The Best A m erican Scien c e Writin9

THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE WRITING

EDITORS

2000: James Gleick

2001: Timothy Ferris
2002: Matt Ridley

FORTHCOMING

2004: Dava Sobel

2005: Alan Li9htman
The Best American
SCIENCE WRI�ING

EDITOR: OLIVER SACKS

Series Editor: Jesse Cohen

An Imprint of HorperCollinsPublishers
THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE WRITING

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Introduction copyright© 2003 by Oliver Sacks.

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 C ont ents

Introduction by Oli ver Sacks vii

PETER CANBY I The Forest Primeval

CHARLES c. MANN I 1491 26

ATuL GAWANDE I The Learnin9 Curve 49

LIZA MUNDY I A World of Their Own 68

FLOYD SKLOOT I The Melody Lin9ers On 88

FRANK WILCZEK The World's Numerical Recipe

MARCELO GLEISER I Emer9ent Realities i n the Cosmos 102

NATALIE ANGIER I
Scientists Reach Out to Distant Worlds 106
ri C onte n ts
MARGARET WERTHEIM I Here There Be Draaons 111

JENNIFER KAHN I Notesfrom a Parallel Universe 1 15

MICHELLE N IJHUIS I Shadow Creatures 12 3

GuNJAN SINHA I You Dirty Vole 132

TREVOR CoRSON I Stalkina the American Lobster 138

SrnDHARTHA MUKHERJEE I Fiahtina Chance 160

MICHAEL KLEsrns I The Bia Bloom 168

SusAN MILIUS I Why Turn Red? 176

THOMAS EisNER I The Mosquito's Buzz 182

LAWRENCE OsBORNE I Got Silk l 86

BRENDAN I. KoERNER I Disorders Made to Order 194

JOSEPH D' AGNESE I An Embarrassment ef Chimpanzees 204

DANIELLE 0FRI I Common Ground 2 13

RoALD HoFFMANN Why Buy That Theory? 222

LEONARD CASSUTO
Bia Trouble in the World ef "Bia Physics" 228

DENNIS OvERBYE I
Hawkina's Breakthrouah Is Still an Eniama 2 37

RICHARD c. LEWONTIN AND RICHARD LEVINS

Stephen Jay Gould: What Does It Mean to Be a Radical? 243

About the C ontributors 251

 In t r o d u c ti o n by Oliver Sacks

SCIENCE WRITING-unpleasant term, but what else should one call it?­
first presented itself to me, as a boy, in books. I was given
The Stars in Their
Courses, by the famous astronomer James Jeans, when I was ten, and this so ex­
cited me that I then wanted to read everything else he had written. I rushed to
the local public library (much of my real education came from reading in pub­
]. I took
lic libraries, rather than from lessons at school), and went straight to
outThe Mysterious Universe and devoured it, then The Universe Around Us and
Through Space and Time.
Through Space and Time was based on the Christmas Lectures that Jeans
delivered at the Royal Institution in London in 1933 (this date particularly ap­
pealed to me, since it was the year of my birth). Such lectures, designed for gen­
eral audiences, had been an important feature of the RI's activities since its
founding in 1799· The early nineteenth century marked, in many ways, the be­
ginnings of modern science (the very word "scientist" was coined only in the
i83os; there had just been "savants" and "natural philosophers" before), and
from the start, there was a need to present the latest discoveries in exciting, ac­
cessible terms. Humphry Davy, the great poet-chemist who discovered the al­
kali metals, and his student Michael Faraday, who went on to discover many
fundamentals of chemistry and electricity, both lectured at the Royal Institu­
tion, where they attracted huge crowds and became a major part of cultural life
 viii I nt roduct ion
in London; and they did much to fuel what was to become a great popular in­
terest in science.
Presenting new scientific concepts and discoveries in an accessible and at­
tractive form was not regarded as a contemptible activity, or as a distraction
from the actual, serious work of science. Thus between 1835 and 1860, Faraday
delivered five or more Evening Discourses every year, covering an enormous
range of topics, and he obviously enjoyed giving these. This sense of delight in
science shines through all of his lectures and writings (his Chemical History ofa
Candle, based on his famous Christmas Lectures at the RI, is still as delightful
and stimulating today as when it was first published in 1861 ) .
By the middle o f the nineteenth century, the general public, confronted by
the rapidly changing technology of the industrial revolution no less than the
revolution in understanding that was happening in chemistry, natural history,
and biology, needed a way for such scientific information to be widely dissemi­
nated, and in terms the layman could readily comprehend. It was during this
period that the great museums of natural history and of science were estab­
lished throughout America and Europe, and that popular science magazines
came into being. Scientific American, founded in the 1840s, was one of the first
and most distinguished of these, and it continues to be published regularly
every month, as it has for more than a hundred and fifty years. Indeed, until the
middle of the twentieth century, one could read Scientific American and stay
reasonably current with scientific development in general. But the last thirty
years or so have seen so huge an explosion in scientific knowledge, the creation
of so many new disciplines and subdisciplines, that it is no longer possible for a
single person to keep current in all fields of science, and it is difficult for any
but the most specialized to read most scientific journals.
Perhaps for this very reason, the popular appetite for good science writing
has increased too, and the venerable Scientific American has been joined by an
ever-increasing number of other magazines aimed at the nonspecialist, some
concerned exclusively with science, or with particular branches of science, and
others with occasional articles on science.
I do, I confess, voraciously read such magazines and periodicals, partly to
keep up in my own field, but also to learn what is going on, what is being dis­
covered and thought in fields far from my own, but also for the excellence of
writing they often contain. I subscribe to many specialized periodicals: Neurol­
ogy, Brain, and so on, because I am a neurologist; Pteridologist and its lighter
cousin, Fiddlehead Forum, because I am a fern lover; Mineralogical Record, be­
cause I love minerals; Journal of the History of Neurosciences and Ambix, be­
cause I am fascinated by the history of science. But I subscribe to a clutch of
 Introduction ix

popular ones as well. Having just returned to my desk after a couple of weeks
away, I find a massive accumulation of these- Science News, Scien tific Ameri­
can, New Scientist, Discover, National Geographic, American Scientist (to say
nothing of Science and Nature, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books,
Harper's Magazine, and The Atlantic Monthly).
I have stuffed them all into my briefcase, wondering if I will tear the handle
off with their weight, and after dinner I will lie down on my bed (I do most of
my reading there, or in the bath), and rush through them eagerly and greedily,
picking out (sometimes razoring out) articles that stimulate me because of
new ideas or information. An omnivore, yet selective, a sort of filter-feeder, I
will extract intellectual nutrients from the articles as I extract nutrients from
my dinner. Every so often, however, I am arrested by an article because it con­
tains not just new information but a highly individual point of view, a personal
perspective, a voice that compels my interest, raising what would otherwise be
a report or a review to the level of an essay marked by clarity, individuality, and
beauty of writing.
Reading an article by the late great Stephen Jay Gould always gave me this
special sense-one felt the man, his special interests and experiences (whether
his favorite snail, Cerion, punctuated equilibrium, or Gilbert and Sullivan),
and the landscape of his mind, whatever the particular theme of the article;
and one felt the highly individual choice of image and language. A Stephen Jay
Gould article was never preqictable, never dry, could not be imitated or mis­
taken for anyone else's.
I am not entirely sure what makes "good" science writing (or indeed,
"good" writing of any sort), but Coleridge put it as succinctly as possible when
he advised "proper words, in proper places." The best science writing, it seems
to me, has a swiftness and naturalness, a transparency and clarity, not dogged
with pretentiousness or literary artifice. The science writer gives himself or
herself to the subject completely, does not intrude on it in an annoying or im­
pertinent way, and yet gives a personal warmth and perspective to every word.
Science writing cannot be completely "objective"-how can it be, when science
itself is so human an activity?-but it is never self-indulgently subjective either.
It is, at best, a wonderful fusion, as factual as a news report, as imaginative as a
novel. It is with this in mind that I have made what is bound to be a highly par­
tial and idiosyncratic selection of the best American science writing of 2002. I
have, frankly, found this to be nearly a impossible task-for I would like to
have included twenty or a hundred pieces for every one here, and to have given
every facet of science, from paleontology to psychoanalysis, its place and due.
But there is only so much one can do in a book of three hundred pages.
 x I n troduction
Science writing, good science writing, is not confined to "scientific" maga­
zines (though this collection, not surprisingly, includes articles that appeared
in Discover, Scientific American, and Popular Science). It is equally to be found
in general publications, such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, The
New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic
Monthly, and The New Republic; as well as many less widely circulated but
highly regarded magazines such as Daedalus, Monthly Review, Mother Jones,
Tikkun, and Southwest Review; and even local and regional publications such
as LA Weekly and High Coun try News. All of these are represented in this collec­
tion, as well as an online magazine, Salon.com, and Wings, the tiny journal of
the Xerces Society, dedicated to the conservation of invertebrates. A very slen­
der magazine-only a dozen pages or so-that comes out every week is the ad­
mirable Science News, which in addition to scientific news always contains
original articles and essays, and I am glad to be able to include a piece from this
publication.
The rules of this series prevent the inclusion of any articles from non­
American authors, and thus this volume does not contain anything from two
great periodicals published in England (but freely available in the United
States) New Scientist, an extremely fine popular science weekly with no exact
-

analogue in the United States, and Nature, which not only represents a world
forum for original scientific articles ( it is just fifty years since Watson and Crick
published their famous letter in it suggesting the structure of DNA), but also
contains some of the very best science writing one is likely to see. It is similar to
its American counterpart, Science.
Though there have always been scientists who have excelled (and de­
lighted) in lucid expositions of their own and others' work, and there has al­
ways been coverage of major scientific discoveries in the general press, "science
writing" as such is a relatively new phenomenon, yet it is one that has already
achieved a central place in our culture, as this series attests. There are now
dozens of first-class science writers whose names are well known to every
reader, and whom one can always turn to with the near certainty of encounter­
ing clarity, enthusiasm, and depth. There is the temptation, in an anthology
such as this, to rely on these tried-and-true names, but I have tried here to in­
troduce new writers as well, whose names may now be unfamiliar but will not
be for long.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, Stephen Jay Gould was, unarguably,
the best known and most beloved science writer of the past quarter century. As
I write this, it is not quite a year since Steve died so prematurely, at the age of
sixty, in May 2002. Steve was everything-a field scientist, a theoretician, a his-
 Introduction xi

torian of science, a bibliophile; but he was also an unabashed lover of orato­

rios, baseball, and old buildings. The miracle of his writing was that he brought
everything together, brought the whole of himself into his writing. His subjects
sometimes seemed recondite or odd-he had a special feeling for the over­
looked, the unconsidered, the forgotten, the dismissed-but by the time he had
dealt with them, they seemed the most interesting things in the world, and the
world seemed richer for having them restored to it. And so it seems fitting to
dedicate this volume, celebrating our best science writing, to his memory.
The Bes t A m e rican Scien c e Writing
 PE T ER CANBY

The Forest Primeval

FROM HA R PE R 's MAGAZINE

Nouabale-Ndoki is one ef the most remote places on Earth-seventeen

hundred square miles ef nature preserve in a hard-to-reach re9ion ef the
Republic ef Con90. Stephen Blake, an En9lish zoolo9istfor whom the word
"intrepid" seems an understatement, has made several monthlon9 journeys,
on foot, throu9h Nouabale-Ndoki-undeterred by lack ef modern ameni­
ties, the threat ef disease, and the presence efpoisonous snakes-to track its
remarkable population ef elephants. The writer Peter Canby accompanies
Blake on what is to be his last trip and observes a scientist at home at the
ed9e ef the world.

've just reached Makao, the most remote village in the Republic of Congo.

I I'm traveling with Stephen Blake, a British wildlife biologist, in a thirty­

foot, outboard motor-powered pirogue-a dugout canoe-following the
muddy, weed-clotted Motaba River north from its confluence with the Uban­
gui River. At first, after leaving the Ubangui, we passed small villages hacked
out of the forest, but for a long time we've seen swamp interrupted only by the
odd fishing camp: small bird nest-like huts and topless Pygmy women in grass
skirts waving their catch forlornly as we motor by.
But now we've arrived at Makao, the end of the line, the last town along the
Motaba. Ahead is pure, howling wilderness. Makao has a population of per­
haps 500, �alf Bantu and half Bayaka-among the most traditional Pygmy
 2 PETER C A N B Y

tribes in Africa. The village long had a reputation as a poaching town, one of
the centers of the extensive and illegal African "bushmeat" trade, which, in the
Congo basin alone, still accounts, annually, for a million metric tons of meat
from animals that have been illegally killed. But since 1993 the poaching in
Makao has all but ceased, and the village has taken on another significance: it is
the back door to the Nouabale-Ndoki forest. Nouabale-Ndoki is named for
two rivers, only one of which actually exists. The name of the existing river­
Ndoki-means "sorcerer" in Lingala, the lingua franca of much of the two
Congos. Nouabale doesn't mean a thing. It's a misnomer for another river, the
Mabale, inaccurately represented on a geographer's map in the faraway Con­
golese capital, Brazzaville.
Nouabale-Ndoki is now a 1,70o-square-mile national park known chiefly
for having the least disturbed population of forest life in Central Africa. No one
lives in the park, or anywhere nearby. Nouabale-Ndoki has neither roads nor
footpaths. It contains forest elephants, western lowland gorillas, leopards,
chimpanzees, forest and red river hogs, dwarf and slender-snouted crocodiles,
innumerable kinds of monkeys, and nine species of forest antelope, including
the reclusive sitatunga and the supremely beautiful bongo. The southwest cor­
ner of the park is home to the famous "naive chimps" that sit for hours and
stare at human intruders. Until biologists arrived just over ten years ago, few of
these animals, including the chimps, had ever encountered humans.
Blake studies elephants. A self-proclaimed "working-class lad" from Dart­
ford, England, Blake read zoology at the University of London; he is now work­
ing on a doctoral thesis about the migratory patterns of Nouabale-Ndoki
forest elephants at the University of Edinburgh. Thirty-six, fit, and lean, Blake
is known as a scientist who likes the bush and is not afraid to go where wild an­
imals live. But he's also considered audacious, a biologist who thinks nothing
of crossing wild forests clad in sandals and a pair of shorts. Richard Ruggiero,
who runs the elephant fund for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and worked
with Blake just after the park was established, compares him to nineteenth­
century explorers: "He's someone who could walk across Africa, turn around,
and then be ready to go back again:' Another colleague described encountering
him as he emerged from a long stint in the bush. "He was wearing torn shorts
and a tattered T-shirt. He had a staph infection but seemed completely happy."
As part of his research, Blake has taken a series of what he calls "long
walks"-foot surveys that start in Makao and follow a web of elephant trails up
the Motaba and Mokala rivers to the park's northern border, cross the park
from north to south, and then emerge from the headwater swamps of the Lik-
 The Forest Primeval 3

ouala aux Herbes River below the park's southern border. (The gorillas of the
Likouala aux Herbes were the subject of Blake's master's thesis at Edinburgh.)
Each of these treks-and Blake has made eight-covers about 150 miles and
takes about a month. When I joined him, Blake was preparing to embark on his
ninth and final trip along his survey route. I had heard of Blake's work from
Amy Vedder, a program director at the Wildlife Conservation Society, which,
along with the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Columbus (Ohio) Zoo,
funds his research. Vedder and I had been discussing the toll that the region's
wars have taken on its wildlife when she told me about Blake's long walks. I
signed on to accompany him on his last one. At the time, it seemed a rare op­
portunity to see the Earth as it was thousands of years ago, at the moment
when humans lived side by side with the great apes from which they evolved.
But now that I've reached Makao, I'm wondering why I made no special
preparations for this trip. All the perils, which seemed theoretical before I left,
have become disturbingly real. Not only don't we have phones or any means of
communication; we also face threats of dengue fever, deadly malaria, the newly
resurgent sleeping sickness, and even AIDS and Ebola, which are believed to
have emerged from the forests of this region. I'm also afraid of army ants, ticks
(eventually one crawls up my nose and inflates just at the top of my nasal pas­
sage), swarms of flies, and, above all, snakes. When I let slip that I am particu­
larly nervous about snakes, Blake tells me about the Gabon viper, a fat,
deadly-poisonous snake with the longest fangs of any snake in the world. It of­
ten lies in ambush on Nouabale-Ndoki trails. "The Gabon viper always bites
the third person in line;' Blake says glibly. "That's your slot."

T H E W I L D L I F E CO N S E RVAT I O N Society maintains a field station in

Makao, and we spend several days there assembling a crew. One morning, as
Blake and I bathe in the Motaba while a cloud of blue butterflies swarms
around us, he explains how his recruiting policy has been determined by local
economics. Bushmeat, he tells me, was a staple of the Congolese diet and, for
many, the only available source of income. In Makao, the WCS provides jobs to
people who are now forbidden by law to hunt; Blake himself has also sought to
hire the best former hunters in order to keep them off the market. Practically
speaking, this means recruiting the Bayaka, who live not just in Makao but also
north and east of the park. Unlike Pygmies elsewhere in Africa, who are in­
creasingly removed from hunting and gathering, many of the Bayaka still go
into the forest for months, or even years, at a time, living off the land with little
 PETER C A N B Y

more than spears and homemade crossbows. Blake hires them because they
know the forest intimately. "I often think every Bayaka should be awarded a
doctorate in forest ecology," Blake says. "They know what's going on."
But Makao is ruled by Bantus, who, while dominant, know much less than
the Bayaka about the forest. Blake would rather travel only with Bayak.a, but,
because of the dynamics of the village, he also hires Bantus. The relationship
between the groups is complicated. The Bayaka Pygmies are small forest
people-the men in Makao seem to average around five feet three-and pre­
sumably the original inhabitants of Central Africa. The Bantus, who are taller,
are fishermen and slash-and-burn cultivators who migrated to the region sev­
eral thousand years ago. The Bantus control Bayaka families; the Bayaka are ex­
pected to hunt for their Bantu owners and to work their manioc fields. In
return the Bayaka get metal implements, notably cooking pots and spear
points, made from automobile leaf springs; having acquired these things, they
light off to follow a nomadic life in the forest. The arrangement is changing,
however, as many Bayaka now live in the village year-round. Not all of the
Bayaka still know how to make crossbows, recognize plants, or use spears. They
can no longer survive in the forest.
Several of Blake's Bayaka recruits have accompanied him on earlier treks.
They include one of Blake's oldest Bayaka friends, Lamba, who is named for a
stout vine that winds helix-like up into the canopy trees, and Mossimbo, who is
named for an elephant-hunting charm. But this time Blake is excited about a
new recruit: Zonmiputu. Zonmiputu comes from one of the most traditional
bands of the Makao Bayaka. Blake had met him on one of his early trips after a
chance encounter, somewhere outside the park, with Zonmiputu's father's
band, which had been living off the forest, following the ancient, intricate
Bayaka way of life, for more than a year.
"They were carrying spears and homemade crossbows," Blake recall s .
"They had one cooking pot, no water jugs, and a lot of baskets they'd made out
of forest vines. Their clothes had worn out, and they'd gone back to wearing
bark fabric."
As the first person ever to have employed the Bayaka, Blake is changing
their lives. "Before they worked for me, their wives had to scrape for yams using
sticks. Almost all their food was baked in leaves. Now one of them works for me
for a month and makes enough money to buy a machete, a few clothes, a pot,
and some fishhooks." Still, after returning from a month in the forest, Blake has
frequently been confronted by Bantu patrons demanding the money he is
about to pay "their" Pygmy. They react with incredulity when Blake won't give
it to them.
 The Forest Primeval s-

As Blake and I talk by the river, I hear what I take for a birdcall. It's soon an­
swered by a similar call-but at a harmonic interval-and then a third. Soon
the river valley is full of strange syncopated harmonies. It's as if the trees them­
selves were singing. "Pygmies:' Blake says when he sees my puzzled expression.
"They're working the fields."

B Y T H E N E X T D AY we've assembled our team-Zonmiputu, Lamba,

Mossimbo, four other Bayaka, three Bantus, Blake, and me. Our walk begins
another six hours up the river. We pile ourselves and our gear into the pirogue.
Our "tucker:' as Blake calls our food, comes from a market in the town of Imp­
fondo along the Ubangui. It consists of sixty cans of tomato paste, two hun­
dred cans of Moroccan sardines, forty cans of Argentine corned beef, twenty
pounds of spaghetti, one hundred pounds of rice, several bags of "pili-pili"­
the very hot, powdered African peppers-and large quantities of cooking oil,
sugar, coffee, and tea. ("What's an Englishman to do in the forest without tea?"
Blake asks.) We've topped off our supplies with three fifty-pound sacks of
manioc flour and two baskets of smoked Ubangui River fish, bought from a
fish merchant in an Impfondo courtyard.
We cast off early one morning. Above Makao, the riverbanks are uninhab­
ited. It's late February-the end of the dry season-but the twenty-foot-wide
river courses swiftly between marshy banks. We pass African fish eagles,
perched on overhanging branches. Hornbills wing their way overhead, making
otherworldly cries and beating the air with a ferocity that evokes the original
archaeopteryx. Around ten in the morning an eight-foot, slen�er-snouted
crocodile surfaces next to the boat and glances dispassionately at us. Our dis­
embarkation point, from which the boatman will return the pirogue to Makao
and we will begin walking, is near a fallen tree just below the juncture of the
Motaba with one of its tributaries, the Mokala. I step ashore, look down at my
pale, tender feet clad in rubber sandals, and wonder how I'm going to survive
this expedition. In front of me, hearts of palm have been peeled-evidence of
gorillas. Behind me Mossimbo spots fresh python skin, assumes the python is
nearby, and leaps back in panic. Pythons here can grow to twenty feet; they
strangle everything from antelopes to crocodiles. Everyone roars with laughter
at Mossimbo's expense. The laughter covers the whir of the pirogue's motor as
it pulls away, and when the Pygmies quiet down I hear the pirogue disappear­
ing back downriver. My heart sinks.
 6 PETER C A N B Y

TEN YEARS AGO the Nouabale-Ndoki park didn't exist. The land was set
aside after a decade of mass slaughter of elephants. During the 1970s a Japanese
vogue for ivory signature seals, a consequent tenfold increase in the price of
ivory, and a continent-wide collapse of civil authority combined to set off an
orgy of elephant destruction. Poachers wielding AK-47s massacred entire
herds for tusks, and then sold the ivory through illegal networks presided over
by potenates like Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the cannibal emperor of the Central
African Republic, and Jonas Savimbi, the murderous Angolan warlord. At the
height of the slaughter, poachers were killing 80,000 elephants annually. In the
1980s almost 700,000 elephants were killed.
In 1989 conservation organizations intervened. The Convention on Inter­
national Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) , a widely supported treaty that
regulates trade in endangered species, put African elephant ivory on its list of
most restricted commodities, thus effectively banning its international ex­
change. The market collapsed and conservationists rallied to save the remain­
ing elephants. Africa has two types of elephants: Loxodonta africana africana,
the bush elephant of the savannas, and Loxodonta africana cyclotis, the forest
elephant. Biologists know a great deal about the savanna elephant, the world's
largest land mammal, which is easy to spot and easy to monitor. But the forest
elephants that Blake studies are smaller, more elusive creatures. Only recently
identified as their own species, forest elephants live in Africa's impenetrable
jungle, and their behavioral patterns-even their numbers-are almost en­
tirely unknown.
As part of a continent-wide elephant census that began with the conserva­
tion efforts, the Wildlife Conservation Society and the European Economic
Community contracted to estimate the elephant population in the north of the
Republic of Congo. The north was then almost entirely unexplored but had re­
cently been carved into forest blocks designated for European logging interests.
Michael Fay, an American botanist and former Peace Corps volunteer who was
studying western lowland gorillas, was hired to conduct the survey. Today, Fay
is known for having made a 1,200-mile "megatransect;' a trek from Nouabale­
Ndoki to the coast of Gabon. But in 1989, Fay was just an adventurous graduate
student and Nouabale-Ndoki merely Brazzaville's name for an unexplored log­
ging concession. Fay traversed Nouabale-Ndoki with a group of Bangombe
Pygmies. In the interior they found large numbers of forest elephants, western
lowland gorillas, and chimpanzees that were unafraid of humans. Chimps are
hunted everywhere in Africa, and their lack of fear in this instance led Fay
to conclude that he and his team were the first humans they had ever seen. He
decided that Nouabale-Ndoki-unspoiled, vast, and teeming with wild
 The Forest Pr imeval 7

animals-would make an ideal national park. Working with Amy Vedder and
William Weber, directors of the Wildlife Conservation Society's Africa pro­
gram, Fay wrote a proposal for a park that WCS, the World Bank, and the U.S.
Agency for International Development agreed to fund. In a dramatic gesture
that pleased conservationists, the government of Congo withdrew Nouabale­
Ndoki from the list of logging concessions. In December of 1993 it became a
national park, with Michael Fay as its first director.

E A R LY 1 N H I s T E N u R E , Fay recruited Blake to study wildlife at Nouabale­

Ndoki. In 1990, Blake had come to Brazzaville to work in an orphanage for go­
rillas whose parents had been killed in the bushmeat trade. In those days, Blake
hung out with a group of De Beers diamond merchants. His best friend ("a
cracking bloke") was an arms trader. He drank a lot of vodka, raced the or­
phanage car around Brazzaville, and ran a speedboat up and down the Congo
River. But by 1993, Blake was ready for a change. When Fay asked him to work
in the new park, Blake quickly accepted. He started as a volunteer. Fay remem­
bers that he showed up "clad from head to toe and carrying an enormous green
backpack that must have weighed five thousand pounds." In contrast, Fay had
evolved a style of jungle travel that involved bringing Pygmies and packing
light-one pair of shorts, Teva sandals, no shirt; he would wear the same
clothes every day, wash them every night, and wrap blisters and cuts with duct
tape. Blake rapidly adopted Fay's style and soon became, as Vedder puts it,
Nouabale-Ndoki's "wild-forest guy."
On his early surveys of the new park, Blake explored an elaborate network
of elephant trails that crisscross the forest. Some trails were as wide as boule­
vards, and each seemed to have a purpose: one led to a grove of fruit trees, an­
other to a river crossing, another to a bathing site. T hese trails existed only
where there were no humans around to disrupt the elephants' lives. Outside
the park, where there were human settlements, the trails vanished. Blake be­
came certain that in the trail system was a map of the ecological and psycho­
logical mysteries of forest-elephant life. In 1997 he enrolled in the Ph.D.
program at Edinburgh and began his thesis on the elephants of Nouabale­
Ndoki. "Elephants are kingpins of forest life," Blake says. "I have come to feel
that if you could understand elephants you could really understand what was
going on throughout the forest. Here's this bloody great big animal. It's disap­
pearing, and we know bugger all about it:'
In the years since he began his study, Blake's work has acquired a new sense
of urgency, and this is one of the reasons he's invited me to join him on his long
 8 PETER C A N B Y

walk. In i997, just as Blake was beginning his research, a civil war erupted in
Brazzaville when the then president, Pascal Lissouba, sought to disarm a tribal
faction from the north. Protracted firefight leveled what had been one of Cen­
tral Africa's few intact cities; io,ooo to 12,000 people were killed in Brazzaville
alone. The violence also spread to rural areas, where a third of the country's
population was displaced and uncounted numbers were killed. Many Con­
golese fled their villages and hid in the forest, where they died of disease or
starvation while trying to subsist off wild game.
"People did a lot of atrocious things and got away with them:' Blake says.
"Every Tom, Dick, and Harry had an AK-47. You'd go into a tiny village and
half a dozen sixteen-year-olds would come strutting down the street with ban­
dannas and automatic rifles?' The war led to more hunting. Although the park
itself was spared, largely because of its remoteness, the surrounding elephant
population, as Blake puts it, "got hammered."
This history has contributed to Blake's conviction that the isolation­
indeed the very existence-of places like Nouabale-Ndoki is imperiled. As
we've traveled, I've noticed a certain desperation on his part, as if he were con­
vinced that whatever he doesn't learn about the elephants on this trip will
never be learned-and that all there is to know about forest elephants will be
irrevocably lost.

"FR E s H Du N G ! Blake exclaims. He sheds his daypack and pulls out his
"

waterproof notebook. With a ruler, he measures the diameter of the dung pile
(which looks like an oversized stack of horse manure), cuts two sticks, and be­
gins to separate seeds from the undigested roughage.
We're four days up a wide-open elephant trail along the Mokala River. The
trail is thick with dinosaur-sized elephant prints. There are also hoof marks of
red river hogs; the seldom seen giant forest hog, which grows to 600 pounds;
and a pangolin, a 75-pound nocturnal consumer of ants and termites that is
covered in dark-brown scales that look like the shingles on a roof; as well as
leopard prints and both rear foot and knuckle prints of a big gorilla. Overhead,
troops of monkeys chatter and scold: spot-nosed guenons, gray-cheeked
mangabeys, and the leaf-eating colobus. In spite of all the tracks and animals
we've come across, however, we've found little evidence that elephants have
been here recently.
We travel each day with one of the Bayaka acting as a guide while the other
Bayaka and Bantus, who tend to be boisterous on what for them is a junket into
the wilderness, cavort well behind us so that they don't scare away the animals.
 The Forest Primeval 9

On this day, Blake's old friend Lamba has taken the lead, followed by Blake, and
then me in the Gabon-viper slot. Lamba crouches over the dung pile while
Blake isolates four types of seeds in it. Three of the four, he says, are dispersed
only by elephants. One of these is the seed of a bush mango.
Lamba tells Blake that we're not seeing elephants along the trail because
they've left the river for the hills, where the wild mangoes are bearing fruit.
"Most fruits are produced in fixed seasons:' Blake says to me. "But there
seems to be no pattern here with mangoes. They fruit whenever. It would be
great if we could find lots of fruiting mangoes and lots of elephant signs. That's
the kind of thing we're looking for, a few indicators of what moves elephant
populations."
The most obvious explanation of what moves elephants is food, and Blake's
research involves making a thorough study of the plants we encounter as well
as chasing down feeding trails. We stop every twenty minutes so that he can
make botanical notes. In order to create a definitive survey, Blake always fol­
lows the same route, varying it only when he makes side trips down feeding
trails. He carries a Global Positioning System, a handheld device that translates
satellite signals into geographic coordinates and which Blake uses to record the
exact location of his observations. The Bayaka take care of navigation. Blake
also carries a palm-sized computer, into which he enters his data. The use of
such technology is new in wildlife biology. As Richard Ruggiero puts it,
"[Blake]'s the first to use GPS and satellites to successfully look at the long­
term movements of elephants in the forest. He's collected data no one else has
looked at before."
But none of this matters if we don't see elephants. Despite Blake's estimate
that as many as 3,000 elephants use the park, the animals themselves elude us.
They're hard to see because they are agile and fast: Forest elephants grow to
nine feet at the shoulder and weigh up to 8,ooo pounds but move with surpris­
ing stealth, thanks to a pad of spongy material on the soles of their feet, which
dampens the sound of breaking branches. The elephants also communicate by
using infrasound, a frequency below the range of human hearing. Once ele­
phants have determined that intruders are present, they can warn one another
over significant distances-without humans detecting the exchange.
Blake has attempted to make elephants easier to find in a number of ways.
In the fall of 1998, he received a grant from Save the Elephants, a foundation
run by noted elephant conservationist Iain Douglas-Hamilton, to outfit several
elephants with GPS collars. Blake and Billy Karesh, a W ildlife Conservation
Society field veterinarian, went deep into the forests of Central Africa with a
high-powered tranquilizing rifle; they managed to sedate two elephants near
 10 PETER CASBY

Nouabale-Ndoki and put collars on them. One of the collars never worked, but
the second, placed on a female, worked for a month, long enough to trace the
elephant's movements outside the protected forest.
The fewer signs we see of elephants, the more restless Blake becomes.
"Amazing, isn't it," he muses. "Absolute bugger all ."
On the fifth day, as we're walking along a ridge above the Mokala, Blake
hears a branch snap. Zonmiputu is our guide. He is a quiet man, about five
feet tall, an inch or two shorter than the rest of the Pygmies, and perhaps forty
years old.
"Ndzoko," Zonrniputu whispers. Elephant.
Quietly he puts down his pack, indicates the elephant's direction '\ith his
machete, and leads us at a crouch through the thick underbrush. After thirty­
five yards, Zonrniputu stops and points out a shadm\1· shape looming twenty
yards away. It is a young-looking bull , about eight feet at the shoulder, '\ith
deep chocolate-colored skin. I can see its brown tusks wa,ing as it reaches up
'\ith its trunk and rips branches out of the surrounding trees. We approach.
Blake hands me his binoculars. The elephant is now fifteen yards away, and I'm
focused on its eye-a startling sight, sunken in the wrinkled skin, bloodshot; it
seems to peer out from another epoch, as if it were looking fonvard at some
huge, unfathomable span of time.
"A young bull ," Blake whispers. "Perhaps twenty years old."
The bull senses that we're near, lifts its trunk toward us, and crashes off into
the forest.

