Phar Lap science excites
by Michèle Nardelli
What is it about the untimely death of a stunning racehorse in a
far-off land that gets the world buzzing?
In simple terms it has all the elements of a news story – drama, conflict, heroism, mystery and intrigue. So when the legendary horse with the big heart, our Phar Lap (never mind that he was bred in New Zealand), died suddenly in California in 1932, it was huge news in Australia.
Now, 74 years after his death, the gelding with a great gallop has hit the international media again – and big time.
When UniSA’s Dr Ivan Kempson from The Wark™ decided to investigate if a few hairs from Phar Lap might finally reveal how the racing legend died, he knew it would be of interest to his colleagues and researchers and historians at the Melbourne Museum. What he perhaps didn’t expect was that it would be front page news in Australia and New Zealand and that it would also run in the UK, the US, Kenya, France and Germany. In 24 hours almost 100 stories on his research ran on radio, TV and newspapers around the world.
Using the Advanced Photon Source synchrotron in Chicago, Dr Kempson discovered that the distribution of arsenic in Phar Lap’s hair was consistent with ingesting a single large dose of arsenic within 30-40 hours of death. This forensic analysis is possible because hair incorporates products from the blood supply and as it grows – in effect the hair becomes a toxins timeline.
Dr Kempson is set to do more research to check that his initial finding isn’t compromised by the arsenic that was commonly used in the taxidermy process.
"To characterise the arsenic in Phar Lap’s hair, comparisons have already been made from historical museum specimens, which were preserved using arsenic and the hair from a pig that had ingested a fatal dose of arsenic," Dr Kempson says. "Now we want to find horse hair samples from another preserved horse contemporary of Phar Lap."
While Phar Lap’s official cause of death is yet to be determined and Dr Kempson may soon prove that Phar Lap was indeed poisoned, we will probably never know for sure if Big Red died by misadventure or murder.