done it all out of love for his wife. She'd been denied the success she deserved, first by the critics and then by her illness. He said, I did it just to keep my wife going and to give her something to live for.

Starting point is 00:10:37 She died feeling that it hadn't all been in vain. She was a very talented musician and piano was her life. But some observers thought perhaps the motive was more cynical. They thought that perhaps Haddo had resented the British musical establishment for failing to recognize her talents and had joined with her husband in this bid to deceive them. Barry refused to help identify the recordings he'd borrowed from because he said the more he revealed, the more people would hound him. He said, whatever I do, it won't be enough. When asked whether all the CDs bearing Joyce's name included at least some of her work, he immediately said yes. When asked if her performances made up the majority of all the

Starting point is 00:11:09 recordings, he paused for a long time and said, I can't say. Asked whether he would do all this again, he said, yes, I would do it again because it made Joyce so happy, but this time I wouldn't publish the CDs. It's not clear how complicit Joyce Haddo herself was in any of this. Barry had told von Bar, My wife was completely unaware that I did this. But most critics seemed to doubt that. As the performer, if she had listened back to the finished recordings, she would certainly have recognized the doctoring.

Starting point is 00:11:36 The British critic Jeremy Nicholas once received a letter from her that read, By the way, I've reworked the Godovsky. You know me. I was never satisfied. Invern said, That means she had to have listened back. And if she listened, then she knew. It's like your handwriting.

Starting point is 00:11:50 Beyond this, as I mentioned, some of the recordings had listed orchestras and conductors that don't appear to exist. If Haddo was innocent, she would have realized that she had no memory of making those recordings. Robert von Bar, the head of the Swedish record label that had recorded Laszlo Simon, said that he had given a lot of thought to suing Berry for damages, but decided against it. He said, Given the circumstances surrounding Ms. Haddo's sickness and fate, there may be deeply felt, if misguided, personal reasons for it. Asked whether he thought the police or the British phonographic industry might take legal action, Barry said, ask them. I've given up worrying about anything. He said, I don't consider I've hurt anybody. A lot of attention has been drawn to forgotten artists. In that, he was actually

Starting point is 00:12:21 right. Von Bar said he'd urged Laszlo Simon to take advantage of the publicity that the scandal had brought him. He said he's gotten more PR than he would get in five lifetimes. This is the time for him to go out and get those concerts. But Michael Spring, sales manager of Hyperion Records, some of whose recordings had been plagiarized, said, I feel we should do something, although it will cost a lot of money to bring him to court. We need to get to the bottom of it and get a list of all the recordings he's pirated. In the end, the Hertfordshire police said they wouldn't take any action unless a complaint were made by the copyright holder of one of the original recordings. Barry was investigated by the industry and made to apologize,

Starting point is 00:12:51 but he was never prosecuted. He died in 2014, disgraced but not formally punished. And he left a strange legacy. Undeniably, he'd proven that he had an excellent ear for music. He was able to recognize great performances by little-known musicians and assemble them into a fake repertoire that dazzled music connoisseurs around the world. James Invern, the editor of Gramophone, said his magazine wasn't embarrassed to have been duped initially by Hato's recordings. He said they're still great performances. But some observers point out that this shows how unfairly stature is apportioned in the classical music world, where critics identify a few stars, but most musicians have to labor in obscurity, even though, as the Hato hoax showed, many of them are widely praised when they're given an audience.

Starting point is 00:13:29 In the New York Times, Dennis Dutton wrote, The greatest lesson for all of us ought to be that there are more fine young pianists out there than most of us realize. Backhanded credit to Joyce Hato for having introduced us to some fine new talent. Finally, this is also a story about technology. Modern technology enabled Berry to perpetrate these frauds himself, almost single-handed, but it also gave Brian Ventura and Andrew Rose the tools they needed to expose him. So it remains to be seen whether frauds like this become easier or harder to pull off in the future. James Inver in the editor of Gramophone said,

Starting point is 00:13:57 What strikes me is that this sort of piracy was made possible by technology and later advances in technology uncovered it. You may use technology to try and hoodwink people, but you never know when it's going to come back and bite you. Nick Moffitt wrote in about my last update on Larry, the UK's official chief mouser, and my curiosity about what the other category would be that the pest controllers had been called in for at 10 Downing Street. Good evening, podcasters and podcat. I just listened to the mail segment from episode 191 and noted with interest the updates about the Downing Street official Mouser. Much levity was made of this august official when David Cameron resigned in 2016.

