Vampire Origin Story: How a Real Virus Inspired the Halloween Legend |Kathleen McAuliffe | Big Think

Vampire Origin Story: How a Real Virus Inspired the Halloween Legend

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Perhaps the most iconic Halloween costume is that of the vampire. Its long black cape, shiny medallion, powdery complexion, and long, white fangs are the result of a legend that stretches hundreds of years back to eastern Europe. And its fangs in particular betray a similarity to bats and dogs — animal forms which the vampire was thought capable of taking on, explains science journalist Kathleen McAuliffe.

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KATHLEEN MCAULIFFE :

Kathleen McAuliffe’s articles, many featured on covers, have appeared in over a dozen national magazines, including Discover, The New York Times (both the Sunday Magazine and newspaper), US News & World Report, Smithsonian, Atlantic Monthly, More Magazine, Glamour, and Reader's Digest. In addition to being a feature writer, McAuliffe was a health columnist for More Magazine from 1999-2006. A decade earlier, she founded a quarterly newsletter put out by the American Foundation for AIDS Research, which she edited for the first year of its publication.  From 1985 to 1988, she was a senior editor at US News & World Report, focusing on the coverage of health and science. In the six years previous to this position, she was an editor at Omni Magazine, where she assigned and prepared science articles for publication. During that period, she also co-authored Life for Sale, one of the first popular books about the genetic engineering revolution

Her article, "Are We Evolving?", was featured in The Best American Science Writing 2010, edited by Jerome Groopman. The year before, she was awarded an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship to study and report on human evolution. In 2000, she received an award from the National Coalition of Women With Heart Disease in recognition of excellence in journalism. Twelve years earlier, she was honored with the Institute of Food Technology award for outstanding writing on food science and nutrition. McAuliffe was also awarded a science writing fellowship in 1996 from the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole.

In 2011, McAuliffe was interviewed on the National Public Radio program All Things Considered, which devoted a segment to her article, "The Incredible Shrinking Brain." McAuliffe participated as a panelist on an hour-long PBS seminar, Our Genes/Our Choices, which aired across the US in the winter of 2003. She did script development and on-camera interviews for Omni: The New Frontier, a nationally syndicated TV series that began airing in October 1981. She has also appeared on other TV and radio programs. McAuliffe was educated at Trinity College Dublin, in Ireland, obtaining a M.A. in natural science after graduating with first-class honors. Her final year thesis on electro-encephalography (EEG) recordings of the human brain was presented at the Eastern Psychology Association Conference in 1977. McAuliffe and her husband – a research physicist at the University of Miami – are the parents of two teenagers and reside in Miami, Fl.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Kathleen McAuliffe:  One parasitic manipulation, and perhaps the oldest one known on the books is what the rabies virus does. As everyone knows once a rabid animal bites you the virus can then travel to the brain. And what it does is it invades the hypothalamus, which is the center of the brain that controls all our most fundamental drives, for example, anger and aggression, hunger and your sex drive. And it's not commonly known but an atypical symptom of rabies is hyper sexuality. And people who become infected can occasional just develop this veracious appetite for sex. And there are a number of scientists who think that the vampire legend actually is based on rabies, that its rabies that was the inspiration for it because as we know, for example, vampires are hyper sexual.

Another aspect of rabies in people is that it makes people very sensitive to any kind of stimuli. So, for example, even the lightest breeze can make somebody agitated. And people with rabies also they hate strong light. It really bothers them. And they for reasons no one understands they become hydrophobic, which is to say they are tormented by the site of water or hearing water splashing in a basin. And if you think about vampire legend, vampires hate light that's why they're nocturnal and in the 18th century when a lot of vampire legends swept Eastern Europe it was thought that pouring water around the grave of a person would keep them from rising at ...

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