It even affects people within those age groups differently …. The one constant about ODAP poisoning, however, very simply put, is this: those who will be hit the hardest are always young men between the ages of 15 and 25 and who are essentially starving or ingesting very limited calories, who have been engaged in heavy physical activity, and who suffer trace-element shortages from meager, unvaried diets.
ODAP was identified in It brings about paralysis by over-stimulating nerve receptors, causing them to die. As Hamilton explains,. And when sufficient neurons die, paralysis sets in….
The signals get weaker and weaker until they simply cease altogether. The only thing left for them to do at that point is to crawl….
Jonathan Southard, the assistant chair of the chemistry department at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and persuaded Southard to have one of his students, Wendy Gruber, test the seeds of both Hedysarum alpinum and Hedysarum mackenzii for ODAP. Upon completion of her tests, in , Gruber determined that ODAP appeared to be present in both species of Hedysarum, but her results were less than conclusive. But Gruber possessed neither the expertise nor the resources to analyze the seeds with H.
To establish once and for all whether Hedysarum alpinum is toxic, last month I sent a hundred and fifty grams of freshly collected wild-potato seeds to Avomeen Analytical Services, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for H. Craig Larner, the chemist who conducted the test, determined that the seeds contained. According to Dr. Considering that potentially crippling levels of ODAP are found in wild-potato seeds, and given the symptoms McCandless described and attributed to the wild-potato seeds he ate, there is ample reason to believe that McCandless contracted lathyrism from eating those seeds.
He was a young, thin man in his early 20s, experiencing an extremely meager diet; who was hunting, hiking, climbing, leading life at its physical extremes, and who had begun to eat massive amounts of seeds containing a toxic [amino acid]. A toxin that targets persons exhibiting and experiencing precisely those characteristics and conditions …. Also, it was ignorance which must be forgiven, for the facts underlying his death were to remain unrecognized to all, scientists and lay people alike, literally for decades.
If that were the case, Chris McCandless would now be forty-five years old. Photographs courtesy the family of Chris McCandless. Ying Long, Dr. Andrew Kolbert and Dr. Laursen also identified other varieties of mushrooms in the photos that made people violently ill. They about as toxic looking as any mushroom could look in my opinion, and it seems hard to believe Chris McCandless would have gorged on them, let alone eat one.
Even if he had tried one, according to the research I found online, it would have made him violently ill — but not fatally so — and it is unlikely he would have tried anymore. Regardless, we will likely never know with any certainty what caused the death of Chris McCandless. It will remain an unsolved mystery, his death a tragic end to a life full of promise. What I believe is that Chris McCandless did not intend his Alaskan trip to be a suicide mission, and that he planned to walk out of the bush and re-enter society sometime at end of How do we know this?
From his photos of course. After all, why document your travels, if not to share them with others. Like Like. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email.
Like this: Like Loading Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. Email required Address never made public. Name required. Many of Krakauer's readers, meanwhile, thought McCandless was a fool — a dreamy kid woefully unprepared for life in the wilderness who, in a sense, had gotten what was coming to him.
In "Into the Wild," Krakauer speculated that what had killed McCandless was not actually starvation but wild potato seeds. McCandless had eaten lots of these seeds, and Krakauer speculated that a toxic alkaloid in the seeds had so weakened him that he had been unable to gather enough food. But wild potatoes are described in most guidebooks including McCandless' as a non-toxic plant. So Krakauer's "toxic alkaloid" theory was ridiculed. Krakauer sent some seeds to a professor for tests, but the professor couldn't find any toxic alkaloids.
A researcher named Ronald Hamilton had written a paper arguing that McCandless had, in fact, been killed by the wild potato seeds, but not because of any "toxic alkaloids. Lathryrism occurs primarily in malnourished young men, and it is caused by the ingestion of an amino acid that was first discovered in the seeds of wild grass peas.
After reading Hamilton's paper, Krakauer sent a bunch of wild potato seeds to a chemist. The chemist found that, indeed, the wild potato seeds contained the amino acid that causes lathyrism. So Chris McCandless may indeed have died of starvation, Krakauer concludes, in a long article in this week's New Yorker.
But he starved not because he was alone in the wilderness, but because an amino acid in a plant that his guidebook had told him was safe had gradually paralyzed him. Once McCandless could no longer move, he could no longer gather more food.
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