Starting point is 00:14:41 During the short interim period between Cameron and the current Prime Minister, Theresa May, someone reasoned that this briefly made Larry the senior official in residence at number 10. You had a mild chuckle at the listing of the pest classified as other, and I may have a likely candidate for that. Urban fox. When I moved to London in 2006, foxes were an absolute rarity in London. China Mieville famously noted in 2012 that, it used to be startling to see a fox in London, impossible not to feel that the city had slipped into a fable. Now you spot them on any late night jog. In 2011, one of these agents of animal chaos infiltrated the Shard at 32 London Bridge, the city's unfinished tallest building,

Starting point is 00:15:23 and climbed a thousand feet above the streets to live on builders' scraps. And Nick notes that in 2009, foxes were still so rare in London that to see one in the underground was newsworthy, and he sent an article from The Telegraph entitled, Fox Takes Tube Station Escalator. An urban fox stunned London Underground passengers by calmly taking an escalator to navigate a tube station. I guess I don't know much about foxes.

Starting point is 00:15:49 Are they that inquisitive or adventurous? I guess I don't know that much about foxes either, and you don't picture them in an urban setting, or at least I don't picture them in an urban setting. That's interesting. Nick continued, these days urban foxes in London are no longer nervous around humans and will slink across the pavement in front of you with the arrogance of a cat. I often have to ring my bell a few times to shoo them out of my path when cycling home late at night. The harsh LED headlamp and general racket of my badly oiled bicycle don't seem to bother them one bit. I've lived in London for almost a dozen years and witnessed this transition with the same amazement as longer-term Londoners. At first, as Mieville noted, these creatures seemed like visitors from England's wooded past,

Starting point is 00:16:30 but these days they're filling a scavenger's niche not entirely unlike raccoons did during my childhood in Seattle, Washington. There are particular nuisance around rubbish collection days, as they can get into all sorts of bins. Fortunately, they're not as good at opening the things as raccoons or bears are, and the arms race hasn't extended beyond simple latches on the bins for compostable waste. I wonder what's changed. I guess maybe they still don't know that. I mean, how is it that you say this niche has opened up? Yeah, I guess so. And maybe they're just adaptable like raccoons, you know, and ended up living in urban areas where they didn't used to just because they adapted to them. Yeah. So somehow some fox decided it was a good thing and others followed.

Starting point is 00:17:12 I don't know. Maybe their wooded areas are diminishing, you know. That's a good idea. Nick also said, on a related note, pigeons became a problem in London when the deadly smog stopped killing them, and the populace had enough food to leave crumbs everywhere. A lot of solutions were tried to keep pigeons off of monuments such as Lord Nelson's statue at Trafalgar Square, but recently they came up with the most elegant solution, falconry. I used to work at an office building in Westminster,

Starting point is 00:17:43 and occasionally I'd eat lunch out in one of the small neighborhood parks there. On a few occasions, I'd see a falconer sending a raptor up to the does indeed use hawks and falcons for what it calls bird pest control. I bet that's really effective. I guess it would be. And as he says, you don't actually even need to kill the pigeons, right? They just, they see the predators and leave the area. Also, hawks also eat rodents. And so I was thinking that if Larry doesn't get his act together and start living up to his chief mouser title a little better, he could end up being replaced by a bird. And just think of what that might do to his feline self-esteem. Simone Hilliard wrote in about the software-generated recipes from episode 190. Dear PodSquad, the listener mail on the podcast today reminded me of a video I saw explaining different complex tech concepts with food.

