Forensic Toxicology THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE APPEARED IN THE JANUARY 1999 ISSUE THE POISON SLEUTHS DEATH BY SODIUM NITRITE -Dr. Anil Aggrawal "Good morning doctor. Oh, my God, what are you doing today? You have the dead body of a young woman today. Her whole body seems to have a chocolate brown color. I remember last time too, I had seen a dead body with chocolate brown color. Did this woman also die of the same poison? Please tell me." "Good morning Tarun. The name of this young woman is Radhika, and she is about 25 years old. She died in her flat at about 9 am today morning. She was a junior executive in a private firm here in Delhi, and was living alone in this flat. Her family members are living in Jaipur. She was living here solely for the purpose of this job. Her parents were looking out for a match for her marriage." "Oh, I see." "Yesterday night she was fine. In fact, she met one of her neighbors Shyamala -also a 25 year old girl- at about 9pm, and she tells us that she was perfectly in good spirits. That rules out suicide...." "Wait a minute doctor. If a person is in good spirits and cheerful a day before his or her death, does it rule out suicide? Is it not possible that she was trying to mislead the neighbors by being cheerful so that nobody gets to know her intentions?" "There are other indications too. There is no suicide note. Generally a person who commits a suicide, leaves a suicide note." "Oh, I see" "Well, the police interrogated Shyamala more about her as she was the only one, who knew Radhika very well. She told the police that she (Radhika) was in love with Chaman, a 26 year old colleague in her office. Recently she had become pregnant by him, and she was pressing him for marriage. However Chaman had lost interest in her, and was trying to avoid her. Only 2 days back she had threatened him to go to his parents if he did not agree for the marriage. Chaman's parents are very religious and God-fearing, and he knew if she approached them, they would force him to marry her. To settle matters he came yesterday to Radhika's flat at about 7 pm. Shyamala knows because when he came, Radhika called her as a mediator. Shyamala tells the police that Chaman was looking very tense and jittery. She thought it was because he had such a difficult matter to resolve. Anyway she just sat there for about an hour. When she saw that the matter is going to take more time, she left the house making an excuse. When she left, Radhika was just preparing to go inside the kitchen to make tea for everyone. She offered Shyamala to go after having tea, but she just left. She however saw Chaman leaving Radhika's house only about 15-20 minutes later. She was sitting idly at her window when she saw him. He looked to be in great hurry." "Oh, I see. So did you find anything in the post-mortem that corroborates what Shyamala is saying?" "Yes, I found a 4 month old male baby inside Radhika's uterus, which definitely tells us that she was pregnant. I have kept the tissues of this fetus for his DNA profiling, which will tell us definitely if Chaman was his father or not. More about that later. What interested me was the color of her body. I told you last time (See SR December 1998 issue) that there are certain poisons which can cause methemoglobin to form inside the body. It is this compound which imparts such color to the body. Well one of such poisons is sodium nitrite. I got a hint that she might have died of sodium nitrite poisoning when I went to her flat and saw that she had unfinished breakfast on her table. She was in the habit of having a full meal in the morning itself. She had prepared Dal and Roti and must be eating it. And it was lying there unfinished. Nearby I could see some dried vomitus on the floor. Obviously when she was eating the food, she must have got sick and must have vomited. I saw a salt cellar on her table which was open. I got quite curious, when I glanced underneath the dining table and found lot of white salt like powder spilled over there. As a poison sleuth, I don't want to take chances and intuition told me there was something either in the salt cellar or in the powder spilled over the floor that we were looking for. So I quietly kept the salt cellar in my pocket and also some of the powder spilled over the floor underneath the dining table. I examined both these substances in my lab. And do you know what I found?" "What? Please tell me doctor. I am getting curious." "Tarun, I had the most extraordinary finding in the salt cellar. It had a substance looking like salt but it was not sodium chloride. It was sodium nitrite. And the salt like powder which was spilled underneath the table was nothing but sodium chloride. Do you get the picture now?" "Well, not really. I don't understand how such a curious thing happened." "To me it is clear like glass. Obviously someone replaced the salt in the cellar with sodium nitrite. And before doing this he spilled the salt underneath the table to empty the cellar so he could fill it with the poison he had brought with him. The only commonly available poison which looks and tastes like salt is sodium nitrite" "Really? Doctor I am getting curious. Please tell me more about sodium nitrite." "Tarun, as I told you earlier, sodium nitrite causes methaemoglobinaemia; even small doses of sodium nitrite can kill within a few minutes. Even the nitrates can be dangerous. Organic nitrates in fact are reduced to nitrites in the intestine. Inorganic nitrates, bismuth subnitrate excepted, are not normally reduced to nitrites in the body, but this may occur when the upper digestive tract (stomach and upper part of small intestines) is infected with nitrate-reducing bacteria, e.g. Escherichia coli. Inorganic nitrates are irritants of the stomach and, in large doses, potassium nitrate is a diuretic. A diuretic is a chemical which increases the production of urine. Poisoning by nitrites is actually not very common. It can result from mistaking this salt for common salt or Epsom salts." "Doctor, under what circumstances can sodium nitrite poisoning occur?" "Tarun, poisoning can be homicidal, accidental or suicidal. With sodium nitrite, accidental poisoning is probably most common, although homicidal poisoning is also possible as we have seen in the case of Radhika. One of the earliest reports of sodium nitrite poisoning came from Middlesborough, UK in 1936. Two adults and their daughter aged five were suddenly taken ill after the midday meal. The adults died before a doctor could reach them and their daughter died shortly after her admission to hospital. It appears they had complained to neighbors of acute abdominal pain and vomiting. Their faces went blue. Investigation showed very similar results to what I found in Radhika's case. A basin of cooking salt and a salt cellar contained sodium nitrite; the upper layer in the latter was of 98% sodium nitrite and the lower layer 98.2% common salt. Unconsumed food contained sodium nitrite, e.g. cabbage 6.5% and Yorkshire pudding 4.5%. The gastric contents of the man contained 4.275 g and those of the woman contained 1.284g of sodium nitrite. Over a gram of the poison was present in the child's vomit. The vomit of the adults was not available for analysis, but presumably they had ingested considerably more than remained in their stomachs. The source of the poison was not determined, but the man had had access to sodium nitrite in the course of his employment. Nobody knows how the mix up happened. Probably someone filled up a half empty salt cellar either intentionally or mistakenly with sodium nitrite." "Oh, that is most extraordinary and bears an eerie resemblance to the case we have on our hands." "Yeah sure. Accidental deaths due to the ingestion of sodium nitrite used in error for common salt in the preparation of soup have also occurred. Several such accidental deaths have been reported. Death in these cases occurred within a few minutes following symptoms which included nausea, headache, vertigo, urgent vomiting, profuse diarrhoea and cyanosis (bluing of the skin). Stomach contents in most of these cases contained sodium nitrite ranging from 1.74 to 84.0 mg/kg of the gastric contents. There was a more consistent concentration in the organs, e.g. in the liver, where the concentration was between 3.0 and 4.35 mg/kg. A quarter of a litre of the soup in most of these cases contained l.5 g of sodium nitrite. I must tell you that the fatal dose of sodium nitrite is from 1 to 2 g. I have already explained you the concept of fatal dose (see "Poisoning by Thallium" SR, October 1997)." "Yes doctor, I do remember you having mentioned it." "In another case, eleven men were poisoned after eating oatmeal seasoned with sodium nitrite in mistake for common salt. The men added more salt from salt shakers later shown to contain sodium nitrite. Immediately after the meal they felt sick and vomited. There was dizziness and abdominal cramps. They went blue and five lost consciousness. Methaemoglobin was later demonstrated in their blood. One of these men, aged 82, died the next morning; his organs had a diffuse brown colour. The source of the poison was nitrite used to cure meat. Only eleven of 125 persons who ate of the oatmeal were affected and these eleven had used contaminated salt shakers of which one contained 0.137% of nitrite. It was estimated they had taken at least 163 mg. In yet another case, a boy aged two months suddenly went blue, 'almost black', after his 7.0 am feed. Sodium citrate had been prescribed for the relief of indigestion and two tablets had been added to the feed. When seen in hospital, about five hours later, the appearance of the child simulated those of congenital heart disease; he was neither distressed nor febrile. A diagnosis of toxic methaemoglobinaemia was made and the remaining tablets, fortunately available, were subjected to analysis. They proved to contain 65 mg of sodium nitrite each. The infant, therefore, had ingested 130mg, the maximum dose for an adult. There are a host of other such cases of which I am aware." "Doctor please tell me a few interesting ones out of these." "In one case, two children aged two and three months respectively took feeds to which from 35 to 40g of sodium nitrite had been added in error for sodium citrate. The elder infant died. Cyanosis and blackening of the mouth were outstanding features. In another case, a boy aged two years vomited while playing with his elder brother aged nine. After a second vomit he was given a glass of water to drink. Vomiting continued and he was taken to hospital. He was deeply cyanosed, collapsed and crying with spasms of pain. Poison was taken out from the stomach with the help of a tube and oxygen was administered, but the child died at about three hours after being poisoned. Sodium nitrite was detected by analysis of his stomach contents. There was methaemoglobin in the blood. It is probable that the boy had ingested and absorbed appreciably more of the poison. The source of the poison in this case was a bottle of sodium nitrite, now nearly empty, which the elder boy had brought for the purposes of a chemical experiment. The dead child had licked the bottle. I must tell you that sodium nitrite is highly soluble in water and its taste resembles that of common salt and that is what makes it such an attractive homicidal poison. Interestingly sodium nitrite is used in machine oil also as a corrosion inhibitor, and deaths have occurred when someone accidentally drank machine oil. There is a case of a girl on record who died in this way. She was eleven years old, and drank a mouthful of machine oil accidentally, some of which she immediately spat out...." "Just a minute doctor. I think sodium nitrite is an oxidizing agent, and if I remember my chemistry alright, corrosion is an oxidative process. Then how can nitrite be used as a corrosion inhibitor?" "Tarun, sometimes oxidizers are also reducing agents. Such is the case of nitrite, which can be further oxidized to nitrate. I must tell you that the tendency of nitrite to act as an oxidizer is increased in an acid environment such as that found in the stomach. At higher pH levels its oxidizing potential is greatly decreased. Corrosion can be inhibited by using a sacrificial reducing agent such as nitrite. Sodium nitrite is also commonly put into packaged foods like meat to keep oxidation from happening. So I was telling you about that little girl. Within an hour she was unconscious and deeply cyanosed. Fortunately she recovered after proper treatment. Analysis showed that the oil contained 36.5% sodium nitrite, 7.5% of an emulsifying agent and 56.0% water. Her stomach washings contained 7-8mg/ 100 ml of sodium nitrite." "Oh, that is certainly most extraordinary!" "Tarun, sodium nitrite poisoning has happened in other ways too. Poisoning by well water drawn from badly constructed wells near farmyards may contain an appreciable amount of nitrate which makes it unfit for drinking and a source of poisoning newborn infants. This illness is however rarely fatal. About 30 cases are on record and only one, it appears, was fatal. It is apparent that the risk is only to infants of under 90 days old, who live in rural communities..." "Doctor, can boiling the water make such water safe? I have heard that boiling the water makes it cleaner." "Yes boiling the water does make it free of infective micro-organisms, because they get killed by boiling, but when the water is contaminated with a chemical substance, it gives no protection whatsoever. On the contrary, it concentrates the nitrates, which can get concentrated upto 3 times on boiling the water! Older children are unaffected, probably because they can tolerate the amount of nitrate likely to be present in their normal fluid intake. It does appear that poisoning in these circumstances is not dependent only upon the amount of nitrate ingested· It has been suggested that poisoning by nitrate will only occur in those whose gastric juice exceeds pH 4.0 and when nitrate-reducing bacteria are present in the upper digestive tract." "Doctor, this is a most extraordinary fact that you have told me. Can you tell me what is the concentration of nitrites in such contaminated water coming from wells?" "The contaminated water, usually drawn from shallow wells, of not over 75 feet deep, usually contains over 20 ppm (parts per million) of NaN03. Methaemoglobinaemia (the existence of too much methemoglobin in the blood) does not normally occur unless the water contains 30 ppm. The upper limit of nitrate should not exceed 10 ppm because as I told you earlier, if boiled the water could be concentrated threefold and thus to a dangerous concentration. Even cows which feed on beet tops rich in nitrates develop methaemoglobinaemia. This is known as the condition of 'purple' cows and is well recognized. Purple is the color the cows get when there is lot of methemoglobin in their blood." "Oh, this is most extraordinary." "There are more interesting facts Tarun. Nitrite poisoning from spinach has also occurred. During 1959-65 in Germany there were 15 cases of nitrite poisoning in infants, aged two to ten months, who had eaten spinach. Nitrite and the remains of spinach were found in the stomach contents of one of the infants. Two factors were responsible. First, the excessive use of nitrate fertilizer, which should not, but often did, exceed 80 kg/hectare. Second, bacterial activity converted the nitrate in spinach into nitrite. Samples of spinach, fresh, frozen and tinned, showed a nitrate contamination of from 40 to 2100 mg/kg. The risk arose when the feed was prepared in advance and stored overlong at room temperature. Even after cooking, a sufficient number of bacteria remained to produce nitrite. The maximum nitrate content of spinach should not exceed 200mg/kg. It has even been recommended that during the first three months infants should not be given spinach." "Doctor, such an interesting poison must have caught the fancy of suicides also. Have there been cases of suicidal poisoning too with sodium nitrite?" "Yes, sure. Suicidal poisoning with sodium nitrite has also occurred. A medical practitioner, aged 51, committed suicide in 1942 by ingesting sodium nitrite. He had been mentally ill for some time. On the night of his death he awoke his son, a medical student, and told him that his mother had suddenly been taken ill during the night. A doctor was summoned and while he was attending to the woman a bump was heard in the passage. The deceased was then found lying on the floor; he died within five minutes of his fall. Poisoning was suspected, but a search revealed only a glass of brandy and another which appeared to contain water. Toxicological analysis demonstrated 2g of sodium nitrite in the gastric contents. The blood was 'dark'. Unfortunately no analysis was made of the brandy or water, otherwise I am sure they would have found nitrite in the brandy. The deceased had given his wife some of the brandy during the night and this may have been the vehicle of poison responsible both for her illness and his death. I feel he first gave brandy laced with nitrite to his wife and then consumed the poison himself, but of course it is only a guess. But sure enough, it is possible to kill someone by lacing his or her drink with as little as 2 grams of sodium nitrite. It was believed that the poison was taken within an hour prior to his death. It was suggested by the relatives that he had died of a heart attack, but the doctor said that he had died of nitrite poisoning." "Oh, doctor. We could go on and on with such interesting stories. Tell me how you can prove Radhika died of nitrite poisoning?" "Tarun, I told you I examined both the contents of the salt cellar as well as the powder spilled over the floor. Now I will tell you what happened. Chaman came to Radhika's house not for reconciliation, but for killing her. He was sure, killing her was his only way out. He got sodium nitrite from a chemistry lab. We have still to find out, how he got hold of it, and who gave it to him. He came fully armed with this poison in a packet. When Shyamala left and Radhika went inside the kitchen to make a cup of tea, he quickly picked up the salt cellar, spilled the salt in it on the floor underneath the table and refilled it with the powder that he had brought. He knew that sometime she would consume the contents of the salt cellar thinking it was salt and she would die. It was no doubt a very clever plan, but thankfully we could catch it. The color of Radhika's body at once told me we were looking for a poison which produces methemoglobinemia, and that was Chaman's undoing. I have found an appreciable quantity of Sodium nitrite from Radhika's stomach contents, and to top it all, the police has found some left over sodium nitrite from Chaman's house too. Initially he denied having any hand in Radhika's death, but when he was told of all the medical and circumstantial evidence against him, he broke down and admitted his guilt." "Very clever doctor. This was a most interesting discussion doctor. Without your masterly deduction, Chaman could never have been caught. People might have thought, it was an accidental death. Tell me what are you going to tell me the next time?" "Tarun, next time, I would tell you about a very interesting poison. You may not have even thought that it was a poison. I will tell you about death by Potassium Permanganate."

Forensic Toxicology Anil Aggrawal's Science Reporter's Articles on Forensic Toxicology Hi, I am Professor Anil Aggrawal from India. I am working as a Professor of Forensic Medicine at the Maulana Azad Medical College, New Delhi-110002, India. I love to exchange ideas on Forensic Medicine, Forensic Pathology and Forensic Toxicology. I love writing books on science, and have published nine books so far. I love reading and writing science fiction, especially that related to forensic medicine. Anyone wishing to exchange ideas with me on forensic medicine, science, and science fiction is welcome. I have been writing popular articles on Forensic Medicine, Forensic Pathology and Forensic Toxicology in some of the most popular magazines and periodicals in India. I love talking to young intelligent students on matters of forensic science. One of my most memorable experiences was when I talked on "Forensic Engineering" to a group of highly intelligent students at IIT, Bombay in February 2002. The students were fantastic; I thoroughly enjoyed being with them and talking to them on this confluence of the two specialties. The students appeared to enjoy my slides and animations too. S cience Reporter is a monthly science magazine, which gives articles of scientific interest on a variety of subjects. This magazine was started in post independent India in 1952 and is published uninterrupted since then. It is published by the National Institute of Science Communication, New Delhi. The full address of the magazine is: THE EDITOR SCIENCE REPORTER National Institute of Science Communication (CSIR) Dr. K.S. Krishnan Marg New Delhi-110 012 INDIA F rom January 1997, I started a new series, POISON SLEUTHS which appeared as a monthly column from January 1997 till April 2001. It proved highly popular among lay people and scientists alike. It was in the form of a dialogue between an intelligent and curious 15 year old, and an expert forensic pathologist. IMPORTANT NOTE: THIS MATERIAL IS COPYRIGHTED BY THE AUTHOR AND MAY NOT BE REPOSTED, REPRINTED OR OTHERWISE USED IN ANY MANNER WITHOUT THE WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR Anil Aggrawal's Science Reporter's 1997 Articles on Forensic Toxicology Poisons, antidotes & anecdotes (January 1997) Arsenic: The king of Poisons (February 1997) The myth of the Spanish Fly (March 1997) Boron Poisoning (April 1997) Silver Poisoning (June 1997) Vanadium Poisoning (July 1997) Methyl Bromide Poisoning (August 1997) Poisoning by Ratti Seeds (September 1997) Poisoning by Thallium (October 1997) Poisoning by Capsaicin (November 1997) Death by Lysol (December 1997) Anil Aggrawal's Science Reporter's 1998 Articles on Forensic Toxicology Death by Phosgene (January 1998) Death by SMFA (February 1998) Common Salt (March 1998) Iodine (April 1998) Barium (May 1998) Selenium (June 1998) Death by DNOC (July 1998) Death by Cadmium (August 1998) Death by Aluminium Phosphide (October 1998) Argemone mexicana (November 1998) Death by Sodium chlorate (December 1998) Death by Argemone Oil Anil Aggrawal's Science Reporter's 1999 Articles on Forensic Toxicology Death by Sodium Nitrite (January 1999) Death by Potassium Permanganate (February 1999) Death by Diesel fumes (March 1999) Death by Arsine gas (April 1999) Death by Alfatoxin (May 1999) Death by Nitric Acid (June 1999) Death by Oxalic Acid (July 1999) Death by Digitalis (August 1999) Death by Yellow Kaner (September 1999) Death by Vitamin A (October 1999) Death by Cicutoxin (November 1999) Death by Brodifacoum (December 1999) Anil Aggrawal's Science Reporter's 2000 Articles on Forensic Toxicology Death by Succinylcholine (January 2000) Death by Gold (February 2000) Death by Radon (March 2000) Death by Hydrogen Peroxide (April 2000) Death by Hydrogen Fluoride (May 2000) Death by Fluorine (June 2000) Potassium Bromate (July 2000) Ethylene Glycol (August 2000) Botulinum Toxin (September 2000) General quiz on Forensic Toxicology Arsenic: The king of poisons Silver Death BY SMFA Death by Cadmium Death by Aflatoxins Death by Arsine gas Death by Nitric Acid Picture quiz on Forensic Toxicology Death by Digitalis Death by Oxalic Acid Quiz Index: Anil Aggrawal's Forensic Toxicology Page Arsenic: The king of poisons Methyl bromide Death by DNOC

Forensic Jokes, Puns & Tidbits Forensic Poems The Toxic Avenger From the grave, if lips could speak the person who was, pleads – you must seek the individual who had my trust, and thru deceit and cunning into the grave did thrust this body once alive and well, now silenced by death, who can not tell my death was NOT what all thought then, for a poison brought my life to end! Avenge me now, for you alone can find the truth beneath the stone. Look close and the clues you will see that tell the tale of what killed me. For you must tell all others now, That this was MURDER – and tell them how! For if no one looks to find what’s here, An injustice was done to a life so dear. If now only you could hear, My muted pleadings to make wants clear. I’d speak as plain as it could be. Since I can’t – You must AVENGE ME! -Anonymous. From a promotional leaflet on the book “Criminal Poisoning” by John Harris Trestrail, III (Acknowledgement: This leaflet was sent to me by John Harris Trestrail, III of the Regional Poison Center, Grand Rapids, MI) Milton Helpern (1902-1977) What kind of man is he we honor here, A doctor who has served his science well? Why, yes, of course, but most of us could tell Of science or profession served. A peer Without a peer in his own field and sphere? Why, yes, that too, but more than this, his spell Is cast by greatness of the mind. We dwell On inner strengths of character so dear To all who know him, radiance that springs From hidden depths of manliness and truth. These are the constant hallmarks of the soul That draw us to the man, these are the things Of which we offer now as humble proof The heartfelt testimony of this scroll -Anonymous. From the book “Autopsy – The Memoirs of Milton Helpern, the World’s Greatest Medical Detective” by Milton Helpern, M.D. with Bernard Knight, M.D. (Acknowledgement: This book was kindly lent to me by Dr. R.K. Sharma of the DDU Hospital)

Forensic Toxicology THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE APPEARED IN THE FEBRUARY 1997 ISSUE THE POISON SLEUTHS ARSENIC - THE KING OF POISONS -Dr. Anil Aggrawal "Good morning doctor. Oh, my God, what are you doing with this dead body? He seems to have a terrible rash all over his body. Would you explain me what he died of?" "Good morning Tarun. This man is Radheyshyam who is a 56 year old man. His first wife died about 5 years back, and soon after he married again. He was complaining of loose motions and vomiting off an on for the last two years. The doctors suspected he was suffering from gastroenteritis, which as you know is an inflammation of the stomach and intestines. But what they could not find out was the cause of this inflammation. Consequently he was being given only the symptomatic treatment. Finally he succumbed yesterday to his illness." "Then why is he here? Why haven't his relatives taken him for cremation. You are a forensic pathologist, and if I understand it correctly, you only look after cases with legal implications. What possible legal implication could be involved in this case." "Y ou are right Tarun. I deal only with legal cases. But yesterday, the brother of this person, Harishyam has alleged that his brother's relations with his new wife Shanti were not good. He suspects some foul play in his death. Many times he saw her mixing some whitish powder in his food. When he enquired, she would say it was some medicine she had brought from the local doctor for his illness. Immediately after his brother's death he reported the matter to the police. In response to his complaint, the police has registered a case against Shanti, and has submitted the body to me for post-mortem. Now my job is to find out if he really died of gastroenteritis." "Doctor, it seems very confusing. Just now you said that he did die of gastroenteritis. His symptoms were that of gastroenteritis, and he was getting treatment for it. Then what else could he die of?" "On the face of it, it does appear that he died of gastroenteritis, but there could be foul play as well. You yourself remarked over the rash he has all over the body. Well, in gastroenteritis one does not get rash over the body." "Then he might be having some concomitant skin disease, isn't it?" "Could be. But a more likely explanation could be arsenic poisoning, especially as Harishyam repeatedly saw Shanti mixing some white powder in his brother's food." "You mean Shanti was giving him arsenic, because of which he developed gastro-enteritis like symptoms and also the rash?" "Yes, that's what I mean Tarun. But I must tell you that pure metallic arsenic is seldom poisonous. It is its white colored salt Arsenious oxide, known in the vernacular as Sankhya or Somalkhar which is poisonous. It is this salt which is often loosely referred to as arsenic. When a chemist talks of arsenic, it is the pure arsenic, but when a toxicologist or a pathologist like me talks of arsenic, he is probably referring to arsenious oxide. We sometimes refer to it as white arsenic also, because of its white color" "Arsenic certainly seems an interesting poison. Please tell me more about it doctor." "Tarun, arsenic is a metallic poison known since ancient times. An eighth century Arab alchemist Geber produced arsenious oxide, from realgar, a naturally occurring red colored ore of arsenic found in lead and iron mining, and thus made available to the humanity one of the most cruel, deadly and widely administered poisons. In Imperial Rome a form of arsenic was used as a poison to such an extent, that kings, queens, and other important court officials regularly employed official food-tasters! It has been a favorite with the poisoners because it fulfills many of the criteria of an ideal homicidal poison..." "I beg your pardon? Do you mean to say that there are things like ideal homicidal poisons? What in the world does this term mean? How can anything as sinister as poison be ideal?" "Tarun, there not only are ideal homicidal poisons, but ideal suicidal poisons too. You see, there are several poisons in this world, but not all can be used homicidally or for suicide. Only certain poisons are ideally suited for these purposes. Poisons which suit well for these purposes are known as ideal poisons." "It is still not very clear to me. Would you please explain with some examples?" "Sure. Let us talk about homicidal poisons first. A bitter poison, like strychnine, can obviously not be given with homicidal intent. The victim would immediately spit it out. Thus a homicidal poison must be tasteless. Similarly a poison which is colored can not be given. Copper sulphate is poisonous, but it is blue colored. If a killer mixes it in water or milk, it will render these liquids blue, and the victim would not drink it. Thus a homicidal poison should be colorless too. There are several other criteria which have to be fulfilled as well before a poison qualifies as an ideal homicidal poison. It should be easily available, fatal in only a small quantity and symptoms of both acute and chronic poisoning must mimic natural diseases..." "Why should this be so?" "Because then the public at large would think that the person died of that natural disease whose symptoms the poisoning mimics, and the killer would go scot free. Arsenic qualifies well in all the above criteria. Symptoms due to its poisoning mimic natural diseases. While acute arsenic poisoning resembles gastro-enteritis, chronic arsenic poisoning presents a combined picture of stomach upsets, peripheral neuritis and dermatitis..." "Sorry to interrupt you doctor. You have introduced some new terms which I don't understand. What in the world is meant by acute and chronic arsenic poisoning?" "Tarun when a large dose of a poison is given in one go, killing the victim within minutes, it is called acute poisoning. On the other hand when small doses of a poison are given over a long period of time, typically over years, it is called chronic poisoning. If a wife wants to kill her husband, it would be very easy for her to mix sublethal doses of a poison in his food over a long period of time. By sublethal dose, I mean a quantity of poison which is not enough to kill the victim in one dose. The hapless husband would die in the end after a few years. In this case he would be said to have died of chronic poisoning." "oh, I see. So you were telling me about the criteria of an ideal homicidal poison." "Yes, I was telling you that the effects of arsenic poisoning resemble natural diseases. Its effects are cumulative, so the poisoner does not have to rely on one large, fatal dose; he can give it little and often, thereby weakening his victim by stages before delivering the fatal dose. An ideal homicidal poison should be undetectable in the dead body. About one and a half century back, arsenic fulfilled this criteria as well, but no more now. Before 1836, it was impossible to detect it in the body organs. All these facts made it the poisoner's ideal choice. So commonly and successfully was it used for homicidal poisoning that once it was variously referred to as king of poisons or poison of poisons. Since many people used it to do away with rich old uncles and aunts, it became known in France as poudre de succession, or "inheritance powder". The history of crime is replete with cases of homicidal poisonings by arsenic. Arsenic was ostensibly bought for killing rats, but it was often used for homicidal purposes. Women purchased it to kill rats; the rat in most cases used to be the husband!" "Funny joke! What about ideal suicidal poisons?" "A person who is going to commit suicide with poison, probably wouldn't worry about its color or