December 9, 2021 • 46 mins
The famous blue people of Kentucky are no longer blue. But why were they like that in the first place?
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, we are so glad to be coming back
to s F Sketch Fest this week, the best comedy
festival in the land, for our first live show in
two years. Yep, we're gonna be there on Friday, January
twenty one, seven thirty pm at the Sydney Goldstein Theater
to be specific. And if you want tickets then head
on over to s F Sketch Fest dot com or
City box Office dot com and search stuff you should know.
(00:22):
That's right. It's a vaccinated only show and a masking
up show, so everyone be safe, get out there and
come check us out live. We'll see you on January one.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
(00:45):
and there's Charles w Chuck Bryan over there, and uh,
Jerry was just here. She said peace out, suckers, and
this is stuff you should know. Of course, it was
nice of her to log on to say goodbye. Right now,
we're just getting Jerry. She's been busy lately. Yeah, what happens.
It totally happens in this busy, go go world of
(01:09):
almost two The Double Deuce this year has just flown by.
It really has I think mercifully because this is going
to be part of the lost years when we look back,
you know. Yeah, it felt like eighteen years and somehow
one has just like been in a snap. Yeah. I
(01:31):
don't know what's going on. I don't think anyone does anymore, Chuck,
So don't don't feel bad. Uh. Can we shout out
to the people and sources that helped us along for
this one? Well, our buddy Dave Rouse wrote an article
for our Stuff Works. Uh, And I found a great
(01:52):
article from Wired. I forgot how much I love Wired.
That's from Mallory Pickett and BBC News, ABC News, NPR
Morning a Dish, which is always a fun listen. Uh,
National Library of Medicine here in the US. And then,
as always, I feel like it makes appearance in every
episode Jamaica Hospital dot Org. That's right, surprisingly helpful? Yeah,
(02:13):
maybe not surprisingly? I wonder is that Jamaica Queens or
Jamaica Jamaica. Oh you know what I was thinking, Jamaica Jamaica.
Maybe Jamaica Queens. Yeah, should I Jamaica scene Jamaica Queens.
My neighbor across the street, neighbor has uh is from Jamaica,
the country, and I feel like a heel now because
I was like, hey, that hospital websites great. Pat, She's like,
(02:38):
what are you talking about? She's like, okay, great, glad
you like some rando hospital website. Oh boys, so we're
talking today. You went and found some medical stuff. That's
why you went to look at Jamaica Hospital dot org.
I'm guessing because we're talking about a really interesting condition
and actually a few kinds of conditions that have something
(03:02):
unusual in common, and that is that the people who
suffer from these conditions have blue skin. Blueskin. You heard
it here first, everybody, even though this really first started
hitting the presses in two thousand eight. Yeah, I mean
you didn't hear it here first. This, I mean, this
is all over the internet. But we're talking about not
(03:22):
the Blue Man Group, but the Blue People Group of Kentucky.
It's a family that is I guess it's pronounced few Gate.
It's not. No, that's Italian. He was from France. Well
that's that's a spoiler. Oh is it? I'm sorry? I
take it back. Everyone. You know it's not a spoiler.
But for some reason, when I saw that the original
(03:46):
Martin Fugate was from France. From uh, I'm not sure
what part of France, but I was like, that's surprising.
It was like, I don't know why it would be. Uh. Yeah.
He could have come from anywhere in the world, and
he would have been like a completely overlookable person, I think,
totally lost to history had it not been for the
rare um rare genetic mutation that he happened to carry
(04:10):
with him. And even that wouldn't have gotten him into
the history books, Chuck, Even that wouldn't have. Instead, it
took Martin Fugate to happen, upon against all odds, to
have found a wife who he was not related to,
who was a total stranger from a totally different country,
who also happened to have that same rare genetic mutation.
(04:34):
And when the two get together, capal blue kids start
popping out. That's right. He came over from France to Kentucky,
to the Blue Hills of Kentucky. Ironically, Oh wow, I
hadn't thought about that. In And like I said, he
was from France when he was an orphan, so he
didn't know a lot about his his family as far
as uh, whether or not any of them were blue,
(04:56):
I guess, or if so, he wasn't he wasn't piping
up a out. Yeah, maybe he just kept it quiet.
But he did marry a redheaded American named Elizabeth Smith,
and they headed on over to Troublesome Creek near Hazard
County in Kentucky and set up a homestead there. And
it is a I mean the one of the doctors
(05:17):
that uh from one of these articles said, you know,
it's maybe one and a one hundred thousand chance that
you have to even have this genetic mutation. And he said,
but you know, once you start, I guess there's no
other way to say it. Once you start in breeding,
which can happen in the eighteen hundreds in the rural
(05:38):
nous of Kentucky, he said, that can go down all
the way to like one in eight chance. And that's
exactly what happened. Yeah, I was surprised there was even
one in eight. But there's some little fluke of genetics that, um,
that you have to when you're talking about probability in genetics,
it's a little more difficult than half in a straight math. Yeah. Um.
(05:58):
So apparently Martin himself possibly had like a little bit
of blue to him. His wife Elizabeth had no blue
to her um. She apparently had very very pale skin
and bright red hair. But when um the two got
together and those two genetic mutations donated UM their mutations
(06:19):
to that specific gene, they the kids that they had
were like, um, irresistibly blue. Like there was no confusing.
It's not like, yeah, Martin's kind of blue. If you
ever noticed, maybe you need to breathe more deeply. This
was like straight up blue kids. I've even seen him
described as dark blue, not even a bluish hue or
(06:41):
tint or tinge dark blue skinned children. Yea, four of
seven were blue. Uh. And it's funny he said that
she was not. The mother was not blue tinted. But
I imagine, like before they knew about genetics and in breeding,
if he would, if she would been a little blue,
that might have been a reason to get together, you
(07:03):
know what I mean? No, I don't explain. Well, blue
man happens to meet blue woman and they're like, jeez,
there's another one like me, and you know we've been
sort of you know, sort of embarrassing and maybe we're
cast out a little bit. So let's hitch our wagons
together because there's probably nothing wrong with us having kids, right,
(07:25):
His medical science hadn't known that at that point. It's
a story as old as time, Chuck, but it was.
It was just complete happenstance though, right. Yeah, So, UM,
And I wonder also, like it was significant to me
that they pointed out that his wife, Elizabeth Smith um
few Gates skin was almost translucent. It was so pale,
(07:46):
because I wonder if she donated that to her children, UM,
which allowed the blue to really shine through even more.
Maybe it's possible, like the ultimate recipe for blueness exactly. Um.
And they actually became owns, this blue family, and they
were not particularly proud of their blue skin. I think
they were a little freaked out about it. I think
(08:07):
that their neighbors may not have particularly treated them well,
and so they already lived in like a pretty isolated
part of Appalachia, UM, but they took pains to actually
isolate themselves even further. And one of the one of
the consequences of that was something you touched upon. That
that meant that, Um, their son married their aunt, and
(08:28):
cousins married cousins, even if they were way too close
to be marrying, and so one of the one of
the products of these this inner marriage was an entire
small regional population of blue families or families who have
blue children or Blue family members, because these neighbor families
were still blood relatives of the few Gates who initially
(08:52):
settled this area and just started reproducing through inbreeding. Uh.
And the condition that they had is not a skin
condition at all. It's actually a blood disorder like you mentioned,
and it's called medima globinemia. It's so pretty good. Wow,
you're so it's not meth now, Okay, Oh, I'm glad
(09:13):
you said it first. Then I actually took great pains
today to look up between this and the other episode
we're recording pronunciations, and when you look at medima globinemia,
that is seventeen letters of it's a mouthful of letters,
pure hell. And it's really one of those that I
(09:33):
looked at over and over and just could not get
it right in my head until I, you know, went
and looked it up on the internet and I was like,
that's not so hard, all right, let me try. Let
me try mediema globinemia. I think it's more of a
t than a d uh, okay, what about a t
you want me try that one? This is like the
(09:53):
worst acting audition ever. What's my motivation here? Uh to
get through this episode? Uh So we're gonna touch a
little bit on melanin throughout this episode. But you remember
melanin from our I think pretty good episode on sunscreen
and sun tans, right. Uh? And this is uh, you know,
(10:18):
special cells in the body, in the skin make melanin
and they are Melanin is responsible for coloring your skin.
And there are all kinds of different uh melanin disorders,
whether you have too much or too little, whether you
can you know, we'll make your skin lighter or darker,
or whether or not it happens in patches. I had
a friend in Los Angeles with bid eligo, which oh
(10:42):
you do, which you know leads to uh, patches of
light skin on the body. In't that what Michael Jackson
claimed to have had to Yes? Was that verified? I
don't know. I don't know either. I really don't know,
because I just remember there was a big stink when
that came out and everyone was like, yeah, right, the
well the reason why it was like, really it's you
(11:03):
got videlago because it's usually um patches like the melano sites.
The melanin producing cells just kind of poop out or
crap out in an area, and it it leaves like
patches without pigment, not your entire face, um without pigment.
But who knows, well, I think his I think what
he said was that he bleached his skin to match
(11:24):
the light patches. Was his reasoning. Oh, well, that's fairly reasonable.
You know, if you're self conscious about videlago and you
have a ton of money, you could do something like that.
Who knows, Who knows? Should we talk about skin color?
