Another mouthful

There is a huge, complex and infinitely fascinating ecosystem real close to my heart: about 15cm South in the transverse loop of my colon. Of course, it's only 'huge' in the fractal sense: it's much smaller that the Serengeti but it now has almost as many named species. Remember Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron ? It has a curiously long name whose origins I've still not been able to explain and it does useful things in our guts. Up until last night, I hadn't even heard of another polysyllabic microbe Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, let alone hazarded spelling it correctly. In contrast to B.θιο, there is no mystery in the name. It is the only species in its "Poo-bugs" genus and the specific name honours the late great German microbiologist Otto Prausnitz. DNA evidence wrenched it from the genus Fusobacterium 20 years ago. That was a very strange place to put F. prausnitzii because it is more closely related to Gram-positives like Clostridium than the Gram-negative Fusobacterium. There is also increasingly less mystery about its function which is important because it makes up between 5%-15% of the gut flora in healthy adult humans. For a single species out of the 1000-10000 bacterial types 'down there' that makes it a big player probably the most numerous.

Normally, your intestine, and mine, is in balance. It's not a monoculture of E.coli or F.prausnitzii or anything else. Harry Sokol and Philippe Langella in Jouy-en-Josas, France are working on the interface between gut microbes and host health and happiness. One of their key findings is that F.prausnitzii is conspicuous by its absence in people with inflammatory bowel disease IBD. IBD manifests in a suite of uncomfortable symptoms and is given different names depending on how flarey-uppy, how bloody and how persistent these symptoms are: ulcerative colitis UC, irritable bowel syndrome IBS, Crohn's Disease CD. The absence appears to be because F.prausnitzii is extremely oxygen sensitive EOS.  One of the effects of an inflammatory response is to send in a bunch of white blood cells that release reactive oxygen species ROS to clean up the threat. This takes out F.pr at least for a while. But one of the biochemical capabilities of F.pr is the produce lots of butyrate by partial oxidation of glucose. Butyrate has been shown to reduce the severity of inflammation in colitis when, for example, added to the darkness intra-rectally. Because of its extreme sensitivity to oxygen, it is difficult to grow F.pr on a petri dish in the lab. Clostridium difficile C.diff , a relative, is also, like Eleftheria terrae, notoriously difficult to culture. But progress has been made in working out a cocktail of additives [flavins and cysteine or glutathione] that will allow laboratory culture. That's good because you can then imagine scaling up to produce a generous handful of F.pr that can be introduced to suppress IBD.  This approach has shown considerable success against C.diff, which is a single rogue species that gets the upper hand in peculiar and particular circumstances - like in hospital after a heavy dose of anti-biotics.  With IBD it's not so easy because IBD is a wholesale shift in the make-up of the microbiota.

Think Serengeti.  Even after 60 years of studying the East African ecosystem, we have a very superficial understanding of the interactions. Literally superficial because we haven't a bog's notion about the role of the soil microbiota.  If one species of antelope or monkey gets uppity the managers of the wild-life reserve could perhaps deal with it: rifle, virus, predator. Although many such rough, simplistic human 'remedies' create as many problems as they solve - like cane toads Bufo marinus Rhinella marina in Australia. If it rains for 60 days straight and the Ngorongoro crater next door to Serengeti fills up with water and half the inhabitants drown then a quick-fix is less conceivable.
I started off down this rabbit hole after reading a 26th Feb 2015v Nature Supplement: Innovations in the Microbiome.  It's all behind a goll-darned paywall, though!  Harry Sokol seems to be on ResearchGate, I'll have to work out how to 'upvote' or 'like' or 'thumbs-up' his work and resist the temptation to endorse-bomb the poor fellow.

Echt Toll

Christiane Volhard was born on 20 October 1942 >!today!< near Magdeburg in the Eastern part of Germany. They escaped to the West after the war and she grew up in Frankfurt. After a workaday PhD at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen working on gene expression in Escherichia coli, she decided to switch to the study of drosophila development. She was briefly married to a chap called Nüsslein and Nüsslein-Volhard became her distinctive scientific handle. She overlapped for a few months with a just finished PhD student in the same lab called Eric Wieschaus who helped her find her feet in her new field.  After pursuing their careers in different directions and different places for several years, they washed up together again at EMBL in Heidelberg in 1978.  It was one of the great, productive, hardest-working, scientific friendships of the late 20thC.