even taste. He wouldn't be bothered with taking large doses too. He would be more concerned about the pain the poison is likely to produce. He needs a poison which produces minimum discomfort, and produces death or at least sleep within minutes, so his agony is lessened. Sulfuric acid is a deadly poison, but it would kill rather slowly; in about 12-24 hours. Moreover it is a strong corrosive producing severe burning pain in the mouth and throat. A potential suicide may be interested in death, but he probably wants a quieter death. So Sulfuric acid is not an ideal suicidal poison. Barbiturates or sleeping pills on the other hand are ideal suicidal poisons, because they would put a person rapidly to sleep, and then to death. There are no unpleasant symptoms." "Oh I see. While talking about arsenic you mentioned the year 1836. What happened in that year?" "In that year a successful test for arsenic was developed for the first time. It was called the Marsh test and it ultimately brought about its downfall as an extremely successful homicidal poison. One quality of arsenic makes it a very poor candidate as a homicidal poison; it can be detected in the dead body, virtually years after the body has been buried. Thus the poisoner leaves a permanent record of his deed in the dead body... "But how can anyone detect the poison in the body, once it has been buried?" "There are laws in all countries which allow the law enforcement agencies to unearth or exhume the body, if strong suspicion develops against some person later on. There have been cases where the bodies have been exhumed as late as 3-4 years after death, and arsenic has been detected in their bones. An ideal homicidal poison should immediately disintegrate after doing its job. Before 1836, this peculiar property of arsenic did not cause any problems to the poisoners because there was no test for arsenic in the first place. With the development of Marsh test, this property assumed paramount importance and it rapidly fell into disfavor." "So before the development of Marsh test, all the cases of poisoning must be going undetected?" "Yes! Many celebrated cases are on record when the suspected poisoner went Scot Free merely because of the inability of the chemists of those times to detect it in a dead body. In fact tests weren't available for any poison. The only reliable test was to feed the remains of the poison to an animal and see if it died. So desperate was public that Henry Fielding (1707-1754), a celebrated English novelist clamored in despair for some way to make poison visible so that one could hang the poisoner. That was in the year 1740. This was in connection with a case in which a widow was accused by neighbors of having poisoned her husband. But no poison was found in the widow's house, nor could it be proved that she had ever purchased poison. The only thing left, therefore, was to show that the corpse had poison in it. When Fielding appealed to the doctors, they answered that there was no way to do this. The widow had to be acquitted" "And then came the Marsh test"? "Marsh test came much later. Many interesting things happened before that. One of the most celebrated cases of arsenic poisoning occurred in 1752, when a 31-year old spinster Mary Blandy murdered her father with arsenic. Her court appearance was the first trial for murder by poison at which medical evidence was called in regard to the cause of death. Dr. Anthony Addington did not possess the knowledge to analyze the victim's organs for poison, nor was he able to use chemical tests to prove that the powder Mary used was arsenic. Nevertheless, on the basis of simple comparison he convinced the court that the powder was arsenic, and Mary Blandy was convicted and sentenced to death." "How were those comparisons made?" "Mary Blandy mixed white arsenic in gruel and gave it to her father. She wanted to kill him, because he was not agreeing for her marriage with someone she loved. Two days after eating the gruel, Mr. Blandy fell seriously ill. Some of the gruel left over was eaten by the charwoman and she was violently sick too. A maid also ate some of it, and she also fell sick. Because of this peculiar chain of events, they became suspicious and examined the pan used to prepare the gruel and saw a white sediment at the bottom. They locked up the pan and next day handed it over to the doctor." "And he compared that sediment with a known sample of arsenious oxide, and found them to be similar?" "Exactly. In today's parlance they would be called physical tests. He believed the sediment on the pan to be white arsenic because it had a milky whiteness, it was gritty and almost insipid. When put in cold water, part of it swam on the surface, but the greater part sank to the bottom and remained there undissolved. Arsenious oxide behaves in exactly the same way. When thrown on red-hot iron it did not burn, but sublimated, i.e. it rose in thick white fumes. These fumes had the stench of garlic. To be sure he did perform some simple chemical tests but they were also comparative in nature. This means that he conducted some chemical tests both on the sediment and on a known sample of arsenious oxide, and both gave similar looking reactions. The court accepted these tests- the first time any court accepted a scientific evidence in a case of arsenic poisoning- and sentenced Mary Blandy to death." "That certainly is interesting! I mean science ultimately catching up with the poisoners." "Twenty-three years after Mary was hanged, in 1775, a Swedish chemist made an important discovery. Karl Wilhelm Scheele found that he could change arsenious oxide to arsenious acid by treating it with nitric acid. Arsenious acid in turn when treated with zinc produced arsine, a highly poisonous gas. This epoch making work had the germs from which a reasonably good test for arsenic could be developed. This work was actively pursued by scientists in Germany, but the break-through was provided by an English chemist James Marsh. In 1836, he published a method for converting arsenic in body tissues and fluids into arsine gas, which was quite similar to that of Scheele. But the interesting thing was that Marsh was able to convert arsine back to metallic arsenic which could be shown to the court. It is much easier for a non-technical person like a judge to convict a criminal when he can actually be shown the poison which killed the victim." "How did Marsh convert arsine to metallic arsenic?" "As the gas escaped, the gas was ignited, and Marsh held a cold porcelain bowl against the flame. The metallic arsenic precipitated on the porcelain in the form of a black deposit. The process was unbelievably sensitive, making it possible to detect as little as a fiftieth of a milligram of arsenic! The Marsh test revolutionized the investigation of poisoning, and it was quickly taken up by crime scientists." "After the development of the Marsh test it must have become a lot easier for crime scientists to prove the presence of arsenic in a dead body?" "Yes surely. In 1840, the Marsh test was used in the celebrated Lafarge poisoning case. In January of that year Charles Lafarge, a minor French industrialist, died of suspected poisoning at his home in Le Glandier. Arsenious acid was found in his stomach, and it became known that his wife, Marie, had bought arsenic as rat-poison. She was arrested and sent for trial. The application of new scientific methods proved futile at first. When the Marsh Test was applied to corroborate earlier findings of arsenic by traditional methods, the results proved negative. The defence was elated, but the elation was short-lived, as the experts declared that the test worked better on organs other than the stomach. Exhumation of Lafarge's body was carried out for the purpose of retrieving these other organs for testing. Famous French toxicologist Dr. Mathieu Orfila was summoned by the court. He applied the Marsh test correctly and found arsenic in Lafarge's body. This case stirred up so much controversy in France, that the entire country was divided into Pro-Marie and anti-Marie factions. The case ended up in Marie being delivered the sentence of life imprisonment. Marie served 10 years of sentence. She was released by Napoleon III in 1850, and she died the following year still declaring her innocence! "Every killer does assert he is innocent. So arsenic has really been responsible for many killings. Good that the scientists ultimately came up with a good test for arsenic. Tell me doctor, what are your conclusions regarding this man Radheshyam?" "When his body was brought to me, I immediately suspected chronic arsenic poisoning..." "Really? What made you think so?" "The fact that his relations were not good with his wife, and that he was complaining of loose motions and vomiting for the last two years. The doctors were not able to find out a cause for his gastroenteritis. This is a classic picture of chronic arsenic poisoning, when the wife is stealthily mixing it in her husband's food. To top it all, she was often seen mixing some white powder in his food. But what clinched the diagnosis was the examination of his dead body. I am now positive he died of chronic arsenic poisoning." "How did you arrive at this conclusion?" "One of the landmark symptoms of chronic arsenic poisoning are the skin changes. The most important skin changes are, first, pigmentation and second hyperkeratosis, which is nothing but a technical term for thickening of the skin. If arsenic is given continuously for some years, even skin cancer may develop. You yourself remarked on the rash this person has all over his body. This rash is nothing but pigmentation. As you can see, this is finely mottled, brown rash, presenting a picture as if colored rain drops splashed his body. In fact this rash is often called "raindrop rash". This rash resembles measles rash in many ways. You can also see that his palms and soles are thickened. This is the hyperkeratotic change, another classical sign of chronic arsenic poisoning. In fact, even if I hadn't been told anything, just this change would have brought arsenic poisoning to my mind. You can also see that he has an irregular thickening of nails which is another good sign of chronic arsenic poisoning. The final clinching fact was the chemical test. when I applied Marsh test to his internal organs like liver, spleen and kidneys, arsenic was found to be present in abnormally high amounts. It is certain that he died of chronic arsenic poisoning. Let us phone the police and tell them about it." "Yes, certainly we should. Thank you doctor for giving me such interesting information on arsenic. What are you going to tell me the next time?" "Tarun, next time I shall tell you about Spanish Fly, which as you shall see has acquired a very notorious reputation. "

Forensic Toxicology THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE APPEARED IN THE JUNE 1997 ISSUE THE POISON SLEUTHS POISONING BY SILVER -Dr. Anil Aggrawal "Good morning doctor. Oh, my God, what are you doing today? Oh well, today you are examining an old man. What happened to him? His body appears to be grayish blue all over. Please explain" "Good morning Tarun. The name of this person is Pyarelal, and he is 65 years old. He can not do much work now, and is mainly dependent on his son and daughter-in-law for his day-to-day needs. He however has a good bank balance which represents his life long savings. During his life time he had worked in relatively respectable positions." "So why is he with you today?" "Tarun, this makes an interesting story. He was quite unwanted by his son and daughter-in-law. His son is working in a private firm as an executive and his daughter-in-law is a chemist. For a few days he has discovered a grayish blue discoloration of his body, especially over the exposed parts of his body, and he contacted a local physician for this. He also complained of some tiredness, but besides this, he was alright. The local physician could not make much of his problem, so referred him to a specialist, and in turn this specialist referred this case to me." "But you are a forensic medicine man. As far as I know, you deal with criminal cases only. How can you be helpful in this case?" "You are right Tarun. I am a specialist in forensic medicine, and these specialists look at cases-live or dead- which are involved legally in some way. Well it goes like this. This specialist friend of mine thought that somebody might be trying to poison him slowly, and he consulted me on phone. When I had a look at this man, I thought he may be right. I enquired about his family life from Pyarelal and after talking to him for sometime, I became all the more convinced that it could indeed be a case of poisoning....." "Do you mean to say that a man who develops bluish gray discoloration of his skin is getting slowly poisoned?" "Not necessarily. There are other causes for this too, but my specialist friend had exhausted all those causes by various tests. Now only one possibility remained; slow poisoning by silver, a condition technically known as argyria, and that's why he referred this case to me. As you know, all cases of poisonings have some legality involved, so they are dealt with by forensic specialists. Before you start feeling uncomfortable with the word argyria, I must tell you that it comes from the Latin word for silver argentum. The chemical symbol Ag for silver has also come from the same Latin word. This condition was first described in 1816 by Johann Abraham Albers." "So you decided Pyarelal was being poisoned. But by whom? and how?" "Probably by his son or his daughter-in-law on whom he was a burden. They had an eye over his money too. Probably some silver salt was being mixed in his food. This rare and exotic poison was probably chosen because it is a relatively unknown poison, and it was probably thought by the culprits that doctors would find it impossible to detect it. But as you can see in a moment they had underestimated the capabilities of modern poison sleuths, who have an impressive array of facilities at their disposal. I asked him not to consume one day's food given to him by his daughter-in-law and instead submit it to me. He has done that today and I have submitted it to the lab for chemical analysis. While the test reports are awaited, let me tell you something about this rare but interesting poison." "Oh, sure I would love to know about it. In fact I didn't even know silver was a poison" "Well, in metallic form, it indeed is not. It is the chemical salts which are poisonous. Compounds of silver important from a toxicological standpoint are silver nitrate, silver lactate, silver picrate, silver acetate and the silver halides. Silver nitrate is a poisonous salt, also known as Lunar Caustic. Silver was likened to the moon by the ancient chemists on account of the latter's silvery color, hence the word Lunar. You would probably recall that Latin luna means moon. This term appears in the term "lunar month" which refers to the period during which the moon waxes and wanes completely once. This period as you know is equal to 28 days. This term also appears quite surprisingly in the word "lunatic". It is because ancient people thought that madness results from the effects of full moon. Even today, an excessively sentimental, dazed or a lunatic person is sometimes referred to as moonstruck." "Interesting! And what is the origin of the term caustic?" "The term caustic refers to the salt's caustic properties both as crystals and in aqueous solution. Silver has both medicinal and non-medicinal uses. Among the main non-medicinal uses are in jewelry, coins, silverware, tableware, and in manufacturing of mirrors and electrical wiring. You will probably recall that pure silver has the highest thermal and electrical conductivity of all metals. That is the basis for its use in electrical wiring." "Yes, I do. And what are its main medicinal uses?" "Tarun, silver and its salts have been used as medicines for various ailments throughout history. During the nineteenth century it was prescribed for the treatment of digestive disorders, including stomach ulcer. Later small sticks of compressed crystals of silver nitrate began to be used for cauterization, notably of throat lesions, because of its astringent properties...." "Excuse me doctor. You have used certain terms which I don't quite understand. What is cauterization and what is meant by the term astringent?" "Tarun, an astringent is a drug which precipitates proteins and causes contraction of tissues. The term comes from Latin astringere which means "to draw tight". Astringents have so little penetrability that only surface of cells is affected. Application of astringent often arrests secretions or discharge, so it is often applied to lesions which are discharging secretions. Precipitation of proteins also kills the cells. The idea of applying these drugs was also that it would kill any infective microorganisms lurking in the lesions, by precipitating proteins in their cells. The most popular astringents are salts of zinc and aluminum. Zinc sulfate (0.25%) is often recommended as an eye medication. Another common astringent is tannic acid. Cauterization is the destruction of tissues by the application of an astringent. Of course cauterization can be done by heat too. Warts can be cauterized by heat or by some astringent substance. There was a time when silver salts were popularly used for cauterization of warts." "Oh, I see. Are these salts still used today for cauterization?" "Not usually. This procedure carried a substantial risk of the silver nitrate stick getting broken and the patient swallowing -or worse- inhaling the detached fragment. Certain quacks in India still keep these sticks for such purposes. These sticks have been known to be used for the cauterization of infected umbilical stumps and in the treatment of nosebleeds too. They have been used in the treatment of warts as I told you earlier. Ayurvedic doctors are known to use Bhasmas (roughly equivalent to ashes) which contain various noble metals, of which silver may be one. Indian sweetmeat manufacturers often decorate sweetmeats with a paper thin sheet of silver, and consumers are known to consume sweetmeats along with it, but I am not aware of silver poisoning occurring by this means. Several other typical Indian preparations such as paan are also decorated in this way." "Does silver nitrate have other medicinal uses too?" "It is used as prophylaxis for ophthalmia neonatorum, which is an infective condition of the eyes in the newborn because of the gonorrhoea bacterium. Infants suffer from this condition when their mothers are known to be suffering from gonorrhoea. Silver nitrate is used in this condition, because of its known antiseptic effect against gonorrhoea bacteria. Dressings soaked in 0.5% silver nitrate have been extensively used in the treatment of burns. Topical use of silver nitrate in this way can produce poisoning although it is not common. Poisoning due to silver iodide nose drops has been reported. Silver is also used in dentistry for dental fillings. Silver salts, because of their germicidal properties, are also used as drinking water disinfectants. Such treated water may contain upto 50 mg/L of silver. Drinking water not treated with silver, usually contains extremely low concentrations of silver -up to 5 mg/L only." "So silver is used for disinfecting water too. I didn't know that. I thought only chlorine is used for disinfecting water." "Oh yes, silver indeed is used for disinfecting water. These days some companies are even marketing gadgets called "mobile electronic water purifiers" which work by generating silver ions. These are shaped like pens. The device is to be opened and dipped in water. In fact it has two silver electrodes and while in water, it is supposed to generate silver ions which in turn are supposed to kill microorganisms lurking in water. But as you know now, such disinfected water has more than the normal quantity of silver in it." "Can one ingest silver accidentally too" "Tarun, silver can be ingested accidentally in a most unexpected manner. To understand how it is possible, first of all I must tell you that sea water is known to contain silver in concentrations of 0.055-1.5 mg/L. Much higher concentrations have been reported in waste water effluents. For instance effluents entering southern California coastal basins have been known to contain silver in concentrations as high as 0.03 mg/L! Note that I am talking of milligrams here, not micrograms. Silver has been accumulated in concentrations of 14-20 mg/kg in bottom sediments in these areas. Molluscs ingesting this water accumulate seawater in their bodies. Molluscs collected from coastal areas of the North Sea have been reported to contain silver concentrations of up to 2.0 mg/kg. Ingestion of these molluscs as well as other marine food can thus lead to chronic silver poisoning!" "Oh, that certainly is most unusual!" "Exposure to silver can occur in other unusual ways too. For instance it can also occur from small amounts released from dental fillings and from eating out of utensils made of silver. Human activity has been known to increase silver concentration in the air. You perhaps know that a silver salt -silver iodide- is sometimes used to seed clouds precipitate rain artificially. The emission of silver iodide crystals during cloud seeding has been estimated to result in silver concentration in air of about 0.1 ng/m3. Silver concentrations in rainwater as a result of this process have been estimated to be between 0.04 pg/ml and 5 ng/ml. I must tell you that ng stands for nanogram and pg for picograms. 1 nanogram (ng) is equal to 10-9 g and 1 picogram (pg) is equal to 10-12 g. There is some amount of silver in tobacco too, but this is generally too low. Because of its high boiling point, most of the silver in cigarettes is not inhaled." "This is quite interesting information about silver. But what happens to silver once it enters inside the body? I know this is not a normal constituent of the body, nor can the body make any use of it. Then how does it handle silver?" "That's a good question Tarun. In humans, more than 50% of the body burden of silver goes in the liver. Elimination is mainly via faeces. The concentrations of silver in kidneys, liver and spleen of normal people have been reported to be about 0.4, 0.7 and 2.7 mg/kg respectively on a dry weight basis. This means that if these organs were dried into powder and then silver estimation done, one would get these figures. Normal concentrations in skin are 0.009 mg/g. This latter figure is on wet weight basis, i.e. estimation is done on the skin as such, without first converting it into dry powder. Daily excretion in urine is 0.006-0.015 mg/day and 0.02-0.11 in feces." "Doctor, how much silver is needed to kill a person?" "Tarun, fifty mg or more of collargol which is a silver salt has been reported to be lethal after intravenous injection for therapeutic purposes. Autopsy findings in such cases have included watery lungs, and destruction of bone marrow, liver and kidney. Silver nitrate has been used by quacks to induce criminal abortions. These are abortions done in a clandestine manner by quacks on girls who do not want a baby. Most of these girls are unmarried girls who contact these quack abortionists to get rid of unwanted pregnancies. They use all sorts of weird chemical compounds to get rid of these pregnancies. In a case which has been reported in medical literature, intrauterine administration of approximately 25 g of silver nitrate caused rapid death of the mother." "And what is argyria?" "The cases which I have mentioned above are cases of acute poisoning- cases in which silver is administered in one single big shot. Poisoning can occur in a chronic fashion, in which small doses of poison are administered slowly. In my earlier stories I told you about acute and chronic poisonings. Argyria is a chronic poisoning with silver. It is an interesting condition, which once seen is never forgotten. The patient- as in the case of Pyarelal- acquires a blue-grey color of the skin, especially over exposed areas. Silver bound to body proteins, is deposited widely in the body tissues. Internal body viscera may get discolored too. Pigmentation results partly from stimulation of melanin deposition but mainly from photoactivated reduction to metallic silver in the dermis- hence the distribution over areas exposed to light. It is like exposure of a photographic plate. The whole body -which has absorbed silver- becomes a kind of photographic plate which blackens on exposure to the sun." "Can you prove this in the case of Pyarelal?" "Yes certainly. In cases of argyrosis, microscopically detectable silver containing granules are found in the skin cells and particularly around the hair follicles and in the sebaceous and sweat glands. I have taken a skin sample from his neck area and have done electron microscopy on it. The dermis of this area showed irregular silver granules both inside as well as outside the skin cells. I also did a special investigation - neutron activation analysis. This technique can tell the exact amount of a chemical in a given sample. This technique showed that the silver concentration in his skin was 72 mg/g, far exceeding the normal 0.009 mg/g. You can plainly see that it represents an accumulation 8000 times normal. His total body content of silver is almost 8 g which is really quite high. In addition he shows a black colored line near the teeth, which is because of the deposition of silver there. It is called the silver line. I must tell you that although silver shines as a metal, in a colloidal state it appears black. That's the reason a photographic negative receiving more light becomes black. It is at these regions that silver halides are converted to colloidal silver by sunlight." "That certainly is quite interesting. If silver is administered slowly to a person, how much silver needs to be introduced before the person suffers from argyria?" "Tarun, it has been estimated that a total dose of about 1-8 g of silver is required by inhalation for argyrosis to occur. The dosage by ingestion seems a little higher; between 1 to 30 g of a soluble silver salt. Blond people are considered more susceptible than others. The reason for this is unknown. Argyrosis seemed to have become only of historical interest, but it has recently reappeared, especially in the West. Respaton an anti-smoking lozenge, available in the West from retail chemists since 1974, contains silver acetate and ammonium chloride. Another similar anti-smoking lozenge is Tabmint. Manufacturers of these lozenges claim that regular sucking of these lozenges can reduce one's desire to smoke. They recommend a maximum of 6 lozenges per day. Chronic use of these lozenges has caused argyria in several cases. The patient remains discolored for life and ironically the smoking habit for which he took all the trouble remains!" "That is certainly most interesting. Can argyria occur in other ways too?" "Tarun, repeated occupational handling of silver objects, especially if repeated minor injury is involved, may give rise to so called local argyria, which is bluish-gray discoloration of the skin at the exposed site. This condition is however considered harmless apart from aesthetic considerations." "So it is now almost certain that Pyarelal was being given some silver salt in low concentrations by his son and daughter-in-law." "Yes it is. Here comes the chemical analysis report of the food and milk submitted by Pyarelal. Oh it shows a rather high concentration of silver nitrate. So my worst fears have proved correct. His daughter-in-law was taking advantage of her position as a chemist and was regularly giving him silver nitrate in his milk and food- probably just a drop or two in his milk. But over the years this has caused silver poisoning in this poor fellow. We have all the evidence now. Let us go to the police and tell them the whole story." "Sure we should. And thank you doctor for telling me about such an interesting poison. What are you going to tell me next time?" "Tarun, next time I shall tell you about vanadium which as you shall see is a very important poison. "

SCIENCE IN CRIME DETECTION-1 WHEN DID THE MURDER TAKE PLACE ? Many a time I have been called by the police to places where dead bodies are lying and I am asked to tell them when a particular person was done to death. This is a very important question for the police to know. Imagine a person found dead in a hotel room at 10.00 pm by a waiter. Visitors' register and statements of various hotel employees reveal that four people met that man on that day at 10 am, 1 pm, 3 pm, and 7 pm respectively. Obviously, the murder was committed by one of them. Many might imagine the last visitor to be the murderer, because, had an earlier visitor murdered the man, the next visitor would have informed the police. But this is not necessarily so. A man might knock at the door, get no answer and return. Also, a visitor with a criminal record may have been too afraid to inform about the murder, even if he had discovered the dead body. Thus, it becomes very important to tell exactly when the person died. We use a very ingenious technique to do that. A law of physics says that a hot body always comes back to the temperature of its surroundings. Thus if you keep a glass of hot milk on the table, after sometime, the milk cools down. Our bodies also work similarly. While living, however, the various life processes keep the human body warm and do not let the body cool. At the time of death, all life processes stop and the body starts cooling down. All human beings have a temperature of 98.4 0 Fahrenheit. The surrounding temperature in shade varies from 60 0 to 80 0 Fahrenheit depending upon the weather. So, after death, the body tends to cool down and come to the temperature of the environment. We do not take the temperature of the dead body by keeping the thermometer in the mouth, as is done in living beings. This is due to various reasons. For one thing, we are interested in taking the core temperature of the dead body and not the surface temperature. Core temperature is the temperature of the internal organs of the body, while surface temperature is the temperature of the skin. Surface temperature is generally lower than the core temperature. Thermometer in the mouth or axilla gives the surface temperature, which is not of much interest to us. Another reason why we do not take the mouth temperature is that the jaws become stiff after death. So, it becomes very difficult to open the mouth of a dead person and if someone forcibly inserted the thermometer in the mouth, there is every likelihood of the thermometer getting cracked. After death, the body starts cooling in a well-defined way. In summers, a dead body cools by about 0.75 0 Fahrenheit ever hour and in winters, it cools faster- by about 1.5 0 Fahrenheit every hour. The first thing that we do after arriving at the scene of crime is to insert a thermometer deed in the rectum of the dead body ( see figure 1). We insert it almost 4-5 inches deep. This gives us the core temperature of the body, in which we are interested. In fact, there are several ways to take the core temperature of the body, but this is the simplest. Many doctors prefer to make a small incision (about 0.5 cm), just below the rib margin on the right side of the body and insert the thermometer deep in this nick ( see figure 2 ) . Since the liver lies just below this nick, the thermometer gets inserted in the liver. This procedure also reveals the core temperature but many doctor do not prefer this method, because it injures the liver. Later, when the body is opened for post mortem, some difficulties may be encountered in assessing the injuries to the liver, if there are any. This is because the insertion of the thermometer may have interfered with the injuries already present in the liver. Some other doctors prefer to take the brain temperature. For this, they drill a hole in the skull and then insert the thermometer deep inside the brain. In the case of females, some doctors prefer to insert the thermometer in the vagina and take the vaginal temperature. However the most common site remains the rectum, as shown in the figure. We already know the rate of cooling of the body after death. Suppose I am called by the police at 10.00 pm to a hotel room, where a dead body is lying. I will first of all take the rectal temperature. Suppose the temperature is found to be 87 0 Fahrenheit. It is the month of February and I know that dead body cools at the rate of 1.5 0 Fahrenheit every hour in winter months. The loss in temperature is (97.4-87) 0 or about 10.4 0 Fahrenheit. Dividing it by 1.5, I get the number of hours the person has been dead to be seven. I deduct 7 hours from 10 pm (the time when I am making the examination) and arrive at the correct time of murder- 3 pm. The police summons the visitor who called the murdered man at 3 pm, and detailed questioning begins. Simple, isn't it? But as Sherlock Holmes used to say, all deductions seem simple when they are explained. They are difficult only till they remain unexplained. (Next issue: From what distance did the person fire?)

