by Alicia Thornton

As someone whose background is in biological sciences, working in the Grant Museum of Zoology feels a little like coming home. Robert Edmond Grant collated the collection for the teaching of comparative anatomy and zoology, showing the differences and similarities between species. The collection is hugely diverse; from sponges and other marine invertebrates (in which Grant held a particular interest) to skeletons of primates, elephants, big cats and other mammals. The collection even has examples of some animals which are now extinct. Most notable are the quagga, a zebra-like creature from Southern Africa which was hunted to extinction in the wild around the time that Grant was teaching at UCL; and the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger. The thylacine was a marsupial native of Australia, also hunted to extinction, during the early 20^th century. The museum also has bones from a Dodo, which died out  as the result of a combination of factors, including hunting and predation by imported species introduced by European settlers.

For me, what the collection shows so well, through its diversity, is how every organism is adapted to the environment in which they live. Each species or subspecies has evolved to have a unique way of living and their biology gives a complete illustration of this.  For example, the shape of a jaw indicating the type of diet an animal has, or the dimensions of the limbs showing how an animal may swing through trees or stalk prey in grassland.  As I near the end of the first year of my PhD, I find that it is sometimes easy to get too engrossed in the details of my research and lose sight of what interested me about the topic in the first place. The Grant museum serves as a perfect reminder. My own research is focused on infectious diseases, and specifically human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The way in which the virus has evolved and continues to evolve has been one of the biggest challenges for scientists and medics working in HIV treatment, care and research.

Like all viruses, HIV requires a living cell to reproduce. During infection, the virus enters the human cells and uses the machinery of the host cell to replicate, producing further infectious particles and releasing them to continue the infection cycle. In order to be successful and survive, the virus must find mechanisms by which it can evade the response of the host immune system that is designed to eliminate it. In fact, HIV is perfected suited to this; having the ability to infect cells which constitute a key component of the immune system as well as those which are out of the reach of the immune system.

Due to the nature of its replication, HIV evolves particularly fast and thus has the ability to survive changing environments.[1]  A huge range of drugs to treat HIV have been developed  since the beginning of the epidemic. These drugs have been a huge success, allowing people to live much healthier lives. Where they are readily available they have dramatically reduced the numbers of people who develop AIDS[2] and increased life expectancy of HIV positive individuals to almost that of HIV negative individuals[3].  Yet they never eliminate the virus completely and as new drugs are introduced, the virus rapidly evolves, giving rise to drug resistant strains and making treatment even more challenging.[4]

The 19^th International AIDS conference was held in Washington DC, USA in July 2012. This is the largest of the HIV conferences with over 20,000 delegates, taking place every two years, and is attended by a mix of medics, nurses, public health professionals, advocacy groups and policy makers. Finding a cure for HIV was a key theme of the conference and like all HIV conferences, a large volume of work presented was focused on the development of new drugs and drug combinations. Increasing the range of drugs available means that doctors are more able to combat the development of drug resistance and keep their patient’s viral replication supressed.

The extent of the HIV epidemic is the result of a complex combination of social and scientific factors. However, there is no doubt that the virus’ ability to continually change and adapt to the environment in which it survives is a one of the key reasons that the infection remains such a challenge to control.

[1] Rambault A, Posada D, Crandall KA & Holes EC.  The Causes and Consequences of HIV Evolution. Nature Reviews Genetics 2004; 5(1): 52-61.

[2] Mocroft A, Ledergerber B, Katlama C, Kirk O, Reiss P, d’Arminio Monforte A, Knysz B, Dietrich M, Phillips AN, Lundgren JD; EuroSIDA study group. Decline in the AIDS and death rates in the EuroSIDA study: an observational study. Lancet. 2003; 362(9377):22-9.

[3] Nakagawa F, Lodwick RK, Smith CJ, Smith R, Cambiano V, Lundgren JD, Delpech V, Phillips AN.  Projected life expectancy of people with HIV according to timing of diagnosis. AIDS. 2012; 26(3):335-43.

[4] UK Collaborative Group on HIV Drug Resistance; UK CHIC Study Group.  Long-term probability of detecting drug-resistant HIV in treatment-naive patients initiating combination antiretroviral therapy.  Clin Infect Dis. 2010; 50(9):1275-85.

by Katie Donington

Above all, he must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the ‘matter itself’ is no more than the strata which yield their long-sought secrets only to the most meticulous investigation. That is to say, they yield those images that, severed from all earlier associations, reside as treasures in the sober rooms of our later insights – like torsos in a collector’s gallery.[1]

The issue of displaying human remains in a museum of zoology was discussed by Jack Ashby, Grant Museum Manager in a recent blog post:

The whole topic of displaying human remains has to be considered carefully and handled sensitively… One of the questions we asked our visitors last term on a QRator iPad was “Should human and animal remains be treated any differently in museums like this?” and the majority of the responses were in favour of humans being displayed, with the sensible caveats of consent and sensitivity.[2]

The discovery and exhibition of human remains raises interesting questions about the relationship between archaeology, history, science, memory and identity. It also links into debates over the ethics of display in relation to human beings. Who were these people? Why did their bodies end up in an anatomy collection? Did they consent or were they compelled? Is it possible or desirable to attempt to retrieve or reconstruct the object as subject?

The case of the bones buried on campus reminds me of another example in which the physical act of excavation was transformed into an act of historical re-inscription. In 1991, workmen digging the foundations of a new federal building close to Wall Street uncovered the remains of 419 men, women and children. Archaeologists, historians and scientists were called in and they were able to identify the area as a 6.6 acre site used for the burial of free and enslaved Africans by examining maps from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The Maerschalck Map of 1754, showing the Negro Burial Grounds near the “Fresh Water” (the Collect Pond). Image © The African Burial Ground Project.