Should we take an awkward Michael Jackson break? I think
we just did. But the point is this that I
(11:44):
think you're making, Chuck, is that changes in like your
skin color typically have to do with a lack of
or an overproduction of melanin. Right, And that what we're
talking about, uh, mattiemoglobinemia right, is actually a blood disorder.
It's not has nothing to do with the skin. It
(12:05):
just shines through that super translucent skin that we have. Right,
So what's going on here in the body? Okay, So
are you surprised, I'm asking you. I'm a little surprised.
I thought we maybe tagging team this one. But okay, okay, so,
uh you have like a pink is shoe too, typically
(12:26):
being being Caucasian. Um, because you're there's not a ton
of melonin that's blocking the blood supply underneath and your tissues.
It's kind of shining through and your blood is red.
And the reason it's red, Chuck, is because because the
reason why blood is red, well, remember in school they
(12:48):
teach you that your blood is blue until you get
cut and then it hits the air. Yeah, that's not true,
and then it turns red. That's what you hear on
the playground in elementary school from dumb kids. But that
is not true. And I bet you anything, kids are
still spreading that mistruth on the playground. Yeah. It's got
some staying power for sure, as far as as far
as rumors go. And you know what, my dad will
(13:09):
sue your dad for all the money he's got. Did
you guys threaten lawsuits? Sure? We were very lutitious kids
did though. It was very funny. We were like, we're
like little Puritans in in Salem town. That's right. Uh
so blood is red? That was a question, right? Uh? Yeah, yeah,
why is blood red, right, because I don't know we've
(13:31):
talked about this before, but it's because our red blood
cells have hemoglobe and it's a protein and it gets
its red color from something called hem It's a compound
that has an iron atom in there, and that iron
atom is the key. That's what binds with oxygen and
allows red blood cells to get oxygen all over the body,
(13:52):
and that's sort of what makes us tick. Yeah, it
definitely is. I mean that oxygen is super important, so
we want to have super red rich hemoglobin blood. Right.
Our bodies also produced something else called metemoglobin's I guess
is how you would pronounce it. That is not how
I've been pronouncing it in my head. But these metema
(14:13):
globins are basically the same thing as hemoglobins, but they
have a different kind of iron attached to them. The
iron they have is like, there's really another way to
put it. Actually, there's plenty of other ways to put it,
but one way you could put it is that is rusted.
It's oxidized iron, which means that it's missing an electron
that it would need to bind oxygen, which means it's
(14:35):
useless for transporting oxygen. Through the blood. So if you
have a bunch of metemoglobin built up in your blood,
your blood can reasonably turn blue. You also may have
some problems breathing um because you don't have any oxygen
in your blood, although that's not true, I'm sorry. You
would be able to breathe, breathe perfectly fine, but it
wouldn't clear up necessarily the lack of oxygen your blood
(14:58):
because it's on a blood level um rather than something
to do with your lungs. Yeah, that was my one question,
because doctor after doctor is confirmed that mativa globinemia doesn't
present any health issues. But how can that be possible
that your blood has is having trouble carrying oxygen to
your body and it doesn't matter. I had a really
(15:19):
hard time with that too. And the best I could
come up with as far as an answer, which is
not definitive, but the best that can come up with,
is that there is a there's a threshold where your
blood will turn blue, where you have enough metema globins
in there that it's blue, but not so there's not
so many metema globins that you're actually having trouble with
(15:40):
your oxygen in your body. So it can turn blue
long before you actually like suffer from the effects of
low oxygen um. Does that make sense? Yeah, I guess
that makes sense. And isn't the threshold to turn your
skin blue like a really low percentage, even like one
percent of metemaments. If you're blood is one percent in
team of globins, you can start to turn blue right
(16:03):
So it doesn't take very much, which means that you
have of of the global the globins in your blood
are are hemoglobin, which means you're still able to get
all the oxygen you need. You just have maybe a
little less than somebody else. That's my best guess from
what I saw UM, and I think at this point
in our understanding of my team of globalemia, it's as
(16:26):
good as anybody's. Well. That sounds like a perfect place
for a break, Okay, and uh, we'll be right back
to talk a little bit more about this and other
interesting blood conditions right for this, So, Chuck, where're talking
(16:58):
about my team globe and temia um and the reason like,
like I think one of us said earlier that the
body naturally produces these things, um, these metema globins um,
but we also produce an enzyme that can convert excess
metema globins into hemoglobin, and it's got a doozy of
(17:19):
a name which I just love. May I take this one? Yes,
this enzyme is called reduced nicotinamide adenine dionucleotide cytochrome B
five reduct as one of the great all times nicknames.
It has no nickname. You have to say the entire
thing every time. And so this enzyme, reduced nicotinamine ad
(17:41):
aine dionucleotide side of chrome B five reduct days is
actually capable of converting the iron from its um ferric
state in metema globin's into its fairest state, which is
capable of binding with oxygen like the kind that's found
in hemoglobin. So, for all intents and purposes, reduced nicotinamide
(18:01):
adenine dinucleotide cytochrome B five reductase is capable of converting
metemoglobins into hemoglobin. And most of us are able to
do that. But if you're like a few gate and
you have that rare genetic condition where both parents donated
that mutation to you and you developed metemoglobinemia, but there's
(18:22):
some reduced amount of reduced nicotinamide adenine dionucleotide cytochrome B
five reductas, which means that that metemoglobin's that you naturally
produced are able to build up and accumulate in your blood.
And when they do that, and they they they that's
how you start to turn blue. That's how you cross
that one percent threshold. That's right. And this is one
(18:42):
of the rare times where you can actually have a
genetic condition that's pretty easily solved. And in this case,
it's just a pill. Uh. And the guy who figured
this out has sort of an interesting story in his
own right. His name is Madison Coween or Coine Kaween.
I'm going with col Wayne cal Wine, Colween, c A
(19:08):
w Ei and Coween, although I like cow Wine. That
doesn't sound like you'd be tasty, but I'll beg it
gives you a pretty good bus. Uh. He was the
h He was the grandson of a pretty famous at
the time poet out of Kentucky. Uh. And Madison was
the third of of the Madison's. And this is just
(19:30):
a side note, very sad and interesting. His wife was
poisoned and murdered by poison in the nineteen sixties and
no one was ever caught in charge with a crime
and it kind of remains one of Kentucky's um, you know,
sort of biggest cold cases. Wow, I did not see
that one coming. Yeah, he and his wife and this
other couple were out drinking all night supposedly like just
(19:53):
got slashed and at a at a at a country club. Um.
He Madison didn't even make at home. I think he
stayed the night there, but the other man, the man
from the other couple, drove his wife home. Um, apparently
just dropped. They had another nightcap and she woke up dead.
One didn't wake up dead. She died and they thought
(20:15):
it was just you know, alcohol or some natural cause.
But then they found these two like little needle pricks
in her where they think she was I guess given
a shot to pass out and then poisoned. And I
can't remember the poison. It was some sort of like
acid or something. But yeah, really really interesting. Neither here
nor there as far as this goes. But that's the
(20:37):
sad story of Dr Madison. Uh cow wines wife. Was
he a suspect because I would have suspected him. I
don't think so, because he wasn't even there. That's the
first thing I thought but apparently it was pretty verified
that he slept it off at the country club. I
guess crazy because yeah, well, I mean one of the
things that he became famous for, if not the thing
(20:58):
he became famous for. It wasn't jacting people with with
some fairly weird stuff. I know, isn't that weird? It
is weird. You're not buying it. No, I don't want
to like cast persions on somebody. I don't know enough
about the story, but that's just very odd, especially like
judging from this ninety second story, exactly I can conclusively
(21:20):
solve this case. I've seen enough law in order to
know that the husband almost always did it else that
is probably true, but probably not in this case. But
at any rate, he was a hematologist at you at
the University of Kentucky, and he heard about these people
throughout the world and really wanted to kind of get
to the bottom of this. When a couple of them,
(21:42):
uh well, I don't think these were few gates, but
Patrick and Rachel Ritchie, I guess you know it happened
in some other family. Know the Combs is. We knew
it Combs from Kentucky. We had a friend that we
worked with for a little while. Really he was never
struck me as blue. Yeah, he never struck you. But
I wonder if he is related to the combs is,
(22:03):
which would make him vibe some somehow. Few Gate because again,
these these families in the few Gate area where all
if you went back far enough, few Gates exactly. All right,
So these people walk into his office and what happened?
So here here's the thing, Like, they didn't walk into
his office, he went and found them. I read an
article about him, and he became maybe a little obsessed
(22:25):
with finding these people. Wanted to know what the heck
was going on. So he actually went out in the
woods and would wait for them, and every once in
a while would see one and he chased them, telling
him to stop, and of course they would run off.
