As Aristotle walked wondering through his great zoological garden, he became convinced that the infinite variety of life could be arranged in a continuous series in which each link would be almost indistinguishable from the next. In all respects, whether in structure, or mode of life, or reproduction and rearing, or sensation and feeling, there are minute gradations and progressions from the lowest organisms to the highest. At the bottom of the scale we can scarcely divide the living from the “dead”; “nature makes so gradual a transition from the inanimate to the animate kingdom that the boundary lines which separate them are indistinct and doubtful”; and perhaps a degree of life exists even in the inorganic. Again, many species cannot with certainty be called plants or animals. And as in these lower organisms it is almost impossible at times to assign them to their proper genus and species, so similar are they; so in every order of life the continuity of gradations and differences is as remarkable as the diversity of functions and forms. But in the midst of this bewildering richness of structures certain things stand out convincingly: that life has grown steadily in complexity and in power; that intelligence has progressed in correlation with complexity of structure and mobility of form; that there has been an increasing specialization of function, and a continuous centralization of physiological control.
—Will Durant
The Story of Philosophy:
The Lives and Opinions of the World’s Great Philosophers
In the Spring of 1966 Wallach’s mentor, Marlin Perkins, director of the St. Louis Zoo and star of the Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom television show, sent a telegram inviting Wallach to move on from the Operation Rhino project in South Africa and return to the United States and join him in a large NIH sponsored research project.
Perkins, along with Barry Commoner, who was an environmentalist, a former presidential candidate for the Independent Party, and a professor and the head of the Department of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, had gotten a $7.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the world ecology, the environment, and the impact of pollution on the plant, animal, and human populations of the world.
The program was to combine the facilities of Washington University’s biology department, the Shaw’s Botanical Gardens in St. Louis County, and the St. Louis Zoological Gardens into a new university department to be known as The Center for the Biology of Natural Systems.
Wallach pondered the invitation for about a week and initially responded with a polite thank-you but no thank-you response, which was placed on top of the mantel for mailing. A month later he realized that the letter was still there. It hadn’t been mailed!
Wallach reread the letter and then tore it up. Hadn’t he stated that “He would do anything to work with Marlin Perkins?” When he was first hired as a kid to work with the elephant barn in the St. Louis Zoo? Perkins had personally written the invitation, and he was not the sort of man you could turn down, and he promised that we would be working with a larger variety of animal species and humans!
At Perkin’s direction, Wallach was appointed to the project as a post-doctoral fellow in comparative pathology and comparative medicine at The Center for the Biology of Natural Systems. He was given an office in the zoo hospital, a fully-equipped and staffed pathology laboratory, and an autopsy facility with a walk-in cooler and an electric hoist on an overhead track for lifting and moving the larger animals. There were knives, cleavers, axes, saws, and sample bottles filled with formaldehyde waiting to be filled. The laboratory equipped for microbiology, parasitology, blood and tissue chemistry, and preparation of histopathological slides had light microscopes and access to electron microscopes, photography equipment, scales, and x-ray facilities. The facilities and tools were all-too familiar.
Wallach’s liaisons at the zoo were Moody Lentz the General Curator, Robert Frueh, assistant curator of mammals, Charlie Hoessle, assistant curator of reptiles and Mike Flieg, curator of birds. Wallach’s advisor and supervisor for human pathology and autopsies was Dr. Malcom Peterson, a human pathologist at the Barnes Hospital, a teaching hospital at Washington University School of Medicine just down the street from the zoo.
The elements, mechanics, and investigation of animal pathology were the same as the elements, mechanics, and investigation of human pathology. The skull and body cavities are opened up with knives, saws, and bone shears so that the central nervous system and the internal organs could be viewed, weighed, and samples taken for microbiology, parasitology, chemistry, and histopathology examinations.
Extra effort had to be taken to prevent blood, body fluids, or urine from splashing into one’s eyes, nose, or mouth. The human pathologist has to be doubly careful to prevent cutting or sticking himself with an instrument or bone splinter to avoid inoculating himself with a potentially deadly organism.
The human pathologist looks for pneumonia, trauma, ruptured aneurysms, blood clots, perforating gastric ulcers, heart attacks, cancer, and maybe will do a chemical or drug screen if the clinical record suggests the need or litigation might be involved. The human pathologist limits the data in the pathology report to the size and color of the organs, gross findings (trauma, etc.), and a “cause of death.”
