Curse to cure

The always-hilarious Gary Larson, whose ability to create absurd combinations of cultural references is unparalleled, had a Far Side comic strip showing a typical office waiting room.  Sitting in one of the chairs, cross-legged and reading a magazine, is a mummy.  The secretary -- with the trademark Larson bouffant hairdo and cat's-eye glasses -- is on the phone to her boss, saying, "Mr. Bailey?  There's a gentleman here who claims an ancestor of yours once defiled his crypt, and now you're the last remaining Bailey, and... oh, something about a curse.  Shall I send him in?"

The whole "Mummy's Curse" thing usually brings to mind the "Boy King" Tutankhamen, and the claim that twenty members of the expedition that opened the tomb died not long afterward.  There are three caveats to this, however: the deaths happened over a decade, suggesting that Tut wasn't in a great hurry to get his vengeance; a statistical study showed that the average age at death of the people who did succumb to "King Tut's Revenge" was no lower than that of the background population; and there is a plausible case to be made that at least two of the deaths (Howard Carter's personal secretary, Richard Bethell, and Bethell's father Lord Westbury, both of whom were murdered) were killed by, or on the orders of, none other than Aleister Crowley.

Whether this last bit is true or not remains very much to be seen; in my opinion, the case relies on highly circumstantial evidence, and after a hundred years it's doubtful we'll ever know for certain.  What I'm pretty sure of is that a scattered bunch of deaths, over ten years or so, of men who were mostly upper middle-aged is not really that much of a mystery, and the curse is nothing more than an attempt to give an added frisson to an archaeological find that honestly is interesting enough without all the supernatural trappings.

On the other hand, consider the opening of the tomb of Casimir IV Jagiellon, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania.  Casimir is considered one of the most able Polish kings, and consolidated his territory, won many military victories, and generally was a force to be reckoned with.  He died in 1492, and was interred with much pomp and circumstance in Wawel Cathedral in Kraków.

Casimir IV Jagiellon of Poland [Image is in the Public Domain]

In 1973, a team of twelve historians and archaeologists opened his tomb.

Within weeks, ten of the twelve were dead.

So do we have a real-life example of tomb desecration?  Oh, and something about a curse?

It turns out that (unsurprisingly) there's nothing supernatural involved here, either.  No need to invoke ancient Polish witchcraft.  The unfortunate researchers succumbed to infections of Aspergillus flavus, a pathogenic fungus that secretes an especially nasty group of organic compounds called aflatoxins.  Fungal infections are notoriously hard to treat -- fungal cells are similar enough to animal cells that chemicals which will kill a fungus often don't do our own tissues any good at all.  Fungal spores are also incredibly tough and long-lived; the Aspergillus spores that killed the research team members had likely been there since the tomb was sealed, over 530 years ago.

But Aspergillus isn't all bad.  A team at the University of Pennsylvania just published a paper in Nature Chemical Biology looking at a different set of compounds the fungus produces -- and found they target and disrupt cancer cells, especially those in leukemia.

The chemicals are called ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptides.  The biochemists call them RiPPs, even though the actual acronym would be RSaPTMPs, which I have to admit would be a little hard to pronounce, so RiPPs it is.  And the scientists found that the RiPPs produced by Aspergillus flavus had as much potency against leukemia cells as cytarabine and daunorubicin, two of the go-to drugs used to treat the disease for decades.

"Nature has given us this incredible pharmacy," said Sherry Gao, senior author of the study.  "It's up to us to uncover its secrets.  As engineers, we're excited to keep exploring, learning from nature and using that knowledge to design better solutions."

Which I think you will all agree is a better approach than superstition about opening graves.

Still, it's probably best to be cautious in any tomb-raiding you're planning on doing.  Curses not withstanding, aspergillosis is nothing to mess around with.  Even if the fungus turns out to have some beneficial features, remember to wear your respirators the next time you investigate the burial sites of fifteenth-century Polish kings.

