November 2024, Volume 35
Newsletter Contents
Message from Your Library Director
Alumni Awards Banquet Recognition - Robyn Oro
New Library Staff - Lydia Donaldson
Virtual Suggestion Box on library website
Something Fun: Zombie Pseudoscience - The Creative and the Braindead
Message from your Library Director, Lori Flitterling, MLS
We're excited about the fantastic start to the fall semester at the library! To enhance your study experience, we've added new study spaces and a sound masking system on the 2nd floor of the D'Angelo Library. We also celebrated National Medical Librarian Month in October. As the holiday season approaches, please know that our team is ready to support you with all your library needs. Don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or need help accessing library resources. Let's make this a fantastic year together!
The Library Advisory Committee met on October 23rd to discuss key improvements for library services. Representatives from various constituencies highlighted the need for:
The committee plays a vital role in shaping the future of the University Library by advising on policies, procedures, services, and resource allocation. They advocate for the needs of library users and identify opportunities for improvement.
To upgrade our resource access systems, FOLIO, Locate, and OpenRS will be shut down for maintenance from 7 PM on Wednesday, Nov. 13th to 7 AM on Thursday, Nov. 14th. During this time, checkouts will be recorded on paper, and the online catalog will be unavailable.
Alumni Awards Banquet Recognition – Robyn Oro
Robyn Oro was honored at the Alumni Awards Banquet with the Distinguished Service Award! Robyn has been with KCU since 1992, beginning as a Library Assistant who worked evenings at the front desk. When the library moved into its current building in 2011, she shifted her attention to preserving the old information and resources within the KCU collection, digitizing information and uploading it to digital storage so it can be accessible for future researchers. Some of her work can be found in Notes from the Library Archives, a blog accessible from the KCU Library site. Thank you, Robyn, for devoting so much time and effort to our library!
New Library Staff – Lydia Donaldson
Lydia Donaldson is pretty jazzed to be starting as the new Library Assistant for the Kansas City campus. She graduated from Truman State University in 2021 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, then spent two years working in Truman’s academic library before moving to KC. On weekdays, Lydia will be one of the first people you see lurking behind the front counter. She’s a pretty big nerd, and while she may not have much background in medicine, she is more than willing to pick up interesting info (especially if it could be useful in a story someday). Lydia would like to remind the KCU community that they can check out almost anything through the MOBIUS catalogue. Niche movies, rare books, graphic novels – you name it, it’s probably in a MOBIUS library somewhere.
Virtual Suggestion Box on library website
Observant perusers of the library site may have noticed an addition to the homepage. A link to a virtual suggestion box has been added to the bottom right corner, where students and staff can anonymously submit their ideas on how to improve the library.
Whether you have concerns about the resources available, suggestions for layout, or think we should get more laptop stands, we want to hear about it! We want to do everything we can to provide the best resources for our campuses, and a big part of that is finding out what you need. Shoot us a message if there’s anything we can be doing better!
Something Fun: Zombie Psuedoscience – The Creative and the Braindead
By Lydia Donaldson
https://www.vecteezy.com/vector-art/26777490-vector-a-set-of-zombie-silhouettes-vector-walking-zombies-zombies-with-their-shadows-vector-illustration-on-white-background
Zombies: the iconic moaning shamblers that haunt international cinemas and Target Halloween aisles.
Despite their strong association with the science fiction genre, zombies originated in Afro-Caribbean folklore as a body whose soul has been expelled and is now controlled by voodoo. During the USA occupation of Haiti, zombie folklore trickled into early 20th century cinema, introducing the mindless, fantastical creature to thriller audiences across the world. Early Hollywood cross-contamination with other iconic Halloween monsters expanded the pop culture zombie’s lore, tying it to Frankenstein-esque reanimation in the 1936 film The Walking Dead, and transmitting zombification as a vampire-like infection in Richard Mattheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend. A landmark entry in the zombie evolution, Night of the Living Dead (1968), synthesized several of the modern zombie’s core tenets: they are undead corpses reanimated by sci-fi means, with a ravenous need to consume flesh, whose condition can be passed along by a bite.
Since then, the zombie has been adapted to suit any sci-fi need imaginable. The virus zombie is the most common breed, particularly in satirical, tropey stories where the phenomenon of zombification does not need to be explored, such as Warm Bodies (2013). Here, zombification is a plot device instead of the speculative focus. However, some zombie stories delve deeper into the mechanics of zombification, exploring the biological process that could lead to the insatiable hunger and the inhuman resilience past death. Virus zombies now shuffle alongside alien zombies, radiation zombies, ice zombies, cyborg zombies, fungus zombies — any kind of zombie imaginable.
But in pursuit of a compelling story, as creators take inspiration from real-world phenomena to invent exciting zombie varieties, foundations in reality crumble and biological pseudoscience abounds. Let’s look at several zombie variations and see if their respective creators did their research.
Zombieland – Mad Cow Disease
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1156398/
“It’s been two months since Patient Zero took a bite of a contaminated burger at a Gas N’ Gulp. Just two months, and I might be the last non-cannibal freak in the country.”