Forensic Science Fiction A tale of detection The man had been dead for five days! At least that is what the forensic pathologist Dr. Chandra would have everyone believe. The body was in an advanced state of putrefaction and there were maggots over the body. Every pathologist knows that flies lay eggs in and around natural orifices of the dead body a little after about 3 days and maggots hatch in another two days. So if a body is found full of maggots, it must be dead five days before. All evidence pointed towards Papi Singh as the killer. He and Bachan Singh, the dead man had been sworn enemies. They both ran rival gambling dens and when two months back Bachan Singh spat over Papi Singh after a drunken brawl, Papi Singh had sworn to get even with him. Everybody knew about that. The body of Bachan Singh was found of the night of 27th May. That put the time of death round about the night of 22nd May. Throughout the proceedings Papi Singh kept asserting he hadn't killed Bachan Singh. Some of his cronies swore they had seen Bachan Singh roaming around on the night of 23rd May with a lady of ill repute but nobody believed them. In fact nobody could think of suspecting Dr. Chandra's judgement. But the defence lawyer Basu was a shrewd man. He was a man of multiple interests and had his fingers in several pies. He studied the autopsy report in great detail and found that the main reason for Dr Chandra's judgement was the presence of maggots on the body. All the putrefactive changes plus the maggots put the time of death as five days, but the same changes minus the maggots put the time of death as merely three days and put the date of death as the night of 24th May. That suited his client Papi Singh, as he had left for Chandigarh on 24th morning by train making his alibi watertight. Everybody knew about it, and furthermore he had the train tickets to prove that. Papi Singh even had some minor scuffle with the guard of the train, and the guard remembered it. Even he could be called as a witness to say that Papi Singh had indeed made the journey to Chandigarh on the morning of 24th May. This was as good an alibi as could possibly be. In essence, Papi Singh could be saved from the gallows, if it could somehow be proved that Bachan Singh had died just 3 days before and not 5 days before as Dr. Chandra had indicated in his post-mortem report. But from where did the maggots emerge? That was the sixty-four thousand dollar question. The answer began emerging in Basu's mind a few days later. While reading the latest issue of the American Journal of Ornithology he read with interest the report of an Indian ornithologist who had reported finding a new species in India called Passeriformes peculiaris. The females of the species ate small seeds while the males ate eggs of insects. This in itself was not a very startling or amazing finding as the same situation is prevalent in many known species. Male anopheles for instance sucks flower juice while the female anopheles sucks blood. The real amazing find was that if by mistake the female bird swallowed the insect eggs which look very much like the seeds it ate, it would not be able to digest them. It would be able to keep the eggs in its gizzard as long as they did not hatch. But once the maggots hatched, they would start irritating the gizzard, and the bird would be forced to disgorge the maggots immediately. Still more surprisingly, the bird would search for decaying flesh, so that it could get nauseated strong enough and be able to evacuate its gizzard as completely as possible. The female of the species seemed to have a kind of aversion for these maggots, so to say. What Basu decided was this. Bachan Singh was killed on 24th night by someone else, and his body thrown away in the open. As the species Passeriformes peculiaris was rather abundant in the region where the body was found, some birds, which had earlier ingested the insect eggs accidentally, disgorged some of the maggots on the decaying flesh. In other words flies never laid eggs on the corpse. Quite simply, the body had not been dead long enough for that to happen. Maggots were directly disgorged upon it by the female Passeriformes peculiaris, and that put the time of death as just 3 days. Maggots were in fact only artifacts. But in the court everybody laughed at this outlandish conjecture. New reports had to be taken with a pinch of salt, they said. However the defence kept harping on the authenticity and reputation of the journal. Finally the judge appointed a committee of ornithologists, entomologists and forensic experts to look into the issue and give its report. The main task of course was to look into whether such a bird really disgorges maggots on decaying flesh or not. And when finally the report came after a month, it acquitted Papi Singh. It said laconically, "The girly bird retches the worm!" *** This story was published in Published in Spandan (Maulana Azad Medical College's Magazine) 1990-91 on Page 8

Science Fiction WHY DINOSAURS BECAME EXTINCT? -Dr. Anil Aggrawal I know you won't believe me, but I first wrote this scientific report about 16 years back and sent it to the editor of a prominent science magazine for publication. I thought I had invented a new discipline of science, bioastronomy, an inter-relationship between biology and astronomy. Bioastronomy could be used to make predictions related to one science based on the data gathered from the other. For instance, I devised ways to predict and extrapolate the time of origin of life on earth (and on any other planet for that matter), by counting the number of stars in a sphere of 100 light years around that planet, and putting that number in a complicated formula. Similarly, by looking at the cellular structure of the animals on any planet, I could make useful predictions about the space around that planet. I know you would think I am beating about the bush, and I wouldn't blame you. If I didn't invent the science myself, and you told me the same thing, I would go to the extent of thinking you were crazy. That's what the editor of the Science magazine thought 16 years back. Actually what I had sent him was a report of an actual science experiment on bioastronomy that I had conducted. But he thought it was a Science Fiction story and refused to publish it, stating that the events mentioned in my report were too unlikely and unnatural even to be included in an SF story. That made me aghast with disbelief, but I couldn't help it. After all, we all writers are at the mercy of editors. If they don't like something, the writer's piece can't see the light of the day, whatever its merit. Then why am I writing it again now, you might ask. Well, much light has flown through the galaxies meanwhile and certainly in the present circumstances my report would appear more trustworthy to you. The world has been gripped with the dinosaur mania during this period, and that is the single most important factor which makes my report look more realistic today. My report as you would shortly see deals with resurrecting the dinosaurs and certainly the events in the story would appear less unnatural to you now. They certainly appeared realistic to my present editor and that's why you are able to read this story. Well, to begin with I must tell you that I am interested in finding the reasons for the extinction of dinosaurs. Years ago, I developed an interesting theory about the extinction of dinosaurs, but needed a live dinosaur to prove it. We all know that if we can somehow get a single intact nucleus of the ancient dinosaurs, we could clone a whole dinosaur from the DNA contained in that nucleus. Michael Crichton in his now famous SF novel, surmises that such an intact dinosaur nucleus could be found in the gastrointestinal tract of mosquitoes who fed on the blood of dinosaurs and then got entrapped in sticky amber flowing down the trees. But in actual life such a finding is extremely unlikely. I found intact dinosaur cells in another way - in Himalayan peat bogs. Peat bogs were marshy, muddy places where some dinosaurs might have strayed and got accidentally buried there. The peat bogs were very much like quicksand. They have a remarkable quality to preserve tissue specimens. Later on, with the coming of ice age the whole peat bogs, along with buried dinosaurs within them got covered with snow, which further helped preservation. I cloned the dinosaur nucleus in the fertilized ova of the American alligator (Alligator mississipiensis). Of course I first destroyed its own nucleus and then transplanted the dinosaur nucleus in the fertilized ova. The American alligator is the closest living relative of the dinosaurs, and it was the best medium to transplant the dinosaur nucleus in. Sure enough when I cloned the dinosaur (Tyrannosaurus rex), and studied its cellular enzymes in great detail, I found a gross abnormality in the respiratory enzyme Cytochrome oxidase. This is an essential respiratory enzyme which is vital to the functioning of the cells. There are about 100 atoms in the molecule. Most of the atoms are of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, but there are two peculiar atoms- iron and copper. Empirically, the altered molecule had the same number of atoms as the natural molecule, but structurally the relative positions of all the atoms including those of iron and copper atoms had been changed drastically. This caused the enzyme to become at least 6 times less effective. Sure enough, the dinosaurs died as a result of this fatal mutation. But what caused the mutation? Well, I had just invented the science of bioastronomy. This helped me come up with a remarkable explanation. The earth had been visited about 65 million years ago by some super-intelligent extraterrestrials. They were masters of genetic engineering. They didn't come to earth on purpose. There was hardly any intelligent life on earth then. They stepped on it only in passing. However during the rest period the spent here, they played a little game, in which they sought to represent the position of their star in relation to the earth's star (The Sun). They did this by genetically altering the 3-dimensional structure of the most important respiratory enzyme of the most conspicuous creatures on earth-the dinosaurs. They did it in such a way, that various atoms in the cytochrome oxidase molecule came to represent the relative positions of all the stars in the vicinity of the Sun. In other words, if all the atoms of the changed cytochrome molecule were enlarged on a galactic scale, each atom of the changed molecule would faithfully represent a star in the vicinity of the sun. There are only two particularly peculiar atoms - iron and copper- in the cytochrome oxidase molecule. Now if the iron atom was taken as the position of the sun, the other unusual atom- copper- would represent their star. Such drastic genetic engineering served their purpose alright but it decreased the efficiency of the enzyme vastly, which over the years caused the dinosaurs to get asphyxiated. I brought out a 3-dimensional star chart and extrapolated the position of copper atom. It represented the star Tau ceti. This clearly meant that the race had come from Tau ceti. You might think I am crazy, but how on earth (excuse the pun) could you otherwise explain the uncanny similarity of the 3-dimensional structure of a macroscopic and a microscopic thing. This was unmistakably the handiwork of a super-intelligent race. Those beings evidently changed the genetic makeup of all dinosaurs in the same way. Doing this is not difficult if you can "programme" gamma rays to do just that and then irradiate the planet with them. Dinosaurs were so important in Jurassic ecology that with their extinction, several other species dependent on them for their survival perished too. This explains the disappearance of many other species simultaneously. I am happy to tell you that some exobiologists in the USA believe my theory and only yesterday I learnt with satisfaction that a very strong electromagnetic wave carrying a friendly message has been sent to Tau ceti.

Forensic Science Fiction

Explore a unique collection of forensic science fiction curated by Dr. Anil Aggrawal. Blending medical accuracy with thrilling narratives, these stories captivate students, professionals, and lovers of scientific mysteries alike. Anil Aggrawal's Forensic Science Fiction Page Hi, I am Professor Anil Aggrawal from India. I teach forensic medicine and toxicology at the Maulana Azad Medical College, New Delhi. I love reading and writing science fiction, especially that related to forensic medicine. My favorite SF author is....yes, you guessed it right- Isaac Asimov! Unfortunately he was not a forensic man, and so not many stories related to forensic medicine exist in current SF literature. Although I am no Asimov, I have made a humble attempt and tried to fill up this gap by writing SF stories related to forensic medicine. Some of these stories have been hosted on the net by science fiction enthusiasts. Anyone wishing to exchange ideas with me on forensic medicine, science, and science fiction is welcome. Many of my Science Fiction stories have been published in Spandan, the inhouse magazine published by the students association of Maulana Azad Medical College. You may want to go to this site for some other very interesting articles. Anil Aggrawal's Forensic science fiction stories ~ ( click on title below to access ) The mysterious old man The Freak A tale of detection The New Antibiotic The mystery of the drowned man The mystery of the burnt bride The mystery of the electrocuted man The mystery of the slain General The mystery of the dead infant The mystery of the assassinated prince Anil Aggrawal's other science fiction stories Why dinosaurs became extinct ? The Weird House. (click on title above to access) My favorite science fiction pages Isaac Asimov Check Website DO YOU HAVE AN INTERESTING TALE TO TELL? E-MAIL ME, AND I WILL PUT YOUR STORY ON THE WEB WITH CREDIT TO YOU. YOU WILL FIND NEW STORIES ON THIS PAGE VERY OFTEN. BOOKMARK THESE PAGES. YOU MAY WANT TO COME TO THESE PAGES AGAIN! Contact

The mysterious old man The Freak A tale of detection The New Antibiotic The mystery of the drowned man The mystery of the burnt bride The mystery of the electrocuted man The mystery of the slain General The mystery of the dead infant The mystery of the assassinated prince - Dr. Anil Aggrawal (one) I met him at a party. He was surrounded by a few friends and they were all laughing their heads off. No doubt the booze was showing its effect. The party was entering into its second phase- phase of loosening inhibitions. People would take off their masks during this phase and would show them as their real self. The man whom I am going to talk about, had a sort of magnetism around him. He was about 5'10", lean and thin, with a thick white hair, a goatee and a glowing face with wrinkles just appearing. From his looks he appeared to be no more than 50, but being a medical man I knew he had crossed sixty. I found myself drifting towards him. The party looked up at me. Everyone except him knew me. "Come on Dr. Aggrawal", said one of them,"Meet Mr Quatra her. A company executive." "Dr. Aggrawal. Professor of forensic medicine", I said and thrust my hand forward. He took my hand in both of his and pumped them till I thought he wanted them pulped. His hands seemed unusually warm. "Quatra here. Working with Jaykay exporters." There was an aura of mystery around him. From his looks, I could guess he was an unusual man. I am not sure what made me think that. Probably an intuition only. I looked again at him. No, I couldn't be wrong. This man had an ace up his sleeve. What? "Gentlemen! Now I am going to demonstrate something special to you", Mr. Quatra said. There were some groans around. Then some one said,"No card tricks for God's sake. We have had enough of that. Everyone seems to be demonstrating that in the recreational session of the party" "Bring me a glass of water", he said, completely ignoring the comment. This engendered some curious looks around. A waiter was passing around with a tray of drinks. Someone picked up a glass of whisky and thrust it towards him. "No, not alcohol. It could be dangerous. I want just plain water". Plain water was brought. The old man put the glass of water on the table. Then he looked around with an aura of mystery and then declared, "Gentlemen, I am going to boil this water without any heat whatsoever" Again there were may groans around. Then someone said, "Okay, Okay, we have seen enough of that vacuum business. You simply create some kind of partial vacuum somehow, and since water boils at a lower temperature in a partial vacuum, it begins to boil at the room temperature" "No, not that at all. That is high school physics. The thing I am going to show you is unexplainable. This is real magic; or perhaps mystery you can say. Definitely it does not involve any science trick." "Okay show it to us," Goldie said, pouting her beautiful breasts in a low cut blouse forwards for everyone to see. She was perhaps disconcerted that people had started taking more interest in that wrinkled old man than her frontal eminence. "Gentlemen, I am going to dip my hands in this water", said Mr Quatra, completely ignoring what the young lady had to offer,"and you will all see, it would become warmer." "Okay go ahead you stuntman", I said to myself,"You can't make it warmer than 370 C, the temperature of the human body. I would be damned if you do that." He dipped his right hand in water and then closed his eyes as if in meditation. After about a minute, he asked me to dip my index finger in the glass of water. I found the water somewhat warmer. But skin temperature is only around 300 C. If the water was even at, say 340 C, it would appear warmer to everyone. No magic whatsoever. He continued for some more time and then asked someone else to dip his finger. He immediately retracted the finger in amazement. "It's warm, very warm!" he exclaimed. "Fools!" I thought, "He is keeping his hand long enough till the water comes to 370 C. Water at this temperature would seem warm to any human being, for the simple reason that skin is at a lower temperature. Water is getting the heat from his blood. Not so easy to do for every human being however. May be he has done some practice and can apparently do it with much ease." After 2 minutes he invited me to dip my fingers in it again. I advanced my fingers to the bowl quite nonchalantly and dipped them deep inside the bowl. Immediately I had to jerk them out. The water was unbearably hot. I found myself sucking at my fingers. Soon fumes started appearing at the surface of water. Everyone of us had had enough of that. We asked him to stop. With a victorious grin, that almost reached his ears, he took off his hand, and mopped it with a handkerchief. "Can you give me your card?" I asked him, still dazed. "Sure" he dished out his visiting card from his wallet. After that he left quietly. (Two) A battery of tests conducted on him showed some unusual results. Thankfully, next day when I had 'phoned him and had asked him if he could make himself available for some lab tests, he readily agreed. Radiographs of the blood vessels of his right hand (after injecting a radio opaque dye in his brachial artery) showed an unusual rich network of arteries there. That was one reason why he could bring so much warmth in his right hand. Still, causing water to boil? That couldn't be explained. For a whole week I couldn't sleep. My friends at the party asked me to forget the incident. "People can do a lot of things with yoga" they said. But I shook them off. Finally I called him one day. "Mr Quatra", I said," I want to take a few cells from your hypothalamus. Would you allow me to do that? It is a small area of the brain sitting at the base of the skull. I would use the nasal route. Don't worry. Nothing would happen to you. With advanced techniques available now, I would just pick up about fifty odd cells which is about one millionth of the total cells you have in your hypothalamus." "Do whatever you like doctor", he said gleefully. "I am all for the advancement of science". I studied the cells for 2 weeks. I did everything possible on them; histology, histochemistry, physiology, radio-nitrogen tagging, everything; but didn't get any clues. Nothing had perturbed me more in life than this problem. Then one night when I was sleeping and dreaming, suddenly the solution came to my mind like the flash of a lightning. I immediately woke up with a start, and thought of the solution from every angle. The more I thought about it, the more I got convinced that I had indeed found the correct solution. So confident was I that I decided to present the results of my findings to the next international science conference I was attending in Geneva. Mr. Quatra was a mutant! Which means he had an altered thermostat. Well, I won't go in details. You all know about hypothalamus and built-in thermostats. The hypothalamus of all human beings has a built-in thermostat which is "pre-programmed" to keep the body temperature at 370 C. If there is cold outside, one would start shivering to generate more heat in order to maintain this temperature. On the other hand if it is too hot outside, one would start sweating. Like the thermostat of an electric appliance, it is the hypothalamic thermostat which decides the human body temperature. In all human beings this thermostat is set at a temperature of 370 C. But this man could apparently set his thermostat at a higher level- at will. The biochemistry of his hypothalamic cells led me to that. To be sure, setting of the body's thermostat at higher level is not abnormal. It happens in ordinary day-to-day life. Bacterial toxins set it at a higher level. That is why one gets fever in bacterial infections. In almost all infections- malaria, pneumonia, typhoid- it would be set at a higher level and then the body's temperature would rise. No man could however do it at will. What was most astounding was that this man could apparently do it at will. Some kind of chemical - a hormone probably- would be released from his brain and set it at a higher level. The mystery was that his whole body temperature would not rise appreciably. Only his right hand's temperature would rise. Admittedly this stumped me. May be a good concentration of capillaries there had something to do with it. I presented the findings of my investigation in the international conference the next month. But contrary to my expectations, the paper was booed over. It was taken to be a paper in pseudo-science. I swallowed the insult with a dismal heart. (Three) Next week I got the startling news that Mr Quatra was dead. He was found burnt in his study. The police was suspecting homicide. That is why they called for me immediately. I visited the place at once. The scene was familiar to me- in fact to all forensic experts. The torso had burnt beyond recognition. In fact there was merely ash where the torso should have been. The legs below the level of knees were almost unharmed. My brain started ticking... Spontaneous human combustion! Undoubtedly. This was the classic picture of Spontaneous human combustion. I assured the police officers, it was neither a case of homicide, nor suicide. It was a rare phenomenon, seen once in a century probably. And then I left his house and pressed down the accelerator viciously. I had to reach my lab soon. Lot of work was pending. Besides, I wanted to forget this witch of a man. But somehow my brain was going back to Mr Quatra again and again. Was there something I was missing completely? A missing link perhaps? One which could link all the bizarre facts nicely and logically? My brain felt as if it was full of jig-saw puzzles, needing to be adjusted in their proper order. Suddenly the solution came to my mind. It gave me such a shudder, I lurched forward. I couldn't help it. The car swerved here and there violently till I slammed over the brakes. That jig-saw puzzle! It had been solved! Suddenly all the pieces seemed to fall together in their right places. That gave me this unexpected shivering. Spontaneous human combustion is an unexplained phenomenon for many centuries. Charles Dickens even mentioned the phenomenon in one of his novels. Various theories have been advanced but none seemed satisfactory. There have been for instance, theories regarding building up of high concentrations of combustible substances in the body; high phosphorus levels in bodies, high alcohol levels in alcoholics and the like. Well, these theories do look attractive, but they don't explain everything properly. If you dip a piece of meat in alcohol and burn it, it would burn only till the alcohol is present in the piece of meat. After that the fire would extinguish. Then there are theories regarding high voltages being built inside the body by walking on things like carpets and so on. But now I knew what really goes on. These people are really mutants. And very rare ones at that. For one thing that explains the rarity of the phenomenon of Spontaneous Human Combustion. The mutation enables the affected persons to set their hypothalamic thermostats at a higher level- at will. Even at levels of 3000 C as in the case of Mr Quatra. You may find it unbelievable but I have the biochemistry reports to show you just that. Some of these people can do it at will while others can't, but in all cases this thermostat gets set at a higher level automatically on a very cold chilly night (perhaps to keep them warm). That's why you get spontaneous combustions on cold chilly nights only. Usually however, their thermostats would be set normally. Raising the thermostat to 3000 C would mean that the body would catch fire, as fat catches fire at 2930 C. That is the gist of my whole theory. I know questions are lurking in your minds. What is the exact biochemistry? How is the thermostat set at a higher level? Why would only the hand get warmer and not the rest of the body? Well, I can't explain all that in this short report which I am writing merely because Mr. Suneel Galgotia, the publisher of this book requested me to do so. In any case they are merely trifling details. The main gist should satisfy most people. Even then, I would not disappoint the scientifically minded people. They can fruitfully scan through the following papers, which I wrote subsequently. Aggrawal A. A Biochemical explanation of Spontaneous Human Combustion. New England Journal of Medicine. 311: 1072-1074, 1999 Aggrawal A. Spontaneous Human Combustion. Do the thermostats go awry? British Medical Journal. 321: 72-87,1999 I hope these should satisfy the more scientifically minded of you. Thanks. This story was published in Published in Spandan (Maulana Azad Medical College's Magazine) 1989-90 on Pages 43-46 - Dr. Anil Aggrawal I was surprised. Extremely surprised. Never before had a patient come to me with such a complaint. I asked him again. "Are you sure, you keep moving back and forth in time? Just how do you know?" Rajiv coughed nervously. "All of a sudden sometimes, I feel dizzy. Then I feel as if I am falling in ordinary three dimensions. In an abyss. Rapidly. But it's not the height I loose. I find I have gone back in time. I see all sorts of things. Mughal splendor. Coming of the English people. Freedom struggle. Everything." "Are you sure you are not hallucinating? I am asking this because people of your species can control movement in time you see." "Yes, we four-dimensionals are not like you. Sure enough we can control movements in time just as you can in space. But I just don't know what's the trouble with me. I just can't control it. Look at this ancient coin. I brought it yesterday, when I tipped back in time." I looked carefully at the coin. A rare gold circlet from the reign of Akbar. There was no mistake about it. This four-dimensional sure enough meant business. He wasn't joking. In the last twenty years of my practice, I must have treated thousands of people - both three dimensionals as well as four-dimensionals. But never before had I seen such a patient. There wasn't much of a difference in the anatomy and physiology of the two major human species currently living on earth. Just a little difference here and a little there - so that the four dimensionals could adapt to their special needs and requirements. Four dimensionals were so called mainly because they had a special ability to move back and forth in time at will. We three dimensionals could do so only in three ordinary dimensions. How the four-dimensionals had come to live on earth is a long story. Centuries before, a space ship went from earth in search of intelligent life. After some years of departure, the radio contact between the space ship and the earth broke down and despite best efforts could not be re-established. God knows what happened to those humans, but when they came back some years ago, inhabitants on earth found they had acquired a new ability - to move back and forth in time at will. They couldn't tell anything as they didn't seem to know much. Exobiologists surmised that their forefathers- the ones that left the earth- must have been captured by a super intelligent race and they must have used them as guinea pigs for their genetic experiments. Most probably the ability to move back and forth in time had come as a result of massive genetic alteration by those super-intelligent beings. Anyway the fact was that their genetic makeup had been substantially altered - so much so that they couldn't interbreed with ordinary three-dimensionals. In spite of my best efforts, I couldn't treat Rajiv. He kept falling back and forth in time. The best I could do was to administer antihistaminics like Avomine so he wouldn't feel dizzy. But that wasn't much help as everybody would agree. Then one day I received the sad news that Rajiv had expired. I was shocked. Worst of all, I had to conduct a post-mortem examination and find the cause of death. I opened the body and as expected found petechial hemorrhages in all internal organs-liver, spleen, heart, brain, everywhere. Hemorrhages of the shape of pin-point. The cause of death was clear. He had been falling continuously over long periods. Small Hemorrhages kept on accumulating everywhere and their effect on the brain was devastating. Tried hard as I did, I couldn't locate any other abnormality. I started closing the body when suddenly I was gripped with a strange curiosity. Could I find the cause of his uncontrollable movements in time? I had more working space now. I had his entire dead body. I could examine all his organs in detail. I might hit upon some curious finding. Besieged with this strange curiosity, I ripped open the stitches and took out all the organs once again. Then I donned my researcher's hat and got down to work. Till late night I had made sections of all his major body organs and examined them under the microscope in great detail. I could find nothing. Tired, I decided to call it a day. I asked my assistant to wrap up the body in formalin and keep it in the cold room. I would have a last go tomorrow. And then I went to sleep. At 4 am I woke up with a start. My subconscious mind must have been working at the problem. That's why I had this ridiculous dream. I thought I had found out the cause of his strange abnormality. I couldn't contain my anxiety, and wanted to test the hypothesis right