I :s sitting around the camp after dinner, I ask Blake to ask

TH E Ev E !'I' I N G ,

the Bayaka if any of them has ever kille d an elephant. I know that Pygmies have
traditionally hunted elephants '\ith spears. As Blake relays the question, the
Bayaka stiffen. It's illegal to kill elephants. They don't know why I'm asking,
and they all say no--uncomincingly. All, that is, except Lamba. Blake refers to
Lamba as "Beya," the Bayaka word for giant forest hog, because he has, as Blake
puts it, "scabby habits." Ha,ing made this trip several times together, Lamba
and Blake are perpetually laughing at each other, and, in front of Blake, Lamba
doesn't bother to dissemble. He's kille d three elephants '\ith his spear, he tells
us. He stalked the elephants and speared them in the gut. When necessary, he'd
spear one a second time in the foot to prevent it from running .
For one of these elephants, which a Makao Bantu hired him to kill for its
tusks, Lamba was paid an aluminum cooking pot. For another, he received a
pair of shorts.
 The Forest Primeval 1 1

"This for a hunt that would have taken him weeks;' Blake says hotly.
I ask Lamba whether he has any fear while hunting an elephant.
No, he doesn't, he responds, even though elephants can kill hunters. Goril­
las, however, scare him. A mature male-a silverback-can grow to over 400
pounds. He knows three Pygmies who've been killed while stalking gorillas.
''And do the Bayaka kill people?" Blake asks.
This elicits nervous laughter. Cannibalism is not unknown in this region,
though no one has ever accused the Bayaka of eating people. But we're not far
from Bangui, where, in modern times, Emperor Bokassa is said to have served
human flesh at state dinners. Blake tells me that the first Frenchman to arrive in
Makao in 1908 was eaten. "We found records of it in the colonial archives in
Paris;' he tells me. (Later, when looking in vain for a copy of the document at
park headquarters, I turn up a similar complaint from another colonist whose
son had been eaten in a nearby village.)
When the laughter dies down, we hear a roar in the hills. It's a gorilla beat­
ing its chest.

T A L K I NG T O M Y F E L L O W T R AV E L E R S requires several stages of trans­

lation. Most of our conversation is in Lingala, which Blake, the Bayaka, and the
Bantus all speak. In addition to Lingala, however, the Bayaka speak Kaka, the

Ubangui language of Makao Bantus, and Sango. Their own language­

Bayaka-is Bantu-based, and if the Bayaka ever spoke an independent, non­
Bantu language, it disappeared after the Bantu migration into the region
thousands of years ago. As we progress farther into the forest, the Pygmies use
words for plants and animals that are so specific they may be relics of an older
Bayaka, the ancestral language of a forest-based people.
"There are 4,000 to 5,000 plants in this forest;' Blake says one day. "I know
the botanical names of perhaps 400. Mossimbo knows the Bayaka names for
probably twice that. Zonmiputu knows even more."
What the language gap means is that if I want to ask the Bayaka a question,
I have to first ask Blake in English, who then translates it into Lingala, which of­
ten sets off a discussion in Bayaka, which is summarized in Lingala to Blake,
who finally gives it back to me in English. Meaning is distorted-lost-in the
process. My frustration rises as I gradually realize that not only do the Bayaka
speak several human languages but they can also summon wild animals.
We are walking under a troop of monkeys one day when Lamba begins to
whistle, a loud, repeated screech in imitation of an African crowned eagle, a
canopy predator. The monkeys are already screaming at us, but Lamba's sound
 I 2 PETER CANBY

throws them into a state of agitation and draws them down to the trees' lower
branches. Soon the forest resounds with the thrashing of limbs and the crack­
ing of branches, as well as grunts, whistles, and alarmed chattering, as the mon­
keys react to being caught between the imagined eagle above them and the
indefinable hominids below.
On another occasion, Lamba crouches down and makes a nasal call that
imitates the distress call of a duiker, a type of forest antelope that has adapted
to the lack of browse on the tropical forest floor by eating fruit, flowers, and
leaves dislodged by canopy monkeys and birds. Immediately a blue duiker­
only a foot tall, one of the smallest of the forest antelopes-charges out of the
undergrowth. It has big eyes and a small, round nose. When it spots us, it pulls
up short, then turns around and bolts. But it can't resist Lamba's call. It returns,
stops, bolts again, and comes back-until Lamba finally breaks the spell by
laughing at the antelope's confusion.
Later, we come across a herd of fifteen red river hogs rooting and grunting
around the forest floor. These hogs grow to 250 pounds and have small, razor­
sharp tusks. Our presence makes them skittish, but they don't flee. They may
never have seen men before. We stalk until the closest hog is five yards away,
just over the trunk of a fallen tree. Mossimbo then begins a wheezing-pig call.
The pigs freeze, dash away, and then, spellbound, return nervously, almost
compulsively. Mossimbo keeps calling until he has the biggest boars lined up
across the trunk from us. Staring, entranced, their faces look extraterrestrial­
tufted ears, long snouts, big sensitive eyes ringed with white; they seem unable
to fathom just what they're looking at. Mossimbo squeals-an alarm. The pigs'
eyes bug out, and they race off into the forest as Mossimbo erupts in laughter.
To me these episodes are fragmentary glimpses of a world in which hu­
mans and animals share a symbolic language. The Bayaka take great pleasure in
their mastery over the animal world, and nearly every episode of their sum­
moning animals ends in guffaws. It's not benevolent laughter. If Blake and I
hadn't been present, each of these animals would certainly have wound up in a
Bayaka cooking pot-and there's something about this nasty, exhilarating con­
fidence that is quintessentially human.

WE ' v E c o M E to a point where we must ford the crocodile-rich Mokala. The

current is swift, the river bottom sandy, and the water up to our chins. We hold
our bags above the water level and, shortly after we reach the far shore, wade
across a tributary and enter the park. As we climb up the bank, we enter an area
 The Forest Pr imeval 13

of closed canopy forest where the understory is more passable and the butts of
the trees are eight and nine feet in diameter, with straight boles that explode
into kingdoms of filigree high above. Zonmiputu is again in the lead when he
stops stock-still, turns back to us, and whispers, "Koi." Leopard.
Through a gap in the underbrush, we make out a pattern of dark rosettes
on a brown background. The impression gradually resolves into the abdomen
and haunch of a large leopard. As we watch, it glides out of the frame, its snaky
tail trailing behind.
Zonmiputu crouches, clears his throat, and makes a duiker call to try to
fool the leopard into coming to investigate. Through another gap, I see the
leopard hesitate, then break into a run. It's gone.
Although leopards are not commonly believed to attack humans, the Pyg­
mies claim they do. Several days earlier, Mossimbo had pointed out a pile of
leopard scat filled with reddish-brown hair. Blake poked around in it long
enough to discover a strange brown cylinder the size and color of a cigar butt.
Using a stick, we rolled it over. I leapt back in horror. It was the top half of a fin­
ger, the nail still intact.
"Chimpanzee;' Blake said.

T H E E E R I E D I S C O M F O R T of the forest is beginning to overwhelm me.

One night, I'm inside my tent in the grips of a dream. I'm being suffocated by
vines, buried until only my face is exposed. Slowly I'm being pulled into the
earth. I awake with a start, pull out my flashlight, and check my watch. It's four­
thirty in the morning. The air inside the tent is thick and stifling. Outside, wa­
ter drips from leaves, unseen creatures scurry, branches snap, beasts hoot and
squeak. Overhead, I feel the claustrophobic weight of tropical foliage. Tonight's
dream is one of a series that has become vivid-houses I used to live in, offices
I've worked in, visits with friends-and I wonder if this is what it's like to be
dead. My restless spirit is haunting the places I loved.
Dawn is filtering down to the forest floor. I hear the rest of the camp stir­
ring: the Pygmies whack their machetes into dead branches and clang our bat­
tered, soot-covered aluminum pots over the fire. I hear Blake yawning in his
tent. He calls out to ask how I've slept. I lie and tell him I've slept well. But now,
at six in the morning, this trip has become oppressive. Breakfast arrives: a
mound of glutinous white rice covered with Moroccan sardines and the left­
overs of last night's smoked-fish stew. Gloomily, I tuck in. Blake asks if I find
the forest claustrophobic. I lie again and tell him no, but it's a bad line of think-
 PETER C A N B Y

ing, because today i n fact I do. Neither am I heartened by the fact that today
we're not moving camp. While Blake goes off to do some elephant-feeding
studies, I'll have to spend the day alone with the Bayaka.
The Bayaka and I leave camp around eight, cross a stream, head up into the
hills, and wander, foraging for wild mushrooms, yams, seasonal fruit, a bark
that tastes like garlic, a bark that serves as an antibiotic, a bark containing qui­
nine, an edible vine in the legume family, a sapling that is said to act like
Viagra-in short, whatever the forest will provide. With Blake, we follow ele­
phant trails and walk purposefully in single file. With the Bayaka we maintain
no consistent direction. My compass becomes useless. I cling to my guides.
My first Bayaka encounter occurred as Blake and I stepped from our
pirogue into the waiting crowd at the riverside. A kindly-looking old Bayaka in
a torn shirt stepped out from the back of the crowd and headed straight for me.
He grasped my hand, stared curiously into my eyes, and wouldn't let go.
"He just wanted to see what kind of a person you are;' Blake explained,
once I'd pried my hand free.
It was almost as if the old Bayaka recognized me. If he had, it wouldn't have
been entirely far-fetched. Douglas Wallace, the geneticist who has made a ca­
reer reconstructing human migrations around the globe through rates of
change in mitochondrial DNA, believes that the Bayaka are descended from a
small group of Paleolithic people who once roamed across eastern Africa. Wal­
lace and several others argue that a population genetically very close to the
present-day Bayaka were the first modern humans to leave Africa some 50,000
years ago. "We are looking at the beginning of what we would call Homo sapi­
ens;' he wrote recently.
In other words, I live in New York, but I'm also the long-lost cousin of the
Bayaka, the depigmented descendant of their ancestors who hiked over the
horizon and never came back-until now.
Strolling through the forest, I've noticed that my cousins appear to be in a
perpetual Wordsworthian idyll; they often gaze dreamily upward, as if contem­
plating the god that has provided them with such sylvan abundance. At one
point, I convey this impression to Blake. He corrects me. "What they're looking
for is not divinity but wild honey. Although, for them, it's pretty much the
same thing."
Sure enough, my day with the Bayaka devolves into a honey hunt. There are
several kinds of wild honey in the forest; one belongs to a stinging bee.
Mossimbo doesn't take long to spot what he takes for a stinging-bee hive high
overhead, sixty feet up, in a hole in a tree branch. The Bayaka rapidly build a
 The Forest Pr imeval 1 �

fire and extinguish it. Mossimbo wraps the coals in a bundle of leaves, straps
the bundle on his back, grabs a machete, and effortlessly shinnies up a liana
along the branchless tree trunk. Soon he's vanished into the foliage, and all we
can hear is his machete hacking into a tree branch. Finally he descends with
two dry honeycombs.
"Chef," he says, drawing on his minimal French for the first time. "C'est
,
ft m.. ,
The hive has been abandoned.
After several more hours of wandering, the Pygmies spot a more accessible
stingless sweat-bee hive, climb the tree, and soon revel in honey that tastes wa­
tery, smoky. I sample it, but to me it's an off-putting soup of bark, twigs, grubs,
and dead and dying bees. I leave it to the Pygmies.
After we leave the hive, the sweat bees pursue us vengefully. We're squatting
down in front of a pile of bush mangoes, shucking the seeds out of the hard­
ened pits, when I'm suddenly overcome with helplessness. A large part of my
frustration comes from the language. Blake is not here to translate my ques­
tions. But I'm not just deprived of speech today; I'm also faced with the fact
that the forest, which is such a source of bounty to the Bayaka, is, to me, an un­
differentiated mass. I don't have the vocabulary to break this environment
down into parts. There's nothing I can parse, nothing I can usefully under­
stand. I'm completely at a loss without words. The Pygmies see that I'm
wilting.
"Papa;' Mossimbo says, affectionately, handing me a mango seed.
By the time we get back to camp, it's thick with tsetse and filaria flies. Tsetse
flies carry sleeping sickness. Filaria flies can deposit the larva of parasitic
worms in a human's bloodstream. (Blake later comes down with fly-borne ele­
phantiasis.) One of the Bantus slaps a tsetse that is feasting on my back, leaving
the dead insect lying in a pool of my blood. I think of what Blake told me when
I'd been bitten earlier by a tsetse. "No one can tell me those flies can't transmit
AIDS. All you need is a few viral cells. We're in the Congo, after all, and the
AIDS problem is huge."
As the afternoon ends, I'm not fit for anything but crawling inside my tent.
The flies disappear at sundown, and I re-emerge for dinner. Smoked fish
again. This time it's served with manioc, a cloying flour made from the tuber­
ous root of the cassava plant. After our meal, the Bayaka pull out djamba­
marijuana-a substance that the Bayaka value only slightly less than wild
honey. As they have on many nights, the Bayaka roll the marijuana in forest
leaves and inhale deeply. Tonight the ensuing hilarity seems greater than usual.
 16 PETER CANBY

Since all the jokes are in Bayaka or Lingala, I ask Blake for explanations. The
Pygmies have asked him if I'm rich, he says. Obligingly, he has told them that I
am the richest man in the world.
"You're their new culture hero," he says.
I try to imagine what might have led the Pygmies to speculate about my
wealth, and remember that, in addition to the Tevas I wear most days (we're
constantly in and out of water), I have two pairs of sneakers, one of which I
haven't even worn. Three pairs of shoes! Extravagant, prodigal-rich.
I retire to my tent and, crawling in, notice that the ground under the tent
floor is blotched with patches of light. I have smoked the djamba, and the tent
floor looks like a city at night seen from an airplane. Until I figure out that it's a
phosphorescent fungus, this vision offers consolation, if only because it re­
minds me that there is a city out there, somewhere in the world. I fall asleep
and have another strange Ndoki dream. A woman appears and teaches me the
supernatural art of being in two places at once.

W E ' v E R E Ac H E D the line of bais stretching from north to south that de­
fines the center of the park's elephant life. The word "bai" is derived from the
French "baie," but it has escaped into local usage to describe a miniature sa­
vanna maintained by forest elephants in the middle of the forest. "If elephants
are lost from an area;' Blake says, " bais quickly grow over."
One afternoon, Blake and I follow the elephant trails to the Bonye River
bai. The bai is big, the size of three football fields, and it's the first open terrain
we've seen since leaving Makao. The afternoon light is soft and golden, playing
on the riffling surface of the river as it winds through the clearing. In the water,
about seventy-five yards away, are nine forest elephants-four adults and five
young, three of them infants. As we watch, an old matriarch ambles out of the
forest, followed by two more young and another adult female. The matriarch
reaches the riverbed, kneels, drills her trunk into the white sand, and gurgles as
she sucks mineral-rich water out of the streambed. When she pulls her trunk
up, she sprays river water into her mouth. Upstream, a wading bird picks at the
riverbed while three red river hogs browse on the marsh grass, trying to avoid
the playful charges of one of the baby elephants. On the far margins a si­
tatunga, with its distinctive wide, splayed feet, feeds quietly.
During the next hour and a half there is a constant coming and going until
we've seen thirty elephants in all. The young ones prance around and engage in
mock fights, and the adults spray themselves and their children, as the sunlight
flashes in the water droplets. Blake looks blissful. He creeps forward to the edge
 The Forest Primeval 17

of the bai, quietly sets up a video camera, pulls out his notebook, and begins
sketching what are the most distinctive and identifying features of individual
elephants: their ears. He'll exchange these later with Andrea Turkalo, a forest­
elephant researcher who is studying the social structures of elephant herds in a
Dzanga Sangha bai across the border in the Central African Republic.
I sit on a fallen tree trunk, relieved, enjoying the light. Elephants are mem­
bers of the ancient, highly successful order of Proboscidea, which, historically,
has contained almost 200 different trunked and tusked species, including
mastodons and mammoths. Beginning 50 million years ago, and as recently as
the late Pleistocene, 10,000 or so years ago, proboscideans roamed the globe.
Mastodons and mammoths grew up to fifteen feet. But there were also pygmy
elephants. (A four-foot-tall elephant, Elephas falconeri, survived on the Greek
island of Tilos until a little over 4,000 years ago. A dwarf mammoth lived on
Wrangel Island off Siberia until 1700 B.c.) Then, toward the end of the Ice Age,
elephants died off en masse, and today only two species survive-the Asian ele­
phant, Elephas maximus, and its bigger cousin, the African elephant, Loxodon ta
africana. Both of these species evolved in Africa, but Elephas moved into Asia
and then became extinct in its home range. Some argue that only then-about
40,000 years ago-did Loxodon ta africana, which had been exclusively a forest
creature, emerge to seize the open savanna.
The mass proboscidean die-off was part of the mysterious and more gen­
eral Pleistocene extinctions. Sometime between 10,000 and 25,000 years ago, all
mammals weighing more than a ton-as well as many lighter than that­
disappeared from Europe, Asia, and the Americas. This is an old story. But the
other story is that some elephants survived-as a miracle, emissaries from the
prehistoric world.

F R O M B o N Y E B A I we head south to Little Bonye bai, Mabale bai, and, ulti­

mately, Mingingi bai, the epicenter of elephant life in the park. Blake points out
the various fruit trees associated with elephant trails. The most conspicuous of
these, he says, is Duboscia macrocarpa, a large tree with an almost gothically
fluted trunk. Virtually every duboscia we see stands at the intersection of
several elephant trails, gracefully alone in a clearing made by fruiting-season
elephant traffic to the tree. Another regular tree along the trails is Omphalo­
carpum elatum, which has fruit growing out of the side of its trunk. The fruit is
encased in a heavy, hard-shelled ball-the size of a medicine ball-which the
elephants like well enough to dislodge by ramming the tree with their heads.
"The importance of fruit trees for forest elephants has only recently been
 1 8 PETER CANBY

acknowledged;' Blake says. "And that's because almost all elephant research has
been based on savanna elephants, which eat very little fruit. In fact, many con­
clusions drawn from savanna-elephant research are simply not applicable to
forest elephants. It's always amazing to me that elephants get lumped in cate­
gories the way they do:'
As we walk, Blake confesses to me his obsession with the rocker Chrissie
Hynde, and in particular with her song "Tattooed Love Boys:' And one
evening, after we arrive in camp, Blake spots Lamba sprawled across his bags.
Blake takes his daypack, lifts it over his head, stands over Lamba as if to hurl it
down, and recites:

Run to the bedroom.

In the suitcase on the left,
You'll find my favorite axe.
Don't look so frightened.
This is j ust a passing phase,
One of my bad days.
Would you like to watch TV?
Or get between the sheets?

Lamba is baffled but, with the rest of the Bayaka, laughs nervously. " 'One
of My Turns; by Pink Floyd;' Blake explains to me. "You never heard The Wall
concert they played in Berlin, did you? There's that whole debate about sta­
dium concerts. I'm not that big a fan of stadium concerts, but that was a great
concert."
As we're ducking under some vines, we see our first snake. It's in the
branches overhead-a big, evil-looking thing nearly five feet long. Blake can't
identify it, but it's not one of the famously poisonous snakes of this region­
not a boomslang, not a black mamba, not one of the several cobras. The Bayaka
give us their name for it, say it's bad, and seem anxious to get away from it.
"Can you imagine how many others we haven't seen?" says Blake.
Shortly afterward we scare a leopard off a fresh-killed duiker. The duiker's
entrails are ripped out, but it's still warm. The Bayaka tie up the duiker and take
it along for our dinner.
We're wading in the sandy shallows of the Mabale River when we discover a
dead baby elephant. It's a gruesome and disturbing sight; the elephant, the size
of a pony but stouter, is half submerged, covered in flies, and leaking blood
from its trunk.
 The Forest Pr imeval 19

At this same spot last evening, we saw one of the elephants Blake had col­
lared two years earlier now standing in the river, still wearing her nonfunction­
ing transmitter. Considering the size of the park, this was quite a coincidence.
And not only did we see her yesterday but we saw her with a young elephant
following close behind her; at the time she was collared, she had been preg­
nant, and this young elephant looked about a year old-the appropriate age.
Now, it seems, that baby is dead.
"Hell of a thing;' says Blake, pacing back and forth. "Hell of a thing." He
picks up the baby elephant's trunk, lets it flop back into the water, and exam­
ines the tiny tusks and the toenails on each foot. He picks up a stiff leg and
turns the little creature over, looking for some telltale sign of what killed it, but
he can't find anything except a group of puncture wounds on the animal's
chest. With snakes on my mind, I suggest that the wounds might be the result
of Gabon-viper bites-and that the elephant may have died of hemolytic
bleeding. Blake is unimpressed but seems distressed that he can't come up with
an explanation. He frets, hovers, pulls out his notebook and takes notes, gets
his video camera and shoots pictures. He is reluctant to leave.
Looking over the little creature, dead of unknown causes, I'm struck again
with a sense of being dead-the idea that this lifeless body could be mine. After
a quarter of an hour, I persuade Blake to give up his forensics, and we start up
a trail--only to turn back ten minutes later. He has decided the puncture
wounds are the result of a leopard attack.
"If we could demonstrate that a leopard could kill a baby elephant, it would
be quite a thing;' he says.
We wade back into the river. Blake pulls out his knife and makes precise in­
cisions along the puncture wounds, two of which go straight through the ele­
phant's chest and into its lungs. A punctured lung could be the source of the
bleeding through the trunk. The elephant could have drowned in its own
blood. Blake's hypothesis about the leopard suddenly seems plausible.
"Hell of a thing. Hell of a thing;' Blake repeats to himself, still agitated, but
in much better spirits now that he's arrived at a theory. It occurs to me that sci­
ence is formidable, and not merely for its accomplishments but because faith
in reason leads people to brave treacherous environments like this one.

W E c A M P A L o N G the Mingingi River, a mile or so below the bai. The day is

sultry, buggy. Thunderclaps rumble across the distant forest, and late in the af­
ternoon we're drenched by a brief downpour. But the weather clears overnight,
 20 PETER CANBY

and I awake at three in the morning to gorilla calls echoing up the valley, ele­
phants trumpeting from the bai above, and moonlight illuminating the side of
my tent.
In the morning we head up to the bai. The approach paths are wide and
parklike, and the landscape has been designed by elephants. They have dug
bathing pools out of the hillsides. The underbrush has been cleared of patches
of forest, and tree trunks are swollen to exotic shapes from elephants having
picked away their bark. We find a meadow surrounding a highly polished ter­
mite nest-an elephant rubbing post surrounded by the marks of heavy traffic
and worn d own so far that it looks somehow like a public monument.
We creep forward toward the edge of the bai, a huge open space of marshy
grassland and isolated clumps of trees. A shower has just passed and the mist is
lifting off the forest all around. Swallows are dipping in the river. A white palm­
nut vulture with its hooked yellow beak is perched on a dead tree limb. A single
bull is drinking from a pool.
Just as we're preparing to walk out into the river, nine bongos-large forest
antelopes-emerge out of the underbrush and wade into the middle of the bai,
tails flicking, sides adorned with vertical white stripes, their celestial-looking
horns curving gracefully skyward.

L A M B A H E A R S what he says is a yellow-backed duiker, the largest of the

duikers. We're beyond Mingingi, in the center of the park. We squat while
Lamba calls. No response. He calls again. A stick snaps. Silence. Lamba calls a
third time. Another stick snaps, off to our right. I wheel around and see two
heads duck quickly behind a termite mound. It's a strange, stealthy gesture.
The heads are humanlike. We're not the only ones stalking; we're being stalked.
Chimpanzees, thinking they're going to find a wounded duiker, have instead
found their nearest primate cousins.
"It's just the lads;' Blake says, "checking us out:'
Along with baboons-and of course humans-chimpanzees are the only
primates who regularly kill other mammals. In Nouabale-Ndoki, chimpanzees
set methodical ambushes for the leaf-eating colobus monkeys and even for
duikers. They also scavenge other meat-including pigs-and Blake tells me
that in the past he has called in chimpanzees by hiding behind tree roots and
making duiker calls.
"When they respond to the duiker call, they come for the kill;' Blake says.
"The males are quite a sight with their tails up and their hair standing on end.
 The Forest Pr imeval 2 1

They come whipping around the tree root, see us, and just deflate. They've
never seen humans before. I 've had one sit and stare at me for five minutes."
In his book The Third Chimpanzee, the physiologist Jared Diamond argues
that humans are close enough to chimpanzees to properly be thought of as a
third chimpanzee species (after chimpanzees and bonobos). The DNA of
chimpanzees is 98.4 percent the same as ours, and of the remaining i.6 percent,
most is insignificant. The meaningful genetic differences could be focused in as
little as one tenth of one percent; they account for the genes that lengthened
our limbs (allowing us to walk upright and use tools) and, more importantly,
altered, as Diamond puts it, "the structure of the larynx, tongue, and associated
muscles that give us fine control over spoken sounds." Indeed, a group of scien­
tists have recently isolated a single gene that may underlie the human ability to
speak. These scientists are presently trying to determine when this gene
evolved. One theory dates it to only 50,000 years ago-around the time the an­
cestral Bayaka left Africa and set out to explore the world.
We're in chimpanzee territory now, and after our stalking encounter we
find signs of chimps everywhere. We hear them pounding on tree trunks and
howling like coyotes out in the forest. We see their skillfully made nests in the
trees and the ingenious traps they've set at termite nests, but we don't see the
chimps themselves. Noticing that I've become preoccupied with spotting a
chimp, Lamba volunteers that the Bayaka make a chimp-hunting charm, but
when I ask him about it he averts his eyes. The next day one of the Bantus
speaks up. "Chef," he says to Blake, "Lamba was lying. There's no chimp­
hunting charm-only a gorilla-hunting charm."
A few nights later, Zonmiputu strips a liana down into fine strands and
dries the strands over the fire. ("It's Manneophyton fulvum, the liana they use
for making hunting nets,'' Blake explains.) Zonmiputu tosses the mass of
shredded vine to Manguso, another of the Bayaka. Taking the mass of vine with
him, just at sunset, Manguso climbs into the lower branches of a tree. He
makes gentle sounds, gorilla sounds-imploring noises, soft exclamations,
sounds of surprise-all the while weaving whatever he's expressing into a rope.
"You do it this way,'' Zonmiputu explains, "so you can get the gorilla up in a
tree."
It's the gorilla-hunting charm.
"Not every Bayaka knows how to make this,'' Blake says to me. "These peo­
ple are disappearing as fast as the elephants, and their knowledge is disappear­
ing with them."
Two days later, I'm wearing the charm bandolier-style across my chest
 2 2 PETER CANBY

when Zonmiputu sees me. He looks alarmed. He's made the gorilla charm for
me, but one of the other Bayaka is supposed to wear it. Such things are sup­
posed to be worn only by initiated Bayaka-but we can't, of course, talk to each
other, and I only learn about this prohibition later. Zonmiputu sends one of
the Bantus to explain that if I come across an elephant, I must take it off. Oth­
erwise the elephant will become mean.
We smell the gorillas before we see them. There's a dusky odor along the
trail. The gorillas are just ahead of us, and apparently they smell us. There's a
loud crash of tree branches, and a silverback barks, then ignominiously flees. A
female with an infant on her back and two juveniles are caught in the trees. For
the next ten minutes, they try to muster the nerve to descend and flee. Eventu­
ally, the mother, the infant, and one of the juveniles make death-defying leaps
to the ground and run off into the underbrush. T he remaining juvenile stays
behind, defiantly pounding his little chest until we move along and leave it in
peace.
"They're in for a shock when the loggers get here," Blake says.

WE' RE Now ouT of the park and in the Pokola logging concession, which
is leased to the German-owned, French-managed company Congolaise Indus­
trielle des Bois (CIB). Blake, who was jubilant while in the forest, now seems
depressed.
"Our wilderness walk is over as far as I'm concerned;' he says. "We're now
in the realm of man."
The prospecting line, however, is only the first sign of what Blake refers to
as the park's "biggest land management issue"-industrial logging. CIB now
has the rights to two of the three concessions surrounding the park, and over
the next twenty years the entire forest surrounding the park will be selectively
logged. What this means, Blake says, is that in twenty years the only intact for­
est in the north of Congo will be Nouabale-Ndoki.
Logging itself is not the most dangerous threat to wildlife. Loggers in the
region generally confine themselves to removing only two species of African
mahogany that bring high enough prices on the European market to justify the
expense of transporting them. (A single African mahogany log might bring
$4,000 on the dock at a European port.) The additional light brought to the
forest floor as trees come down may even promote the growth of ground ferns
favored by many large mammals, including elephants, and logging may in­
crease densities of certain animals. But by building roads, bringing in thou­

sands of foreign workers, and creating a cash economy, logging has invariably
 The Forest Pr imeval 23

led to uncontrolled killing of animals-poaching. CIB is working with the

Wildlife Conservation Society and the Congolese government to develop
wildlife management within logging concessions and to control poaching, but
it remains an ominous situation.
"The big issue," Blake told me, "is for the logging companies to take respon­
sibility for hunting in their concessions. It's not a feasible argument for us to
say they shouldn't be here-Congo needs revenue, and we'd be laughed out of
the country. Controls on hunting, the prohibition on the export of bushmeat,
and the importation of beef or some other source of protein are about the ex­
tent of our demands on the company."

W E D E s c E N D the Bodingo peninsula, an elevated ridge of land south of the

park's border that runs down into the Likouala aux Herbes swamps. We soon
discover that more than a prospecting line has been cut through the forest. CIB
has surveyed much of the peninsula, marking off the commercially valuable
trees with stakes in the ground. The prospectors appear to have been accompa­
nied by a party of Pygmy hunters. We see abandoned snares and places where
trapped animals have struggled to free themselves by digging holes in the
ground and raking trees with their claws in attempts to escape.
The forest has been cut up in a grid, letting in light, leaving it curiously
thin. Taking in the devastation around us, I realize that what's lost when a for­
est is cut is the weight of evolutionary history, the whole sequence of life, all the
voices that the Bayaka can still understand-the voices that existed in nature
before we other primates found a way to describe, and circumscribe, the world
around us.
Blake is studying an African mahogany that's been marked for harvest. Its
dense trunk, which is ten feet in diameter and has oaklike bark, soars upward
toward the canopy. "That tree may be 900 years old;' he says. "Soon it will be
gone. Just like that."
We continue down the peninsula and launch off into the swamps. Tsetse
flies are in evidence, along with sword grass, thorn forest, army ants. We sprint
through the ant columns. We sleep on patches of raised earth, bathe in mud
puddles, and drink coffee-colored water out of stagnant pools. One day Lamba
finds a greenish-water-filled excavation-the home, he explains, of an African
dwarf crocodile. He squats down and makes a birdlike sound. Soon eight little
crocodile heads nervously broach the algae-green surface, their elevated eyes
popping up like bubbles.
I am walking behind Zonmiputu when I look up and spy a spider the size of
 24 PET ER C A N B Y

a dessert plate crawling up his back toward his hair and his collar. "Putus!" I
shout, using his nickname. Zonmiputu freezes. This is distressing. Zonmiputu
is supposed to be invulnerable. I run up behind him, intending to brush the
spider off. But the spider has a furrowed, lethal-looking body and strong hairy
legs that are tensing as if it is preparing to leap. I grab a stick and whisk the spi­
der into the bushes. Zonmiputu turns around, looks at my spider pantomime,
grimaces, shudders, and hurries back along the trail.
In Nouabale-Ndoki there is always the unnerving sensation that something
is watching you. A mongoose creeps through the underbrush; a tree snake
twirls along a branch. Today, as we scramble over root snarls, plunge thigh­
deep through pools of mud, and approach Terre de Kabounga, the end of our
walk, we come across the fresh trail of a crocodile and then hit something that
really stops us: a human footprint in the mud. It's so fresh that it's still filling
with water. Someone has spotted us, and he's hiding.
The Bayaka find the trail and follow it. We hit dry land and soon hear a
woman singing, a meandering, flutelike voice. A tall, graceful Bantu woman,
clad in brightly colored wax-print African fabrics, her hair in cornrows, is gath­
ering firewood and, though she has seen us, defiantly continues her song. Be­
fore long a husband emerges. He's a square-shouldered, handsome man, the
schoolteacher, he tells us, from the nearby town of Bene. He hasn't been paid in
three years, so he closed down the school and left his students, the future of
Africa, to fend for themselves. He moved out into the swamps, along with a
good part of the rest of this region's shattered population, to smoke fish and
hunt bushmeat.
We follow the schoolteacher and his wife to their camp. It's filled with fish
and hung with shotguns. Other relatives come out of the forest to stare at us in
wonder. They direct us to a path that leads, an hour later, to the cut-over edge
of the forest. We emerge onto a red-clay road, blinking and squinting in the
harsh, flat light of the open road. The heat, unfiltered by the forest, hits like a
blast furnace. We shake hands in a gesture of shared congratulation, but the tri­
umph feels hollow. We've been dreaming of the human world, but now that
we've arrived it's disorienting.
We walk for hours. Late that afternoon a big, flatbed Mercedes drives up.
The driver is so drunk he can barely stand. The ten of us find space in back
among twenty-seven other passengers, sacks of manioc tubers, baskets of
smoked fish, mounds of edible leaves, and the carcasses of several dead duikers.
Soon we're being carried off toward the logging town of Pokola at such high
speeds that at times the big truck seems to go airborne. I offer a silent prayer
that, having survived a month in the forest, I won't be killed in a car crash.
 The Forest Pr imeval 2 _s-

A decade ago, Pokola was a tiny fishing village on the Sangha River. It's now
a sprawling shantytown built of scrap mahogany. In its busy market, the
Bayaka spend their pay outfitting themselves in bright sports clothes until they
look, in Blake's words, "like Cameroonian soccer stars." Blake and I drink wine
with the French logging managers inside their fenced-off compound. I pull the
tick out of my nose. Before I know it, I 'm back in New York, where I am treated
for schistosomiasis, amoebic dysentery, and whipworms.