So he figured out another way to do it. He
moved to Hazard County near Troublesome Creek, and he started
asking around at clinics, like had anybody ever treated a
(22:45):
blue patient? And he finally struck gold Um blue Gold
when he spoke to one nurse at a clinic that said, yeah,
this this one woman came in with blue skin and
she was really self conscious about her skin. She came
to the back door. Was really just kind of me,
he can embarrassed. Um, but yeah, we've treated a blue
person before. So Colween basically hung around this clinic until
(23:08):
more blue people came in and that this is where
he met the Richie siblings. Yeah, so he started to
dig into their family a little bit. Uh. It became
pretty obvious to him that it was a genetic disorder,
and he started digging around other stories around the North
America and found an Inuit population in Alaska who had
(23:29):
who had the same condition. I'm just gonna call it
this condition now. I think we said it enough, at
least I have. And he said, well, you know these
people were interbreeding a lot because they were very remote
as well. And so he said, I think we understand
the problem here. How do we fix it? Yeah, I
don't know if he where he he got this idea,
(23:54):
but he used something called methylene blue, which was already
like in wide use. It's used to staying tissue because
it affects some cells differently than others. Um, it was
a malarial treatment, which malaria can actually produce matema globe anemia.
(24:14):
And suddenly having trouble saying, because we have been practicing lately.
Um And what it does is it goes in and
it interacts with the reduced nicotinamine, adenine di nucleotide side
chrome B five reductation and basically gives it a boost
and helps convert all of that excess um matema globins
(24:35):
into hemoglobins in patients with metema globe anemia. And so
I don't know where he got the idea, but he
tried it and apparently injected the Ritchie kids with it,
and they they stopped being blue, like almost on the spot. Yeah,
Like minutes later they returned to a to a you know,
a standard color, and I mean they were overjoyed. Could
(25:00):
you imagine being like this your whole life, getting a
shot and looking in the mirror a few minutes later
and you're like, oh my gosh, it's like it's it's gone.
It's actually really sweet because they were very self conscious,
the whole family. I mean, this family like retreated to
the woods to to like people didn't know where they lived,
and they lived like five miles away from him and
knew that there's this blue family still had no idea
(25:20):
where they lived. It was like that's how far they
retreated from society because they were that self conscious. So yeah,
I'm sure it's a pretty joyous occasion for them. There's
gonna be a movie about this at some point, right,
I can't believe there's not. There's a very famous interview
with Kyle Wayne in a magazine called Science Ad two.
And there's also a really famous painting that somebody did
(25:40):
and it was just kind of lost to history who
did it? And I read this article. I can't remember
what it was on, but this person tracked down, um,
the artist, the initial artist, and got to see like
the original. Because it's been scanned so many times, it's
really lost a step. But um, the originals apparently really
something to see. Should we say the quote that head
in that science he said, he said, and they walked
(26:05):
in the office, he said. They were bluer in Hill,
very Kentucky. Alright. So over time, uh, a few gates
started moving away, like some of the younger population of
the family got out of Hazard County. And it's so
hard not to make Dukes of Hazzard jokes. I've been
just sidestepping the whole time. I've been doing really great,
(26:26):
thank you. But they started to move away over time,
and basically you know, that's gonna stop the inner breeding
and that's gonna make fewer and fewer blue babies. And
as of I think some were still blue, but not today. Yeah,
I think now that there's a treatment and easy treatment
because they don't even have to be injected anymore. Like
(26:47):
if you're blue and you don't want to be blue,
you just take a methylene blue pill once a day
and it goes in. Apparently once you excreted out the
methylene blue, you'd go back to being blue, so you
have to take it daily. But I'll bet there's members
of that family now and I'm just guessing here, but
um that are proudly blue now that they know that
(27:08):
they don't have to be blue, some of them I'll
bet make a choice to be blue as kind of
like a like a pride in their family heritage. I'm
guessing here. Well, the thing I saw that there was
one and that was the one in twelve that was
still blue, like by choice, I think, so, yeah, I
just didn't take the pillow. That's neat, But but not
(27:28):
today anymore. So this is uh not the only way
you can get bluish or any you know. I guess
silvery skin is another. There's another thing that comes into
play here with this next disorder, and this is one
called argeria. And some people are bluish, some people are silver.
(27:49):
If you've looked up you know blue people or silver
people online, you have no doubt seen uh Paul Harrison.
They called him Papa Smurf, and he is all over
the internet as one of the more famous cases of Algeria. Yeah,
and he was. He kind of emerged as I don't
know if a cautionary tale is right, because that was
(28:10):
not his purpose. Um, but he he also he whether
he meant to or not, he served as a cautionary
tale about taking colloidal silver because that is what turned
him blue. And it didn't just turn his skin blue.
It turned his mucous membranes blue. So if he like
flashed his teeth, his gums were blue, and the inside
of his mouth was blue, the inside of his nose
(28:31):
was blue. He was blue blue or in hell, as
Kawayne would probably put it um. And he he did
it because he saw an article about how um silver
eyeons basically restored some cut flower back to life again,
and he thought, well, that would be really something to
to to see what it can do on a human body.
(28:52):
I want to be a fresh daisy, right, And he
wasn't the only person at experimenting at the time, Like
apparently for a while it was a over the counter drug.
We've been using silver for a very long time. But
he was, um, somebody who used it every single day.
He was drinking like a ten ounce drink of colloidal silver.
He figured out how to basically make his own colloidal
(29:14):
silver potion, and he also rubbed it on his face too,
and so in very short order he started to turn blue.
Because that is definitely a consequence of using silver too
much of overexposure to silver, that's right. Uh, And this
can happen if you work in like a silver mine
or something like. It can be one of the side
effects of mining silver mine. I also saw that in
(29:35):
the old time, um, not even that old, but just
pre digital photography processing photograph processing, you could actually um yeah,
you know the eighties, Um, you could actually develop algeria
be from exposure to the silver dust that was used
to expose um photographic plates. I think prior to the eighties.
(29:57):
I I don't know when they stopped using that. I
don't either. I spent a lot of times in dark
rooms as a kid because my dad, because you were
a mad go in there, turn on that red light
and sit there and think about what you do. Now.
My dad was an amateur photographer, well I guess, and
my professionally sold stuff, but he did his own developing,
(30:19):
and um, I learned how to do it and did
it something through high school and then kind of quit
doing it. It It was a lot of fun. Though. Dark
rooms are very like peaceful places, is that right? Yeah?
Just you know they're dark obviously, and you're in there
for a long period of time, and it's just very nice,
usually by yourself, but unless you're in a teen romance
movie and then you know the cute girls in there
(30:41):
with you, I well, I always associate them with the
murderer finally coming into focus, and they happen to be
staying right next to the photographers developing it. So to me,
dark rooms are very tense, scary like as it as
the as the photo paper like comes into focus, very tense,
the calls coming from inside the dark room. That's right, Um,
(31:05):
where were we? Okay? So what causes this is an
excess of silver ions in your body and when they're
exposed to light, they react by forming dark deposits on
the skin that end up looking silver ish. And the
bad news about this is, once you've got it, it's there.
You can't take a pill and get rid of it. No,
it's irreversible. We don't have a way to remove excess
(31:26):
silver from the tissues and the human body. And that's
all it is. It's just it builds up. Normally, the
body can excrete you know, small amounts of silver that
we're exposed to from like you know, touching silver or
um snorting silver, that kind of stuff. Um, you know, uh,
like we pee it out, We poop it out and
we get rid of it. But if we overcome that
(31:49):
threshold and our silver ingestion um exceeds our ability to
excrete it, it starts to build up in the tissue.
And so if you're drinking your own tent outs colloidal
silver um homebrew every single day, you're going to overwhelm
your body's ability to excrete silver very quickly, and it's
going to build up and build up and build up,
and pretty soon you're going to be blue or silver blue,
(32:13):
that's right. Uh. And if you look up images of
Carrison you're probably also gonna find pictures of Stan Jones,
a libertarian politician in Montana who around why two K said,
you know what, I think things are gonna go south
and we're not gonna have any antibiotics. So I'm gonna
start making my own again colloidal silver solution and drink
(32:35):
that stuff. And then there was a teacher in Brooklyn,
too named Rosemary Jacobs, who uh, very sadly I think
got um nasal drops with silver when she was a kid,
and she was sort of not sort of she was
very silver for life. She was. So these people again
have proved to be cautionary tales to most people who
are like, oh, that's what happens if you take too
(32:56):
much silver. I'm not going to take colloidal silver saw
pplements over the counter, um anything like that. I'm just
gonna steer clear silver all together. Because one of the
problems is there's not a lot of pure reviewed evidence,
if any, that suggests that silver has any beneficial effect
when taken internally right, it is actually anti anti microbial.
(33:18):
It's pretty clever to um use silver like in the
pre scientific days, but there's nothing that says like, yes,
if you drink colloidal silver homebrew, it's going to have
any effect on your on your life or your health,
and in fact, it might actually turn you blue. Despite this,
people still take colloidal silver um pretty frequently. Apparently, Alex
(33:42):
Jones touts it, Gwyneth Paltrow touts it. Dr Oz touts it.
And that's you know, if it's not actually harming you,
there doesn't seem to be any any harm from it,
aside from potentially irreversibly turning blue. But there's a larger
harm that I saw chuck to society in general, and
that silver is a anti microbial of last resort, that is, um,
(34:07):
they're figuring out how to use it against um my
antibiotic resistant bugs like mersa. That silver will get in
there and even kill mersa. But that silver resistance may
be developed in bugs by all these people taking colloidal
silver supplements and drinking colloidal silver um, you know, homebrews
(34:29):
and stuff like that. That is actually creating silver resistant microbes,
which is not a good thing for anybody. All Right, Well,
let's take our second break, good, yes, and we'll talk
a little bit more about coloidal silver right after this.
