What was the real Dracula like? Four 'chemical historians' look for the answer in proteins

In his 1897 novel about the most famous vampire in history, Bram Stoker mentions blood or the color red more than 200 times, sometimes when talking about Dracula's eyes.

"The last thing I saw was the count blowing me a kiss, with a red glint of triumph in his eyes and a smile that would have made Judas in hell proud."

One of the protagonists, Jonathan Harker, declaimed like this, for example, before being left alone in the castle in the Carpathians with the "sisters", three vampires who anticipated "kisses for all" because Harker ―who fled out of loyalty to his fiancée Mina— was “young and strong”.

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Did Vlad Dracula, the cruel 15th-century European prince who inspired the book, have hemolacria (blood in his tears)?

Or was it just a literary device by Stoker to allude to sexual desire and Eros and Thanatos in conservative Victorian England (and which ended up forcing the most iconic Dracula in cinema, Christopher Lee, to act with red contact lenses that he hated)? ?

Two Israeli businessmen in the field of biotechnology and an Italian biochemist are currently seeking the answer, and many others, in the proteins that Vlad Dracula left behind half a millennium ago by signing three letters.

The word

can be seen on the signature of one of the documents, kept by the National Archives of Romania, and on the red wax seal of another.

He was one of the pseudonyms (after his father, Vlad Dracul) of Vlad III, also known as The Impaler (Tepes in Romanian) because of his fondness for killing Transylvanian Saxons and Ottomans in this way.

Born in Transylvania in 1431, he ruled with an iron fist and shifting alliances with Wallachia, a now-defunct principality in present-day Romania.

Letter signed by Vlad Dracula, one of the documents analyzed. Gleb Zilberstein

In one of the letters, dated 1475, shortly before dying on the battlefield, he introduced himself as "prince of the transalpine regions" when he informed the bourgeois of the Transylvanian city of Sibiu that he would settle there.

Stories of his brutality in command of neighboring Wallachia were already circulating by then, including one about how the terrified Ottomans discovered a “forest of impalements”.

In Romania he is considered a national hero who defended the land from him in a hard time when few ruled with contemplation.

Three years ago, the Israelis Gleb and Svetlana Zilberstein, both 53 years old, and the Italians Pier Giorgio Righetti, 81, and Vincenzo Cunsolo, 60, obtained permission to analyze the documents with a system that collects ―without damaging them― the proteins present by contact with any part of the body, sweat, saliva or tears.

Under the right conditions, they can stay there for up to millions of years.

"It does not require tearing out a part of the object and proteins are more stable than DNA, which deteriorates more over time," explains Gleb Zilberstein in a cafeteria in Tel Aviv, in Israel, where he and Svetlana immigrated 26 years ago from their Native Kazakhstan.

He has a master's degree in Physics and she, in Economics, but they are not traditional academics nor do they have a university teaching position.

They are rather, as Gleb admits,

“typical Israeli high-tech entrepreneurs.”

Righetti is, on the other hand, emeritus professor of Chemistry at the Polytechnic University of Milan, while Cunsolo teaches Organic Chemistry at Catania.

Svetlana and Gleb Zilberstein, last week in Tel Aviv.antonio whistles

The system consists of ionized plastics on the surface that are deposited on the object.

proteins, other biomolecules and metals capable of shedding light on diseases, medication, food and even the environment in which Dracula lived.

“We work in two directions.

On the one hand, biological markers generated in the body of a human being.

On the other, proteins from microbes”, says Gleb.

“Chemical history”, they like to call it.

“We are not detectives, although it can be used in forensic analysis,” says Svetlana.

The process makes it possible to determine if a protein comes from a human, a rat or a mosquito that landed on the document.

Also date it.

That is to say, to distinguish if the human proteins in the part of the letter where Vlad Dracula signed his signature belong to that time or are later.

There is always, yes, a point of attribution, to assume that this biological marker does indeed correspond to Dracula because everything seems to indicate it.

“It helps us that the paper was then made from cotton fibers, it keeps very well,” says Svetlana.

In any case, few hands have touched these documents since the fifteenth century, according to the preliminary results of the tests.

Diseases dictate behavior

The Zilbersteins bite their tongues not to reveal their conclusions about Vlad III.

They refuse to do so until they are confirmed in Italy, although they state that two of the 10 human proteins attributed to Vlad Dracula indicate pathologies.

Among those they have looked for are arteriosclerosis - the hardening of the arteries, which can clog the veins of the retina - or a conjunctivitis so acute that it produces blood in the tears.

“When we have information about specific diseases, we can provide material for historians to speculate about.

Illnesses dictate behaviour”, emphasizes Gleb.

They do not enter the cause of death because it is already known (fighting Ottoman forces) and the body has never been found.

They tend to focus on famous historical or literary figures.

And they are documented before the biological analysis to know what clues to look for and to be able to connect history and chemistry.

This time they decided on Dracula because he "is an ideal character to understand the political games of the time," says Gleb.

“We wanted to understand who he was.

A true dictator or a victim of the political-military situation? ”, He adds.

It is also interesting, he adds, from a medical point of view, because of the multiple legends about his diseases, and to explore the climatic conditions and the bacterial universe prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus in America.

Still from the film 'Dracula, by Bram Stoker', by Francis Ford Coppola (1992). cordon press

The first joint mission of the four scientists was the original manuscript of a key novel of the 20th century:

, to which Mikhail Bulgakov dedicated his last years of life.

The analysis revealed biological indicators that the writer, who had practiced as a doctor, was taking a lot of morphine and painkillers for a kidney disorder called nephrotic syndrome.

In another investigation, they found traces of gold, silver, mercury and lead in a manuscript about the moon by Johannes Kepler, which leads them to believe that the prominent German astronomer and mathematician combined the scientific method with alchemy, still popular in early Europe. XVII century.

“We generate data to destroy paradigms.

We put them on the table and open a debate”, sums up Gleb.

For example, historians already agreed that George Orwell, the author of

and

, died of tuberculosis in 1950. After analyzing a letter he sent to Moscow, they added a conclusion in 2018: that he contracted the disease in the hospital where he was recovering from a shot during the Spanish civil war, where Orwell had gone to fight on the Republican side.

The Russian Anton Chekhov also had tuberculosis, but they believe he died of a stroke, due to a protein found in one of his tests.