The human pathologist never lists the nutritional deficiency that causes birth defects, aneurysms, diabetes, arthritis, blood clots, heart attacks, cancer, Alzheimer’s, or even osteoporosis. As a result of this systematic omission of critical information clinical nutrition has never advanced. Wallach’s responsibilities included changing this huge oversight.
Twenty to thirty postdoctoral fellows were attached to the “Center” at any given time. They were an eclectic “think-tank” of graduate students that included botanists, biologists, environmental engineers, biochemists, computer experts, water experts, geneticists, geologists, anthropologists, astronomers, meteorologists, and Wallach, the comparative pathologist. To solve problems quickly without each specialist redoing another’s research that had already been completed, each team member was obligated to learn the scientific language of the other disciplines represented at the center. Time was too short for delays that might be caused by semantics. After all, there was an environmental crisis in the world and the members of the center were specifically chosen to identify and solve the looming world problems and literally save the earth!
While at the center, Wallach continued his graduate studies at Washington University in the subjects of comparative pathology, subcellular biology, molecular biology, the genome, biochemistry, and pollution. New tools included the electron microscope, and Wallach could now look at cellular structures at magnifications of 126,000 times. He could see chromosomes, the double helix, and internal structures of the mitochondria, including inclusion bodies and the RNA inner membranes!
Wallach was now able to see what had been postulated by the early philosophers, Epicurius, Darwin, Mendel, Pauling, Watson and Crick, and others.
Wallach visited with Dr. Malcom Peterson, pathologist at Barnes Hospital, Washington University two to three times weekly, respectfully gleaning through full human autopsies, worked through the autopsy reports, the preserved tissues, slide sets, and the chemistries from each autopsy performed at Barnes hospital and from autopsy materials sent in from other teaching hospitals.
Dr. Peterson was particularly interested in clinical problems and the pathology reports from nonhuman primates at the zoo, so he was given a call when any clinical procedure or autopsy was carried out on a primate. They had many discussions regarding the identical nature of the anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, and pathology of humans and nonhuman primates. It was agreed that certainly we and they are brothers and sisters!
Wallach was also responsible for performing complete autopsies on all animals that died in the St. Louis Zoo and also on frozen animals and specimens sent in by other participating zoos. These autopsies including gross pathology, histopathology, chemical screens for pollution, nutritional status, hair and tissue analysis, reviewing the clinical records of each human and animal specimen, as well as a complete recording of their diets, supplement program, and their list of over-the-counter and prescribed pharmaceuticals. The goal was to identify pollution and environmental problems and monitor percentages of “genetic” diseases and nutritional deficiencies.
The command was “Find a sensitive animal or several species that could be used as a modern day ‘Canary in the mine.’” Find a species that could act as an early warning system for an impending environmental collapse, much as the legendary Welsh coal miners had used caged canaries to warn them of the presence of mine gasses that could suffocate them or explode.
Wallach did complete autopsies on every snake, fish, alligator, turtle, parrot, duck, pigeon, ostrich, kangaroo, wombat, puma, African lion, zebra, antelope, llama, fox, wolf, pig, monkey, hippo, rhino, ape, seal, and walrus that died in the St. Louis zoo and its sister zoos in North America. Dr. Peterson and Wallach would then compare the causes of death in the zoo animals with similar or identical diseases in the humans who lived and then died in close proximity to the zoo. Initially they were only looking for deaths for which there was some relationship to pollution.
The first revelation that Wallach was confronted with was that the responsibility for the zoo animal’s dietary supplement programs were not controlled by any central authority. No one with any nutritional training was responsible. If an animal or group of animals were a curator’s pet project, they got lots of attention and close scrutiny regarding its nutritional program. Animals that weren’t that exciting or part of a herd or flock might have its diet regime left to the whim and decision of an individual animal keeper who may have had a love for animals but only a 9th grade or high school education and certainly no serious training in animal nutrition.
Some animal keepers concocted homemade vitamin-mineral supplements for their charges by grinding up pills and capsules designed as multivitamins for kids or adult humans. Many zoo keepers applied the advice of their own personal doctor to the animals that were in their charge; they falsely believed that their animals could get all of their required vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and essential fatty acids by simply eating “high quality” food. As a result of this simplistic and sloppy approach zoo animals developed all of the nutritional-deficiency diseases that can plague domestic animals, free ranging wild animals, and humans. The nutritional health of zoo animals was a calamity that had already happened!