B L A K E ' s N I N T H A N D last "long walk" capped the first phase of his doc­
toral research and gave him the data to begin writing his thesis. Since our trip
he has returned to the interior of Nouabale-Ndoki several times to collar more
elephants and collect data to support his argument that by disseminating the
seeds of forest-fruit trees, elephants play a crucial role in the evolution of Cen­
tral African forests.
But in the interim, civil war has broken out again, and Blake reports that
since our trip all of the remaining concessions in the north of Congo have been
leased to logging companies. A new sawmill is being built north of the park,
and a logging road now runs straight into Makao. Another road cuts across the
Bodingo peninsula close to the park's southern border. The place where we saw
the gorillas, Blake reports, is already a lacework of logging trails. "The civil war
was a disaster for the country," he says. "If there'd never been a civil war, the
government might have been more open to conservation. Now development
and reconstruction have become the country's highest priority.
"In many ways," he says, "what we saw is already gone:'
 C H AR L E S C . M A N N

149 1
F R O M THE A TLA N TI C M O N TH L Y

Recent research into the natural history ef the pre-C olumbian Americas is
turnin9 up some provocativefindin9s about the size ef the Indian popula­
tion and the sophistication ef its culture. A 9roup ef archaeolo9ists and an­
thropolo9ists is threatenin9 to overturn many cherished ideas about the
Indians' civilization-and creatin9 controversy in the process, as Charles
C. Mannfinds out.

he plane took off in weather that was surprisingly cool for north­

T central Bolivia and flew east, toward the Brazilian border. In a few
minutes the roads and houses disappeared, and the only evidence of
human settlement was the cattle scattered over the savannah like jimmies on
ice cream. Then they, too, disappeared. By that time the archaeologists had
their cameras out and were clicking away in delight.
Below us was the Beni, a Bolivian province about the size of Illinois and In­
diana put together, and nearly as flat. For almost half the year rain and
snowmelt from the mountains to the south and west cover the land with an ir­
regular, slowly moving skin of water that eventually ends up in the province's
northern rivers, which are sub-subtributaries of the Amazon. The rest of the
year the water dries up and the bright-green vastness turns into something that
resembles a desert. This peculiar, remote, watery plain was what had drawn the
researchers' attention, and not just because it was one of the few places on
 149 1 27

earth inhabited by people who might never have seen Westerners with cam­
eras.
Clark Erickson and William Balee, the archaeologists, sat up front. Erick­
son is based at the University of Pennsylvania; he works in concert with a Boli­
vian archaeologist, whose seat in the plane I usurped that day. Balee is at Tulane
University, in New Orleans. He is actually an anthropologist, but as native peo­
ples have vanished, the distinction between anthropologists and archaeologists
has blurred. The two men differ in build, temperament, and scholarly procliv­
ity, but they pressed their faces to the windows with identical enthusiasm.
Dappled across the grasslands below was an archipelago of forest islands,
many of them startlingly round and hundreds of acres across. Each island rose
ten or thirty or sixty feet above the floodplain, allowing trees to grow that
would otherwise never survive the water. The forests were linked by raised
berms, as straight as a rifle shot and up to three miles long. It is Erickson's belief
that this entire landscape-30,000 square miles of forest mounds surrounded
by raised fields and linked by causeways-was constructed by a complex, pop­
ulous society more than 2,000 years ago. Balee, newer to the Beni, leaned to­
ward this view but was not yet ready to commit himself.
Erickson and Balee belong to a cohort of scholars that has radically chal­
lenged conventional notions of what the Western Hemisphere was like before
Columbus. When I went to high school, in the 1970s, I was taught that Indians
came to the Americas across the Bering Strait about 12,000 years ago, that they
lived for the most part in small, isolated groups, and that they had so little im­
pact on their environment that even after millennia of habitation it remained
mostly wilderness. My son picked up the same ideas at his schools. One way to
summarize the views of people like Erickson and Balee would be to say that in
their opinion this picture of Indian life is wrong in almost every aspect. Indians
were here far longer than previously thought, these researchers believe, and in
much greater numbers. And they were so successful at imposing their will on
the landscape that in 1492 Columbus set foot in a hemisphere thoroughly dom­
inated by humankind.
Given the charged relations between white societies and native peoples, in­
quiry into Indian culture and history is inevitably contentious. But the recent
scholarship is especially controversial. To begin with, some researchers-many
but not all from an older generation-deride the new theories as fantasies aris­
ing from an almost willful misinterpretation of data and a perverse kind of po­
litical correctness. "I have seen no evidence that large numbers of people ever
lived in the Beni;' says Betty J. Meggers, of the Smithsonian Institution.
"Claiming otherwise is just wishful thinking." Similar criticisms apply to many
 28 CHARLES C. MANN

of the new scholarly claims about Indians, according to Dean R. Snow, an an­
thropologist at Pennsylvania State University. The problem is that "you can
make the meager evidence from the ethnohistorical record tell you anything
you want;' he says. "It's really easy to kid yourself."
More important are the implications of the new theories for today's ecolog­
ical battles. Much of the environmental movement is animated, consciously or
not, by what William Denevan, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin,
calls, polemically, "the pristine myth"-the belief that the Americas in 1491
were an almost unmarked, even Edenic land, "untrammeled by man," in the
words of the Wilderness Act of 1964, one of the nation's first and most impor­
tant environmental laws. As the University of Wisconsin historian William
Cronon has written, restoring this long-ago, putatively natural state is, in the
view of environmentalists, a task that society is morally bound to undertake.
Yet if the new view is correct and the work of humankind was pervasive, where
does that leave efforts to restore nature?
The Beni is a case in point. In addition to building up the Beni mounds for
houses and gardens, Erickson says, the Indians trapped fish in the seasonally
flooded grassland. Indeed, he says, they fashioned dense zigzagging networks
of earthen fish weirs between the causeways. To keep the habitat clear of un­
wanted trees and undergrowth, they regularly set huge areas on fire. Over the
centuries the burning created an intricate ecosystem of fire-adapted plant
species dependent on native pyrophilia. The current inhabitants of the Beni
still burn, although now it is to maintain the savannah for cattle. When we flew
over the area, the dry season had just begun, but mile-long lines of flame were
already on the march. In the charred areas behind the fires were the blackened
spikes of trees-many of them, one assumes, of the varieties that activists fight
to save in other parts of Amazonia.
After we landed, I asked Balee, Should we let people keep burning the Beni?
Or should we let the trees invade and create a verdant tropical forest in the
grasslands, even if one had not existed here for millennia?
Balee laughed. "You're trying to trap me, aren't you?" he said.

L i ke a Club Between the Eyes

A C C O R D I N G TO F A M I LY L O R E , my great-grandmother's great­
grandmother's great-grandfather was the first white person hanged in Amer­
ica. His name was John Billington. He came on the Mayflower, which anchored
off the coast of Massachusetts on November 9, 1620. Billington was not a Puri­
tan; within six months of arrival he also became the first white person in
America to be tried for complaining about the police. " He is a knave," William
Bradford, the colony's governor, wrote of Billington, "and so will live and die."
What one historian called Billington's "troublesome career" ended in 1630,
when he was hanged for murder. My family has always said that he was
framed-but we would say that, wouldn't we?
A few years ago it occurred to me that my ancestor and everyone else in the
colony had voluntarily enlisted in a venture that brought them to New England
without food or shelter six weeks befo re winter. Half the 102 people on the
Mayflower made it through to spring, which to me was amazing. How, I won­
dered, did they survive?
In his history of Plymouth Colony, Bradford provided the answer: by rob­
bing Indian houses and graves. The Mayflower first hove to at Cape Cod. An
armed company staggered out. Eventually it found a recently deserted Indian
settlement. The newcomers-hungry, cold, sick-dug up graves and ransacked
houses, looking for underground stashes of corn. "And sure it was God's good
providence that we found this corn:' Bradford wrote, "for else we know not
how we should have done." (He felt uneasy about the thievery, though.) When
the colonists came to Plymouth, a month later, they set up shop in another de­
serted Indian village. All through the coastal forest the Indians had "died on
heapes, as they lay in their houses;' the English trader Thomas Morton noted.
"And the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations made
such a spectacle" that to Morton the Massachusetts woods seemed to be "a new
found Golgotha"-the hill of executions in Roman Jerusalem.
To the Pilgrims' astonishment, one of the corpses they exhumed on Cape
Cod had blond hair. A French ship had been wrecked there several years earlier.
The Patuxet Indians imprisoned a few survivors. One of them supposedly
learned enough of the local language to inform his captors that God would de­
stroy them for their misdeeds. The Patuxet scoffed at the threat. But the Euro­
peans carried a disease, and they bequeathed it to their jailers. The epidemic
(probably of viral hepatitis, according to a study by Arthur E. Spiess, an archae­
ologist at the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, and Bruce D. Spiess,
the director of clinical research at the Medical College of Virginia) took years
to exhaust itself and may have killed 90 percent of the people in coastal New
England. It made a huge difference to American history. " The good hand of
God favored our beginnings;' Bradford mused, by "sweeping away great multi­
tudes of the natives . . . that he might make room for us."
By the time my ancestor set sail on the Mayflower, Europeans had been vis­
iting New England for more than a hundred years. English, French, Italian,
Spanish, and Portuguese mariners regularly plied the coastline, trading what
 CHARLES C . MAN N

they could, occasionally kidnapping the inhabitants for slaves. New England,
the Europeans saw, was thickly settled and well defended. In 1605 and 1606
Samuel de Champlain visited Cape Cod, hoping to establish a French base. He
abandoned the idea. Too many people already lived there. A year later Sir Ferdi­
nando Gorges-British despite his name-tried to establish an English com­
munity in southern Maine. It had more founders than Plymouth and seems to
have been better organized. Confronted by numerous well-armed local Indi­
ans, the settlers abandoned the project within months. The Indians at Ply­
mouth would surely have been an equal obstacle to my ancestor and his
ramshackle expedition had disease not intervened.

FAcE D w I T H such stories, historians have long wondered how many people
lived in the Americas at the time of contact. "Debated since Columbus at­
tempted a partial census on Hispaniola in 1496;' Will i am Denevan has written,
this "remains one of the great inquiries of history." (In 1976 Denevan assembled
and edited an entire book on the subject, The Native Population of the Americas
in 1492.) The first scholarly estimate of the indigenous population was made in
1910 by James Mooney, a distinguished ethnographer at the Smithsonian Insti­
tution. Combing through old documents, he concluded that in 1491 North
America had 1.15 million inhabitants. Mooney's glittering reputation ensured
that most subsequent researchers accepted his figure uncritically.
That changed in 1966, when Henry F. Dobyns published "Estimating Aborig­
inal American Population: An Appraisal of Techniques with a New Hemispheric
Estimate;' in the journal Current Anthropology. Despite the carefully neutral title,
his argument was thunderous, its impact long-lasting. In the view of James
Wilson, the author of The Earth Shall Weep ( 1998 ), a history of indigenous Amer­
icans, Dobyns's colleagues "are still struggling to get out of the crater that paper
left in anthropology:' Not only anthropologists were affected. Dobyns's estimate
proved to be one of the opening rounds in today's culture wars.
Dobyns began his exploration of pre-Columbian Indian demography in
the early 1950s, when he was a graduate student. At the invitation of a friend, he
spent a few months in northern Mexico, which is full of Spanish-era missions.
There he poked through the crumbling leather-bound ledgers in which Jesuits
recorded local births and deaths. Right away he noticed how many more deaths
there were. The Spaniards arrived, and then Indians died-in huge numbers, at
incredible rates. It hit him, Dobyns told me recently, "like a dub right between
the eyes."
It took Dobyns eleven years to obtain his Ph.D. Along the way he joined a
 149 1 ] I

rural-development project in Peru, which until colonial times was the seat of
the Incan empire. Remembering what he had seen at the northern fringe of the
Spanish conquest, Dobyns decided to compare it with figures for the south. He
burrowed into the papers of the Lima cathedral and read apologetic Spanish
histories. The Indians in Peru, Dobyns concluded, had faced plagues from the
day the conquistadors showed up--in fact, before then: smallpox arrived
around 1525, seven years ahead of the Spanish. Brought to Mexico apparently
by a single sick Spaniard, it swept south and eliminated more than half the
population of the Incan empire. Smallpox claimed the Incan dictator Huayna
Capac and much of his family, setting off a calamitous war of succession. So
complete was the chaos that Francisco Pizarro was able to seize an empire the
size of Spain and Italy combined with a force of 168 men.
Smallpox was only the first epidemic. Typhus (probably) in 1546, influenza
and smallpox together in 1558, smallpox again in 1589, diphtheria in 1614,
measles in 1618-all ravaged the remains of Incan culture. Dobyns was the first
social scientist to piece together this awful picture, and he naturally rushed his
findings into print. Hardly anyone paid attention. But Dobyns was already
working on a second, related question: If all those people died, how many had
been living there to begin with? Before Columbus, Dobyns calculated, the
Western Hemisphere held 90 to 112 milli on people. Another way of saying this
is that in 1491 more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.
His argument was simple but horrific. It is well known that Native Ameri­
cans had no experience with many European diseases and were therefore im­
munologically unprepared-"virgin soil;' in the metaphor of epidemiologists.
What Dobyns realized was that such diseases could have swept from the coast­
lines initially visited by Europeans to inland areas controlled by Indians who
had never seen a white person. The first whites to explore many parts of the
Americas may therefore have encountered places that were already depopu­
lated. Indeed, Dobyns argued, they must have done so.
Peru was one example, the Pacific Northwest another. In 1792 the British
navigator George Vancouver led the first European expedition to survey Puget
Sound. He found a vast charnel house: human remains "promiscuously scat­
tered about the beach, in great numbers." Smallp ox, Vancouver's crew discov­
ered, had preceded them. Its few survivors, second lieutenant Peter Puget
noted, were "most terribly pitted . . . indeed many have lost their Eyes." In Pox
Americana (2001) , Elizabeth Fenn, a historian at George Washington Univer­
sity, contends that the disaster on the northwest coast was but a small part of a
continental pandemic that erupted near Boston in 1774 and cut down Indians
from Mexico to Alaska.
 32 CHAR LES c . MAN N

Because smallpox was not endemic in the Americas, colonials, too, had not
acquired any immunity. The virus, an equal-opportunity killer, swept through
the Continental Army and stopped the drive into Quebec. The American Revo­
lution would be lost, Washington and other rebel leaders feared, if the conta­
gion did to the colonists what it had done to the Indians. "The small Pox! The
small Pox! " John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail. "What shall We do with it?"
In retrospect, Fenn says, "One of George Washington's most brilliant moves
was to inoculate the army against smallpox during the Valley Forge winter of
'78:' Without inoculation smallpox could easily have given the United States
back to the British.
So many epidemics occurred in the Americas, Dobyns argued, that the old
data used by Mooney and his successors represented population nadirs. From
the few cases in which before-and-after totals are known with relative cer­
tainty, Dobyns estimated that in the first 130 years of contact about 95 percent
of the people in the Americas died-the worst demographic calamity in
recorded history.
Dobyns's ideas were quickly attacked as politically motivated, a push from
the hate-America crowd to inflate the toll of imperialism. The attacks continue
to this day. "No question about it, some people want those higher numbers,"
says Shepard Krech III, a Brown University anthropologist who is the author of
The Ecological Indian (1999 ) . These people, he says, were thrilled when Dobyns
revisited the subject in a book, Their Numbers Become Thinned (1983)-and re­
vised his own estimates upward. Perhaps Dobyns's most vehement critic is
David Henige, a bibliographer of Africana at the University of Wisconsin,
whose Numbers from Nowhere (1998) is a landmark in the literature of demo­
graphic fulmination. "Suspect in 1966, it is no less suspect nowadays;' Henige
wrote of Dobyns's work. "If anything, it is worse."
When Henige wrote Numbers from Nowhere, the fight about pre­
Columbian populations had already consumed forests' worth of trees; his bib­
liography is ninety pages long. And the dispute shows no sign of abating. More
and more people have jumped in. This is partly because the subject is inher­
ently fascinating. But more likely the increased interest in the debate is due to
the growing realization of the high political and ecological stakes.

ln ven t i n9 by t h e Milli ons

0 N M AY 3 o , 1 5 3 9 , Hernando de Soto landed his private army near

Tampa Bay, in Florida. Soto, as he was called, was a novel figure: half warrior,
half venture capitalist. He had grown very rich very young by becoming a mar-
 149 1 33

ket leader in the nascent trade for Indian slaves. The profits had helped to fund
Pizarro's seizure of the Incan empire, which had made Soto wealthier still.
Looking quite literally for new worlds to conquer, he persuaded the Spanish
Crown to let him loose in North America. He spent one fortune to make an­
other. He came to Florida with 200 horses, 600 soldiers, and 300 pigs.
From today's perspective, it is difficult to imagine the ethical system that
would justify Soto's actions. For four years his force, looking for gold, wan­
dered through what is now Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Ten­
nessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas, wrecking almost everything
it touched. The inhabitants often fought back vigorously, but they had never
before encountered an army with horses and guns. Soto died of fever with his
expedition in ruins; along the way his men had managed to rape, torture, en­
slave, and kill countless Indians. But the worst thing the Spaniards did, some
researchers say, was entirely without malice-bring the pigs.
According to Charles Hudson, an anthropologist at the University of Geor­
gia who spent fifteen years reconstructing the path of the expedition, Soto
crossed the Mississippi a few miles downstream from the present site of Mem­
phis. It was a nervous passage: the Spaniards were watched by several thousand
Indian warriors. Utterly without fear, Soto brushed past the Indian force into
what is now eastern Arkansas, through thickly settled land-"very well peo­
pled with large towns:' one of his men later recalled, "two or three of which
were to be seen from one town." Eventually the Spaniards approached a cluster
of small cities, each protected by earthen walls, sizeable moats, and deadeye
archers. In his usual fashion, Soto brazenly marched in, stole food, and
marched out.
After Soto left, no Europeans v isited this part of the Mississippi Valley for
more than a century. Early in 1682 whites appeared again, this time Frenchmen
in canoes. One of them was Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle. The
French passed through the area where Soto had found cities cheek by jowl. It
was deserted-La Salle didn't see an Indian village for 200 miles. About fifty
settlements existed in this strip of the Mississippi when Soto showed up, ac­
cording to Anne Ramenofsky, an anthropologist at the University of New Mex­
ico. By La Salle's time the number had shrunk to perhaps ten, some probably
inhabited by recent immigrants. Soto "had a privileged glimpse" of an Indian
world, Hudson says. "The window opened and slammed shut. When the
French came in and the record opened up again, it was a transformed reality. A
civilization crumbled. The question is, how did this happen? "
The question i s even more complex than it may seem. Disaster o f this mag­
nitude suggests epidemic disease. In the view of Ramenofsky and Patricia Gal-
 34 CHAR LES C . MAN N

loway, an anthropologist at the University of Texas, the source of the contagion

was very likely not Soto's army but its ambulatory meat locker: his 300 pigs.
Soto's force itself was too small to be an effective biological weapon. Sicknesses
like measles and smallpox would have burned through his 600 soldiers long
before they reached the Mississippi. But the same would not have held true for
the pigs, which multiplied rapidly and were able to transmit their diseases to
wildlife in the surrounding forest. When human beings and domesticated ani­
mals live close together, they trade microbes with abandon. Over time muta­
tion spawns new diseases: avian influenza becomes human influenza, bovine
rinderpest becomes measles. Unlike Europeans, Indians did not live in close
quarters with animals-they domesticated only the dog, the llama, the alpaca,
the guinea pig, and, here and there, the turkey and the Muscovy duck. In some
ways this is not surprising: the New World had fewer animal candidates for
taming than the Old. Moreover, few Indians carry the gene that permits adults
to digest lactose, a form of sugar abundant in milk. Non-milk-drinkers, one
imagines, would be less likely to work at domesticating milk-giving animals.
But this is guesswork. The fact is that what scientists call zoonotic disease was
little known in the Americas. Swine alone can disseminate anthrax, brucellosis,
leptospirosis, taeniasis, trichinosis, and tuberculosis. Pigs breed exuberantly
and can transmit diseases to deer and turkeys. Only a few of Soto's pigs would
have had to wander off to infect the forest.
Indeed, the calamity wrought by Soto apparently extended across the
whole Southeast. The Coosa city-states, in western Georgia, and the Caddoan­
speaking civilization, centered on the Texas-Arkansas border, disintegrated
soon after Soto appeared. The Caddo had had a taste for monumental architec­
ture: public plazas, ceremonial platforms, mausoleums. After Soto's army left,
notes Timothy K. Perttula, an archaeological consultant in Austin, Texas, the
Caddo stopped building community centers and began digging community
cemeteries. Between Soto's and La Salle's visits, Perttula believes, the Caddoan
population fell from about 200,000 to about 8,500-a drop of nearly 96 per­
cent. In the eighteenth century the tally shrank further, to 1,400. An equivalent
loss today in the population of New York City would reduce it to 56,000-not
enough to fill Yankee Stadium. "That's one reason whites think of Indians as
nomadic hunters," says Russell Thornton, an anthropologist at the University
of California at Los Angeles. "Everything else-all the heavily populated ur­
banized societies-was wiped out."
Could a few pigs truly wreak this much destruction? Such apocalyptic sce­
narios invite skepticism. As a rule, viruses, microbes, and parasites are rarely
lethal on so wide a scale-a pest that wipes out its host species does not have a
 149 1 H

bright evolutionary future. In its worst outbreak, from 1347 to 1351, the Euro­
pean Black Death claimed only a third of its victims. (The rest survived,
though they were often disfigured or crippled by its effects.) The Indians in
Soto's path, if Dobyns, Ramenofsky, and Perttula are correct, endured losses
that were incomprehensibly greater.
One reason is that Indians were fresh territory for many plagues, not just
one. Smallpox, typhoid, bubonic plague, influenza, mumps, measles, whoop­
ing cough-all rained down on the Americas in the century after Columbus.
(Cholera, malaria, and scarlet fever came later.) Having little experience with
epidemic diseases, Indians had no knowledge of how to combat them. In con­
trast, Europeans were well versed in the brutal logic of quarantine. They
boarded up houses in which plague appeared and fled to the countryside. In
Indian New England, Neal Salisbury, a historian at Smith College, wrote in
Manitou and Providence (1982) , family and friends gathered with the shaman at
the sufferer's bedside to wait out the illness-a practice that "could only have
served to spread the disease more rapidly:'
Indigenous biochemistry may also have played a role. The immune system
constantly scans the body for molecules that it can recognize as foreign­
molecules belonging to an invading virus, for instance. No one's immune sys­
tem can identify all foreign presences. Roughly speaking, an individual's set of
defensive tools is known as his MHC type. Because many bacteria and viruses
mutate easily, they usually attack in the form of several slightly different
strains. Pathogens win when MHC types miss some of the strains and the im­
mune system is not stimulated to act. Most human groups contain many MHC
types; a strain that slips by one person's defenses will be nailed by the defenses
of the next. But, according to Francis L. Black, an epidemiologist at Yale Uni­
versity, Indians are characterized by unusually homogenous MHC types. One
out of three South American Indians have similar MHC types; among Africans
the corresponding figure is one in 200. The cause is a matter for Darwinian
speculation, the effects less so.
In 1966 Dobyns's insistence on the role of disease was a shock to his col­
leagues. Today the impact of European pathogens on the New World is almost
undisputed. Nonetheless, the fight over Indian numbers continues with undi­
minished fervor. Estimates of the population of North America in 1491 disagree
by an order of magnitude-from 18 million, Dobyns's revised figure, to i.8 mil­
lion, calculated by Douglas H. Ubelaker, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian.
To some "high counters;' as David Henige calls them, the low counters' refusal
to relinquish the vision of an empty continent is irrational or worse. "Non­
Indian 'experts' always want to minimize the size of aboriginal populations,"
 36 CHARLES c . MANN

says Lenore Stiffarm, a Native American-education specialist at the University

of Saskatchewan. The smaller the numbers of Indians, she believes, the easier it
is to regard the continent as having been up for grabs. "It's perfectly acceptable
to move into unoccupied land;' Stiffarm says. ''And land with only a few 'sav­
ages' is the next best thing."
"Most of the arguments for the very large numbers have been theoretical,"
Ubelaker says in defense of low counters. "When you try to marry the theoreti­
cal arguments to the data that are available on individual groups in different
regions, it's hard to find support for those numbers." Archaeologists, he says,
keep searching for the settlements in which those millions of people suppos­
edly lived, with little success. ''As more and more excavation is done, one would
expect to see more evidence for dense populations than has thus far emerged."
Dean Snow, the Pennsylvania State anthropologist, examined Colonial-era
Mohawk Iroquois sites and found "no support for the notion that ubiquitous
pandemics swept the region." In his view, asserting that the continent was fill ed
with people who left no trace is like looking at an empty bank account and
claiming that it must once have held millions of dollars.
The low counters are also troubled by the Dobynsian procedure for recov­
ering original population numbers: applying an assumed death rate, usually 95
percent, to the observed population nadir. Ubelaker believes that the lowest
point for Indians in North America was around 1900, when their numbers fell
to about half a million. Assuming a 95 percent death rate, the pre-contact pop­
ulation would have been 10 million. Go up one percent, to a 96 percent death
rate, and the figure jumps to 12.5 million-arithmetically creating more than
two million people from a tiny increase in mortality rates. At 98 percent the
number bounds to 25 million. Minute changes in baseline assumptions pro­
duce wildly different results.
"It's an absolutely unanswerable question on which tens of thousands of
words have been spent to no purpose;' Henige says. In 1976 he sat in on a semi­
nar by William Denevan, the Wisconsin geographer. An "epiphanic moment"
occurred when he read shortly afterward that scholars had "uncovered" the ex­
istence of eight million people in Hispaniola. Can you just invent millions of
people? he wondered. "We can make of the historical record that there was de­
population and movement of people from internecine warfare and diseases;'
he says. "But as for how much, who knows? When we start putting numbers to
something like that-applying large figures like ninety-five percent-we're
saying things we shouldn't say. The number implies a level of knowledge that's
impossible."
Nonetheless, one must try-or so Denevan believes. In his estimation the
 149 1 3 7

high counters (though not the highest counters) seem to be winning the argu­
ment, at least for now. No definitive data exist, he says, but the majority of the
extant evidentiary scraps support their side. Even Henige is no low counter.
When I asked him what he thought the population of the Americas was before
Columbus, he insisted that any answer would be speculation and made me
promise not to print what he was going to say next. Then he named a figure
that forty years ago would have caused a commotion.
To Elizabeth Fenn, the smallpox historian, the squabble over numbers ob­
scures a central fact. Whether one million or 10 million or 100 million died, she
believes, the pall of sorrow that engulfed the hemisphere was immeasurable.
Languages, prayers, hopes, habits, and dreams-entire ways of life hissed away
like steam. The Spanish and the Portuguese lacked the germ theory of disease
and could not explain what was happening ( let alone stop it) . Nor can we ex­
plain it; the ruin was too long ago and too all-encompassing. In the long run,
Fenn says, the consequential finding is not that many people died but that
many people once lived. The Americas were filled with a stunningly diverse as­
sortment of peoples who had knocked about the continents for millennia. "You
have to wonder;' Fenn says. "What were all those people up to in all that time?"

B riflalo Farm

I N 1 8 1 0 H E N R Y B R A C K E N R I D G E came to Cahokia, in what is now

southwest Illinois, just across the Mississippi from St. Louis. Born close to the
frontier, Brackenridge was a budding adventure writer; his Views of Louisiana,
published three years later, was a kind of nineteenth-century Into Thin Air,
with terrific adventure but without tragedy. Brackenridge had an eye for ar­
chaeology, and he had heard that Cahokia was worth a visit. When he got there,
trudging along the desolate Cahokia River, he was "struck with a degree of as­
tonishment:' Rising from the muddy bottomland was a "stupendous pile of
earth,'' vaster than the Great Pyramid at Giza. Around it were more than a hun­
dred smaller mounds, covering an area of five square miles. At the time, the
area was almost uninhabited. One can only imagine what passed through
Brackenridge's mind as he walked alone to the ruins of the biggest Indian city
north of the Rio Grande.
To Brackenridge, it seemed clear that Cahokia and the many other ruins in
the Midwest had been constructed by Indians. It was not so clear to everyone
else. Nineteenth-century writers attributed them to, among others, the
Vikings, the Chinese, the " Hindoos,'' the ancient Greeks, the ancient Egyptians,
lost tribes of Israelites, and even straying bands of Welsh. (This last claim was
 38 CHAR LES C. MAN N

surprisingly widespread; when Lewis and Clark surveyed the Missouri, Jeffer­
son told them to keep an eye out for errant bands of Welsh-speaking white In­
dians. ) The historian George Bancroft, dean of his profession, was a dissenter:
the earthworks, he wrote in 1840, were purely natural formations.
Bancroft changed his mind about Cahokia, but not about Indians. To the
end of his days he regarded them as "feeble barbarians, destitute of commerce
and of political connection." His characterization lasted, largely unchanged, for
more than a century. Samuel Eliot Morison, the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes,
closed his monumental European Discovery ofAmerica (1974) with the observa­
tion that Native Americans expected only "short and brutish lives, void of hope
for any future." As late as 1987 American History: A Survey, a standard high
school textbook by three well-known historians, described the Americas before
Columbus as "empty of mankind and its works." The story of Europeans in the
New World, the book explained, "is the story of the creation of a civilization
where none existed."
Alfred Crosby, a historian at the University of Texas, came to other conclu­
sions. Crosby's The Columbian Exchange: Biological Consequences of 1492
caused almost as much of a stir when it was published, in 1972, as Henry
Dobyns's calculation of Indian numbers six years earlier, though in different
circles. Crosby was a standard names-and-battles historian who became frus­
trated by the random contingency of political events. "Some trivial thing hap­
pens and you have this guy winning the presidency instead of that guy;' he says.
He decided to go deeper. After he finished his manuscript, it sat on his shelf­
he couldn't find a publisher willing to be associated with his new ideas. It took
him three years to persuade a small editorial house to put it out. The
Columbian Exchange has been in print ever since; a companion, Ecological Im­
perialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900- 1900, appeared in 1986.
Human history, in Crosby's interpretation, is marked by two world-altering
centers of invention: the Middle East and central Mexico, where Indian groups
independently created nearly all of the Neolithic innovations, writing in­
cluded. The Neolithic Revolution began in the Middle East about 10,000 years
ago. In the next few millennia humankind invented the wheel, the metal tool,
and agriculture. The Sumerians eventually put these inventions together,
added writing, and became the world's first civilization. Afterward Sumeria's
heirs in Europe and Asia frantically copied one another's happiest discoveries;
innovations ricocheted from one corner of Eurasia to another, stimulating
technological progress. Native Americans, who had crossed to Alaska before
Sumeria, missed out on the bounty. "They had to do everything on their own;'
Crosby says. Remarkably, they succeeded.
 149 1 39

When Columbus appeared in the Caribbean, the descendants of the

world's two Neolithic civilizations collided, with overwhelming consequences
for both. American Neolithic development occurred later than that of the Mid­
dle East, possibly because the Indians needed more time to build up the requi­
site population density. Without beasts of burden they could not capitalize on
the wheel (for individual workers on uneven terrain skids are nearly as effective
as carts for hauling), and they never developed steel. But in agriculture they
handily outstripped the children of Sumeria. Every tomato in Italy, every po­
tato in Ireland, and every hot pepper in Thailand came from this hemisphere.
Worldwide, more than half the crops grown today were initially developed in
the Americas.
Maize, as corn is called in the rest of the world, was a triumph with global
implications. Indians developed an extraordinary number of maize varieties
for different growing conditions, which meant that the crop could and did
spread throughout the planet. Central and Southern Europeans became par­
ticularly dependent on it; maize was the staple of Serbia, Romania, and Mol­
davia by the nineteenth century. Indian crops dramatically reduced hunger,
Crosby says, which led to an Old World population boom.
Along with peanuts and manioc, maize came to Africa and transformed
agriculture there, too. "The probability is that the population of Africa was
greatly increased because of maize and other American Indian crops," Crosby
says. "Those extra people helped make the slave trade possible." Maize con­
quered Africa at the time when introduced diseases were leveling Indian soci­
eties. The Spanish, the Portuguese, and the British were alarmed by the death
rate among Indians, because they wanted to exploit them as workers. Faced
with a labor shortage, the Europeans turned their eyes to Africa. The con­
tinent's quarrelsome societies helped slave traders to siphon off millions of
people. The maize-fed population boom, Crosby believes, let the awful trade
continue without pumping the well dry.
Back home in the Americas, Indian agriculture long sustained some of the
world's largest cities. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan dazzled Hernan Cortes
in 1519; it was bigger than Paris, Europe's greatest metropolis. The Spaniards
gawped like hayseeds at the wide streets, ornately carved buildings, and mar­
kets bright with goods from hundreds of miles away. They had never before
seen a city with botanical gardens, for the excellent reason that none existed in
Europe. The same novelty attended the force of a thousand men that kept the
crowded streets immaculate. (Streets that weren't ankle-deep in sewage! The
conquistadors had never heard of such a thing.) Central America was not
the only locus of prosperity. Thousands of miles north, John Smith, of Poca-
 CHARLES C. MANN

hontas fame, visited Massachusetts i n 1614, before it was emptied by disease,

and declared that the land was "so planted with Gardens and Corne fields, and
so well inhabited with a goodly, strong and well proportioned people . . . [that]
I would rather live here than any where."
Smith was promoting colonization, and so had reason to exaggerate. But he
also knew the hunger, sickness, and oppression of European life. France-"by
any standards a privileged country," according to its great historian, Fernand
Braudel-experienced seven nationwide famines in the fifteenth century and
thirteen in the sixteenth. Disease was hunger's constant companion. During
epidemics in London the dead were heaped onto carts "like common dung"
(the simile is Daniel Defoe's) and trundled through the streets. The infant
death rate in London orphanages, according to one contemporary source, was
88 percent. Governments were harsh, the rule of law arbitrary. The gibbets
poking up in the background of so many old paintings were, Braudel observed,
"merely a realistic detail."
The Earth Shall Weep, James Wilson's history of Indian America, puts the
comparison bluntly: "the western hemisphere was larger, richer, and more
populous than Europe." Much of it was freer, too. Europeans, accustomed to
the serfdom that thrived from Naples to the Baltic Sea, were puzzled and
alarmed by the democratic spirit and respect for human rights in many Indian
societies, especially those in North America. In theory, the sachems of New En­
gland Indian groups were absolute monarchs. In practice, the colonial leader
Roger Williams wrote, "they will not conclude of aught . . . unto which the
people are averse."
Pre-1492 America wasn't a disease-free paradise, Dobyns says, although in
his "exuberance as a writer," he told me recently, he once made that claim. Indi­
ans had ailments of their own, notably parasites, tuberculosis, and anemia. The
daily grind was wearing; life-spans in America were only as long as or a little
longer than those in Europe, if the evidence of indigenous graveyards is to be
believed. Nor was it a political utopia-the Inca, for instance, invented refine­
ments to totalitarian rule that would have intrigued Stalin. Inveterate practi­
tioners of what the historian Francis Jennings described as "state terrorism
practiced horrifically on a huge scale," the Inca ruled so cruelly that one can
speculate that their surviving subjects might actually have been better off un­
der Spanish rule.
I asked seven anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians if they would
rather have been a typic:il Indian or a typical European in 1491. None was de­
lighted by the question, because it required judging the past by the standards of
today-a fallacy disparaged as "presentism" by social scientists. But every one
 149 I 41

chose to be an Indian. Some early colonists gave the same answer. Horrifying
the leaders of Jamestown and Plymouth, scores of English ran off to live with
the Indians. My ancestor shared their desire, which is what led to the
trumped-up murder charges against him-or that's what my grandfather told
me, anyway.
As for the Indians, evidence suggests that they often viewed Europeans
with disdain. The Hurons, a chagrined missionary reported, thought the
French possessed "little intelligence in comparison to themselves." Eu ropeans,
Indians said, were physically weak, sexually untrustworthy, atrociously ugly,
and just plain dirty. (Spaniards, who seldom if ever bathed, were amazed by the
Aztec desire for personal cleanliness.) A Jesuit reported that the "Savages" were
disgusted by handkerchiefs: "They say, we place what is unclean in a fine white
piece of linen, and put it away in our pockets as something very precious, while
they throw it upon the ground." The Micmac scoffed at the notion of French
superiority. If Christian civilization was so wonderful, why were its inhabitants
leaving?
Like people everywhere, Indians survived by cleverly exploiting their envi­
ronment. Europeans tended to manage land by breaking it into fragments for
farmers and herders. Indians often worked on such a grand scale that the scope
of their ambition can be hard to grasp. They created small plots, as Europeans
did (about i.5 million acres of terraces still exist in the Peruvian Andes) , but
they also reshaped entire landscapes to suit their purposes. A principal tool was
fire, used to keep down underbrush and create the open, grassy conditions fa ­
vorable for game. Rather than domesticating animals for meat, Indians re­
tooled whole ecosystems to grow bumper crops of elk, deer, and bison. The first
white settlers in Ohio found forests as open as English parks-they could drive
carriages through the woods. Along the Hudson River the annual fall burning
lit up the banks for miles on end; so flashy was the show that the Dutch in New
Amsterdam boated upriver to goggle at the blaze like children at fireworks. In
North America, Indian torches had their biggest impact on the Midwestern
prairie, much or most of which was created and maintained by fire. Millennia
of exuberant burning shaped the plains into vast buffalo farms. When Indian
societies disintegrated, forest invaded savannah in Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas,
Nebraska, and the Texas Hill Country. Is it possible that the Indians changed
the Americas more than the invading Europeans did? "The answer is probably
yes for most regions for the next 250 years or so" after Columbus, William
Denevan wrote, "and for some regions right up to the present time."
When scholars first began increasing their estimates of the ecological im­
pact of lndian civilization, they met with considerable resistance from anthro-
 42 CHARLES C . MANN

pologists and archaeologists. Over time the consensus in the human sciences
changed. Under Denevan's direction, Oxford University Press has just issued
the third volume of a huge catalogue of the "cultivated landscapes" of the
Americas. This sort of phrase still provokes vehement objection-but the main
dissenters are now ecologists and environmentalists. The disagreement is en­
capsulated by Amazonia, which has become the emblem of vanishing wilder­
ness-an admonitory image of untouched Nature. Yet recently a growing
number of researchers have come to believe that Indian societies had an enor­
mous environmental impact on the j ungle. Indeed, some anthropologists have
called the Amazon forest itself a cultural artifact-that is, an artificial object.