away. I took out my car and headed for the mortuary in the darkness. The roads, drowned in darkness at that time of the night appeared unusually spooky. At the mortuary, as expected, I found everything closed. The assistant had locked up the main gate, mortuary doors, cold rooms, everything- and had gone away to his house. I took out my duplicate set of keys and opened the mortuary. In the cold room, I opened catacomb number 13, the one where Rajiv was resting. Needless to say, my hands were trembling; perhaps both from fear and from the anxiety of making an unknown discovery. I took out the body myself and laid it out neatly at the table. The skull cap and brain matter were already removed. I looked at the base of skull- at the petrous part of the temporal bone. The one that forms the roof of the middle and inner ear. The mystery could be lying there, I told myself. Gradually and neatly I started chiselling away the temporal bone, so that none of the inner ear structures would be damaged. And then with great precision I took out the inner ear contents. The cochlea, the utricle, the saccule and the semicircular canals, along with vestibular nerves. I kept the whole complex under a simple hand lens and examined it - especially the semicircular canals. Suddenly I found myself trembling in excitement. My conjecture was correct. There were only three semicircular canals in his body, while actually there should have been four. The three semicircular canals are at right angles to each other, each representing a single dimension of space. Whenever someone tips in one or the other dimension, the otoliths inside the appropriate semicircular canal would start moving and activate the vestibular nerve which would send the information to the brain immediately. The brain would then send orders to proper muscles and joints to correct the body position. Those who had a disease of semicircular canals would not be able to stand erect properly. Since each semicircular canal represented one dimension, four dimensionals must have four canals, all perpendicular to each other. Three dimensionals like us, of course had only three canals. My reasoning was this. If Rajiv tipped slightly in the fourth dimension and didn't have the fourth semicircular canal representing the fourth dimension of time, the brain wouldn't get the necessary information and he would keep on falling in that dimension. Of course when he started seeing ancient scenario, he realized he was falling and could thus consciously control the fall. But by that time he would have gone quite far back in time and had to come forward in time on his own. This was the reason for his constant trippings in time. One last thing. How could one have four canals perpendicular to one another in ordinary three dimensions? One may wonder, where exactly I expected to see the fourth canal. Well, a four dimensional cube can be projected in three dimensions as a tesseract. What I expected to see was a tesseract of the semicircular canals, but there was none. There were just three semicircular canals. The finding has since been confirmed by dissection of other four-dimensionals. They all show their semicircular canals as a tesseract. They have four mutually perpendicular canals alright, but they show up as a tesseract, in ordinary three dimensions. This unexpected discovery gave me much satisfaction in itself. But the thing that surprised me most was to find my name in the Padma Shree winners of next year. *** This story was Published in July 1988 issue of 2001 (Science Today) on centerfold page under the title Time and Again - Dr. Anil Aggrawal The man had been dead for five days! At least that is what the forensic pathologist Dr. Chandra would have everyone believe. The body was in an advanced state of putrefaction and there were maggots over the body. Every pathologist knows that flies lay eggs in and around natural orifices of the dead body a little after about 3 days and maggots hatch in another two days. So if a body is found full of maggots, it must be dead five days before. All evidence pointed towards Papi Singh as the killer. He and Bachan Singh, the dead man had been sworn enemies. They both ran rival gambling dens and when two months back Bachan Singh spat over Papi Singh after a drunken brawl, Papi Singh had sworn to get even with him. Everybody knew about that. The body of Bachan Singh was found of the night of 27th May. That put the time of death round about the night of 22nd May. Throughout the proceedings Papi Singh kept asserting he hadn't killed Bachan Singh. Some of his cronies swore they had seen Bachan Singh roaming around on the night of 23rd May with a lady of ill repute but nobody believed them. In fact nobody could think of suspecting Dr. Chandra's judgement. But the defence lawyer Basu was a shrewd man. He was a man of multiple interests and had his fingers in several pies. He studied the autopsy report in great detail and found that the main reason for Dr Chandra's judgement was the presence of maggots on the body. All the putrefactive changes plus the maggots put the time of death as five days, but the same changes minus the maggots put the time of death as merely three days and put the date of death as the night of 24th May. That suited his client Papi Singh, as he had left for Chandigarh on 24th morning by train making his alibi watertight. Everybody knew about it, and furthermore he had the train tickets to prove that. Papi Singh even had some minor scuffle with the guard of the train, and the guard remembered it. Even he could be called as a witness to say that Papi Singh had indeed made the journey to Chandigarh on the morning of 24th May. This was as good an alibi as could possibly be. In essence, Papi Singh could be saved from the gallows, if it could somehow be proved that Bachan Singh had died just 3 days before and not 5 days before as Dr. Chandra had indicated in his post-mortem report. But from where did the maggots emerge? That was the sixty-four thousand dollar question. The answer began emerging in Basu's mind a few days later. While reading the latest issue of the American Journal of Ornithology he read with interest the report of an Indian ornithologist who had reported finding a new species in India called Passeriformes peculiaris. The females of the species ate small seeds while the males ate eggs of insects. This in itself was not a very startling or amazing finding as the same situation is prevalent in many known species. Male anopheles for instance sucks flower juice while the female anopheles sucks blood. The real amazing find was that if by mistake the female bird swallowed the insect eggs which look very much like the seeds it ate, it would not be able to digest them. It would be able to keep the eggs in its gizzard as long as they did not hatch. But once the maggots hatched, they would start irritating the gizzard, and the bird would be forced to disgorge the maggots immediately. Still more surprisingly, the bird would search for decaying flesh, so that it could get nauseated strong enough and be able to evacuate its gizzard as completely as possible. The female of the species seemed to have a kind of aversion for these maggots, so to say. What Basu decided was this. Bachan Singh was killed on 24th night by someone else, and his body thrown away in the open. As the species Passeriformes peculiaris was rather abundant in the region where the body was found, some birds, which had earlier ingested the insect eggs accidentally, disgorged some of the maggots on the decaying flesh. In other words flies never laid eggs on the corpse. Quite simply, the body had not been dead long enough for that to happen. Maggots were directly disgorged upon it by the female Passeriformes peculiaris, and that put the time of death as just 3 days. Maggots were in fact only artifacts. But in the court everybody laughed at this outlandish conjecture. New reports had to be taken with a pinch of salt, they said. However the defence kept harping on the authenticity and reputation of the journal. Finally the judge appointed a committee of ornithologists, entomologists and forensic experts to look into the issue and give its report. The main task of course was to look into whether such a bird really disgorges maggots on decaying flesh or not. And when finally the report came after a month, it acquitted Papi Singh. It said laconically, "The girly bird retches the worm!" *** This story was published in Published in Spandan (Maulana Azad Medical College's Magazine) 1990-91 on Page 8 - Dr. Anil Aggrawal AIDS had struck planet Akashgriha too! It was AD 2073. Man had colonized about 500 odd planets of the Milky Way and more than 200 planets belonging to other galaxies of the universe. Planet Akashgriha was one of the farthest planets man had colonized. It was at a distance of 15 million light-years, located in a galaxy named Doosra Akash. Such a large distance meant that light with its fantastic velocity of about 2 lakh kilometres per second would have taken about 15 million years to reach that galaxy! Population on earth had increased beyond all projections. In late 1990s, the world population was increasing at a rate of 170 people a minute. According to these figures, scientists in 1990s calculated that the world population would reach about 12.5 billion in AD 2050. But the population increased much beyond those levels, thanks to the advent of interplanetary travel and colonization. In AD 2050, the total number of human beings anywhere in the universe were a staggering 125 billion! Of these, less than 4 billion were living on earth, meaning thereby that there were lesser number of human beings on earth in AD 2050, than there were in AD 1990! No scientist in 1990s could have imagined that. Effective antibiotics for AIDS had been discovered by an Indian scientist Dr. Shekhar in AD 2001. It had rightly been named Amrit Jal. Mankind on earth was free from AIDS by AD 2010. No one going to other planets used to carry Amrit Jal with him, because it was considered a useless accompaniment. But now the denizens of Akashgriha were in real trouble. They had no supply of Amrit Jal and AIDS was spreading fast on their planet. The disease must have entered the planet through interplanetary human travellers from other planets, where the disease was not yet extinct. An emergency message was sent to earth. Urgent supplies of Amrit Jal were requested on an urgent basis. The authorities on earth acted fast. There was one problem though. How to trasport Amrit Jal to Akashgriha? The enormous distance of that planet meant that even light at its fantastic speed would take 15 million years to reach that planet. Will this remedy be of any use at that time? Of course there was a way out. The medicine would be sent through the same route, through which humans had gone there to colonize those planets - through Black Holes. As we all know, Black holes are supercompressed stars, which distort the time and space around them to an unimaginable degree. If someone could enter a black hole and somehow manage to keep him intact, he would enter the so-called 4th dimension. Thus his travelling distance would be greatly shortened. An analogy could perhaps make things easier to understand. Cosider an ant resting of a big piece of paper, who wants to travel to the other side of the paper. The only way it can do so is to travel to the edge of the paper first and then travel all the way back to where it was stationed, but on the opposite side of the paper. All this involves useless travel. If the ant could somehow pierce the paper, which is equivalent to travelling in the 3rd dimension, it would not have to take all that useless journey. All it would do would be to pierce the paper and voilà, it would be on to its destination! Amrit Jal was sent to Akashgriha through the Black hole Maha Chakra, which was stationed just on the fringe of Milky Way. The inhabitants of Akashgriha were very grateful to earth and its authorities. However to the astonishment of all, the antibiotic failed to work. No matter how much antibiotic was given to the patient, it would have no effect on the virus. Nobody knew why the antibiotic was not working. All communications with earth, failed to find an answer. The batch was fresh, and had been tested in the laboratory on lab-cultivated viruses, before being dispatched to Akashgriha. Dr. Ghosh, who was in-charge of the whole operation contacted Tarun, the space chemist, to solve this riddle. Tarun heard the whole problem patiently, and then tested the antibiotic in his lab. Finally he smiled as he seemed to have found an answer. "Dr. Ghosh, a strange thing has happened during the transportation of Amrit Jal to this planet. We should have guessed it earlier actually. We transported the antibiotic through the black hole-isn't it? When you enter into a black hole you enter the forth dimension, right. Now when a particular thing is stationed in four dimensions, it can accidentally take a turn in the forth dimension and become a mirror image of itself. It is just as if you flipped an 8-anna coin on your table, so that it shows tails instead of heads. It is surely the same coin, but it shows a differet face to you. You could flip it back anytime. But imagine what would happen if you were prevented to flip it back. It would be an entirely new coin. A shopkeeper who has only seen the "heads" surface of the coin, may refuse to accept it when he sees a new surface - the "tails". Something similar has happened to Amrit Jal. It is a giant molecule, having more than 10,000 atoms of various kinds. It has its own 3-dimensional structure. When it is stationed in a 3-dimensional world, no matter how you rotate it, it remains the same molecule, because it can be rotated back to its original configuration. While it was being transported through the black hole, it made an accidental turn in the forth dimension. When it landed on our planet, it was in its new configuration. Since it is now in a 3-dimensional world again, it can not flip itself back to regain its original configuration. The result is that it is an entirely new molecule now, with entirely new physical and chemical properties. That is why it has failed to act against the AIDS virus." "Ingenious!", said Dr. Ghosh, " but what do we do now"? "I will have it sent to my space lab, orbiting round this planet. It is very close to a mini-black hole. We are actually using that mini-black hole to investigate the various properties of the forth dimension. The drug would be recycled through that mini-black hole. Once the antibiotic is in the mini-black hole, we will instruct our computer to give it a command to flip it back to its original configuration. That way when the drug emerges from the black hole, it should be its original self." Sure enough, the trick worked and the antibiotic started working on AIDS patients as effectively as it was supposed to. To prevent the recurrence of such an occurrence later on, Dr. Ghosh advised the authorities on earth to put this label on all future batches of the drug. " Warning! Transport carefully, if using a black hole as a short-cut to destination. The drug may alter during travel in the forth dimension. Preferably check for chemical properties at the destination. The authorities on earth assume no responsibility for damage, if the drug is accidentally altered during transportation due to carelessness." *** This story was originally published in Hindi as Black Hole ke us paar in the newspaper Aaj on 3 February 1996 on page 12 - Dr. Anil Aggrawal The man had been drowned for five days! At least that is what Dr. Khanna made me believe. Dr. Sunil Khanna as we all know is a leading forensic expert of our country and his opinion had to be respected. Well! before proceeding further, I shall explain what forensic experts are. They are doctors who, among other things, cut up dead bodies and try to find out the cause and manner of death. After we completed our graduation in medicine, we decided to devote our energies to the detection of crime, rather than to the routine, drab, utterly boring checking of festering sores, furred tongues, missed heart-beats, aberrant pulse rates and bizarre temperature patterns. Coming back to our case. The man was ultimately identified as one Ramlal. When the police made investigations, they came up with some rather dubious evidence that Ramlal had been killed by Jagga and then thrown in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Gujrat. It is well-known that in our country, criminals often kill their victims and then do dispose of the body by throwing it in this manner in deep ocean, river, lake or pond or some such similar body of water where it would be difficult to retrieve the body for quite some time. But it so happened that I personally knew Jagga and was quite convinced that Jagga could not kill anybody. I talked to Jagga, and after talking to him, I became all the more convinced that Jagga was not the killer. When I talked to Jagga, he categorically denied his hand in Ramlal's killing. He requested me to save him from the clutches of the law. Well then, if Ramlal had not been killed by Jagga, how had he died. I surmised that Ramlal must have gone to the sea shore for a bath and then must have been carried away by the tidal waves. He thus drowned accidentally. But I was told that Ramlal was an accomplished swimmer. If this was true how could he drown accidentally? Well, even accomplished swimmers have been known to drown in sea water. The tidal waves are really very strong, and can carry the person deep inside the ocean in no time. Before the person has time to think, he finds himself deep inside in the sea. The waves are so forceful that they do not allow him to swim back to the shore. The person gets exhausted and ultimately drowns. This is what should have happened to Ramlal. But the law wants solid proof. The courts do not pay attention to mere conjectures. If I wanted to save Jagga, I had to produce some real good scientific evidence in favour of my theory of accidental drowning. The police was bent upon implicating Jagga. They had even requested the court and taken him in police remand for a period of 15 days. I had to do something fast. I consulted Dr. Khanna and he suggested me that our question basically boiled down to proving that Ramlal's drowning was a case of antemortem drowning. If the police version was correct, then Ramlal's drowning was a case of post-mortem drowning. Before proceeding further, I must tell you a little bit about ante-mortem drowning and post-mortem drowning, in case you are unaware of it. This is an age old question in forensic medicine and one for which no satisfactory answer has been found yet. Basically ante-mortem drowning means that the person drowned when he was still alive. Post-mortem drowning on the other hand, means that the person was first killed by someone and then thrown in water to conceal crime. While post-mortem drowning almost certainly points to homicide, ante-mortem drowning could be anything; accidental, suicidal or homicidal, roughly in that order. It is rather difficult for someone to drown a conscious adult person with homicidal intent, so on the face of it, a case of ante-mortem drowning goes against homicidal drowning. I had to do an autopsy on the dead body of Ramlal and find out the cause and manner of his death. Now if I could prove that it was a case of antemortem drowning, it would go in favour of my theory that Ramlal had died accidentally while taking a swim. If on the other hand the autopsy showed it to be a case of post-mortem drowning, it would be a very strong evidence in favour of the police theory that Jagga had done him to death and then thrown away the dead body in the ocean. Of course we forensic scientists know that one of the best ways to differentiate between ante-mortem and post-mortem drowning is to conduct the so-called diatom test. I won't bother you with details, but just give you the outline of the principle of this test so that you could follow the story better. In all bodies of water- in rivers, lakes, ponds, oceans, even in tap water- are present some minute microscopic unicellular organisms called diatoms. These are microscopic algae with hard and highly refractile silicon shells. They come in all kinds of shapes; in fact about 15,000 different species are known. Under the microscope they all appear very beautiful and symmetrical, presenting rather a kaleidoscopic picture. Diatoms are quite abundant. A mere c.c. of water would contain literally thousands of diatoms. Now if a man drowns while he is still alive, he would make violent efforts to respire. Water would enter his respiratory passages along with respiratory air, and would reach the alveoli, the fine balloon like terminals of the lungs. Sure enough diatoms would also reach the alveoli along with the water. Due to the violent respiratory efforts, some of the alveoli would get ruptured causing the water (and the diatoms along with it) to be sucked in the tiny blood vessels lining the alveoli. From here they would find their way to the left chamber of the heart and from there the aorta would pump this water (and the diatoms along with it) to all the conceivable organs of the body- liver, spleen, brain, bone marrow, everywhere. In case the person was thrown in the water when he was already dead, neither his lungs, nor his heart would be functioning. Thus in the first place almost no diatoms would enter the lungs. If due to sheer pressure of water, some diatoms did enter the lungs, they would not be able to penetrate the alveolar wall. Further, for the sake of argument if we assume that the water pressure was enough to break some of the alveoli, and some diatoms did enter the alveolar blood vessels, they couldn't be pumped to all the systemic organs for the simple reason that the heart would not be beating. Thus a simple test to prove a case of antemortem or postmortem drowning was simply to look for diatoms in some internal organ, say liver or spleen or brain. If you found diatoms there, it was a case of antemortem drowning; if you didn't find any, it was of course a case of postmortem drowning. When I conducted a post mortem on the body of Ramlal, I found all his internal body organs literally infested with diatoms. Diatoms were to be found everywhere- in his liver, spleen, brain, bone-marrow, everywhere. This naturally made me very jubilant, as this proved beyond doubt that my theory was correct and Ramlal had indeed died while he was alive. But when I contacted Dr. Khanna with these findings, he seemed doubtful. He reminded me that the diatom test was in fact challengeable. Well, I will digress for a moment and tell you why he said so. It so happens that the diatoms are rather ubiquitous; they are present in all bodies of water- even in the tap water as I have already said. Now imagine a situation when a person has been drinking tap water all his life. Suppose he has an ulcer in his stomach (or for that matter, even some minor abrasion anywhere in his gastrointestinal tract) the diatoms would be entering his circulation all his life and be pumped throughout his internal organs. The internal organs of such a person would show diatoms irrespective of the cause of his death. Such a person might die of, say, electrocution and yet his internal body organs would show diatoms. Dr. Khanna rightly told me that my findings could be challenged by a well-informed prosecution. I could see his point, especially as I knew the prosecution was taking the help of Dr. George Paul, another well-known medico-legal expert of our country. Certainly Dr. George Paul, when called to the court would rip my theory apart. What should I do then? This question gave me many restless moments. Then like a flash of lightning, a possible solution crossed my mind. I recalled that a few days back, there had been a big oil spill off the coast of Gujrat. A big oil tanker had been bringing crude petroleum somewhere from the Gulf, when just off the coast of Gujrat, a crack appeared on the bottom of the tanker and many thousand tonnes of crude oil leaked into the sea. This incident had been the talk of several environmentalists, especially as this was causing threat to marine life. Well, if there was crude oil in the sea water, and if Ramlal was breathing at the time of immersion (as I believed), then some petroleum must have seeped into his circulation, through the same route as the diatoms would normally take in a breathing man. This would result in traces of petroleum being present in his internal body organs. If I found traces of petroleum in, say, liver or spleen, I could prove my point beyond doubt. In that case, Dr. George Paul was definitely going to have a hard time explaining how it reached there, otherwise than what I was suggesting. We all know that petroleum is not a normal constituent of the body and no sane person drinks petroleum, so indeed there was no conceivable way for the petroleum to reach the internal body organs other than through ante-mortem drowning. This naturally made me very jubilant, and I used our newly acquired Gas-Liquid Chromatograph to determine petroleum in Ramlal's body organs. But contrary to my expectations, Ramlal's internal body organs failed to show any trace of petroleum. What had gone wrong? Well, Dr. Khanna suggested that may be I was wrong from the very beginning. Ramlal was indeed killed by Jagga first and then thrown in sea water. Otherwise why didn't I find petroleum in Ramlal's internal organs? Failure to find petroleum there meant only one thing- that Ramlal was not respiring at the time of his immersion in water. But I refused to believe Dr. Khanna. Something deep inside my heart told me that Jagga was innocent. But if he was innocent why was I not getting any traces of petroleum in Ramlal's internal body organs? That was the sixty-four thousand dollar question. Soon I forgot the question anyway. Meanwhile Dr. Khanna and I jointly started an ICMR project in which we intended to find out the etiology of solvent abuse or glue sniffing. It is a poorly understood phenomenon, in which the addict gets an inordinate pleasure in sniffing various hydrocarbons. Most commonly sniffed substances include various glues, paint thinners, gasoline, chloroform, carbon tetrachloride and so on. We were trying to find a biological cause for this phenomenon. It so happened that one day I was talking casually to Dr. S.K.Gupta, Professor of Biochemistry in our college. He was working on some new cellular enzymes, and his work was being internationally appreciated. While talking to him, suddenly a weird thought crossed my mind, and I ran back to my department, silently crying "Eureka", much in Archimedean fashion. Thank God I had my clothes on! I retrieved some of Ramlal's tissues I still had in bottles, and brought them back to Dr. Gupta. I asked him to look for a specific cellular enzyme, which had not been discovered till then. Dr. Gupta, as is his wont, told me I was a fool, but I let that pass, and asked him to look for that enzyme anyway. But after a few days, Dr. Gupta was quite surprised that I was right. He could indeed find the enzyme I had asked him to look for. In fact he reported that the cells were very rich in that enzyme. I know you are getting curious. What was that enzyme, you may ask. You will laugh at what I will tell you, but you can confirm it from Dr. Gupta who has lab reports to confirm my statement. In fact even he would not have believed me, had he not found the enzyme himself. This was an entirely new enzyme. An enzyme which metabolizes hydrocarbons! Dr. Gupta suggested that we should call it Petroleum dehydrogenase. Dr. Gupta found 50 microgrammes of Petroleum dehydrogenase per c.c. of tissue, which is quite high as you can understand. A minor mutation in Ramlal's body gave rise to that enzyme. He was a mutant in other words. Well, how does this fact fit in our story. I will tell you shortly. But first things first. While talking to Dr. Gupta, I was subconsciously working on my own multifarious problems and suddenly it occurred to me that the solution to my problems lay in the realm of biochemistry. Perhaps Ramlal had an enzyme in his tissues which metabolized any petroleum that had seeped in his body cells during drowning. Now we were indeed able to find that enzyme in Ramlal's body cells. This changed our investigation much in our favour. I will tell you what happened. Ramlal was indeed breathing at the time of immersion. Some petroleum did seep inside his circulation and got deposited in his internal organs as explained earlier. Molecular death, as we all know occurs a few hours after the somatic death. Somatic death is the time when a doctor pronounces a person dead. But we all know that molecular activity continues for a few hours after that. During the interval between the somatic and the molecular death, the enzyme Petroleum dehydrogenase metabolized any traces of petroleum that had seeped in Ramlal's body tissues. That was the reason why we did not find any traces of petroleum in Ramlal's body despite the fact that he died while still breathing. You might say this is spurious reasoning. It is quite possible that there was no petroleum in Ramlal's tissues in the first place. Merely the fact that the enzyme Petroleum dehydrogenase had been discovered in Ramlal's tissues does not necessarily mean that this was responsible for the absence of crude petroleum in his tissues. This was certainly one of the possibilities but the possibility of crude petroleum being absent in Ramlal's tissues from the very beginning could not be ruled out. I knew if confronted with my new findings, Dr. George Paul would certainly come up with this question. So I decided to play one up on him from the very beginning. I took out Ramlal's preserved tissues once again, and looked for the metabolites of Petroleum in them. I had worked out its metabolites in detail, and one of them was 2-Butyne. In my renewed analysis with my Gas-Liquid Chromatograph, I looked not for petroleum but for its metabolites, mainly 2-Butyne. You can perhaps imagine my joy when I found fairly rich quantities of 2-Butyne in Ramlal's tissues. Earlier when I was not specifically looking for it, I met with failure, but now I knew what I had to look for and sure enough I got it. All of us know that 2-Butyne is not a normal constituent of body cells. Thus the only way it could have accumulated in the tissues is through metabolism of crude petroleum by the enzyme Petroleum dehydrogenase. This was the final vindication of my theory. Of course if Ramlal had survived longer, even 2-Butyne would have got metabolized further to carbon dioxide and water. Petroleum dehydrogenase was capable of metabolizing all hydrocarbons down to their very basic elements. I knew I had killed two birds with one stone. I enquired from his family members and was quite satisfied to find out that Ramlal was a glue sniffer. In fact I was quite sure of this fact when I was submitting his tissues to Dr. Gupta. I will tell you now what happens in a glue sniffer. These glue sniffers are all mutants. They have the enzyme Petroleum dehydrogenase in their body cells. Petroleum dehydrogenase is able to metabolize not only petroleum products but all hydrocarbons, liberating a good amount of energy in the process. These glue sniffers sometime during the course of their life discover accidentally that sniffing hydrocarbons