Who In The Hell?

Happy National Heroes Day! Here’s to many more heroes to come!

Pleased to meet you, I'm Captain Birdseye's mutated child.

“I never forget a face, but for you I’ll make an exception” – Groucho Marx

You’ve probably never heard of the Hagfish, let alone know that there’s a day of the year (coincidentally, today) named after them. It probably doesn’t help their cause that they leave at the bottom of deep oceans and sea across the world, nor does it help their case that they are monumentally ugly. However, the latter reason proves that they can be heroes too. Why? I’ll explain.

Look to your left. Now look back. If you’ve run away screaming in terror thinking a sea-captain has gone all Brundlefly on you, then I don’t blame you. Hagfish are even less attractive than their name implies, and that’s saying something – coming from the Essex coast, I’ve encountered a lot of decrepit sea hags in my time. Meeting a four-foot long eel with a face like a cauliflower duck isn’t going to fill your day with joy.

Neither will its eating habits. While most normal animals enjoy finding some prey and noshing on the meaty skin to get to the juicy innards, the hagfish does this in reverse – it will crawl into its chosen target through their mouth, gills or even anus when they are dead or, even more disconcertingly if you have a mental image, dying, and eats away at the succulent organs within. In the end, all that is left is a floating bag of skin filled with bones.

Even one of its more impressive features is quite repulsive – when being targeted itself by predators it secretes slime. By the bucketload. If you don’t quite get how much, just look at the images in this interview with a slightly scary man who sounds like he would like to take a hagfish home, keep it locked in a basement for 7 months and then marry it. That’s a lot if slime.

Life can't be easy when you look like a penis

It’s final feature is not ugly and actually quite impressive – the hagfish doesn’t bleed when cut and as such, these cuts don’t get infected. As a result, scientists have been looking at the slime for medical purposes, though have yet to find anything.

None of these reasons, though, show how the hideous hagfish can be a hero. The answer comes from the day that’s been named after them. They are used as an example for ugly animals every year, for disfigured creatures everywhere. While this may be promoting beauty on the inside in nature, they are still taunted. They have to be the face of ugliness across all the animal kingdom, while creatures such as the shrivelled and equally penis-like Naked Mole Rat and the California Condor remain relatively unscathed.

So thank you on behalf of other ugly animals (and whatever Shane McGowan is), hagfish. While they can’t hack the mental scarring, you’ve had to bear the brunt of it all. Just please don’t go on a rampage of revenge and eat us – humans don’t look good as sacks of skin filled with bones.

He probably didn't look like that in prison

“You’re a pink toothbrush, I’m a blue toothbrush; have we met somewhere before?” – Max Bygraves

If there’s one thing that’s good about waking up, it’s brushing your teeth. Let’s face it, in the morning, your mouth tastes like the arse-end of a drain and no matter how much you try to distract yourself, the festering flavour pesters and lingers. So as comfortable as your bed is, you’ll eventually realise that you need to brush your teeth to get all the bits out of hard to reach places and refresh your mouth at the same time.

But what about the old days? How on earth did they get that happy feeling in the morning? If you guessed salt and rags, you win the prize (it’s some salt and rags). While toothbrushes had been around in some forms in history, they were not mass-produced tools and as such barely anyone had one. This is why we have prisoner William Addis to thank for starting the revolution. Wait, prisoner?

Yes, I never thought we’d be heralding a man held at Her Majesty’s pleasure as a hero, but here we are. His crime wasn’t too bad – he provoked a riot in 1770. It’s not like he murdered anyone or threw a child down a well or anything. Well, presumably not. But in committing his crime he set himself and the rest of us up for a more hygienic life.

The morning routine wouldn't be quite the same with salt and rags, would it?

While in prison, he tried to work out what he’d do upon release to recoup lost earnings and you know, pay for living and such. In the midst of this is presumably realised he was British and that cleaning your mouth with a communal prison rag probably wasn’t good for him, so he got thinking. He took the bone of a chicken from one of his meals and bored holes into it. He was obviously an alright prisoner too, because when he asked the guards for some bristles, they didn’t bat an eyelid and even gave him some glue. Either that, or they weren’t too bright, which is equally possible.

Addis tied the bristles together and glued them onto the bone and viola, the tooth bone-bristle-stick was formed! Possibly much to the confusion of Americans everywhere, the inventor of the modern-day toothbrush was British.

The first mass-produced toothbrush hit England in 1780 and suddenly Addis was crapping money, until he died in 1808, leaving his business to his son. The company, named Wisdom Toothbrushes, still exists today. Not bad for a convict.

Strike a pose

“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?” – Albert Einstein

We’ve dealt with heroes who have since departed the world before, but never with one who became a hero in death. You probably have in your head that it would be someone who diligently decides that his or her fate is less important than those of other people (something I’ll get on to in another exciting installment) and sacrifices themselves for the greater good, but unlike the thighs of a Soho hooker, it’s doesn’t have to be as easy as that. This is the case of Henrietta Lacks.

Henrietta had a less than ordinary childhood, with her mother dying through childbirth and as a result of her father not being able to take car of the ten children, she ended up with her grandfather. She ended up marrying her first cousin and gave birth to five children in her lifetime. By 1951, she had started noticing lumps in her body and was diagnosed with cancer of the cervix. At this time, a biopsy was performed, with a part of the cervix taken out for biomedical research. After going through all the hoops and tight ropes found in the US medical system, she died at the age of 31.