– Columbus, Zombieland (2009)
Protagonist Columbus doesn’t explicitly name the virus plaguing the world of Zombieland, but it is heavily implied to be a variation of mad cow disease. The film’s production team studied the effects of several viruses such as syphilis, mad cow disease, and Ebola to inspire their visual approach to zombification. Stephen Prouty, Key Makeup Effects for the film, describes the virus symptoms thus: “They’re still alive, but they’re raging fevers… They’re hemorrhaging from all their orifices and spewing up black bile-like material.” Spread by a bite, the Zombieland virus does not resurrect the dead, but rather infects the living with an insane hunger and gradually destroys their body through peeling flesh and bubbling sores. These symptoms are kept consistent throughout the film. The zombies display elementary human behavior, such as opening doorknobs and picking their teeth in a camera screen, but lose their minds when they perceive an uninfected person.
Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, does cause gradual degradation of the infected animal’s gray matter, hence the ‘spongy’ appearance of the brain. A form of mad cow disease that can infect humans was identified in the UK in 1996, a variation of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (or vCJD). vCJD spreads is a prion disease, so symptoms can take years to develop (contrasted to the hours-long transformation of infected humans in Zombieland). Late-term patients experience brain damage which may cause them to lose coordination and display shuffling movements. But while lack of coordination is one thing the Zombieland virus has in common with vCJD, bile-spewing and flesh-peeling aren’t typical indicators of the disease.
I Am Legend – Adrenal Virus
https://cineramble.com/2018/10/off-the-page-i-am-legend/
“If you can imagine your body as a highway, and you picture the virus as a very fast car, being driven by a very bad man. Imagine the damage that car can cause. Then if you replace that man with a cop... the picture changes. And that's essentially what we've done.”
– Dr. Krippen, I Am Legend (2007)
The book version of I Am Legend was one of the first monster stories where the arrival of a virus escalated to worldwide apocalypse. Even though the book received a lot of criticism upon release (and the infected Darkseekers have a lot more in common with vampires than zombies), I Am Legend was highly influential to the zombie fiction genre. Modern audiences are likely more familiar with the 2007 movie adaptation starring Will Smith, which made several departures from the source material and framed the story more securely as a zombie apocalypse.
Attempting to cure cancer, scientists in the world of I Am Legend (2007) genetically engineered the measles virus to be beneficial to the humans they exposed to it, though they are vague on how precisely it does so. As fictional hubris demands, the virus adapted beyond their control, became transmittable by air, and infected nearly the entire population of New York. Most infected by the virus die soon after, but a few are transformed into terrifying, vampiric monsters with extremely heightened adrenal activity, leading to aggressive behavior, enhanced speed and pain resistance, racing pulse, elevated breathing, hair loss, and a severe burning reaction when their skin encounters strong UV light. Darkseeker zombies are restricted to shaded buildings during the daytime, but at night, they are dangerously fast and aggressive.
Inconsistencies between book and movie aside, it is hard to make precise critiques on the biological basis for the virus because no details of its function or origin are further described. With a serum derived from the blood of an immune human, it is possible to cure a zombie of the virus, which implies that the traits of the Darkseeker zombies are symptoms of the disease rather than a post-mortem condition. Adrenaline spikes, admittedly, have been known to give bursts of speed and strength outside the parameters of a person’s usual abilities, but consistent adrenaline spikes can also cause hypertension and trigger cardiac arrest. The Darkseekers that Will Smith fights are probably more at risk of spontaneously dying of a stroke than outlasting the sliver of humanity who are innately immune to the virus.
Fallout – Radiation
https://fallout.wiki/wiki/Overview:Ghoul
"Severe radiation. That’s how. How do you think? You know, many bombs go boom, flash of light and heat, flesh burns off, but you don’t-quite-die-type severe radiation?"
– Wooz, Fallout 2
Hence the name of the game, radiation poisoning has devastated the world of the Fallout game franchise. Given the right conditions and genetic predispositions, some few humans who are blasted by radiation survive to become ghouls, horrifying humanoids of undead appearance with a genetic mutation that allows their bodies to regenerate at a rate that calls Antoine Lavoisier’s Law of Conservation of Mass into question. While ghouls have been known to consume human flesh, they do not experience an insatiable drive to do so. Practically speaking, in a world of rampant nuclear contamination, sometimes the safest food source is the guy you just shot for trying to rob you. Ghouls are more likely than others to exhibit cannibalistic behavior than your average Fallout gunslinger, though, due to a degenerative phenomenon known as ‘feralization’. While the direct cause of feralization is unclear, social isolation and poor mental/emotional state are key factors that may trigger their descent into raving, animalistic behavior.
As far as modern science has discovered so far, drenching yourself in ionizing radiation gives you nothing but cancer and radiation poisoning, or the wealthy entrepreneurs of our world would have commercialized it by now. The ghouls’ regenerative abilities lie entirely in the realm of science fiction, but severe radiation dermatitis can cause erythema, desquamation, and eventually necrosis, which visually resembles the scalded appearance of the Fallout ghoul. As for cannibalistic behavior, the only examples in our modern world occur as a symptom of extreme psychological disease. But, given the post-apocalyptic setting of Fallout, the incredible trauma of watching your body degrade before your eyes, and the extreme social isolation and loss of human connection that many ghouls endure within that harsh world, falling into such a poor mental state that one would practice cannibalism is far more explicable than fantastical bodily regeneration.
