How did you locate the zombie poison?
I was living in a stone hut on the beach and going out every night alone to these secret societies. When I went around the country, there was one consistent ingredient in these preparations, and that was these marine fish. I didn’t know any of these fish from Adam, but I brought back all of the ingredients and the ichthyologist at Harvard identified them: puffer fish. He turned me on to this biomedical literature, and my God, I found case after case in which people had been nailed in their coffins by mistake. There was absolutely no doubt scientifically that these fish I had found in Haiti had, at least at certain times of the year, a drug in them, tetrodotoxin [TTX], that could make people appear dead. Haiti whacked me in the face like a sledgehammer. I remember that fantastic sense of how surreal Haiti was, a place of such poverty, where people adorn their lives with their imaginations. I didn’t know it, but I had malaria and hepatitis at the same time. I felt like that line from the Bob Dylan song, “Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?” Eventually a friend had to just pluck me out of Haiti and put me on her farm to write my book.
Why did you write a book before finishing your graduate thesis?
I walked in off the street in London and got a book advance. I used the book advance to pay for the research. Then I sold the rights to Hollywood—I wouldn’t say naively, because I’d do it again today. I mean, name me a graduate student you know who would turn down a quarter-million dollars for the rights to their Ph.D. thesis—let’s see them line up. It was a terrible movie. I risked a lot academically, intellectually, and personally to tell this story with honor and integrity, but it brought down all of this wrath.
People made some serious accusations against you at the time. What happened?
Haiti whacked me in the face like a sledgehammer. Eventually a friend had to pluck me out of Haiti and put me on her farm to write my book.
I went to the world’s expert on TTX, a man called Kao at Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York. At first he was absolutely thrilled. This was gonna put him on the map. I brought the BBC and I brought 20/20 to him. All he wanted to talk about was his research, but all they wanted was a sound bite saying TTX could make you appear dead. At the end of one of these sessions, he looked up at me and said, “Why zombies?” What he meant was, why had he worked in this bloody lab all his life with no one paying attention while I, a young graduate student, was in Time magazine? Right after that, two samples go away for analysis. One comes back zero TTX. The other comes back trace amounts.
The minute those samples came back, Kao called me up and said: “You’re all wrong. Get another thesis topic. This is nonsense.”
And I said, “Dr. Kao, I told you that 50 percent of the time these fish are nontoxic. It varies tremendously, and it’s highly significant that either sample showed any at all, because it means that tetrodotoxin was found. You also have to understand that the Haitian belief system allows a sorcerer an out, a way to rationalize failures and emphasize successes: If I go down to the beach and give you a poison and absolutely nothing happens, I can say that my attempt to capture your soul was interrupted by a priest who protected you. I explained all that to this guy, but he began writing hundreds of letters all around the country, unsolicited, saying, “I’m here to alert you to a serious case of fraud in science.”
With all the uproar, I’m amazed you ever got your Ph.D.
When I wrote my thesis, Irvin DeVore, the greatest biological anthropologist in the history of the university, said it was the best Ph.D. he had ever read in his career at Harvard. But another professor involved in approval was overheard at a party after I was in Time magazine saying that no matter what happened, I would not get my degree.
And sure enough, when the time came around for the faculty to rubber-stamp the approval of the committee, that professor did not put the vote as an agenda item on this faculty board meeting. And in the meeting he suddenly stood up and started railing against my thesis, apparently. Fortunately one of my committee members was there, this wonderfully kind botanist. So after this great tirade, Rolla Tryon just taps—in a classic sort of Harvard moment—taps his pipe on his glass of water and says, “Excuse me, but have you read the thesis?” And he had to admit that he had never seen it.
After all that, you abandoned the study of zombies. Why?
I was driving around Boston with this very close friend of mine, a professor of sociology. He looked at me—he had known me for years, and he just looked at me and said, “You know, Wade, do you want to be a zombiologist?” And it was like zazen from a Buddhist monk, because what he was really saying was: Here you are. You’re in this whirlwind. Doonesbury was doing a three-week parody of the book. Miami Vice was doing episodes. I was on the Today show. It was completely surreal, right? And Charlie was saying to me, “Do you want to spend the rest of your fucking life defending this theory, running around Haiti trying to find more zombies?” And of course I instantly laughed and said no. And at that instant, I turned my back on the entire story. I never went back to Haiti, not out of any kind of bitterness or regret. I didn’t want to be a zombie expert. Instead, I disappeared into the forests of Borneo.
Haiti, the Amazon, Borneo…How do you manage to fit in no matter where you are?
You’re with a bunch of yak herders at night in Tibet, and you’ve got a choice: You can hang out with the other scientists and listen to their stories of Chicago or their problems with their wives, or you can just wrap yourself up in a blanket and go down and hang in the body pile with the yak herders and drink rakshi and eat tsampa and fart. I have a good intuition for finding that kind of opening into culture that allows you to be welcomed.
