■lO-Lancastar Farariag, Satarday, March 30,1985
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Pollen: the breath of life
WASHINGTON - To the IS
million Americans who suffer
through the seasonal agonies of
hay fever, pollen is unquestionably
something to be sneezed at.
But the tiny grains that torment
one out of 14 citizens, who in 1975
spent $2 million on hospital care,
$224 million in doctors’ bills, and
|297 million on drugs, are a
blessing, not a bane, to most
people.
“Pollen is to plants what sperm
is to animals: the agent of
viability,” writes Cathy Newman
in the October National
Geographic. “It is the breath of life
as well as of sneezes.”
Allergic or not, there’s almost no
way for you to escape it. Various
hay-fever cures are being studied
but none has yet been found.
NOPLACE
TO HIDE
And hiding places have all but
disappeared. Even Arizona, once a
haven for the afflicted, has lost
that advantage, largely because of
the introduction of non-native
plants that have sent the pollen
count soaring about tenfold in two
decades.
“If you don’t mind penguins, you
can always go to Antarctica,”
suggests Dr. Max Sam ter, senior
allergy and immunology con
sultant at Grant Hospital in
Chicago.
Newman’s reporting on pollen
took her far beyond the wheezes
and sneezes of hay-fever sufferers:
to a murder in Vienna, to a Navajo
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medicine man’s hogan m Arizona,
to a Paris laboratory, to a Texas oil
field, to an athletic field in Finland.
In Vienna, the only clue in a 1959
murder was a pair of leather boots
belonging to the suspect. Less than
a gram of dirt clung to the
carefully cleaned boots. A pollen
expert-called a palynologist
found 1,200 grains of pollen in the
dirt.
The pollen pinpointed the
location of the murder and con
tradicted the suspect’s story.
Confronted with the evidence, he
confessed and led officers to the
buried body.
In the Navajo hogan, Fred
Stevens Jr., a medicine man in
Chinle, Ariz., told Newman: “Com
pollen is a true thing. It is our life.
When a child is bom, we feed it
pollen, and it is in his spirit the rest
of his life. At weddings it blesses
the young couple. And when a man
is dying, pollen is put on him too.”
Pueblo and Apache Indian tribes
of the Southwest use the sacred
substance in various ceremonies,
from puberty rites to special
dances to healing rituals. The
Navajo owner of a new pickup
truck, Newman was told, even
sprinkled pollen on the tires to
bless it.
GRIEVING CAVEMEN
In Paris, palynologists examined
grains of pollen, which survives
the ages, from a 50,000-year-old
grave site of a Neanderthal man in
Shanidar Cave, Iraq. The scien
tists concluded that neither
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animals nor wind could have
carried the pollen so far back in the
cave, but that mourners had left
flowers.
“The tiniest of clues had
revealed a new dimension of cave
dwelling Neanderthal man,"
Newman writes. “He grieved.”
In the Texas oilfields, the in-
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dustry uses palynology to help
determine where and how deep to
drill. Fossil pollens serve as a
geological dipstick for prospective
exploration.
“It’s detective work on the
grandest scale,” says Lew Stover,
a senior research associate in
Exxon’s Houston offices. “People
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regard oil exploration as static.
It’s not. Think of mountains
uplifting, seas drying up, plants
evolving. What could be more
grand?”
On the Finnish track, Seppo
Nuuttila extols the value of pollen
supplements for the Olympic
(Turn to Page B 13)
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