Mutants (21 page)

At the base of our brains, in a cavity of the skull, lies a gland called the pituitary. As big as a pea, it is immensely powerful. The pituitary secretes six hormones that collectively regulate the development of breasts in pubescent girls and the secretion of milk in mothers; the production of sperm in men and the maturation of ova in women; our allergic responses and the way we cope with stress.

But much of the pituitary is devoted to making growth
hormone: it makes about a thousand times more of this one molecule than any of the other five. Secreted into the bloodstream, growth hormone circulates throughout the body. Its message to the body’s cells is a simple one: ‘grow and divide’. Growth hormone is not, of course, the only molecule that can do this. Every organ has its own molecular devices for regulating its size and shape, but the ability of growth hormone to spread throughout the body from a single source means that it simultaneously affects the growth of
all
tissues. It is the multiplier of our flesh and bones.

Joseph Boruwlaski has all the signatures of growth-hormone failure: a body the size and proportions of a four-year-old’s, delayed puberty, and a briskly adult intellect. It is impossible to identify the molecular fault with any precision. A mutation in any one of half a dozen genes that control the regulation of growth hormone may have been responsible for Boruwlaski’s smallness. Alternatively, he may have had lots of growth hormone, but no receptor for it to bind to. In the foothills of the Ecuadorean Andes there is an entire community of more than fifty people who have mutated receptors; when fully grown, the men are only 124 centimetres (four feet) tall. They live in just two villages and are rather inbred. Although Catholic, many of them have Jewish names; they are thought to descend from
conversos
who came to the New World in flight from the Inquisition. It is likely that they brought the dwarfism mutation with them, since exactly the same mutation has also been found in a Moroccan Jew. The Ecuador dwarfs are bright; as children they have a knack for winning prizes at school. But as they get older they tire of being teased by schoolmates and tend to drop out, and in the most recent generation not one of the adults has married.

* * *

In 1782 Joseph Boruwlaski met his physical opposite.

Soon after my arrival in London, there appeared a stupendous giant; he was eight feet four inches high, was well proportioned, had a pleasing countenance, and what is not common in men of his size, his strength was adequate to his bulk. He was then two and twenty years of age; many persons wished to see us in company, particularly the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, my worthy protectress who, with Lady Spencer, proposed to see the giant.

I went and I believe we were equally astonished. The giant remained sometime mute. Then stooping very low he offered me his hand, which I am sure would have enclosed a dozen like mine. He paid me a genteel compliment and drew me near to him, that the difference of our size might strike the spectators the better: the top of my head scarce reached his knee.

Boruwlaski does not tell us the name of this man, but contemporary prints record the meeting of a dapperly dressed dwarf and a man called O’Brien who billed himself as ‘the Irish Giant’. This hardly clarifies matters, since there were at least four ‘Irish Giants’ circulating about Georgian London, two of whom called themselves O’Brien. Both O’Briens were born in Ireland around 1760 and claimed lineal descent from Brian Boru, an Irish monarch of mythically gigantic dimensions. Both came to London in the early 1780s; one exhibited himself in Piccadilly, the other in St James’s. Both claimed they were over eight feet tall, but neither was more than 235 centimetres (seven feet eight inches).

We know this because their skeletons have been measured. One of these men, Patrick Cotter, was buried in Bristol; his casket was found in 1906 and his skeleton examined before re-interment. The skeleton of the other, Charles Byrne, hangs in the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons and Physicians in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. He is known there as Charlie, and he is an imposing sight, conveying an impression of oaken massivity. This is partly due to the brown tint of the bones, caused, it is said, by the speed and secrecy of their preparation. His jaw, chin and postorbital ridges are of a strength that must have given him a forbidding appearance in life. Towards his death,
which was probably due to drink, he developed the morbid fear that anatomists would seize his bones. He was right to be worried, for a contemporary newspaper describes how ‘the whole tribe of surgeons put in a claim for the poor departed Irishman and surrounded his house, just as harpooners would an enormous whale’. In the event the anatomist and surgeon John Hunter got him, boiled him, and hung him where he can be seen today.

P
ITUITARY GIGANTISM
. C
HARLES
B
YRNE
(1761–83).

Charles Byrne had a pituitary tumor. In 1911 Sir Arthur Keith, Curator of the Hunterian, opened Charlie’s skull. The indentation that had once contained the pituitary was cavernous; the gland itself must have been more the size of a small tomato than a pea. Pituitary tumors secrete vast amounts of growth hormone. They cause the cells in the growth plates of a child’s limbs to divide abnormally fast, which in turn makes for super-charged growth. Childhood pituitary tumors are no less common now than when Irish giants stalked London’s West End, but these days they are quickly detected and surgically removed. In May 1941, when the Hunterian suffered a direct hit from German incendiary bombs, John Hunter’s giant fossil armadillo was destroyed, as were his stuffed crocodiles and many of the exquisite anatomical preparations to which he had devoted his life. Charlie, however, survived, so to speak.