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Tut tut

Most of you are probably familiar with the famous "King Tut's Curse."

The story goes that when British archaeologist Howard Carter opened the hitherto undisturbed tomb of King Tutankhamen, the "Boy King" of Egypt during the 18th dynasty, it unleashed a curse on the men who had desecrated it -- resulting in the deaths of (by some claims) twenty of the expedition members.

Tutankhamen was the son of the famous "Heretic King" Akhenaten, and died at the age of eighteen in 1341 BCE.  Some archaeologists speculate that he was murdered, but current forensic anthropology seems to indicate that he died of a combination of malaria and complications from a badly broken leg.

King Tutankhamen's death mask [image courtesy of photographer Carsten Frenzl and the Wikimedia Commons]

Be that as it may, shortly after Tut's tomb was opened, people associated with the expedition began to die.  The first was Lord Carnarvon, who had funded Carter's expedition, who cut himself badly while shaving and died shortly thereafter of sepsis from an infection.  While it's easy enough to explain a death from infection in Egypt prior to the advent of modern antibiotics, the deaths continued after the members of the expedition returned to London:

• Richard Bethell, Carter's personal secretary, was found smothered in a Mayfair club.
• Bethell's father, Lord Westbury, fell to his death from his seventh-floor flat -- where he had kept artifacts from the tomb his son had given him.
• Aubrey Herbert, half-brother of the first victim Lord Carnarvon, died in a London hospital "of mysterious symptoms."
• Ernest Wallis Budge, of the British Museum, was found dead in his home shortly after arranging for the first public show of King Tut's sarcophagus. 

And so on.  All in all, twenty people associated with the expedition died within the first few years after returning to England.  (It must be said that Howard Carter, who led the expedition, lived for another sixteen years; and you'd think that if King Tut would have wanted to smite anyone, it would have been Carter.  And actually, a statistical study done of Egyptologists who had entered pharaohs' tombs found that their average age at death was no lower than that of the background population.)

Still, that leaves some decidedly odd deaths to explain.  And historian Mark Benyon thinks he's figured out how to explain them.

In his book London's Curse: Murder Black Magic, and Tutankhamun in the 1920s West End, Benyon lays the deaths of Carter's associates in London -- especially Bethell, Westbury, Herbert, and Budge, all of which were deaths by foul play -- at the feet of none other than Aleister Crowley.

Crowley, the self-proclaimed "Wickedest Man on Earth," was a sex-obsessed heroin addict who had founded a society called "Thelema."  Thelema's motto was "Do what thou wilt," which narrowly edged out Crowley's second favorite, which was "Fuck anything or anyone that will hold still long enough."  His rituals were notorious all over London for drunken debauchery, and few doubted then (and fewer doubt now) that there was any activity so depraved that Crowley wouldn't happily indulge in it.

Aleister Crowley, ca. 1912 [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

One of Crowley's obsessions was Jack the Ripper.  He believed that the Ripper murders had been accomplished through occult means, and frequently was heard to speak of Jack the Ripper with reverence.  Benyon believes that when Crowley heard about Howard Carter's discoveries, he was outraged -- many of Thelema's rituals and beliefs were derived from Egyptian mythology -- and he came up with the idea of a series of copycat murders to get even with the men who had (in his mind) desecrated Tutankhamen's tomb.

It's an interesting hypothesis.  Surely all of the expedition members knew of Crowley; after all, almost everyone in London at the time did.  At least one (Budge) was an occultist who ran in the same circles as Crowley.  That Crowley was capable of such a thing is hardly to be questioned.  Whether Benyon has proved the case or not is debatable, but even at first glance it certainly makes better sense than the Pharaoh's Curse malarkey.  Whether Benyon's explanation is right in all the details or not  is probably impossible at this point to prove, rather like the dozens of explanations put forward to explain the Ripper murders themselves.  But this certainly makes me inclined to file the "Mummy's Curse" under "Another woo-woo claim plausibly explained by logic and rationality."