 

 

 

 

 

The bones offered specific information which helped to give a partial identity to the people interred. Using ‘skeletal biology’[3] it was possible in some cases to pin point where in Africa individuals had come from – Congo, Ghana, Ashanti and Benin, as well as revealing whether they had been transported via the Caribbean. Bone analysis spoke of the appalling conditions of slavery; fractured, broken, malformed and diseased bones articulated stories of unrelenting labour, nutritional deficiency and coercive violence.

Objects found inside some of the burials created a sense of the uniqueness of each person as well as the care taken by loved ones as they performed burial rituals. The lack of items found also indicated the social status of the majority of people buried on the site.

This pendant (image courtesy of the African Burial Ground Project) was recovered from burial 254, a child aged between 3 ½ and 5 ½ years old. It was found near the child’s jaw and may have been either an earring or part of a necklace. The objects and bones represented a visceral historic link to the African American community in New York. The sense of ownership they felt towards this history and the individuals who had emerged from the soil, led to active community engagement in the project. In line with the wishes of the African American community, all original items were facsimiled before being reinterred along with all 419 ancestral remains in a ceremony in 2003. A memorial and museum were also built on the site (see image below, courtesy of the African Burial Ground Project).

The emergence of the skeletons was interpreted by some as a literal rendering of the way in which America has been haunted by its relationship with slavery. As physical anthropologist Michael Blakely, who worked on the site explained; ‘with the African Burial Ground we found ourselves standing with a community that wanted to know things that had been hidden from view, buried, about who we are and what this society has been.’[4]

The context of the two sites is of course very different. However, a comparison of them does raise questions about the uses of human remains and their relationship to history, memory and identity. The bones at UCL formed part of an anatomical teaching collection; a composite of individuals whose bodies somehow became the property of medical institutions. Those people often consisted of those on the margins of society; the poor, the criminal and the exoticised ‘others’ of empire.[5] Debates over the repatriation of human remains in museum collections highlight their importance to people’s sense of identity and history. Without family or community groups to claim the individuals discovered at UCL, it seems that they are destined to remain object rather than subject – ‘severed from all earlier associations… torsos in a collector’s gallery’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Have your say – what do you think should happen to the bones at UCL?

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[1] Walter Benjamin, ‘Excavation and Memory’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part 2 (1931–1934),ed. by Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, (Massachusetts, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 576.

[2] http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/museums/2012/04/24/buried-on-campus-has-opened/

[3] http://www.archaeology.org/online/interviews/blakey/

[4] http://www.archaeology.org/online/interviews/blakey/

[5] Sadiah Qureshi, ‘Displaying Sara Baartman, The Hottentot Venus’, History of Science, Volume 42 (2004), pp.233-257.

http://www.negri-froci-giudei.com/public/pdfs/qureshi-baartman.pdf

by Sarah Chaney

So ran one particularly enthusiastic nineteenth century advertisement for the animal that has had the most enduring association with medical history. So much so, that one inspired individual decided to make a mechanical version of the creature. During my public engagement sessions in the Grant Museum, I’ve tried asking various visitors to guess what animal the fist-sized metal box was designed to emulate: no one has yet hit on the right answer, even though I usually stand right in front of the leech cabinet. Shiny, clean and angular, where the leech is squat, wet and slug-like, there would appear to be little comparison between the two.

Indeed, that was the claim of certain nineteenth century leech advocates, who deemed the miraculous little creature itself far gentler than lancet, fleam or scarifier (also called a scarificator: the “mechanical leech” in the illustration, left). The leech secretes a substance called hirudin, which stops the blood from clotting, meaning that one small bite will continue to bleed for around 12 hours after the leech has been removed. I know this well, for, in the pursuit of medical history, I have been leeched not once, but twice, and still have the (tiny) scars to prove it!

Testing out ancient cures is an intriguing – but by no means recommended – practice. For myself, it gave me a far greater appreciation of the unique abilities of a creature that had previously seemed to me only a particularly ugly vampire. The movements of leeches are surprisingly elegant – they stretch out, entwine around each other, and swim rapidly with a characteristic s-shaped wiggle. They create very little trauma when they bite and, although the process is lengthy (I never in my wildest imaginings thought it would take as long as an hour and a half for the leech to drink its fill, but it did), it isn’t as unpleasant as might be expected. It’s easy to see why the leech might have been a more popular choice in the widely prescribed practice of bloodletting than its viciously-bladed mechanical twin. And bloodletting had, since ancient times, been adopted for an extremely broad variety of ailments: and even as a regular “tonic” (to be carried out in the spring) to ensure continued good health.

Since the scarifier did not have the leech’s hirudin to prolong the bleeding, it required rather a lot more (and larger) blades than the leech’s tri-radiate jaws. To use it, you would turn the lever to ready the spring mechanism, place on the skin, and press the switch to release. The blades whip round with a satisfying click, leaving twelve shallow wounds. Of course, you’d then need a bleeding bowl to measure the amount of blood lost. This is not necessary with live leeches, which effectively have a built in mechanism for this; one leech generally takes one ounce (about 30ml) of  blood. What’s more, the leech tidily disposes of the blood removed, efficiently recycling it to fuel its own existence.

Despite efforts to emulate it, or extract its natural hirudin, the leech has not been improved upon by science. Leeches themselves are thus still used in clinical practice today, particularly in reconstructive and cosmetic procedures. The scarifier, meanwhile, is now only a curious reminder of an era obsessed with mechanism: much as our own is obsessed with computer-based technology.