If you want to see a scientific collaboration that really delivered you can't do better that watch a delightful two-hander when she and Eric Wieschaus [R in the late 1980s] look back on the old days when they were young and at the very peak of their game.  Sydney "apoptosis" Brenner and Francis "DNA" Crick famously shared an office for twenty years and bounced ideas off the walls, some of which turned out to be really valuable insights into how the biological world worked. EW & CN-V shared an even smaller office and made it work for them and for science. You can't be crammed up against another person in this way without a mutual respect.  They both recognise that their unique talent is the capacity for observation; they were both really good at detecting uber-subtle differences from "normal" in a screening factory for mutants in developing fruit-fly Drosophila melanogaster larvae.  When they were in the tiny lab adjacent to their minute office a key piece of kit was a top-of-range optical microscope with two sets of eye-pieces.  They were scanning through hundreds of fly larvae bearing mutations, looking for those that changed the pattern and process of development. They'd know simultaneously that this slide was interesting and their friendly rivalry hinged on one being 2 or 3 seconds ahead of the other in claiming gold.  The interesting mutations were so rare that normal people would easily become slide-after-slide-after-slide inattentive - like being a quality controller on auto-pilot in a Saab factory.

She is famous in the legends of science for being so taken aback by one of the mutants that she cried out "Das ist ja toll!", [toll previously] presumably just before Eric twigged what they was looking at. Maybe he'd stepped out of the lab for a moment. This mutant was all belly and no back and so the complement to an earlier mutant that they had named dorsal.  It turns out that the proteins derived from these genes are part of the same biochemical signalling pathway: toll near the top - embedded in the cell wall detecting incoming signals - and dorsal near the end where it acts as a 'transcription factor' [homologous with mammalian NF-κB] switching on genes in the nucleus.

Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, Eric Wieschaus and Ed Lewis scooped the 1995 Nobel Prize for their ground-breaking work in understanding embryonic development, one of the great miraculous mysteries of biology. How does a fertlised egg [N=1 cell] come to be an adult human [N=100 trillion cells] that is recognisably different from her dog which started off from essentially the same zygotic starting-blocks?

Toll was clearly important in the control of embryonic development: it sets up the dorso-ventral axis without which no growing, dividing cells will know where they are or where they are meant to be.  It was a staggering surprise when in 1996, Bruno Lemaitre and his boss Jules Hoffmann, working at CNRS in Strasbourg, discovered that flies mutant in Toll were abnormally prone to fungal attack [L adult fruit-fly riddled with fungal growth - the furry cardigan is a web of fungal mycelia]. The immunological importance of Toll and its pathway was emphasised when Janeway & Medzhidov and Bruce Buetler realised that mammals had homologs to Toll that were vital for correct immune function. We've met their favorite toll-like receptor TLR4 before sweeping TLR3 and TLR5 aside in its demands for attention. Hoffmann and Buetler shared the 2011 Nobel Prize, the others here named did not [ooops?!].

If the 1995 Nobel went to Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus for discovering the first insect TLR Toll and the 2011 went to Buetler and Hoffmann for first nailing the immunological function of the mammalian TLR TLR4, do you think that the 2027 Nobel will come our way for discovering and characterising the first avian specific TLR TLR15?  No, I don't either unless and until the 20 billion [!!] imprisoned chickens break loose and take over the world. It might, however, go to those who are re-claiming a developmental function for TLR in mammals after TLRs-in-immunology took all the attention over the last 20 years: you know who you are.

We are so amazed when a woman makes it to the top in the boy's world of science that interviewers always ask her about being a woman in science rather than about being a scientist. As I paraphrased Dr Curmudgeon last year:  "Sir, a woman's sciencing is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." CN-V talks [briefly] in a Nobel interview about the lack of respect that women who aspire to be scientists are likely to attract and expresses a dilemma about whether she is doing girls any favours by encouraging them to edge into the boy's club.  Nevertheless, in 2004 she set up the Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard Stiftung a foundation to help young women scientists juggle their careers with the exigencies of family life. So she clearly does believe in science for women and women for science and has coughed up a wodge of money to endorse this feeling. She is indeed echt toll; prima; fantastisch; klasse; wunderbar!

Mützen ab! und alles Gute zum Geburtstag!

More women in science.

