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FACT: There is cocaine in the Library of Congress

By Raquel Feltman

The Library of Congress has more than 170 million items and they are definitely not all books. And no, I’m not just talking about old letters and other historical documents. There are also many… things. What kind of things? A topographical map of the Grand Canyon made of chocolate, for example. The LoC is also home to Carl Sagan’s old blackboard, a 160-year-old wedding cake and at least one package of cocaine. Contrary to popular belief, the cocaine in question did not belong to Sigmund Freud, but it is still his fault that it is there.

This story begins in the 1880s, when a young Freud was receiving super in cocaine. He was not the only one: the medical journal the lancet basically couldn’t keep up with all the new research being published on cocaine (probably because researchers were also in cocaine). Freud sent a bottle to his fiancée and wrote a monograph called “Über Coca” (On Coca, which, again, he really liked). was) exaggerating the “promise” of cocaine. Among the many potential uses of cocaine, Freud briefly noted that it could be a good local anesthetic.

That’s where his friend Carl Koller, an ophthalmologist at Vienna General Hospital, came into play. Koller noticed that cocaine numbed his tongue and realized it could revolutionize eye surgery. He tried it on a frog’s eye (success), then on himself (also success), and published the first work on cocaine as a local anesthetic in 1884. Freud was not satisfied.

Koller kept a small package of cocaine from his experiments. More than a century later, his daughter donated his papers to the Library of Congress, and library staff found them. The FBI verified that it was inert and is now in a vault. Meanwhile, Freud became the father of psychology (much of it conceived while using cocaine).

Listen to this week’s episode to learn more, including the story of how a Civil War veteran and morphine addict accidentally invented the world’s most famous soft drink.

FACT: Fallout shelters were never as popular as TV might lead you to think.

Presenting Ben Bradford

When you hear “atomic shelter,” what do you imagine? Maybe a staircase in the backyard, a cylindrical vault door, and canned food on green metal shelves.

In this week’s episode, Ben Bradford, host of the podcast Are we doomed?—came together to discuss the strange reality of sheltering in place from a nuclear war.

The classic idea of ​​the family fallout shelter comes largely from a fad of the early 1960s, which lasted only a few months, sparked an industrial bubble, and then quickly collapsed. But the image remained, shaping generations of movies, television and nuclear anxiety ever since.

While up to a couple hundred thousand fallout shelters may have existed, most were probably makeshift spaces like cellars and storm cellars, not a hole in the backyard built expressly for a family to weather nuclear Armageddon.

So what was (and is?) the plan for you and other Americans in the event of a nuclear war? Instead of funding private shelters or digging up decorated public shelters, as other countries do, the United States looked for makeshift sites. If you live in New York, Boston, or other major cities, you may still see signs directing you to them.

Do they work? What would they be like? How long would someone be expected to stay down there? Listen to this week’s episode for Ben’s radioactive scoop.

FACT: My great-grandfather discovered 2 percent of all known mosquito species.

By Laura Baisas

As we talked during our first date, my now-husband Francis told me that his great-grandfather was a mosquito entomologist and had several species named after him. Turns out he wasn’t just making up fun facts about mosquitoes to impress me.

Francisco Edelgan Baisas was an accomplished entomologist. He lived in the Philippines most of his life, where he had a prolific career studying mosquitoes and malaria. He was born on a farm in Luzon in 1896 and became the first Filipino trained as a malaria technician while attending the University of the Philippines in the 1920s.

According to Smithsonian entomologist Dr. Yvonne Linton, Francisco had a real knack for understanding how all the organisms in the Philippines related and fit together. He used a keen eye for detail to prune and remove many of them. That eye for detail was made very clear in one of the textbooks he wrote, Notes on Philippine mosquitoes. He was literally splitting hairs and worked closely with scientific illustrators to capture the subtle differences between species. In fact, his textbook is still used by entomologists and is considered a bible of Philippine mosquitoes. Understanding these differences can help scientists know which disease-carrying mosquitoes are present so they can help the public take precautions.

Over the course of his career, Francisco discovered 71 of 3,800 known mosquito species (about 2 percent of all known mosquitoes) and seven species are named after him. In 1955, the Philippine government named him among the country’s Ten Outstanding Scientists and awarded him a gold medal and an Honorary Diploma for his contributions to the study of malaria and mosquitoes.

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