One of his photos depicts a one-gallon Ziploc bag stuffed with these seeds. When I visited the bus in July, , wild-potato plants were growing everywhere I looked in the surrounding taiga. I filled a one-gallon bag with more than a pound of seeds in less than thirty minutes. By adding potato seeds to the menu, he apparently made the mistake that took him down. After July 30th, his physical condition went to hell, and three weeks later he was dead. Working on a tight deadline, I researched and wrote an eighty-four-hundred-word piece, published in January, Because the wild potato was universally believed to be safe to eat, in this article I speculated that McCandless had mistakenly consumed the seeds of the wild sweet pea, Hedysarum mackenzii —a plant thought to be toxic, and which is hard to distinguish from Hedysarum alpinum.
I attributed his death to this blunder. It seemed more plausible that McCandless had indeed eaten the roots and seeds of the purportedly nontoxic wild potato rather than the wild sweet pea.
Thomas Clausen, a professor in the biochemistry department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, for analysis. Shortly before my book was published, Clausen and one of his graduate students, Edward Treadwell, conducted a preliminary test that indicated the seeds contained an unidentified alkaloid. When Clausen and Treadwell completed their analysis of wild-potato seeds, though, they found no trace of swainsonine or any other alkaloids. No alkaloids. I was perplexed. Clausen was an esteemed organic chemist, and the results of his analysis seemed irrefutable.
His hunch derived from his knowledge of Vapniarca, a little-known Second World War concentration camp in what was then German-occupied Ukraine. In , as a macabre experiment, an officer at Vapniarca started feeding the Jewish inmates bread made from seeds of the grass pea, Lathyrus sativus , a common legume that has been known since the time of Hippocrates to be toxic.
Arthur Kessler, understood what this implied, particularly when within months, hundreds of the young male inmates of the camp began limping, and had begun to use sticks as crutches to propel themselves about. In some cases inmates had been rapidly reduced to crawling on their backsides to make their ways through the compound …. Once the inmates had ingested enough of the culprit plant, it was as if a silent fire had been lit within their bodies.
Numerous cases have been observed of cattle being poisoned after foraging on jack beans Canavalia ensiformis , the seeds of which contain about 2. Although there have been few clinical or epidemiological studies of canavanine-induced illness in humans, there have been anecdotal reports of toxic effects in people who have ingested jack-bean seeds.
Jonathan Southard, Dr. Ying Long, Dr. Andrew Kolbert, Dr. In the conclusion of our paper, we write:. Our results confirmed the presence of L-canavanine an antimetabolite with demonstrated toxicity in mammals as a significant component of H. In the case of Christopher McCandless, there is evidence that H.
Based on this and what is known about the toxic effects of L-canavanine, we make the logical conclusion that under these conditions, it is highly likely that the ingestion of relatively large amounts of this antimetabolite was a contributing factor to his death. The death of Chris McCandless should serve as a caveat to other foragers: Even when some parts of a plant are known to be edible, other parts of the same species may contain dangerous concentrations of toxic compounds.
Additionally, there may be seasonal, as well as ecotypic, variations in the concentrations of L-canavanine between various communities of H. Further studies are needed to determine the range of L-canavanine concentrations among different populations of the plant. Given the known toxic properties of L-canavanine and its established presence in H.
McCandless was passionate about leading an outdoor life. In the months after selling his belongings, he kayaked a section of the Colorado river and hitchhiked his way across the US. It was this passion for travel and the outdoors that enticed Gavin Brennan to pick up the book 'Into the Wild' by Jon Krakauer. Then one day he booked a three-week-long trip to Alaska.
I left my book on Chris's bed in the bus vowing never to return and my journey into the Alaskan wilderness was done. Clay Walker, the Denali borough mayor, wonders whether removing the bus will solve the issue. This is Alaska after all.
These days, the bus is in poor shape: the number on its side has been shot out and the windows are all gone. A brewery in Healy has already installed a duplicate of the bus which was used in the film. Tourists short on time choose to venture there instead of trekking to the original, and the message from locals is getting across to some visitors.
Antonette Spaan decided to visit the bus outside the brewery after talking to locals. Image source, Shutterstock. Image source, Gavin Brennan.
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