Alexander the Great Killed by Toxic Bacteria?

By Rossella Lorenzi, for Discovery News

An extraordinarily toxic bacterium harbored by the "infernal" Styx River might have been the fabled poison rumored to have killed Alexander the Great (356 - 323 B.C.) more than 2,000 years ago, according to a scientific-meets-mythic detective study.

The research, which will be presented next week at the XII International Congress of Toxicology annual meetings in Barcelona, Spain, reviews ancient literary evidence on the Styx poison in light of modern geology and toxicology.

According to the study, calicheamicin, a secondary metabolite of Micromonospora echinospora, is what gave the river its toxic reputation.

The Styx was the portal to the underworld, according to myth. Here the gods swore sacred oaths.

"If they lied, Zeus forced them to drink the water, which struck them down. The 8th-century B.C. Greek poet Hesiod wrote that the gods were unable to move, breathe or speak for one year," co-author Adrienne Mayor, a research scholar at Stanford University's Departments of Classics and History of Science, told Discovery News.

Another account by the Greek geographer Pausanias (110 - 180) reported that the river could ruin crystal, pottery and bronze. "(The) only thing able to resist corrosion is the hoof of a mule or horse," he wrote.

"Indeed, no ancient writer ever casts doubt on the existence of a deadly poison from the Styx River," Mayor, author of the Mithradates biography "The Poison King," said.

The researchers believe this mythic poison must be calicheamicin. "This is an extremely toxic, gram-positive soil bacterium and has only recently come to the attention of modern science. It was discovered in the 1980s in caliche, crusty deposits of calcium carbonate that form on limestone and is common in Greece," author Antoinette Hayes, toxicologist at Pfizer Research, told Discovery News.

Now called Mavroneri, "Black Water," the Styx originates in the high mountains of Achaia, Greece. Its cold waters cascade over a limestone crag to form the second highest waterfall in Greece.

"Unfortunately, the geochemistry of the river has not yet been studied by modern scientists; therefore, there is no scientific data to support the plausible and interesting calicheamicin theory," Walter D’Alessandro, hydro-geochemist at the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Palermo, told Discovery News.

Whether Alexander really died from poisoning, as some of his closest friends believed, is pure speculation, Mayor and Hayes concede.

"We are not claiming that this was the poison that killed Alexander, nor we are arguing for or against a poison plot," Mayor said.

"However, such a sacred poison, used by the gods, would be appropriate for Alexander, who was already being thought of as semi-divine," she added.

Alexander fell ill at one of many all-night drinking parties in Babylon, in modern Iraq, crying out from a "sudden, sword-stabbing agony in the liver." The overlord of an empire stretching from Greece to India, was taken to bed with abdominal pain and a very high fever.

Over the next 12 days, he worsened. Alexander could only move his eyes and hands and was unable to speak. He later fell into a coma.

Alexander was pronounced dead on June 11, 323 B.C. -- just before his 33rd birthday.

Retrodiagnoses for his mysterious death have included poisoning, heavy drinking, septicemia, pancreatitis, malaria, West Nile fever, typhoid, and accidental or deliberate poisoning (hellebore, arsenic, aconite, strychnine).

"Notably, some of Alexander’s symptoms and course of illness seem to match ancient Greek myths associated with the Styx. He even lost his voice, like the gods who fell into a coma-like state after drinking from the river," Mayor said.

The poisoning diagnoses were rejected by many experts because few poisons induce fever. Furthermore, even fewer such poisons were available in Alexander's time.

However, naturally occurring calicheamicin, which is extremely cytotoxic, could still be the culprit.

"Cytotoxins cause cell death and induce high fever, chills, and severe muscle and neurological pain. Therefore, this toxin could have caused the fever and pain that Alexander suffered," Hayes said.

According to Richard Stoneman, the foremost expert on the myths of Alexander, the theory offers a good explanation for the Styx's ancient reputation.

"I personally think that Alexander probably died of natural causes -- either typhoid or an overdose of the hellebore used to treat his illness -- but other views are possible," Stoneman, author of "A Life in Legend: Alexander the Great," told Discovery News.

Buckyballs Found in Space

By Irene Klotz, for Discovery News

Twenty-five years after the discovery of buckyballs, the 60-packs of carbon molecules are found again -- this time in space, baked into the death shroud of a sun-like star.

The finding promises to open new doors in astronomy, just as the 1985 discovery of the third form of solid carbon (after diamond and graphite) revolutionized chemistry, leading to new materials built one stable molecule at a time.

The buckyballs were found in a planetary nebula called Tc 1, located about 6,000 light-years away. These types of nebula are shells of gas and dust shed by dying stars. In the case of Tc 1, the star, now a white dwarf, is still encased, but not quite dead.

Astronomers believe that as recently as 100 years ago, the star had another outburst. Its layers of hydrogen, however, already had been shed, leaving it with a helium shell and carbon-rich core.

"For a lot of planetary nebulae, that may be an end stage. But then the helium shell started burning, and it shed carbon-rich and hydrogen-poor material," lead researcher Jan Cami with the University of Western Ontario in Canada told Discovery News.

That turned out to be an ideal environment for cooling carbon atoms to cluster into their most stable form, 60-atom molecules shaped like soccer balls, known as buckyballs.

Cami and colleagues found the molecules by looking at Tc 1's infrared emissions with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

When light hits molecules and atoms, they will vibrate in specific, measurable ways -- a field of science known as spectroscopy. One of Cami's colleagues, who was studying Tc 1, found some unfamiliar fingerprints in the nebula's infrared light. Cami recognized them as carbon's 60-atom configuration and its favored 70-atom carbon partner.

"Cami's data is just so beautifully convincing. They have got some observations that there's almost nothing else interfering," Florida State University chemist Harold Kroto said in an interview.

In 1985, Kroto, with the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom at the time, and colleagues at Rice University in Texas were conducting laboratory experiments to try to understand how long chains of carbon molecules could be made. The carbon chains were found in interstellar space with radio telescopes in the 1970s.

They ended up discovering a third form of solid carbon, perfectly symmetrical geodesic spheres, which they named buckminsterfullerene after the American architect Buckminster Fuller. The most widely known fullerene is a buckyball -- 60 carbon atoms arranged by pentagons and hexagons into a hollow molecular cage one-billionth of a meter wide.

The discovery, which earned Kroto and colleagues Robert Curl and Richard Smalley the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, opened new frontiers in organic chemistry, physics, materials sciences and electronics.

The molecule proved a stable scaffold for creating new molecules that could hold and dispense electrical charges. Nanotechnology, the science of building materials one atom at a time, was born.

The finding of buckyballs in space may be similarly profound. Buckyballs, for example, may be responsible for mysterious sets of chemical fingerprints in the interstellar medium, known as the diffuse interstellar bands.

"Once you form fullerenes, it's hard to destroy them. They survive high energy, harsh radiation, even cosmic rays hitting them. They're very stable," Cami said. "This is actually just the beginning of a new research field."