It's just an epigenetic phase

There's an arresting moment in Michael Sandel's Harvard lecture series on Justice when he asks his audience who is an only child or the firstborn. Virtually everyone in the room puts up their hand, with the implication that younger sons and daughters are grinding away in some State School because they weren't smart enough to make the Ivy League. One implication of that is: parents lavish care and attention on Dau.I and run out of steam or interest or money for Dau.II, Dau.III and Son.IV.  The idea that some hormonal change makes second and subsequent children duller, if not exactly dullards, is hard to credit. On the other hand, you could note that rich well-connected families are small, while large families come from poorer neighbourhoods which have crappier schools. I think the status of this is that the observation is true but a widely accepted explanation is still awaited. If you a) haven't seen the Sandel Justice lectures b) have teenage children; then they are recommended.  We sat through a chunk of them before Dau.II left home as leaven from serial binge episodes of House, Desperate Housewives, Masterchef and The Wire.

It appears that birth order may affect whether you will grow up gay.  Seems that with each older brother blokes become a third more likely to love blokes. That doesn't mean that all fourth boys are gay; it means that if, say, 5% of #1s are gay then 6.6% of #2s are and 8.8% of #3s. If that's true, and we're still citing only that 2006 study, we're still adrift about the chemical / psychological /genetic mechanisms by which the phenomenon is achieved. Until the observation is incontrovertible, it is a waste of time to talk about, for one widely circulated example, the maternal immune system getting increasingly fed up with all the extra testosterone down there.  Now my pal El Asturiano has flagged a link in the most recent Nature which suggests that gay is probably not genetic but might be epigenetic. He also came up with the neat title to this post.

Epigenetics is a rather hot topic in genetics these past 5 or 10 years. Most famously in the investigations of the Dutch Hongerwinter of 1944-1945.  After the failure of Operation Market Garden [bloboprevious] when capturing Arnhem became A Bridge Too Far, occupied Netherlands suffered a terrible famine because the Germans diverted all available food to their core territory and the Allies were not in a position to make up the calorie deficit. A study in 2008 reported that children who were in utero during those desperately hard times grew up smaller than their siblings who were in process when their mother was comparatively better fed both before and after 1944. In particular they noted that the gene for insulin-like growth factor II (IGF2) was methylated in such a way as to damp down the effectiveness of its growth-promoting protein.  These epigenetic changes don't effect the underlying DNA but they definitely alter the way genes work . . . and the changes can persist into subsequent generations. You can imagine why such epigenetic control might be a good idea: if times are tough and belts are tight you need to be small and hardy to survive but the system needs to be flexible because cyclical good times favour fatter and taller offspring.  John Greally [see below] has written an informative editorial about the current status of epigenetic studies.

The genetics of gay has always been a bit of a conundrum because it is hard to work out how such a trait could be 'adaptive'. Gay people are surely less likely to have offspring than their heterosexual siblings because we are still ultimately dependent on one sperm and one egg to start the next generation and straight people can achieve this union with rather less trouble [5 minutes in the car-park outside a disco is all that is strictly necessary]. Everything-is-driven-by-selection people are therefore reduced to more subtle arguments about women benefitting if they have a gay brother on hand to help with the household chores and raising lots of nieces and nephews. A Nature report finding epigenetic tags to certain genes to be more common among homosexual men is the sort of thing that keeps the journal afloat as the general science journal of record.  Nature is fully commercial and much of the content is firmly behind their paywall, so material that is freely available may have slipped through the editorial process as too-sexy-to-turn-down. And even a cursory reading of the report should set your skepdar a-whirling because the key finding is based on only 37 hetero-homo identical twin pairs AND was only correctly predictive in 2/3rds of the cases. They report "UCLA computational geneticist Tuck Ngun [the lead author] will present the work on 8 October at the American Society of Human Genetics meeting in Baltimore, Maryland".  It's coincidental only in The Blob (because I read Natures out of sync) that just two weeks ago I was writing about a psychological study published by Nature that also allowed sexy to outweigh grossly under-powered to get something into print which should not have been published at all. And it would be good if the editors at Nature would reflect on their own failings when they take the high moral ground to criticise systemic failings in other areas of science and politics.

Well it seems that there was some robust criticism when these sketchy findings were presented to several hundred active researchers at ASHG15 rather than an editorial board that wanted a bit of spicy copy. Among them was John Greally who gave a really stonking talk to Irish Binfos two years ago in Galway.  He was at ASHG15 and blogs about the tearing asunder of the study, and also about the review process that should have stopped the publishing of such a weak preliminary study much earlier.  There's a great pop-sci summary of the methodological flaws in The Atlantic. It's really refreshing to have  a skeptical, clearly written critique of science and the flaws of the scientific process in a glossy magazine. There is another seam of comment and opinion on Metafilter. Now it may turn out that this little dataset is the first feather in the wind of our understanding the developmental under-pinnings of homosexual attraction; but on its own, as it stands, not yet replicated, it means . . . nothing.

