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Frances Humphrey Lecture Series: On the Trail of the Jackalope Profile Photo

Frances Humphrey Lecture Series: On the Trail of the Jackalope

 10/27/2022  |  06:30 PM - 08:00 PM
  NSM-Carson City  |  Registration Required

Frances Humphrey Lecture Series

Perhaps you think jackalopes are just the stuff of legends—curio items you might spot on the wall of a novelty taxidermist. Well, there’s more to this cottontail than meets the eye, as Michael P. Branch explores in his new book, On the Trail of the Jackalope: How a Legend Captured the World’s Imagination and Helped Us Cure Cancer. This is the never-before-told story of the horned rabbit—the myths, the hoaxes, the very real scientific breakthrough it inspired—and how it became a cultural touchstone of the American West. Just what is a jackalope? Purported to be part jackrabbit and part antelope, the jackalope began as a local joke concocted by two young brothers in a small Wyoming town during the Great Depression. Their creation quickly spread around the U.S., where it now regularly appears as innumerable forms of kitsch—wall mounts, postcards, keychains, coffee mugs, shot glasses—and a vast body of folk narratives carried the jackalope’s fame around the world to inspire art, music, film, even erotica! Although the jackalope is an invention of the imagination, its form was inspired by actual “horned rabbits,” animals with a strange disease that causes them to grow long, dark lumps from their faces and heads which resemble horns. Around the time the two young boys were creating the first fake jackalope in Wyoming, Dr. Richard Shope, a Princeton, New Jersey-based virologist, was making his breakthrough about the cause of the horns: a virus. When the virus that causes rabbits to grow “horns” (a keratinous carcinoma) was first genetically sequenced in 1984, oncologists were able to use that genetic information to make remarkable, field-changing advances in the development of anti-viral cancer therapies. The most important of these is the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, which protects against multiple kinds of cancer – that’s right, jackalopes are helping us cure cancer. This lecture will be presented in person and on Zoom. Admission is $10 for adults, members and children age 17 and under are free.

Minimum Participants: 1
Maximum Participants: 45

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Kelly Brant
(775) 687-4810

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