Although the stated universal goal of all zoological parks was to protect and propagate endangered species, the high rate of nutritional-deficiency diseases Wallach found in zoos proved there was some major pieces missing in the pursuit of that goal. Wallach saw marmosets, alligators, and shrews that died of type 2 diabetes caused by a simple mineral deficiency (lack of chromium and vanadium). He autopsied dozens of alligators and their cousins. The cayman, a small three foot long cousin to the alligator, had died of a global steatitis (a form of systemic cellulite) that were the result of eating a high-oil (fish) diet where the oils had oxidized, and which when combined with a vitamin E and selenium nutritional deficiency had caused death.
He also autopsied hatchling ostriches and aoudads (wild African sheep) that had died of muscular dystrophy (from a deficiency of vitamin E and selenium), and he recorded many wild sheep, llamas, greater kudus, pheasants, and monkeys that had died of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (a selenium deficiency). He found pheasants, ostriches, gorillas, and squirrel monkeys that had died of ruptured aneurysms (caused by a copper deficiency), and there were lions, wolves, foxes, raccoons, woolly monkeys, alligators, iguanas, parrots who had reared baby animals of all kinds that had died of the manifestations and complications of osteoporosis such as fractures, kidney stones and cystic calculi, and nutritional secondary hyperparathyroidism (from a calcium and magnesium deficiency).
There was severe calcified arteriosclerosis in the coronary arteries and aortas of vegetarian species, such as pheasants, parrots, kangaroos, aoudads, antelopes, and primates (from consumption of oxidized oils in stored grains in combination with a magnesium deficiency and a shortage of antioxidants). Also osteoarthritis was a universal disease found in all species, including iguanas, ducks, flamingos, pheasants, sheep, llamas, monkeys, rhinos, and kangaroos (caused by calcium, magnesium, sulfur, and trace-mineral deficiencies).
Wallach saw a constant stream of congenital birth defects that could be directly attributed to nutritional deficiencies in the mother prior to and during her pregnancy: cerebral palsy in a llama (from a copper and zinc deficiency); spina bifida in a monkey (from a folic acid and/or zinc deficiency); cleft palates in arctic foxes (from a vitamin A and or a zinc deficiency); a ventricular septal heart defect in a kangaroo (from a congenital vitamin A and or a zinc deficiency).
Diets were re-evaluated. Vitamins, minerals, and trace minerals were calculated and adjusted for body weight to prevent disease and promote fertility and normal full-term pregnancies with perfect young. Sometimes Wallach could use existing commercial animal feeds, a concept that initially horrified just about every member of the zoo’s senior staff, who would think, “These are exotic animals. How could commercial diets for domesticated animals apply to them?” As a base to start with there were rabbit pellets for kangaroos and wombats; dog food for bears, foxes and wolves; laboratory monkey biscuits for marmosets, monkeys, baboons, and apes; turkey pellets for pheasants; duck pellets for ducks, swans, and geese; turkey pellets and horse pellets for ostriches, rhea and emu; horse pellets for zebras, hippos, rhinos, and elephants; and sheep and cattle pellets for antelopes, llamas, bison, and wild sheep and goats.
More complicated diets were put together from dog food designed for toy dogs. Cat food and laboratory mouse pellets were put together for shrews, marmosets, and iguanas. Large reptiles including snakes, alligators, and tortoises had whole rats or fish stuffed with cat food and multivitamins according to body weight.
There were two pet projects that Perkins wanted to get started immediately when Wallach arrived. The first was a tissue bank of frozen and preserved tissues and organs of rare and endangered species that could provide invaluable irreplaceable material to investigators who were studying the anatomy, anthropology, biochemistry, genetics, and pathology of certain rare species. The second was to figure out the cause of liver cancer in bears housed in zoos throughout the world.
Wallach consulted with other zoos, universities, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health as a member of the NIH site visit committee that approved or disapproved funding for research being done with exotic species as the animal model.
Wallach was the founder of the Journal of Zoo Animal Medicine as a natural progression of his research, so that other zoos would quickly benefit from newly acquired information. He remained the journal’s Editor-in-Chief for three years until he passed on the responsibility to the other zoo veterinarians that had more time, because his responsibilities with The Center for the Biology of Natural Systems were growing. All involved believed that time was short.
Wallach was now living on airplanes, traveling as a featured speaker at medical, veterinary, and university centers and zoos, as well as at nutritional seminars. Along the way he worked for and consulted with the world’s foremost zoos, including zoos and aquariums in the Bronx, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Jacksonville, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Madison, Memphis, Miami, Milwaukee, St. Louis, San Diego, Topeka, Tucson, Washington, DC, and overseas. His responsibilities reached to London, Frankfort, Tel Aviv, New Deli, and Zurich, to name a few.
