Revisionist History - The Imaginary Crimes of Margit Hamosh

Episode Date: July 5, 2018

Epidemics of fear repeat themselves. The first time as tragedy. The second time as farce. Margit Hamosh? Definitely farce.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In early summer of 1999, there was a strange incident in Belgium. Products had been taken back from the market when it happened. But obviously it was already a bit too late. It began at a secondary school in a little town called Bornem, just outside Antwerp. A group of students got sick. Abdominal distress, headaches, nausea, trembling, dizziness. Dozens of kids in the first wave all ended up in the hospital. And the only commonality was that they had been eating together,

but each had eaten their own sandwiches, so there was no possibility of a foodborne problem. That's Benoit Nemery. He's a medical toxicologist at the University of Leuven. He was part of the group that investigated the outbreak among the students. The only thing that they had in common is that they had drunk Coca-Cola from bottles, from a crate, and allegedly there was a strange odor in the Coke. And then the school teachers went in the different classrooms asking, is anybody feeling unwell?

And drank Coca-Cola, which of course made sense at the time. But that led a few more children to report sick, to be taken to hospital. The story went national. The evening news was a montage of ambulances and worried parents. The next day, four more schools reported outbreaks. I mean, it was really a state of panic. Every single Coca-Cola product in Belgium was pulled from the shelves and destroyed.

30 million cans and bottles. The largest recall in Coca-Cola history. The company was in crisis. The stock price plummeted. I was transfixed by the Belgian Coke crisis. Not because I had any special interest in Coca-Cola or Belgium, but because the whole affair reminded me of another panic. Something I'd lived through years before that left me baffled and frustrated. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things forgotten and misunderstood. The next two episodes are about a panic that swept the United States a quarter century ago,

an outbreak of insanity. two episodes are about a panic that swept the United States a quarter century ago. An outbreak of insanity. I was in the middle of it, covered it as a young reporter for the Washington Post, but it took the Belgian Coke crisis a few years later for me to understand why it happened. Because you know what poisoned all those Belgians? Nothing. The best explanation Coca-Cola could come up with was that some of the carbon dioxide at their local bottling plant had been contaminated with sulfur compounds. Enough to cause a slight odor, but trace amounts,

orders of magnitude below what is necessary to cause illness. No major toxins detected, nothing that would suggest true poisoning. And so epidemiologically, it made no sense that there was poisoning by a single, same agent. After looking into it, Nemri and his colleagues concluded that the crisis was an example of what's known as a mass sociogenic illness, what used to be called mass hysteria. People had real symptoms. They were nauseated and vomiting and dizzy,

and the initial batch of Coke served at the school in Bornham was a bit off. But the Coke didn't poison them. There was no actual connection between their sickness and the thing they thought made them sick. Nemry says that he saw another sociogenic outbreak firsthand in Soviet Georgia in 1989. Soviet troops had sprayed a group of protesters with chemical agents. A terrible incident. The strange thing, though, was that the children of the protesters had the same symptoms as their parents, even though they weren't the ones who were sprayed. In the medical literature, there are countless cases

like this. A group of people linked by some shared anxiety come to believe they have been exposed to something malevolent. And the scary thing is that when you're in the middle of a sociogenic outbreak, when you're vomiting and running a fever after drinking your can of Coke, you have no idea, none, that the cause of your illness is all in your imagination. So she spoke, I mean, her native tongue was German, and then she spoke Hebrew, and she learned English, and she learned French, and she learned Latin. This is mom?

Yeah. Medieval French. Medieval French. Medieval French. And she knew Aramaic very well. Yes. She spoke with a private teacher in high school conversational Latin. They spoke Latin with each other.

I'm at the house of Ada Hamish, just outside of Baltimore, on her porch. She's a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins. Next to her is her sister, Tamar, professor of medicine at Yale University. And next to Tamar, their father, Paul, retired professor of medicine at Georgetown University. And next to Tamar, their father, Paul, retired professor of medicine at Georgetown University.

Ada and Tamar are talking about their mother, Margit, also a professor of medicine at Georgetown University, until she died of cancer in 2011. And then when she got cancer, she's like, oh, you know, it's a little inconvenient, but it's going to be fine. Just the way she did her whole life.

And she was very, very positive. She had this amazing ability to make whoever she was talking to think that they were the single most important person in the room with the most interesting story. Margit Hamas was born in Germany, then raised in Bucharest after her family fled the Nazis in 1936. She met her husband Paul in Israel after the war. She was the star. He was the protector.