(35:02):
All right, So you mentioned earlier that uh kind of
in passing that cloydal Silver had been used pre UM.
You know, mainstream medical science coming on board, and it's
really true, and they were kind of onto something and that,
like you said, there were there are some anti microbial properties.
So people like Plenty the Elder Cyrus to the Great
(35:22):
they both touted the use of silver. Monks in the
Middle Ages used silver nitrate UM to treat ulcers and burns,
and it was used a lot. It's it's kind of
in a way before we had real antibotics, one of
the first antibiotics. Yes, UM again externally, it messes up
(35:43):
microbs and we're not exactly sure even still today what
the mechanism is. The guesses are that somehow penetrates the
membrane of the of bacteria and prevents it from replicating
properly UM or it had it does like some one two,
which is on enzymes that the microbes need to to
(36:03):
survive UM, but that it it will leave your human
skin cells alone. It just attacks microbes weirdly bacteria specifically UM.
So yeah, it was like an early antibiotic and it
actually kept UM stayed in use for a long time
now to nowadays, you'll find it in like wound dressings.
(36:23):
Sometimes suitures will be coated in silver. Replacement joints artificial
joints will have some sort of silver component to it
to to protect um against infection UM. But we were
using them internally for a really long time up until
the sixties. Even I think babies got like silver eye
drops when they were born, which I had not heard
(36:44):
of until you know, yesterday. I had neither yes, silver
nitrate to prevent eye infections, but then they found out
it can actually cause eye damage and burn the skin.
So they really worked on UM just sort of, uh,
what's the word I'm looking for? When you make something
less potent by mixing it with water diluting it right
(37:08):
on the tip of my tongue, You did it, No,
you did it. So they learned how to dilute it.
But the problem with diluting it in a formula is
it wasn't an exact science, Like they didn't know exactly
how much silver was still going to be active, and
so you know, you couldn't really use it as a
medicine anymore because it was either too weak to do anything,
(37:31):
or it was so much that you risk turning blue.
So eventually they just scrapped it as a medicine and said,
I think in the FDA said this isn't a medicine.
You can't advertise it as such. So they said, all right,
well to say it's a supplement and just move it
to the shelf, you know, four ft away, and the
Ft said, and that's what happened, and you can still
get this stuff. That's where you know. That's why when
(37:53):
it's Paltrow uses it. Yeah. So, and I mean, like again,
it's one of those things where it's like, yes, it
makes sense. Silver has an anti microbial properties. There's probably
some microbes in your body you don't want um, so
take some silver and see if it works. But again,
there's just not any pure of viewed evidence that backs
this up. That's not necessarily to say that it doesn't work.
(38:14):
Just because there isn't pure viewed evidence that backs it
up doesn't also necessarily mean in the same breath that
there's plenty of pure viewed evidence that says it doesn't work.
I'm not suggesting anybody take the stuff. I'm just saying
there's not pure of viewed evidence to back up that
it actually does anything. And if you do take it again,
you risk permanently irreversibly turning blue. Yeah, and and I
(38:38):
should point out I don't know anything about Gwyneth Paltrow's
current usage, but this her appearance on Dr OZ was
when she touted it. She she may have given it up,
who knows? Who knows? Um. Paul Keason never gave it
up the chuck. He died in uh two thirteen as well,
same year that Gwyneth Paltrow outed herself as a silver
(38:59):
user um and Paul carrasan Uh. He apparently used colloidal
silver that homebrew he made up until the end. Like
he never stopped, even though he apparently retreated from the
public eye because he was tired of being treated like
a freak or a weirdo UM and had some rough
years towards the end apparently after he went public, but
(39:20):
he's still kept up with the colloidal silver, although that
doesn't seem to have been linked to his death. He
was also a really heavy smoker for many years, and
he suffered a heart attack and a stroke. Yeah. I mean,
I guess his point was probably while I'm already blue, Yeah,
like why stop? Now? You can't get much bluer? So uh,
what else you got? Well, I just thought we'd wind
(39:43):
it up with this little kind of sidebar. Uh. I
can't This doesn't really have any to do with being
blue or silver, but I thought it was an interesting
find that, uh, they basically determine. Uh, there's something called
repigmenting that has happened to people, uh to go their
skin both darker and lighter. That has nothing to do
(40:04):
that in this funny in this article kept calling it
inter marriage. Um, what they mean is you know or
or yeah, what they mean is having sex and having babies, uh,
two different skin colors. But they keep calling it inter marriage,
which I guess is uh, you know, very sweet. It's
just such a lovely way to put it. It's but
(40:24):
they know that repigmenting happens regardless of uh, inter marriage.
But what they found recently is that this has happened
a lot faster than anyone thought. And we're talking about
a hundred generations, or as little as a hundred generations,
which is a long time, but over the course of
human history, it's not that long. It's potentially not. Yeah,
(40:44):
it's not that long. Usually a generation is chalked up
at about twenty years, So we're talking as little as
two thousand years, groups that were once lily white went
back to being dark, and groups that were dark can
turn into a lily white population, and that it's it's
it's just basically more evidence that race is strictly a
(41:05):
social construct. Skin color has nothing to do with anything
but the amount of melanin that our genes tell our
bodies to produce, which is triggered by the amount of
UV exposure that we have over something like a hundred generations, right,
And so if you're family lineage moves from a place
(41:26):
that has lots of UV near the equator to a
place that doesn't how much daylight or vice versa, your
body is going to adapt and melanin production is going
to change, and over time, your entire family's skin color
can change. Yeah, because we actually need UV, right, but
we just need a certain amount of it. If you
have too much, you can get skin cancer. Apparently, it
(41:46):
can have reproductive issues. If you get too little. It
can also have issues on your bone because we use
UV to produce vitamin D, which we use for for
strong bones bone density. So our bodies have figured out
how to kind of adjust depending on that you V
exposure by producing or slowing down melanin production. That's it
(42:07):
pretty amazing, pretty neat. But it is surprising that it's well, actually,
it's not that surprising that it can happen over a
hundred generations or two thousand years because the body is
very responsive to its environment. We adapt very easily, so
that's not particularly surprising, although it is neat. Yeah, I
mean it's surprised the scientist. I think they just thought
it was quicker than they anticipated. So if you're a racist,
(42:31):
just stop and think that somewhere down your family line
there is a white person or a black person or
in the future. Yeah, that's true. That's right. So take that.
You got anything else? I have nothing else? All right, Well,
if you want to know more about blue people or
colloidal silver or pigmentation, go start reading up on it
(42:51):
on the internet. Uh. And thanks again to all the
great sites that you found in putting this really good
episode together, Chuck. And since I complimented talks episode putting
together skills, it's time for a listener mail. I'm gonna
call this, uh, one of the many thanks we got
for the m Not in Array, but the the Mr
(43:13):
Not episode, Uh, this is one I think for both
of us like we were super stoked to do and
like in retrospect, very proud of you know, we're stoked.
We were super stoked, not just stoked stoked. Plus, there's
no way to say stoked without sounding like the bro. No,
no way at all. It stinks too because I'm not
(43:34):
a bro, but I do like things stoked. That's fine
to say stoked, be loud and proud, like the last
remaining blue fugate. So this is from Mark, and it
was a really long one that I'm gonna just sort
of summarize. The first part, uh, is that Mark works
in healthcare information technology and had a rough go of
it over the past couple of years, like so many people,
(43:54):
um working alone and uh listening to our show, which
he said help quite a bit, losing some close friends
to COVID and seeing all this up close and personal.
So Mark had a tough time. So he says this,
after working for almost two years on the COVID nineteen problem,
the last thing I wanted to hear was your podcast
(44:16):
about Mr No vaccines. When I saw the topic pop
up on my player, took a deep breath and decided
to listen. Anyway, I knew almost everything you shared on
the podcast, but became enthralled in the recap of this
amazing story. To my surprise, I was again brought to
tears with a recognition one that you two share of
these brilliant helpers who use their gifts for the benefit
(44:38):
of all humanity. At the risk of making you blush.
You two are part of those helpers. You presented this
mr NA episode with the childlike curiosity and relatable simplicity
that anyone with doubts on taking the vaccine would reconsider.
I can't believe that I have to say this, but
facts help and fact shares are helpers. I might also
(44:59):
add that letting go of any bias is to let
your curiosity curiosity take hold is heroic. Uh. And that
is from Mark, and boy, I'm gonna read that one
another hundred times today. Yeah. Just print it out and
fold it up and keep it under your pillow. Yes,
thank you Mark. He wanted his last name to be
with help but appreciates Mark. You've done Mark, and hang
in there. Yeah. Same same to you, Mark. And UM,
(45:21):
that was very high praise. Thank you very much for
it means a lot to hear something like that. Um.
One other thing they chuck that that Mark reminded me
of that people with matima globe anemia actually can blush blue.
Oh so they get bluer. Yeah in that neat, I
guess that makes sense. Thanks for that to Mark, even
(45:42):
though you had no idea, you're setting us up for it.
You did, so you're just basically a an altogether great person.