Starting point is 00:18:48 It had a segment explaining neural networks with a recipe generator. The recipe produced, which was actually made by the creators of the video, was pretty disgusting and weird. And the recipe Simone is referring to was created by a neural network that was trained by Janelle Shane using over 30,000 recipes. But apparently, 30,000 recipes was not nearly enough for the algorithm to understand what sorts of things constitute ingredients, as the list of ingredients included items such as desserts and seafood, as well as some items that don't even exist, such as shredded Cool Whip, California Home Jazzin', Warm or Whole Mim, One My Other, and One Wather Haves. Some of those aren't even English words as far as I could tell. And the only directions given for this wonderful recipe in the video were

Starting point is 00:19:41 the cream soupy stops and cools, pour mixture over top of pile, garnish. I like the little garnish at the end. In an article in Slate, Shane explains that in traditional programming, a human programmer gives the computer rules about data. But in machine learning, like in neural networks, the computer is given a large data set and tries to deduce the rules for itself. On her blog, Shane says, given a set of data, a neural network will learn the patterns that let it imitate the original data, although its imitation is sometimes imperfect. And it seems that those imperfections are actually what Shane really loves about playing with neural networks and their outputs. Some good examples of those imperfections can be seen in the ingredients

Starting point is 00:20:26 in some of the other recipes that have been generated by her neural network, such as one one-inch, a quarter cup along with, one up, 12-ounce kettle, one can fried pale fruit to cover that drain, and my favorite, five cups lumps thinly sliced. Because you wouldn't want to thickly slice your lumps. That'll ruin the whole thing.

Starting point is 00:20:55 The directions included in the recipes also tended to be pretty nonsensical, such as, watch the end of the fillets to the heat and set in a bowl and heat at this low for five minutes until softened. Spoon the one day, one, one half hours. Take an and, inverting it and turn the center. To serve cooking time. It is been rib so tro. While the serving is alternatively rich, we'll puree in the McQuinnelly preparing gravy. They should seal. That was like the last step. They should seal.

Starting point is 00:21:31 We should build a robot to follow that recipe and see what we get. Shane has trained her neural networks to generate a number of things, such as knock-knock jokes, pickup lines, heavy metal band names, and names of paint colors. And Greg actually had a post on his blog recently about kitten names that were generated by one of Shane's neural networks. Some of my favorite kitten names are Ruber, Snorp, Snoxboops, Cylon, Snowpie, Licky Cat, Mr. Gruffles, Corco, and Muppin. I actually quite like Mr. Gruffles.

Starting point is 00:22:03 It sort of depends on the cat's personality. Yes. But that could be perfectly fine. Actually, my favorite was Mr. Winkles. So maybe we could get a pair of them and name them Mr. Winkles and Mr. Gruffles. That might go together really well. One of Shane's other experiments that I really liked was her training the algorithm on candy hearts, which are also called conversation hearts.

Starting point is 00:22:23 And these are little candies that are made for Valentine's Day that have short messages printed on them, such as love you or be mine. Some of the computer generated suggestions for these candy hearts were actually kind of cute, such as love bot, my bear and love bun. Some made a little less sense, such as oog love, I honker, tweet up bat, and whirly oot. And some made me wonder if I was just missing the message, such as all hover, stank love, you are bag. And this one was very interesting. Love 2,000 hogs, yay.

Starting point is 00:23:02 There's got to be a story behind that one. There are some situations where that'd be perfectly appropriate. And on her blog, Shane notes that given the prevalence of four-letter words in the original Candy Heart data set, the neural network, maybe unsurprisingly, produced some messages that were not so family-friendly. She declined to list those on her blog, but will send them to you on request if you would like. So thanks so much to everyone who writes in to us. If you have anything that you'd like to send to us podcasters or podcat here on the pod squad, you can send that to podcast

Starting point is 00:23:37 at futilitycloset.com. It's Greg's turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle i'm going to give him an odd situation and he has to try to figure out what's going on asking only yes or no questions this puzzle comes from karsten hammond with some minor rewording a man begins vomiting and feeling unwell and is quite pleased why minor rewording. I wonder where that started. Say it again. A man begins vomiting. And feeling unwell and is quite pleased. Okay, so he intended to begin vomiting.

