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Underground > Laboratory >

Zombie biology: how ghouls work.

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12:17 / 22.08.05

The Serpent and the Rainbow was about a doctor's attempt to find a general anaesthetic that was more survivable than available ones.

I forget what was in it, but he concluded that zombification only worked within the matrix of community and belief in Voudoun. The live burial and exhumation was meant to deliver a psychic shock to imprint the victim as a zombie.

Real zombies are very much alive and can recover, though probably with some psychological damage.

If you start from that and add some weird disease like porphyry, you can get something like a movie zombie, except for the part about surviving loss of major body parts.

nyarlathotep's shoe horn

15:28 / 23.08.05

Wade Davis was the ethnobotanist who was hired to investigate the plants/toxins used in the zombie ritual in the serpent and the rainbow.

He started out thinking that a derivative of the datura plant was used (and in some cases, it was, but it was more incidental to the process than the blowfish toxin).

I think that in the case of the dead remaining animate (or regainining their animation) can be anything from opportunistic consciousness taking over to feed an undying desire to consume to the death-rattle to projections of loss and redemption and horror.

Brains, one's thoughts, identities, fears, loves are destroyed, leaving but two things: a shell, and desire.

with the Haitian zombiefication, the effect is the same. As a zombie, one is cursed with being a shell of a person (out of fear, acceptance, and sociatal excommunication), with an eternal hunger - to be accepted.

however, the only acceptance is at the hands of the dead.

so, what's the science then?

ta
tenix

Henningjohnathan

17:43 / 23.08.05

Whatever the reason for the reanimation, I think for the zombies to be "living" dead, then we'd have to look at the process on a cellular level. The basic difference between life and death is that the chemical processes cease to the cellular level. Even though there are certain chemical processes and dehydration that cause the body to break down, most of the serious decay that follows death is due to living organisms (bacteria and maggots, for example) breaking down and devouring the cells thus causing what we recognize as rot.

A body's muscular system can still be activated by electrical signals after death. Could a virus or bacteria, once it is inside a corpse, realistically reactivate the nervous system so that it would still send extremely degraded signals to account for the zombies behavior after death? Basically, the energy powering the corpse would come from the living processes of the organisms that are slowly devouring it cell by cell. Also, these mutant organisms or viruses could fight off the usual agents of decay and thus the corpse rots more slowly since it is protected by a symbiotic antibody of a kind.

nyarlathotep's shoe horn

14:22 / 24.08.05

realistically,

if a living organism is likely to reanimate a human corpse by taking control of its nervous system, it's most likely to be a fungus, the chief agent of rot.

there are also vast networks of emergent interconnectivity between fungus and plants... if fungi should endeavour to run their tendrils up our neurons to the central nervous system, maybe they could take our corpses along for a stroll.

I'm sure stranger things have happened as a result of fungus.

ta ta
tenix

Bard: One-Man Humaton Hoedown

17:36 / 24.08.05

Don't some forms of cancer also develop their own circulatory systems?

nyarlathotep's shoe horn

18:39 / 24.08.05

really?

what about mitochondria with their own DNA?
our bodies have been invaded before!

ta
tenix

A beautiful tunnel of ghosts

13:55 / 25.08.05

Collagen, which is found in animals but not in plants, has been found in mushrooms, which may support the idea of a fungal organism infecting the human body.

However, if zombies are decomposing, why don't carrion-eaters, especially flies, prey on them?

14:35 / 25.08.05

It would be quite tough for a virus to exist as an active agent within a dead body unless it was a pathogen of the various microorganisms breaking down the body. Viruses need living cell machinery to replicate.

It's unlikely that a virus would be the agent of zombifaction, a fungal agent sounds more likely.

Theoretically a virus that was able to cross the blood/brain barrier and start replicating in certain parts of the brain could damage it in such a way as to destroy the ability for all rational thought with the exception of the primal urges. Perhaps this kind of damage would cause the infected individual to ignore any pain. Infected wounds would fester and rot, giving the impression of a walking cadaver.

