Dr Robert Quatt could not believe it was happening again.

He put down his chopsticks and tried to calm himself.

It didn't work.

His heart began racing and his arms and neck went numb. Why did Chinese food do this to him?

Quack, a pediatrician, was an immigrant to the U.S. from Southern China.

Sometimes though, he craved northern Chinese food and would visit

a restaurant near his home in Maryland. Unfortunately, like Thunder follows lighten, he always felt

awful afterward. A racing heart, fatigue, numbness, which left

Kwok baffled. Why would Northern Chinese food cause those symptoms.

Quack had some guesses.

Maybe it was the food's high salt content,

or maybe the cooking wine northern chefs used.

But those were just stabs in the dark.

So in early 1968, Kwok wrote a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine detailing

his symptoms.

He was curious what other doctors thought.

And boy, did other doctors have thoughts.

Letters poured into the journal, some of them indulging in wild speculation about the cause of quark symptoms. Soon, however, most of the suspicion focused

on one ingredient, monosodium Glutimate or MSG. The funny thing was, until that point, people had been eating

MSG for decades and no one ever imagined it was poison. But as we'll see, hysteria, psychological

suggestiveness, and bad science are very powerful things.

From the Science History Institute, this is Sam Keene and the Disappearing Spoon, a topsy-turvy

...