A Chilean poet was said to have died naturally, but new Canadian research might suggest otherwise

The Current9:48Researchers find clues to poet Pablo Neruda's death

For decades, the death of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was attributed to prostate cancer, despite allegations he was actually poisoned. Now researchers say they’ve found new clues; we hear more from Debi Poinar, a researcher at McMaster’s University's Ancient DNA Centre.

For nearly 50 years, the death of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was a controversial one. Officially, he had died of prostate cancer and malnutrition. But some, including his nephew, believed he was poisoned.

Now, new research done in part by Canadians suggests that might be the case.

"After several experiments, years of work, we tried to take it down to the strain level and determined that he definitely had Clostridium botulinum in his body when he died," said Debi Poinar, a researcher at McMaster University's Ancient DNA Centre.

"It was a strain. It was closely related to another strain that does cause food poisoning," she told The Current's Matt Galloway.

Neruda was one of Chile's greatest poets. He started writing poems when he was 13 years old, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971.

But he was also heavily involved in Chilean politics. He was a former senator for the Chilean Communist Party, and served as a close advisor to Chile's socialist President Salvador Allende.

So when he died in 1973, shortly after Augusto Pinochet assumed control of Chile in a violent coup, there were suspicions that his demise had sinister motives, even if the official report said otherwise.

Neruda wasn't without controversy, though. In his memoir, he describes sexually assaulting a maid in 1929 in Ceylon, now known as Sri Lanka.

Although Poinar said their analysis — done in collaboration with experts at the University of Copenhagen — can't say for certain whether he was murdered or not, it does raise some new questions.

"It still to this day is like, well, we are completely certain? No, but on the other hand, why is it there?" she said. "It's not a natural organism that should be present in your body for any other reason. So it's been tricky."

What I can say is that the science has not ruled out third-party intervention at this point.-Debi Poinar, researcher at McMaster's University's Ancient DNA Centre.

Here's part of Galloway and Poinar's conversation.

How did you get involved in this investigation into the death of Pablo Neruda?

Our lab actually received a phone call in 2015 from a forensic geneticist that was working on the investigations of the human rights abuses in Chile.

He was well aware of our work, and one of the cases was the possible murder of Pablo Neruda with what they thought could be a biological agent or weapon; that a bacteria was used possibly to poison him.

Our lab being one of the few in the world that does that type of work on skeletal remains that are hundreds and thousands of years old, they gave us a call.

The original explanation, the official explanation for the cause of death of Pablo Neruda, was prostate cancer and malnutrition. Why was there suspicion that that wasn't the case?

In 2017, we actually went down the second time to be part of the panel that investigated that death certificate, and there was no way that he died from malnutrition. He was a very robust man. He had very large girth. 

One of the things that they investigated is when he was buried, of course, he was dressed in a suit and a belt ... and the girth of that was measured, which was really something that contributed to the fact that there was no malnutrition.

Even though he did have prostate cancer, he was in treatment for that and definitely was not in the final stages when he died. 

That certificate was very questionable because the person at the hospital never observed the patient or the body at the time of death. It was rushed to someone's house. Someone signed it. It was very complicated. 

You talked about skeletal remains. How did you get access to the remains of Pablo Neruda?

We actually went down and took the samples ourself because we felt we needed to do it in a very proper and sterile environment. You worry a lot about contamination when you're working on a case like this. 

So we actually went down and sampled two bones and we took a tooth too. They would not let us bring it, of course, into Canada. [The samples were] hand-delivered to us a few months later.

So you are able to extract DNA from those samples. You run tests, and what did you find?

We started out looking for a bacteria called Staphylococcus aureus because they believe that was what was possibly used. The story goes that he may have been injected in the abdomen with the toxin or the bacteria. 

After several months of scanning through and experiments and sequencing, you look through thousands of bacteria and there wasn't hardly anything present of that particular bacteria. 

But I just couldn't leave it at that. I thought, "Well, what if there was something else?" Because there are other biological weapons that were used at the time in the 40s, and we saw a lot of Clostridium botulinum, which produces the toxin botulism, and we just sort of went from there. 

So what would this have done to him?

Typically from botulinum, it's a neurological disease or you die from paralysis. The other way that that can happen is if you have a large amount put in your body at once, you can become [septic] and die within hours because it's in your bloodstream.

It was definitely in his bloodstream with him when he died because we extracted that DNA from the pulp of the tooth, where it's really rich with a blood supply. 

We can never find the toxin itself because that's a protein and we just work with DNA. So we actually found the DNA of the bacteria.

Is there any way that that could appear naturally? Or is the sense that if this C. botulinum was there, that that would have been somehow injected into him?

We really can't prove that it was injected — and, you know, Matt, [what] would make the case really complicated is C. botulinum is also a soil-dwelling organism. 

So another thing that was added, time wise, to the case and difficulty, is we had them collect soil around the burial site and above the coffin and below the coffin because that — through 50 years, of course — could leach into his bones. 

We thought, well, he could have been contaminated from an environmental contaminant of [C. botulinum]. And so we had to determine that that was not the case, which we did. 

There was very little [C. botulinum] in the soil, and so it was definitely what we call endogenous or in his tooth when he died, of course, but we can't determine how it got there.

So, I mean, that's mixing metaphor weapons here, but this does not sound like a smoking gun. That sounds like it's evidence.... Does it actually prove that he was murdered?

No, and when we started the project, we made it very clear that we could never say, well, he was murdered or he wasn't. 

What I can say is that the science has not ruled out third-party intervention at this point

Produced by Howard Goldenthal.