If you want to be a great person like Mark
and right in to let us know whatever you want
to let us know we want to hear from you,
you can wrap it up and spank it on that
bottom until it's blue in the case and send it
off to Stuff Podcasts at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff
(46:06):
you Should Know is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
H
Hey, everybody, we are so glad to be coming back
to s F Sketch Fest this week, the best comedy
festival in the land, for our first live show in
two years. Yep, we're gonna be there on Friday, January
twenty one, seven thirty pm at the Sydney Goldstein Theater
to be specific. And if you want tickets then head
on over to s F Sketch Fest dot com or
City box Office dot com and search stuff you should know.
(00:22):
That's right. It's a vaccinated only show and a masking
up show, so everyone be safe, get out there and
come check us out live. We'll see you on January one.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
(00:45):
and there's Charles w Chuck Bryan over there, and uh,
Jerry was just here. She said peace out, suckers, and
this is stuff you should know. Of course, it was
nice of her to log on to say goodbye. Right now,
we're just getting Jerry. She's been busy lately. Yeah, what happens.
It totally happens in this busy, go go world of
(01:09):
almost two The Double Deuce this year has just flown by.
It really has I think mercifully because this is going
to be part of the lost years when we look back,
you know. Yeah, it felt like eighteen years and somehow
one has just like been in a snap. Yeah. I
(01:31):
don't know what's going on. I don't think anyone does anymore, Chuck,
So don't don't feel bad. Uh. Can we shout out
to the people and sources that helped us along for
this one? Well, our buddy Dave Rouse wrote an article
for our Stuff Works. Uh, And I found a great
(01:52):
article from Wired. I forgot how much I love Wired.
That's from Mallory Pickett and BBC News, ABC News, NPR
Morning a Dish, which is always a fun listen. Uh,
National Library of Medicine here in the US. And then,
as always, I feel like it makes appearance in every
episode Jamaica Hospital dot Org. That's right, surprisingly helpful? Yeah,
(02:13):
maybe not surprisingly? I wonder is that Jamaica Queens or
Jamaica Jamaica. Oh you know what I was thinking, Jamaica Jamaica.
Maybe Jamaica Queens. Yeah, should I Jamaica scene Jamaica Queens.
My neighbor across the street, neighbor has uh is from Jamaica,
the country, and I feel like a heel now because
I was like, hey, that hospital websites great. Pat, She's like,
(02:38):
what are you talking about? She's like, okay, great, glad
you like some rando hospital website. Oh boys, so we're
talking today. You went and found some medical stuff. That's
why you went to look at Jamaica Hospital dot org.
I'm guessing because we're talking about a really interesting condition
and actually a few kinds of conditions that have something
(03:02):
unusual in common, and that is that the people who
suffer from these conditions have blue skin. Blueskin. You heard
it here first, everybody, even though this really first started
hitting the presses in two thousand eight. Yeah, I mean
you didn't hear it here first. This, I mean, this
is all over the internet. But we're talking about not
(03:22):
the Blue Man Group, but the Blue People Group of Kentucky.
It's a family that is I guess it's pronounced few Gate.
It's not. No, that's Italian. He was from France. Well
that's that's a spoiler. Oh is it? I'm sorry? I
take it back. Everyone. You know it's not a spoiler.
But for some reason, when I saw that the original
(03:46):
Martin Fugate was from France. From uh, I'm not sure
what part of France, but I was like, that's surprising.
It was like, I don't know why it would be. Uh. Yeah.
He could have come from anywhere in the world, and
he would have been like a completely overlookable person, I think,
totally lost to history had it not been for the
rare um rare genetic mutation that he happened to carry
(04:10):
with him. And even that wouldn't have gotten him into
the history books, Chuck, Even that wouldn't have. Instead, it
took Martin Fugate to happen, upon against all odds, to
have found a wife who he was not related to,
who was a total stranger from a totally different country,
who also happened to have that same rare genetic mutation.
(04:34):
And when the two get together, capal blue kids start
popping out. That's right. He came over from France to Kentucky,
to the Blue Hills of Kentucky. Ironically, Oh wow, I
hadn't thought about that. In And like I said, he
was from France when he was an orphan, so he
didn't know a lot about his his family as far
as uh, whether or not any of them were blue,
(04:56):
I guess, or if so, he wasn't he wasn't piping
up a out. Yeah, maybe he just kept it quiet.
But he did marry a redheaded American named Elizabeth Smith,
and they headed on over to Troublesome Creek near Hazard
County in Kentucky and set up a homestead there. And
it is a I mean the one of the doctors
(05:17):
that uh from one of these articles said, you know,
it's maybe one and a one hundred thousand chance that
you have to even have this genetic mutation. And he said,
but you know, once you start, I guess there's no
other way to say it. Once you start in breeding,
which can happen in the eighteen hundreds in the rural
(05:38):
nous of Kentucky, he said, that can go down all
the way to like one in eight chance. And that's
exactly what happened. Yeah, I was surprised there was even
one in eight. But there's some little fluke of genetics that, um,
that you have to when you're talking about probability in genetics,
it's a little more difficult than half in a straight math. Yeah. Um.
(05:58):
So apparently Martin himself possibly had like a little bit
of blue to him. His wife Elizabeth had no blue
to her um. She apparently had very very pale skin
and bright red hair. But when um the two got
together and those two genetic mutations donated UM their mutations
(06:19):
to that specific gene, they the kids that they had
were like, um, irresistibly blue. Like there was no confusing.
It's not like, yeah, Martin's kind of blue. If you
ever noticed, maybe you need to breathe more deeply. This
was like straight up blue kids. I've even seen him
described as dark blue, not even a bluish hue or
(06:41):
tint or tinge dark blue skinned children. Yea, four of
seven were blue. Uh. And it's funny he said that
she was not. The mother was not blue tinted. But
I imagine, like before they knew about genetics and in breeding,
if he would, if she would been a little blue,
that might have been a reason to get together, you
(07:03):
know what I mean? No, I don't explain. Well, blue
man happens to meet blue woman and they're like, jeez,
there's another one like me, and you know we've been
sort of you know, sort of embarrassing and maybe we're
cast out a little bit. So let's hitch our wagons
together because there's probably nothing wrong with us having kids, right,
(07:25):
His medical science hadn't known that at that point. It's
a story as old as time, Chuck, but it was.
It was just complete happenstance though, right. Yeah, So, UM,
And I wonder also, like it was significant to me
that they pointed out that his wife, Elizabeth Smith um
few Gates skin was almost translucent. It was so pale,
(07:46):
because I wonder if she donated that to her children, UM,
which allowed the blue to really shine through even more.
Maybe it's possible, like the ultimate recipe for blueness exactly. Um.
And they actually became owns, this blue family, and they
were not particularly proud of their blue skin. I think
they were a little freaked out about it. I think
(08:07):
that their neighbors may not have particularly treated them well,
and so they already lived in like a pretty isolated
part of Appalachia, UM, but they took pains to actually
isolate themselves even further. And one of the one of
the consequences of that was something you touched upon. That
that meant that, Um, their son married their aunt, and
(08:28):
cousins married cousins, even if they were way too close
to be marrying, and so one of the one of
the products of these this inner marriage was an entire
small regional population of blue families or families who have
blue children or Blue family members, because these neighbor families
were still blood relatives of the few Gates who initially
(08:52):
settled this area and just started reproducing through inbreeding. Uh.
And the condition that they had is not a skin
condition at all. It's actually a blood disorder like you mentioned,
and it's called medima globinemia. It's so pretty good. Wow,
you're so it's not meth now, Okay, Oh, I'm glad
(09:13):
you said it first. Then I actually took great pains
today to look up between this and the other episode
we're recording pronunciations, and when you look at medima globinemia,
that is seventeen letters of it's a mouthful of letters,
pure hell. And it's really one of those that I
(09:33):
looked at over and over and just could not get
it right in my head until I, you know, went
and looked it up on the internet and I was like,
that's not so hard, all right, let me try. Let
me try mediema globinemia. I think it's more of a
t than a d uh, okay, what about a t
you want me try that one? This is like the
(09:53):
worst acting audition ever. What's my motivation here? Uh to
get through this episode? Uh So we're gonna touch a
little bit on melanin throughout this episode. But you remember
melanin from our I think pretty good episode on sunscreen
and sun tans, right. Uh? And this is uh, you know,
(10:18):
special cells in the body, in the skin make melanin
and they are Melanin is responsible for coloring your skin.
And there are all kinds of different uh melanin disorders,
whether you have too much or too little, whether you
can you know, we'll make your skin lighter or darker,
or whether or not it happens in patches. I had
a friend in Los Angeles with bid eligo, which oh
(10:42):
you do, which you know leads to uh, patches of
light skin on the body. In't that what Michael Jackson
claimed to have had to Yes? Was that verified? I
don't know. I don't know either. I really don't know,
because I just remember there was a big stink when
that came out and everyone was like, yeah, right, the
well the reason why it was like, really it's you
(11:03):
got videlago because it's usually um patches like the melano sites.
The melanin producing cells just kind of poop out or
crap out in an area, and it it leaves like
patches without pigment, not your entire face, um without pigment.
But who knows, well, I think his I think what
he said was that he bleached his skin to match
(11:24):
the light patches. Was his reasoning. Oh, well, that's fairly reasonable.
You know, if you're self conscious about videlago and you
have a ton of money, you could do something like that.
Who knows, Who knows? Should we talk about skin color?
