The mystery of blue-skinned people has been a topic of debate among scientists for nearly half a century.
The mystery of the blue-skinned people
In the early 1820s, Martin Fugate from France married an American woman named Elizabeth Smith. Their lives were completely normal until one day, Elizabeth gave birth to a baby with blue skin, which surprised many people in the village.
Subsequent generations continued to maintain the strange blue skin. Until the sixth generation, Ben Stacy, the story of the blue-skinned family began to spread.
A photo of Martin Fugate’s family (colorized on a black and white background)
Unraveling the Mystery Behind the Unusual Phenomenon
Madison Cawein, a hematologist from the University of Kentucky, became interested in the strange phenomenon. He searched for and found many similar cases, even discovering a group of blue-skinned people living in the forest due to their self-consciousness. Cawein then constructed the genealogy of the blue family, and the final result showed that all were descendants of the couple Martin and Elizabeth.
After blood tests, Madison revealed that these individuals all had unusually high levels of methemoglobin (MetHb). Since MetHb has a blue color, it causes the skin to turn pale and exhibit a strange blue hue.
Ben Stacy, a descendant of the Fugate family, was found to have blue skin due to abnormally high levels of methemoglobin (which is blue in color) in his blood
According to medicine, hemoglobin (Hb) is a cell that contains a lot of oxygen, so its structure is often at risk of being oxidized and very sensitive to oxidation processes. Therefore, Hb is easily damaged. To avoid this phenomenon, Hb regularly undergoes the process of creating MetHb, while also regularly reducing MetHb to Hb.
He suggested that a rare gene may have disrupted the conversion process between methemoglobin (MetHb) and hemoglobin (Hb). This is a recessive gene, so only when both parents inherit it do their children develop the disorder of skin color, and the ratio of having children with the disorder is 1/4.
A genetic map illustrating the gene combination (r is the recessive gene that determines the blue skin process)
Find a Treatment Method
Not stopping at just discovering the cause, Madison continued to search for a treatment method. He injected methylene into the vein of a blue-skinned man named Patrick. Something miraculous happened, after just a few minutes, Patrick’s sky-blue skin turned pink. 13 similar people from the Fugate lineage were given methylene tablets and their skin returned to normal.
The mystery of the Fugate family’s sky-blue skin had officially come to an end after more than a century of existence.
