The England Black Death Plague

How did so many live through the attack of a disease that had been consistently taking the lives of almost all those infected? It is here that two extraordinary stories from 1665 emerged, stories that affect life today. The first relates to Isaac Newton, the famous scientist who was studying at Cambridge when the Black Death began to reach that city. His mother took him home to northern England for two years and it was during that time of enforced isolation that he did most of the work on his Principia, meaning mathematical principles of natural philosophy, often regarded as one of the greatest scientific works of all time. The second story relates to the survivors of Black Death.

In London, as well as in the village where the tailor received the cloth with fleas, there were accounts of people who survived the Black Death in spite of close contact with family members who had been infected and died. Elizabeth Hancock was one of these. In 1665, she had buried her six children and her husband within a single week but never became ill. The village gravedigger who had close contact with hundreds of dead bodies also survived. Were these people somehow immune to the Black Death? In the last few years, as concern mounted over the possibility of a flu pandemic reaching North America, Dr. Stephen O’Brien of the National Institutes of Health in Washington, DC, decided to investigate the accounts of seventeenth century survival.

He searched for descendants of the village where a number of infected people had clearly survived the disease. This was not easy as a dozen or so generations of families had successively spanned the long period of time. He finally succeeded and took their DNA record. Dr. O’Brien had already been working with HIV patients and had discovered in 1996 that the modified form of a particular gene in these patients, one known as CCR5 and commonly described as Delta 32, prevents HIV from entering human cells and infecting the body. Based on this finding and convinced that the way in which Delta 32 protects the body from infection might apply to other diseases he took DNA samples from the surviving relatives of the lucky ones in 1665.

As he examined them he made two startling discoveries based on both his work with HIV patients and the experiences of the surviving relatives. One copy of the mutation enables people to survive although they get very sick. Two copies, that is to say one gene from each of two parents, ensure that an individual will suffer no infection of any kind. Delta 32 has not been found in parts of Asia or Africa or other areas where bubonic plague or Black Death did not occur so this, for Dr. O’Brien, raised an interesting question: did some natural event create this mutation so that some would survive? It has been said that a destructive bacterium or virus does not want to destroy all of its hosts so that it can continue to infect others later. Was this what happened in the case of Delta 32?