Green Pr isons

N o R T H E R N v I s I T o R s ' first reaction to the storied Amazon rain forest

is often disappointment. Ecotourist brochures evoke the immensity of Amazo­
nia but rarely dwell on its extreme flatness. In the river's first 2,900 miles the
vertical drop is only 500 feet. The river oozes like a huge runnel of dirty metal
through a landscape utterly devoid of the romantic crags, arroyos, and heights
that signify wildness and natural spectacle to most North Americans. Even the
animals are invisible, although sometimes one can hear the bellow of monkey
choruses. To the untutored eye-mine, for instance-the forest seems to
stretch out in a monstrous green tangle as flat and incomprehensible as a
printed circuit board.
The area east of the lower-Amazon town of Santarem is an exception. A se­
ries of sandstone ridges several hundred feet high reach down from the north,
halting almost at the water's edge. Their tops stand drunkenly above the jungle
like old tombstones. Many of the caves in the buttes are splattered with ancient
petroglyphs-renditions of hands, stars, frogs, and human figures, all reminis­
cent of Miro, in overlapping red and yellow and brown. In recent years one of
these caves, La Caverna da Pedra Pintada (Painted Rock Cave) , has drawn at­
tention in archaeological circles.
Wide and shallow and well lit, Painted Rock Cave is less thronged with bats
than some of the other caves. The arched entrance is twenty feet high and lined
with rock paintings. Out front is a sunny natural patio suitable for picnicking,
edged by a few big rocks. People lived in this cave more than 11,000 years ago.
They had no agriculture yet, and instead ate fish and fruit and built fires. Dur­
ing a recent visit I ate a sandwich atop a particularly inviting rock and looked
over the forest below. The first Amazonians, I thought, must have done more
or less the same thing.
 149 1 43

In college I took an introductory anthropology class in which I read Ama­

zonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise {1971), perhaps the most influ­
ential book ever written about the Amazon, and one that deeply impressed me
at the time. Written by Betty J. Meggers, the Smithsonian archaeologist, Ama­
zonia says that the apparent lushness of the rain forest is a sham. The soils are
poor and can't hold nutrients-the jungle flora exists only because it snatches
up everything worthwhile before it leaches away in the rain. Agriculture, which
depends on extracting the wealth of the soil, therefore faces inherent ecological
limitations in the wet desert of Amazonia.
As a result, Meggers argued, Indian villages were forced to remain small­
any report of"more than a few hundred" people in permanent settlements, she
told me recently, "makes my alarm bells go off." Bigger, more complex societies
would inevitably overtax the forest soils, laying waste to their own foundations.
Beginning in 1948 Meggers and her late husband, Clifford Evans, excavated a
chiefdom on Maraj6, an island twice the size of New Jersey that sits like a gi­
gantic stopper in the mouth of the Amazon. The Maraj6ara, they concluded,
were failed offshoots of a sophisticated culture in the Andes. Transplanted to
the lush trap of the Amazon, the culture choked and died.
Green activists saw the implication: development in tropical forests de­
stroys both the forests and their developers. Meggers's account had enormous
public impact-Amazonia is one of the wellsprings of the campaign to save
rain forests.
Then Anna C. Roosevelt, the curator of archaeology at Chicago's Field Mu­
seum of Natural History, re-excavated Maraj6. Her complete report, Mound­
builders of the Amazon (1991), was like the anti-matter version of Amazonia.
Maraj6, she argued, was "one of the outstanding indigenous cultural achieve­
ments of the New World;' a powerhouse that lasted for more than a thousand
years, had "possibly well over 100,000" inhabitants, and covered thousands of
square miles. Rather than damaging the forest, Maraj6's "earth construction"
and "large, dense populations" had improved it: the most luxuriant and diverse
growth was on the mounds formerly occupied by the Maraj6ara. "If you lis­
tened to Meggers's theory, these places should have been ruined;' Roosevelt
says.
Meggers scoffed at Roosevelt's "extravagant claims:' "polemical tone:' and
"defamatory remarks:' Roosevelt, Meggers argued, had committed the begin­
ner's error of mistaking a site that had been occupied many times by small, un­
stable groups for a single, long-lasting society. " [Archaeological remains] build
up on areas of half a kilometer or so:' she told me, "because [shifting Indian
groups] don't land exactly on the same spot. The decorated types of pottery
 44 CHAR LES C . MANN

don't change much over time, so you can pick up a bunch of chips and say, 'Oh,
look, it was all one big site!' Unless you know what you're doing, of course."
Centuries after the conquistadors, "the myth of El Dorado is being revived by
archaeologists:' Meggers wrote last fall in the journal Latin American Antiquity,
referring to the persistent Spanish delusion that cities of gold existed in the
jungle.
The dispute grew bitter and personal; inevitable in a contemporary aca­
demic context, it has featured vituperative references to colonialism, elitism,
and employment by the CIA. Meanwhile, Roosevelt's team investigated Painted
Rock Cave. On the floor of the cave what looked to me like nothing in particu­
lar turned out to be an ancient midden: a refuse heap. The archaeologists
slowly scraped away sediment, traveling backward in time with every inch.
When the traces of human occupation vanished, they kept digging. ("You al­
ways go a meter past sterile:' Roosevelt says.) A few inches below they struck
the charcoal-rich dirt that signifies human habitation-a culture, Roosevelt
said later, that wasn't supposed to be there.
For many millennia the cave's inhabitants hunted and gathered for food.
But by about 4,000 years ago they were growing crops-perhaps as many as
140 of them, according to Charles R. Clement, an anthropological botanist at
the Brazilian National Institute for Amazonian Research. Unlike Europeans,
who planted mainly annual crops, the Indians, he says, centered their agricul­
ture on the Amazon's unbelievably diverse assortment of trees: fruits, nuts, and
palms. "It's tremendously difficult to clear fields with stone tools:' Clement
says. "If you can plant trees, you get twenty years of productivity out of your
work instead of two or three."
Planting their orchards, the first Amazonians transformed large swaths of
the river basin into something more pleasing to human beings. In a widely cited
article from 1989, William Balee, the Tulane anthropologist, cautiously esti­
mated that about 12 percent of the nonflooded Amazon forest was of anthro­
pogenic origin-directly or indirectly created by human beings. In some circles
this is now seen as a conservative position. "I basically think it's all human­
created:' Clement told me in Brazil. He argues that Indians changed the assort­
ment and density of species throughout the region. So does Clark Erickson, the
University of Pennsylvania archaeologist, who told me in Bolivia that the low­
land tropical forests of South America are among the finest works of art on the
planet. "Some of my colleagues would say that's pretty radical:' he said, smiling
mischievously. According to Peter Stahl, an anthropologist at the State Univer­
sity of New York at Binghamton, "lots" of botanists believe that "what the eco­
imagery would like to picture as a pristine, untouched Urwelt [primeval world]
 149 1 45

in fact has been managed by people for millennia." The phrase "built environ­
ment;' Erickson says, "applies to most, if not all, Neotropical landscapes."
"Landscape" in this case is meant exactly-Amazonian Indians literally
created the ground beneath their feet. According to William I. Woods, a soil ge­
ographer at Southern Illinois University, ecologists' claims about terrible Ama­
zonian land were based on very little data. In the late 1990s Woods and others
began careful measurements in the lower Amazon. They indeed found lots of
inhospitable terrain. But they also discovered swaths of terra p reta-rich, fer­
tile "black earth" that anthropologists increasingly believe was created by hu­
man beings.
Terra preta, Woods guesses, covers at least 10 percent of Amazonia, an area
the size of France. It has amazing properties, he says. Tropical rain doesn't leach
nutrients from terra preta fields; instead the soil, so to speak, fights back. Not
far from Painted Rock Cave is a 300-acre area with a two-foot layer of terra
preta quarried by locals for potting soil. The bottom third of the layer is never
removed, workers there explain, because over time it will re-create the original
soil layer in its initial thickness. The reason, scientists suspect, is that terra preta
is generated by a special suite of microorganisms that resists depletion. "Appar­
ently;' Woods and the Wisconsin geographer Joseph M. McCann argued in a
presentation the summer of 2001, "at some threshold level . . . dark earth at­
tains the capacity to perpetuate-even regenerate itself-thus behaving more
like a living 'super' -organism than an inert material."
In as yet unpublished research the archaeologists Eduardo Neves, of the
University of Sao Paulo; Michael Heckenberger, of the University of Florida;
and their colleagues examined terra preta in the upper Xingu, a huge southern
tributary of the Amazon. Not all Xingu cultures left behind this living earth,
they discovered. But the ones that did generated it rapidly-suggesting to
Woods that terra preta was created deliberately. In a process reminiscent of
dropping microorganism-rich starter into plain dough to create sourdough
bread, Amazonian peoples, he believes, inoculated bad soil with a transforming
bacterial charge. Not every group of Indians there did this, but quite a few did,
and over an extended period of time.
When Woods told me this, I was so amazed that I almost dropped the
phone. I ceased to be articulate for a moment and said things like "wow" and
"gosh:' Woods chuckled at my reaction, p robably because he understood what
was passing through my mind. Faced with an ecological problem, I was think­
ing, the Indians fixed it. They were in the process of terraforming the Amazon
when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.
Scientists should study the microorganisms in terra preta, Woods told me,
 46 CHARLES C . MANN

to find out how they work. If that could be learned, maybe some version of
Amazonian dark earth could be used to improve the vast expanses of bad soil
that cripple agriculture in Africa-a final gift from the people who brought us
tomatoes, corn, and the immense grasslands of the Great Plains.
"Betty Meggers would just die if she heard me saying this;' Woods told me.
"Deep down her fear is that this data will be misused:' Indeed, Meggers's 2001
Latin American An tiquity article charged that archaeologists who say the Ama­
zon can support agriculture are effectively telling "developers [that they] are
entitled to operate without restraint." Resuscitating the myth of El Dorado, in
her view, "makes us accomplices in the accelerating pace of environmental
degradation." Doubtless there is something to this-although, as some of her
critics responded in the same issue of the journal, it is difficult to imagine
greedy plutocrats "perusing the pages of Latin American Antiquity before de­
ciding to rev up the chain saws." But the new picture doesn't automatically le­
gitimize paving the forest. Instead it suggests that for a long time big chunks of
Amazonia were used nondestructively by clever people who knew tricks we
have yet to learn.
I visited Painted Rock Cave during the river's annual flood, when it wells up
over its banks and creeps inland for miles. Farmers in the floodplain build
houses and barns on stilts and watch pink dolphins sport from their doorsteps.
Ecotourists take shortcuts by driving motorboats through the drowned forest.
Guys in dories chase after them, trying to sell sacks of incredibly good fruit.
All of this is described as "wilderness" in the tourist brochures. It's not, if
researchers like Roosevelt are correct. Indeed, they believe that fewer people
may be living there now than in 1491. Yet when my boat glided into the trees,
the forest shut out the sky like the closing of an umbrella. Within a few hun­
dred yards the human presence seemed to vanish. I felt alone and small, but in
a way that was curiously like feeling exalted. If that place was not wilderness,
how should I think of it? Since the fate of the forest is in our hands, what
should be our goal for its future?

No vel S h ores

HERNANDO DE SoTo' s EXPEDITION stomped through the South­

east for four years and apparently never saw bison. More than a century later,
when French explorers came down the Mississippi, they saw "a solitude unre­
lieved by the faintest trace of man," the nineteenth-century historian Francis
Parkman wrote. Instead the French encountered bison, "grazing in herds on
the great prairies which then bordered the river."
 149 1 47

To Charles Kay, the reason for the buffalo's sudden emergence is obvious.
Kay is a wildlife ecologist in the political-science department at Utah State Uni­
versity. In ecological terms, he says, the Indians were the "keystone species" of
American ecosystems. A keystone species, according to the Harvard biologist
Edward 0. Wilson, is a species "that affects the survival and abundance of
many other species." Keystone species have a disproportionate impact on their
ecosystems. Removing them, Wilson adds, "results in a relatively significant
shift in the composition of the [ecological] community."
When disease swept Indians from the land, Kay says, what happened was
exactly that. The ecological ancien regime collapsed, and strange new phenom­
ena emerged. In a way this is unsurprising; for better or worse, humankind is a
keystone species everywhere. Among these phenomena was a population ex­
plosion in the species that the Indians had kept down by hunting. After disease
kille d off the Indians, Kay believes, buffalo vastly extended their range. Their
numbers more than sextupled. The same occurred with elk and mule deer. "If
the elk were here in great numbers all this time, the archaeological sites should
be chock-full of elk bones:' Kay says. "But the archaeologists will tell you the
elk weren't there." On the evidence of middens the number of elk j umped
about 500 years ago.
Passenger pigeons may be another example. The epitome of natural Amer­
ican abundance, they flew in such great masses that the first colonists were stu­
pefied by the sight. As a boy, the explorer Henry Brackenridge saw flocks "ten
miles in width, by one hundred and twenty in length." For hours the birds
darkened the sky from horizon to horizon. According to Thomas Neumann, a
consulting archaeologist in Lilburn, Georgia, passenger pigeons "were incredi­
bly dumb and always roosted in vast hordes, so they were very easy to harvest."
Because they were readily caught and good to eat, Neumann says, archaeologi­
cal digs should find many pigeon bones in the pre-Columbian strata of Indian
middens. But they aren't there. The mobs of birds in the history books, he says,
were "outbreak populations-always a symptom of an extraordinarily dis­
rupted ecological system:'
Throughout eastern North America the open landscape seen by the first
Europeans quickly fill e d in with forest. According to W illiam Cronon, of the
University of Wisconsin, later colonists began complaining about how hard it
was to get around. (Eventuall y, of course, they stripped New England almost
bare of trees.) When Europeans moved west, they were preceded by two waves:
one of disease, the other of ecological disturbance. The former crested with
fearsome rapidity ; the latter sometimes took more than a century to quiet
down. Far from destroying pristine wilderness, European settlers bloodily ere-
 48 CHAR LES c . MANN

ated it. By 1800 the hemisphere was chockablock with new wilderness. If "forest
primeval" means a woodland unsullied by the human presence, William
Denevan has written, there was much more of it in the late eighteenth century
than in the early sixteenth.
Cronon's Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New
England (1983) belongs on the same shelf as works by Crosby and Dobyns. But
it was not until one of his articles was excerpted in The New York Times in 1995
that people outside the social sciences began to understand the implications of
this view of Indian history. Environmentalists and ecologists vigorously at­
tacked the anti-wilderness scenario, which they described as infected by post­
modern philosophy. A small academic brouhaha ensued, complete with
hundreds of footnotes. It precipitated Reinventing Nature? (1995), one of the
few academic critiques of postmodernist philosophy written largely by biolo­
gists. The Great New Wilderness Debate (1998) , another lengthy book on the
subject, was edited by two philosophers who earnestly identified themselves as
"Euro-American men [whose] cultural legacy is patriarchal Western civiliza­
tion in its current postcolonial, globally hegemonic form:'
It is easy to tweak academics for opaque, self-protective language like this.
Nonetheless, their concerns were quite justified. Crediting Indians with the
role of keystone species has implications for the way the current Euro­
American members of that keystone species manage the forests, watersheds,
and endangered species of America. Because a third of the United States is
owned by the federal government, the issue inevitably has political ramifica­
tions. In Amazonia, fabled storehouse of biodiversity, the stakes are global.
Guided by the pristine myth, mainstream environmentalists want to pre­
serve as much of the world's land as possible in a putatively intact state. But
"intact;' if the new research is correct, means "run by human beings for human
purposes." Environmentalists dislike this, because it seems to mean that any­
thing goes. In a sense they are correct. Native Americans managed the conti­
nent as they saw fit. Modern nations must do the same. If they want to return
as much of the landscape as possible to its 1491 state, they will have to find it
within themselves to create the world's largest garden.
 A T U L G AWA N D E

The Learnin9 Curve

FROM THE NE W YO R K E R

"Practice, practice, practice"9oes the punch line to the old joke, and it 's as
truefor sur9eons as it isfor musicians. Atul Gawande, who has chronicled
his own sur9ical trainin9 with honesty and humor, shares his experiences­
and anxieties-about the way doctors learn their skills: performin9 suppos­
edly routine procedures on unsuspectin9 patients.

he patient needed a central line. "Here's your chance:' S . , the chief resi­

T dent, said. I had never done one before. "Get set up and then page me
when you're ready to start."
It was my fourth week in surgical training. The pockets of my short white
coat bulged with patient printouts, laminated cards with instructions for doing
CPR and reading EKGs and using the dictation system, two surgical hand­
books, a stethoscope, wound-dressing supplies, meal tickets, a penlight, scis­
sors, and about a dollar in loose change. As I headed up the stairs to the
patient's floor, I rattled.
This will be good, I tried to tell myself: my first real procedure. The
patient-fiftyish, stout, taciturn-was recovering from abdominal surgery
he'd had about a week earlier. His bowel function hadn't yet returned, and he
was unable to eat. I explained to him that he needed intravenous nutrition and
that this required a "special line" that would go into his chest. I said that I
would put the line in him while he was in his bed, and that it would involve my
 50 A T U L G AWA N D E

numbing a spot on his chest with a local anesthetic, and then threading the line
in. I did not say that the line was eight inches long and would go into his vena
cava, the main blood vessel to his heart. Nor did I say how tricky the procedure
could be. There were "slight risks" involved, I said, such as bleeding and lung
collapse; in experienced hands, complications of this sort occur in fewer than
one case in a hundred.
But, of course, mine were not experienced hands. And the disasters I knew
about weighed on my mind: the woman who had died within minutes from
massive bleeding when a resident lacerated her vena cava; the man whose chest
had to be opened because a resident lost hold of a wire inside the line, which
then floated down to the patient's heart; the man who had a cardiac arrest
when the procedure put him into ventricular fibrillation. I said nothing of such
things, naturally, when I asked the patient's permission to do his line. He said,
"OK."
I had seen S. do two central lines; one was the day before, and I'd attended
to every step. I watched how she set out her instruments and laid her patient
down and put a rolled towel between his shoulder blades to make his chest arch
out. I watched how she swabbed his chest with antiseptic, injected lidocaine,
which is a local anesthetic, and then, in full sterile garb, punctured his chest
near his clavicle with a fat three-inch needle on a syringe. The patient hadn't
even flinched. She told me how to avoid hitting the lung ("Go in at a steep an­
gle;' she'd said. "Stay right under the clavicle") , and how to find the subclavian
vein, a branch to the vena cava lying atop the lung near its apex ("Go in at a
steep angle. Stay righ t under the clavicle") . She pushed the needle in almost all
the way. She drew back on the syringe. And she was in. You knew because the
syringe filled with maroon blood. ("If it's bright red, you've hit an artery," she
said. "That's not good.") Once you have the tip of this needle poking in the
vein, you somehow have to widen the hole in the vein wall, fit the catheter in,
and snake it in the right direction-down to the heart, rather than up to the
brain-all without tearing through vessels, lung, or anything else.
To do this, S. explained, you start by getting a guide wire in place. She
pulled the syringe off, leaving the needle in. Blood flowed out. She picked up a
two-foot-long twenty-gauge wire that looked like the steel D string of an elec­
tric guitar, and passed nearly its full length through the needle's bore, into the
vein, and onward toward the vena cava. "Never force it in;' she warned, "and
never, ever let go of it." A string of rapid heartbeats fired off on the cardiac
monitor, and she quickly pulled the wire back an inch. It had poked into the
heart, causing momentary fibrillation. "Guess we're in the right place;' she said
to me quietly. Then to the patient: "You're doing great. Only a few minutes
 The Lear n i n9 Cu rve s 1

now." She pulled the needle out over the wire and replaced it with a bullet of
thick, stiff plastic, which she pushed in tight to widen the vein opening. She
then removed this dilator and threaded the central line-a spaghetti-thick,
flexible yellow plastic tube-over the wire until it was all the way in. Now she
could remove the wire. She flushed the line with a heparin solution and su­
tured it to the patient's chest. And that was it.
Today, it was my turn to try. First, I had to gather supplies-a central-line
kit, gloves, gown, cap, mask, lidocaine-which took me forever. When I finally
had the stuff together, I stopped for a minute outside the patient's door, trying
to recall the steps. They remained frustratingly hazy. But I couldn't put it off
any longer. I had a page-long list of other things to get done: Mrs. A needed to
be discharged; Mr. B needed an abdominal ultrasound arranged; Mrs. C
needed her skin staples removed. And every fifteen minutes or so I was getting
paged with more tasks: Mr. X was nauseated and needed to be seen; Miss Y's
family was here and needed "someone" to talk to them; Mr. Z needed a laxative.
I took a deep breath, put on my best don't-worry-I-know-what-I'm-doing
look, and went in.
I placed the supplies on a bedside table, untied the patient's gown, and laid
him down flat on the mattress, with his chest bare and his arms at his sides. I
flipped on a fluorescent overhead light and raised his bed to my height. I paged
S. I put on my gown and gloves and, on a sterile tray, laid out the central line,
the guide wire, and other materials from the kit. I drew up five cc's of lidocaine
in a syringe, soaked two sponge sticks in the yellow-brown Betadine, and
opened up the suture packaging.
S. arrived. "What's his platelet count?"
My stomach knotted. I hadn't checked. That was bad: too low and he could
have a serious bleed from the procedure. She went to check a computer. The
count was acceptable.
Chastened, I started swabbing his chest with the sponge sticks. "Got the
shoulder roll underneath him?" S. asked. Well, no, I had forgotten that, too. The
patient gave me a look. S. , saying nothing, got a towel, rolled it up, and slipped
it under his back for me. I finished applying the antiseptic and then draped
him so that only his right upper chest was exposed. He squirmed a bit beneath
the drapes. S. now inspected my tray. I girded myself.
"Where's the extra syringe for flushing the line when it's in?" Damn. She
went out and got it.
I felt for my landmarks. Here? I asked with my eyes, not wanting to under­
mine the patient's confidence any further. She nodded. I numbed the spot with
lidocaine. ("You'll feel a stick and a burn now, sir." ) Next, I took the three-inch
 .P A T U L G AWA N D E

needle in hand and poked it through the skin. I advanced it slowly and uncer­
tainly, a few millimeters at a time. This is a big goddam needle, I kept thinking.
I couldn't believe I was sticking it into someone's chest. I concentrated on
maintaining a steep angle of entry, but kept spearing his clavicle instead of slip­
ping beneath it.
"Ow! " he shouted.
"Sorry;' I said. S. signaled with a kind of surfing hand gesture to go under­
neath the clavicle. This time, it went in. I drew back on the syringe. Nothing.
She pointed deeper. I went in deeper. Nothing. I withdrew the needle, flushed
out some bits of tissue clogging it, and tried again.
"Ow!"
Too steep again. I found my way underneath the clavicle once more. I drew
the syringe back. Still nothing. He's too obese, I thought. S. slipped on gloves
and a gown. "How about I have a look?" she said. I handed her the needle and
stepped aside. She plunged the needle in, drew back on the syringe, and, just
like that, she was in. "We'll be done shortly;' she told the patient.
She let me continue with the next steps, which I bumbled through. I didn't
realize how long and floppy the guide wire was until I pulled the coil out of its
plastic sleeve, and, putting one end of it into the patient, I very nearly contami­
nated the other. I forgot about the dilating step until she reminded me. Then,
when I put in the dilator, I didn't push quite hard enough, and it was really S.
who pushed it all the way in. Finally, we got the line in, flushed it, and sutured it
in place.
Outside the room, S. said that I could be less tentative the next time, but
that I shouldn't worry too much about how things had gone. "You'll get it," she
said. "It just takes practice." I wasn't so sure. The procedure remained wholly
mysterious to me. And I could not get over the idea of jabbing a needle into
someone's chest so deeply and so blindly. I awaited the X-ray afterward with
trepidation. But it came back fine: I had not injured the lung and the line was
in the right place.

the attractions of surgery. When you are

N O T E V E R Y O N E A P P R E C I AT E S
a medical student in the operating room for the first time, and you see the sur­
geon press the scalpel to someone's body and open it like a piece of fruit, you
either shudder in horror or gape in awe. I gaped. It was not just the blood and
guts that enthralled me. It was also the idea that a person, a mere mortal, would
have the confidence to wield that scalpel in the first place.
There is a saying about surgeons: "Sometimes wrong; never in doubt." This
 The Lear n i n9 Cu rve �3

is meant as a reproof, but to me it seemed their strength. Every day, surgeons

are faced with uncertainties. Information is inadequate; the science is ambigu­
ous; one's knowledge and abilities are never perfect. Even with the simplest op­
eration, it cannot be taken for granted that a patient will come through better
off-or even alive. Standing at the operating table, I wondered how the sur­
geon knew that all the steps would go as planned, that bleeding would be con­
trolled and infection would not set in and organs would not be injured. He
didn't, of course. But he cut anyway.
Later, while still a student, I was allowed to make an incision myself. The
surgeon drew a six-inch dotted line with a marking pen across an anesthetized
patient's abdomen and then, to my surprise, had the nurse hand me the knife.
It was still warm from the autoclave. The surgeon had me stretch the skin taut
with the thumb and forefinger of my free hand. He told me to make one
smooth slice down to the fat. I put the belly of the blade to the skin and cut.
The experience was odd and addictive, mixing exhilaration from the calculated
violence of the act, anxiety about getting it right, and a righteous faith that it
was somehow for the person's good. There was also the slightly nauseating feel­
ing of finding that it took more force than I'd realized. (Skin is thick and
springy, and on my first pass I did not go nearly deep enough; I had to cut twice
to get through.) The moment made me want to be a surgeon-not an amateur
handed the knife for a brief moment but someone with the confidence and
ability to proceed as if it were routine.
A resident begins, however, with none of this air of mastery-only an over­
powering instinct against doing anything like pressing a knife against flesh or
jabbing a needle into someone's chest. On my first day as a surgical resident, I
was assigned to the emergency room. Among my first patients was a skinny,
dark-haired woman in her late twenties who hobbled in, teeth gritted, with a
two-foot-long wooden chair leg somehow nailed to the bottom of her foot. She
explained that a kitchen chair had collapsed under her and, as she leaped up to
keep from falling, her bare foot had stomped down on a three-inch screw stick­
ing out of one of the chair legs. I tried very hard to look like someone who had
not got his medical diploma just the week before. Instead, I was determined to
be nonchalant, the kind of guy who had seen this sort of thing a hundred times
before. I inspected her foot, and could see that the screw was embedded in the
bone at the base of her big toe. There was no bleeding and, as far as I could feel,
no fracture.
"Wow, that must hurt;' I blurted out, idiotically.
The obvious thing to do was give her a tetanus shot and pull out the screw.
I ordered the tetanus shot, but I began to have doubts about pulling out the
 A T U L G AWA N D E

screw. Suppose she bled? Or suppose I fractured her foot? Or something worse?
I excused myself and tracked down Dr. W., the senior surgeon on duty. I found
him tending to a car-crash victim. The patient was a mess, and the floor was
covered with blood. People were shouting. It was not a good time to ask ques­
tions.
I ordered an X-ray. I figured it would buy time and let me check my ama­
teur impression that she didn't have a fracture. Sure enough, getting the X-ray
took about an hour, and it showed no fracture-just a common screw embed­
ded, the radiologist said, "in the head of the first metatarsal." I showed the pa­
tient the X-ray. "You see, the screw's embedded in the head of the first
metatarsal," I said. And the plan? she wanted to know. Ah, yes, the plan.
I went to find Dr. W. He was still busy with the crash victim, but I was able
to interrupt to show him the X-ray. He chuckled at the sight of it and asked me
what I wanted to do. "Pull the screw out?" I ventured. "Yes:' he said, by which he
meant "Duh." He made sure I'd given the patient a tetanus shot and then
shooed me away.
Back in the examining room, I told her that I would pull the screw out, pre­
pared for her to say something like "You?" Instead she said, "OK, Doctor." At
first, I had her sitting on the exam table, dangling her leg off the side. But that
didn't look as if it would work. Eventually, I had her lie with her foot jutting off
the table end, the board poking out into the air. With every move, her pain in­
creased. I injected a local anesthetic where the screw had gone in and that
helped a little. Now I grabbed her foot in one hand, the board in the other, and
for a moment I froze. Could I really do this? Who was I to presume?
Finally, I gave her a one-two-three and pulled, gingerly at first and then
hard. She groaned. The screw wasn't budging. I twisted, and abruptly it came
free. There was no bleeding. I washed the wound out, and she found she could
walk. I warned her of the risks of infection and the signs to look for. Her grati­
tude was immense and flattering, like the lion's for the mouse-and that night
I went home elated.
In surgery, as in anything else, skill, judgment, and confidence are learned
through experience, haltingly and humiliatingly. Like the tennis player and the
oboist and the guy who fixes hard drives, we need practice to get good at what
we do. There is one difference in medicine, though: we practice on people.

M Y s E c o N D T RY at placing a central line went no better than the first. The

patient was in intensive care, mortally ill, on a ventilator, and needed the line so
that powerful cardiac drugs could be delivered directly to her heart. She was
 The Lear n i n9 Cu rve ss

also heavily sedated, and for this I was grateful. She'd be oblivious of my fum­
bling.
My preparation was better this time. I got the towel roll in place and the sy­
ringes of heparin on the tray. I checked her lab results, which were fine. I also
made a point of draping more widely, so that if l flopped the guide wire around
by mistake again, it wouldn't hit anything unsterile.
For all that, the procedure was a bust. I stabbed the needle in too shallow
and then too deep. Frustration overcame tentativeness and I tried one angle af­
ter another. Nothing worked. Then, for one brief moment, I got a flash of
blood in the syringe, indicating that I was in the vein. I anchored the needle
with one hand and went to pull the syringe off with the other. But the syringe
was jammed on too tightly, so that when I pulled it free I dislodged the needle
from the vein. The patient began bleeding into her chest wall. I held pressure
the best I could for a solid five minutes, but still her chest turned black and blue
around the site. The hematoma made it impossible to put a line through there
anymore. I wanted to give up. But she needed a line and the resident supervis­
ing me-a second-year this time-was determined that I succeed. After an
X-ray showed that I had not injured her lung, he had me try on the other side,
with a whole new kit. I missed again, and he took over. It took him several min­
utes and two or three sticks to find the vein himself and that made me feel bet­
ter. Maybe she was an unusually tough case.
When I failed with a third patient a few days later, though, the doubts really
set in. Again, it was stick, stick, stick, and nothing. I stepped aside. The resident
watching me got it on the next try.