He was the cook. He was the come out of school and make sure you don't have meningitis when you, you know, can't move your neck. He came to the plays. He came to the games. He cheered us on. He took a backseat to her. He always did. For 60 years, they were a team. They would have breakfast and bed together. They would drive to work together. They would work in the same office. They would drive home together. They would make dinner together. They would go and do whatever they were doing for the evening together. And they would go to the same bed. And my mother would say, I just don't see enough of your father. All the time. I just don't see enough of you. Yeah. 24-7. Yeah. And that's what she would say.

She's like, I don't know where he is. I'm like, I think he went to the bathroom, Mom. No, I mean, they were crazy. I mean, even when they were in their 60s, you know, they always read the paper on a Sunday morning. We had a, you know, big window in front of the house. And the opera. Yeah. And so they would read the paper and they would chase each other around. Like, I mean, like kids in love. I mean, like, I'm like chase each other around, like kids in love.

I mean, I'm like, okay, guys, you're 65. We've had enough already. Come on, all right? Yeah, it was bizarre. It was very bizarre. Margit Hamish discovered an enzyme critical for newborn digestion, became an expert on human milk and nutrition, lectured all over the world, ran a major laboratory at Georgetown, funded by millions in research grants from the National Institutes of Health. An intellectual, elegant, and cultured. Even when she had three children, a full-time job and everything else, they went out at least three times a week to a play or a concert or performance every week. One weekend day was in the museums, the other or a concert or performance every week.

One weekend day was in the museums, the other weekend day was cooking for the week. On Saturday afternoon, the opera was on, and if you made a sound, you were dead. So you took a nap from two to five. Live from Lincoln Center. In the late 1980s, Marguerite Hamas had a small problem in her lab. Nothing major. A disagreement with one of her researchers. The researcher quit, then she changed her mind.

Wanted her job back. The Hamases rehired her. The second time around, the researcher grew even more disgruntled. She ended up making a series of accusations. Georgetown launched an investigation. Hamas was cleared. But the researcher then appealed her case to the National Institutes of Health, the institution that funded Hamas's research. Because the NIH gives out billions of dollars in research grants, they have a mechanism to ensure their money is used appropriately.

In those days, it was an investigative unit called the OSI, the Office of Scientific Integrity. When universities could not resolve disputes on their own, the OSI would step in and take the case. That's what happened with Hamish. The OSI investigated and wrote a report. Several people asked me, what is this all about? And the truth is that I really didn't know what it was all about

in the sense that, you know, there was a lot of ranting and raving going on. Now let me ask you this. When was the last time you heard about an internal laboratory dispute between medical researchers working in some esoteric corner of human physiology. Unless you're a scientist, I'm going to guess never. People in academic laboratories work long hours in close quarters. The pay is low. You can spend years on an experiment with little to show for it. You might see the person next to you get a job or publish a paper or win an award that you think you deserved. Competition for funding is intense.

Labs are stressful places. So what? That's why scientists publish their results, to work out disagreements among themselves. Fights rarely go public. Except during a brief period in the early 1990s, the window of insanity, when everything went public. Back then, I was on a team of science writers at the Washington Post. We called ourselves the pod. We wrote about medicine and physics and psychology and covered the health bureaucracy, the NIH, the Food and Drug Administration, the CDC.

And what were we obsessed with? Not just us, but our counterparts in other newspapers as well? Science fraud. There was the Baltimore case, an insanely complicated allegation against the Nobel Prize winner David Baltimore. The Gallo case. An unbelievable tale of the AIDS virus and a lab theft. The Cleveland Clinic case.

It never ended. Leaks, lawsuits, page one stories, big headlines. A science writer at the Chicago Tribune, a reporter named John Crudson, wrote 80,000 words on the Gallo case. 80,000 words for a newspaper. I have written books that aren't 80,000 words. There was a nine-hour congressional hearing entirely devoted to a scientific paper entitled, Altered Repertoire of Endogenous Immunoglobulin Gene Expression in Transgenic Mice Containing a Rearranged Mu-Heavy Chain gene. Nine hours, during which congressmen

attempted to sound intelligent on the subject of transgenic mu products. Then, in the middle of all of this, Marguite Hamish. I never met her, but for some reason, out of all the cases that bubbled up in the great science panic, hers was always the case that affected me the deepest. It made me angry in ways that will take the better part of this episode and the next to explain. Why did Margit Hamas choose to spend her life in a laboratory out of all the things she could have done? It's not hard to imagine. She was a refugee from Nazi Germany. There were times when I remember vividly I interrupted my mother because, I don't know, I was in sixth grade and a boy dumped me or something.