Headshots would kill such a zombie. As would heartshots as it would still be a living creature. Truely Living Dead.

This class wouldn't survive very long. I prefer walking dead myself.

So anyone got any thoughts on how radiation could do it?

20:20 / 25.08.05

1. When fungus invades healthy bodies, it's called things like "athlete's foot" and "ringworm." There are plenty of fungal diseases already out there. Like lethal Aspergillus infections.

2. Who says flies don't snack on zombies? I always thought they did. Maybe you notice it less because the zombies keep moving. Harder to lay eggs. I'm sure I've seen zombies wandering around with maggots in 'em, though.

3. I don't think radiation could do anything -- unless... hmm. Maybe trigger a specific set of mutations? I can't conceive of a recessive gene responsible for zombification, but I don't think we'd be talking *breeding* -- just a specific kind of mutation. Maybe one that causes hypernetworking of neural cells (along with an associated necrosis of muscle & skin -- maybe consumed by nerves for fuel?).

Bard: One-Man Humaton Hoedown

22:42 / 25.08.05

Perhaps radiation damages certain functions of the brain and induces necrosis in the flesh, resulting in an animalistic, rotting creature that feels no pain and knows only hunger? Doesn't account for why just humans, but it certainly does go a ways towards suggesting rutting hungry creatures from radioactive sludge pits.

...well, or not, really.

13:14 / 26.08.05

mutation in mitochondrial DNA, that is -- such that the little critters replicate all wonky, replacing "living" tissue with mutant cells....

Henningjohnathan

20:27 / 26.08.05

I think a bacteria will fungal properties (perhaps some sort of symbiosis caused by radioactive mutation

) could create a kind of colonization of the nervous system and reignite low level or degraded motor function. That is sorta how Matheson explained his vampire zombies in I AM LEGEND.

Also, as far as being devoured by insects or infected by other bacteria, what if the infecting agent is radioactive and thus kills anything else that tries to get into the zombie OR the "fungi from Venus" acts as a kind of necrotic immune system preventing any other disease or organism from devouring its corpse host?

17:54 / 29.08.05

Has anyone ever heard of a Indigenous disease called "Kuru" the Cannibals of old were apt to it when they consumned fresh brains and also when they snorted dried ground up powder of the brain tissue.

In keeping in line with the old maxim of you take everything and also snort the person's brains to hi-jack their "soul" - cannibal rites display an irony of spiritism and shamanism.

Also cannibalism did display an honoured social darwinist praxis that it pruned the garden of over population. Much like the theories that some men and women went "gay" so as not to procreate.

I think so called zombie technology to make interesting anthroplogist data, you know with tetradoxins and intersting old herbs. It's Puffer Fish Guts the most hyperactive ingredient as with thorn apple and god knows what.

The Zombies were said to have shamed their community in some sort of fashion by stealing or having affairs or whatever, well this is according to Wade Davis.

As for a "virus" that takes over its "host" I like that and I will research that. Very Now and Scientific. Of course with drugs and addictive television and consumner goods it can exist that we live as mirrors of the old Zombies films.

Henningjohnathan

14:14 / 30.08.05

Yeah, I think at least in Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD, it's pretty clear that he was making a social comment on the norcotic (and necrotic) effects of an accelerating consumer commercial that is educated more by television commercials than schooling or real life experience.

That is really the interesting thing - unless your a technically proficient guy, for most people the television and the Internet might as well work "by magic." It's a short metaphorical step to make the "radiation" of our electronic media into the source for the zombies in the Romero films.

16:12 / 18.09.05

Read The serpent and the rainbow

Haitian voodoo can create zombies. they arent living dead but use ancient formula with blowfish fugu that paralizes the body and not the mind combined with other elements a walking shell in created. But the Haitian voodoo is very much a protective society looking out for the bastards in society as well as driving off the french slave owners back in the day. Everything is Real Zombies are Real

semioticrobotic

23:45 / 29.10.05

Looks like HowStuffworks has an article on the matter now.

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