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A MOLECULE FROM THE MADNESS
Kidnapped Brain Stories
By Sara Manning Peskin
On an ordinary day in August 2016, Lauren Kane was pulled into a zombie apocalypse. A recent college graduate and aspiring fiction writer had moved back into his mother’s house; she spent her days polishing off short stories and binge-watching episodes of “The Walking Dead.” She woke up that morning, had her breakfast, and went back to bed. “What’s for breakfast?” she asked when she reappeared. Lauren slept even more and woke up for the third time around noon. “What’s for breakfast?” he asked again. She had a fever by that evening and became unstable on her feet, she. Her mother took her to the emergency room, where Lauren calmly answered a doctor’s questions. Neuroscientist Sara Manning Peskin describes what happened next in her first book, “A Molecule Far From Madness.”
Suddenly, as if possessed by a spirit, Lauren reached across the doctor’s chest and clutched his shirt. He pushed her across the room, then dug her nails into a frightened nurse’s arm. Her mother moved to calm her down, but Lauren pushed her to the ground. Security guards flocked to the scene. Lauren turned and shouted, pointing to someone, “Can’t you see she’s a walker?” One guard asked if her PCP was high, while another pieced together the patient’s popular culture reference: “Oh my God. … he thinks he’s in ‘The Walking Dead’.”
Lauren wasn’t using the hallucinogen phenylcyclohexyl piperidine known as PCP—but her own body was producing a molecule that produced a similar effect. A tumor growing in her right ovary had stimulated her immune system to produce millions of antibodies that mistakenly attacked key receptors in her brain. Lauren fell victim to a stray molecule.
This kind of faulty molecular activity underlies many serious mental disorders, says Peskin, an assistant professor of clinical neurology at the University of Pennsylvania. “The molecules that run our brains can also change our personalities and destroy our ability to think,” he writes. (After Kane’s tumor was surgically removed, he slowly regained contact with reality.)
The author divides these “molecular villains” into four categories. “Mutants” are altered DNA sequences; They can lead to conditions such as Huntington’s disease and frontotemporal dementia. “Rebels” are abnormal proteins such as the one that causes Kane’s psychosis; they can lead to scourges such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a neurodegenerative disease that is usually fatal within a year of its onset. “Invaders” are foreign substances such as “environmental toxins, illegal drugs and drugs”; They can produce pathologies such as mercury toxicity. And the “leaks” are key ingredients that, like vitamins, wreak havoc when they’re gone. For example, a thiamine deficiency can lead to the development of Korsakoff’s syndrome, a symptom of which is confabulation: Sufferers make up fantastical stories believing they are true.
Peskin writes about these situations and the patients they consume with a grace and humanity that reminds us of Oliver Sacks. His thin skin also manages to tell the stories of doctors and researchers chasing these treacherous molecules in the field and in the laboratory; He has a talent for quick character sketch and an eye for vivid detail.
The only person left out of this compelling narrative is the author himself. We learn in just a footnote that Lauren Kane is Peskin’s patient; The main body of the tale is told from an artistic distance.
Kane’s doctor is a dazzling stylist and compassionate observer. In her next book, perhaps she’ll show us more of what’s going on in her own mind.
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