Zombies
In light of The Onion’s exposé on Pittsburgh’s lack of zombie preparedness,1 I decided that it would be prudent to review the primary literature on these undead abominations of science. Much to my chagrin, entering the search term zombie into PubMed yielded a paltry 15 search results, signaling a similar lack of preparedness in our laboratories and hospitals. Even more disappointingly, most of these articles used the term zombie merely to superficially classify a silent catatonia present in a smorgasbord of disparate psychiatric conditions that only remotely resemble classical conceptions of zombieness, such as depressive disorders,2 borderline personality disorders,3 and the grief process of adolescents dealing with cancer.4 Based on this evidence, I was led to suspect that scientists seem to care less about educating people about the living dead and more about selling papers using inappropriate horror-flick metaphors.
Similarly disappointing was the scant retrieval of results addressing the puffer fish venom tetrodotoxin, the suspected main ingredient of the Haitian Voodoo “zombie powder,” a poorly defined formula of animal parts and products ranging from marine toad toxins to tree frog secretions to human remains. Only one article reported on the application of said powder; however, the authors primarily dispelled the rumors that suggested a causal role of tetrodotoxin in the formula.5 Interestingly, a later publication6 by the same authors delivered the proverbial smack-down to critics of their original findings in a hilariously candid manner, concluding their paper with the following vitriol: “We hold firmly that science done without a moral and ethical foundation can never be more than a mockery of science. And that, in our view, is what Davis (thesis; 1988) [ethnobiologist who paid somebody to exhume a grave of a recently deceased child] and Benedik and Rivier (1989) [critics who performed a shoddy critique of the original work] really are.”
Two articles initially gave me hope of learning about zombie phenomena in the world of animals, but even here I was deceived by the bait-and-switch of metaphor. One group7 investigated the imposed social harmony in the hives of hornets and concluded that, compared to other bees and wasps, the haploid male workers in European hornets (Vespa crabro) showed no significant worker uprisings against hornet queens. In fact, the males of this species showed their complete subservience by granting sole egg-laying privileges to the queen hornets instead of utilizing their distinct (and rather troubling to me) ability to lay viable haploid eggs of their own. Based on this finding, the authors postulated in their discussion, with meager support, the possibility of a pheromone secreted by the queen that is responsible for “the worker’s acquiescent zombie-like behaviours.”
I also learned a little bit about zebrafish development8 in which it rapidly became apparent that the Drosophila fruit-fly geneticists have been seriously outdone by zebrafish researchers’ ridiculous name choices. While fly gene names like spätzle, sonic hedgehog, and Krüppel are pretty outstanding, they pale to gene names in the zebrafish world that include ogre, specter, poltergeist, ghoul, and, of course, zombie, all of which are important components in early development. This article proved to be more fruitful than others because, as an interesting side note, in the course of background web-searching on zebrafish zombie genes I came across evidence that zebrafish are able to regenerate their hearts. I can thus safely conclude that while the hornets may mimic a Haitian Voodoo type of zombie, zebrafish fit the Western concept of zombies with higher fidelity.
This is not to say that none of the 15 hits addressed zombieness in humans. An introduction9 to a case study, succinctly entitled “Zombie,” gave a unique gender bias to zombies, claiming they are the female equivalents of a “Golem,” a horrific figure of Jewish lore. Both are described as persons who are severely deficient in the “love-receiving apparatus” and are therefore automaton-like creatures who are inappropriately labeled as catatonic schizophrenics. The author does a very thorough job of classifying this zombie in terms of sexual appetites and habits, as well as their attitudes regarding interpersonal relationships, and contrasts these diagnostic criteria with other feminine emotional aberrations that encompass such categories as the “nymphomaniac” and “male mother.” In the course of this examination, I was relieved to find out that “zombies” are not “easy target[s] for rapist[s]” but this could be solely due to the fact that they are “frightened of men.” Certainly the zombies I’ve known from movie lore fit only the former of these criteria.
Probably most directly relevant to zombie research are two articles that discuss, in particular, the cognitive aspects of human zombies. In the one case, a cursory examination of automatic behaviors that exist outside the context of consciousness, such as sleep-walking or hand-eye coordination adjustments, gives some credence to the possibility of the existence of zombies; that is, the ability to function without conscience. The authors go so far as to conjecture the existence of a “zombie gene.”10 Skokowski11 instead argues against the existence of zombies in the context of an exact duplicate of us who is identical in every respect except the ability to have conscious experiences. This is based upon the externalist argument in which outside objects cannot be perceived at face value but must be interpreted internally and consciously. Skokowski posits that our duplicates and we must possess the “Q,” or a phenomenal content of an experience, in order to process and react to any and all external stimuli, and that this requires conscience. Though mostly pontification, he does raise an interesting question at the end of his thesis: if zombies do exist, then without conscience how could we ever know that we are or are not zombies? I find it frankly terrifying that I could have been a zombie all along, but it at least puts the brain-eating behavior of traditional zombies in a whole new light.
From this search, there are two conclusions I could draw: science appears to care very little about the potential for zombie invasions and suffers from a frequently overblown use of metaphors. After all this, I think I’ll leave my education on the undead and the use of zombie symbolism to George Romero instead.
References
5. Yasumoto T, Kao CY. 1986. Tetrodotoxin and the Haitian zombie. Toxicon. 24(8): 747-9.
6. Kao CY, Yasumoto T. 1990. Tetrodotoxin in “zombie powder.” Toxicon, 28(2): 129-32.
7. Foster KR, Ratnieks FL, Raybould AF. 2000. Do hornets have zombie workers? Mol Ecol. 9(6), 735-42.
8. Kane DA, et al. 1996. The zebrafish early arrest mutants. Development, 123: 57-66.
9. Bierer J. 1976. Zombie. Int J Soc Psychiatry. 22(3): 200-1.
10. Koch C, Crick F. 2001. The zombie within. Nature, 411(6840): 893.
11. Skokowski P. 2002. I, zombie. Conscious Cogn. 11(1): 1-9.
PubMeditation
PubMed is the search engine of choice for most scientists and doctors, and is the reason why science libraries are usually empty these days. With archives of abstracts that go back decades and links to full journal article PDF files, PubMed is the gateway to science history, the tool for inflating your reference list, or making the painful discovery that your experiment has already been done. For this recurring column, we exploit its power for fun and mischief.