I said, Nikki dumped me, and she looked at me and she said, you know, at your age, I was in an air raid shelter, wondering what I was going to eat. A laboratory offered order and certainty and safety after all she'd been through. What happens outside the laboratory doesn't matter. And then, out of the blue, the outside world does matter. A routine disagreement with someone in her lab turned into a national story. Margit Homish has been forced to defend herself against charges of falsifying data, plagiarism, and

mismanaging research in her laboratory. Washington Post, January 22, 1991. Written by one of my colleagues. I'm not going to say who because I think that any of us back then could have written it. It was what we did. I remember vividly when the paper came out and one of my friends said, have you seen this paper? Have you seen this article? And I said, what article? And they're like, did your mom commit scientific fraud? I'm like, no, what are you talking about?

And I read it and I was like, gosh, this is bad. It was bad. The Hamishes didn't want to talk at first. They told me they didn't want to dig up all those memories. I was married to her 57 years. It's a long time. And I was, I was her protector. Yeah, they had a completely symbiotic relationship. And he couldn't protect her from this. It was really bad. And that I couldn't protect her in this particular case. Paul Hamish could not protect Margit anymore. She had been swept up in a panic. Would you knowingly allow yourself to be treated by a doctor with AIDS?

It's been just over a year since dentist David Acer died of AIDS in Florida, and he left five of his former patients with the disease of AIDS. The Oprah Winfrey Show, September 1991. Oprah's guest is 23-year-old Kimberly Bergales, one of five patients infected by Dr. Acer. Has there been any clarification, Kimberly, on how you contracted the disease? Was there a cut or was the doctor cut or was it transmitted through the instrument? Have you been clarified on that as yet? No, we haven't. You don't. And I suppose at this point it doesn't really matter that much. It doesn't matter.

The AIDS epidemic was then at its height. There was no effective treatment. The epidemic had started with the gay community and IV drug users and people who had received contaminated blood transfusions. But Kimberly Bregalis wasn't gay, or a drug user, or someone who had gone through a major medical procedure. She was just a college student in Florida, a virgin from a religious family

who had done nothing more than go see the dentist. If you were to chart public fear of HIV over time, that summer of 1991, during Kimberly Bregalis' slow and very public death, was the peak. Bergalis' parents took her on a train from their home in Florida to Washington, D.C. to testify before Congress. They wanted mandatory HIV testing for all health care providers. An army of reporters from around the country climbed on board to document her journey. I was one of them.

Kimberly Bergalis' Ride of Rage, September 26, 1991, Washington Post. She was down to 70 pounds by that point. When she spoke to reporters, her father would carry her in his arms. There was a 60 Minutes episode about her, a long-running controversy over whether her dentist deliberately infected her, interviews, headlines, and then Oprah, twice. Now, in a recent letter to Florida health officials, Kimberly Bergallus makes it clear who she thinks is responsible for her having this disease. In an excerpt, Kimberly states, who do I blame? Do I

blame myself? I sure don't. I never had a blood transfusion. I blame Dr. Acer and every single one of you bastards, she says. I'm dying, guys. Goodbye. Really, we all just are interested in knowing, first of all, how you are feeling and how are you doing? Well, I'm walking with assistance right now. Mm-hmm. And I'm eating a lot. Mm-hmm. I'm still pretty weak.

Mm-hmm. But I feel better. A few months later, she was gone. The great anxiety of the early AIDS epidemic was that science and the medical establishment had failed us. They hadn't protected us. And the Regalas case embodied that fear. We get a lot of abuse from your medical establishment. I think that's one of the most frustrating things.

When Kimberly appeared on Oprah the final time, her mother Anna was by her side. You know, my daughter dying, they realize that she is dying. They realize that she is dying because of the medical establishment, the civil liberties, the gay activist groups, and they're not doing anything. You know, I'm not emotional. I'm not hysterical. I am enraged. Ten years into the AIDS epidemic, people had found their culprit, the medical establishment.