S u R G E o N s , as a group, adhere to a curious egalitarianism. They believe in

practice, not talent. People often assume that you have to have great hands to
become a surgeon, but it's not true. When I interviewed to get into surgery pro­
grams, no one made me sew or take a dexterity test or checked to see if my
hands were steady. You do not even need all ten fingers to be accepted. To be
sure, talent helps. Professors say that every two or three years they'll see some­
one truly gifted come through a program-someone who picks up complex
manual skills unusually quickly, sees tissue planes before others do, anticipates
trouble before it happens. Nonetheless, attending surgeons say that what's
most important to them is finding people who are conscientious, industrious,
and boneheaded enough to keep at practicing this one difficult thing day and
night for years on end. As a former residency director put it to me, given a
choice between a Ph.D. who had cloned a gene and a sculptor, he'd pick the
 _s- 6 A T U L G AWA N D E

Ph.D. every time. Sure, he said, he'd bet on the sculptor's being more physically
talented; but he'd bet on the Ph.D.'s being less "flaky." And in the end that mat­
ters more. Skill, surgeons believe, can be taught; tenacity cannot. It's an odd ap­
proach to recruitment, but it continues all the way up the ranks, even in top
surgery departments. They start with minions with no experience in surgery,
spend years training them, and then take most of their faculty from these same
homegrown ranks.
And it works. There have now been many studies of elite performers­
concert violinists, chess grand masters, professional ice-skaters, mathemati­
cians, and so forth-and the biggest difference researchers find between them
and lesser performers is the amount of deliberate practice they've accumu­
lated. Indeed, the most important talent may be the talent for practice itself.
K. Anders Ericsson, a cognitive psychologist and an expert on performance,
notes that the most important role that innate factors play may be in a person's
willingness to engage in sustained training. He has found, for example, that top
performers dislike practicing just as much as others do. (That's why, for exam­
ple, athletes and musicians usually quit practicing when they retire.) But, more
than others, they have the will to keep at it anyway.

I wA s N ' T s u R E
I did. What good was it, I wondered, to keep doing central
lines when I wasn't coming close to hitting them? If I had a clear idea of what I
was doing wrong, then maybe I'd have something to focus on. But I didn't.
Everyone, of course, had suggestions. Go in with the bevel of the needle up. No,
go in with the bevel down. Put a bend in the middle of the needle. No, curve the
needle. For a while, I tried to avoid doing another line. Soon enough, however,
a new case arose.
The circumstances were miserable. It was late in the day, and I'd had to
work through the previous night. The patient weighed more than three hun­
dred pounds. He couldn't tolerate lying flat because the weight of his chest and
abdomen made it hard for him to breathe. Yet he had a badly infected wound,
needed intravenous antibiotics, and no one could find veins in his arms for a
peripheral IV. I had little hope of succeeding. But a resident does what he is
told, and I was told to try the line.
I went to his room. He looked scared and said he didn't think he'd last more
than a minute on his back. But he said he understood the situation and was
willing to make his best effort. He and I decided that he'd be left sitting
propped up in bed until the last possible minute. We'd see how far we got after
that.
 The Lear n i n9 C u rve n

I went through my preparations: checking his blood counts from the lab,
putting out the kit, placing the towel roll, and so on. I swabbed and draped his
chest while he was still sitting up. S., the chief resident, was watching me this
time, and when everything was ready I had her tip him back, an oxygen mask
on his face. His flesh rolled up his chest like a wave. I couldn't find his clavicle
with my fingertips to line up the right point of entry. And already he was look­
ing short of breath, his face red. I gave S. a " Do you want to take over?" look.
Keep going, she signaled. I made a rough guess about where the right spot was,
numbed it with lidocaine, and pushed the big needle in. For a second, I
thought it wouldn't be long enough to reach through, but then I felt the tip slip
underneath his clavicle. I pushed a little deeper and drew back on the syringe.
Unbelievably, it filled with blood. I was in. I concentrated on anchoring the
needle firmly in place, not moving it a millimeter as I pulled the syringe off and
threaded the guide wire in. The wire fed in smoothly. The patient was strug­
gling hard for air now. We sat him up and let him catch his breath. And then,
laying him down one more time, I got the entry dilated and slid the central line
in. "Nice job" was all S. said, and then she left.
I still have no idea what I did differently that day. But from then on my lines
went in. That's the funny thing about practice. For days and days, you make out
only the fragments of what to do. And then one day you've got the thing whole.
Conscious learning becomes unconscious knowledge, and you cannot say pre­
cisely how.

I H A v E N o w put in more than a hundred central lines. I am by no means in­

fallible. Certainly, I have had my fair share of complications. I punctured a pa­
tient's lung, for example-the right lung of a chief of surgery from another
hospital, no less-and, given the odds, I'm sure such things will happen again. I
still have the occasional case that should go easily but doesn't, no matter what I
do. (We have a term for this. "How'd it go?" a colleague asks. "It was a total
flog;' I reply. I don't have to say anything more.)
But other times everything unfolds effortlessly. You take the needle. You
stick the chest. You feel the needle travel-a distinct glide through the fat, a
slight catch in the dense muscle, then the subtle pop through the vein wall­
and you're in. At such moments, it is more than easy; it is beautiful.
Surgical training is the recapitulation of this process-floundering fol­
lowed by fragments followed by knowledge and, occasionally, a moment of
elegance--over and over again, for ever harder tasks with ever greater risks. At
first, you work on the basics: how to glove and gown, how to drape patients,
 }8 A T U L G AWA N D E

how to hold the knife, how to tie a square knot in a length of silk suture (not to
mention how to dictate, work the computers, order drugs). But then the tasks
become more daunting: how to cut through skin, handle the electrocautery,
open the breast, tie off a bleeder, excise a tumor, close up a wound. At the end
of six months, I had done lines, lumpectomies, appendectomies, skin grafts,
hernia repairs, and mastectomies. At the end of a year, I was doing limb ampu­
tations, hemorrhoidectomies, and laparoscopic gallbladder operations. At the
end of two years, I was beginning to do tracheotomies, small-bowel operations,
and leg-artery bypasses.
I am in my seventh year of training, of which three years have been spent
doing research. Only now has a simple slice through skin begun to seem like
the mere start of a case. These days, I'm trying to learn how to fix an abdominal
aortic aneurysm, remove a pancreatic cancer, open blocked carotid arteries. I
am, I have found, neither gifted nor maladroit. With practice and more prac­
tice, I get the hang of it.
Doctors find it hard to talk about this with patients. The moral burden of
practicing on people is always with us, but for the most part it is unspoken. Be­
fore each operation, I go over to the holding area in my scrubs and introduce
myself to the patient. I do it the same way every time. "Hello, I'm Dr. Gawande.
I'm one of the surgical residents, and I'll be assisting your surgeon." That is
pretty much all I say on the subject. I extend my hand and smile. I ask the pa­
tient if everything is going OK so far. We chat. I answer questions. Very occa­
sionally, patients are taken aback. "No resident is doing my surgery;' they say. I
try to be reassuring. "Not to worry-I j ust assist;' I say. "The attending surgeon
is always in charge:'
None of this is exactly a lie. The attending is in charge, and a resident knows
better than to forget that. Consider the operation I did recently to remove a
seventy-five-year-old woman's colon cancer. The attending stood across from
me from the start. And it was he, not I, who decided where to cut, how to posi­
tion the opened abdomen, how to isolate the cancer, and how much colon to
take.
Yet I'm the one who held the knife. I'm the one who stood on the operator's
side of the table, and it was raised to my six-foot-plus height. I was there to
help, yes, but I was there to practice, too. This was clear when it came time to
reconnect the colon. There are two ways of putting the ends together­
handsewing and stapling. Stapling is swifter and easier, but the attending sug­
gested I handsew the ends-not because it was better for the patient but
because I had had much less experience doing it. When it's performed cor­
rectly, the results are similar, but he needed to watch me like a hawk. My stitch-
 The Learn i n9 C u rve S9

ing was slow and imprecise. At one point, he caught me putting the stitches too
far apart and made me go back and put extras in between so the connection
would not leak. At another point, he found I wasn't taking deep enough bites of
tissue with the needle to ensure a strong closure. "Turn your wrist more;' he
told me. "Like this?" I asked. "Uh, sort of," he said.
In medicine, there has long been a conflict between the imperative to give
patients the best possible care and the need to provide novices with experience.
Residencies attempt to mitigate potential harm through supervision and grad­
uated responsibility. And there is reason to think that patients actually benefit
from teaching. Studies commonly find that teaching hospitals have better out ­
comes than non-teaching hospitals. Residents may be amateurs, but having
them around checking on patients, asking questions, and keeping faculty on
their toes seems to help. But there is still no avoiding those first few unsteady
times a young physician tries to put in a central line, remove a breast cancer, or
sew together two segments of colon. No matter how many protections are in
place, on average these cases go less well with the novice than with someone ex­
perienced.
Doctors have no illusions about this. When an attending physician brings a
sick family member in for surgery, people at the hospital think twice about let­
ting traincees participate. Even when the attending insists that they participate
as usual, the residents scrubbing in know that it will be far from a teaching case.
And if a central line must be put in, a first-timer is certainly not going to do it.
Conversely, the ward services and clinics where residents have the most re­
sponsibility are populated by the poor, the uninsured, the drunk, and the de­
mented. Residents have few opportunities nowadays to operate independently,
without the attending docs scrubbed in, but when we do-as we must before
graduating and going out to operate on our own-it is generally with these, the
humblest of patients.
And this is the uncomfortable truth about teaching. By traditional ethics
and public insistence (not to mention court rulings), a patient's right to the
best care possible must trump the objective of training novices. We want per­
fection without practice. Yet everyone is harmed if no one is trained for the fu­
ture. So learning is hidden, behind drapes and anesthesia and the elisions of
language. And the dilemma doesn't apply just to residents, physicians in train­
ing. The process of learning goes on longer than most people know.

I G R E W U P in the small Appalachian town of Athens, Ohio, where my par­

ents are both doctors. My mother is a pediatrician and my father is a urologist.
 60 A T U L G AWA N D E

Long ago, my mother chose to practice part time, which she could afford to do
because my father's practice became so busy and successful. He has now been
at it for more than twenty-five years, and his office is cluttered with the evi­
dence of this. There is an overflowing wall of medical files, gifts from patients
displayed everywhere (books, paintings, ceramics with Biblical sayings, hand­
painted paperweights, blown glass, carved boxes, a figurine of a boy who, when
you pull down his pants, pees on you), and, in an acrylic case behind his oak
desk, a few dozen of the thousands of kidney stones he has removed.
Only now, as I get glimpses of the end of my training, have I begun to think
hard about my father's success. For most of my residency, I thought of surgery
as a more or less fixed body of knowledge and skill which is acquired in train­
ing and perfected in practice. There was, I thought, a smooth, upward-sloping
arc of proficiency at some rarefied set of tasks (for me, taking out gallbladders,
colon cancers, bullets, and appendixes; for him, taking out kidney stones, tes­
ticular cancers, and swollen prostates) . The arc would peak at, say, ten or fifteen
years, plateau for a long time, and perhaps tail off a little in the final five years
before retirement. The reality, however, turns out to be far messier. You do get
good at certain things, my father tells me, but no sooner do you master some­
thing than you find that what you know is outmoded. New technologies and
operations emerge to supplant the old, and the learning curve starts all over
again. "Three-quarters of what I do today I never learned in residency," he says.
On his own, fifty miles from his nearest colleague-let alone a doctor who
could tell him anything like "You need to turn your wrist more"-he has had to
learn to put in penile prostheses, to perform microsurgery, to reverse vasec­
tomies, to do nerve-sparing prostatectomies, to implant artificial urinary
sphincters. He's had to learn to use shock-wave lithotripters, electrohydraulic
lithotripters, and laser lithotripters (all instruments for breaking up kidney
stones) ; to deploy Double J ureteral stents and Silicone Figure Four Coil stents
and Retro-Inject Multi-Length stents (don't even ask); and to maneuver fiber­
optic ureteroscopes. All these technologies and techniques were introduced af­
ter he finished training. Some of the procedures built on skills he already had.
Many did not.
This is the experience that all surgeons have. The pace of medical innova­
tion has been unceasing, and surgeons have no choice but to give the new thing
a try. To fail to adopt new techniques would mean denying patients meaningful
medical advances. Yet the perils of the learning curve are inescapable-no less
in practice than in residency.
For the established surgeon, inevitably, the opportunities for learning are
far less structured than for a resident. When an important new device or proce-
 The Lear n i n9 C u r ve 6 1

dure comes along, as happens every year, surgeons start by taking a course
about it-typically a day or two of lectures by some su rgical grandees with a
few film clips and step-by-step handouts. You take home a video to watch. Per­
haps you pay a visit to observe a colleague perform the operation-my father
often goes up to the Cleveland Clinic for this. But there's not much by way of
hands-on training. Unlike a resident, a visitor cannot scrub in on cases, and
opportunities to practice on animals or cadavers are few and far between.
(Britain, being Britain, actually bans surgeons from practicing on animals.)
When the pulse-dye laser came out, the manufacturer set up a lab in Columbus
where urologists from the area could gain experience. But when my father went
there the main experience provided was destroying kidney stones in test tubes
filled with a urinelike liquid and trying to penetrate the shell of an egg without
hitting the membrane underneath. My surgery department recently bought
a robotic surgery device-a staggeringly sophisticated nine-hundred-and­
eighty-thousand-dollar robot, with three arms, two wrists, and a camera, all
millimeters in diameter, which, controlled from a console, allows a surgeon to
do almost any operation with no hand tremor and with only tiny incisions. A
team of two surgeons and two nurses flew out to the manufacturer's headquar­
ters, in Mountain View, California, for a full day of training on the machine.
And they did get to practice on a pig and on a human cadaver. (The company
apparently buys the cadavers from the city of San Francisco.) But even this was
hardly thorough training. They learned enough to grasp the principles of using
the robot, to start getting a feel for using it, and to understand how to plan an
operation. That was about it. Sooner or later, you just have to go home and give
the thing a try on someone.
Patients do eventually benefit-often enormously-but the first few pa­
tients may not, and may even be harmed. Consider the experience reported by
the pediatric cardiac-surgery unit of the renowned Great Ormond Street Hos­
pital, in London, as detailed in the British Medical Journal last April. The doc­
tors described their results from three hundred and twenty-five consecutive
operations between 1978 and 1998 on babies with a severe heart defect known
as transposition of the great arteries. Such children are born with their heart's
outflow vessels transposed: the aorta emerges from the right side of the heart
instead of the left and the artery to the lungs emerges from the left instead of
the right. As a result, blood coming in is pumped right back out to the body in­
stead of first to the lungs, where it can be oxygenated. The babies died blue, fa­
tigued, never knowing what it was to get enough breath. For years, it wasn't
technically feasible to switch the vessels to their proper positions. Instead, sur­
geons did something known as the Senning procedure: they created a passage
 62 A T U L G AWA N D E

inside the heart to let blood from the lungs cross backward to the right heart.
The Senning procedure allowed children to live into adulthood. The weaker
right heart, however, cannot sustain the body's entire blood flow as long as the
left. Eventually, these patients' hearts failed, and although most survived to
adulthood, few lived to old age.
By the nineteen-eighties, a series of technological advances made it possi­
ble to do a switch operation safely, and this became the favored procedure. In
1986, the Great Ormond Street surgeons made the changeover themselves, and
their report shows that it was unquestionably an improvement. The annual
death rate after a successful switch procedure was less than a quarter that of the
Senning, resulting in a life expectancy of sixty-three years instead of forty­
seven. But the price of learning to do it was appalling. In their first seventy
switch operations, the doctors had a twenty-five-percent surgical death rate,
compared with just six percent with the Senning procedure. Eighteen babies
died, more than twice the number during the entire Senning era. Only with
time did they master it: in their next hundred switch operations, five babies
died.
As patients, we want both expertise and progress; we don't want to ac­
knowledge that these are contradictory desires. In the words of one British
public report, "There should be no learning curve as far as patient safety is con­
cerned." But this is entirely wishful thinking.

R E c E N T LY , a group of Harvard Business School researchers who have made

a specialty of studying learning curves in industry decided to examine learning
curves among surgeons instead of in semiconductor manufacture or airplane
construction, or any of the usual fields their colleagues examine. They followed
eighteen cardiac surgeons and their teams as they took on the new technique of
minimally invasive cardiac surgery. This study, I was surprised to discover, is
the first of its kind. Learning is ubiquitous in medicine, and yet no one had ever
compared how well different teams actually do it.
The new heart operation-in which new technologies allow a surgeon to
operate through a small incision between ribs instead of splitting the chest
open down the middle-proved substantially more difficult than the conven­
tional one. Because the incision is too small to admit the usual tubes and
clamps for rerouting blood to the heart-bypass machine, surgeons had to learn
a trickier method, which involved balloons and catheters placed through groin
vessels. And the nurses, anesthesiologists, and perfusionists all had new roles to
 The learn i n9 C u rve 63

master. As you'd expect, everyone experienced a substantial learning curve.

Whereas a fully proficient team takes three to six hours for such an operation,
these teams took on average three times as long for their early cases. The re­
searchers could not track complication rates in detail, but it would be foolish to
imagine that they were not affected.
What's more, the researchers found striking disparities in the speed with
which different teams learned. All teams came from highly respected institu­
tions with experience in adopting innovations and received the same three-day
training session. Yet, in the course of fifty cases, some teams managed to halve
their operating time while others improved hardly at all. Practice, it turned out,
did not necessarily make perfect. The crucial variable was how the surgeons
and their teams practiced.
Richard Bohmer, the only physician among the Harvard researchers, made
several visits to observe one of the quickest-learning teams and one of the
slowest, and he was startled by the contrast. The surgeon on the fast-learning
team was actually quite inexperienced compared with the one on the slow­
learning team. But he made sure to pick team members with whom he had
worked well before and to keep them together through the first fifteen cases be­
fore allowing any new members. He had the team go through a dry run before
the first case, then deliberately scheduled six operations in the first week, so lit­
tle would be forgotten in between. He convened the team before each case to
discuss it in detail and afterward to debrief. He made sure results were tracked
carefully. And Bohmer noticed that the surgeon was not the stereotypical Na­
poleon with a knife. Unbidden, he told Bohmer, "The surgeon needs to be will­
ing to allow himself to become a partner [with the rest of the team] so he can
accept input." At the other hospital, by contrast, the surgeon chose his operat­
ing team almost randomly and did not keep it together. In the first seven cases,
the team had different members every time, which is to say that it was no team
at all. And the surgeon had no pre-briefings, no debriefings, no tracking of on­
going results.
The Harvard Business School study offered some hopeful news. We can do
things that have a dramatic effect on our rate of improvement-like being
more deliberate about how we train, and about tracking progress, whether
with students and residents or with senior surgeons and nurses. But the study's
other implications are less reassuring. No matter how accomplished, surgeons
trying something new got worse before they got better, and the learning curve
proved longer, and was affected by a far more complicated range of factors,
than anyone had realized.
 64 A T U L G AWA N D E

This, I suspect, is the reason for the physician's dodge: the " I just assist" rap;
the "We have a new procedure for this that you are perfect for" speech; the "You
need a central line" without the "I am still learning how to do this:' Sometimes
we do feel obliged to admit when we're doing something for the first time, but
even then we tend to quote the published complication rates of experienced
surgeons. Do we ever tell patients that, because we are still new at something,
their risks will inevitably be higher, and that they'd likely do better with doctors
who are more experienced? Do we ever say that we need them to agree to it
anyway? I've never seen it. Given the stakes, who in his right mind would agree
to be practiced upon?
Many dispute this presumption. "Look, most people understand what it is
to be a doctor;' a health policy expert insisted, when I visited him in his office
not long ago. "We have to stop lying to our patients. Can people take on choices
for societal benefit?" He paused and then answered his question. "Yes;' he said
firmly.
It would certainly be a graceful and happy solution. We'd ask patients­
honestly, openly-and they'd say yes. Hard to imagine, though. I noticed on
the expert's desk a picture of his child, born just a few months before, and a
completely unfair question popped into my mind. "So did you let the resident
deliver?" I asked.
There was silence for a moment. "No;• he admitted. "We didn't even allow
residents in the room."

0NE REAsoN I doubt whether we could sustain a system of medical train­

ing that depended on people saying "Yes, you can practice on me" is that I my­
self have said no. When my eldest child, Walker, was eleven days old, he
suddenly went into congestive heart failure from what proved to be a severe
cardiac defect. His aorta was not transposed, but a long segment of it had failed
to grow at all. My wife and I were beside ourselves with fear-his kidneys and
liver began failing, too-but he made it to surgery, the repair was a success, and
although his recovery was erratic, after two and a half weeks he was ready to
come home.
We were by no means in the clear, however. He was born a healthy six
pounds plus but now, a month old, he weighed only five, and would need strict
monitoring to ensure that he gained weight. He was on two cardiac medica­
tions from which he would have to be weaned. And in the longer term, the doc­
tors warned us, his repair would prove inadequate. As Walker grew, his aorta
 The Lear n i n9 Curve 65

would require either dilation with a balloon or replacement by surgery. They

could not say precisely when and how many such procedures would be neces­
sary over the years. A pediatric cardiologist would have to follow him closely
and decide.
Walker was about to be discharged, and we had not indicated who that car­
diologist would be. In the hospital, he had been cared for by a full team of car­
diologists, ranging from fellows in specialty training to attendings who had
practiced for decades. The day before we took Walker home, one of the young
fellows approached me, offering his card and suggesting a time to bring Walker
to see him. Of those on the team, he had put in the most time caring for
Walker. He saw Walker when we brought him in inexplicably short of breath,
made the diagnosis, got Walker the drugs that stabilized him, coordinated with
the surgeons, and came to see us twice a day to answer our questions. More­
over, I knew, this was how fellows always got their patients. Most families don't
know the subtle gradations among players, and after a team has saved their
child's life they take whatever appointment they're handed.
But I knew the differences. '' I'm afraid we're thinking of seeing Dr. New­
burger;' I said. She was the hospital's associate cardiologist-in-chief, and a
published expert on conditions like Walker's. The young physician looked
crestfall en. It was nothing against him, I said. She just had more experience,
that was all .
"You know, there is always an attending backing me up;' he said. I shook
my head.
I know this was not fair. My son had an unusual problem. The fellow
needed the experience. As a resident, I of all people should have understood
this. But I was not torn about the decision. This was my child. Given a choice, I
will always choose the best care I can for him. How can anybody be expected to
do otherwise? Certainly, the future of medicine should not rely on it.
In a sense, then, the physician's dodge is inevitable. Learning must be
stolen, taken as a kind of bodily eminent domain. And it was, <luring Walker's
stay-on many occasions, now that I think back on it. A resident intubated
him. A surgical trainee scrubbed in for his operation. The cardiology fellow put
in one of his central lines. If I had the option to have someone more experi­
enced, I would have taken it. But this was simply how the system worked-no
such choices were offered-and so I went along.
The advantage of this coldhearted machinery is not merely that it gets the
learning done. If learning is necessary but causes harm, then above all it ought
to apply to everyone alike. Given a choice, people wriggle out, and such choices
 66 A T U L G AWA N D E

are not offered equally. They belong to the connected and the knowledgeable,
to insiders over outsiders, to the doctor's child but not the truck driver's. If
everyone cannot have a choice, maybe it is better if no one can.

I T 1 s 2 P . M . I am in the intensive-care unit. A nurse tells me Mr. G.'s central

line has clotted off. Mr. G. has been in the hospital for more than a month now.
He is in his late sixties, from South Boston, emaciated, exhausted, holding on
by a thread-or a line, to be precise. He has several holes in his small bowel,
and the bilious contents leak out onto his skin through two small reddened
openings in the concavity of his abdomen. His only chance is to be fed by vein
and wait for these fistulae to heal. He needs a new central line.
I could do it, I suppose. I am the experienced one now. But experience
brings a new role: I am expected to teach the procedure instead. "See one, do
one, teach one," the saying goes, and it is only half in jest.
There is a junior resident on the service. She has done only one or two lines
before. I tell her about Mr. G. I ask her if she is free to do a new line. She misin­
terprets this as a question. She says she still has patients to see and a case com­
ing up later. Could I do the line? I tell her no. She is unable to hide a grimace.
She is burdened, as I was burdened, and perhaps frightened, as I was fright­
ened.
She begins to focus when I make her talk through the steps-a kind of dry
run, I figure. She hits nearly all the steps, but forgets about checking the labs
and about Mr. G.'s nasty allergy to heparin, which is in the flush for the line. I
make sure she registers this, then tell her to get set up and page me.
I am still adjusting to this role. It is painful enough taking responsibility for
one's own failures. Being handmaiden to another's is something else entirely. It
occurs to me that I could have broken open a kit and had her do an actual dry
run. Then again maybe I can't. The kits must cost a couple of hundred dollars
each. I'll have to find out for next time.
Half an hour later, I get the page. The patient is draped. The resident is in
her gown and gloves. She tells me that she has saline to flush the line with and
that his labs are fine.
"Have you got the towel roll?" I ask.
She forgot the towel roll. I roll up a towel and slip it beneath Mr. G.'s back. I
ask him if he's all right. He nods. After all he's been through, there is only resig­
nation in his eyes.
The junior resident picks out a spot for the stick. The patient is hauntingly
thin. I see every rib and fear that the resident will puncture his lung. She injects
 Th e Learn i n9 C u r ve 67

the numbing medication. Then she puts the big needle in, and the angle looks
all wrong. I motion for her to reposition. This only makes her more uncertain.
She pushes in deeper and I know she does not have it. She draws back on the
syringe: no blood. She takes out the needle and tries again. And again the angle
looks wrong. This time, Mr. G. feels the jab and jerks up in pain. I hold his arm.
She gives him more numbing medication. It is all I can do not to take over.
But she cannot learn without doing, I tell myself. I decide to let her have one
more try.
 L I Z A M U N DY

A World of Th eir O wn
F R O M THE WA S H I N G TO N P O S T MA GA Z I N E

Would you choose a disabilityfar your child? For some parents, proud mem­
bers ef the vibrant Deef culture, the birth ef a deef baby is not a cause far
despair but a reason to rejoice . Washington Post reporter Liza Mundyfal­
lows a deef couple awaitin9 the arrival ef a child they are hopin9 will be
happy, healthy, and deef.

s her baby begins to emerge after a day of labor, Sharon Duchesneau

A has a question for the midwife who is attending the birth. Asking it is
not the easiest thing, just now. Sharon is deaf, and communicates
using American Sign Language, and the combination of intense pain and the
position she has sought to ease it-kneeling, resting her weight on her hands­
makes signing somewhat hard. Even so, Sharon manages to sign something to
Risa Shaw, a hearing friend who is present to interpret for the birth, which is
taking place in a softly lit bedroom of Sharon's North Bethesda home.
"Sharon wants to know what color hair you see:' Risa says to the midwife.
The midwife cannot tell because the baby is not-quite-visible. He bulges
outward during contractions, then recedes when the contraction fades. But
now comes another contraction and a scream from Sharon, and the midwife
and her assistant call for Sharon to keep pushing but to keep it steady and con­
trolled. They are accustomed to using their voices as a way of guiding women
 A World ef Thei r O wn 69

through this last excruciating phase; since Sharon can't hear them, all they can
hope is that she doesn't close her eyes.
"Push through the pain ! " shouts the midwife.
"Little bit ! " shouts her assistant, as Risa frantically signs.
And suddenly the baby is out. One minute the baby wasn't here and now
the baby is, hair brown, eyes blue, face gray with waxy vernix, body pulsing
with life and vigor. A boy. "Is he okay? " signs Sharon, and the answer, to all ap­
pearances, is a resounding yes. There are the toes, the toenails, the fingers, the
hands, the eyes, the eyelashes, the exquisite little-old-man's face, contorted in
classic newborn outrage. The midwife lays the baby on Sharon and he bleats
and hiccups and nuzzles her skin, the instinct to breast-feed strong.
"Did he cry? " signs Sharon, and the women say no, he cried remarkably little.
"His face looks smushed:' Sharon signs, regarding him tenderly.
"It'll straighten out:' says the midwife.
Presently the midwife takes the baby and performs the Apgar, the standard
test of a newborn's condition, from which he emerges with an impressive score
of nine out of a possible 10 . "He's very calm:' she notes as she weighs him (6
pounds 5 ounces), then lays him out to measure head and chest and length. She
bicycles his legs to check the flexibility of his hips; examines his testicles to
make sure they are descended; feels his vertebrae for gaps.
All in all, she pronounces the baby splendid. "Look how strong he is! " she
says, pulling him gently up from the bed by his arms. Which means that it is, fi­
nally, possible to relax and savor his arrival. Everyone takes turns holding him:
Sharon; her longtime partner, Candace McCullough, who is also deaf, and will
be the boy's adoptive mother; their good friend Jan Delap, also deaf; Risa Shaw
and another hearing friend, Juniper Sussman. Candy and Sharon's five-year­
old daughter, Jehanne, is brought in to admire him, but she is fast asleep and
comically refuses to awaken, even when laid on the bed and prodded. Amid the
oohing and aahing someone puts a cap on the baby; somebody else swaddles
him in a blanket; somebody else brings a plate of turkey and stuffing for
Sharon, who hasn't eaten on a day that's dedicated to feasting. Conceived by ar­
tificial insemination 38 weeks ago, this boy, Gauvin Hughes McCullough, has
arrived two weeks ahead of schedule, on Thanksgiving Day.
''A turkey baby:' signs Sharon, who is lying back against a bank of pillows,
her dark thick hair spread against the light gray pillowcases.
''A turkey baster baby:' j okes Candy, lying next to her.
''A perfect baby:' says the midwife.
''A perfect baby:' says the midwife's assistant.
 70 LIZA M UNDY

But there is perfect and there is perfect. There is no way to know, yet,
whether Gauvin Hughes McCullough is perfect in the specific way that Sharon
and Candy would like him to be. Until he is old enough, two or three months
from now, for a sophisticated audiology test, the women cannot be sure
whether Gauvin is-as they hope-deaf.

s EvE RA L M 0N T H s B E F 0 RE his birth, Sharon and Candy-both stylish

and independent women in their mid-thirties, both college graduates, both
holders of graduate degrees from Gallaudet University, both professionals in
the mental health field-sat in their kitchen trying to envision life if their son
turned out not to be deaf. It was something they had a hard time getting their
minds around. When they were looking for a donor to inseminate Sharon, one
thing they knew was that they wanted a deaf donor. So they contacted a local
sperm bank and asked whether the bank would provide one. The sperm bank
said no; congenital deafness is precisely the sort of condition that, in the world
of commercial reproductive technology, gets a would-be donor eliminated.
So Sharon and Candy asked a deaf friend to be the donor, and he agreed.
Though they have gone to all this trouble, Candy and Sharon take issue
with the suggestion that they are "trying" to have a deaf baby. To put it this way,
they worry, implies that they will not love their son if he can hear. And, they in­
sist, they will. As Sharon puts it: "A hearing baby would be a blessing. A deaf
baby would be a special blessing:'
As Candy puts it: "I would say that we wanted to increase our chances of
having a baby who is deaf."
It may seem a shocking undertaking: two parents trying to screen in a qual­
ity, deafness, at a time when many parents are using genetic testing to screen
out as many disorders as science will permit. Down's syndrome, cystic fibrosis,
early-onset Alzheimer's-every day, it seems, there's news of yet another disor­
der that can be detected before birth and eliminated by abortion, manipulation
of the embryo or, in the case of in vitro fertilization, destruction of an embryo.
Though most deafness cannot be identified or treated in this way, it seems safe
to say that when or if it can, many parents would seek to eliminate a disability
that affects one out of 1,000 Americans.
As for actively trying to build a deaf baby: " I think all of us recognize that
deaf children can have perfectly wonderful lives," says R. Alta Charo, a profes­
sor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin. "The question is
whether the parents have violated the sacred duty of parenthood, which is to
 A World ef Th eir Own 7 1

maximize to some reasonable degree the advantages available to their children.