100000 PVs

100KPV!

A milestone sort of day: The Blob passes 100,000 pageviews.  This is, therefore, all about you Dear Reader. We just passed 1000 posts = kiloblob and for the last two years+ they've been going up at a tad over 1 per day, so you might think that each post gets about 100 reads.  It doesn't work like that, however, because all most all the the PVs are to the opening page rather than to a particular post. At the moment The Blob is getting about 150 strikes a day [R showing PVs/day over the last month] , sometimes a little less than 100 [I get worried that a steep decline to oblivion in imminent] and very few days it scrapes over 200 [I delude myself that I'm about to go viral and start schmoozing with Justin Bieber].

As both of my friends live in Ireland, and as I do quite a bit of strictly local parish-pump stuff, I'm not surprised that Ireland provided the biggest chunk of Bloboreaders.  They have, however, recently been topped out by Merkins who are about 70x more numerous and have a high proportion of native English speakers.  I continue to be bemused by the number of readers from Russia [N=144m] and Ukraine [N=44m].  It might be because of an early post twinning Irish counties with Ukrainian Oblasts.  But that can't be the only explanation because I have virtually no readers from Belarus [N=9.5m] despite my linking their Voblasts with the 6 counties of Ulster.  The top 10 sources account for +80% of the traffic to The Blob, so there is a rather long tail.

Pageviews in a blog are a bit like citations for scientific papers: they peak a few months after publication and then disappear to a trickle over the succeeding decades. I don't expect any of my papers from the 1990s to get any more notice.  Hot as they were back then, science has moved on and folks are now citing more recent material. Some of my posts have been 'important' because I'm saying something new and interesting but much of the material here is strictly ephemeral and is in no sense timeless. Apart from that, some of it is impenetrable: not even I can understand what I was going on about in some of the earlier material.  Nevertheless, with my two-week event horizon, it's fun to pick random material from the Blobopast.  I think that must be what happens because older posts tend to have more PVs than more recent. I am up on the top page of Google for some stuff: I'm #1 for "Maude Delap" above Wikipedia for example. That's quite gratifying because I have been compiling a List of Women in Science which I think is rather good but which gets very little attention. ANNyway, 4 Blobs in the list below of posts with >200 strikes are these little essays about women making their way in a boy's world. The green Blobs seem to be accidental or from spam-attack because there really isn't anything in them that justifies the interest.

Nirenberg and Matthaei 1961	1114
Vital Statistics	733
Local Milk O'Magnesia	547
2014 Marmalade is IN	478
1339	474
Always for others	394
The World through Geoguessr	386
Vlambeer has bottle	369
100-up	363
Ireland's Shame	348
Jocelyn Bell Burnell turns 70	346
Pythagoras and the bean stalk	335
Maude Delap a life in the wet	326
Footless and fancy that	322
Eat! enough of the washing already	321
Potential energy	315
The Madness of the Inclined Plane	287
Banged up in chokey	252
Mary Mulvihill	244
Vexillology a la Nord	222
It's not helping your kids	210
Total for >200	8386

The 100-up post is really just a list of names of people who appeared early on in The Blob, so the interest here must be due to quite obscure biographical combinations put into Bing or Google: "Frank Ramsey Gene Wilder" "Ralph Leighton Raj Padam" and "James Gleick James Joyce James Lovelock" are all top-hit at Google.  Last weekend, for example, I got a slew of Bing hits looking for "Phoenician Deity" because that clue had featured in my 2013 Christmas Crossword and so I was halfway down page 2 at Bing. I presume some Sunday paper crossword in the Midwest was foxing readers with a comparative religion deficit.  In the US Midwest that would be everybody.

ANNyway, thanks for your continued attention, I write The Blob because I can do no other but it's nice to know that someone somewhere is reading the stuff.  Now if you'd only recommend me to your well-connected cousin in Minsk, I'd maybe get some traction there and be invited on a speaking tour by the Belarus Minister of Culture.