Should we take an awkward Michael Jackson break? I think
we just did. But the point is this that I
(11:44):
think you're making, Chuck, is that changes in like your
skin color typically have to do with a lack of
or an overproduction of melanin. Right, And that what we're
talking about, uh, mattiemoglobinemia right, is actually a blood disorder.
It's not has nothing to do with the skin. It
(12:05):
just shines through that super translucent skin that we have. Right,
So what's going on here in the body? Okay, So
are you surprised, I'm asking you. I'm a little surprised.
I thought we maybe tagging team this one. But okay, okay, so,
uh you have like a pink is shoe too, typically
(12:26):
being being Caucasian. Um, because you're there's not a ton
of melonin that's blocking the blood supply underneath and your tissues.
It's kind of shining through and your blood is red.
And the reason it's red, Chuck, is because because the
reason why blood is red, well, remember in school they
(12:48):
teach you that your blood is blue until you get
cut and then it hits the air. Yeah, that's not true,
and then it turns red. That's what you hear on
the playground in elementary school from dumb kids. But that
is not true. And I bet you anything, kids are
still spreading that mistruth on the playground. Yeah. It's got
some staying power for sure, as far as as far
as rumors go. And you know what, my dad will
(13:09):
sue your dad for all the money he's got. Did
you guys threaten lawsuits? Sure? We were very lutitious kids
did though. It was very funny. We were like, we're
like little Puritans in in Salem town. That's right. Uh
so blood is red? That was a question, right? Uh? Yeah, yeah,
why is blood red, right, because I don't know we've
(13:31):
talked about this before, but it's because our red blood
cells have hemoglobe and it's a protein and it gets
its red color from something called hem It's a compound
that has an iron atom in there, and that iron
atom is the key. That's what binds with oxygen and
allows red blood cells to get oxygen all over the body,
(13:52):
and that's sort of what makes us tick. Yeah, it
definitely is. I mean that oxygen is super important, so
we want to have super red rich hemoglobin blood. Right.
Our bodies also produced something else called metemoglobin's I guess
is how you would pronounce it. That is not how
I've been pronouncing it in my head. But these metema
(14:13):
globins are basically the same thing as hemoglobins, but they
have a different kind of iron attached to them. The
iron they have is like, there's really another way to
put it. Actually, there's plenty of other ways to put it,
but one way you could put it is that is rusted.
It's oxidized iron, which means that it's missing an electron
that it would need to bind oxygen, which means it's
(14:35):
useless for transporting oxygen. Through the blood. So if you
have a bunch of metemoglobin built up in your blood,
your blood can reasonably turn blue. You also may have
some problems breathing um because you don't have any oxygen
in your blood, although that's not true, I'm sorry. You
would be able to breathe, breathe perfectly fine, but it
wouldn't clear up necessarily the lack of oxygen your blood
(14:58):
because it's on a blood level um rather than something
to do with your lungs. Yeah, that was my one question,
because doctor after doctor is confirmed that mativa globinemia doesn't
present any health issues. But how can that be possible
that your blood has is having trouble carrying oxygen to
your body and it doesn't matter. I had a really
(15:19):
hard time with that too. And the best I could
come up with as far as an answer, which is
not definitive, but the best that can come up with,
is that there is a there's a threshold where your
blood will turn blue, where you have enough metema globins
in there that it's blue, but not so there's not
so many metema globins that you're actually having trouble with
(15:40):
your oxygen in your body. So it can turn blue
long before you actually like suffer from the effects of
low oxygen um. Does that make sense? Yeah, I guess
that makes sense. And isn't the threshold to turn your
skin blue like a really low percentage, even like one
percent of metemaments. If you're blood is one percent in
team of globins, you can start to turn blue right
(16:03):
So it doesn't take very much, which means that you
have of of the global the globins in your blood
are are hemoglobin, which means you're still able to get
all the oxygen you need. You just have maybe a
little less than somebody else. That's my best guess from
what I saw UM, and I think at this point
in our understanding of my team of globalemia, it's as
(16:26):
good as anybody's. Well. That sounds like a perfect place
for a break, Okay, and uh, we'll be right back
to talk a little bit more about this and other
interesting blood conditions right for this, So, Chuck, where're talking
(16:58):
about my team globe and temia um and the reason like,
like I think one of us said earlier that the
body naturally produces these things, um, these metema globins um,
but we also produce an enzyme that can convert excess
metema globins into hemoglobin, and it's got a doozy of
(17:19):
a name which I just love. May I take this one? Yes,
this enzyme is called reduced nicotinamide adenine dionucleotide cytochrome B
five reduct as one of the great all times nicknames.
It has no nickname. You have to say the entire
thing every time. And so this enzyme, reduced nicotinamine ad
(17:41):
aine dionucleotide side of chrome B five reduct days is
actually capable of converting the iron from its um ferric
state in metema globin's into its fairest state, which is
capable of binding with oxygen like the kind that's found
in hemoglobin. So, for all intents and purposes, reduced nicotinamide
(18:01):
adenine dinucleotide cytochrome B five reductase is capable of converting
metemoglobins into hemoglobin. And most of us are able to
do that. But if you're like a few gate and
you have that rare genetic condition where both parents donated
that mutation to you and you developed metemoglobinemia, but there's
(18:22):
some reduced amount of reduced nicotinamide adenine dionucleotide cytochrome B
five reductas, which means that that metemoglobin's that you naturally
produced are able to build up and accumulate in your blood.
And when they do that, and they they they that's
how you start to turn blue. That's how you cross
that one percent threshold. That's right. And this is one
(18:42):
of the rare times where you can actually have a
genetic condition that's pretty easily solved. And in this case,
it's just a pill. Uh. And the guy who figured
this out has sort of an interesting story in his
own right. His name is Madison Coween or Coine Kaween.
I'm going with col Wayne cal Wine, Colween, c A
(19:08):
w Ei and Coween, although I like cow Wine. That
doesn't sound like you'd be tasty, but I'll beg it
gives you a pretty good bus. Uh. He was the
h He was the grandson of a pretty famous at
the time poet out of Kentucky. Uh. And Madison was
the third of of the Madison's. And this is just
(19:30):
a side note, very sad and interesting. His wife was
poisoned and murdered by poison in the nineteen sixties and
no one was ever caught in charge with a crime
and it kind of remains one of Kentucky's um, you know,
sort of biggest cold cases. Wow, I did not see
that one coming. Yeah, he and his wife and this
other couple were out drinking all night supposedly like just
(19:53):
got slashed and at a at a at a country club. Um.
He Madison didn't even make at home. I think he
stayed the night there, but the other man, the man
from the other couple, drove his wife home. Um, apparently
just dropped. They had another nightcap and she woke up dead.
One didn't wake up dead. She died and they thought
(20:15):
it was just you know, alcohol or some natural cause.
But then they found these two like little needle pricks
in her where they think she was I guess given
a shot to pass out and then poisoned. And I
can't remember the poison. It was some sort of like
acid or something. But yeah, really really interesting. Neither here
nor there as far as this goes. But that's the
(20:37):
sad story of Dr Madison. Uh cow wines wife. Was
he a suspect because I would have suspected him. I
don't think so, because he wasn't even there. That's the
first thing I thought but apparently it was pretty verified
that he slept it off at the country club. I
guess crazy because yeah, well, I mean one of the
things that he became famous for, if not the thing
(20:58):
he became famous for. It wasn't jacting people with with
some fairly weird stuff. I know, isn't that weird? It
is weird. You're not buying it. No, I don't want
to like cast persions on somebody. I don't know enough
about the story, but that's just very odd, especially like
judging from this ninety second story, exactly I can conclusively
(21:20):
solve this case. I've seen enough law in order to
know that the husband almost always did it else that
is probably true, but probably not in this case. But
at any rate, he was a hematologist at you at
the University of Kentucky, and he heard about these people
throughout the world and really wanted to kind of get
to the bottom of this. When a couple of them,
(21:42):
uh well, I don't think these were few gates, but
Patrick and Rachel Ritchie, I guess you know it happened
in some other family. Know the Combs is. We knew
it Combs from Kentucky. We had a friend that we
worked with for a little while. Really he was never
struck me as blue. Yeah, he never struck you. But
I wonder if he is related to the combs is,
(22:03):
which would make him vibe some somehow. Few Gate because again,
these these families in the few Gate area where all
if you went back far enough, few Gates exactly. All right,
So these people walk into his office and what happened?
So here here's the thing, Like, they didn't walk into
his office, he went and found them. I read an
article about him, and he became maybe a little obsessed
(22:25):
with finding these people. Wanted to know what the heck
was going on. So he actually went out in the
woods and would wait for them, and every once in
a while would see one and he chased them, telling
him to stop, and of course they would run off.