gives them a renewed sense of well-being. What actually happens is that they are able to metabolize the hydrocarbons quite effectively which gives them short bursts of energy, which they construe as a sense of rejuvenation or well-being. They ultimately get addicted to the hydrocarbons. So now Dr. Khanna and I had hit upon an entirely new and novel theory of glue-sniffing. Initially Dr. Khanna was quite hesitant about accepting it, but I am happy to tell you that since my fateful meeting with Dr. Gupta, I have submitted blood samples of more than 50 glue sniffers to Dr. Gupta and he has found Petroleum dehydrogenase in all of them, which is a good confirmation of my theory! Thanks to Ramlal's death mystery, we found out a solution to an age old forensic question. Oh, yes, I must also tell you that the court admitted my findings and released Jagga. But the thing that satisfied me most, was that when Dr. Khanna read our paper on glue sniffing at The International Conference on Drug Addiction at Tokyo next year, it was adjudged the best paper of the conference! *** This story was published in Spandan, 1995-96 on Pages 13-17 - Dr. Anil Aggrawal When I was called at Sarita's house, she was already dead! To be sure I didn't expect anything better. They don't call forensic pathologists when people are still alive. The very fact they had called me, meant that someone had died. That's in our fate you see. Sometimes I take perverse pleasure in describing myself as one who is called in when all doctors have failed! As you can plainly see I do not have any wrong intentions, but the people tend to get misguided somehow. Whenever I say this, I get appreciative glances from everyone around. I frankly do not know what they make of my statement. Although I love forensic pathology, and would love to fiddle around with dead bodies, some forensic pathologists do want to shed off the image of the "doctors of the dead", and want to do some clinical work. Not that forensic medicine does not provide a scope for this. In fact there is enough scope for this. For instance there is a whole lot of toxicology, which we can dabble with. We can treat patients suffering from poisons, and can devise new treatments for them. But as I told you earlier, I would rather fiddle around with dead bodies. I love dissection you see. I want to see the intricacies of the human body, and no one can do that better than a forensic pathologist- or perhaps an anatomist. But Dr. Sunil Khanna, professor of forensic medicine in our department does not share my views. He is constantly seeking to excel in the clinical sciences. He has several patents to his credit, and his recent research concentrates on finding an effective treatment of some poisonings, especially poisonings by asphyxiants such as carbon monoxide. In fact he has contacted me several times with a request to start a joint project on this, but I have always declined it, as I have no aptitude for clinical work at all. But of course I am taking interest in his work and am aware of all the developments he is making. But coming back to our case. The moment I reached the spot, I was inundated with the usual questions. How had she died.... who killed her.... was her death suicidal or homicidal and so on and so forth. Let me tell you a few details about Sarita. She had married only a year ago. Her husband Ramesh was a petty clerk in a private company, but they were carrying on very well. Of course there was a dowry problem in the family in the beginning, but everything had settled by now, and apparently the couple was living together in good harmony. But the police would have nothing of this. They cooked up a theory that Sarita had been burnt by her in-laws. To be sure they were in a kind of bind. According to recent legal amendments, if a bride dies within 7 years of marriage, the case has to be registered as a murder. To the legally minded, I may add that the relevant section is 304B of Indian Penal Code, and it is entitled "Dowry Death". It was introduced as an amendment in 1986 when dowry death cases had increased to enormous proportions. In all such cases the presumption is that the husband or some of his relative has murdered the bride, and the onus of proving himself innocent lies on the husband or his relative. This is a lot tougher situation than the normal. Normally a person is deemed to be innocent and the prosecution has to prove otherwise. When the presumption is the other way round and you have to prove yourself innocent, things become lot tougher. This was the situation in which Ramesh and his family found themselves. It so happened that I personally knew Ramesh. I also knew that there had been some minor dowry problem in the house, but it had settled. In any case, I was not prepared to believe that he or any of his relatives could go to the extent of killing Sarita for bringing insufficient dowry. Of course there are people who do it, but Ramesh definitely was not among them. I talked to Ramesh in isolation, and took him in confidence. He told me that Sarita was rather a sentimental girl. She used to get depressed very soon. Recently the results of her MA exams had been declared and she had failed miserably. She used to remain too depressed after that and that was perhaps the reason she had burnt herself. Sounded like a fair reason to me. Sentimental people often do take their lives for petty reasons. I am personally aware of several youngsters who have committed suicide when they could not get admission to a medical or an engineering college. But there was a snag. Such people often leave a suicide note, and in Sarita's case, no suicide note had been found. I asked about this from Ramesh and he couldn't explain about it to me either. Well, I let it leave at that. Although suicide notes are usually found in suicidal deaths, they are not invariably found in all suicide cases. In any case, I made up my mind to defend Ramesh. When I examined the scene of death, it did not appear to be too disturbed to me. You see, things like turned up chairs, fallen flower pots, rumpled up bedsheets and so on. Such a set up often points to violent struggle having taken place soon before death, which in turn could strongly point to homicide. Since the scene was too "clean", I made up my mind that it indeed had to be taken as a case of suicide. Of course there are snags to this too. Murderers can set up a scene after having committed a murder. They can place everything back in order so that no one gets other ideas. But in such cases, I can often read it in murderer's faces. This is due to my long experience you see. I could see none of that in Ramesh or his family member's faces. But you would surely agree, I couldn't defend Ramesh in a court of law on hunches. I had to produce sound scientific evidence to be produced in court. But what was it going to be? I must admit, I had no idea of that at that point in time. Fortunately for me (and my case), the police had formed a rather weird theory of murder. They asserted that Sarita had first been killed by Ramesh and her family members by some means, such as gagging and then had been burnt by them, to give it the color of suicidal burning. Normally of course bride burnings occur when the bride is still alive. The traditional theory is that the mother-in-law comes surreptitiously from behind, pours kerosene on the hapless girl, and then someone lights a match. You might tend to believe that the police was foolish in building up this theory in the first place, but I wouldn't blame them. Sarita had died at about 11 am on Sunday, when every one is up and about. If they had developed a theory of traditional bride burning, some of their neighbors would of course had heard her cries, and other sounds of scuffle, but no one had heard such sounds. Indeed this was another factor which helped convince me towards a suicidal theory. Since no one had heard her cries, the police were a lot better off theorizing that Sarita was already dead when she was burnt. How could any forensic pathologist prove or disprove police theory? Gagging as we all know, doesn't leave any remarkable tell-tale signs of its own, especially when the gagging cloth has been removed from the mouth, and the body has been burnt subsequently. So an autopsy was not likely to prove with any conviction that the death had occurred because of gagging. In such circumstances, the only way the police theory could be proved was by showing that Sarita's was a case of post-mortem burning. On the contrary, if Ramesh and his family members' theory of suicide was correct, then Sarita's was a case of antemortem burning. So basically the question boiled down to this: Was this a case of antemortem or postmortem burning? I wouldn't bother you with details, but in a single line would tell you what these dreadful terms mean. An antemortem burning refers to a case of burning when the person was still alive, while postmortem burning refers to a case where the person was already dead when his body caught fire. While post-mortem burning almost certainly points to homicide, a case of ante-mortem burning could be anything- accidental, suicidal or homicidal- roughly in that order. There are some very clever ways to differentiate antemortem from postmortem burning. One of them - and one on which I rely heavily - is the finding of carboxyhemoglobin in the blood. During burning of any carbonaceous object, especially if the burning has taken place in closed surroundings, lot of carbon monoxide is produced. If the victim was alive at the time of burning he would be respiring and would invariably inhale some of the carbon monoxide (or CO for short). CO binds very strongly to hemoglobin to form carboxyhemoglobin. This bond is almost 200 times stronger than that made with oxygen. Because of this, carboxyhemoglobin does not "break up" even after death and can be detected by forensic pathologists. On the contrary, if the victim was already dead at the time of burning, he wouldn't be respiring and would thus not inhale any carbon monoxide. What does this piece of information lead us to? Simple. Do an analysis of the blood of the victim, and try to find out if there are appreciable amounts of carbon monoxide in his blood or not. By "appreciable amounts", I mean about 15-20% or more. People living in cities do tend to have small amounts of carbon monoxide in their blood anyway. With the vehicular pollution showing a steady rise - outdoing even our national economic growth rate- we couldn't expect anything better. Cities like Delhi would beat Hitler's gas chambers hands down any day. But I am straying away from the main line again. Let us come back to it. I brought Sarita's body to my mortuary, took some blood from her iliac vessels and got down to work straightaway. I almost certainly expected to find carboxyhemoglobin in her blood, but try hard as I would, I couldn't find even traces of it. I tried again, with more sophisticated methods, with spectrophotometer, with everything else I could lay my hands on, but try hard as I would, I couldn't find any carboxyhemoglobin. As you can imagine, this had grave repercussions for Ramesh and his family. Not finding carboxyhemoglobin in Sarita's blood could only mean one thing- that she was already dead at the time of burning. And that raised a very strong accusing finger towards Ramesh and his family. To tell you the truth, the finding did send me in a bout of confusion. I tried hard to explain the absence of carboxyhemoglobin but couldn't, except assuming that she was already dead at the time of burning. If I assumed her to be alive at the time of burning, there was no way I could explain the absence of carboxyhemoglobin. I was sitting confused in my anteroom thinking over the problem while the body lay in the mortuary. At five O' clock, the attendant came and informed me that he was leaving. I told that I would shut the department and asked him to leave. I came home and continued racking my brains over the problem. The next day was a public holiday and then there was a Sunday. After that a public holiday once again, made a continuous break of three days. It was only on the morning of the fourth day- the day when I was to go to the department once again- that I realized that I had left Sarita's body on the mortuary table itself! I should have transported the dead body to the cold room before leaving the mortuary. The mortuary attendants always do that. But on that Friday evening, I had stayed in the mortuary longer than usual; the mortuary attendant had left and I had promised him that I would do the needful before leaving the department. But I am not used to closing the mortuary. Coupled with this was the fact that I was quite puzzled that evening. That was the reason, I forgot to put back Sarita's dead body in the cold room. It was horrifying to even think of the consequences. The body would be badly putrefied now. In this summer heat, three days could play havoc with a dead body. At best, it would be a swollen, greenish-black putrid and badly smelling mass of organic matter. Of course things could be a lot worse. There could be maggots crawling all over the body for instance. What worried me was not the bad state of the body I would be confronted with, but that the putrefaction would blot out all medical evidence pointing to the mystery of her death. There was absolutely no hope of unearthing any more useful evidence now. With the worst fears in my mind, I opened the door of the mortuary, and expected a strong gush of revolting smell to hit my nose. I was mentally prepared for it. But nothing of that sort happened. I looked at the table where I had left Sarita's body, and was nonplussed to see the body there with almost no putrefactive change! Now I do believe in wonders, but not in wonders of this sort. I mean the ones, which defy logic and science. Sarita's body was lying there out in the open on the mortuary table and had not putrefied in the least! This was a wonder I could not believe. Something extraordinary had happened. But what could have happened? I started thinking about the problem, but couldn't come to an answer. Finally I took some of her muscle tissue and took it to Dr. S.K. Gupta, professor of biochemistry in our own college. Everybody knows he is a genius, and I personally believe he is made of Noble Prize stuff. In fact it is a mystery to me why he has not been able to get it till now. Well let us not digress from the main point. I submitted the tissue to him, and asked him to look for anything abnormal. I was a little surprised when two days later, he told me he had found abnormally high amounts of formaldehyde in the tissues. In fact so high was the amount that he asked me if I had preserved the body in formalin. I surely hadn't, but perhaps Jamman Singh, the attendant who left the mortuary on that Friday evening had done it before leaving. That was perhaps the reason, the body had not putrefied. I went to Jamman Singh and asked if he had sprinkled formalin over the dead body before leaving, but he informed me he hadn't done so. Why would he do so, when we have an excellent facility of a cold room? This confused me a lot more- and I had one more problem on my hands- to explain the presence of formalin in Sarita's body. Sarita surely hadn't ingested formalin. She had no access to it, and it couldn't have been given to her by Ramesh and his family members as a homicidal poison. Formalin has a strong smell and a very acrid taste, and because of these properties, it is a very poor homicidal poison. All homicidal poisons must be tasteless and odorless. If you tried to kill me by putting formalin in my milk, I would know somebody had put something in it and I wouldn't drink it. Of course I would do so, if you put arsenic trioxide in it, because it is colorless, odorless and tasteless. So if you wanted to kill me you would be much better off with arsenic trioxide than with formalin. The problem before me was how formalin reached her tissues. I thought for the problem for a few hours, and then a possible solution flashed in my brain, like the stroke of a lightning. Well, the train of my reasoning was this. There should have been carbon monoxide in Sarita's blood and muscles, but it wasn't there. And there should have been no formalin in her muscles, but it was there. Was it possible that carbon monoxide in her body had somehow converted to formaldehyde? Well, chemically it is not impossible. Formaldehyde is chemically HCHO, while carbon monoxide is CO. Plainly and simply, if CO can combine with water - which is quite abundant in human body- it can extract two hydrogen atoms from there and get converted to HCHO, while releasing the single oxygen atom free. Theoretically it is possible, but can it occur actually? I am no chemist, and surely I did not know the answer to this. To find the solution to this, I had to see no farther than my own home. My wife is a professor of chemistry (besides being a great cook, just in case you are reading it), and one fine day when I returned from college, the first thing I asked her was if that was possible. You can do that, she told me, but it is not simple. You have to have high temperatures and pressures and costly catalysts. Trickier is the situation in a human body- dead or living- where you have no catalysts, no high temperatures, no high pressures and so on. Why don't we have catalysts in the body, I asked her. Catalysts are not merely the domain of chemists. We do have our own catalysts. They are the various enzymes in the blood and in the body cells. And they can do seemingly impossible jobs. Like burning glucose so slowly and deftly that the body does not get burnt. Instead a fairly equable temperature is maintained. Is there any catalyst with the chemists which could even come anywhere near it? Of course she did not have to answer that, because she had gone to the kitchen to make a cup of tea for me, but her statement had already set me thinking. I couldn't kid myself with the weird notion, that an enzyme existed in human body which could convert carbon monoxide to formaldehyde, but what I came up with was the thought that perhaps Sarita was a mutant and such an enzyme existed in her body. Now why would such an enzyme creep up in the human body, you may ask. We all know that mutations do keep occurring in our bodies constantly, and they can lead to the formation of new proteins and enzymes. That is how evolution has occurred. Most mutations are of course deleterious to the body, but some are quite useful. Take for instance the enzyme which could convert carbon monoxide to formaldehyde in a body. Both are poisons, but the body finds it harder to deal with carbon monoxide, especially because it sticks so strongly to hemoglobin. On the contrary, formaldehyde is much easier for the body to tackle. This mutation could be quite helpful to Sarita if she had survived, and perhaps had been doing good to her all her life. It is a built in mechanism to protect you from the carbon monoxide of this increasingly polluting city. But we are again digressing from the main issue. The main point was whether or not Sarita had such an enzyme in her tissues. If I could positively prove that, only then could I simultaneous solve all my problems. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I got convinced that this indeed was the solution. In science, the best solution is that which simultaneously solves several problems, however weird that may appear in the first instance. And once again I found myself in the lab of Dr. S.K. Gupta, but with a different request this time. He is an expert in cellular enzymes, and if there was one person on earth who could help me, it was he. I asked him to look at the muscle tissues once again and tell me if there was an unusual enzyme in it, especially one which had the property to convert carbon monoxide to formaldehyde. Now Dr. Gupta knows for sure that I am a little soft in the head, but he also knows that I can turn violent, if my genuine hunches are not attended to. They have to be either proved or disproved. So despite thinking that I was turning senile, he preferred to keep quite and got to work. He was in for a surprise. He did find an enzyme next day with exactly the same properties that I had predicted. It could effectively convert carbon monoxide to formaldehyde. He preferred to call it carbon monoxide reductase. He also told me that it was a completely unexpected finding- one that would stun the biochemical world. All my problems were solved now. I now knew that Sarita was a mutant. There was a unique enzyme in her blood, which converted the carbon monoxide of her blood in formalin, and that is why her body was so remarkably preserved. The presence of carbon monoxide in her blood meant that she was alive at the time of burning, and this in turn meant that she had committed suicide. One could of course argue that there was no carbon monoxide in her body from the beginning, but if we assumed that, we could not explain the presence of formaldehyde in her blood and muscles. So we had to assume that there was carbon monoxide in her blood to start with which got converted to formaldehyde. The court accepted my findings and conclusions and set Ramesh and his relatives free. But the biggest surprise was when I found that Dr. Khanna had lapped up my findings and was trying to make an useful drug aimed to treat carbon monoxide poisoning. He got Dr. Gupta to decode the chemical structure of this new enzyme and got him to make samples of it in his laboratory. He is trying to give injections of artificially prepared carbon monoxide reductase to patients of carbon monoxide poisonings and see if it helps them. The initial reports are encouraging. He has published several papers on this. Some have been written with me as a co-author. I wrote some on my own, and some with Dr. Gupta. I am giving you the references for some of the more interesting papers. Interested readers may look for details in the said references. 1. Khanna S.K., Aggrawal Anil. The role of carbon monoxide reductase in carbon monoxide poisonings. Journal of the American Medical Association 1998; 247: 1471-1475 2. Aggrawal Anil, Gupta S.K. The story of the discovery of Carbon monoxide reductase. Medical History 1999; 145: 365-377 I hope these papers would satisfy the curiosity of the more scientific minded people. But I must tell you that the thing that surprised me most was when Dr. Gupta was called by the European Academy of Biochemists to give them a series of lectures on the new enzyme, and Dr. Khanna got a call from the American Medical Association to tell them of his latest developments on the treatment of carbon monoxide poisoning. As for me, I was being burdened with more autopsies! Well, I asked for it!! *** This story was published in Spandan'97 (1996-97) , on Pages 53-57 - Dr. Anil Aggrawal When I was called at the factory, Kanti had already died. Well, I didn’t expect anything better. I am called only at such unfortunate moments. To be sure, I was called neither by the factory owner, nor the dead man’s colleagues, but by the police! As you can perhaps understand, forensic pathologists are mostly called by the police, who want them to decipher the language of the dead. Let me tell you the story. Kanti was a 36 year old technician, who worked as an electrician in a relatively small setup "DC Industries". The factory as well as the administrative office was located in Ghaziabad. The group comprised of about 100 people and was engaged in making some industrial gadgets. The management was not responsive to the workers’ genuine needs, to say the least. There were many safety hazards in the factory, which were dangerous to the life of the workers. The workers had raised this issue several times before the management, but it always turned a deaf ear towards their genuine demands. One of their genuine demands was to get the electrical installations renovated. Several points in the electrical installations were corroded and posed a serious threat of short-circuiting. The management had not shown any interest whatsoever in renovating the installations. It was perhaps understandable that the management didn’t worry about the lives of the workers, but what was most surprising was that such a defective and outdated electrical installation could lead to fires resulting in destruction of their own property too, and yet the management had not shown any interest. Well, that shouldn’t worry us for the moment. There are all types of people in this world, and we have got to learn to live with them. But let us get on with the story. On 13th March, one day after Holi (an important festival of Hindus, during which people throw colors at one another. Also known as the "festival of colors", it is usually celebrated in March every year), Kanti came to work as usual. He started work on a heavy duty electrical appliance. I was shown that electrical appliance. It looked like a giant dinosaur but more than that, I couldn’t make any head or tail of it. But what was important for me as a forensic pathologist was that it worked on heavy tension- I was told, it required 20,000 volts to work. Kanti started work at about 10 am. He was working on that appliance standing on a shaft, about 15 feet above the floor. At about 11 am, some labourers heard a heavy thud. When they rushed to the spot, they found Kanti dead. There was no doubt about that. Thus nobody felt the need to call the doctor. They called the police instead. Meanwhile the factory was agog with rumours. The management had killed him, because he stood for workers’ demands...he got electrocuted while working on that defective gagdet...some stooge of the management had pushed him down....and so on. But the story that was doing the rounds most vigorously and with most conviction was that he had got electrocuted while working on that defective gadget. By the time, I had arrived, some labourers had even started shouting slogans against the management. One representative of the management, quite nervously was showing the police around. Most others were sitting like frightened does in their offices. Some were probably even contacting their lawyers. The management’s version was that the gadget was fully safe, and Kanti had died because of a fall from the height. According to them, he was a very careless worker and was always prone to accident because of this carelessness. He probably fell from that lofty shaft because he was not working carefully. By the time, I arrived at the factory, two major conjectures regarding Kanti's cause of death had emerged. One, floated by the workers was that Kanti had been electrocuted by that defective gadget. The other floated by the management, who undoutedly had been doctored by their lawyers by that time, was that Kanti had fallen from height due to carelessness and had died. What the police wanted to know from me naturally was how Kanti had died actually. Did he die of electrocution or did he die of fall from height? We pathologists have a way –if not foolproof- of knowing if a person had died from either. If he had died due to electrocution, he must show an electric entry and exit mark. And if he died due to fall from height, he must show fractures, head injury and so on. I immediately got to work, and started postmortem on Kanti’s body. But try as hard as I would, I could not see a single electrocution mark on his body. Now don’t begin to think that this excluded electrocution. In fact electrocution deaths are quite tricky. If you find electric entry mark (for the more technically minded, it is commonly known as the Joule burn), you could perhaps say with certainty that the person died of electrocution, but if you don’t find any electrocution mark, you can not exclude electrocution. One of the situations in which you don’t get electrocution mark despite having been electrocuted is if the body’s area of contact with the electricity was very wide. There are a number of other situations too, in which you don’t get electrocution mark, but let us not go in unnecessary details. What is important to appreciate here is that the absence of electrocution mark didn’t rule out electrocution. A word about the other post-mortem findings on the body. Kanti showed a long linear fracture of the left parietal bone and there was an underlying extradural hematoma. You might think that this clearly indicated that he died of fall from height. But to opine on such matters is quite tricky, especially when such matters as compensation and criminal negligence on the part of administration are in question. If a person gets electrocuted and falls immediately thereafter, he would get injuries as shown by Kanti, yet it would be fallacious to say that he died due to fall from height. The fall occurred in the first place because of the electrocution, and if you don’t mention that in the post mortem report, the management could get undue advantage of that report. So you can quite easily understand that I was keen on knowing how he actually fell- from his own carelessness or due to sudden jolt from the electrocution. The workers were obviously very agitated and they wanted to see the word "electrocution" somewhere in the postmortem report. Well, if one would change the report merely from workers’ pressure, he wouldn’t be doing justice, but in this case I was myself very much convinced that Kanti had indeed been electrocuted. My belief was substantiated when I called an expert electrician on my own and had that equipment checked on which Kanti was working. The electrician gave me the report that the equipment was indeed faulty and it was very liable to give shocks to people working on it. In fact he said, that it should have been replaced years ago. I didn’t hand over the dead body to the relatives for cremation, because I wanted to think more about the problem. When his wife, brother and other relatives came to me for the dead body, I requested them to let me have the body for a couple of days more, so I could think about the problem in detail. Since finding out the true cause of death was in their own interest, they understood and let me keep the body. I placed the body in the cold room, came home and kept thinking about the problem in the night. When I slept, I kept dreaming of the metallic gray hue of the skin of Kanti’s brother who had come to collect his dead body. There was no doubt that his skin was of a distinct metallic gray hue, but I didn’t know why that color should trouble me in my dreams. It was so disturbing that finally I got up from my bed, had a stroll in the park outside my house and then after about half an hour came back and slept. I had much better sleep after that. Next day I called Kanti’s brother to my office. His name was Shashi and he was about 44 years of age. I looked at his skin more closely and found that it did have a distinct metallic gray hue. I couldn’t make much of it. Without having the faintest idea of what I was doing, I started questioning him of his past life. What caught my fancy was that Shashi was suffering from diabetes for the past 7-8 years of his life. A vague idea began emerging in my mind. I took him to my examination table and palpated his liver. As I had expected, it was enlarged. Things began becoming clearer in my mind now. I wouldn’t insult your intelligence by telling that a person who has skin with a metallic gray hue, an enlarged liver and diabetes is most probably suffering from a peculiar