Sunday Misc

Sunday is where we do a little light rechurning of material on the interweb and pop up a few links that are interesting but which I can't pad out to make into a full-sized Blob.  Sometimes people out there have the last word . . . if I added anything I would just detract. Today it's a mix of musical and visual entertainment, from Cork, Denmark, Portugal, and Japan.  Some of these may be of interest.  If you have children, before you read on try to identify the film from which the illustration [L] is clipped.

• It's more than 2 years since I tribbed up The Talent from West Cork. Back then W¡ld were trying to get their extensive back-catalog of original work out into the public domain because it is both original and good.  It's not only because one of them is Dau.II's bloke.  They have since spent a chunk of money and hours and hours in the studio to get a professional quality demo album together.  It's almost ready to go viral, recoup their outlay and still have enough over to buy the yacht which Dau.II aspires to marry.  While we're waiting, maybe check out an even more out-there musician from Denmark whose stuff is rather compelling. Den Europæiske Spejlbue [the European Mirror-bow] is a mixture - by Frisk Frugt [Fresh Fruit] an alias for a young chap called Anders Lauge Meldgaard. I hope you like it. Reviewed here.  Order the vinyl [naturally] from tambourhinoceros.
• If that's too outré for you, or too-too Dansk, then you can brush up your Portuguese with Mariza singing a trib to her African granny [with English subtitles], or to the white rose. If it turns out that fado turns you on, then go back to Amália Rodrigues, fadista essencial do século 20.
• After all the Blobotraffic on Scott "Appalachian Trail" Jurek in July, you might enjoy a short documentary about the Barkley 100 a brutal 20 x 5 = 100 mile 60 hour [max] cross-country jog-trot.
• Until I saw this 16 min documentary critique of the works of Hayao Miyazaki I wasn't really aware of how much simple pleasure I got from watching his animated movies with Dau.I and Dau.II when they were the same age as Kiki of the Delivery Service [L above]. You don't really have to listen to Lewis Bond's voice over, the images are so lovely on their own.

Ther is a wode called Heyle

In 1251 Hugo de Northwold the Bishop of Ely commissioned a survey of his estates which included the statement [original in medieval Latin] There is one wood which is called Heyle which contains fourscore acres. When Oliver Rackham read those words in the great Coucher Book of Ely in the 1960s he realised that the small patch of woodland which he had campaigned to save as an island of ecological diversity had been in continuous existence for at least 1000 years.  The worthy bishop was not talking about a recent plantation but an already ancient, constantly changing, but also immutable complex of trees.  Trees, yes, but also bushes and coppice stools, and carpets of bluebells Scilla non-scripta, and woodmice Apodemus sylvaticus and beetles and birds. Rackham was born on 17th October 1939, so in 1962 he was still very young. a scholarship boy, recently graduated from Cambridge with a 1st class honours degree in Natural Sciences and working towards his PhD.

I came across him [L posing in Hayley Wood] when I was sharing a house in Dublin with two long-haired botanists 15 years ago and I borrowed a copy of his Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape. It was brilliant, I spent the whole of the following weekend ripping through it with a sense of delight.  By applying his eyes, informed by a lifetime's study of maps, manuscripts and placenames; and tangled banks and transects through the landscape; Rackham could conjure up the whole dynamic history of a hedgerow between field and wildwood. He was a notable iconoclast, rubbishing cosy certainties about what trees were and how woodlands should be handled. He realised that, to be a resource for weekend walks they must be managed and indeed had been managed by foresters for many generations. That felling trees for building was part of the process. That you couldn't hurry the process of regeneration on. That forestry was playing the long game. When the Great Storm of 15-16th October 1987 swept millions of English trees to the ground, Rackham was vocal "A fallen tree is not a dead tree" about letting some of the corpses be left to fulfill their natural destiny as a home to beetles and fungi.

James Lovelock was with him on this. When I last met Lovelock, he had just given a presentation in UCD.  In response to a tree-hugging question at the end of the talk, he confessed that, when he bought a small-holding in North Devon, he had planted a biggish section of the property with 'native hardwoods'.  With 20/20 20 year hindsight, he regretted that he'd not just left the small rough fields alone to develop in a natural ecological succession. That way the real native hardwoods, best suited to the local micro-environment, would settle in and grow up.  It only takes one extra lifetime to reach steady state.  If you hurry things impatiently on you risk causing incalculable damage.  Imported (even imported from the next county) tree saplings carry not only themselves but also a whole ecosystem of microbes and fungi . . . in equilibrium there but maybe less so here.