Starting point is 00:24:14 What a strange puzzle. You would say that he's pleased because this is happening? He's pleased that this is happening. So he wanted to feel nauseated? Would you say that? I don't know that I would say it quite like that. Is he like eating something poisonous or dangerous and is trying to purge it? No.

Starting point is 00:24:35 Is he an actor? No. Begins vomiting. Is this true? Yes. Do we need to know the man's identity? You probably won't know his specific identity. His occupation? Yes. Do we need to know the man's identity? You probably won't know his specific identity. His occupation? Yes.

Starting point is 00:24:50 Is he an actor? No. Why would you... Would you say he induced his own vomiting? He did something to cause this to happen? He did something to cause this to happen. Is he a doctor? Yes.

Starting point is 00:25:01 He's a doctor. Yes. And he induced vomiting in himself. Is he just trying to come up with a technique that makes people vomit? No. And he's pleased with himself because he succeeded? That's a perfectly valid solution. Yes, but I'm sure lots of people have come up with techniques to make people vomit.

Starting point is 00:25:18 It's not that hard to do, I guess. Okay, so he's a doctor. Are there other people involved? There is somebody else involved, but for the purposes of this puzzle, you don't need to know about them. He's just solo vomiting. As far as you need to know. Is there more, is there like backstory, like he ate something in particular? He did eat something in particular.

Starting point is 00:25:36 And I need to figure that out. That might be challenging to figure out what it was that he ate in particular. Is it poisonous? Is there his own safety involved? Is he pleased because he's protecting his own safety? No. Okay, but he has eaten something in the recent past that he's now vomiting. What a weird puzzle. That's not quite right, the way you've said it. Okay, is the thing that he ate recently causing him to vomit? I would say yes. thing that he ate recently causing him to vomit?

Starting point is 00:26:04 I would say yes. Starts to vomit and feels unwell. And is quite pleased. Would you say this is a scientific discovery? Yes. So he's discovered that eating whatever this is causes nausea. Would you say that? That's not quite right.

Starting point is 00:26:24 Because it sounds like that's exactly what he ate. That's very vaguely right, but not quite right. Not like, oh, I've discovered that if you eat purple mushrooms, you get nauseated. Like, it's not like that. Because it sounds exactly like that. All right. Okay. So he ate something, though, and it nauseated him.

Starting point is 00:26:42 You'd say that. It caused him to be unwell.'s not he didn't specifically have to vomit he would have been pleased if he had just gotten fairly sick right right right and you said that's a discovery of some kind it is he didn't know that he was testing some theory in he was swallowing this whatever it was yes he thought hey i wonder if i swallow this if i'll feel unwell. He actually had the hypothesis that he would, and that's why he's pleased, because it was borne out. All right. So what was he trying to discover or prove?

Starting point is 00:27:16 Well, unless I have to figure out exactly what it was he ate. The food is irrelevant. He's trying to prove something else, though. A principle. Sort of. Do we need to know his surroundings? Like, is this in space or underwater or something? No, no.

Starting point is 00:27:35 So he was trying to prove, he had the idea that if he swallowed a certain substance. Yes. In certain conditions. Not really certain conditions. So just that he swallowed something, it would make him feel unwell? Yes, that it would cause him to be unwell. So that was his hypothesis. He did that. He found that it was true, and so he was pleased. Yes. I'm not sure what I'm not getting, except for the actual identity of the thing that he swallowed. Right. He was trying to prove something about a particular illness.

Starting point is 00:28:04 Ah. Not about the food. He was trying to prove something about a particular illness. Ah. Not about the food. He was trying to prove something about an illness. Okay. An illness? Is this like allergy? No. Like a gastrointestinal? Yes. Illness?