The Last of Us – Cordyceps
https://slate.com/technology/2023/02/last-of-us-fungal-pandemic-real-maybe.html
“Viruses can make us ill, but fungi can alter our very minds.”
– Dr. Neuman, The Last of Us Season 1, Episode 1
An interesting entry in the zombie list, video game franchise The Last of Us took inspiration from the real-world cordyceps fungus, whose various species are known for parasitizing the nervous system of certain insects. Terminally infected insects will exhibit “summiting” behavior, abandoning their normal territorial range to ascend the plant life around them. Once the infected insect has climbed to an optimal growing location, the fungus causes them to remain there (in the case of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis and carpenter ants, by clamping their mandibles into their perch and clinging there until death) until the fruiting body of the fungus erupts from the insect’s head and spreads its spores. Grisly, yet compelling.
In the HBO TV adaptation of The Last of Us, the first episode opens with a fictional scientist warning of the dangers of fungal infection, stating that if somehow fungi were able to evolve to survive the human body’s internal temperature of 98.5 degrees Fahrenheit, humanity may be threatened by a new kind of disease. Several decades and some climate change later, his warning comes to fruition. Humanity is rapidly infected by a fungal pandemic they have no tools to combat, and the zombie apocalypse begins.
While cordyceps is admittedly a very creepy fungus, The Last of Us leaps several logical hurdles to make it threatening to humans. First, human infection by cordyceps needs to be possible. Then, the infection would need to be severe enough to cause noticeable changes in behavior, specifically more aggressive methods of transmission (i.e. a ravenous drive to bite other humans). Cordyceps fruiting bodies are also much smaller than those exhibited by the zombies in the video game and the show, with no direct parallels between real-world infected insects and the iconic echolocating ‘Clicker’ zombies (which are blinded by the fruiting body erupting from their eye sockets) or hulking ‘Bloaters’ (which gain incredible mass and durability from the fungi bulking out their body). In comparison to the slavering monsters of The Last of Us, real-life cordyceps infections are practically pacifistic.
What If?
“Nothing’s ever real until it’s real.”
– George A. Romero, director of Night of the Living Dead
The whole purpose of speculative fiction is to ask ‘what if?’ Sometimes the ‘what if’ explores genuinely threatening things in our world, such as prion diseases, the risk of scientific exploration without accountability or oversight, and the eeriness of exotic fungus. Other times, the ‘what if’ simply invites the audience to imagine how they could survive in an apocalypse with nothing but their wits and a couple of friends. Zombie science is patchy, duct-taped together and thrown onto the screen, but the inherent silliness of it can still give us something to think about if we choose to. If we don’t choose to, oh well. There’s still whole worlds of wacky, ridiculous, spooky zombies to enjoy.
Sources
1. Apewokin S, Bonez W, La Hoz RM. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
2. Brian B. Hoffman. Adrenaline. Harvard University Press; 2013. Accessed October 29, 2024. https://search-ebscohost-com.kansascity.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=520788&site=eds-live
3. Fleischer R, Eisenberg J. The Rules of Zombieland Scene | Zombieland (2009) | Now Playing. YouTube. April 2, 2023. Accessed October 31, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKaxamxjXwQ.
4. Fleischer R, Prouty S. Zombieland (2009) Zombieland Cast & Making of Featurette. YouTube. July 13, 2019. Accessed October 28, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoDLoDgxTkQ.
5. Ian Olney. Zombie Cinema. Rutgers University Press; 2017. Accessed November 4, 2024. https://search-ebscohost-com.kansascity.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1455681&site=eds-live
6. Mad Cow Disease. Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia. January 2018:1; Accessed October 31, 2024. https://search-ebscohost-com.kansascity.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=funk&AN=ma009750&site=eds-live
7. Medina Ortiz O, Contreras Galvis D, Sánchez-Mora N, Arango López C. Cannibalism in paranoid schizophrenia: a case report. Actas Españolas de Psiquiatría. 2006;34(2):136-139. https://actaspsiquiatria.es/index.php/actas/article/view/1182. Accessed October 28, 2024.
8. Radiation Effects, Biological. Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia. January 2018:1; Accessed October 31, 2024. https://search-ebscohost-com.kansascity.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=funk&AN=ra003400&site=eds-live
9. Singh G, Tan B, Bergin S. Radiation dermatitis in Adult. Published online October 10, 2019.
10. Ortiz, O. M., Galvis, D. C., Sánchez-Mora, N., & López, C. A. (2006). Cannibalism in paranoid schizophrenia: a case report. Actas Espanolas de Psiquiatria, 34(2), 136-139.
Your libraries are more than just a physical space on campus. They're a portal to virtual information that is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week! Having trouble accessing resources or finding what you need? Contact your library staff! We're here to help!