Now, of course, just a few years later, the same medical establishment that everyone was blaming in 1991 would figure out how to treat HIV. And the thing that was so scary, infection by a healthcare provider, would turn out to be a one-off, incredibly rare. But no one knew that in the summer of 1991. All we had was fear and anger. And once you start seeing something dark in the motives of people in white coats, it doesn't end. Every disagreement, every anomaly, every molehill becomes a scandal. That's exactly what happened with the Belgian co-custarium. A few months earlier, Belgium had been through a crisis.

Chickens in farms across the country had fallen ill. Their feed had gotten contaminated with dioxin, one of the most toxic of all chemicals. No, it was major. It was probably one of the biggest food scares, I would say, maybe in history. Benoit Nemery, the toxicologist, was in the middle of it. The Belgian government had to recall anything that might possibly have been in contact with a contaminated feed. Eggs, chicken, beef.

The news was filled with talk about how extraordinarily dangerous dioxins are, how even trace amounts can cause cancer. Every day on television you could see animals that were being slaughtered and dumped into mass graves. Then, a few weeks later, a batch of Coke smells a little funny, and the panic starts. A panic born entirely in the imagination of terrified children and their parents and teachers. School children being poisoned by Coca-Cola, which is again one of the biggest symbols of our modern food. And so that was really the sort of cherry on that rotten cake. Epidemics of fear repeat themselves. You start with dioxin, you end up with Coca-Cola.

You start with Kimberly Brigalis, you end up with Margit Hamish. First time is tragedy, second time is farce. On March 22, 1991, the Washington Post published its second article on the Hamish case. It began the way all the science fraud stories of that era began, with a call to authority. Quote, the National Institutes of Health has concluded that a top scientist at Georgetown University Medical Center committed scientific misconduct by knowingly submitting false information in applying for two federal research grants, end quote. This is now two months after the first big piece on the Hamish case in

The Washington Post. The Office of Scientific Integrity has finished its investigation and found her guilty. Maybe because this was a story written by someone else, and maybe because I could see it with fresh eyes, but I remember reading the piece and reading it again and wondering, what is this? Something's wrong. This was the point I became a skeptic. First thing, so it sounds like there was some kind of formal hearing which ruled against Margit Hamish, right? Actually, no. Here's the way things worked at the Office of Scientific Integrity. They would interview both parties to a disagreement, write up their findings, and then just leak them to the press. Someone in the office would slip his or her favorite reporter a package of documents stamped something like confidential or for internal use only or simply draft, put inside plain brown envelopes. I got

them. We all got them. Now, if you scroll down to the second to last paragraph in the Washington Post piece, you'll come to this. Hamas, who is chief of the Division of Developmental Biology and Nutrition in Georgetown's Pediatrics Department, will have an opportunity to review the report and submit a written rebuttal, end quote. We'll have an opportunity. She hadn't seen it. And also, submit a written rebuttal. The OSI had concluded Margit Hamas was a fraud without showing her the evidence or letting her respond. I remember once, not long before this, doing another story on a science fraud case. I called the attorney for the accused and he said,

well, I can't comment because I have no idea what my client is accused of. I took my leaked OSI report out of its plain brown wrapper, photocopied it, and sent it over to him. No part of that transaction had seemed weird to me at the time. Now, the most important question of all. What was it that Marguerite Hamish did? What was her alleged fraud? I have been going on and on about this case for a good half hour now,

and I haven't told you. You know why? Because we didn't know. You won't find a good explanation in the Washington Post story of March 22, 1991, just vague mentions of an experiment involving rabbits. Well, let me tell you the final accusation against Marguit Hamish. At the end of a 20,000-word NIH grant application, in a section that was completely peripheral to the subject of her grant request, Margit Hamish wrote the following sentence. Last but not least, we are presently using the newborn rabbit as an animal model for total parenteral nutrition.

After scrutinizing every word of her grant application, the OSI said, that's wrong. Because at the time Marguerite Hamish wrote the grant, she didn't actually have the animal model up and running. She wasn't presently using newborn rabbits. Their understanding of the word presently was it stands as a synonym for currently. Hamish's defense was she had designed the rabbit experiments. She had received the money to conduct those experiments. She had obtained the special surgical equipment to run the rabbit experiments, and she had begun collecting the necessary preliminary data on the rabbits prior to the experiment. She was going to do the rabbit experiments presently. She was using presently as a synonym for shortly,

