Harvard Find Explains Duke's `Death'

Duke is dead. Or so you Doonesbury fans thought until Monday, when cartoonist Garry Trudeau revealed that his character Duke was still alive, having become a comotose zombie after receiving a massage from a woman that worked for a Haitian voodoo center.

Unsatisfied with Trudeau's explanation? Think his solution was a tad too implausible? Well, take heart, Donnesbury fans, for Trudeau based Duke's bizarre transformation on a Harvard graduate student's recent scientific discovery.

Wade Davis, a 28-year-old Canadian pursuing a Ph.D. in Harvard's Biology Department, discovered a rare Haitian drug that can actually turn people into zombies by lowering their metabolic rates to make them appear dead.

The zombie drug, resembling dry black dirt, contains toads, sea worms, lizards, tarantulas, and human bones. When rubbed on someone's skin, (as the Haitian masseuse did to Duke), the victim becomes nauseous and begins to have breathing difficulties in a number of hours. Following a pins and needles sensation, the victim becomes paralyzed, his lips turning blue from lack of oxygen. Soon, his metabolism is so low that his condition is indistinguishable from death.

Trudeau read of Davis' finding in the current issue of The Harvard Magazine, according to lee Salem, Trudeau's editor at United Press Syndicate, which distributes Doonesbury.

After a number of disturbing claims by Haitians claiming to be zombies, the Centre de Psychiatrie et Neurologie in Port au Prince, Haiti had requested help from ethnobiologists in the United States.

The search for an investigator finally ended at the Harvard Botanical Museum, one of the world's foremost institutes of ethnobiology. The director of the museum, Emeritus Professor Richard E. Shultes, recommended Davis for the mission.

Most outsiders had dismissed the zombie phenomenon as folklore, but several investigators had studied the problem, unsuccessfully searching for a drug that could induce a zombie state.

Davis discovered that the active ingredient in the "zombie potion" was a species of puffer, or blowfish. Many of these fish contain a tetrodotoxin, one of the most powerful non-protein poisons known to man.

The puffer fish is a delicacy in Japan, where it is known as fugu. Licensed chefs remove enough poison to make the fish nonlethal, yet leave enough to give a spine-tingling sensation, prickling of the tongue and lips, and a feeling of euphoria.

So, satisfied with Duke's miraculous recovery? You should be, because, when the chips were down, Trudeau, a Yalie, knew where to turn.