I WAS A WAILING WEREWOLF

Porphyria is a rare disease affecting the pigment in blood cells; among its occasional symptoms is excessive body hair and reddish colored teeth.

Now if anyone has a profound scientific hypothesis that werewolves and vampires suffer from this disease, he would normally submit it for publication to the National Enquirer, and if rejected as too low for their standards, he might rewrite it as "I Was a Wailing Werewolf" and try True Confessions. But if he cannot even make that grade, what does he do?

He presents it as a paper to the convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). So I judge from a paper with just that hypothesis, presented by Dr David Dolphin of the U. of British Columbia at the National AAAS Convention Los Angeles on May 30.

If it had happened in Transylvania, the peasants would have laughed it off, but in backward places like New York or Los Angeles, the press picks it up, and an illiterate generation brought up on the boob tube now asks porphyria victims whether they are vampires. One of them, a 28-year old patient of Prof. Jerome Marmorstein of the U. of S. Calif., was close to suicide, as Marmorstein reports in the Medical Tribune (9/25 and 2/10).

When porphyria victims across the country protested, some of the newspapers who had believed the story, retracted and apologized, the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle among them. Needless to say, the louts of the New York Times do not retract; they fall for all the news not fit to print.

But the real point here is Science, the official AAAS weekly. When Marmorstein sent a letter of protest, asking for a retraction and an apology to his patient, Science refused to print it (chief censor Abelson has now retired and has been succeeded by D.E. Koshland). Moreover, the August Pillars of American Science stated that Science does not have much space for "discussion of controversial statements."

But there is something else that is worrisome: of the 1,000 or more scientists at the convention only one found the time to protest and write an article. If there were more Marmorsteins, perhaps there would be fewer Sternglasses and Paul Ehrlichs; and maybe Science would be run by scientists instead of superstition peddlers.

Meanwhile, Dracula for AAAS President!