which is the way that it is often used in British English. The doctor will be with you presently. That's it. Her crime was not writing the more conventional, we will shortly be using the newborn rabbit as an animal model. Or maybe shifting the word presently to the end of the sentence, which is the one place where in American English we will accept the British definition of presently. We will be using the newborn rabbit as an animal model for total parenteral nutrition

presently. But I don't know. She was born in Germany. She was educated in Israel. English is her seventh language. Okay, now you might say, this is ridiculous. Still, ridiculous cases sometimes happen. So what? But after Hamish, it dawned on me that they were all like this. All the science fraud cases that we had become obsessed with. Like the case of Mika Popovic, a virologist at the NIH. The scientist who figured out how to grow the AIDS virus in the laboratory. Without which, nothing, no subsequent research on HIV, would have been possible. Here he is as a bit character in a film adaptation of And the Band Played On.

Popovic here, yes. Yes, who's calling? At a time when people knew nothing about HIV, except that it was the most murderous virus anyone had ever seen, Popovic slaved away in the laboratory, hours on end, working with samples of HIV-infected blood with his hands. Popovic was also accused of fraud. Why? Because in a chart in the paper where he first described growing the AIDS virus, Popovic eight times used the initials N-D

in the place of a number. The chart's legend said N-D meant not done. The OSI said, wait, you did do those experiments. That's fraud. Except Popovic's English is bad. Somebody helped him write the paper, and that person put in the footnote about ND meaning not done. What Popovic actually meant by ND was not determinable, meaning the results were inconclusive. So why did Popovic miss the error in the not done footnote? Maybe because the article in question was published in 1984,

when AIDS was in its first terrifying stages. And maybe he was in just a little bit of a hurry to publish the most important advance to that point against the epidemic. The battle over ND went on for years. The OSI conducted more than 7,000 hours of interviews and deliberations. Popovic sued, lost, ran through his savings, got chased out of NIH over a dispute over the correct interpretation of two initials, N.D., presently. It was like the Spanish Inquisition staffed by a mob of angry copy editors.

In the face of a panic, it is the job of those who know better to stand and say, like Benoit Nemry did, wait, it isn't the Coke. The Coke is harmless. This is misplaced anxiety. It is the job of those who know better to deliver the difficult truth. But those of us who were science writers in that era didn't do that. We lapped up the leaks from the OSI. We wrote our sensational stories.

And we tore apart the lives of innocent people. No one remembers Marguerite Hamish today. She's a footnote, one scientist long gone, who worked away quietly in a lab on a problem that most of us have never heard of. First of all, the amount of material that this case generated was no less than 300 pounds of paper. Okay. I mean, I would say... In their house. Right. In their house. And you didn't see the part that was downstairs.

No, but you're talking about the entire file cabinet. Entire file cabinet. And then up in the cellar, there were boxes and boxes full of binders. Margit Hamish shouldn't be a footnote. Her case should be a warning. This is what happens when we let our fears consume us. But I opened a binder, and I mean, her annotations were, she annotated every, every binder had her handwriting in it.

This isn't true. I didn't say that. You know, I think this is misinterpreted. Tiny mom handwriting everywhere. Yellow pages, legal pages, stuck in. I disagree with this. Tiny mom handwriting everywhere. Yellow pages, legal pages stuck in. I disagree with this. This isn't right. Every binder. She annotated every binder. Mom, mom annotated every binder of everything with this case. So think about what she could have been doing at that time. Then one day it stopped. How that happened is the subject of the next episode. How all the cases that obsessed us just went away.

And the fever passed. It aged her, I think, a lot. I mean, when I think of my mother and how she aged, she was a woman who, like, in her late 40s, early 50s, was still very beautiful. but by the time she had 60 she looked every bit of 60 and that decade was probably hard for her she was always g4 with me and i didn't know that she's suffering and to what extent she's suffering for this whole thing? Well, I tell you, I talked to mom a lot about it. And what she said was, I pretend it's not happening.

Unless I have to speak with a lawyer. And then I get a migraine. And then the next day I'm fine. One last question. Because I don't want to keep you guys forever. Did anyone from NIH ever apologize? No, no, but who? Yeah, no, I don't think anyone ever apologized.

The insanity passes. Then everyone pretends it never happened. Except for those who don't have the luxury of pretending. I was angry about it then. I'm angry about it still. Revisionist History is a Panoply production. The lead producer is Mia Lobel with Jacob Smith and Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flan Williams is our engineer. Fact-checking by Beth Johnson.

Original music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.