Bear Liver Cancer Mystery
Perkins’s project about prevalent liver cancer in captive bears was the first proactive study that Wallach immersed himself in. Why did free-ranging wild bears live to be forty-five years of age with a nearly zero rate of cancer, and in contrast to them almost 100% of all captive zoo bears, worldwide, died of liver cancer by the time they were thirty years old? Liver cancer in captive bears was not a unique problem of American zoos. This liver cancer issue was a global problem of all zoos from all industrialized nations throughout the world!
Wallach remembered that in 1958 just about every turkey raised in America for the annual Thanksgiving celebration died of liver cancer. It was a bad year for soy beans, so feed manufacturers imported peanut meal from Nigeria by the boat load to provide some of the protein needed to meet the grower’s specifications for their turkey rearing feed. It turned out that the peanut meal was contaminated by an overgrowth of Aspergillus spp. fungi.
Aspergillus is a common bread mold. However, under certain circumstances it produces an exotoxin called aflatoxin, which in large doses causes a sudden death from liver necrosis (liver death). In low doses the aflatoxin produces a very specific type of liver cancer—the same type of liver cancer that plagued the captive bear populations in the world’s zoos! Where were the captive zoo bears getting the aflatoxin?
Wallach made phone calls and sent letters asking what were these animals fed, what they were supplemented with, where the zoos were located in relationship to industrial and nuclear power facilities, and what the liver cancer rate was in the human population who lived in close proximity to the zoos.
It turns out that each year the directors and curators of all of the major zoos of the world come together for an annual meeting to share information. Small species of bears weigh 300 to 500 pounds; large species of bears can weigh well over 1,000 pounds, and that is a lot of animal to feed. So zoos learned from each other that a bear, being an omnivorous species, could be provided a lot of calories by feeding them moldy bread from bakery thrift stores. One slice of bread provided 110 calories, a loaf of bread might contain 1,500 calories or more, and a loaf of moldy bread cost only five cents! So around the world the message went out—that a zoo could maintain large bears without having to break their budget by feeding moldy bread and a few frozen fish!
While waiting for return letters from the other zoos, Wallach went to the zoo keepers in St. Louis that cared for the bear moats and inquired about their feeding program. As expected. it was “old bread” and some fish—the universal recipe! Wallach ran back to the zoo hospital and grabbed the “black light,” a UV light that would cause ring worm skin infestations and other fungi and molds to fluoresce.
Wallach ran back to the bear grotto and asked the bear keeper to show him where the “old bread” was stored, and he turned out the lights and flashed the black light on the bread through the cellophane wrapper. The loaf of bread fluoresced like a disco! The cause of the bears’ liver cancer was the aflatoxin in the moldy bread!
The next day, within two weeks of arriving at The Center for the Biology of Natural Systems in St. Louis, Wallach had solved the twenty-year mystery of bear liver cancers in zoos all over the world! He switched the bears’ diets from moldy bread to dry dog food, and the problem ended almost overnight. Letters were sent and calls were made to the major zoos of the world. It was done! The liver cancer plague of zoo bears had been conquered—the first of many victories to be credited to the center!
After spending twelve-plus years performing complete autopsies on 17,500 animals of over 454 species, and 3,000 human autopsies for a comparison, the bottom line learned was that “every animal and every human who dies of ‘natural causes’ dies of a nutritional-deficiency disease!”
The autopsy results for man and beast were so obvious and so profound that they screamed out the answer to the question “Is pollution a major factor in human disease?”—which was that the current level of background environmental pollution was not our immediate concern. Apparently our bodies had a capacity to fend off or work around low levels of pollution.
Therefore our immediate concerns were nutritional deficiencies and the self-destruction inflicted by eating too many fried and overcooked (burnt) foods by the overuse of dietary oils, including margarines, salad dressings, cooking oils, as well as the consumption of canned fish packed in oils and processed meats preserved with nitrates and nitrites—all of which increased the daily load of dietary trans fatty acids, heterocyclic amines, and acrylamides!
Certainly when major industrial accidents, catastrophic spills, train and highway accidents, and acts of terrorism occur, the pollution surge that follows can present a significant negative impact on the humans and animals in the immediate locality, but not on the continent and not on the world.
Why Are the Earth’s Oceans Dying?
One of the concerns we at the Center were supposed to investigate was: “Why were the oceans dying and why were the populations of plankton, fish, and other sea creatures diminishing? Was pollution a factor?”