Without sounding crass about the rest of her life, this is where things get interesting. You see, those parts of the cervix that were removed had research carried out upon it, and it surprised everyone – the healthy cells were living. That’s actually surviving outside of the body on their own – previously the cells would only survive two or three cell divisions. This was the first time this had ever been achieved. The scientist behind the research, George Gey, isolated a specific cell and managed to maintain a healthy line through roller tubes.

Screw you, Polio!

The cells were suddenly hot property and Gey was sending samples of the cells to scientists across the country with instructions on how to grow them properly. The cells were named HeLa after Henrietta and were commercialised. It would probably take less time to list what diseases HeLa hasn’t been a contribution in the fight against, but you can thank Henrietta for polio vaccines, IVF, research into cancer, AIDS, toxic substances and radiation, as well as genetics research and the manufacture of many drugs to combat more common illnesses like influenza and STDs.

Unfortunately, this is where the story goes a bit off kilter, sorry folks. You thought it was all sunshine and roses, but no, there was a steaming turd on the lawn all along.

No-one could work out why Henrietta’s body was so special, so contact was made with her living family to garner blood samples to see if it was genetic. Her family, completely ignorant of what had occurred with HeLa agreed – remember that cervix tissue that was removed from her body. Yeah, that was done completely without telling any member of her family and more samples had been taken from her dead body to cope with demand. Her children, who couldn’t afford medical insurance sat with nothing from their mother’s ‘immortal’ cells while a multimillion dollar industry had been built around the HeLa cells by the pharmaceutical industry.

No insurance for you!

The real kicker though? This has been deemed legal time and again in the US courts. Even though they were taken without consent, judges declared that by dying, she gave up her right to ownership of the cells. You can debate the whys and wherefores all you want, but it would strike anyone as odd as to why Henrietta died without a tombstone to commemorate her – even the location of the plot is uncertain – while the big pharmaceutical companies made a mint.

The Henrietta Lacks Foundation was set up to help aid her great grandchildren as well as descendants of research subjects from other medical trials that… didn’t go so well. Suffice to say, being injected with an STD isn’t that good for you

Death...

“Don’t panic, don’t panic” – Mrs Rabbit

CBBC back in its heyday was great fun to watch. Whether is was because of Andi Peters in the broom cupboard with Edd the Duck or watching Ant go blind on Byker Grove, there was something for everyone.

The schedule was laid out for younger more colourful cartoons earlier in the afternoon for all the 5-8 year olds to marvel over, followed by arty shows like SMArt while later in the afternoon came gritty-for-kids-television programmes like Grange Hill, for those who had spent the hour after school shooting up cocaine or beating up the ugly kid.

It was a schedule that made sense, given that primary schoolers really didn’t want to be seeing a lot of anger, death and drama when they got in from school and would much rather watch Dave Benson Phillips cover a man in goo or some teenage turtles eat some pizza while being groomed by a giant rat. It just made sense.

...after death...

Well, apart from one show. A show that wasn’t afraid to talk to its viewers like they were mature 5-8 year olds who read The Guardian and liked fishing. Perhaps the most vicious cartoon on children’s telly boxes at the time and probably since; a happy colourful cartoon called The Animals of Farthing Wood. It had your usual characters; serious, forgetful, slapstick, moany, morally confused, nasty and sarcastic, was very colourful and had lots of animals traipsing around having adventures together. How on earth could it be so vicious?

Well, it may have had something to do with the huge body count. You don’t see death a lot in CBBC-land, which is why something like a boy going blind because his friends are really bad at paintball (seriously, it’s their own teammate!) is so infamous., but the ways and amount of deaths over the two series (two, definitely two. There were only ever two… that mattered and were decent) was mesmeric.

To see animals burn to death, shot repeatedly, caught in traps, run over, eaten and strangled at 3:40pm on a weekday afternoon takes balls to schedule and was infinitely better value than a short stumpy fox with a hand up his arse. In one episode, you see some field mice decide they want to stay in a place on their travels. They bid their farewells and leave. Later, on of the travelling animals wonder how the mice are getting on. Cut to perhaps the most horrific scene in a cartoon where you see a gore bush covered in blood – a butcher bird appears with a baby mouse in its mouth and impales it on the bush, and then follows by showing grieving mother mouse crying her eyes out.

...after death. Also, I'm hungry now.

This is just the most extreme example, but throughout the show, the scenes are just as bad. As Mrs Rabbit is being eaten by a blue fox at the wildlife sanctuary the group were travelling to, she continuously screams “don’t panic, don’t panic!” for a good 30 seconds until she is a lifeless rabbity carcass.

My other favourite death in the series was Mrs Pheasant. She and her husband were a bickering couple right at the start of the adventure. Unfortunately for them, they wandered into a farm with the group and got stuck in a barn over night. Mrs Pheasant was keeping watch for the farmer and on trying to alert her friends, she was shot. Her husband, Mr Pheasant, was sure she had died, but wanted to go look for her in case. On his return to the farm, he saw her alright; roasted and cooling down in the window. At which point, he is also shot. And presumably eaten with some excellent stuffing.

The show was not afraid to push this point home and I feel it needs to be commended for that. It got a preachy about other things, such as human intervention in the wild, but the deaths were just deaths that people dealt with and moved on from, like in real life. Also, it had a fantastic theme song.