PYGMIES

An old photograph shows a triptych of skeletons that used to stand in the public galleries of the Natural History Museum in London. The central skeleton once belonged to a European man.
On his left stood the hunched skeleton of a lowland gorilla; on his right, the gracefully erect one of a pygmy woman. A label, barely discernible, credits the pygmy skeleton to Emin Pasha, African explorer and Ottoman administrator. His 1883 expedition diary records that it had been unusually expensive, an outbreak of cannibalism having inflated the price of human remains in Monbuttu-land. Yet he had paid the asking price without a murmur. Pygmy skeletons were highly desirable and every museum in Europe wanted one. It had only been thirteen years since an African pygmy had first stepped out of myth and into the modern world.

A
KA PYGMY WOMAN (LEFT), CAUCASIAN MALE (CENTRE), GORILLA (RIGHT)
.
PYGMY SKELETON COLLECTED BY
E
MIN
P
ASHA
, C
ONGO
1883.

After a few mornings my attention was arrested by a shouting in the camp, and I learned that Mohammed had surprised one of the Pygmies in attendance upon the King, and was conveying him, in spite of strenuous resistance, straight to my tent. I looked up, and there, sure enough, was the strange little creature, perched upon Mohammed’s right shoulder, nervously hugging his head, and casting glances of alarm in every direction. Mohammed soon deposited him in the seat of honour. A royal interpreter was stationed at his side. Thus, at last, was I able veritably to feast my eyes upon a living embodiment of the myths of some thousand years!

The writer’s name was George August Schweinfurth, a Riga-born botanist and traveller; the pygmy’s name was Akadimoo. They met in 1870 on the banks of the Uele River in what is now the northernmost province of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Akadimoo should not have existed. By the time Schweinfurth came across him the notion that there was, buried somewhere in the dark heart of Africa, a race of very small people had long been dismissed as the fancies of Greek mythographers. ‘The Trojans filled the air with clamour, like the cranes that fly from the onset of winter and sudden rains and make for the Ocean Stream with raucous cries to bring sudden death to the Pigmies,’ wrote Homer. Later authors wrote about a pygmy queen named Genara who had, for her beauty and her vanity, been transformed into a crane by a jealous goddess and set against her own people.

The war of the pygmies, the
Geranomachia
as the Greeks called it, is an engaging story, and one that endured for millennia. Pliny repeats and embroiders it; he places the pygmies in Thrace, Asia Minor, India, Ethiopia and at the source of the Nile, and cannot resist adding that they rode into battle on the backs of goats and were only seventy-three centimetres (two feet four inches) tall. Puzzled medieval scholastics wondered if people so small could be human, and concluded that they could not. As late as 1716 Joseph Addison wrote twenty-three Latin verses entitled
The Battle of the Pygmies and the Cranes
. Along with them he published two other Latin poems in praise of the barometer and the bowling ball. In his essay on Addison, Dr Johnson comments that some subjects are best not written about in English.

Addison’s poem was the last flourish of the Homeric tradition. By the late 1600s, the hardheaded men of the Royal Society were testing legend against empirical evidence and finding it wanting. In 1699 Edward Tyson wrote a pamphlet to prove that a putative pygmy corpse he had dissected was not human. He was right, as it happens, for his pygmy was a chimpanzee. Tyson then went on to write a scathing commentary in which he pointed out that though the inhabited world was well known, no race of little men had been found; the pygmies, as well as the cynocephali (dog-headed men) and satyrs of the Greeks, were merely garbled stories about African apes.

Tyson’s reasoning was clear and his intentions admirable, but he overestimated the extent of the world that was actually known. He also failed to consider that Homer’s lovely simile
might have been concrete knowledge transmuted. Homer certainly knew that the storks that can still be seen nesting in Greek villages in late summer, winter each year in Africa. The inference that his pygmies must live there too is plain. He was also probably remembering something distantly learned from the Egyptians. Almost a thousand years before Homer lived, Pepy II of the sixth dynasty had written to one of his generals urging him to look after a pygmy found in an expedition to the Southern Forests.

Akadimoo, the first modern pygmy, belonged to a people called the ‘Aka’ – a name by which they are still known. The Aka are only one of a rather heterogeneous collection of shortish peoples who live in the African forest between the parallels 4° North and South. If a pygmy is defined as any member of a group with an average adult male height of less than 150 centimetres (four feet ten inches), then Africa has about a hundred thousand of them. The shortest are the Efe of the Ituri forest; their men are only 142 centimetres (four feet eight inches), their women 135 centimetres (four feet five inches). They are thought to have been there long before the invasion of the taller Bantu from the north-west about two thousand years ago.

The French anthropologist Armand de Quatrefages thought that African pygmies are the remnants of a small, dark, frizzy-haired and steatopygous people who once occupied much of the globe. This is not a ridiculous idea. In the islands of the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea there are groups of people who are almost physically indistinguishable from African pygmies. These are the ‘negritos’ who have been a shadowy presence in
anthropology ever since the Spanish first encountered them when settling the interior of Luzon Island in the Philippines archipelago. Recent genetic studies suggest that the negritos are ancient: that they were the first Palaeolithic colonists of Asia. Like the rest of humanity, they came from Africa, but they are not especially closely related to Africans, much less African pygmies. They may have evolved smallness quite independently.