We started out with “Where does the ocean get its food?” The answer was very quickly provided. Wallach, having become an expert in the areas of agricultural nutrition and, in particular, mineral nutrition, immediately came up with the theory that somehow the ocean’s source of dietary minerals (silt) had been reduced, and simultaneously he came up with the theory. He shouted, “The oceans are dying because we have dammed up all of the major rivers. We have systematically cut off the oceans food supply by putting a ligature on the flow of silt (minerals) into the oceans!”
Prior to man’s systematic damming of the rivers of the earth, it is estimated that some twenty-seven billion tons of mineral-rich river sediments (silt) poured into the oceans annually. Today, this historically massive food supply has been reduce to a mere trickle by human intervention.
A second food supply for the oceans of the world comes from volcanic eruptions and dust storms. Each year a cubic mile of minerals and rock dust are blown into the air; however, this source is variable depending on each year’s rainfall. Rainy years produce less dust and conversely drought produces more dust.
The question, “Why are the oceans dying?” was asked and answered. However, most of the world (including the biologist at the center) was hell-bent on solving a problem that didn’t exist. Everyone “believed that pollution was the problem.” The human biomass is puny compared with the oceans volume and collective biomass because oceans, like humans, have the capacity to neutralize even what we would consider significant pollution.
The basic functions of life itself cannot be performed without the presence of optimal amounts of minerals, either as a major part of a functional recipe, a structural building block, and/or a catalytic cofactor necessary to facilitate a chemical or enzymatic reaction. No biological process is exempt. This fact holds true for RNA, DNA, chromosomes, subcellular and digestive enzymes, biochemical reactions, vitamin function, hormone functions, energy use, and even our ability to utilize oxygen: nothing in a living system will work without mineral cofactors.
We determined that minerals and mineral supplements to our meals were just as necessary to humans as they were for pet animals, laboratory animals, farm animals, free-ranging wild animals, and captive zoo species. These supplement programs are a necessity for a long and healthful, disease-free life for we could not get these nutrients from food no matter how well one ate, no matter how spiritually elevated one was. The fact is that man needs to supplement with all of the 90 essential nutrients and, in particular, the 60 essential minerals!
Since before recorded history, man craved and consciously consumed minerals from various sources, including the major minerals, trace minerals, and rare earths that also come from various sources: clay, salt, and animal tissues (such as bones, cartilage, liver, and skin), colloidal mineral rice plant material, and wood ashes (containing plant minerals). Simply said, minerals are the currency of life, and the medical system ignores this truth to the point of absurdity.
The Center for the Biology of Natural Systems encouraged publication of findings that had resulted from our studies and research. Wallach alone published seventy-five peer-reviewed and refereed journal articles and contributed more than fifteen chapters in eight multi-author textbooks that were the direct results of his comparative pathology and nutritional research.
Wallach was also a member of the ad hoc committee of the National Science Foundation that authored the Animal Welfare Act of 1968. The act, which was quickly voted on passed by the U.S. Congress, required that a laboratory animal veterinarian be in charge of the laboratory facility and implementing the law to ensure proper care of the animals and the integrity of the experiment. It also outlined the specific nutritional and housing requirements for laboratory animals and captive zoo animals. The medical system which had ignored the basic precepts of animal research was now aware of Wallach.
Animal laboratories in medical environments were notoriously abused by the medical doctors who were the lead investigators. The animals might not be fed or watered for days or weeks at a time, which resulted in under-dosing problems when investigating pharmaceuticals and nutrients, and in worst cases the animals cannibalized each other while the doctors “created” data to support their theories and the goals of the study.
As a direct result of Wallach’s nutritional work at the center, many species of rare animals including the Giant Panda that had not successfully reproduced in captivity, were now becoming a glut on the market, and healthy zoo animal babies of every species were appearing everywhere! A second advantage of this turn of events was that the pressure to capture wild animals every year to replace those zoo animals that had died every year in captivity ended! The market that had for hundreds of years (and in some cases thousands of years) encouraged illegal hunters and poachers to catch and sell rare animals to zoos, wild animal parks, and traveling animal shows dried up which the indirectly contributed to the survival of many marginal animal populations!
Another direct result of Wallach’s comparative pathology and nutritional research was that several of the leading animal-feed companies, including Ralston Purina and Hill’s Packing Company, created special commercial canned and dry diets and feeds for zoo animals and captive wild species. The immediate payoff was that the fertility of captive zoo animals was more consistent, from the smallest of municipal zoos to the largest and more sophisticated zoological parks. Birth defects were eliminated, and endangered species lived longer and healthier without the development of degenerative diseases.