Rackham was also an expert on the evolution of the landscape of Crete [he needed his place in the sun like any other English academic] and neatly said “One should not assert that goats eat everything without having watched goats.”. We are all of us picky eaters and the our food preferences can profoundly affect the landscape. By observing and recording and mapping he could explode a number of myths about the state of the English countryside: the wildwood was not destroyed to build the British navy; woodland was rather destroyed when cheap coal made the management of woodlands uneconomic.  The Hayley Wood Trust was able to preserve a key element of its ecological diversity by the judicious use of wire fences to exclude invasive deer Muntiacus reevsii [Prev on The Blob]. Not one to waste things, Rackham recommended "Eat Bambi" as a partial solution to the ravaging of saplings.

Rackham's last book The Ash Tree was written in response to the threat of ash die-back disease which is caused by a fungus Chalara fraxinea or more properly Hymenoscyphus fraxineus.  It was imported into Ireland in October 2012 from continental Europe because the EU barely recognises biological species let alone ecotypes. If your county council wishes to plant a roadside with a screen of trees they are obliged to put the contract out to tender across the EU.  If a company in Italy can come in cheaper than one from Roscommon, the CC is more or less obliged to accept their delivery of 100,000 whips, and the appended microscopic beetles, fungi and bacteria. Those trees may not grow so well, or at all, 1000km further North.  Oliver Rackham died on Darwinday this year having collapsed over dinner a few days before. He had made a difference.

Closure 1946

<distress warning>don't read this one if you're squeamish about hanging</distress warning>
On this day 16th October in 1946 it was the end of the road for Ribbentrop, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Franck, Frick, Streicher, Seyss-Inquart, Sauckel and Jodl.  They were people at the top of the NSDAP tree who were deemed to deserve death by the  International Military Tribunal (IMT) generally known as the Nuremberg Trials. N=10, because Hermann Göring finished himself off in his cell the night before and Martin Bormann was either a) already dead trying to escape from Berlin or b) safely on his way to Paraguay under an assumed name. We've met the human side of Göring, and particularly that of his brother Albert, before. The trials were set up so that it wouldn't seem that summary justice had been performed: evidence was marshalled, witnesses were called, there were lawyers for both prosecution and defense and the public theatre went on for nearly eleven months, having started on 20th November the previous year. It was by no means the only trial and certainly not the only executions that were meted out on the losing side of WWII.  The niceties of protocol were observed: the military officers among the condemned were denied the option of a firing-squad because they were deemed to have dishonoured their uniform by the actions.  Accordingly between 0100hrs and 0300hrs in the morning all ten men were hanged by the neck until dead.
The man in charge of the actual operations was Sergeant John C Woods [L posing for the press with the tool of his trade], who had risen from the ranks when the US Army asked for a volunteer to train as a military hangman. 16 Oct 1946 was by no means his first job. He had helped to off a substantial proportion of the 140+ US soldiers who had been condemned to death between 1942 and 1945 under authority of the 1920 Articles of War. The number who died on his watch has been variously reported as 34, 60-70 and 340. Hanging was the mechanism of choice to achieve a humane killing and Woods followed the standard operating procedure SOP established by Irishman <huzzah> Samuel Haughton who applied science to the problem and calculated a formula for doing the job right.  It's a balance between allowing a lingering death by strangulation, which is very distressing for the spectators and a longer drop where the head is completely separated from the body, which really frightens the horses. Although the trial was public, the Allied authorities drew the line at a public hanging á la Révolution française.  It was a rather delicate line because they were trying to hold the high moral ground and distance their questionable wartime actions [indiscriminate bombing of civilians or unleashing the very first weapon of mass destruction etc.] from those of the opposition. At another trial at about the same time, for example, the Soviets tried to foist the NKVD murders in the Katyn Forest onto NSDAP shoulders.

Despite his extensive training hanging US squaddies, Woods is widely believed to have miscalculated the length of drop for several of his Nuremberg victims who took between 10 and 25 minutes to be pronounced dead. The military had constructed 2 gallows which were designed to get through the grisly business as efficiently as possible. It is claimed that Woods or his assistants were obliged to swing on the legs of the dying Keitel and Ribbentrop to finish them off and keep things to schedule. One of the consequences of destroying the brain-stem is that the sphincters down below open up so the legs are no longer clean. As Sherwin Nuland asserts, death is usually both grim and messy but there is something peculiarly repellent about judicial executions when they try to be humane. Closure? au contraire.