I'm loath to say it, but I think it's a shame to set limits on a child's potential."
In the deaf community, however, the arrival of a deaf baby has never
evoked the feelings that it does among the hearing. To be sure, there are many
deaf parents who feel their children will have an easier life if they are born
hearing. "I know that my parents were disappointed that I was deaf, along with
my brother, and I know I felt, just for a fleeting second, bad that my children
were deaf," says Nancy Rarus, a staff member at the National Association of the
Deaf. Emphasizing that she is speaking personally and not on behalf of the as­
sociation, she adds, ''I'm a social animal, and it's very difficult for me to talk to
my neighbors. I wish I could walk up to somebody and ask for information.
I've had a lot of arguments in the deaf community about that. People talk
about 'The sky's the limit,' but being deaf prevents you from getting there. You
don't have as many choices."
"I can't understand,'' she says, "why anybody would want to bring a dis­
abled child into the world."
Then again, Rarus points out, "there are many, many deaf people who
specifically want deaf kids." This is true particularly now, particularly in Wash­
ington, home to Gallaudet, the world's only liberal arts university for the deaf,
and the lively deaf intelligentsia it has nurtured. Since the 1980s, many mem­
bers of the deaf community have been galvanized by the idea that deafness is
not a medical disability, but a cultural identity. They call themselves Deaf, with
a capital D, a community whose defining and unifying quality is American
Sign Language (ASL), a fluent, sophisticated language that enables deaf people
to communicate fully, essentially liberating them-when they are among
signers-from one of the most disabling aspects of being deaf. Sharon and
Candy share the fundamental view of this Deaf camp; they see deafness as an
identity, not a medical affliction that needs to be fixed. Their effort-to have a
baby who belongs to what they see as their minority group-is a natural out­
come of the pride and self-acceptance the Deaf movement has brought to so
many. It also would seem to put them at odds with the direction of reproduc­
tive technology in general, striving as it does for a more perfect normalcy.
But the interesting thing is-if one accepts their worldview, that a deaf
baby could be desirable to some parents-Sharon and Candy are squarely part
of a broader trend in artificial reproduction. Because, at the same time that
many would-be parents are screening out qualities they don't want, many are
also selecting for qualities they do want. And in many cases, the aim is to pro­
duce not so much a superior baby as a specific baby. A white baby. A black
 72 LIZA MU NDY

baby. A boy. A girl. Or a baby that's been even more minutely imagined.
Would-be parents can go on many fertility clinic Web sites and type in prefer­
ences for a sperm donor's weight, height, eye color, race, ancestry, complexion,
hair color, even hair texture.
"In most cases:' says Sean Tipton, spokesman for the American Society of
Reproductive Medicine, "what the couples are interested in is someone who
physically looks like them:' In this sense Candy and Sharon are like many par­
ents, hoping for a child who will be in their own image.
And yet, while deafness may be a culture, in this country it is also an official
disability, recognized under the Americans with Disabilities Act. What about
the obligation of parents to see that their child has a better life than they did?
Then again, what does a better life mean? Does it mean choosing a hearing
donor so your baby, unlike you, might grow up hearing?
Does it mean giving birth to a deaf child, and raising it in a better environ­
ment than the one you experienced?
What if you believe you can be a better parent to a deaf child than to a hear­
ing one?

" I T w o u L D B E N I c E to have a deaf child who is the same as us. I think that
would be a wonderful experience. You know, if we can have that chance, why
not take it?"
This is Sharon, seven months pregnant, dressed in black pants and a
stretchy black shirt, sitting at their kitchen table on a sunny fall afternoon,
Candy beside her. Jehanne, their daughter, who is also deaf, and was conceived
with the same donor they've used this time, is at school. The family has been
doing a lot of nesting in anticipation of the baby's arrival. The kitchen has been
renovated, the backyard landscaped. Soon the women plan to rig a system in
which the lights in the house will blink one rhythm if the TTY-the telephonic
device that deaf people type into-is ringing; another rhythm when the front
doorbell rings; another for the side door. They already have a light in the bed­
room that will go on when the baby cries.
In one way, it's hard for Sharon and Candy to articulate why they want to
increase their chances of having a deaf child. Because they don't view deafness
as a disability, they don't see themselves as bringing a disabled child into the
world. Rather, they see themselves as bringing a different sort of normal child
into the world. Why not bring a deaf child into the world? What, exactly, is the
problem? In their minds, they are no different from parents who try to have a
 A World ef Th e i r O wn 73

girl. After all, girls can be discriminated against. Same with deaf people. Sharon
and Candy have faced obstacles, but they've survived. More than that, they've
prevailed to become productive, self-supporting professionals. "Some people
look at it like, 'Oh my gosh, you shouldn't have a child who has a disability,' "
signs Candy. "But, you know, black people have harder lives. Why shouldn't
parents be able to go ahead and pick a black donor if that's what they want?
They should have that option. They can feel related to that culture, bonded
with that culture."
The words "bond" and "culture" say a lot; in effect, Sharon and Candy are a
little like immigrant parents who, with a huge and dominant and somewhat
alien culture just outside their door, want to ensure that their children will
share their heritage, their culture, their life experience. If they are deaf and have
a hearing child, that child will move in a world wh ere the women cannot fully
follow. For this reason they believe they can be better parents to a deaf child, if
being a better parent means being better able to talk to your child, understand
your child's emotions, guide your child's development, pay attention to your
child's friendships. "If we have a hearing child and he visits a hearing friend,
we'll be like, 'Who is the family? ' " says Candy. "In the deaf community, if you
don't know a family, you ask around. You get references. But with hearing fam­
ilies, we would have no idea."
They understand that hearing people may find this hard to accept. It would
be odd, they agree, if a hearing parent preferred to have a deaf child. And if they
themselves-valuing sight-were to have .a blind child, well then, Candy ac­
knowledges, they would probably try to have it fixed, if they could, like hearing
parents who attempt to restore their child's hearing with cochlear implants. "I
want to be the same as my child,'' says Candy. "I want the baby to enjoy what we
enjoy."
Which is not to say that they aren't open to a hearing child. A hearing child
would make life rich and interesting. It's just hard, before the fact, to know
what it would be like. "He'd be the only hearing member of the family,'' Sharon
points out, laughing. "Other than the cats."

" D I D Y O U W E I G H yourself ?"

"What?"
"Did you weigh yourself ?"
"Yes,'' says Sharon. It's a few weeks before the baby's birth, and Sharon has
taken the Metro to Alexandria for a prenatal checkup. Wearing a long black
 74 L I ZA M U N DY

skirt and loose maroon blouse, she has checked in at the BirthCare and
Women's Health Center and has been ushered into an examining room, where
she now shifts, bulky, in her seat.
"How are you feeling?" the midwife asks.
"Tired today," says Sharon. Often, Sharon brings her hearing friend Risa
Shaw to interpret at checkups, but today she's relying on her own ability to
speak and read lips. Reading lips is something Sharon does remarkably well.
She developed the skill on her own. Growing up, she was also enrolled in
speech therapy, where a progression of therapists fitted her with hearing aids,
shouted into her ear, sent her home to practice talking in front of a mirror be­
cause her "a" was too nasal, and generally instilled in her, she says now, a sense
of constant failure. On one level, the therapy worked: When she speaks, she
does so with fluency and precision.
But even the following small exchange shows what an inexact science lip­
reading is. "This is our first visit?" the midwife says, looking at her chart.
"What?" Sharon replies, peering to follow the movement of her tongue and
teeth and lips.
"This . . . is . . . my . . . first . . . visit . . . with . . . you," says the midwife,
speaking more slowly.
"Oh," says Sharon, who has seen other midwives on previous visits. "Yes."
"Let's see-we are at 36 weeks, huh? So today we need to do an internal
exam and also do the culture for beta strep. You're having a home birth, right?
So do you have the oxygen?" "What?"
"The oxygen?"
"What?"
The midwife gestures to indicate an oxygen tank, one of the supplies they
need to have on hand at home.
"No."
This gives some sense of what life has been like for Sharon, who was raised
in what's known as the oralist tradition. Which is to say, she was raised to func­
tion in the hearing world as best she could, without exposure to sign language
or to other deaf people, except her mother. Like her mother, Sharon was born
with some residual hearing but experienced hearing loss to the point where, at
eight or so, she was severely deaf. Her father, Thomas, a professor of economics
at the University of Maine, can hear, and so can her younger sister, Anne. In
this family Sharon was referred to as "hearing impaired" or "hard of hearing;'
rather than "deaf." She attended public school in Bangor; there was a special
classroom for deaf kids, and Sharon stayed as far away from it as possible.
"I find it very hard to say now," says Sharon. "Sometimes my speech thera-
 A World of Th eir O wn 7s

pist would want me to meet the other deaf children, and it was an embarrass­
ment. I didn't want to be identified with them. I didn't want my friends to look
at me as if I was different."
Those friendships were relatively easy when she was young, riding bikes
and running around, but became much harder in adolescence, where so much
of friendship is conducted verbally, in groups, which are impossible to lip-read.
She got by. "I played field hockey, I did layout for the yearbook, it looked like I
did fine, but inside I always felt there was something wrong with me. I remem­
ber someone would ask what kind of music I liked, and I didn't know what the
cool answer would be. I used to make my sister write down the words to the
most popular songs."
She grew up feeling that her sister was normal and that she was flawed, a
feeling, she says, exacerbated by her father, who pushed her to speak. She
knows he meant well, and Sharon functioned so ably, it's easy to see why his ex­
pectations for her were high. But those standards filled her with a desire to
meet them and a chronic sense of falling short. "Once when I was u or 12, my
family went to a restaurant to eat, and I wanted to have milk to drink, and I was
trying to tell the waitress and she couldn't understand me. I think I tried maybe
two or three times, and she kept looking at me like I was speaking Chinese. I
looked at my father like: 'Help me out here.' And he was like: 'Go ahead. Say it
again.' "
Another time, she says, her father told her that if she ever had children, she
should check with a geneticist to assess the risk that her baby, like her, would be
deaf. "I felt put down, like it would be bad if my child was deaf, or it was a neg­
ative thing to bring a deaf child into the world," she says. "I took it personally."
And high school, compared with what came later, was easy. Having done
well academically, Sharon enrolled at the University of Virginia. She tries to
convey the numbing isolation of that experience; of being at a huge college full
of strangers; being from out of state; being deaf; straining to catch names; feel­
ing at sea in dorms or at parties; sitting at the front of big classes, tape­
recording the lecture and then taking the tape to a special office to be typed,
then returning, alone, to her room with a 30- or 40-page transcript. For a hear­
ing person, perhaps the best analogy would be to imagine yourself in a foreign
country where you understand the language only slightly; where comprehen­
sion will not get better no matter how hard you try. "I got;' she says, "very tired
of that."
She gravitated to a major in medical ethics, and in that department she met
a professor who urged her to learn sign and meet some deaf people. Sharon re­
sisted; he persisted, pointing out that if she learned sign, she could interview
 76 LIZA M U N DY

deaf people as part of her research. So she relented, went to Gallaudet for a
summer of sign lessons, and realized that her professor's argument had been a
ploy. "The first day I got there, I knew that it wasn't about taking it for school. It
was for myself;' she says. She returned to U-Va., graduated, got an internship in
the bioethics department at the National Institutes of Health. But her heart
and mind were in continuing her sign lessons and becoming part of the deaf
community. The writer Oliver Sacks, in his book about deafness, Seeing Voices,
has described American Sign Language, for deaf people encountering it for the
first time, as coming home.
"It was the best time," she says. "There were so many wonderful things
about it. About deaf people, about signing. People understood me. I didn't
have to explain myself. I didn't have to fake it. It was a positive thing to be deaf
at Gallaudet.
"That summer:' she continues, beginning to weep, "really changed my life,
my hopes and my dreams and my future. It changed everything.
"Before that," she says, "I couldn't think about the future. I felt so lost."
Some of this lostness had to do with her sexual identity. She had never
dated men much, and at Gallaudet she became increasingly aware of herself as
a lesbian. A fellow student recognized this, took her out to some bars, helped
her come out. She went on to pursue a master's in the Gallaudet counseling de­
partment; it was during that period that she met Candy, a slender, vivacious
woman with a taste for leather jackets and hip, flared trousers. At the time,
Candy drove a Honda Prelude with a sound system that had-deaf people ex­
perience music through vibrations-really hot woofers.
Unlike Sharon, Candy had been brought up signing, the child of deaf par­
ents, but that doesn't mean her upbringing was easier. Neither of her parents
finished high school. Her father was a printer, the classic deaf profession; his­
torically, to be deaf often meant to be relegated to industrial work-factories
and print shops being among the few places where it is an advantage not to
hear. They lived in northern California, where for a while she was put in a spe­
cial deaf classroom in an inner-city Oakland school, where signing was not
permitted in class. Candy was so bright she worked through the entire third­
grade math textbook in a weekend, but she felt the expectations of her were
very low (some kids with deafness are also born with other disorders, so the
range of abilities in a deaf classroom is very broad) . She transferred to a special
school for deaf kids, but-finding that easy, too-transferred again to a hear­
ing high school, where she attended classes with an interpreter. But an inter­
preter can't help a high schooler make friends. No teenage conversation can
survive the intrusion of third-party interpretation, and Candy, unlike Sharon,
 A World of Thei r O wn 77

was not able to speak for herself. Profoundly deaf from birth, she had no resid­
ual hearing to help her figure out how a voice should sound. Even with speech
therapy, she'd learned early on that hearing people could not understand her
when she spoke. "So," she says now, "I stopped talking."
At lunch the interpreter would take a break, and Candy, unable to talk to
anyone, would go to the library and do her homework. On weekends, she stud­
ied or worked at the library shelving books. "I was the perfect student," she
says, so from high school she went to the University of California at Berkeley.
Like Sharon, she found college grindingly lonely. Her first year she met Ella
Mae Lentz, a deaf poet who composes in ASL. Lentz suggested Candy transfer
to Gallaudet. Like Sharon, Candy felt a deaf school would be academically infe­
rior. But, Lentz pointed out, a crucial part of college is having friends. Candy
had already come out as a lesbian; her mother was upset, so it occurred to
Candy that 3,000 miles away might be a good place to be. So she transferred,
and like Sharon, she has never looked back. The women, who have been to­
gether for nearly 10 years, moved in with each other, then bought a house with
their close friend Jan Delap. At some point Sharon spoke of a dream she'd
once had but dismissed: to have children. She assumed they couldn't, not be­
cause they were deaf but because they were lesbians. It is not Candy's nature to
dismiss dreams. " 'Can't' isn't in my vocabulary;' she says. So they found a
donor, a friend of Candy's who comes from five generations of deafness. In
Sharon's family there are four generations on her mother's side. Once she was
pregnant, a genetic counselor predicted that based on these family histories,
there was a 50-50 chance her child would be deaf. Heads for a deaf child, tails
for hearing.
The very first time-with Jehanne-the coin came up heads.
Candy usually signs with both hands, using facial expressions as well as
signs. This is all part of ASL, a physical language that encompasses the whole
body, from fingers to arms to eyebrows, and is noisy, too: There is lots of clap­
ping and slapping in ASL, and in a really great conversation, it's always possible
to knock your own eyeglasses off.
When she drives, though, Candy also signs one-handed, keeping the other
hand on the wheel. Chatting with Sharon, she maneuvers her Volvo through
Bethesda traffic and onto I-270, making her way north toward Frederick, home
to the Maryland School for the Deaf. State residential schools have played a
huge role in the development of America's deaf community. Historically, deaf
children often left their homes as young as five and grew up in dorms with
other deaf kids. This sometimes isolated them from their families but helped to
create an intense sense of fellowship among the deaf population, a group that,
 78 LIZA MU NDY

though geographically spread out, is essentially a tribe, a small town, a family

itself.
Now that people are more mobile, families with deaf children often relo­
cate near a residential school for the deaf, where the young children are more
likely to be day students. Jehanne is one; today she's waiting for them in a low
corridor inside the elementary school building at MSD, petite, elfin, dimpled,
with tousled brown hair and light brown, almost amber eyes. Essentially, the
baby Sharon is carrying represents a second effort that they're making because
the first was so successful. (Candy tried to have their second child, but a year of
efforts didn't take.) At her own infant audiology test, Jehanne was diagnosed as
profoundly deaf. In their baby book, under the section marked "first hearing
test," Candy wrote, happily, "Oct. 11, i996-no response at 95 decibels­
DEAF!"
This afternoon, Jehanne greets her mothers and begins immediately to
sign. She has been signed to since birth and, unlike her mothers, has been edu­
cated from the start in sign. At five she is beginning to read English quite well;
when they're riding in the car, she'll notice funny shop names, like Food Lion
and For Eyes. But she is also fluent in ASL, more fluent even than Sharon.
The women have arrived to visit Jehanne's kindergarten classroom, which
in most ways is similar to that of any other Maryland public school; the kids are
using flashcards to learn about opposites, conducting experiments to explore
concepts like wet and dry, light and heavy. The classes are small, and teachers
are mostly deaf, which is something new; years ago, even at MSD, deaf people
weren't permitted to teach the young kids, because it was believed that sign
would interfere with their learning to read. Now that's all changed. Sign is used
to teach them reading. They learn science in sign; they sign while doing puz­
zles, or gluing and pasting, or coloring, or working in the computer lab.
There is a speech therapy class, but it's optional, and a far cry from the ones
that Sharon and Candy remember, where laborious hours were spent blowing
on feathers to see the difference between a "b" and a "p." In general, Sharon and
Candy have tried not to make what they see as the mistakes their own parents
did. Sharon, for example, resents having been made to wear hearing aids and
denied the opportunity to learn sign, while Candy-who really wanted to try a
hearing aid when she was little-was told by her father that she couldn't be­
cause it would be expensive and pointless, anyway. Trying to chart a middle
course, they let Jehanne decide for herself whether she wanted to try a hearing
aid; she did, one summer when attending camp at Gallaudet. It was hot pink.
She wore it about a week.
Similarly, they left it up to her whether to take speech therapy; since she is
 A World of Th eir O wn 79

much more profoundly deaf than Sharon, it is unlikely that she will ever have
speech as clear as Sharon's. But she wanted to take the class; when they asked
why, she told them that it was fun. Now they understand why. When Jehanne
and another friend are pulled out for speech class on this day, they make their
way down the hall to a classroom where the children enact a mock Thanksgiv­
ing dinner. The teacher passes out plastic turkey and mashed potatoes and
bread; as they pretend to eat, enjoying the role- playing, the teacher signs and
speaks.
"Now we're going to do what with our napkins? " she says as the two girls
look up at her. "Put it in our 1-1-1-1-1-ap." She exaggerates the sound, so they can
see how an "l" is made. The girls learn speech by watching her and then trying
to imitate the tongue and lip movements they see. At such a young age, the
sounds that emerge are vague and tentative.
"Now we need a knife;' she says, and Jehanne makes a sound like "nuh."
"Knife."
"Nuh."
"Would you like some water?"
Jehanne makes a good-faith effort to say "yes, please," pursing her lips and
wiggling her tongue to come out with a "pl."
Candy and Sharon watch intently, concerned not about Jehanne's speech
but about the teacher's style of signing. At one point she tells Jehanne to lay out
her napkin, but because the sign isn't the classic ASL sign, Jehanne looks at her
blankly. "Oh well," says Sharon later. "It's good for her to know that not every­
body is a fluent signer." They inspect the computer lab, chatting with the school
Webmaster, whom they know; he and his wife are the parents of one of Je­
hanne's classmates. For Sharon and Candy, one of the great advantages of hav­
ing a deaf child is that it gives them a built-in social life. Like most parents, they
socialize a lot with the parents of their children's friends, and at MSD, many of
the parents are deaf. They also see the school as one way to ensure that Jehanne
doesn't endure the loneliness and isolation that they did. By raising her among
deaf children, they feel she's getting a much stronger start in life.
And they are every bit as ambitious for Jehanne as any parent would be for
a child. Afterward, the women talk to the principal, who is also deaf. They tell
her they are happy with the school, with a few caveats: They wish she had a lit­
tle more self-directed time; they wish the weekly written reports were more de­
tailed. Jehanne, who is clearly an outstanding student, is also just a tiny bit
klutzy, no big deal, but even so they'd like to hear some details from the gym
teacher. Her last report, for gym, was checked "needs improvement." "Needs
improvement? What does that tell me? " signs Candy. "We've taken her to dance
 So LIZA M U N DY

class, soccer; we swim each week, she does yoga! What more do you want us to
do?" Laughing, Sharon and Candy talk about the fact that Jehanne is one of
those kids who haven't figured out how to swing; she's still trying to get the
pumping motion. It's an interesting moment. To most parents, hearing would
seem a much more important ability, in the grand scheme of things, than
pumping. But that's not how Candy and Sharon see it.
"She's a sweetheart;' says the principal soothingly. "She's a role model.
She's in with such a nice group of friends." The principal has known most of
these kids almost since the day they were born. At MSD, deaf infants qualify
for a weekly morning class. When they are two, they go to preschool. Their
education-with small classrooms, extra teachers, transportation-is free,
paid for with public funds.
So advantageous is MSD, in fact, that one of the things Candy and Sharon
think about is how much more a hearing child would cost. If the baby is hear­
ing, they'll have to pay for day care. For preschool. Even, if they find they don't
agree with the teaching philosophy of the public schools, for private school.
"It's awful to think that, but it'll be more expensive!" Sharon acknowledges.
But-while deaf children do receive some financial advantages-they
point out that deaf children give back, in ways that are complex and impossible
to predict. Take Candy and Sharon themselves: Both work at home as coun­
selors, seeing deaf clients and, often, hearing family members. Not only do they
provide the deaf with dear, accessible mental health care; Sharon also finds that
hearing patients sometimes open up more for a therapist who is not herself
"perfect." And hearing parents of deaf children are often "relieved to come and
see a deaf therapist:' Sharon finds. "They're like, 'Oh, you went to college! Oh,
that means my children can do that! ' They're afraid the child will be on the
street selling pencils."
So sure, Jehanne's education may cost the public more. But deaf children,
Sharon argues, make a society more diverse, and diversity makes a society more
humane. Plenty of individuals and groups receive public support, and if you
start saying which costs are legitimate and which aren't, well, they believe, it's a
slippery slope.
"Do you think this baby's hearing?" Candy asks Sharon afterward, when
they are having lunch in downtown Frederick.
"I don't know;' says Sharon. "I can say that I hope the baby's deaf, but to say
I feel it's deaf, no."
They are talking about an old saying in the deaf community: If the mother
walks into a place with loud music, and the baby moves, the baby is hearing. "If
you base it on that, I do think it's deaf;' says Sharon.
 A World of Th e i r O wn 8 1

"I just say to myself that the baby's deaf," Candy says. "I talk as if the baby's
deaf. If the baby's hearing, I'll be shocked:'
"You better be prepared;' Sharon tells her. "With Jehanne, I prepared my­
self. It could happen." Thinking about it, she speculates: ''A hearing child would
force us to get out and find out what's out there for hearing children. Maybe
that would be nice."
Candy looks at her, amazed.
"It's not that it's my preference;' says Sharon. "But I 'm trying to think of
something positive."

E X A C T LY T W O W E E K S after his birth, Gauvin (pronounced Go-YAHN, as

in French) is sleeping in a Moses basket, luminous and pink and tiny. He con­
tinues to sleep, undisturbed, when Jan Delap turns on the disposal and Candy
loudly grates cheese with the salad shooter. But when Sharon begins to set the
table, opening cupboards and clattering plates, he shifts, clenches his fists and
stretches. Jehanne pretends to test his hearing, making a noise like "buh-buh­
buh;' and he writhes a little. When she is relaxed and around people she
loves-as now-Jehanne makes noises all the time, a low, constant, happy
humming.
The more relaxed a deaf household is, the noisier it is. Around hearing peo­
ple, deaf people are careful to control the sounds they make, but when they're
alone they can let go. When Sharon wants Candy, she calls her by stomping the
floor. When the cats get on the table, Jan lets out a hair-raising whoop. It
doesn't always work. One of the cats, they believe, is hard of hearing. The vet­
erinarian disagrees. "He thought we were projecting;' Sharon says.
Dinner tonight is burritos. Gauvin, who is turning out to be a very easy
baby, is still sleeping, so they can eat uninterrupted and chat with Jehanne. In
school, Jehanne's class is reading The Very Busy Spider, which involves animals
saying "baaa" and "neigh" and "meow;' sounds that none of the kids has heard.
And so today, Jehanne tells them, they learned about animal sounds.
"What does a duck say?" asks Candy.
"Oink, oink;' signs Jehanne.
"No! " signs Candy, amused. "Quack! Quack! "
"What does a rooster say?" she asks. Jehanne is stumped, and so, for a
minute, is everybody else.
"Oh yeah! " somebody remembers. "Cock-a-doodle-doo! "
After dinner, it's story time. The house is full of books. Downstairs are shelf
after shelf of novels, nonfiction and clinical textbooks, even a shelf dedicated to
 82 LIZA MUNDY

the English language, everything from dictionaries of English usage to the

Pocket Dictionary of American Slang. They are constantly buying books for
Jehanne; tonight they're reading Elizabite: Adventures of a Carnivorous Plant
and Blueberries for Sal.
Candy is tonight's designated reader. She signs the stories in ASL, some­
times with both hands, sometimes with one and using the other to point to the
words. Candy is such a beautiful, vivid signer that the stories seem to possess
her, and she them. Hands fluttering, face mobile and focused on Jehanne,
Candy is Little Sal's mother putting berries in her tin pail, plink plank plunk;
she is Mother Bear, separated from her cub; she is both of the babies, Little Sal
and Little Bear, looking for their moms. Jehanne watches, rapt; Jan watches,
rapt; Sharon, who is now breast-feeding Gauvin on a couch in the living room,
watches, rapt. A deep contentment falls over the household. "And the bear went
over and she heard the rumbling of Little Bear in the bushes, and she knew that
it was her baby, and they went down the mountain, eating berries and storing
them up for winter!" Candy finishes.
After Jehanne goes to bed, they take out an inking kit to record Gauvin's
footprint in his baby book. Like most second babies, Gauvin doesn't have the
extensive archives that his older sibling does. His baby book is still somewhat
sparse, whereas Jehanne's is crammed full of tiny writing. Under "baby's first
words," Candy noted that at about 11 months-the time most babies would say
their first word-Jehanne signed "fan." Soon came "swing," and "more," and
"light." In the section where the parents are to write their aspirations for the
baby, Candy wrote: "Jehanne can plan her own future. Seeing her happy is all
that is important to us."
It is an open question, however, to what extent Jehanne can plan her own
future. Candy and Sharon say that it will be okay with them if she goes to Gal­
laudet, but okay, too, if she wants to go to a hearing college. Though it would be
harder for her to participate, say, in student government or athletics or dorm
life, they think otherwise she would manage. And after that? The opportuni­
ties, they believe, are unlimited. Recently, though, Jehanne and Sharon were
talking about astronauts, and Jehanne asked whether a deaf person can be an
astronaut. Sharon was obliged to tell her no. Astronauts, she explained, need to
communicate by radio. "That's not nice!" Jehanne said. "It's not nice that deaf
people can't be astronauts! " Sharon told her maybe someday astronauts will be
able to use video.
But with the exception of that-and, probably, of the classic childhood am­
bition, president-they do feel that Jehanne can be what she wants. She has
electronic communications to help her; e-mail has made a huge difference to
 A World ef Their O wn 83

deaf people. She'll have what they feel is the solid foundation of an education
anchored by sign. They think she'll have what they never had: strong self­
esteem, a powerful belief in herself. She'll have the considerable legal protec­
tion of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which forbids employment
discrimination.
Not that the ADA can solve everything. Candy, who is in the final stages of
getting her doctorate in psychology, needs to do a yearlong internship at a hos­
pital or other workplace. She plans to counsel both deaf and hearing patients;
plans, in short, to be a psychologist like any other. This means two things. It
means an interpreter will need to be hired. It also means she is competing
mostly with hearing applicants. When she sends off her resume, there is no in­
dication she is deaf; at Gallaud et, most of the students in her graduate program
are hearing people who plan to work with the deaf. But if she gets an interview,
she has to e-mail the prospective employer, to discuss her need for an inter­
preter.
"If I go and they aren't interested," she says, "how do I know why? It's hard
sometimes to know whether discrimination is taking place, or not."
"Some deaf people think it's a hard life;' reflects Candy, whose grandfather
wanted to be a pilot but was prevented by deafness. "But some people think the
world is open."
"Did you ever want to be a policeman? " she asks Jan, whose father was a
cop. Jan, who is 60, had a deaf mother but a hearing father, so she grew up
around hearing relatives, and from them was exposed to music. When she was
seven, she saw a movie about an opera singer. "I told my friends that I wanted
to be an opera singer:' Jan recalls. "My cousin was like, 'You can't be an opera
singer. You're deaf ! ' I think that at that point I thought, 'I'm deaf now but
maybe I can be hearing later.' "
"I remember wanting to be a lawyer;' says Candy. "And then my teacher
said that a deaf person can't do it. And later it wasn't my area of interest."
Now, Jan mentions, there are quite a few deaf lawyers. They have a friend
who is one. In the courtroom she makes use of something called real-time cap­
tioning. There are technical advances every day. But technology doesn't help a
deaf person who is standing next to a hearing person who can't sign. It will
never completely bridge what is, still, an enormous gap. Jehanne has a neigh­
bor she plays with, a hearing girl she's known almost since birth. The mothers
agree that as they get older, it's getting harder and harder for the girls to com­
municate, and they get together less and less.
"What I wonder;' Jan says at one point, "is whether they'll eliminate the
deaf gene. Maybe they'll be able to pluck out the deaf gene. Maybe there will be
 84 LIZA M U N DY

no more deaf people." They sit contemplating this. It isn't out of the question.
Members of another disabled group were taken by surprise when the gene that
causes their condition was discovered: Now, a child with achondroplasia, or
disproportionately short arms and legs-also known as dwarfism-can be
identified in utero. And, if the parents don't want a child with dwarfism, the fe­
tus can be aborted. The community of "little people;' which has its own associ­
ation, its own Web site, a strong tradition in Hollywood, and a powerful
fellowship, has been left contemplating its children destroyed, its numbers
dwindling, its existing members consigned to a narrowing life of freakishness
and isolation. Such a fate could-it's possible-befall the deaf. The situation il­
lustrates how in this country, at this cultural moment, disabled people are ex­
posed to two powerful but contradictory messages. One says: You are beautiful.
You are empowered. The other says: You are deficient. You may be snuffed out.
"Maybe there will be no more deaf children:' Jan says.
"Except," says Candy, "for those of us who choose to make more deaf chil­
dren."
As the weeks go by, Gauvin starts staying awake more. His eyes, blue and
wide, start tracking more; he watches his mothers, and Jehanne, with an inten­
sity that they believe is characteristic of deaf children. They sign to him in deaf
"motherese"; like a hearing mother speaking in a high-pitched, singsong voice,
they sign slowly, with exaggerated gestures. In mid-December they take him to
Gallaudet for a show. In the auditorium there are people signing across the
room, people signing from the floor to people in the balcony.
In this group Gauvin is admired like a crown prince. Friends, colleagues
and former classmates come to peek inside the sling in which Sharon is carry­
ing him, and, inevitably, to inquire whether he is deaf. "How many of you are
deaf?" asks the emcee, and Jan-half-joking, half-serious-motions to Sharon
to raise Gauvin's hand.
There are many more admirers: In December the sperm donor comes for a
visit, as he does about twice a year. Then, after Christmas, Sharon's father,
Thomas, arrives. Sharon's mother died of breast cancer not long after Sharon
graduated from U-Va., so he is here with the woman who is now his compan­
ion, Caroline Dane. Both of them are hearing. Also visiting are Candy's
mother, Diana, who is deaf; Sharon's sister, Anne, who is hearing; Anne's boy­
friend, Paul, who is hearing. That means there are four hearing people in the
house and five deaf people. Plus Gauvin, whatever team he ends up on.
Jehanne moves from or�e group to another, but usually gravitates toward peo­
ple who are signing, because she has no way, save by gesturing, to communicate
with her hearing relatives.
 A World of Their O wn 8 s-

Sharon is the pivot point, the only one who can translate, which is exhaust­
ing for her. She has to keep lip-reading and talking and signing, almost simul­
taneously. When an interpreter arrives to interpret for this article, the entire
group-all 10 of them-crowds into the living room and sits, talking intently,
for two hours.
It is the first time they have been able to fully express themselves to one an­
other, the first time Sharon has ever had someone to interpret a conversation
with her own family. The first time she didn't have to strain to understand what
her father said, or her sister. Much of it is funny and fond: It turns out that
Thomas, cleaning out his attic, recently found some of the song lyrics that
Anne transcribed for Sharon, back when both were girls. "You saved those? "
says Sharon. "Why?" Then Anne remembers how she would interpret for
Sharon on the phone.
"I remember when that boy asked you to the prom;' says Anne, who is six
years younger than Sharon, her hair lighter brown, her face illuminated by the
same quizzical expressions, the same seriousness, the same faintly Gallic
beauty.
"You interpreted that?" Sharon says, laughing.
"Yes! " says Anne, who also remembers that whenever Sharon didn't want to
go out with a boy, Anne was the one who had to tell him.
"Do you remember that time we were having an argument, and I called you
'deaf ' ? " Anne says.
"You weren't happy. A lot has changed."
Together, the sisters try to excavate some of their mother's history, find out
why she never signed: Both Sharon and her mother struggled to lip-read each
other, mother and daughter divided rather than united by deafness, their com­
mon bond. Eventually Sharon confronts her father with what she sees as the
central mistake her parents made in her upbringing. "I can look back now;' she
signs, "and say that things would have been different if I had learned to sign, or
been exposed to deaf culture. Growing up, if l got 60 percent of a conversation,
I felt like that was good. Some of those behaviors are still with me. In groups of
signers, they may be signing really fast and even if I'm not getting it all I'm like,
'This is good enough.' I still don't like asking people to repeat. I'm just used to
not getting everything.''
Later, sitting with her father, she asks, "Did you feel bad when I said that I
wished it had been different when I was growing up? "
"No," says her father, a solid, deliberative man with glasses who has brought
Jehanne a University of Maine sweatshirt. "We all think about that. We all feel
that way about our parents.''
 86 LIZA M U N DY

