Discovering a Medieval Louse

John Steinbeck's interest in science was stimulated by his long friendship with the marine biologist Ed Ricketts. Even more consuming was his interest in the Arthurian legends. This extract is from a letter written in September 1962.

The Morgan Library has a very fine 11th-century Launcelot in perfect condition. I was going over it one day and turned to the rubric of the first known owner dated 1221, the rubric a squiggle of very thick ink. I put a glass on it and there imbedded deep in the ink was the finest crab louse, pfithira pulus, I ever saw. He was perfectly preserved even to his little claws. I knew I would find him sooner or later because people of that period were deeply troubled with lice and other little beasties - hence the plagues. I called the curator over and showed him my find and he let out a cry of sorrow. `I've looked at that rubric a thousand times,' he said. `Why couldn't I have found him?'

Source: Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, ed. Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten, London, Heinemann, 1975.

One hundred and eighty one years ago today in the town of Heinzendorf, Austria Gregor Mendel came into his genetic inheritance. Mendel chose to use it as a monk in the service of botanical experimentation. Among other achievements he pioneered the mathematical foundation of the science of genetics. His legacy turned up ultimately in the “accidental discovery” — whatever that means — by Alec Jeffreys (now Sir Alec) of the “genetic ‘fingerprint’” (his coinage). Probably not as many people have heard of Sir Alec as have heard of Mendel or James Watson, although Anna Anderson would have had more reason to hear of Sir Alec than most had she lived longer. As it happened, she died in 1984, just as Jeffreys was forming the work that in the end undid her claim to have been the Anastasia missing from the grave pit in which lay the remains of Tsar Nicholas II and the royal family, all of whom had been brutally murdered in July, 1918. In 1920 Ms. Anderson began laying claim to her royal identity, and maintained it until her death. Her persistence caused a movie to be made. (It provided a star turn for Ingrid Bergman.) Unraveling Anderson’s claim was no simple matter as James Watson details in DNA: The Secret of Life (at your booksellers). Watson describes numerous cases, right up to the most recent melodramas. It also provides an exemplary exposition of how DNA sampling and comparison works and why it has come to replace that old repository of our need for certainty, the smudgeable fingerprint.