disease. They used to call it bronzed diabetes at a time, but now it is more commonly known as Hemochromatosis. It is about 5-10 times more common in the males than females, and may be both genetic and acquired. Kanti was living in a joint family, and most males of his family showed one or the other symptom of hemochromatosis. Some had testicular atrophy, some arthropathies, some cardiac involvements and still some others such symptoms as loss of body hair. In short every male of Kanti’s family was suffering from hemochromatosis. I wanted to be doubly sure and had their serum ferritin levels done. Now as you know, in normal males, the serum ferritin levels should be of the range of 10-200 micrograms per litre, but these individuals all had more than 4000 micrograms per litre! Some even had as high as 6000 micrograms per Litre of serum. There was no doubt now that they were all suffering from hemochromatosis. I went to Kanti’s house and looked at their cooking utensils. As I had expected, they were all made of raw iron, and that is where they were getting their excess iron from. You might wonder why the females do not suffer from hemochromatosis. As far as I know, no one knows about it, but there are various conjectures, not the least impressive of which is the one which holds womens’ regular menstruation responsible for this. But let us not digress from the main story. Now I think I am a reasonably good forensic pathologist, and I know how a person’s internal organs should look like, if he were suffering from hemochromatosis. It was only reasonable to think that Kanti was also suffering from hemochromatosis. If this were so, he should have had an enlarged nodular liver and it should have had a strong ochre color. But it showed neither of the two features! That is what surprised me. To be sure, even his pancreas should be showing an ochre color, but I didn’t remember his internal organs having any color other than normal. But I could reverify as I had his body in my mortuary. I went to the mortuary once again, took out Kanti’s body which I had preserved and had a look at his organs once again...No. There was no abnormality at all of the liver or of the pancreas. You might think that I should not have worried about that at that moment, as my primary aim was to find out the correct cause of his death. Whether he showed signs of hemochromatosis or not wouldn’t have helped me one way or the other. You are perhaps right, but I have this silly habit of getting to the root of all such peculiar problems, even if they have no bearing. To me they are like solving a crossword puzzle, and that’s why I kept racking my brains about it. I was not sure why he was not showing any of the classical findings of hemochromatosis. As we all know, in hemochromatosis, the excess iron is deposited in the liver, pancreas and the heart. In the spleen, kidney and skin the iron levels increase to about 5 times normal, in the heart 25 times, and in liver and pancreas, as much as 50-100 times than normal! I had his whole organs in my custody and I got down to work immediately. To my utter frustration, the iron levels in all his organs were completely normal. You can imagine my frustration at this point. I went to Kanti’s house and asked his wife if he was eating food along with the rest of his family, and she said yes. That broke my last hope of solving the puzzle. If he was having food from the same source, undoubtedly he was ingesting extra iron along with the rest of his family. But while all his family members –especially males- were showing signs of hemochromatosis, Kanti was cocking a snook at me even after his death by not showing the minimal signs of that disease. Where was his extra iron going? I was so frustrated by this time, that I began having the wildest ideas. What about getting his total body iron done? There is a costly technique- Neutron Activation Analysis or NAA in short- by which the total body iron can be estimated. Now if you love me, don’t ask me what this technique is all about. But I can assure you it is a genuine technique by which total body iron can be estimated. You would have to take my word for it, or if you don’t believe me go to any physicist and ask him about this technique. He will tell you the mechanics of this in great detail. NAA is obviously not available in our college and for this I had to take the help of National Physical Laboratory. When I approached the Director of NPL with this strange request, he thought I had gone mad. Perhaps I had, but at that time, my biggest concern was to have his total body iron done by whatever means. When he didn’t agree to my request, I approached Dr. Bal Phondke, Director of the National Institute of Science Communication (NISCOM in short). I am doing a little monthly series called "Poison Sleuths"; for their magazine "Science Reporter" for quite some time now and have good rapport with him. Before this I was doing yet another series "Crime Busters" for the same magazine and obviously had developed great ties with him. I asked Dr. Phondke to phone the director of NPL and do this little favour for me. To tell you the truth even Dr. Phondke thought I was getting senile, but as a small favour to an old friend he somehow inveigled the director of NPL into doing this little test for me. When the tests for the total body iron of Kanti came to me, I was in for a big surprise. His total body iron was about 25 g, - almost the same what a patient of hemochromatosis must have. A normal man doesn’t have more than 5 g of iron in his body. Levels as high as 25 g are found only in patients of hemochromatosis. So here was Kanti’s body not showing an iota of hemochromatosis and yet his total body iron was at the same level as that of any hemochromatosis patient. Where was his extra iron hiding? Now things had started becoming really complicated. Then suddenly I thought of a peculiar finding in such patients. They show very little iron in the testes (this is despite the fact that they all show loss of libido and testicular atrophy). Since Kanti was throwing surprise after surprises, I decided to have one more shock, and did his testes iron levels. As I had expected, it was unusually high. Are you getting the picture now? Kanti’s body was somehow a mirror image of a normal hemochromatosis patient. All his organs which should have shown an increased iron level were showing the normal level, and all those organs which should show a normal iron level were showing increased levels. And this brings us back to our original question- death by electrocution. What about Kanti’s nerves? Were they having extra iron too? You can well imagine, I couldn’t resist myself at that level. I immediately cut a big chunk of Kanti’s sciatic nerve and put it to test. Expectedly it was very high in iron! In fact when I examined its sections in a microscope, its external sheath was so heavily laden with iron that I might as well have been looking at an iron wire! I took a longer piece of his sciatic nerve and connected it to a simple electric circuit. Strangely (well, not so strangely after what we have read now), it could keep the circuit going. There was so much iron in it, that the piece of sciatic nerve almost acted as an iron wire! Things began emerging clearly in my mind now. Kanti had indeed been electrocuted. But his nerves were such good conductors of electricity that they hardly offered any resistance to it. Electric entry mark, or Joule burn as we call it, is caused by the generation of heat in the body by the flow of electricity through it. But if the body were not to offer any resistance to its flow, no heat is going to generate in the body and there would be no burn or electric entry mark. That was the reason Kanti was not showing any electric entry mark despite the fact he was electrocuted. And now I had rigorous scientific proof to show it. But you may ask why Kanti died if the current safely got earthed via his superconducting nerves. Well, most of the current did find its way into the earth, but some also travelled –via his superconducting nerves again- to such sensitive areas as the heart and brain stem. These little organs as you know, work by little currents of body electricity. Such large currents as industrial electricity are going to play havoc with their normal functioning, and the person is going to die very quicky. The mode of death could be cardiac fibrillation if the heart was affected more or stoppage of respiration if the brain stem were affected more. You may also ask why Kanti’s body behaved in this particular way, i.e why it showed a reverse pattern of iron deposition. To be honest with you, I don’t know the answer. But what I do know is that there is an entity called genetic hemochromatosis too. In this disease there is an abnormal gene sitting on chromosome 6. Many cases of acquired hemochromatosis (the one shown by Kanti’s family) are having an associated genetic disorder too. I am personally aware of several people taking medicinal iron for years, who start showing symptoms of hemochromatosis after some time. But all their symptoms can not be explained by the excessive intake of iron. Many of them have an associated genetic abnormality too. It is quite likely that Kanti’s family also had that abnormal gene on chromosome 6. But Kanti's gene had an additional anomaly. Somehow it coded for excess iron deposition not in the normal organs but in the ones which are normally saved. It was a kind of mirror gene, so to say. Well, I am no geneticist, and I can not comment on it more than that. Kanti’s family was pestering me for his body- I had already kept it for more than a week, so ultimately I handed the body over to them. But I made it a point to preserve large pieces of his various body tissues in my custody. I have submitted them to Mr. Lalji Singh, a senior scientist at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology at Hyderabad, and am waiting for his report. He is reportedly preparing his genetic profile, and as soon as his report comes to me, I will inform you regarding it. Meanwhile don’t forget to look at the latest (June 1998) issue of the Journal of American Medical Association for a brief scientific report of this strange case. One last question that may be lingering in your mind. Finding "nerves of iron" does not in itself prove that electricity had passed through Kanti’s body. No doubt if electricity were made to pass through his body, it would not show Joule burn, but what if it hadn’t passed through the body in the first place. In that case too, Kanti’s body wouldn’t show any Joule burn. I solved this problem in another way. If electricity passed through those nerves, body chloride would be attracted to it, and would form iron chloride. On the contrary, if no current passed through those nerves no iron chloride would form. Obviously the easiest way to test for this was to test for a thin film of iron chloride over the nerves. Yes, you got it. When I examined the nerves in detail, I found a thin film of iron chloride over the nerves while the core was mostly pure iron. What pleased me was that the court accepted my findings and awarded damages to Kanti’s wife. The management of DC industries was asked to cough up Rs 20 Lakhs to Kanti’s wife as damages. Obviously DC industries was not happy with me. Well, who cares as long as I have more dead bodies to look after! ------- xxx ------- This story appeared in Spandan'98 (1997-98) , (a Maulana Azad Medical College inhouse magazine) on pages 27-33. Questions on this story asked by readers, (and other reactions) Discerning readers have asked a lot of questions on this story. I will continue to post some select questions on this page. I have answers to these questions, but they may not be very convincing to all. Readers who come up with answers may want to send me E-mail. Many experts keep sending me their comments about stories. I am putting some select comments here too for the benefit of all. I am afraid most comments I will be putting here would be of a critical nature. 1. Asked on September 24, 1999 by Mr Jan Hjelm, Kramfors, Sweden Hello, I read your story with great pleasure. One thing struck me and I hope to get your input on this. Kanti showed a different distribution of iron in his organs compared to the members of his family. Could this be caused by him being exposed to strong electric/magnetic fields in his work as he presumably was the only one working in this kind of environment? Friendly greetings, Mr Jan Hjelm Kramfors Sweden 2. The following comment was sent on October 28, 1999 by R.K. Wright MD JD I read your story with interest. I disagree with a number of points. First, the presence of electrical burns does not mean electrocution. Dead bodies have identical electrical burns as live persons. These are not vital reactions. You can test this yourself in the morgue with ordinary household current applied to a deceased person. (do be careful) As to the hemachromatosis and super conductivity of the body, I must respectfully disagree. The skin is the most unconductive and therefore most heated of the body parts. Here Kanti's skin was not a site of ferrous deposition and thus irrespective of the condition of his nerves, his skin would not conduct more than others. As to whether ferrous metal increase does reduce resistance of organs, I do not know with certainty, having not tested it. However, I would doubt it based upon what I know of these things. Nice story thoug - Dr. Anil Aggrawal When the phone started ringing incessantly, I was deep asleep, and was dreaming some good things of life. Wearily I tried to rub sleep off my eyes and looked at the clock. It was 2 am. Who could it be? "Hello, is it Dr. Aggrawal?", a faint voice came from the other side. "Yes, who is it?", I asked with a little bit of irritation. "Sir, are you the forensic pathologist working in Maulana Azad Medical College?" "Oh, yes. Come on. Now who are you, and what do you want from me?" "Sir, I have a bad news to give you", he said, ignoring my question completely, "The President of Malibotu has been assassinated, and you are required to attend immediately." Malibotu? Malibotu?? Now where in the world is Malibotu? I started thinking. I had been somewhat of a quizzer in my college days, and at that time reveled in quizzing on such subjects. But age is now telling on my brain, and I really couldn't remember where it was. All I could recollect after some quick thinking was that it was a small principality somewhere in the middle of Africa, probably near Congo. Yes, I got it. It indeed was. Its capital was Rwandanu, and General Oshonga had recently staged a successful coup, replacing the democratically elected President. Oshonga had said that the economy had gone down, and it had become absolutely important for him to stage that coup, in order to take that nation fast forward. To the best of my knowledge all army generals said that after staging a coup. "Are you there doctor?" the same faint voice broke my reverie. "Yeah. But who are you, and where are you calling from? And what am I supposed to do?" "Sir, I am Ngunmah, the first Secretary in the Embassy of Malibotu. Right now I am speaking from the Embassy itself. You are required by our Government to take a flight immediately to our country, and conduct a post-mortem examination on the General. Of course you have to tell the police all you can. It is very urgent. Don't worry about the Government clearances. They have all been taken. Please get ready in an hour. Our man is coming to your residence with the ticket and the necessary papers." Now, it isn't exactly a pleasant exercise visiting a country ruled by the military, but obviously it could not be avoided, because as soon as I hung up, I received a phone call from someone high up in the ministry asking me to do the same. I was told that necessary papers from the Ministry were reaching immediately to my residence, and I was to take the 6.35 am Air India flight to Rwandanu, the capital of Malibotu. My wife wasn't exactly pleased when I told her that she had to pack my luggage in about an hour. We both struggled and when the man with the tickets came to our house, I was reasonably well dressed, and ready with a quickly assembled luggage. I will skip the details, and now tell you straightaway what happened when I reached Rwandanu. All army officers gathered round me, and started telling me the story. The gist of the story was this... General Oshonga was overlooking a routine army parade on 23 March 1996, at about 10 am, when suddenly he dropped down. In the first instance it appeared as if he had had a stroke. On closer examination however, a big gaping hole was seen at his neck, which was bleeding profusely. Obviously someone had tried to assassinate him. His army guard, a man named Bishounga, was standing closeby with a gun. Nobody saw him firing at the General, but since there was no other person with a gun in the vicinity, the suspicion immediately fell upon him. Some army officers immediately pounced upon him, starting hammering him with all their might. In the melee that ensued, somebody took away his gun, and nobody knew where it was. I am saying this, because in my investigation it was very important to have his gun. We all know that all guns leave their tell-tale markings on the bullet. There are the primary markings, which are the characteristic of a particular make, say a Colt or a Smith and Wesson. But what are really important are the secondary markings, which are caused due to idiosyncrasies within a particular gun. Thus two different Colt guns would leave the same primary markings on the bullet, but different secondary markings. Secondary markings can in fact be called the fingerprints of the gun left on the bullet. If you give me a bullet fired from a particular weapon, and give me 100 weapons, I can tell you positively which weapon out of those 100 was the bullet fired from. What I would do to determine this would be to fire a bullet from each of those hundred weapons, recover those bullets, and compare the markings on each of them with the bullet you gave me. The weapon whose markings match exactly is the gun in question. For this we need a special microscope called the comparison microscope, in which we make the comparisons. I wouldn't bother you with any more scientific details, and get on straightway with the story. Well, I received the phone call on 24 March at 2 am, as I already told you in the beginning. I took the 6.35 am plane the same day, and reached Malibotu the same day at 9.30 am local time. Well, the journey lasted almost 6 hours, but since Malibotu - as we all know - is 3 hours behind Indian standard time, it was 9.30 am local time. In other words, I was there in Malibotu, exactly one day after the General was slain. When I conducted the autopsy, I didn't have to exert much on finding the cause of death. The bullet had entered the left side of General's neck, lacerated both the left carotid artery and the left jugular vein, then pierced the trachea, and then had come out from the other side of his neck. The death was clearly due to hemorrhage and shock consequent upon excessive bleeding from the neck vessels. However the most notable feature was that the entrance wound showed tattooing. There was very little blackening, but I could understand that, as modern ammunitions don't have black powder. They mostly work on the so-called "smokeless powders" which comprise of nitrocellulose and nitroglycerine. Tattooing around the wound, in cases of hits by hand weapons such as revolvers, means that the gun was fired from a fairly close range. And that put a very strong finger of suspicion on Bishounga. A word about burning, blackening and singeing before we move on. When any gun is fired, lots of gases come out along with the bullet. This is because gun powder in the cartridge is burnt, with resultant formation of gases which actually push the bullet forwards. Some gun powder gets converted to smoke, while some remains unburnt. The smoke travels for some distance along with the bullet, and then it tends to dissipate away. Unburnt powder travels somewhat longer but ultimately it too dissipates. If the victim's body happens to be within these distances, the smoke and the unburnt powder gets deposited on the victim's skin around the bullet entry wound, causing blackening and tattooing respectively. The flame from the gun also leaps forwards from the muzzle, but for really a very small distance. If the victim's body happens to be within this distance, there would be burning too around the bullet hole. The whole subject is very complex, and I wouldn't bother you with details. Suffice it to say, that in cases of pistols and revolvers, burning is seen if the victim was within 3 inches of the gun, blackening, if he was within 6 inches, and tattooing, if he was anywhere around 12 to 18 inches from the gun. To take an example, if I see only tattooing, and no burning and blackening, I can say that the gun was fired more than 6 inches but less than 18 inches from the victim. And similarly by looking at the appearances, I can opine on any distance. Bishounga was obviously in trouble because I had seen tattooing on the General's body. I could not see any signs of burning or blackening. This means that the gun was within about 12 to 18 inches from the General, and who else could fire a gun from such close quarters except Bishounga. I talked to Bishounga for some time. He was very terrified, and told me he was innocent. He said he really did not know what had happened. According to the version given by him, the General suddenly fell down, and he was as surprised as any other. He however gave me a very important piece of information that there was a conspiracy to finish the General among some army higher-ups. After talking to him for some time, I was convinced that Bishounga had not fired the gun. You may ask, how could I be so sure. Well, I am a serious student of a new branch of forensics called forensic psychology, in which we can talk to a suspect and can know a lot about him. I was very sure after talking to him, that Bishounga was being framed in a very sinister plot. But if he hadn't fired the shot, who had? And how could I explain the million dollar question - the tattooing? Gradually I realized, that my whole exercise of proving Bishounga innocent boiled down to just one thing: to explain the tattooing. If for instance, I had not seen any tattooing, I could have confidently said that the wound was caused by some gun fired from a distant range, but the very obvious tattooing was preventing me from saying that. And that was putting Bishounga in a very tight spot indeed. I went to the place where the General was killed and looked around. There were some tall buildings around 200 yards from where the General was standing. I counted the floors. Most of them had more than 10 floors. It was very easy for some one to take a position there and kill the General with a rifle. Had I got the bullet or Bishounga's gun, I could have solved the problem easily, but neither the bullet, nor the gun was available. The gun as already mentioned had been taken away by someone, and was untraceable now. Similarly, the bullet had pierced the General's neck through and through, had probably fallen on the ground and had got lost in the melee. Now the only lead I had was the appearance of the wound. After the autopsy there was a lot of pressure from the Army higher-ups to dispose off the body of the General after doing the last rites. But I was not sure if that would be the right thing to do. Perhaps the General's body had more clues than I had been able to detect. And perhaps I might have to have a look at it later. So I advised them to keep the body in the cold room for another day. There was no way- I told myself- that a gun firing from such a great distance could cause tattooing, and yet my mind was saying that Bishounga was innocent. How could I prove that? I slept a very disturbed sleep in my hotel. Next day a vague thought crossed my mind, and I went back to the mortuary where I had preserved the body of the General. I examined the wound closely again. The tattooing was unmistakable. Now we know that the tattooing is due to the unburnt particles. There are ways you can see the unburnt particles actually under the microscope if you do a histology of the skin around the wound. I decided to snipe off some skin from around the wound and do the histological analysis. When I was putting the piece of skin in the formalin bottle, a Geiger-Muller counter which was lying there gave a loud beep, and I must say, it surprised me no end. Generally Geiger-Muller counters have no business being present in a mortuary until and unless you are doing a post-mortem on a radioactive body. I asked the mortuary attendant why they had kept this in the mortuary, and he told me a very strange reason. The biophysics department of that hospital was undergoing renovation, and they had kept all their instruments in other departments. By sheer chance the Geiger Muller counter, which the biophysics department was using for their experiments had come to the Forensic Medicine department, and they had found no better place to keep it than their mortuary. To come back to our serendipitous finding. To make sure, it was not an accident, I took the piece of skin away from the counter, and then brought it near again, and again it gave a loud beep. I was almost sure now that the General's body was radioactive. But how did it acquire radioactivity? I wasn't really sure. The whole of Malibotu did not have a single nuclear reactor, and I could not explain the reactivity in any way. To make myself sure, this time I cut a piece of skin from his foot and brought it near the counter, and was surprised again no end to find that the counter stayed quiet. I brought the piece of skin around the wound again near the counter, and again it gave a loud beep. Were they making the bullets with some radioactive substances? Did this radioactive bullet - which was lost anyway - rub off some of its radioactive material around the skin of the general. Radioactive bullets should be no better than ordinary lead bullets as far as their killing power is concerned, but just to make sure, I went to the ammunition factory of Malibotu and asked the Chief Engineer there. He told me that they were making bullets from an alloy which contained iron, copper and lead. Sure enough this did not help me in any way. The next day, I was talking to some Army Generals and I was amazed by an interesting piece of information regarding the General. In his youth, the general did stunts like eating whole iron nails. In fact he reveled in eating things made up of iron. He had once eaten the iron parts of a whole automobile in a single week. This is a phenomenon which many people can do in our country too. This is a very rare gift to people, and nobody really knows how they can do that, and why the nails don't hurt their guts. Well, doctors had wanted to know more about this interesting curiosity, and had asked him to undergo a stool test, but he had never agreed for that. Then finally he joined the army, and his spate of stunts ended with that. However insiders told me that while in Army, he still reveled in showing off these stunts privately off and on. People also told me that when he ate nails, he rarely had the need to eat regular food. In biological terms this meant that he was deriving all his energy from the iron nails that he ate. This set me thinking. A vague idea had started forming in my mind. Now I changed my plan, and instead of doing a histological examination, I sent the skin around the wound for chemical analysis. I really do not know why I did that. All that was sufficient for me to do was to have a look under the microscope. But perhaps I wanted to know the composition of the gunpowder they were using. I really can not say, why I sent the skin to the chemistry lab, but certainly I had a hunch I would get something there. Perhaps the look of the tattooing was somewhat different, and I wanted to know what it was. But most probably I was disturbed by the radioactivity found in the General's skin. I can not say, how that justified my sending the skin for chemical analysis, but all the same I did send the skin. My worst fears were confirmed, when I was told that they had not found any unburnt gunpowder in the skin. Instead they had found Uranium-235. In other words, there was U-235 in General's skin. And that was the cause of General's tattooing. Before proceeding further, I consider it my duty to tell that freshly precipitated Uranium is almost black and can certainly mimic tattooing very much. Now where did this U-235 came from? Were the Malibotuans using uranium in their guns? There is no way they could use that even if they wanted to. There simply was no Uranium in their small principality. Then how do I explain U-235? I thought endlessly, but couldn't think of anything plausible. There was no way left for me except to put an Overseas call through to India to my good old friend Dr. A.K.Jain of the Department of Physiology at our college. And sure enough next day he was there with me, of course at the expense of the Malibotuan Army. The Jolly Good Fellow was careful to bring some samples of his newly written Physiology books for Army Higher Ups! The Army officers appeared pleased when they received his books, although I doubt they made much head or tail out of them. Well, coming back to the point. As I told you earlier, a vague idea had started creeping in my mind. I now froze some pieces of General's skin. I had taken them from around the bullet wound, from his forearms, from his belly and from his shins. I asked Dr. Jain to go through the pieces, and tell me if he could find something unusual. Of course he had the facility of a very good lab provided by the Army General Hospital. Dr. Jain struggled with the pieces for some days, and then told me he had found a very strange enzyme in those tissues. He liked to call it iron-uranium convertase for want of better terminology. It was diffusely distributed throughout the cytoplasm of the cells, and what it did was unique. It somehow combined five atoms of iron into a single atom of uranium. Now before you throw up your arms in despair, let me tell you this is not entirely impossible. An atom of Uranium-235, if you recall your physics, contains 92 protons and 143 neutrons. So the total number of nucleons add up to 235. Iron on the other hand contains 26 protons and 30 neutrons. A single atom of iron thus has only 56 nucleons. We know that all nucleons are almost similar in weight. You would immediately interrupt me and inform that a neutron is slightly heavier than proton, and that it consists of one proton, one electron and one antineutrino. Well, I know all that, but since I am not talking of physics details, let us discuss this point at a macro level. Five atoms of iron thus have 280 nucleons in all. An atom of U-235 has just 235. Now if an enzyme converted five atoms of iron into a single atom of Uranium, about 45 nucleons (and some electrons) would have to be taken care of. Well, 40 of these nucleons (with an appropriate number of electrons) were converted into calcium and the remaining five nucleons were converted into energy. To sum up the equation which Dr. A.K. Jain gave me... 5 Fe⁵⁶ -> (Using Iron-Uranium Convertase as an enzyme)->U235 + Ca40 + energy ******************* This calcium was deposited in the bones. Are you getting the point now? Do you remember the general eating the iron nails and getting away with it? He actually had a remarkable enzyme in his cells, which could convert iron into Uranium and calcium, and the fellow was getting energy from that. That explained why he did not have the need to eat regular food when he was eating iron nails. I now sincerely believe that all these stuntmen who eat these iron things have this enzyme in their bodies. This has to be investigated however. How did this enzyme come to be in the General's body. Well, to tell you the truth, I do not have the vaguest notion. But I feel it was a very interesting mutation in one of his cells, when he was still in the embryonic stage, and this brought about the existence of this enzyme. Bishounga could easily be cleared now. I will tell you once again what had actually happened. There was someone hiding in those tall buildings which I mentioned earlier in my story. At an appropriate moment, he fired the gun from a distance and killed the general. He as well as the Army higher-ups who were supporting him thought that they could easily make Bishounga a scapegoat and get away with murder. But very strange things happened. The bullet which was made from an alloy containing iron passed through the neck, and in the process some iron was rubbed in and around the skin of the wound. This iron diffused into surrounding skin for a distance of about 5 cm, and was immediately converted into U-235 by the enzyme present within his skin cells, and the skin came to the laden heavily with U-235. This gave somewhat darkish appearance to the skin, which I confused with tattooing. In fact, so convincing was the appearance that any forensic pathologist would have made the same mistake. Had there been no Geiger-Muller counter in the autopsy room on that day, this discovery might never have been made. To this day, the real killer has never been found. Nor did I expect him to be found, as he was obviously a stooge of some Army higher ups, who actually staged the whole show. In fact, had they thought I would have found out the truth so quickly they would never have called me, and had got the autopsy done from their own doctors. They probably thought they had done a neat job, and wanted to prove to the world that they had left no stone unturned by calling a forensic pathologist from a neutral country. Anyway, what satisfied me most was that I could exonerate Bishounga with full authority and conviction. The poor fellow had a very beautiful devoted wife and three young children, and all of them knew no words to thank me when they came to know that Bishounga had finally been exonerated. My problem was solved, but I asked Dr. Jain if he could isolate the gene responsible for coding such an interesting enzyme. He showed his inability to do this, and I again had to put another overseas call - this time to my good old friend Dr. Lalji Singh of the Center for Cellular and Microbiological Research at Hyderabad. He is a world renowned geneticist, and he immediately agreed to come. Malibotuan Army would of course not pay for his visit, but the devil is so influential, he could arrange the funds immediately on his own, under the garb of a research scheme. He was not entirely wrong, I think. I will skip the details, but would say that he was ultimately able to isolate the gene. It was sitting on the p-arm of chromosome 16. He not only decoded the gene successfully, but could also insert it in a bacteriophage. To our surprise he could culture that bacteriophage on a medium rich in iron, and get trace quantities of U-235. He had in fact found a noble way to generate U-235. He is developing the technique further and is sure to be able to make U-235 in commercial quantities very soon. Sure enough he is travelling round the world lecturing on his new technique. As for Dr. Jain, he has written several research papers on this new enzyme, and I believe is mentioning it even in the next edition of his physiology book. As for me, I am being burdened with more dead bodies. Everybody conveniently forgot that it was I who was responsible for all these developments. Well, who cares, as long as I have more dead bodies to care for! *** This story appeared in Spandan 2000 , (a Maulana Azad Medical College inhouse magazine) on pages 12-15. - Dr. Anil Aggrawal I had just got up from the bed. It was a nice Sunday morning, and lazily I asked my wife to prepare a cup of coffee for me. Tarun, my son brought me the newspaper, and just when I sank further deep in my bed anticipating a nice sunny Sunday morning, with a cup of coffee in one hand, and the newspaper in the other, the telephone bell rang. “Who is it?”, I asked somewhat impatiently. “Sir, I am the Sub divisional Magistrate of this hill district located about 200 km from your place. We have a very tricky case on our hands. Could you come immediately please?” and then without waiting for my answer, added. “I am sending the vehicle. It is a Fiat car DL 4C A 6600. It will be there in about half an hour. Please be ready with your post-mortem kit.” “Hell”, I thought, “Why in the world did I chose forensic medicine as a career?” To be honest with you, I chose this career because I love the dead. But probably a minor reason was that by choosing it, I would not be getting any emergency calls. The dead hardly call you on Sunday mornings. And yet, here I was getting calls almost all Sundays. Well, that’s life. I was already quite worked up by the time my wife brought me coffee. I quickly gulped it down, and became ready with my post-mortem kit. The car soon arrived at my house, and in about 6 hours took me away to a nice sleepy little hamlet tucked away in the lap of some very huge mountains. The air was so fresh and invigorating, I was glad I came there. The SDM was waiting for me at the office. “Thank you doctor for coming. It’s already 3 pm. Let us first have some lunch and then we would talk”, and quickly he took me inside. He made some motions with his hands to his subordinates and they all swung in action. Soon trays, plates, cups with nice little eatables started pouring in. What he told me over the lunch was this. Sushila was a 27 year old woman married to Dinesh, and both of them had a happy life. They lived about 5 km from where we were sitting. They had a neighbor called Sitaram, with whom they were having a land dispute for almost one generation now. Their (Dinesh and Sitaram’s) fathers had died while the litigation was on, and now Dinesh and Sitaram were getting on with the litigation. Sitaram had a bad reputation in the area, and he had threatened Dinesh many times with dire consequences if he did not relinquish his claim on that controversial piece of land. However since about one year, the two had buried the hatchet, and were meeting each other regularly at least on social occasions such as Diwali, Holi, marriages etc. The case of course was going on in the court as usual. This is not a very unusual occurrence in our country. Land disputes do go on, while people mix together in social occasions. About a week back Sushila gave birth to her first son in a local hospital. When she started having labor pains - at about 4 pm - she was taken to the local hospital, and admitted there. Soon the word spread among the locality and many people gathered at the hospital. Many of them came with sweets. Dinesh’s mother and Sushila’s parents were there to receive them. Sitaram also came to congratulate the young couple. After exchanging some pleasantries most of them melted away. By the time the baby was born - at about 3 am the next day- only Dinesh, Sushila’s father and Sitaram were outside the labor room. All of them distinctly heard the baby’s cries. Dinesh and Sushila’s father became ecstatic and ran outside to phone their friends. Only Sitaram remained there. When they came back after fifteen minutes after telephoning all the relatives they found Sitaram talking with the doctor in somber tones. They were told that the child had been born dead! They could not believe their ears. They had heard the child’s cries with their own ears. This definitely meant that the child had been born alive. How could the doctor play this fast one on them by saying that he had been born dead. Definitely there was something black at the bottom. When the police made enquiries, both Dinesh and Sushila’s father asserted that they had heard the child’s cries standing outside the labor room. Sitaram was also standing along with them, but when he was asked about it, he said he hadn’t heard any such cries, and may be Dinesh and his father-in-law were mistaken. Sometimes you do listen what you want to listen. This now became a two versus one story, and naturally a lot of doubt started whether the baby had actually cried or not. This was important, because if the baby had cried he had been born alive, and somebody - most probably Sitaram - had killed him. And if the baby had not cried, then it was possible that he was a case of a still born child. Many fingers started raising at Sitaram. He did have an old rivalry with Dinesh, and he had a strong motive to harm him. He was alone for as much as 15 minutes outside the delivery room, and the nurse told to the police that for five minutes after the baby was born, there was no one in the delivery room, as they had to rush to the next room for an emergency case. In these five minutes, it was quite easy for Sitaram to enter the room and -say- strangle the child. Sushila was of course too exhausted to note anything. She had probably passed out for some time after delivery. The doctor and nurse were questioned. The doctor was a young man, who had passed his MBBS only a year back, and had taken up this job to pass his time while he studied for his post-graduate entrance examination. The nurse was also very young and inexperienced. They had probably already sensed some medico legal problems and had become very defensive. Both of them asserted that the baby was born dead. As you can very well understand, things had become very complicated by now with some saying the baby was born alive and others saying he was born dead. The only way to solve this puzzle was to order an autopsy. Since in that little hamlet no expert forensic expert was available, the autopsy was entrusted to a young pediatrician named Dr. Harish. I looked at the autopsy report. It was a fairly nice job, considering it was done by a pediatrician. I certainly could not do a pediatric job as nicely as he had done this forensic job being a pediatrician. He had conducted the hydrostatic test and had found it to be positive and in addition had found several semilunar marks around the baby’s neck. As we all know these semilunar marks indicate nail marks and often form on the neck in cases of throttling or manual strangulation. As regards hydrostatic test, I am sure all of us know about it, but just for recapitulation, it is an interesting test which tells us - the forensic pathologists- whether a baby was born alive or not. The premise is that if the baby was born alive, he would have respired - at least once - and this would fill his lungs with air, making their specific gravity less than that of water. If on the other hand, the baby was born dead, he would not have respired and his lungs’ specific gravity would remain more than that of water. So what one does in such cases is just to dissect out the lungs and put them in water. If the lungs float, the test is positive - meaning thereby that the infant was born alive - and if the lungs sink, the test is negative implicating the opposite conclusion. To be sure, the actual test is much more complicated than this, but this is the gist. There are some problems with the test, with many pathologists claiming that it is not an infallible test, but we will leave aside those controversies for the time being. As I told you, the doctor had made a fairly thorough post-mortem. His conclusions were summed up like this: “The baby had been born alive, and survived probably five minutes. The cause of death was asphyxia due to manual strangulation.” This raised a very strong finger of suspicion at SitaRam, and the police arrested him. The basis of arrest was of course the implicating post-mortem report. But SitaRam was a well-connected man. He contacted someone high up in the political hierarchy, and got an order for a repeat post-mortem. And this post-mortem had to be done by a forensic expert of some standing. That is how I came into this picture. My job was of course to conduct the autopsy again, and find out if the earlier findings by Dr. Harish were alright. I must say, this was not an enviable task. First autopsy destroys many organs, and disturbs their natural relationships with one another. A repeat autopsy is at least ten times as difficult as the first one, yet the SDM had reposed his faith in me, and I had to live up to my reputation. The first thing I did was to talk to SitaRam at length. Now after remaining in this specialty for almost 25 years now, I have developed a knack of sensing when a person is speaking the truth. I don’t know how I do it, but I can give you some pointers. When you question a suspect, look straight in his eyes. If his eyes flinch, he might be speaking a lie - otherwise he would look straight at you too. Look at his fingers, and observe any fine tremors there. Look at his Adam’s apple, while he is speaking and look for the very faint quivering there. Touch his hands and see if he has just those tiny traces of sweat on his hands. These little things tell me if the person is speaking the truth. An accomplished liar can consciously control his voluntary nervous system, but can’t control his sympathetics and parasympathetics, and they usually give him away. Above all there is this sixth sense which has developed in me, which tells me if the person is speaking the truth. After talking to Sitaram for about an hour, I was convinced he was not the murderer. He was definitely at loggerheads with Dinesh and Sushila, but he would not go to the extent of killing their new born son. Either the infant had been born dead in the first place, or he had been killed by someone other than Sitaram. There were some difficulties though. First of all, courts don’t act on hunches. They need real proof. I could tell them, I had a knack of knowing a liar, but they would still want scientific proof, and I had to get one. When Dinesh and his father-in-law left the hospital to phone their relatives, their was no one beside the labor room except Sita Ram, so there was no question of someone else killing the new born infant. So I was left with just one option; that the infant was born dead. But what was I to make of the positive hydrostatic test? And furthermore how was going to explain the tell-tale semilunar nail marks on the neck of the infant. That was the main question. Without waiting further, I demanded to see the infant’s body. It was lying in the cold room of the mortuary, and was brought out for me. I looked at him. He was a nice sweet little boy. It was heart-rending to see his chest and abdomen all sewed up (after the first autopsy). I closely examined the so-called nail marks on his neck, and I must say, they were looking quite similar to the usual nail marks that we see day in and day out in cases of manual strangulation. There were no other injuries on the infant’s body. I opened the stitches and examined the internal organs closely. I looked at his lungs, which definitely seemed inflated. I conducted the hydrostatic test again, and it was undoubtedly positive. In addition I conducted some additional tests which the previous doctor had not done. For instance, I also conducted the so-called Wreden’s test (sometimes wrongly called as "Wredin's test"). First suggested by R. Wreden in 1868 (in Otitis media neonatorum), this is a rather dubious test, yet in a case of second post-mortem, it was strongly indicated. If not for anything else, then just for confirmation. For the purposes of recapitulation again, this test relies on the fact that a fetus’s middle ear contains jelly like material till he resides in the womb. When he is born and takes a deep breath, his Eustachian tubes open and air enters through them to the middle ear. So if you find a small bubble in the middle ear, you can be quite sure, the baby was born alive. On the contrary if you find just jelly like material in the middle ear, the baby was most probably born dead. Again this is a highly controversial test, and no pathologist worth his salt performs this test these days. But as I told you earlier, this was a case, where we were leaving no stones unturned. [More information on Wreden's test for the more scientific minded amongst you. In 1873 - five years after the initial report by Wreden - another scientist Wendt reported in Arch. f. Heilkunde that if the infant respired when he was immersed within the amniotic fluid, one could detect even amniotic fluid in the middle ear of such babies. Based on the researches of these two scientists, the test is often known as Wreden-Wendt test, or Wreden-Wendt tympanic cavity test. One may also want to go through the following paper for the details of the test: Jobba G, Sandor T. (1971) Medicolegal evaluation of the Wreden-Wendt tympanic cavity test [Article in German]. Z Rechtsmed 69(3):173-6 Or you may want to click on the following link http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=5170412&dopt=Abstract ]. Wreden’s test also came positive and I was quite depressed. The baby had indeed been born alive. So depressed was I that I came back to my hotel, and tried to sleep. Tried hard as I would, I couldn’t sleep. After sometime, I went out for a walk in the mountain roads. The fresh air invigorated me. After about one hour of aimless stroll, I came back and slept. Probably I kept dreaming of the case. I know this because at 4 am, I suddenly got up. I had probably dreamt something strange. I kept sitting for some time, and then I remembered there was a phenomenon called vagitus vaginalis, which is such a rare phenomenon, that most people take it as a myth. Here we might be dealing with a case of vagitus vaginalis. You might be wondering what this strange term means. Let me explain. In the nineteenth century, there were a number of reports by reputed obstetricians, which stated that a fetus can in fact respire while he is still in the vaginal canal. He can emit a cry in the vaginal canal, while he is being born! This would be heard as a muffled cry by people standing close by, and anyone would swear he had heard the infant cry. There is a still stranger phenomenon known as vagitus uterinus, in which the baby cries while he is still higher up - in the uterus. Well here we probably had a case either of vagitus vaginalis or vagitus uterinus. These babies who utter such a cry either inside the vagina or uterus may be born alive or dead. If born alive, naturally no problem would occur, but if such babies were born dead, they could land the doctor in severe trouble. Relatives standing outside the labor room would invariably have heard the cry and they would hold the doctor responsible for the death of the baby. They would keep asserting the baby was born alive, and died subsequently due to doctor’s negligence. I personally know of many such cases, in which doctors had to face the patients’ ire. The more I thought about it, the more I got convinced that I could convince any court of law about its possibility. I had xerox copies of all those reports of vagitus vaginalis and vagitus uterinus. And if so many reputed obstetricians had seen this phenomenon, certainly this phenomenon was possible in our case too. But what indeed remained to be explained were the strange looking semilunar marks on the baby’s neck. They did look like nail marks, indicating someone had tried to kill him. If he was born dead, why anyone in the world would try to kill him. I could not solve this problem despite thinking deeply about it. Finally I got tired and slept again. Next day I took out the body of the infant again from the cold room and looked closely at his neck. There were these unmistakable nail marks. There was no doubt about that. I was quite nonplussed. Without having the faintest idea of what I was doing, I began examining his abdominal contents. Suddenly I was gripped with excitement. When I looked near the area of his liver, I found that the baby had not just one, but two ligamentum teres. The previous doctor had probably missed this strange finding. And I wouldn’t blame him for that, for he was so inexperienced. Now before you throw up your arms in despair, let me tell you a little bit about this strange structure. In a fetus, originally there are two umbilical veins which take oxygenated blood from the placenta to the fetus. After sometime, the right umbilical vein disintegrates; only the left persists. After birth the baby starts respiring and this umbilical vein becomes quite redundant. Nature has a way of dealing with this new situation. This umbilical vein obliterates and becomes a ligament like structure in about 3-5 days after birth. This ligament like structure is called ligamentum teres. This is a very useful marker for forensic pathologists. By seeing this structure, they can tell how long the child survived after being born. For instance if we see only the umbilical vein, we can say, that the child died within 3-5 days of being born, but if we see a ligament in its place we would be quite sure that the child survived at least 3 days after being born - probably more. Does that meant, the little child survived 3 days after birth? Not in the least. The child’s death immediately after death was so well documented that there was not an iota of doubt about it. It was probably a case of very early disintegration. Such cases do occur once in a while. But what surprised me no end was that he was showing not just one, but two ligamentum teres. To my feeble mind, the only implication was that his right umbilical vein had not obliterated early in his uterine life. It had persisted till birth and only after that it obliterated. Well, I am no anatomist, and did not want to make any further conjectures on it. So I phoned, one of the best anatomists I know of - Professor J.M. Kaul of our own anatomy department. What she told me over the phone was quite surprising to me. She said that in some lower animals, the right umbilical vein does persist till birth. She was not aware of any case where it was seen in humans, but if I had seen one this must be a case of atavism. You might accuse me of throwing one technical term after other, but I can’t help it. I was taking things as they were coming to me. Thankfully I did know something about atavism, so I did not have to bother her more for that. I thanked her profusely and rushed back to mortuary. Atavism is a technical term which comes from the Latin at, meaning above or beyond and avus, meaning a grandfather. Thus Atavism literally means “above a grandfather”. It refers to a reversion or throw-back of an inherited characteristic which has skipped a number of successive generations. To the best of my knowledge, the presence of a cervical rib in a human being is a good example of atavism. Evolutionarily there has been a reduction in the number of ribs, especially in the region of our pectoral and pelvic girdle (to allow for greater freedom of movement), but every once a while we see persons with cervical ribs. These people are very good living examples of atavism. Well, what about this boy. I dissected his neck, and was amazed to see not just one, but two cervical ribs - both on sixth and seventh cervical vertebra. Are you getting the picture now? This boy was showing several primitive characteristics. In other words, he showed many atavistic characteristics. Probably my salvation lay in him showing atavism. What about neck scales? Lower animals like snakes and crocodiles show scales on their necks, while humans do not. Was it possible that his little boy showed another atavistic character in his neck? Was it possible that those little semilunar marks on his neck were not nail marks, but very primitive scales? I could not rule the possibility out, as this boy was showing so many of the atavistic characters. I am no biologist, and I contacted a very prominent biologist - Dr. Lalji Singh of Hyderabad. He told me to send over some of the skin samples from those semilunar marks, so that he could put them to tests. I did exactly that. He examined them in great detail and his reports really astounded me - well! Not so much after what I had been seeing all throughout. Those semilunar marks were not nail marks at all. They were very tiny scales which were probably again a relic from the past. He had histological reports with him to confirm his findings. Those semilunar marks did not show the structure of skin, but that of scales! So this little child indeed showed a number of atavistic characters. I will now tell you what exactly happened. This child cried probably in the vagina, because of which his hydrostatic test - and other tests depending on respiration - came positive. In fact he died somewhere within the birth canal probably because of fetal distress. In addition, he showed a number of atavistic characters, one of which was tiny scales over his neck, which looked exactly like nail marks. These marks stumped not only the young inexperienced Dr. Harish, but even me. I was very happy when the court accepted my findings, and released SitaRam. He came to me and thanked me no end. I was happy I could do justice to that person. Meanwhile, I am told, Dr. Kaul has written a very good paper on atavism, and is going to Berlin to deliver it there. As for Dr. LaljiSingh, he is trying to find the incidence of atavism in Indian children, taking that child as an example. As for me, I am burdened with more dead bodies and more post-mortems. Well, who cares. The dead are after all ones whom I love most! - Dr. Anil Aggrawal When I got a telephone call from the Indian High Commission in Timbuktoo, I was relaxing in my bed with a cup of coffee and the morning newspaper. My wife was sitting besides me, and we were gossiping. Nothing irritates me more at such times than a telephone call. With some measure of irritation, I picked up the receiver. “Is it Dr. Aggrawal, Professor of Forensic Medicine at the Maulana Azad Medical College?”, a faint voice asked from the other side. “That’s right”, I replied. “Dr. Aggrawal, I am Abhinav Sinha, High Commissioner of the Indian High Commission in Timbuktoo. We are in a great problem. We have a doctor here, who is being falsely framed in a medical negligence case. I am convinced he is innocent. Could you please come and help us?” and without waiting for my reply, added, “Your tickets are being sent to your house, along with some money to take care of your travel expenses. All the hospitality here will be taken care of by us.” “Look.. .”, I protested, “I don’t know what your problem is, and I am really not sure I can help you in this case. Moreover I can’t possibly leave my college for any great length of time.” “Everything has been taken care of sir. Your trip is official. You will be treated as on duty. All expenses paid. Please come as soon as possible”, and he hung up. I was quite nonplussed, and I was almost sure, it was some practical joker trying to play a fast one on me. But within five minutes, I received a phone call from the Ministry repeating the same thing almost verbatim. Within half an hour, a government official came to my house with some travelers cheques and a club class return air ticket to Timbuktoo. There was an accompanying letter from someone higher up in the Ministry asking me to proceed to Timbuktoo immediately. It also said that I would be treated as on duty. There was no option now. The flight was at 9 pm. I looked at my watch. It was still 8 am. I had about 13 hours for preparations. I requested my wife to start packing. For those, who are not aware of Timbuktoo, it is a very tiny principality somewhere in the Middle of Africa - quite near Lake Victoria. It is a hereditary monarchy. Elections have never taken place here. Kings have been ruling this principality since time immemorial from the same family clan. Mostly the eldest son gets the chance to rule, but sometimes court intrigues result in murders, and the younger brother gets the throne. There have been cases, when a still younger brother has in turn killed his second brother and got the throne! In short, the history of this principality is rife with murders, court intrigues, treachery, debauchery and so on. Our country had no diplomatic relations with this country till sometime back, but recently in the wake on the so-called Non Aligned Movement, we had developed diplomatic relations with them. A small mission had been opened there, which was staffed by just six people. One of them was a young Indian doctor, whose main job was to look after the Indian officials and their families, as the medical fraternity in that principality was really in a very nascent stage. After a relatively comfortable nine hour flight, I landed at the King Hassan Airport in Timbuktoo. The High Commissioner of the mission was there personally to take me to my hotel. Along with him was the young doctor posted in the Mission. His name was Dr. Harish. While I was being driven to my hotel, I looked out of my window, and was amazed at the clean air and greenery all around in that tiny nation. Coming from New Delhi, it was certainly a very welcome change. The hotel was comfortable and clean. After I took bath and changed, the duo narrated their story to me, and it was something like this: Ndubuisi Eke was the king of this nation since about three years. He had a younger brother called Mombutu Eke, who wanted to usurp his throne. On 18 February 2001 - a Sunday - when Ndubuisi was taking his morning stroll, one unidentified man came from somewhere and stabbed him in the neck. The attack was so sudden that Ndubuisi’s two bodyguards couldn’t do anything. However there were rumors that they had been “bought” and did not try to stop the attacker on purpose. There was an immediate commotion all around, and in the mêlée that ensued, the attacker managed to slip away. Again people who had an ear to the ground said that this was also stage managed. The killer was someone hired by Ndubuisi’s younger brother Mombutu, who wanted to usurp his throne. As luck would have it, Ndubuisi did not die immediately thereafter. He did however receive a nasty gash in the neck. As the whole of Timbuktoo did not have a reasonably smart surgeon, he was brought to Dr. Harish in the Indian Embassy. To be sure, he too was young and rather inexperienced, but better than the best Timbuktooan doctor. Dr. Harish tried his best to save Ndubuisi, but he died immediately after arriving at the hospital. No autopsy was ever conducted on the body, and the body was cremated in haste. Mombutu Eke ascended the throne immediately thereafter. However the public - who loved Ndubuisi no end - was restless. In Mombutu, they saw a killer and usurper. There were hushed voices all around. And perhaps to silence his critics - and perhaps to clear him as well - Mombutu ordered an enquiry against Dr. Harish. It certainly was against diplomatic norms. But as far as Mombutu was concerned, it didn’t matter as his throne was in jeopardy. He