I N T R Y I N G T O K N O W how to think about Sharon and Candy's endeavor,

there are any number of opinions a person might have. Any number of abstract
ideas a person might work through in, say, an ethics course. Are the women be­
ing selfish? Are they inflicting too much hardship on the child? How does one
think of them compared with, say, a mother who has multiple embryos im­
planted in the course of fertility treatments, knowing that this raises the likeli­
hood of multiple births and, with it, birth defects in some or all of the babies?
Morally, how much difficulty can a parent impose on a child in order to satisfy
the desire to have a child, or to have a certain kind of child?
A person can think about this, and think about it, but eventually will run
up against the living, breathing fact of the child herself. How much difficulty
have Sharon and Candy imposed on Jehanne? They haven't deafened her.
They've given life to her. They've enabled her to exist. If they had used a hear­
ing donor, they would have had a different child. That child would exist, but
this one wouldn't. Jehanne can only exist as what she is: Jehanne, bright, funny,
loving, loved, deaf.
And now what about Gauvin, who, at three months, already resembles his
sister? He has the same elfin face shape, the same deep dimples when he smiles.
On his head is a light fuzz of hair; bulkier now, alert and cheery, he's wearing
gray overalls and groovy red leather sneakers. The question that will be an­
swered this February afternoon, at Children's National Medical Center, is
whether Gauvin, like Jehanne, is deaf. Whether the coin has landed on the same
side twice. By now, Gauvin has had an initial hearing screening, which he
failed. They considered this good news, but not conclusive. From there he was
referred to this one, which is more sophisticated. The preliminaries take
awhile. Sharon lays Gauvin in a crib and a technician applies conductive paste
at points around his head, then attaches electrodes to the paste. He needs to be
asleep for the test, in which microphones will be placed in his ears and a click­
ing noise sent through the wires. Through the electrodes, a machine will mon­
itor the brain response. If the waves are flat, there is no hearing. He stirs and
cries, so Sharon breast-feeds him, wires dangling from his head, until he falls
asleep. The technician slips the microphone in his ear, turns on the clicking
noise-up and up, louder and louder-and the two women look at the com­
puter screen. Even at 95 decibels, a sound so loud that for hearing people it's lit­
erally painful, the line for the left ear is flat. But there is a marked difference in
the right. For softer sounds the line is flat, but at 75 decibels there is a distinct
wave. The technician goes to fetch the doctor, and the mothers contemplate
 A World of Their O wn 87

their sleeping son, who, it appears, might be neither deaf nor hearing but
somewhere in between.
The doctor, Ira Weiss, bustles in; he is a white-haired, stocky man, jovial
and accustomed to all sorts of parents, hearing and deaf, happy and sobbing.
The technician points to the wave and suggests that perhaps it represents
some noise that Gauvin himself was making. "No," says the doctor, "I think it's
not just noise." Sharon looks up at Candy and lets out a little breath. The doc­
tor disappears to get a printout of the results, then returns, reading it. Gauvin,
he says, "has a profound hearing loss in his left ear and at least a severe hearing
loss in his right ear.
"It does appear," he adds, "that his right ear has some residual hearing.
There might be some usable hearing at this time. Given the mother's history, it
will probably get worse over time. If you want to take advantage of it, you
should take advantage of it now. Right now it's an ear that could be aided, to
give him a head start on spoken English. Obviously, he's going to be a fluent
signer."
At this stage, Weiss says later, a hearing parent would probably try a hearing
aid, in the hope that with it, that right ear could hear something. Anything. A
word, here and there. A loud vowel. Maybe just enough residual sound to help
him lip-read. Maybe just enough to tell him when to turn his head to watch
someone's lips. Hearing parents would do anything-anything-to nudge a
child into the hearing world. Anything-anything-to make that child like
them. For a similar reason, Sharon and Candy make the opposite choice. If he
wants a hearing aid later, they'll let him have a hearing aid later. They won't put
one on him now. After all, they point out, Sharon's hearing loss as a child oc­
curred at below 40 decibels, which meant that under certain conditions she
could make out voices, unaided. Gauvin's, already, is far more severe than hers.
Bundling Gauvin up against the cold, they make their way down the corridor,
and into the car, and home, where they will tell Jehanne, and Jan, and friends,
and family, a sizable group, really, that wants to know. He is not as profoundly
deaf as Jehanne, but he is quite deaf. Deaf enough.
 F L O Y D S K LO O T

Th e Melo dy Lin9 ers On

F R O M S O U TH WE S T R E VI E W

As researchers try to 9et a betterfix on its causes and patholoa.r, Alzheimer's

disease remains a terrif.yin9 mystery. With candor and tenderness, the poet
and writer Floyd Skloot observes the toll the disease is takin9 on his ninety­
one -year-old mother, who literally andfi9uratively may have jor9otten the
words but can remember the tune .

t ninety-one, deep i n dementia, my mother n o longer remembers her

A life. Thoughts drift as though in zero gravity, bumping occasionally

against a few stray bits of memory, but nothing coheres. Her two hus­
bands, her late son, all the cousins and community acquaintances who fill ed
her days, her ambitions and achievements, her travels and yearnings-almost
everything has floated away from her grasp, mere debris.
"Was I happily married?" she asked last week, when my wife, Beverly, and I
took her out for coffee and snacks. Before I could answer, she added, " Oh how
we somthinged on the hmmm hmm we were wed. Dear, was I ever on the stage?"
I nodded and said, "On the radio too."
"I was on the radio?" She smiled, dosed her eyes and sang, "Birds gotta
swim, fish gotta fly, da-dada-da one man da-da die." Then she lifted a fragment
of blueberry muffin and said, "Was I ever on the stage?"
It's not just her distant past that's gone. What happened two minutes ago is
as lost as what happened during the twenty-seven years she lived in Manhat-
 The Melody lin9ers On 89

tan, the twenty years she lived in Brooklyn or the forty-four years she lived on
Long Island. Now that she's in Oregon, she doesn't know she ever lived else­
where. Sometimes she believes her Portland nursing home is a beachfront ho­
tel, just as she sometimes believes I am her late brother.
What's become apparent, though, is that she still knows songs. She retains
many lyrics, snatches that may get confused but are easily recognizable, and
when the lyrics are missing the melodies remain. She loves to sing, sings on key
and with zest, and I can't help wondering why song has hung on so tenaciously
while her life memories have not.
It's tempting to take the psychological approach : She never was very happy
with her life, but she was happy dreaming of stardom as a torch singer. She was
happy knowing she'd had a brief career singing on radio in the mid-193os,
where her five-minute program on WBNX in the Bronx aired opposite Rudy
Valee. In the chemical bath of her mind, she always transformed a few years of
apprentice costume work in the legitimate theater, and an assortment of roles
in local community theater, into a protracted career in the Thee-a-ter. No ques­
tion: she loved performing. I remember how extravagantly she accompanied
herself on the piano, sliding along the bench to reach her notes, stomping the
pedals, rising and sitting again, going through her brief repertoire before
erupting with gusto at the end as a signal for applause. According to this psy­
chological approach, my mother forgets what she needs to forget, and is left
with song.
But such an explanation isn't really convincing, not when the evidence of
deep organic brain damage is so apparent in her activities of daily living. She
cannot dress herself, needs reminding during a meal if she is to continue eat­
ing, cannot process new information. Her failures of memory are not choices,
not driven by subconscious needs. It must be that, unlike personal memories
or the recall of facts, such things as song lyrics are stored in a part of her brain
that has, so far, escaped the ravages of her dementia.

A s A R E s u LT of advances in neuroscience, the pattern of my mother's losses

can be pinpointed biologically. First, there's the sheer diminishment in her
overall cognitive capacity. In his book Searching for Memory, Harvard psychol­
ogist Daniel L. Schacter says that "overall brain mass steadily shrinks as we en­
ter our sixties and seventies, at roughly 5 percent to 10 percent per decade." So
my mother's brain has probably lost about a quarter of its size by now. In addi­
tion, "blood flow and uptake of oxygen both decrease significantly" and there is
"widespread loss of neurons in the cortex," a major site of memory storage. In
 90 F LOYD SK LOOT

Alzheimer's patients, the shrinking brain also becomes clotted with plaques
and tangles, and there is further neuron loss in the hippocampus, a part of the
brain associated with the ability to remember the ongoing incidents in our
lives. This set of compounding pathologies explains most of her symptoms,
but not the curious endurance of those songs. It's most likely that my mother's
lifelong joy in performing, and the powerful emotional forces associated with
it for her, have enabled the deeper storage of lyric and melody in her amygdala.
This almond-shaped organ in the inner brain is critical for forming and sus­
taining emotional memories. Though most often spoken of in connection with
persistent, enduring traumatic memories, it also is responsible for enduring
positive memories. This is where our most vivid memories reside, etched there
by a mix of chemical and physical processes that ensure their endurance. I sus­
pect that my mother's amygdala has not yet been overtaken by her disease
process. This would explain not only the persistence of her song repertoire, but
the relative calmness and sweetness she still manifests. As David Shenk notes in
his book The Forgetting, when the "amygdala becomes compromised, control
over primitive emotions like fear, anger, and craving is disrupted; hostile emo­
tions and bursts of anxiety may occur all out of proportion to events, or even
out of nowhere."
My mother is not there yet. In trying to reduce her symptoms to these ob­
jective clinical explanations, I know I'm trying to cushion myself from the
changes she's undergone and from what lies ahead. But this is my mother, not
some interesting case history in a neurology text. This is the woman who
fought to allow my birth, eight years after my older brother's, overcoming my
father's continuing resistance. The woman who recited nonsense verse to me,
sounds I still remember fifty years later though she does not, though she can no
longer always remember who I am: Nicky nicky tembo, whatso rembo, wudda
wudda boosky, hippo pendro, national pom pom. The woman, so miserable and
disappointed throughout her life, filled with anger, volatile, friendless in old
age, who now in dementia has grown sweet and accommodating, happy to
greet the day, who has come back to song.
Those songs of hers, which routinely interrupt any effort at communica­
tion, are in fact signs of hope. They represent an enduring part of her past, con­
nected with the rare joy in her life, which is why they linger when so much is
gone. I must learn to welcome rather than be annoyed by them. In many ways,
they're all we have left of her.
 The Melody Lin9ers On 91

LIKE THE MAss of her brain, the physical structure of my mother's body is
also shrinking. At her tallest, about 5' 111, the top of her head used to be level
with the middle of my forehead; now she comes up to my throat. She was al­
ways wide, too, a solid and blocky woman whose flowing outfits didn't disguise
her figure as she'd hoped. She took up room despite being small. But now she
has lost both water and mass. Her once swollen legs have slimmed; she sags and
looks frail. It's as though my mother is pulling herself in around a diminishing
core, the dwindling autobiographical self she's losing touch with, and closing
down before my eyes.
She was moving slowly toward our table in the coffee shop, inching her
walker along, taking a few steps and stopping. When she reached the table
where Beverly was placing napkins and spoons, she looked around with a
smile, let go of her side rails, tilted her head heavenward and sang, " S'wonder­
ful, s'marvelous, la da da."
Her voice still comes from down near her chest, the way it's supposed to, a
richly resonating smoky contralto. It's almost as deep as my own off-key tenor.
But as a young singer, my mother was a soprano. There are three surviving 78
rpm records from her radio show that p rove it. She was called "The Melody
Girl of the Air" on a program hosted by an old family friend, and once a week
she sang a few standards for him. George Gershwin was alive then and Gersh­
win was her favorite. There were times when she hinted at a romance with him,
never going quite so far as to say they'd dated, but implying that a certain dash­
ing young composer-whom she was not at liberty to name but who had a
dowdy lyricist brother-was once very interested in her.
A solid fifty years of unfiltered Chesterfields transformed my mother's
voice and, though she stopped smoking in her early seventies, those cigarettes
remain audible now in her gravelly tones. But she can and does still belt out the
tunes, holding nothing back. This dynamic and deeper voice is how I remem­
ber her singing. I never could make sense out of those old records, the high
pitched girlishness, the piercing delivery. In my hearing, she sang dark and
windy.
There was always a well-tuned mahogany piano against a living room wall
in our various apartments. Its lid was shut, its music deck empty, its surfaces
without dust or fingerprints. No one was allowed to sit on its bench or open the
keyboard lid, much less touch the keys or press the pedals down. No examining
the sheet music hidden inside the bench. She wasn't sure she wanted us even to
look at the piano.
By the 1950s, as I was growing up, my mother's performance repertoire had
 92 F LOYD S K LOOT

been condensed to five tunes that she would play in the same order. She seldom
sang more than one refrain and chorus, took no requests, brooked no singing
along. She would consent to entertain at the end of small dinner parties or hol­
iday meals, perching on the bench and holding her chin up until there was total
silence. Then she struck a chord fortissimo and launched herself into perfor­
mance. First came the Gershwin portion of the program, "They Can't Take
That Away from Me;' " 'S Wonderful" and "Our Love Is Here to Stay." Then she
did Rodgers and Hart's "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered" from Pal Joey
and finished with her signature song, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein's
"Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man:' from Show Boat. No encores. She was still, it
seemed, tied to the fifteen-minute radio show format.
I see now that her songs were songs of love, joyful love. Along with fame as
a performer, this was the other great unfulfilled yearning of her life. It was not
there with the man she married first, who died in 1961, the man she spoke of in
my hearing as "your father the butcher." Nor was it there apparently with her
second husband, a kind and gentle widower, the man she spoke of as "that nice,
handsome fellow." After his death, when she moved into a retirement hotel
overlooking the boardwalk, my mother had a succession of boyfriends but
none without glaring faults-too old and bent, too devoted to children and
grandchildren, too working-class, too senile. Now, from within her own de­
mentia, one of the main themes woven through her rambling speech is love,
joyful love. Was she happily married? Does she have a boyfriend? Are Beverly
and I married? Are we happy? Is the nurse married? The young man behind the
Starbucks counter? Can we help my mother find a new boyfriend?
Even as a child, I sensed something that made me very uncomfortable with
my mother's recitals. It wasn't j ust the showy way she played, or the too­
familiar spontaneity of her moves. It had to do with the look on her face, a rap­
turous hunger, and the sudden exposure of her deepest, most obsessive wishes.
She leaped off her piano bench like a nearly drowned diver suddenly bursting
to the surface, head back, mouth wide open, and I imagine her longing was pal­
pable to everyone. There was something brazenly sad about her selection of ro­
mantic hits, a sadness I failed to appreciate for most of my life. She must have
wanted what she could never have, what few people ever have, and she hadn't
let go of the need: idealized romantic love. Her playlist was a litany of failed
dreams.
Those failed dreams and her overall sense of disgruntlement seem to have
shrunk now too. With the fading of memory and life story has come an appar­
ent narrowing of mood. From the outside, seeing how she is now, this phe-
 The Melody lin9ers On 93

nomenon suggests a compensation for her shattering losses, and I hope that's
how it works for her. I know it could have been otherwise. Like so many people
with Alzheimer's or deep dementia, she could long ago have become even an­
grier and more tormented, hostile and restless.

M Y M O T H E R L O O K E D D O W N at the coffee in her cup, unsure what to do

with it. She gazed into its tawny surface and blinked. Only when she looked
away did she, as though triggered by signals from a more instinctive zone of her
brain, lift the cup toward her lips. I helped her steady it.
"Was I ever on the stage, dear?" she asked again.
I responded automatically: "I whistle a happy tune . . . ," and she beamed,
picking up the tune itself, humming along, nodding firmly. One way to look at
this, I've realized, is to consider song lyrics as my mother's native tongue. Tonal
and melodious, its beauties of sound offset by the banality of its linguistic con­
tent. Well, beauties of sound when she sings it, not when I do.
"What comes next?" she asked.
"I hold my head . . . :' and she nods again, taking over, finishing out the
sentence after her own fashion: " so no one da dee da I forget."
From the mid-195os to the mid-197os, my mother was active in community
theater. She was usually cast in small singing roles. I remember her playing
Melba Snyder in Pal Joey, doing the striptease number "Zip" in the basement of
our Brooklyn synagogue. She played the nanny, Gooch, in Auntie Mame, where
she was dressed up by Mame and her friend Vera for one night as a swinger
(singing "I lived! I lived! I lived! ") . She was King Mongkut's first wife, Lady Thi­
ang, in The King and I, shunted aside for younger wives, the romance of mar­
riage gone though she still admires her husband and tells Anna so ("Something
Wonderful"). Taking on a non-singing role, she was Yente the Matchmaker in
Fiddler on the Roof What these roles all have in common is their tangential re­
lationship to passion: a cynical stripper, an unglamorous nanny spruced up for
a quick taste of the sexy high life, a queen spurned and settling for grandeur in­
stead of romance, an old woman whose business is brewing love for others.
Ironically, even as she got to fulfill her desire for performing, the roles she
played re-enacted romantic failure and disappointment.
I performed with her on occasion, when no reasonable excuse could be
found. When she was in The King and I, I was ten and played one of the king's
children, learning my one schoolroom speech ("What is that green over
there?"), rehearsing the March of the Siamese Children, singing my brief solo
 94 F LOYD S K L O OT

("Suddenly I'm bright and breezy") in "Getting to Know You." At thirteen, dur­
ing a horrifying cabaret-style local fund-raiser, I sang a duet with her, the duti­
ful Sonny Boy climbing upon my mother's knee though we were the same size.
When she wasn't part of a play's cast, she still became engaged in the pro­
ductions. She attended rehearsals to play the piano or read cues or kibbitz. She
painted sets. Resorting to her earliest contributions to the theater, she helped
design costumes.
I remember her working on hat designs for a production of Guys and Dolls.
She would glue buttons onto blank greeting cards, paint black dots for eyes in
the buttonholes and red dots for mouths, add a few ink strokes for hair. Then
she snipped bits of fabric and feathers to resemble hats, pasted them onto the
crowns of the buttons and made tiny adjustments with toothpicks. Below the
buttons, she drew the shape of necks, then added scarves or ties. It was possible
for her to devote four or five intense hours a night to this work, cigarettes smol­
dering in her abalone shell ashtray. The finished illustrations would be spread
out over a card table to dry or for further modification. Finally, she would
bring them to rehearsal, stacked in a shoe box, and get herself ready for another
round.
My mother was, clearly, a trouper. I cannot remember her being as focused
or as sprightly as she was at her design work or within the acting company. She
saved all the reviews from our local paper, all the programs, and most of the
scripts. I found them in a storage locker when she moved into the retirement
hotel and, just glancing at them, felt myself swamped with the scents and
sounds of her theatrical life.

As WE TURNED onto Boundary Avenue, bringing my mother back to the

nursing home after our outing, Beverly said, "This is the street where you live."
Then, as though on cue, all three of us started singing Lerner and Loewe's "On
the Street Where You Live": I have often walked down the street before. My
mother's voice fractured into laughter and she could hardly keep singing. Be­
sides, she didn't exactly have the words anymore. So she went into scat: Doo doo
doo doo do, la da dee doo da, knowing I'm doo be la doo wee oh. We pulled up to
the front door, all three of us cackling at our mutual cleverness.
I've noticed during recent visits that my mother's repertoire has actually
expanded. She's no longer limited to the Big Five Hits. Now she'll bring out
songs I never heard her sing before, like "Fly Me to the Moon" or "Anything
Goes:· which I recognize from the sustained melodies more than from the
snippet of lyrics she can muster. Dixon and Henderson's "Bye, Bye Blackbird"
 The Melody Lin9ers On 9s

from 1926, Gus Kahn's "Makin' Whoopee" from 1928. She sings Yiddish songs,
too, all new to me, songs she must have learned during her childhood, when
Yiddish was spoken at home and in the Upper West Side neighborhoods where
she lived. I haven't heard her speak a word of Yiddish since we moved from
Brooklyn in 1957 and cannot remember her ever singing in the language that
might have marked her as marginal. She also now has the melodies for some
Hebrew tunes she must be picking up during Sabbath services at the nursing
home. I don't believe they come from her memory tune-bank because she
never went to the synagogue except for social or theatrical events, and I haven't
heard her utter a word in Hebrew before.
Much as I'm amazed to hear her dredge up songs from her childhood or
youth, it's the phenomenon of new songs-"Adon Olam:' for instance, and
"Hatikvah"-that astounds me. Perhaps this means that, because she still con­
nects so powerfully to music, she can somehow learn and remember fresh ma­
terial, at least song material, particularly melodies, though in conversation she
cannot remember the question she asked a moment before, or whether we told
her what state we live in, or if we're married. Asked if she has been to Sabbath
services, she says, "No, they don't have them here." But they do, and she has,
and the melodies have stuck.
She also comes up with songs I know she's heard in my lifetime but I hadn't
realized she remembered. And she delivers them with genuine glee. Be down to
la da in a taxi baby, doo dah be-dee dee in your hay dee hay. Gradually, I've been
discovering that this is an opportunity for conversation of a sort. While it's not
possible for me to ask her questions and get meaningful answers, or share in­
formation with her about the life Beverly and I are leading, or even go over
memories of childhood with her, we can approximate the give and take of con­
versation through song. "What are those?" I'll say, pointing to the necklace of
beads she's made during a crafts session. "Baubles? Bangles?" And she'll say,
"Bubbles, Bangles bright shiny beads la da dee dah." Or I'll hum the opening
notes from "If I Were a Rich Man" and she will pick up the song from there.
I'm beginning to find a solace in this exchange. We have the rhythm of con­
versation, if not the content. A form of give and take that enables us still to feel
connected by words, or at least by meaningful sounds. "The song is ended:' as
her favorite songwriter wrote, "but the melody lingers on." We are holding on
to the melody of contact. And they can't take that away from me, from us, at
least not yet.
 F RA N K W I L C Z E K

Th e World 's Num eri cal Reci p e

F R O M DA E DA L US

The phrase "music ef the spheres"has passed into metaphor, but it was ori9i­
nal!J coined to describe celestial motion. The physicist Frank Wilczek won­
ders whether the music ef the spheres is to be found not in the arand
movements ef the heavens but in the tiny workin9s ef the atom.

wentieth-century physics began around 600 B.c. when Pythagoras of

T Samos proclaimed an awesome vision.

By studying the notes sounded by plucked strings, Pythagoras dis­
covered that the human perception of harmony is connected to numerical ra­
tios. He examined strings made of the same material, having the same
thickness, and under the same tension, but of different lengths. Under these
conditions, he found that the notes sound harmonious precisely when the ra­
tio of the lengths of string can be expressed in small whole numbers. For exam­
ple, the length ratio 2:1 sounds a musical octave, 3:2 a musical fifth, and 4:3 a
musical fourth.
The vision inspired by this discovery is summed up in the maxim ''All
Things Are Number." This became the credo of the Pythagorean Brotherhood,
a mixed-sex society that combined elements of an archaic religious cult and a
modern scientific academy.
The Brotherhood was responsible for many fine discoveries, all of which it
attributed to Pythagoras. Perhaps the most celebrated and profound is the
 The World 's Numerical Recipe 97

Pythagorean Theorem. This theorem remains a staple of introductory geome­

try courses. It is also the point of departure for the Riemann-Einstein theories
of curved space and gravity.
Unfortunately, this very theorem undermined the Brotherhood's credo.
Using the Pythagorean Theorem, it is not hard to prove that the ratio of the hy­
potenuse of an isosceles right triangle to either of its two shorter sides cannot
be expressed in whole numbers. A member of the Brotherhood who revealed
this dreadful secret drowned shortly afterward, in suspicious circumstances.
Today, when we say V2 is irrational, our language still reflects these ancient
anxieties.
Still, the Pythagorean vision, broadly understood-and stripped of cultic,
if not entirely of mystical, trappings-remained for centuries a touchstone for
pioneers of mathematical science. Those working within this tradition did not
insist on whole numbers, but continued to postulate that the deep structure of
the physical world could be captured in purely conceptual constructions. Con­
siderations of symmetry and abstract geometry were allowed to supplement
simple numerics.
In the work of the German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1570-1630) , this
program reached a remarkable apotheosis-only to unravel completely.
Students today still learn about Kepler's three laws of planetary motion. But
before formulating these celebrated laws, this great speculative thinker had an­
nounced another law-we can call it Kepler's zeroth law-of which we hear
much less, for the very good reason that it is entirely wrong. Yet it was his dis­
covery of the zeroth law that fired Kepler's enthusiasm for planetary astronomy,
in particular for the Copernican system, and launched his extraordinary career.
Kepler's zeroth law concerns the relative size of the orbits of different planets. To
formulate it, we must imagine that the planets are carried about on concentric
spheres around the Sun. His law states that the successive planetary spheres are
of such proportions that they can be inscribed within and circumscribed about
the five Platonic solids. These five remarkable solids-tetrahedron, cube, octa­
hedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron-have faces that are congruent equilateral
polygons. The Pythagoreans studied them, Plato employed them in the specu­
lative cosmology of the Timaeus, and Euclid climaxed his Elements with the first
known proof that only five such regular polyhedra exist.
Kepler was enraptured by his discovery. He imagined that the spheres emit­
ted music as they rotated, and he even speculated on the tunes. (This is the
source of the phrase "music of the spheres.") It was a beautiful realization of
the Pythagorean ideal. Purely conceptual, yet sensually appealing, the zeroth
law seemed a production worthy of a mathematically sophisticated Creator.
 98 FRAN K WI LCZEK

To his great credit as an honest man and-though the concept is anachro­

nistic-as a scientist, Kepler did not wallow in mystic rapture, but actively
strove to see whether his law accurately matched reality. He discovered that it
does not. In wrestling with the precise observations of Tycho Brahe, Kepler was
forced to give up circular in favor of elliptical orbits. He couldn't salvage the
ideas that first inspired him.
After this, the Pythagorean vision went into a long, deep eclipse. In New­
ton's classical synthesis of motion and gravitation, there is no sense in which
structure is governed by numerical or conceptual constructs. All is dynamics.
Newton's laws inform us, given the positions, velocities, and masses of a system
of gravitating bodies at one time, how they will move in the future. They do
not fix a unique size or structure for the solar system. Indeed, recent discoveries
of planetary systems around distant stars have revealed quite different pat­
terns. The great developments of nineteenth-century physics, epitomized in
Maxwell's equations of electrodynamics, brought many new phenomena
within the scope of physics, but they did not alter this situation essentially.
There is nothing in the equations of classical physics that can fix a definite scale
of size, whether for planetary systems, atoms, or anything else. The world­
system of classical physics is divided between initial conditions that can be as­
signed arbitrarily, and dynamical equations. In those equations, neither whole
numbers nor any other purely conceptual elements play a distinguished role.
Quantum mechanics changed everything.
Emblematic of the new physics, and decisive historically, was Niels Bohr's
atomic model of 1913. Though it applies in a vastly different domain, Bohr's
model of the hydrogen atom bears an uncanny resemblance to Kepler's system
of planetary spheres. The binding force is electrical rather than gravitational,
the players are electrons orbiting around protons rather than planets orbiting
the Sun, and the size is a factor 10-22 smaller; but the leitmotif of Bohr's model is
unmistakably "Things Are Number:'
Through Bohr's model, Kepler's idea that the orbits that occur in nature are
precisely those that embody a conceptual ideal emerged from its embers, re­
born like a phoenix, after three hundred years' quiescence. If anything, Bohr's
model conforms more closely to the Pythagorean ideal than Kepler's, since its
preferred orbits are defined by whole numbers rather than geometric con­
structions. Einstein responded with great empathy and enthusiasm, referring
to Bohr's work as "the highest form of musicality in the sphere of thought."
Later work by Heisenberg and Schrodinger, which defined modern quan­
tum mechanics, superseded Bohr's model. This account of subatomic matter is
less tangible than Bohr's, but ultimately much richer. In the Heisenberg-
 The World 's Numerical Recipe 99

Schrodinger theory, electrons are no longer particles moving i n space, ele­

ments of reality that at a given time are "j ust there and not anywhere else."
Rather, they define oscillatory, space-filling wave patterns always "here, there,
and everywhere." Electron waves are attracted to a positively charged nucleus
and can form localized standing wave patterns around it. The mathematics de­
scribing the vibratory patterns that define the states of atoms in quantum
mechanics is identical to that which describes the resonance of musical instru­
ments. The stable states of atoms correspond to pure tones. I think it's fair to
say that the musicality Einstein praised in Bohr's model is, if anything, height­
ened in its progeny (though Einstein himself, notoriously, withheld his ap­
proval from the new quantum mechanics) .
The big difference between nature's instruments and those o f human con­
struction is that her designs depend not on craftsmanship refined by experi­
ence, but rather on the ruthlessly precise application of simple rules. Now if
you browse through a textbook on atomic quantum mechanics, or look at
atomic vibration patterns using modern visualization tools, "simple" might
not be the word that leaps to mind. But it has a precise, objective meaning in
this context. A theory is simpler the fewer nonconceptual elements, which
must be taken from observation, enter into its construction. In this sense,
Kepler's zeroth law provided a simpler (as it turns out, too simple) theory of
the solar system than Newton's, because in Newton's theory the relative sizes of
planetary orbits must be taken from observation, whereas in Kepler's they are
determined conceptually.
From this perspective, modern atomic theory is extraordinarily simple.
The Schrodinger equation, which governs electrons in atoms, contains j ust two
nonconceptual quantities. These are the mass of the electron and the so-called
fine-structure constant, denoted a, that specifies the overall strength of the
electromagnetic interaction. By solving this one equation, finding the vibra­
tions it supports, we make a concept-world that reproduces a tremendous
wealth of real-world data, notably the accurately measured spectral lines of
atoms that encode their inner structure. The marvelous theory of electrons
and their interactions with light is called quantum electrodynamics, or QED.
In the initial modeling of atoms, the focus was on their accessible, outlying
parts, the electron clouds. The nuclei of atoms, which contain most of their
mass and all of their positive charge, were treated as so many tiny (but very
heavy! ) black boxes, buried in the core. There was no theory for the values of
nuclear masses or their other properties; these were simply taken from experi­
ment.
That pragmatic approach was extremely fruitful and to this day provides
 I 00 FRAN K WILCZEK

the working basis for practical applications of physics in chemistry, materials

science, and biology. But it failed to provide a theory that was in our sense sim­
ple, and so it left the ultimate ambitions of a Pythagorean physics unfulfilled.
Starting in the early 1930s, with electrons under control, the frontier of fun­
damental physics moved inward, to the nuclei. This is not the occasion to
recount the complex history of the heroic constructions and ingenious deduc­
tions that at last, after fifty years of strenuous international effort, fully exposed
the secrets of this inaccessible domain. Fortunately, the answer is easier to de­
scribe, and it advances and consummates our theme.
The theory that governs atomic nuclei is quantum chromodynamics, or
QCD. As its name hints, QCD is firmly based on quantum mechanics. Its
mathematical basis is a direct generalization of QED, incorporating a more in­
tricate structure supporting enhanced symmetry. Metaphorically, QCD stands
to QED as an icosahedron stands to a triangle. The basic players in QCD are
quarks and gluons. For constructing an accurate model of ordinary matter just
two kinds of quarks, called up and down or simply u and d, need to be consid­
ered. (There are four other kinds, at least, but they are highly unstable and not
important for ordinary matter.) Protons, neutrons, 1t mesons, and a vast zoo of
very short-lived particles called resonances are constructed from these build­
ing blocks. The particles and resonances observed in the real word match the
resonant wave patterns of quarks and gluons in the concept-world of QCD,
much as states of atoms match the resonant wave patterns of electrons. You can
predict their masses and properties directly by solving the equations.
A peculiar feature of QCD, and a major reason why it was hard to discover,
is that the quarks and gluons are never found in isolation, but always in com­
plex associations. QCD actually predicts this "confinement" property, but
that's not easy to prove.
Considering how much it accounts for, QCD is an amazingly simple the­
ory, in our objective sense. Its equations contain just three nonconceptual in­
gredients: the masses of the u and d quarks and the strong coupling constant
a s, analogous to the fine structure constant of QED, which specifies how pow­
erfully quarks couple to gluons. The gluons are automatically massless.
Actually even three is an overestimate. The quark-gluon coupling varies
with distance, so we can trade it in for a unit of distance. In other words, mu­
tant QCDs with different values of as generate concept-worlds that behave
identically, but use different-sized metersticks. Also, the masses of the u and d
quarks turn out not to be very important, quantitatively. Most of the mass of
strongly interacting particles is due to the pure energy of the moving quarks
and gluons they contain, according to the converse of Einstein's equation,
 The World 's Numerical Recipe 1o1

m = E/c1• The masses of the u and d quarks are much smaller than the masses
of the protons and other particles that contain them.
Putting all this together, we arrive at a most remarkable conclusion. To the
extent that we are willing to use the proton itself as a meterstick, and ignore the
small corrections due to the u and d quark masses, QCD becomes a theory
with no nonconceptual elements whatsoever.
Let me summarize. Starting with precisely four nu merical ingredients,
which must be taken from experiment, QED and QCD cook up a concept­
world of mathematical objects whose behavior matches, with remarkable ac­
curacy, the behavior of real-world matter. These objects are vibratory wave
patterns. Stable elements of reality-protons, atomic nuclei, atoms-corre­
spond, not just metaphorically but with mathematical precision, to pure tones.
Kepler would be pleased.
This tale continues in several directions. Given two more ingredients, New­
ton's constant G N and Fermi's constant G p , which parametrize the strength of
gravity and of the weak interaction, respectively, we can expand our concept­
world beyond ordinary matter to describe virtually all of astrophysics. There is
a brilliant series of ideas involving unified field theories and supersymmetry
that might allow us to get by with just five ingredients. (Once you're down to so
few, each further reduction marks an epoch.) These ideas will be tested de­
cisively in coming years, especially as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at
CERN, near Geneva, swings into operation around 2007.
On the other hand, if we attempt to do justice to the properties of many ex­
otic, short-lived particles discovered at high-energy accelerators, things get
much more complicated and unsatisfactory. We have to add pinches of many
new ingredients to our recipe, until it may seem that rather than deriving a
wealth of insight from a small investment of facts, we are doing just the oppo­
site. That's the state of our knowledge of fundamental physics today-simulta­
neously triumphant, exciting, and a mess.
The last word I leave to Einstein:

I would like to state a theorem which at present can not be based upon
anything more than upon a faith in the simplicity, i.e., intelligibility, of na­
ture: there are no arbitrary constants . . . that is to say, nature is so constituted
that it is possible logically to lay down such strongly determined laws that
within these laws only rationally completely determined constants occur
(not constants, therefore, whose numerical value could be changed without
destroying the theory) .
 M A RC E L O G L E I S E R

