After the first world war, they built a big area for blimps, with also a big hangar, but I am not sure if it happens during the Fascism or earlier.
> But is there any guarantee that Francesco was not also poisoned?
> “Perhaps not,” Ochoa said, “but the genetic evidence presented in our study decreases the margin for speculation.”
> Gisella Caccone, a senior research scientist also at Yale and a study coauthor, agrees. “We can say that they had malaria, we cannot say that they were not poisoned as well,” Caccone said in an email.
I worked for a very small company getting funding by the Medici Fund a while back. First I ever heard of the name.
So much intrigue in the past. Guys like Montaigne were said to have "food tasters" to sample the goods before they ate themselves.
As a career trace analytical chemist, I can tell you for sure, that weird poisonings are so much less likely to occur now, because of the probability of detection. That's a little comforting. The same goes for the food supply. Mechanisms are in place to rapidly detect deliberately placed poisons.
Unfortunately, this + the unification of Italy may have irredeemably foiled our plan.
Not sure what to do now, should I find a wife with a better claim?
(sorry guys channeling my ken m)
"solves" is a silly thing to ask for in matters of probability. I think this test result adds data which shifts probabilities, and that's the best we'll get.
Just now learning Grigori Rasputin died of malaria.
Maybe? If testing of their remains had revealed (say) LD95 of arsenic, or some other poison well-known at the time, it'd be pretty reasonable to call that "solved". (At least as to their cause of death. It wouldn't establish the perpetrator.)
Reality as experienced in the moment is often binary (I am walking vs sitting) but is often murkily probabilistic (am I am tired because I am jet-lagged, or because I flew to give a high stakes presentation?).
History is also a mix, but facts become murkier the older they are.
So sure, LD95 sounds pretty much like we would have solved it. But if enough people wanted them dead, it’s not impossible that a lethal dose could coincide with some other cause of death. That could be my defense if I were on trial for it.
As I understand it, some malaria parasites can remain dormant in the body for a long time. Clinical symptoms develop once the parasite burden and immune response become sufficient to cause illness.
Not sure if the couple had made trips to Tuscany before the last one, but it is interesting they found two species of malaria pathogens.
I thought that was also an interesting angle to consider.
The pragmatic answer is "if only it was that easy" -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria#Immune_system_evasion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_malaria_deaths_201...
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Sure, but as soon as you add wild-collected fungi [1] or greens [1] to the food mix... it gets easy enough to slip in the bad doppelgangers into a meal.
That's also why I never deal with collecting any food in the wild, I don't trust myself (and certainly I don't trust any of the vibecoded AI apps!) to reliably tell the difference between "this is edible", "this probably will give you a few days of diarrhea" and "even touch that thing and you'll die a horrible painful death".
[1] https://niedersachsen.nabu.de/tiere-und-pflanzen/pilze/23048...
[2] https://www.wwf.de/aktiv-werden/tipps-fuer-den-alltag/famili...
Just imagine the titles you could use.
Naah. You start an AI company!
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I choked on my latte
proving the strains of malaria was interesting
proving whether they died from arsenic or malaria isn’t, unless its of consequence half a millenia later
There could be a consequential angle I’m not aware of
But yes, if they had malaria, does it make it their cause of death? Who knows?
Dude, they were the royal family of Tuscany. They lived there. Which is why this test is not conclusive: sure, they had malaria, but at the time it was pretty common in the region and they likely had it for a long time.
From TFA:
> “Francesco and Giovanni, a young member of the family, both traveled 25 years apart to areas of Tuscany which were known for malaria,” Giuffra said.
“The court physicians tried to discourage some members of the Medici family from doing these trips, especially in autumn, which was a season particularly favorable for malaria...”
If what you say is accurate (that malaria can remain dormant) then I agree that I don't see how DNA is proof of how they died. Certainly, regardless of how they died the malaria didn't help, and a double infection is likely even worse, but yeah if you have it chronically then DNA alone is insufficient.