So he figured out another way to do it. He
moved to Hazard County near Troublesome Creek, and he started
asking around at clinics, like had anybody ever treated a
(22:45):
blue patient? And he finally struck gold Um blue Gold
when he spoke to one nurse at a clinic that said, yeah,
this this one woman came in with blue skin and
she was really self conscious about her skin. She came
to the back door. Was really just kind of me,
he can embarrassed. Um, but yeah, we've treated a blue
person before. So Colween basically hung around this clinic until
(23:08):
more blue people came in and that this is where
he met the Richie siblings. Yeah, so he started to
dig into their family a little bit. Uh. It became
pretty obvious to him that it was a genetic disorder,
and he started digging around other stories around the North
America and found an Inuit population in Alaska who had
(23:29):
who had the same condition. I'm just gonna call it
this condition now. I think we said it enough, at
least I have. And he said, well, you know these
people were interbreeding a lot because they were very remote
as well. And so he said, I think we understand
the problem here. How do we fix it? Yeah, I
don't know if he where he he got this idea,
(23:54):
but he used something called methylene blue, which was already
like in wide use. It's used to staying tissue because
it affects some cells differently than others. Um, it was
a malarial treatment, which malaria can actually produce matema globe anemia.
(24:14):
And suddenly having trouble saying, because we have been practicing lately.
Um And what it does is it goes in and
it interacts with the reduced nicotinamine, adenine di nucleotide side
chrome B five reductation and basically gives it a boost
and helps convert all of that excess um matema globins
(24:35):
into hemoglobins in patients with metema globe anemia. And so
I don't know where he got the idea, but he
tried it and apparently injected the Ritchie kids with it,
and they they stopped being blue, like almost on the spot. Yeah,
Like minutes later they returned to a to a you know,
a standard color, and I mean they were overjoyed. Could
(25:00):
you imagine being like this your whole life, getting a
shot and looking in the mirror a few minutes later
and you're like, oh my gosh, it's like it's it's gone.
It's actually really sweet because they were very self conscious,
the whole family. I mean, this family like retreated to
the woods to to like people didn't know where they lived,
and they lived like five miles away from him and
knew that there's this blue family still had no idea
(25:20):
where they lived. It was like that's how far they
retreated from society because they were that self conscious. So yeah,
I'm sure it's a pretty joyous occasion for them. There's
gonna be a movie about this at some point, right,
I can't believe there's not. There's a very famous interview
with Kyle Wayne in a magazine called Science Ad two.
And there's also a really famous painting that somebody did
(25:40):
and it was just kind of lost to history who
did it? And I read this article. I can't remember
what it was on, but this person tracked down, um,
the artist, the initial artist, and got to see like
the original. Because it's been scanned so many times, it's
really lost a step. But um, the originals apparently really
something to see. Should we say the quote that head
in that science he said, he said, and they walked
(26:05):
in the office, he said. They were bluer in Hill,
very Kentucky. Alright. So over time, uh, a few gates
started moving away, like some of the younger population of
the family got out of Hazard County. And it's so
hard not to make Dukes of Hazzard jokes. I've been
just sidestepping the whole time. I've been doing really great,
(26:26):
thank you. But they started to move away over time,
and basically you know, that's gonna stop the inner breeding
and that's gonna make fewer and fewer blue babies. And
as of I think some were still blue, but not today. Yeah,
I think now that there's a treatment and easy treatment
because they don't even have to be injected anymore. Like
(26:47):
if you're blue and you don't want to be blue,
you just take a methylene blue pill once a day
and it goes in. Apparently once you excreted out the
methylene blue, you'd go back to being blue, so you
have to take it daily. But I'll bet there's members
of that family now and I'm just guessing here, but
um that are proudly blue now that they know that
(27:08):
they don't have to be blue, some of them I'll
bet make a choice to be blue as kind of
like a like a pride in their family heritage. I'm
guessing here. Well, the thing I saw that there was
one and that was the one in twelve that was
still blue, like by choice, I think, so, yeah, I
just didn't take the pillow. That's neat, But but not
(27:28):
today anymore. So this is uh not the only way
you can get bluish or any you know. I guess
silvery skin is another. There's another thing that comes into
play here with this next disorder, and this is one
called argeria. And some people are bluish, some people are silver.
(27:49):
If you've looked up you know blue people or silver
people online, you have no doubt seen uh Paul Harrison.
They called him Papa Smurf, and he is all over
the internet as one of the more famous cases of Algeria. Yeah,
and he was. He kind of emerged as I don't
know if a cautionary tale is right, because that was
(28:10):
not his purpose. Um, but he he also he whether
he meant to or not, he served as a cautionary
tale about taking colloidal silver because that is what turned
him blue. And it didn't just turn his skin blue.
It turned his mucous membranes blue. So if he like
flashed his teeth, his gums were blue, and the inside
of his mouth was blue, the inside of his nose
(28:31):
was blue. He was blue blue or in hell, as
Kawayne would probably put it um. And he he did
it because he saw an article about how um silver
eyeons basically restored some cut flower back to life again,
and he thought, well, that would be really something to
to to see what it can do on a human body.
(28:52):
I want to be a fresh daisy, right, And he
wasn't the only person at experimenting at the time, Like
apparently for a while it was a over the counter drug.
We've been using silver for a very long time. But
he was, um, somebody who used it every single day.
He was drinking like a ten ounce drink of colloidal silver.
He figured out how to basically make his own colloidal
(29:14):
silver potion, and he also rubbed it on his face too,
and so in very short order he started to turn blue.
Because that is definitely a consequence of using silver too
much of overexposure to silver, that's right. Uh, And this
can happen if you work in like a silver mine
or something like. It can be one of the side
effects of mining silver mine. I also saw that in
(29:35):
the old time, um, not even that old, but just
pre digital photography processing photograph processing, you could actually um yeah,
you know the eighties, Um, you could actually develop algeria
be from exposure to the silver dust that was used
to expose um photographic plates. I think prior to the eighties.
(29:57):
I I don't know when they stopped using that. I
don't either. I spent a lot of times in dark
rooms as a kid because my dad, because you were
a mad go in there, turn on that red light
and sit there and think about what you do. Now.
My dad was an amateur photographer, well I guess, and
my professionally sold stuff, but he did his own developing,
(30:19):
and um, I learned how to do it and did
it something through high school and then kind of quit
doing it. It It was a lot of fun. Though. Dark
rooms are very like peaceful places, is that right? Yeah?
Just you know they're dark obviously, and you're in there
for a long period of time, and it's just very nice,
usually by yourself, but unless you're in a teen romance
movie and then you know the cute girls in there
(30:41):
with you, I well, I always associate them with the
murderer finally coming into focus, and they happen to be
staying right next to the photographers developing it. So to me,
dark rooms are very tense, scary like as it as
the as the photo paper like comes into focus, very tense,
the calls coming from inside the dark room. That's right, Um,
(31:05):
where were we? Okay? So what causes this is an
excess of silver ions in your body and when they're
exposed to light, they react by forming dark deposits on
the skin that end up looking silver ish. And the
bad news about this is, once you've got it, it's there.
You can't take a pill and get rid of it. No,
it's irreversible. We don't have a way to remove excess
(31:26):
silver from the tissues and the human body. And that's
all it is. It's just it builds up. Normally, the
body can excrete you know, small amounts of silver that
we're exposed to from like you know, touching silver or
um snorting silver, that kind of stuff. Um, you know, uh,
like we pee it out, We poop it out and
we get rid of it. But if we overcome that
(31:49):
threshold and our silver ingestion um exceeds our ability to
excrete it, it starts to build up in the tissue.
And so if you're drinking your own tent outs colloidal
silver um homebrew every single day, you're going to overwhelm
your body's ability to excrete silver very quickly, and it's
going to build up and build up and build up,
and pretty soon you're going to be blue or silver blue,
(32:13):
that's right. Uh. And if you look up images of
Carrison you're probably also gonna find pictures of Stan Jones,
a libertarian politician in Montana who around why two K said,
you know what, I think things are gonna go south
and we're not gonna have any antibiotics. So I'm gonna
start making my own again colloidal silver solution and drink
(32:35):
that stuff. And then there was a teacher in Brooklyn,
too named Rosemary Jacobs, who uh, very sadly I think
got um nasal drops with silver when she was a kid,
and she was sort of not sort of she was
very silver for life. She was. So these people again
have proved to be cautionary tales to most people who
are like, oh, that's what happens if you take too
(32:56):
much silver. I'm not going to take colloidal silver saw
pplements over the counter, um anything like that. I'm just
gonna steer clear silver all together. Because one of the
problems is there's not a lot of pure reviewed evidence,
if any, that suggests that silver has any beneficial effect
when taken internally right, it is actually anti anti microbial.
(33:18):
It's pretty clever to um use silver like in the
pre scientific days, but there's nothing that says like, yes,
if you drink colloidal silver homebrew, it's going to have
any effect on your on your life or your health,
and in fact, it might actually turn you blue. Despite this,
people still take colloidal silver um pretty frequently. Apparently, Alex
(33:42):
Jones touts it, Gwyneth Paltrow touts it. Dr Oz touts it.
And that's you know, if it's not actually harming you,
there doesn't seem to be any any harm from it,
aside from potentially irreversibly turning blue. But there's a larger
harm that I saw chuck to society in general, and
that silver is a anti microbial of last resort, that is, um,
(34:07):
they're figuring out how to use it against um my
antibiotic resistant bugs like mersa. That silver will get in
there and even kill mersa. But that silver resistance may
be developed in bugs by all these people taking colloidal
silver supplements and drinking colloidal silver um, you know, homebrews
(34:29):
and stuff like that. That is actually creating silver resistant microbes,
which is not a good thing for anybody. All Right, Well,
let's take our second break, good, yes, and we'll talk
a little bit more about coloidal silver right after this.