wanted to show that the wound received by Ndubuisi was not fatal, and the death occurred instead because of Dr. Harish’s negligence. It was where I came into picture. I was to prove that Dr. Harish had tried his best. There was no negligence on his part and the death occurred prima facie because of the wound. But how could I do that? Had Ndubuisi’s body been with us, it would have been a relatively simple matter for me. All that I needed to do in that case was to conduct a thorough autopsy on his body to find out the correct cause of death. But the body had already been cremated in haste. Now all I had in my possession were some reports prepared by Dr. Harish, when Ndubuisi first arrived at the hospital. I interviewed Dr. Harish in great detail. He was young and inexperienced, but certainly a very bright doctor. Obviously he was terrified. He was being prosecuted in an alien land, and if found guilty, they could send him behind bars for a lengthy period of time. Something had to be done very fast. Fortunately Dr. Harish had prepared a very detailed injury report. I read the injury report over and over again, and found that the most significant part was that his left sternocleidomastoid had received a gash 6x2x4.5 cm in size. It was that wound which appeared fatal to me. But the volume of blood that Ndubuisi lost was not very much. Dr. Harish had immediately sutured the wound. At a rough guess, he had lost about 500 cc of blood. Now that is not sufficient to cause death by shock. One would require at least 2000 cc for that. Obviously Ndubuisi had died because of some other reason. But what? That was the million dollar question. I could not sleep that night. I kept thinking the whole night. And I do not know when I fell asleep. But soon I started dreaming. I saw Ndubuisi going down and down in deep water. He was struggling to stay at the surface. But something was taking him down and down. Bubbles of air were streaming through his nostrils. Bubbles of air.. .. I woke up with a start. It came to my mind in a flash. It had to be air embolism! Perhaps I was thinking about air embolism subconsciously. That is why I dreamed of those air bubbles, perhaps. For recapitulation, let me state what air embolism is. It was Rudolf Virchow, the famous 19th Century German pathologist who introduced the term embolus and embolism into modern medicine. In 1856 he applied the term embolus to a loose clot in the blood stream. These words are of Greek origin and come from the Greek word “emballe” meaning to throw in, or to lay in or to put in as a stopper, peg or bolt. A loose blood clot in the circulation indeed acts as a stopper or a peg. As long as it travels in vessels bigger than its size, it is alright, but as soon as it encounters a vessel smaller than its own size, it gets stuck there, acting as a stopper or a peg. Many of you would be surprised to know that embolism is used in a general sense too, meaning the adding or “throwing in” of an extra day to the year. In relation to medicine, we usually speak of embolism in relation to blood clots which travel from leg veins upwards and get lodged in pulmonary arteries. This is a serious condition causing almost instantaneous death. Under certain conditions - as when veins are cut - air can get sucked inside the veins. It forms a bubble inside and this bubble travels towards the heart along with the blood stream, and gets lodged in the pulmonary arteries just as a blood clot does. A bubble of air is incompressible, and there is no way the blood stream can negotiate this bubble. Inside the vein this bubble acts just like a blood clot. That is, it blocks the circulation just as effectively as does ordinary blood clots, causing immediate death. It is almost as if someone had put an arterial clamp over that place! Detecting ordinary blood clots in pulmonary arteries, or for that matter anywhere else in the body, is relatively easy, but detecting air embolism is a different game altogether. It remains one of the most challenging tasks faced by a forensic pathologist. The reason is that the moment you open pulmonary arteries, the bubble is going to disappear in the air. For this reason, forensic pathologists usually dissect the heart under water in suspected cases of air embolism, but believe me it is a very difficult and challenging procedure. Nobody loves it. There is a silver lining though. If you are suspecting air embolism in a case, before you start the autopsy, one of the best things you can do is to X-ray the body. If an air bubble is present in the heart or pulmonary arteries, it will show up in the X-rays. So you conduct this difficult procedure only in the cases in which you see the bubble in the X-rays, and leave out the rest. In fact, the X-ray plate itself is proof that the person died of air embolism and many forensic pathologists don’t take the trouble to dissect the heart under water after that. But we all know, no post mortem was ever conducted on Ndubuisi. Even if it had been conducted, I am doubtful, if anyone would have been able to detect the cause of death as air embolism, as there was no forensic pathologist in the whole of Timbuktoo. I was now in a very unenvious position. I did not have the dead body of Ndubuisi, and I had to prove that he had died of air embolism. That was the only way to save Dr. Harish. Only then we could prove conclusively that it was the initial stab wound which caused the death (by air embolism), and not negligence on the part of Dr. Harish. But how could I do it? That was the million dollar question. In the evening, I was sitting by the lakeside looking at the beautiful lake and the birds leisurely floating in it. I was recalling my younger days, when we had to send almost all bodies for X-rays, in which we suspected air embolism. Then for many months, our X-ray unit was out of order, and we had to start the autopsy without the benefit of the initial X-ray plates. This meant that effectively we had to open all hearts under water and nobody liked that. You have to make a sac in the pericardial cavity by making appropriate cuts in the pericardium; then you fill that pericardial sac up with water with an assistant holding up both the flaps of pericardium with forceps; and then finally you inserted the blade in the pulmonary artery and under various heart cavities, twisting and turning it expecting a bubble to rise through water. Not many forensic pathologists love this. And many complained. To solve the problem, I came up with an interesting formula. I had for long observed that more people tend to die of embolism if the cut was longer and deeper. Similarly if the muscle involved was more voluminous, chances of air embolism were higher than if the muscle were less voluminous. Thus if someone got a 5 cm cut in gluteus maximus, he would stand much greater chances of getting air embolism than if he got a cut of the same size in, say, temporalis muscle. It was because temporalis muscle is less massive than gluteus maximus. Could I turn this observation into a strict mathematical formula, I had asked myself at that time. And quite interestingly I did come up with an interesting formula. It was: E=mc² Now if you think you are already familiar with the formula, probably you are wrong. E in our formula stands for Embolism (rate of), m for muscle mass (in grams) and c was a somewhat complicated parameter, which I called the “Cut factor”. I had observed that air embolism tended to depend both on the length and the depth of the cut, but depth had a greater effect on producing air embolism than the length. Thus if the length of the cut was twice, the chances of air embolism in a person would be doubled, but if the depth was twice, the chances would be four times. To take this observation into account, I put the Cut factor equal to [(cut depth)2 x (cut length)]. The interesting thing about this formula was that this stands true across all animal species. Once this formula was in place, we applied it in some experimental animals too, namely rats, guinea pigs, hamsters and pigs. To my satisfaction the formula proved true in all cases. Now as you can see, this formula actually gives the rate of embolism. To put it in other words, it would give you the probability that the person might have suffered air embolism. What we did with this formula was to look at the muscle which was cut and the size of the cut, and put the numbers in the formula (we had to put the decimal back by four digits, i.e. we had to effectively divide the figure by 10,000 to arrive at the correct rate of probability). If we got a figure, say, 50, it effectively meant that the person had a 50% chance of getting air embolism. If we got a figure of, say, just 2, there was just a two percent chance of getting air embolism and the forensic pathologist could perhaps look the other way and forget about dissecting the heart under water. Gradually all forensic pathologists in our institution got round to opening the heart under water if the figure was greater than 50. This made sense too, because if the probability of getting an air embolism is greater than 50%, you must take enough trouble to find it out. For those, who are able to follow me only vaguely, I would illustrate with an example. Gluteus maximus’ weight on the average is 493 g. Now if it sustains a cut which is 5 cm long and 3 cm deep, what are the chances that the person would die of air embolism? We would calculate it as follows: The cut is 5 cm long and 3cm deep. Since the cut factor is equal to [(cut depth)² x (cut length)], simple mathematics would show that it would be 45. Now putting this figure in our earlier formula E=mc² We get 493 x 452 or 998325 We put four decimals behind and we get 99.8325. This means that a person getting a 5 cm long and a 3 cm deep cut would stand a 99.8325% chances of getting an air embolism. This is well near hundred percent, and I would certainly like to take all trouble to dissect the heart under water. Over the years this formula had gained International acceptance, and almost every forensic pathologist was using it in his day-to-day practice. Could I use this formula in Ndubuisi’s case? Then suddenly I remembered that Dr. Harish had been careful enough to record the dimensions of the cut quite accurately. I jumped and ran back to my hotel room. Once inside the hotel room I phoned Dr. Harish immediately and in a most excited voice asked him to give me the dimensions of the cut. He was a little surprised at my strange request but gave the figures to me. The dimensions were 6x2x4.5 cm. Now my only problem was to find out the weight of the sternocleidomastoid muscle. I am no anatomist and did not know its weight at all. But fortunately I have many good anatomists as friends. One of them is Dr. R.K.Suri, Professor of Anatomy at our own medical college. I immediately made an overseas call, forgetting the time difference completely. It was 2 am in India, and he picked up the phone with some measure of irritation. “Dr. Suri, what is the weight of Sternocleidomastoid muscle?” “Is it Dr. Aggrawal?” he asked in great irritation. “Never mind. The weight?” I insisted. “Why! it is 153 grams. But why do you ask this question in the thick of the night?” He was obviously quite nonplussed. “Thanks” I said, ignoring his question completely, banged the receiver back and got back to crunching numbers. The cut factor in this case would be 121.5 as the length of the wound was 6 cm and its depth 4.5 cm. Now putting all the figures in our good old formula E=mc², we get: 153x(121.5)2 =153 x 14762.25 or 2258624.25 Putting the decimal back by four points, we arrive at the figure 225.862425 I jumped on my feet in glee. The probability of getting air embolism was even greater than 100! To a mathematician it may look silly, but we had encountered such figures before. It meant that the person was sure to get air embolism. Everything was clear now. With such a deep cut on his Sternocleidomastoid muscle, Ndubuisi stood a 225% chance of getting air embolism. In other words, he died of air embolism. That was for sure. We immediately filed our answer in the Law Ministry of Timbuktoo. I am given to believe that the Ministry was going to dismiss that answer too, but before doing that they took the advice of some international forensic experts, and all of them advised that my reasoning was watertight and there was no scope of rebutting it. In fact if they did it, they would go down in the eyes of the International Community as an utterly unjust nation, and would stand the risk of getting completely isolated. Mombutu obviously did not want to take this risk. Dr. Harish was immediately cleared of all charges. I returned back to India, and the very next day went to Dr. Suri and thanked him for the help he rendered us. He was still very very angry with me, especially because I had banged the phone on him, but when he heard the great service he had rendered for our nation, he forgot all anger and is once again a very great friend of mine.

Forensic Science Fiction The mystery of the assassinated prince When I got a telephone call from the Indian High Commission in Timbuktoo, I was relaxing in my bed with a cup of coffee and the morning newspaper. My wife was sitting besides me, and we were gossiping. Nothing irritates me more at such times than a telephone call. With some measure of irritation, I picked up the receiver. “Is it Dr. Aggrawal, Professor of Forensic Medicine at the Maulana Azad Medical College?”, a faint voice asked from the other side. “That’s right”, I replied. “Dr. Aggrawal, I am Abhinav Sinha, High Commissioner of the Indian High Commission in Timbuktoo. We are in a great problem. We have a doctor here, who is being falsely framed in a medical negligence case. I am convinced he is innocent. Could you please come and help us?” and without waiting for my reply, added, “Your tickets are being sent to your house, along with some money to take care of your travel expenses. All the hospitality here will be taken care of by us.” “Look.. .”, I protested, “I don’t know what your problem is, and I am really not sure I can help you in this case. Moreover I can’t possibly leave my college for any great length of time.” “Everything has been taken care of sir. Your trip is official. You will be treated as on duty. All expenses paid. Please come as soon as possible”, and he hung up. I was quite nonplussed, and I was almost sure, it was some practical joker trying to play a fast one on me. But within five minutes, I received a phone call from the Ministry repeating the same thing almost verbatim. Within half an hour, a government official came to my house with some travelers cheques and a club class return air ticket to Timbuktoo. There was an accompanying letter from someone higher up in the Ministry asking me to proceed to Timbuktoo immediately. It also said that I would be treated as on duty. There was no option now. The flight was at 9 pm. I looked at my watch. It was still 8 am. I had about 13 hours for preparations. I requested my wife to start packing. For those, who are not aware of Timbuktoo, it is a very tiny principality somewhere in the Middle of Africa - quite near Lake Victoria. It is a hereditary monarchy. Elections have never taken place here. Kings have been ruling this principality since time immemorial from the same family clan. Mostly the eldest son gets the chance to rule, but sometimes court intrigues result in murders, and the younger brother gets the throne. There have been cases, when a still younger brother has in turn killed his second brother and got the throne! In short, the history of this principality is rife with murders, court intrigues, treachery, debauchery and so on. Our country had no diplomatic relations with this country till sometime back, but recently in the wake on the so-called Non Aligned Movement, we had developed diplomatic relations with them. A small mission had been opened there, which was staffed by just six people. One of them was a young Indian doctor, whose main job was to look after the Indian officials and their families, as the medical fraternity in that principality was really in a very nascent stage. After a relatively comfortable nine hour flight, I landed at the King Hassan Airport in Timbuktoo. The High Commissioner of the mission was there personally to take me to my hotel. Along with him was the young doctor posted in the Mission. His name was Dr. Harish. While I was being driven to my hotel, I looked out of my window, and was amazed at the clean air and greenery all around in that tiny nation. Coming from New Delhi, it was certainly a very welcome change. The hotel was comfortable and clean. After I took bath and changed, the duo narrated their story to me, and it was something like this: Ndubuisi Eke was the king of this nation since about three years. He had a younger brother called Mombutu Eke, who wanted to usurp his throne. On 18 February 2001 - a Sunday - when Ndubuisi was taking his morning stroll, one unidentified man came from somewhere and stabbed him in the neck. The attack was so sudden that Ndubuisi’s two bodyguards couldn’t do anything. However there were rumors that they had been “bought” and did not try to stop the attacker on purpose. There was an immediate commotion all around, and in the mêlée that ensued, the attacker managed to slip away. Again people who had an ear to the ground said that this was also stage managed. The killer was someone hired by Ndubuisi’s younger brother Mombutu, who wanted to usurp his throne. As luck would have it, Ndubuisi did not die immediately thereafter. He did however receive a nasty gash in the neck. As the whole of Timbuktoo did not have a reasonably smart surgeon, he was brought to Dr. Harish in the Indian Embassy. To be sure, he too was young and rather inexperienced, but better than the best Timbuktooan doctor. Dr. Harish tried his best to save Ndubuisi, but he died immediately after arriving at the hospital. No autopsy was ever conducted on the body, and the body was cremated in haste. Mombutu Eke ascended the throne immediately thereafter. However the public - who loved Ndubuisi no end - was restless. In Mombutu, they saw a killer and usurper. There were hushed voices all around. And perhaps to silence his critics - and perhaps to clear him as well - Mombutu ordered an enquiry against Dr. Harish. It certainly was against diplomatic norms. But as far as Mombutu was concerned, it didn’t matter as his throne was in jeopardy. He wanted to show that the wound received by Ndubuisi was not fatal, and the death occurred instead because of Dr. Harish’s negligence. It was where I came into picture. I was to prove that Dr. Harish had tried his best. There was no negligence on his part and the death occurred prima facie because of the wound. But how could I do that? Had Ndubuisi’s body been with us, it would have been a relatively simple matter for me. All that I needed to do in that case was to conduct a thorough autopsy on his body to find out the correct cause of death. But the body had already been cremated in haste. Now all I had in my possession were some reports prepared by Dr. Harish, when Ndubuisi first arrived at the hospital. I interviewed Dr. Harish in great detail. He was young and inexperienced, but certainly a very bright doctor. Obviously he was terrified. He was being prosecuted in an alien land, and if found guilty, they could send him behind bars for a lengthy period of time. Something had to be done very fast. Fortunately Dr. Harish had prepared a very detailed injury report. I read the injury report over and over again, and found that the most significant part was that his left sternocleidomastoid had received a gash 6x2x4.5 cm in size. It was that wound which appeared fatal to me. But the volume of blood that Ndubuisi lost was not very much. Dr. Harish had immediately sutured the wound. At a rough guess, he had lost about 500 cc of blood. Now that is not sufficient to cause death by shock. One would require at least 2000 cc for that. Obviously Ndubuisi had died because of some other reason. But what? That was the million dollar question. I could not sleep that night. I kept thinking the whole night. And I do not know when I fell asleep. But soon I started dreaming. I saw Ndubuisi going down and down in deep water. He was struggling to stay at the surface. But something was taking him down and down. Bubbles of air were streaming through his nostrils. Bubbles of air.. .. I woke up with a start. It came to my mind in a flash. It had to be air embolism! Perhaps I was thinking about air embolism subconsciously. That is why I dreamed of those air bubbles, perhaps. For recapitulation, let me state what air embolism is. It was Rudolf Virchow, the famous 19th Century German pathologist who introduced the term embolus and embolism into modern medicine. In 1856 he applied the term embolus to a loose clot in the blood stream. These words are of Greek origin and come from the Greek word “emballe” meaning to throw in, or to lay in or to put in as a stopper, peg or bolt. A loose blood clot in the circulation indeed acts as a stopper or a peg. As long as it travels in vessels bigger than its size, it is alright, but as soon as it encounters a vessel smaller than its own size, it gets stuck there, acting as a stopper or a peg. Many of you would be surprised to know that embolism is used in a general sense too, meaning the adding or “throwing in” of an extra day to the year. In relation to medicine, we usually speak of embolism in relation to blood clots which travel from leg veins upwards and get lodged in pulmonary arteries. This is a serious condition causing almost instantaneous death. Under certain conditions - as when veins are cut - air can get sucked inside the veins. It forms a bubble inside and this bubble travels towards the heart along with the blood stream, and gets lodged in the pulmonary arteries just as a blood clot does. A bubble of air is incompressible, and there is no way the blood stream can negotiate this bubble. Inside the vein this bubble acts just like a blood clot. That is, it blocks the circulation just as effectively as does ordinary blood clots, causing immediate death. It is almost as if someone had put an arterial clamp over that place! Detecting ordinary blood clots in pulmonary arteries, or for that matter anywhere else in the body, is relatively easy, but detecting air embolism is a different game altogether. It remains one of the most challenging tasks faced by a forensic pathologist. The reason is that the moment you open pulmonary arteries, the bubble is going to disappear in the air. For this reason, forensic pathologists usually dissect the heart under water in suspected cases of air embolism, but believe me it is a very difficult and challenging procedure. Nobody loves it. There is a silver lining though. If you are suspecting air embolism in a case, before you start the autopsy, one of the best things you can do is to X-ray the body. If an air bubble is present in the heart or pulmonary arteries, it will show up in the X-rays. So you conduct this difficult procedure only in the cases in which you see the bubble in the X-rays, and leave out the rest. In fact, the X-ray plate itself is proof that the person died of air embolism and many forensic pathologists don’t take the trouble to dissect the heart under water after that. But we all know, no post mortem was ever conducted on Ndubuisi. Even if it had been conducted, I am doubtful, if anyone would have been able to detect the cause of death as air embolism, as there was no forensic pathologist in the whole of Timbuktoo. I was now in a very unenvious position. I did not have the dead body of Ndubuisi, and I had to prove that he had died of air embolism. That was the only way to save Dr. Harish. Only then we could prove conclusively that it was the initial stab wound which caused the death (by air embolism), and not negligence on the part of Dr. Harish. But how could I do it? That was the million dollar question. In the evening, I was sitting by the lakeside looking at the beautiful lake and the birds leisurely floating in it. I was recalling my younger days, when we had to send almost all bodies for X-rays, in which we suspected air embolism. Then for many months, our X-ray unit was out of order, and we had to start the autopsy without the benefit of the initial X-ray plates. This meant that effectively we had to open all hearts under water and nobody liked that. You have to make a sac in the pericardial cavity by making appropriate cuts in the pericardium; then you fill that pericardial sac up with water with an assistant holding up both the flaps of pericardium with forceps; and then finally you inserted the blade in the pulmonary artery and under various heart cavities, twisting and turning it expecting a bubble to rise through water. Not many forensic pathologists love this. And many complained. To solve the problem, I came up with an interesting formula. I had for long observed that more people tend to die of embolism if the cut was longer and deeper. Similarly if the muscle involved was more voluminous, chances of air embolism were higher than if the muscle were less voluminous. Thus if someone got a 5 cm cut in gluteus maximus, he would stand much greater chances of getting air embolism than if he got a cut of the same size in, say, temporalis muscle. It was because temporalis muscle is less massive than gluteus maximus. Could I turn this observation into a strict mathematical formula, I had asked myself at that time. And quite interestingly I did come up with an interesting formula. It was: E=mc² Now if you think you are already familiar with the formula, probably you are wrong. E in our formula stands for Embolism (rate of), m for muscle mass (in grams) and c was a somewhat complicated parameter, which I called the “Cut factor”. I had observed that air embolism tended to depend both on the length and the depth of the cut, but depth had a greater effect on producing air embolism than the length. Thus if the length of the cut was twice, the chances of air embolism in a person would be doubled, but if the depth was twice, the chances would be four times. To take this observation into account, I put the Cut factor equal to [(cut depth)2 x (cut length)]. The interesting thing about this formula was that this stands true across all animal species. Once this formula was in place, we applied it in some experimental animals too, namely rats, guinea pigs, hamsters and pigs. To my satisfaction the formula proved true in all cases. Now as you can see, this formula actually gives the rate of embolism. To put it in other words, it would give you the probability that the person might have suffered air embolism. What we did with this formula was to look at the muscle which was cut and the size of the cut, and put the numbers in the formula (we had to put the decimal back by four digits, i.e. we had to effectively divide the figure by 10,000 to arrive at the correct rate of probability). If we got a figure, say, 50, it effectively meant that the person had a 50% chance of getting air embolism. If we got a figure of, say, just 2, there was just a two percent chance of getting air embolism and the forensic pathologist could perhaps look the other way and forget about dissecting the heart under water. Gradually all forensic pathologists in our institution got round to opening the heart under water if the figure was greater than 50. This made sense too, because if the probability of getting an air embolism is greater than 50%, you must take enough trouble to find it out. For those, who are able to follow me only vaguely, I would illustrate with an example. Gluteus maximus’ weight on the average is 493 g. Now if it sustains a cut which is 5 cm long and 3 cm deep, what are the chances that the person would die of air embolism? We would calculate it as follows: The cut is 5 cm long and 3cm deep. Since the cut factor is equal to [(cut depth)² x (cut length)], simple mathematics would show that it would be 45. Now putting this figure in our earlier formula E=mc² We get 493 x 452 or 998325 We put four decimals behind and we get 99.8325. This means that a person getting a 5 cm long and a 3 cm deep cut would stand a 99.8325% chances of getting an air embolism. This is well near hundred percent, and I would certainly like to take all trouble to dissect the heart under water. Over the years this formula had gained International acceptance, and almost every forensic pathologist was using it in his day-to-day practice. Could I use this formula in Ndubuisi’s case? Then suddenly I remembered that Dr. Harish had been careful enough to record the dimensions of the cut quite accurately. I jumped and ran back to my hotel room. Once inside the hotel room I phoned Dr. Harish immediately and in a most excited voice asked him to give me the dimensions of the cut. He was a little surprised at my strange request but gave the figures to me. The dimensions were 6x2x4.5 cm. Now my only problem was to find out the weight of the sternocleidomastoid muscle. I am no anatomist and did not know its weight at all. But fortunately I have many good anatomists as friends. One of them is Dr. R.K.Suri, Professor of Anatomy at our own medical college. I immediately made an overseas call, forgetting the time difference completely. It was 2 am in India, and he picked up the phone with some measure of irritation. “Dr. Suri, what is the weight of Sternocleidomastoid muscle?” “Is it Dr. Aggrawal?” he asked in great irritation. “Never mind. The weight?” I insisted. “Why! it is 153 grams. But why do you ask this question in the thick of the night?” He was obviously quite nonplussed. “Thanks” I said, ignoring his question completely, banged the receiver back and got back to crunching numbers. The cut factor in this case would be 121.5 as the length of the wound was 6 cm and its depth 4.5 cm. Now putting all the figures in our good old formula E=mc², we get: 153x(121.5)2 =153 x 14762.25 or 2258624.25 Putting the decimal back by four points, we arrive at the figure 225.862425 I jumped on my feet in glee. The probability of getting air embolism was even greater than 100! To a mathematician it may look silly, but we had encountered such figures before. It meant that the person was sure to get air embolism. Everything was clear now. With such a deep cut on his Sternocleidomastoid muscle, Ndubuisi stood a 225% chance of getting air embolism. In other words, he died of air embolism. That was for sure. We immediately filed our answer in the Law Ministry of Timbuktoo. I am given to believe that the Ministry was going to dismiss that answer too, but before doing that they took the advice of some international forensic experts, and all of them advised that my reasoning was watertight and there was no scope of rebutting it. In fact if they did it, they would go down in the eyes of the International Community as an utterly unjust nation, and would stand the risk of getting completely isolated. Mombutu obviously did not want to take this risk. Dr. Harish was immediately cleared of all charges. I returned back to India, and the very next day went to Dr. Suri and thanked him for the help he rendered us. He was still very very angry with me, especially because I had banged the phone on him, but when he heard the great service he had rendered for our nation, he forgot all anger and is once again a very great friend of mine.