Starting point is 00:28:22 Yes. It was about ulcers. He was trying to prove something about ulcers. Okay. So you swallow a certain substance or item. Yeah. If you have ulcers, okay. Did the thing that he swallowed cause him to get ulcers? Yes. And that's what he was testing? And that's what he was proving.

Starting point is 00:28:38 He was proving something. So when he vomited and fell down, well, that showed him that he developed the ulcers as he expected he might. As he'd hoped he would. As he'd hoped he would, As he'd hoped he would. Yeah. And that was a breakthrough. And so he could warn other people, don't swallow this thing because it'll give you ulcers. What was he trying to prove about ulcers? Do you know?

Starting point is 00:28:54 Can you guess? I think that's all going to come down to what it was that he swallowed. Yeah. it was that he swallowed. Yeah. Unless it's just a bare fact that ulcers are caused by diet or can be. No, it's not diet. It was immaterial what the food was,

Starting point is 00:29:14 but there was something in the food. Something that wasn't itself food? Correct. That caused like physical trauma to his stomach lining? I don't think you'd say that, no. He was trying to prove something novel about the cause of ulcers. Well, that they would be potentially caused by this substance, whatever it was. So the idea is that he can go out and warn other people, hey, don't swallow this thing, whatever it is, because it can cause ulcers.

Starting point is 00:29:42 Yeah, I'll tell you. He was able to prove that ulcers are caused by bacteria, which nobody would believe at the time. Oh, wow. Karsten says, the man in question is Dr. Barry Marshall, an Australian physician who, along with pathologist colleague Robin Warren, accredited with discovering the patho-ideology of peptic ulcers. In the early 1980s, the pair discovered that an unusual corkscrew-shaped bacteria was commonly

Starting point is 00:30:04 found in the gastric lining of peptic ulcer patients. At the time, it was generally thought that no bacteria could survive in the acidic stomach environment. Doctors Marshall and Warren became convinced that this bacterium, now called Helicobacter pylori or H. pylori, had a causal role in the development of peptic ulcers, gastric ulcers, and certain types of gastritis. And Karsten quotes from a discover magazine article that says unable to make his case in studies with lab mice because h pylori affects only primates and prohibited from experimenting on people marshall grew desperate finally he ran an

Starting point is 00:30:35 experiment on the only human patient he could ethically recruit himself he took some h pylori from the gut of an ailing patient stirred it into into a broth, and drank it. I know. As the days passed, he developed gastritis, the precursor to an ulcer. He started vomiting, his breath began to stink, and he felt sick and exhausted. Back in the lab, he biopsied his own gut, culturing H. pylori, and proving unequivocally that bacteria were the underlying causes of ulcers. And so in recognition of their discovery, Marshall and Warren were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Because that's a really important thing to know. It is a really important thing

Starting point is 00:31:09 to know. When was this again? The 1980s. So that's fairly recent. Yeah, I kind of remember it was a big deal when it came out because people had a very different idea about what the underlying cause of ulcers was. And apparently they just couldn't convince anybody of their theory. So that's why he was very pleased when he started vomiting. It's like, hey, look, I gave myself an ulcer. Good for him. So thanks so much to Carson for that puzzle in which people did get sick, but no one died. Yay.

Starting point is 00:31:34 He's maybe saving people from dying. That's right. And if anyone else has a puzzle for us to try, you can send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet is supported primarily by our awesome listeners. If you'd like to contribute to our celebration of the quirky and the curious, please check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset or see the support us section of the website at futilitycloset.com. While you're at the site, you can also graze Greg's collection of over 10,000 compendious amusements. Browse the Futility Closet store,

Starting point is 00:32:10 learn about the Futility Closet books, and see the show notes for the podcast with the links and references for the topics we've covered. If you have any questions or comments for us, you can email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and performed by Greg's phenomenal

Starting point is 00:32:25 brother, Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 195-A Case of Musical Plagiarism

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