(35:02):
All right, So you mentioned earlier that uh kind of
in passing that cloydal Silver had been used pre UM.
You know, mainstream medical science coming on board, and it's
really true, and they were kind of onto something and that,
like you said, there were there are some anti microbial properties.
So people like Plenty the Elder Cyrus to the Great
(35:22):
they both touted the use of silver. Monks in the
Middle Ages used silver nitrate UM to treat ulcers and burns,
and it was used a lot. It's it's kind of
in a way before we had real antibotics, one of
the first antibiotics. Yes, UM again externally, it messes up
(35:43):
microbs and we're not exactly sure even still today what
the mechanism is. The guesses are that somehow penetrates the
membrane of the of bacteria and prevents it from replicating
properly UM or it had it does like some one two,
which is on enzymes that the microbes need to to
(36:03):
survive UM, but that it it will leave your human
skin cells alone. It just attacks microbes weirdly bacteria specifically UM.
So yeah, it was like an early antibiotic and it
actually kept UM stayed in use for a long time
now to nowadays, you'll find it in like wound dressings.
(36:23):
Sometimes suitures will be coated in silver. Replacement joints artificial
joints will have some sort of silver component to it
to to protect um against infection UM. But we were
using them internally for a really long time up until
the sixties. Even I think babies got like silver eye
drops when they were born, which I had not heard
(36:44):
of until you know, yesterday. I had neither yes, silver
nitrate to prevent eye infections, but then they found out
it can actually cause eye damage and burn the skin.
So they really worked on UM just sort of, uh,
what's the word I'm looking for? When you make something
less potent by mixing it with water diluting it right
(37:08):
on the tip of my tongue, You did it, No,
you did it. So they learned how to dilute it.
But the problem with diluting it in a formula is
it wasn't an exact science, Like they didn't know exactly
how much silver was still going to be active, and
so you know, you couldn't really use it as a
medicine anymore because it was either too weak to do anything,
(37:31):
or it was so much that you risk turning blue.
So eventually they just scrapped it as a medicine and said,
I think in the FDA said this isn't a medicine.
You can't advertise it as such. So they said, all right,
well to say it's a supplement and just move it
to the shelf, you know, four ft away, and the
Ft said, and that's what happened, and you can still
get this stuff. That's where you know. That's why when
(37:53):
it's Paltrow uses it. Yeah. So, and I mean, like again,
it's one of those things where it's like, yes, it
makes sense. Silver has an anti microbial properties. There's probably
some microbes in your body you don't want um, so
take some silver and see if it works. But again,
there's just not any pure of viewed evidence that backs
this up. That's not necessarily to say that it doesn't work.
(38:14):
Just because there isn't pure viewed evidence that backs it
up doesn't also necessarily mean in the same breath that
there's plenty of pure viewed evidence that says it doesn't work.
I'm not suggesting anybody take the stuff. I'm just saying
there's not pure of viewed evidence to back up that
it actually does anything. And if you do take it again,
you risk permanently irreversibly turning blue. Yeah, and and I
(38:38):
should point out I don't know anything about Gwyneth Paltrow's
current usage, but this her appearance on Dr OZ was
when she touted it. She she may have given it up,
who knows? Who knows? Um. Paul Keason never gave it
up the chuck. He died in uh two thirteen as well,
same year that Gwyneth Paltrow outed herself as a silver
(38:59):
user um and Paul carrasan Uh. He apparently used colloidal
silver that homebrew he made up until the end. Like
he never stopped, even though he apparently retreated from the
public eye because he was tired of being treated like
a freak or a weirdo UM and had some rough
years towards the end apparently after he went public, but
(39:20):
he's still kept up with the colloidal silver, although that
doesn't seem to have been linked to his death. He
was also a really heavy smoker for many years, and
he suffered a heart attack and a stroke. Yeah. I mean,
I guess his point was probably while I'm already blue, Yeah,
like why stop? Now? You can't get much bluer? So uh,
what else you got? Well, I just thought we'd wind
(39:43):
it up with this little kind of sidebar. Uh. I
can't This doesn't really have any to do with being
blue or silver, but I thought it was an interesting
find that, uh, they basically determine. Uh, there's something called
repigmenting that has happened to people, uh to go their
skin both darker and lighter. That has nothing to do
(40:04):
that in this funny in this article kept calling it
inter marriage. Um, what they mean is you know or
or yeah, what they mean is having sex and having babies, uh,
two different skin colors. But they keep calling it inter marriage,
which I guess is uh, you know, very sweet. It's
just such a lovely way to put it. It's but
(40:24):
they know that repigmenting happens regardless of uh, inter marriage.
But what they found recently is that this has happened
a lot faster than anyone thought. And we're talking about
a hundred generations, or as little as a hundred generations,
which is a long time, but over the course of
human history, it's not that long. It's potentially not. Yeah,
(40:44):
it's not that long. Usually a generation is chalked up
at about twenty years, So we're talking as little as
two thousand years, groups that were once lily white went
back to being dark, and groups that were dark can
turn into a lily white population, and that it's it's
it's just basically more evidence that race is strictly a
(41:05):
social construct. Skin color has nothing to do with anything
but the amount of melanin that our genes tell our
bodies to produce, which is triggered by the amount of
UV exposure that we have over something like a hundred generations, right,
And so if you're family lineage moves from a place
(41:26):
that has lots of UV near the equator to a
place that doesn't how much daylight or vice versa, your
body is going to adapt and melanin production is going
to change, and over time, your entire family's skin color
can change. Yeah, because we actually need UV, right, but
we just need a certain amount of it. If you
have too much, you can get skin cancer. Apparently, it
(41:46):
can have reproductive issues. If you get too little. It
can also have issues on your bone because we use
UV to produce vitamin D, which we use for for
strong bones bone density. So our bodies have figured out
how to kind of adjust depending on that you V
exposure by producing or slowing down melanin production. That's it
(42:07):
pretty amazing, pretty neat. But it is surprising that it's well, actually,
it's not that surprising that it can happen over a
hundred generations or two thousand years because the body is
very responsive to its environment. We adapt very easily, so
that's not particularly surprising, although it is neat. Yeah, I
mean it's surprised the scientist. I think they just thought
it was quicker than they anticipated. So if you're a racist,
(42:31):
just stop and think that somewhere down your family line
there is a white person or a black person or
in the future. Yeah, that's true. That's right. So take that.
You got anything else? I have nothing else? All right, Well,
if you want to know more about blue people or
colloidal silver or pigmentation, go start reading up on it
(42:51):
on the internet. Uh. And thanks again to all the
great sites that you found in putting this really good
episode together, Chuck. And since I complimented talks episode putting
together skills, it's time for a listener mail. I'm gonna
call this, uh, one of the many thanks we got
for the m Not in Array, but the the Mr
(43:13):
Not episode, Uh, this is one I think for both
of us like we were super stoked to do and
like in retrospect, very proud of you know, we're stoked.
We were super stoked, not just stoked stoked. Plus, there's
no way to say stoked without sounding like the bro. No,
no way at all. It stinks too because I'm not
(43:34):
a bro, but I do like things stoked. That's fine
to say stoked, be loud and proud, like the last
remaining blue fugate. So this is from Mark, and it
was a really long one that I'm gonna just sort
of summarize. The first part, uh, is that Mark works
in healthcare information technology and had a rough go of
it over the past couple of years, like so many people,
(43:54):
um working alone and uh listening to our show, which
he said help quite a bit, losing some close friends
to COVID and seeing all this up close and personal.
So Mark had a tough time. So he says this,
after working for almost two years on the COVID nineteen problem,
the last thing I wanted to hear was your podcast
(44:16):
about Mr No vaccines. When I saw the topic pop
up on my player, took a deep breath and decided
to listen. Anyway, I knew almost everything you shared on
the podcast, but became enthralled in the recap of this
amazing story. To my surprise, I was again brought to
tears with a recognition one that you two share of
these brilliant helpers who use their gifts for the benefit
(44:38):
of all humanity. At the risk of making you blush.
You two are part of those helpers. You presented this
mr NA episode with the childlike curiosity and relatable simplicity
that anyone with doubts on taking the vaccine would reconsider.
I can't believe that I have to say this, but
facts help and fact shares are helpers. I might also
(44:59):
add that letting go of any bias is to let
your curiosity curiosity take hold is heroic. Uh. And that
is from Mark, and boy, I'm gonna read that one
another hundred times today. Yeah. Just print it out and
fold it up and keep it under your pillow. Yes,
thank you Mark. He wanted his last name to be
with help but appreciates Mark. You've done Mark, and hang
in there. Yeah. Same same to you, Mark. And UM,
(45:21):
that was very high praise. Thank you very much for
it means a lot to hear something like that. Um.
One other thing they chuck that that Mark reminded me
of that people with matima globe anemia actually can blush blue.
Oh so they get bluer. Yeah in that neat, I
guess that makes sense. Thanks for that to Mark, even
(45:42):
though you had no idea, you're setting us up for it.
You did, so you're just basically a an altogether great person.
If you want to be a great person like Mark
and right in to let us know whatever you want
to let us know we want to hear from you,
you can wrap it up and spank it on that
bottom until it's blue in the case and send it
off to Stuff Podcasts at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff
(46:06):
you Should Know is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
H
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.