Botulism takes center stage at UMass conference

DARTMOUTH — Dr. Daniel Drachman is an unlikely movie actor. Tall, distinguished, rumpled, deep-voiced and very intense, he's a neurologist and professor at Johns Hopkins University. He's also the scientist who gave Botox injections to famed classical pianist Leon Fleischer, unlocking his crippled right hand and restoring the artist to the heights of his concert career.

Dr. Drachman, who played himself in "Two Hands," an Oscar-nominated documentary about the Fleischer story, was one of 60 scientists and graduate students who converged on UMass Dartmouth last week for two solid days of botulinum.

Dr. Bal Ram Singh, the biochemist behind the new two-story national Botulinum Research Center, was beaming Friday as he circulated through the gathering, a high-powered list of doctors, researchers, government officials and military officers, along with a few entrepreneurs, all looking at the world's most potent poison.

Researchers at UMass are working under government Homeland Security and military grants aimed largely at finding antidotes to the toxin that causes botulism, which is produced by the common bacterium clostridium botulinum. To do so involves unlocking the mysteries of how it so efficiently invades nerve cells and shuts them down, paralyzing muscles and causing death.

It involves understanding how it doesn't work, as well, as in the case of the lowly quahog, which was found — much to UMass researchers' amazement — to be virtually immune to botulism, and thus a possible defense against a potential weapon in the war on terror.

Dr. Drachman's interest is in the mechanisms of the human body and how they relate to all manner of things, including botulinum, he explained patiently to a layman reporter. "I use (botulinum) more as a tool" for understanding processes, and he has been studying it since the 1960s, he said.

Many of the other attendees also see botulinum as a piece of their own research, and the fact that there were so many attending the symposium amazed and delighted Dr. Singh.

"I sent out the letters and they all said they were coming," he said.

In the case of the famed pianist Fleischer, botulinum, in the extremely low-dose form known commercially as Botox, targeted not facial wrinkles but a condition known as focal dystonia. It is a severe, often painful and permanent contraction of the muscles that eluded treatment until botulinum was tried. The afflicted can exhibit distorted feet, a lost voice known as dysphonia, hard squinting to the point of blindness, or locally paralyzed and contorted limbs or fingers, as in Mr. Fleischer's case.

Dr. Andy Pickett, representing a British drug company that makes a competitor to Botox known as Dysport, gave a presentation that described the effects of dystonia as "so painful that they never go out in public, and they haven't for many years."

Dystopia can be the result of cerebral palsy or of brain trauma; 1.5 million brain injuries a year occur in the United States, and 25 percent of those people exhibit some signs of dystopia — and may be candidates for botulinum therapy, Dr. Pickett said

Dr. Singh led tours of the new UMass facility, including the Level 3 biosafety security areas that are designed for a high level of security against releases of the toxin, and which are soon going to be off-limits for the most part. Many of the visitors were colleagues of Dr. Singh now or in the past, including Dr. Drachman, who was stymied by the question of why the botulinum lab wasn't built at John Hopkins.

He noted with approval the level of interest that botulinum is getting among scientists and researchers, compared to the 1960s when he began and was nearly alone in the pursuit. What 19th century German researcher Justinius Kerner termed the "smart poison" after predicting the medicinal value of what was then known as "sausage poison" because of unexplained deaths from tainted food.

Today, the attitude may be closer to that expressed in the 16th century alchemist Paracelsus, quoted by Dr. Pickett, who wrote, "All things are poisonous, and there is nothing that is harmless; the dose alone decides that something is a poison."

Contact Steve Urbon


Reader Reaction
Not sure how to add your comment? Here's how
Top Jobs
Top Homes