Em er9 en t Reali ti es i n th e Cosm os

!f we are the universe 's sole intelligent species, asks the physicist and as­
tronomer Marcelo Gleiser, then what must we do to be good citizens ef the
cosmos?

here is a creative tension in the cosmos. We feel it every time we look at

T Nature, and we feel it within ourselves. It is revealed in the smallest of

details, a dewdrop balancing on the tip of a leaf on an early fall morn­
ing, the hexagonal symmetry of snowflakes, resulting from water's molecular
structure and heat dissipation. And it is revealed in large-scale natural phe­
nomena, a lightning strike ripping across the sky during a stormy night, or in
stars burning their entrails in order to survive the inexorable crush of their
own gravity. Our collective history can be told as an effort to represent and
make sense of this creative tension, this constant dance of chaos and order that
shapes the world.
We have created countless stories, drawings, dances, and rituals in search of
meaning, in search of answers. We look at the cosmos with a mixed sense of awe
and wonder, of terror and devotion. And we want to know. How can something
come from nothing? What is the origin of all things? Can order emerge by itself,
without a guiding hand? Is beauty a mere accident of Nature, or is there a
deeper meaning to it? Why do we crave beauty, as junkies a drug? What is it that
makes us plant gardens, compose poems and symphonies, create mathematical
 Emerg ent Realities in the Cosmos 1 o3

theorems and equations? Why can't we be content simply by eating, procreat­

ing, and sleeping? These are questions that bridge and expand our ways of
knowing, being part of cutting-edge scientific research, philosophical medita­
tion, religious prayer, and artistic output. We have an unquenchable urge to un­
derstand who we are and what is our place in this vast Universe. In many ways,
it is through this search for answers that we define ourselves. By asking, by
wanting to know, we define what it means to be human. And, although the an­
swers may vary, just as cultures vary from place to place and time to time, many
questions are the same, and remain, to a large extent, unanswered.
Modern science has developed a comprehensive narrative describing the
emergence of material structures in the Universe. Although many of the details
and fundamental questions remain open, we now can claim with certitude that
the history of the cosmos traces an increasing complexification of its living and
nonliving inhabitants, of the hierarchical development of form and function
from the simple to the complex. Thus, at very early times, when the Universe
was extremely hot and dense, matter was in the form of its most basic con­
stituents, the indivisible elementary particles. As the Universe expanded and
cooled, attractive forces between the different particles made clustering possi­
ble: protons and neutrons emerged from binding quarks, atomic nuclei from
binding protons and neutrons, light atoms from binding atomic nuclei and
electrons, galaxies from huge collapsing hydrogen clouds, stars from smaller
hydrogen-rich clouds within these galaxies until, eventually, living beings
emerged in at least one of the billions of solar systems spread across the cos­
mos.
The scientific account describing the emergence of complex material struc­
tures has enjoyed enormous success. Cosmology is now a data-driven branch
of physics, as opposed to even two decades ago. However, in spite of this suc­
cess, or perhaps because of it, several fundamental questions have surfaced that
defy present knowledge. Among the most fascinating of these questions are
questions of origins: the origin of the cosmos, the origin of life, and the origin
of the mind. The answers to these questions, even if presently unknown, are all
related to the issue of emergence: How is it that structures self-organize to the
point of generating extremely sophisticated complex behavior? Be it a surging
cosmos out of a primordial soup of cosmoids, a simple living being made of
millions of organic macromolecules, or a thinking being, capable of won­
dering about his or her own origins and of pondering moral dilemmas, the
emergence of complexity encompasses some of the most awesome and least
understood natural phenomena.
These three origin questions may be compressed into a single one: "How
 1 04 MARC E L O G LEISER

come us?" This is the kind of exasperating question that makes most scientists
throw in the towel. A common answer is "Who cares?" After all, there may not
be a reason at all; we may be here simply as the result of a random sequence of
accidents, the right-size planet, with the right amount of water, at the right dis­
tance from a moderate-size star, and so on. "The Universe may be full of Earth­
like planets with other forms of intelligent life;' the argument proceeds.
Indeed, it is quite possible that the Universe is filled with Earth-like planets,
some of them with similar amounts of water and Earth-like atmospheric com­
positions. Possibly, several will also have some form of living beings. If Earth is
a demonstrative example, life is very resilient and can adapt to very adverse cir­
cumstances. But intelligent life is a whole other story. (By intelligent I mean a
species capable of self-reflection and with the ability for abstract thinking.)
Evolutionary arguments claiming that natural selection necessarily leads to
intelligence are flawed. Consider the history of life in the only place we actually
know it, Earth. The dinosaurs were here for about 150 million years and
showed no signs of decline or of intelligence. Intelligence may be a sufficient
condition for dominating the food chain, but it is not a necessary one. It took a
devastating collision with a 10-kilometer-wide asteroid 65 million years ago to
decimate the dinosaurs, together with 40 percent of all life-forms on Earth.
Ironically, the mammals, which up to that point were pretty much insignifi­
cant, survived and flourished in the wake of this cataclysm. In a very real sense,
we are here due to this catastrophic collision.
Life is an experiment in emergent complexity: we may know what the in­
gredients are, but we cannot predict its detailed outcome (and we still cannot
repeat it in the laboratory) . Intelligent life is certainly a very rare outcome. This
goes against everything we have learned over the last 400 years of modern sci­
ence, that the more we know about the Universe the less unique we seem to be.
True, we live in one amongst billions of other galaxies in the visible Universe,
each of them with billions of stars. True, the matter that makes up people and
stars is subdominant; most of the matter that permeates the cosmos is not
made of protons and electrons, but of something else that does not shine, as
matter making up stars does. Our location in the cosmos and our material
composition are not of great cosmic relevance or special. But our minds are. As
far as we know, there aren't any others out there. If there were, chances are we
would have been visited by now. Our galaxy, being about 100,000 light-years
across and 12 billion years old, could have been traversed countless times by
other intelligent civilizations. But it hasn't. Unless, of course, aliens have been
here long before we have and didn't leave any clues, or do not want to make
contact. (Taking the first 2 billion years off for good measure, and assuming in-
 Emer9ent Reali ties in the Cosmos 1 o _s-

telligent civilizations can travel at least at one-tenth the speed of light, gives a
total of 10,000 galaxy crossings in the last 10 billion years. Either we have been
purposely ignored, or we are really inconspicuous.) Given the unknowns­
how can we presume to understand an alien psyche if we don't even under­
stand our own?-we should keep an open mind, repeating, as Carl Sagan
suggested, that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Maybe the
aliens are j ust very shy.
If, indeed, we are a rare event, we must be ready to take on an enormous re­
sponsibility: we must preserve our legacy, learning how to survive in spite of
ourselves. Humans are capable of the most wonderful creations and the most
horrendous crimes. It is often very convenient to dream of archetypical aliens,
wise and all-knowing, who will inspire and educate us before it's too late.
Those aliens are not so different from the saints and prophets of many reli­
gions, who bring us hope and direction. But if we are alone, we must learn to
save ourselves following our own guidance and acquired wisdom. It is here that
a blending of science and religious ethics can be profoundly useful. We can
start by extending the Old Testament maxim "Do unto others as you would
have them do unto you" from society to all known and unknown living beings
here and across the cosmos.
Then, we must learn from the way Nature operates. There is a single princi­
ple behind all existing order in Nature, an all-embracing urge to exist and to
bind that manifests itself at all levels, from the racing world of subatomic parti­
cles to the edges of the observable Universe. It also manifests itself in our lives
and our history. Humans cannot escape this alliance with the rest of the cos­
mos. Our tensions are part of this universal trend, our creations and destruc­
tions are part of the same rhythms that permeate the Universe. Through them,
we search for transcendence, for a reality deeper and more permanent than our
own. However, we have distanced ourselves from Nature and have become
wasteful. Nature is never wasteful, it never uses more energy than it has to, it
never chooses a more costly path to achieve the same end result. This is true of
atoms, of bacteria, of elephants, and of galaxies. Our wastefulness is reflected in
the way we treat our planet and ourselves. It is a cancer that grows and over­
whelms what lives and what doesn't.
We must learn from Nature's simple elegance, from its esthetical and eco­
nomical commitment to functionality and form. We must look beyond our
immediate needs and greed, reintegrating ourselves into a physical reality that
transcends political and social boundaries. Perhaps then we will start to respect
our differences, to learn from those who believe differently than we do, who
live and look differently than we do. And we don't have a minute to waste.
 N ATA L I E A N G I E R

Sci en tists Rea ch O u t t o

Distan t Worlds
F R O M THE N E W YO R K TIM E S

Had some quorn lately? !J the answer is no, then you probably are not plan­
nin9 on travelin9 to distant stars. The celebrated New York Times reporter
and best-sellin9 author Natalie An9ier explains why lon9-ran9e space voy­
a9es are not likely to resemble life on board the USS Enter p rise.

. obody knows why our early ancestors decided to get off their knuckles

N and stand upright. Maybe they just wanted a better view of the stars.
And when sky gazers finally realized that the heavenly lights were
not the footprints of the gods, but rather millions of blazing stars like our Sun
writ far, they began to wonder, How do we get there? How can we leave this world
and travel, not merely the 238,000 miles to the Moon, or 35 million miles to Mars,
but through the vast dark silk of interstellar space, across trillions and trillions of
miles, to encounter other stars, other solar systems, even other civilizations? Ac­
cording to a group of scientists for whom the term "wildly optimistic dreamers"
is virtually a job description, it will indeed be very difficult to travel to other stars,
and nobody in either the public or private sector is about to try it anytime soon.
But as the researchers sec it, the challenge is not insurmountable, it requires no
defiance of the laws of physics, so why not have fun and start thinking about it
now?
 Scientists Reach Out to Distant Worlds 1 07

At the annual meeting o f the American Association fo r the Advancement of

Science, held in February 2002 in Boston, scientists discussed how humans
might pull off a real-life version of Star Trek, minus the space Lycra and perpet­
ual syndication rights.
They talked about propulsion at a reasonable fraction of the speed of light,
a velocity that is orders of magnitude greater than any spaceship can fly today,
but that would be necessary if the light-years of space between the Sun and
even the nearest star are ever to be crossed.
They talked about the possibility of multigenerational space travel, and
what it might be like for people who board a spaceship knowing that they, their
children, grandchildren and descendants through 6, 8 or 10 generations would
live and die knowing nothing but life in an enclosed and entirely artificial envi­
ronment, hurtling year upon year through the near-featureless expanse of in­
terstellar space.
They talked about how big the founding crew would have to be to prevent
long-term risks of inbreeding and so-called genetic drift. They talked about
how the crew's chain of command would be structured, what language people
would most likely speak, and what sort of marital and family policies might be
put in place.
And they talked about food, all of which would have to be grown, culti­
vated and synthesized on board.
"One thing is almost certain," said Dr. Jean B. Hunter, an associate p rofes­
sor of biological and environmental engineering at Cornell. "You'll have to
leave the steak, cheesecake and artichokes with hollandaise sauce behind."
Many of the subjects raised during the session were so fanciful that at times
it felt like a discussion of how to clone a unicorn, and indeed half the presenters
moonlight as science fiction writers.
Nevertheless, the researchers argued, human beings have shown themselves
to be implacable itinerants, capable of colonizing the most hostile environ­
ments.
Dr. John H. Moore, a research professor of anthropology at the University
of Florida, compared a theoretical crew of spacefaring pioneers to groups of
Polynesians setting out tens of thousands of years ago in search of new islands
to populate.
"Young people with food and tools would set out in large flotillas of ca­
noes;' he said. "Nobody knew if they would ever come back, the trade winds
went in only one direction, and many of them perished in the ocean."
Yet over time, the Polynesians managed to colonize New Zealand, Easter Is­
land and Hawaii.
 1 08 N ATA L I E A N G I E R

Still, no human migration in history would compare in difficulty with

reaching another star. The nearest stellar neighbor, the triple-starred Alpha
Centauri, is about 4.4 light-years from the Sun, and a light-year is equal to al­
most 6 trillion miles. The next nearest star, Barnard's Star, is 6 light-years from
home. To give a graphic sense of what these distances mean, Dr. Geoffrey A.
Landis of the NASA John Glenn Research Center in Cleveland pointed out that
the fastest objects humans have ever dispatched into space are the Voyager in­
terplanetary probes, which travel at about 9.3 miles per second.
"If a caveman had launched one of those during the last ice age, 11,000
years ago:' Dr. Landis said, "it would now be only a fifth of the way toward the
nearest star."
Dr. Robert L. Forward, owner and chief scientist of Forward Unlimited, a
consulting company that describes itself as "specializing in exotic physics and
advanced space propulsion," argued that rockets and their fuel would be so
heavy that they would prevent a starship from reaching the necessary velocity
to go anywhere in a sane amount of time. He envisions a rocketless spacecraft
that would be manufactured in space and equipped with an ultrathin, ultra­
large sail, its span as big as Texas but using no more material than a small
bridge. A beam of laser light or high-energy particles from a source on Earth,
in space or perhaps on the Sun-drenched planet of Mercury would be aimed at
the sail, propelling it and its attached module to as much as 30 percent the
speed of light--or about 55,000 miles per second.
At that pace, said Dr. Forward, a crew would reach Alpha Centauri in under
50 years.
"You could get a bunch of 16-year-olds, train them and then send them out
at the age of 20," he said. "They'd have a long, boring trip, reach Alpha Centauri
when they're in their 6o's or 7o's, do some exploring, and send everything they
learned back home."
Admittedly, the astronauts would not make it home themselves. "It's a life­
time job:' Dr. Forward said. "But it could be done in a single generation."
For longer journeys, designed with multigenerational crews in mind, an
onboard engine and fuel source would be required, perhaps something pow­
ered by nuclear bombs, or the combining of matter and antimatter in a reac­
tion that converts both substances into pure energy.
However the ship is propulsed, the researchers agree that it must be com­
fortable for long-distance travel. That means creating artificial gravity by gen­
tly rotating the craft; a spin no greater than one or two revolutions per minute
would suffice.
It might also mean calling upon architects with Disney-esque sensibilities.
 Scientists Reach Out to Distant Worlds 1 09

"The inside of one of these long-duration space habitats might feel like the
inside of a shopping mall;' Dr. Landis said. "Malls are carefully designed to use
space efficiently, yet to give you the feeling that they're more spacious than they
,,
are.
And malls, of course, are a great place to bring the family. In Dr. Moore's
view, the good old-fashioned family is the key to success in space.
"Over the past several decades, space scientists and writers of science fic­
tion have speculated at length about the optimum size and composition" of an
interstellar crew, he said. They have imagined platoons of Chuck Yeager-type
stalwarts grimly enduring all hardships, or teams of bionic and vaguely asexual
crew members overseeing freezers of embryos that can be defrosted and ges­
tated as needed.
"Some of the scenarios proposed so far are downright alarming from a so­
cial science perspective," Dr. Moore said, "since they require bizarre social
structures and an intensity of social relationships which are quite beyond the
experience of any known human communities."
In deciding how to organize a star mission, Dr. Moore looks to the most
"familiar, ubiquitous, well-ordered and well-understood" of social forms, the
human family. "Virtually every human society in history has been structured
along kinship lines;' he said, "from small-scale foraging societies to empires
comprising millions of people."
Lines of authority and seniority in a family are reasonably clear, and when
they're not, well, there's always the time-out chamber.
In Dr. Moore's rendition, all recruits for an interstellar odyssey would be
guaranteed the opportunity, though not the requirement, to marry and have
children. Mate choice would be part of the bargain as well, with the population
cannily structured so that each cohort of individuals, on reaching sexual matu­
rity, would have about 10 potential partners of a similar age to select from.
Dr. Moore and his colleagues have developed a computer simulation called
Ethnopop, in which they asked how large the crew must be in order to main­
tain genetic variability over time while still allowing crew members a choice of
sex partners. They determined that a founding crew could be as small as So to
100 people and stay viable for more than a thousand years, assuming that two
rules were followed: women waited until they were in their mid-3o's or so be­
fore having children, and they had only a couple each. Counterintuitive though
it may seem, said Dr. Moore, delayed childbearing and small families are
known to help maintain genetic variability in a closed population.
Genetic diversity may be essential, but Dr. Sarah G. Thomason, a professor
of linguistics at the University of Michigan, argued that the same could not be
 1 10 N A TA L I E A N G I E R

said for language. "You want everyone to be able to talk to each other as soon as
they're on board," she said.
As Dr. Thomason sees it, the likeliest lingua franca for a starship will be­
gracias a Dior-English. After all, she said, English is the language of the inter­
national air traffic control system, the scientific community and the educated
class generally. English is the official language of 51 of the 195 nations of the
world, and it is the second language of many others.
Yet, while crew members will be expected to speak English, their accents are
likely to be quite diverse, and the English that their children and grandchildren
end up speaking will have a rhythm and texture of its own-Space English.
And though Dr. Thomason believes that the basic structure of Space English is
not likely to change much from that of the mother tongue, teenagers will, of
course, invent words of their own and drop words of scant use. "I can imagine
the loss of words like snow, rivers, winter, mosquitoes, if they're lucky," she
said.
Another arena that will test the limits of human ingenuity is space cuisine.
Without livestock on board or supply ships to restock the pantry, crew mem­
bers will have to be entirely self-sufficient. Dr. Hunter of Cornell envisions
crops grown in hydroponic gardens, in which plants are suspended in troughs
like rain gutters, and water and fertilizer are trickled slowly over their roots.
Among the possible food groups are wheat, rice, sweet potatoes, beans, soy,
corn, herbs and spices.
In addition, space-minded agronomists are exploring the marvels of mi­
crobes. Plants take weeks to grow, but yeastlike microorganisms replicating in
vats can be used to churn out significant quantities of carbohydrates, sugars,
proteins and fats in a matter of hours. Of benefit to a community in which re­
cycling is not just a personal virtue but a public necessity, microorganisms can
live on the carboniferous waste products of plants and people.
"There's a protein product called quorn, which is made from filamentous
mold;' Dr. Hunter said. "Not to make a joke of it, but it does taste like chicken."
Some cliches, it seems, are truly universal.
 M A R G A R E T W E RT H E I M

Here Th ere B e Dra9 ons

F R O M L A WE E K L Y

Astronomers, like ma9icians, peiform with the aid ef mirrors-speciflcally,

the enormous mirrors that catch li9htjrom the ed9es efthe universe. The dis­
tin9uished science writer Mar9aret Wertheim tours a remarkablefacility that
manefactures these massive,yet exquisitely calibrated, windows to the stars.

en of the Middle Ages sadly realized that the great dragons were long

M since gone from European soil. Only feeble remnants remained, pal­
try debased descendants of the grand saurians of the past: frilled
snakes and lizards, and small, feathered, scaly-headed beasts not much bigger
than a pheasant. The latter bore an uncanny resemblance to roosters, which
had recently been imported from China and were still a bizarrity to European
eyes. If the fearsome fire-breathing creatures of legend existed anywhere, it was
in far-off lands at the edges of the known world. "Here there be dragons:' the
maps optimistically declared.
Historians Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park (authors of Wonders and
the Order ofNature) alert us to a perverse tendency of wonders to congregate at
the outer reaches of our cartographic knowledge. Throughout history, distant
lands have beckoned with the promise of marvels: unicorns and elephants; gi­
ants, Cyclopes and races of dog-headed men; miraculous healing springs and
trees whose gourds enclose, like fruits, miniature fleecy lambs. Distance
loosens the mind, freeing the imagination from the restraints of common
 I I 2 M A R G A R E T W E RT H E I M

knowledge and opening the doors of perception to strange and unlikely coun­
terintuitive phenomena.
Adventurous persons, from Marco Polo to Neil Armstrong, have always
been willing to travel immense distances to experience wonders for them­
selves-expeditions have been mounted, novel conveyances constructed and
fortunes expended. Today, of course, cartographic knowledge exceeds the
bounds of our planet, and the domain of the marvelous has retreated, as it al­
ways will, to even farther fringes. These days, those in search of the preternatu­
ral look not across the Atlantic but beyond the horizons of geography itself, to
what Kant called the "island universes" of distant galaxies. Ever since Galileo
pointed his "optick tube" to the heavens and discovered mountains on the
moon and "satellites" orbiting Jupiter, outer space has become our chief do­
main of marvels. Here there be dragons indeed: quasars spitting the energy of
entire galaxies, cosmic strings thrumming with the original Primal Force, neu­
tron stars so dense a teaspoon weighs as much as Everest, and black holes so
powerful they could shred a spaceship into strings of spaghetti.
The ties that bind matter to space prevent us from voyaging in person to
this fabulous frontier; absent a revolution in physics and a radical new form of
propulsion, humanity seems destined to remain on our ancestral cosmic
home. Miraculously, however, light is exempted from Einstein's laws, confirm­
ing perhaps the great physicist's belief that if "God is subtle, he is not mali­
cious." Ephemeral and immaterial, light bears witness across the universe.
Where adventurers past were propelled on ocean waves toward the lands of
their dreams, so the phantasms of distant cosmic landscapes are borne to us
across oceans of space on waves of light. Here, the wonders come to us, though
again, Herculean effort is required for proper apprehension of the magical
phenomena-which is why astronomers build telescopes.
Sometimes, bigger really is better. The speed and power of sailing ships de­
pended on the size of their sails; so, the bigger the telescope mirror, the more
light waves you can catch. Translating this into the metric of marvelousness­
which, in opposition to gravity, increases with distance-the larger the mirror,
the farther out into space you can see, and hence the more marvels you can be­
hold. This tyranny of numbers was majesticaly brought home to me on a re­
cent trip to the University of Arizona's Mirror Lab, where the world's largest
telescope mirrors are made. There is nothing minimal about the place, which is
in itself a haven of wonder.
Even before you enter the Mirror Lab, a touch of the surreal hovers about
the enterprise, for it is bolted to the side of the university's sports stadium, the
 Here There Be Dra9ons 1 1 3

only structure on campus strong enough to support the huge machinery that
casting requires. Inside it is more aerospace than bench top; the main work­
room stretches three stories high and is half the size of a football field. Gigantic
gantries crisscross the cavernous space, while massive cranes stand by with
claws unclenched; they must be strong enough to heft 20 tons, yet gentle
enough to handle crystal. The whole building is low-pressurized to protect the
nascent mirrors from dust.
At the far end of the lab, some 50 yards away, an enormous mirror is being
polished: 8-4 meters in diameter, it seems impossibly big yet indescribably deli­
cate. With its deep concave surface smooth and glistening, and bathed in water
to aid the buffing, it resembles nothing so much as a vast contact lens. Tele­
scope mirrors are augmented eyes, and this one has 12 times the light-gathering
surface of the Hubble Space Telescope. It is one of a pair intended for the Large
Binocular Telescope currently being constructed on Mount Graham, in the
Quinlan Range west of Tucson, which will soon be the world's most powerful
optical instrument. Maximal vision demands that no bump on the mirror sur­
face be larger than ioo nanometers (about 500 times narrower than a human
hair): If the giant mirror being polished here were expanded to the size of
North America, there would be no protrusion higher than 4 inches. The
custom-designed robotic polisher crawling over the surface acts like a mechan­
ical caterpill a r nibbling away atoms at a time. Amazingly, it will be at its task 24
hours a day, seven days a week, for eight to 10 months.
Where conventional telescope mirrors are spherical, the Mirror Lab's are
parabolic, the most efficient shape for focusing light. As early as the i7th cen­
tury, Johannes Kepler perceived that one way to make a parabola was to rotate a
bowl ofliquid-under the force of gravity, spinning liquid naturally configures
itself to this unique mathematical form. A few telescopes have employed this
idea using rotating bowls of mercury, but that's a toxic way to view the stars. In
i980, Mirror Lab founder Roger Angel realized that Kepler's insight could be
implemented with molten glass, if only you could keep the whole apparatus
spinning while the glass cooled and set.
A physicist by training, Angel tells me that when insight struck, his under­
standing of the chemistry of glass was nil. Though English by birth, he repaired
immediately to that great American laboratory, the backyard, where in a
homemade kiln he fused together a couple of Pyrex custard cups-enriching
both the future of astronomy and the noble tradition of domestic science.
 I 14 M A R G A R E T W E RT H E I M

O N T H E D A Y I visited the lab, a rare treat awaited. A brand-new mirror had

just been taken out of the colossal new oven and was sitting on its pallet like a
gigantic freshly baked cookie. Most of the glass is in a honeycomb structure,
with just a thin layer on top that will be polished to form the actual mirror sur­
face. Angel explains that the honeycombing gives the mirror strength while
radically reducing the weight. Still, we're talking 21 tons of ultrapure borosili­
cate glass. The oven itself is a gargantuan steel contraption, bristling with bolts
and snaking tubes 10 meters in diameter and 2.5 meters high. This apparatus
rests on a base 3.5 meters high that spins the entire construction seven times a
minute. In flight it resembles a giant whirling pressure cooker. Normally, ther­
mal expansion would tear the mirror apart, and to guard against that catastro­
phe, the floor is lined with aluminum plates sitting on a bed of steel ball
bearings that allow the mold to expand and contract as the glass heats and
cools. When it's cooking, the oven reaches 2,120 degrees Fahrenheit, the heat of
the Earth's mantle 50 miles down, and hot enough to melt rock into magma.
In the Age of Sony, when the little black box is king, there is something
tremendously comforting about Large Scale Engineering, which reminds us, as
we seem to need reminding, that there is (still) a physical world beyond the vir­
tual flicker of our screens. Extending our vision monstrously, Angel's mirrors
take us to the far edges of material awareness, to those distant domains where
the cosmos dreams, and where matter and space disport themselves in contra­
diction to natural law. As always on the periphery, the real becomes marvelous
and the marvelous becomes real.
 J E N N IFER KAH N

Notesfr om a Parallel Universe

F R O M D I S C O VE R

They call themselves maverick theorists. Scientists call them cranks. Mem­
bers ef the physics department at the University ef California, Berkeley,
keep every letter they receive from these eften delusional outsiders in an
archive they call the X:files. Siftin9 throu9h themfar a 9rain ef truth,Jen­
nifer Kahn 9ets a disorientin9 9limpse ef a kind <if Bizarro-world science.

leven years ago Eugene Sittampalam was sitting in a hotel room on the

E Libyan coast when he stumbled, as if by fate, on the unified field theory

of physics. "I was on an engineering project at the time, with hardly any
social life;' he says. "I would retire to my room after dinner. I would switch on
the radio, relax at my table, and start doodling." The problem that occupied
him has stumped physicists from Albert Einstein to Stephen Hawking: how to
join together the profound yet disparate insights of general relativity and
quantum theory. But Sittampalam's doodling, apparently, drew connections
that the rest had missed. "One thing led to another;' he says, "and before the
evening was over, I had the inverse square law of gravity derived-for the first
time ever-from first principles!"
Sittampalam has no advanced degrees in physics. His theory is girded by
mathematics no more complicated than high school algebra. Still, his claims
are modest compared with those of other "maverick theorists;' or cranks, as
most scientists call them. At the American Astronomical Society meeting in
 1 1 6 JENNIFER KAHN

1999, a freelance astronomer argued strenuously that connecting certain pul­

sars across the night sky made an arrow that pointed directly to a vast alien
communications network. A few years before, at Dartmouth, a dishwasher
swamped the Internet newsgroups with his descriptions of the universe as a gi­
ant plutonium atom. The man, who identified himself as Archimedes Pluto­
nium, wrote songs praising this atom universe and also provided stock tips.
When he appeared on campus, it was in a parka covered with equations like a
necromancer's robe.
Judging from the reams of odd theories sent daily to science journals, uni­
versities, and researchers, science cranks are more prolific than ever. This is
true despite a discouraging silence on the part of the recipients. The author of
one atmosphere-based theory of gravity estimates that he has mailed 5,000
copies of his work to physicists over the past 15 years but received just two
replies. Presentation is part of the problem. "GENTLEMEN ARE YOU INTER­
ESTED IN SEPARATING VALUABLE CHEMICAL COMPOUNDS FROM
THE SUNSHINE RAY?" demands one impatient correspondent. Crank papers
are so consistent in their tics that they're sometimes hung on physics depart­
ment bulletin boards and given ratings-with points awarded for bold type,
multiple exclamation marks, and comparison of self to Newton, Einstein, or
God. But a few, like Sittampalam's, are more difficult to dismiss.
Sittampalam holds a bachelor of science degree from the University of Cey­
lon and has spent 20 years consulting for a number of prominent global engi­
neering firms. His 85-page treatise is formatted with flawless professionalism,
and he has no history of psychological disorders. Yet since his "breakthrough"
in Libya, Sittampalam has all but sidetracked his career in pursuit of his theory.
He has repeatedly sent his treatise to universities, paid to self-publish the work
in paperback, and lost "a small fortune in salary" by his own estimation. Seven
years ago he even offered a $25,000 reward to any physicist who could refute his
theory and, as he puts it, "slap me out of this obsession." So far, no one has
come up with a sufficient rebuttal.
Such single-minded absorption is part of the mythology of science. It's no
wonder, then, that scientists are nearly as fascinated by cranks as cranks are by
science. "It's unnerving," says Geoff Marcy, an astronomer at the University of
California at Berkeley. "It shows how easy it is to slip from healthy, even neces­
sary, conviction into certainty and delusion. Plus, you realize that you don't al­
ways know which camp you're in." There's the rub. Science owes a good part of
its success to its capacity to contend with doubt-to engage it, respond to it,
and transform itself in the encounter. Yet there's rarely a point at which a good
idea becomes clearly, incontestably a bad idea. Neurologist Stanley Prusiner
 Notesfrom a Parallel Un i verse 1 17

spent 15 years arguing that a misfolded protein called a prion caused the brain
decay associated with scrapie and mad cow disease. Researchers snickered at
him. Evidence slowly accumulated in his favor, and in 1997 he was awarded the
Nobel Prize in medicine. "It's like a ball on top of a saddle;' Marcy says. "You
can't listen too closely to the establishment or you'll never be creative. But if
you don't listen enough, you fall over the edge."

I F I R S T C A M E A C R O S S Sittampalam's theory in the Berkeley physics de­

partment. There, for the past 20-odd years, the secretaries have diligently com­
piled what they call the X-files: the mother lode of crankiana. Kept in a
three-foot-wide cabinet, the files contain hundreds of submissions, including
one man's musical CD about thermodynamics and another's explanation of
relativity and quantum mechanics spelled out on six postcards. Elsewhere on
campus, researchers maintain what amount to branch libraries of the X-files. "I
have an entire shelf of crank mail;' MacArthur-winning physicist Rich Muller
told me. "My favorite is a book written by a crank that includes all the letters
she received from scientists."
Muller's office at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory sits several hundred feet
above the city, in a stolid cement building edged by eucalyptus trees. The lab's
newly heightened security was in force, and I was allowed through the gate
only after a lab employee turned up to vouch for my good intentions. When I
arrived, Muller had everything laid out, fat folders of letters and textbooks
stacked across half of a colleague's desk. "There was a poster of the universe:' he
mumbled, peering up at the room's highest shelf. "It was beautiful. I put it
someplace special. Now I don't know where it is."
Superficially, Muller is a bit cranky himself. His hair is thin but mussed, and
his office is a cave of overstuffed folders and yellowing articles tacked to a cork­
board. He is the author, among other things, of the controversial Nemesis the­
ory, which argues that a second sun caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, and
a novel that explains some biblical miracles as clever but scientifically consis­
tent sleight of hand. Muller corresponds with cranks and has thought enough
about them to sort them into a fairly elaborate taxonomy. " The range . . . is
quite broad;' he says. At the top of his hierarchy are the merely misguided: re­
tired engineers who have strayed from load-and-strain calculations into sur­
mises about relativity. The bottom of the stack is hairier: the Mullerian estate
of the super-crank. Some super-cranks are harmlessly delusional, others dan­
gerously paranoid, but none are very good at listening-a trait that drives
Muller bats. "You take the time to explain the mistake in their argument, and
 1 1 8 JENNIFER KAHN

they just ignore the explanation," he says bitterly. "They don't realize how much
time scientists spend coming up with ideas and rejecting them."
Cranks, of course, see it differently. In their view they are Davids fighting a
Goliath. Sometimes their foes may be theorists who have gone too far ("Decep­
tion, horn-swoggling . . . Who are you fooling?" demands an opponent of
string theory) . Other times they are scientists--overeducated, institutional­
ized, hidebound-who don't dare go far enough.
This confusion over fundamental purpose is understandable, given that
modern physics manages to seem at once simple and profoundly puzzling. As­
tronomers have only recently determined that a mysterious "dark energy" is
forcing the universe apart, overwhelming the equally mysterious "dark matter"
that seemed to be holding it together. Even gravity, faithful shepherd of falling
rocks and fly balls, has recently gone to pieces: At small distances, it may not be
constant at all. "Some of the ideas are incredibly counterintuitive," says Nima
Arkani-Hamed, a Harvard physicist who specializes in theoretical particle
physics. "And they're just getting more bizarre."
Arkani-Hamed himself believes that space contains seven extra dimensions
we can't see because they're rolled up like very small window shades. His man­
nerisms, too, might seem suspect in someone with less impressive credentials.
He talks faster than I can take notes, a kind of super-revved speech that still
seems to fall frustratingly short of the speed of thought. "Certain traits of per­
sonality and character are . . . close," he admits. "The obsessive tendencies, the
compulsion, the restlessness. It's not the same, but there's a resemblance." Then
he adds, dryly: ''A lot of scientists have traits that would be bizarre if not chan­
neled into science. I know that's part of why cranks interest me."

of reading the X-files, I felt as if I were attending

A F T E R S E V E R A L D AY S
school in a parallel universe. "It is imperative that we begin burning water as
fuel!" one author urged. Others were more puzzling. A note written on a
ripped sheet of notebook paper said only, "I contend the holes on the right side
of these pants are not explainable by contemporary science." A few submis­
sions aped the style of scholarly papers, including credentials: An outline for
"Symmetrical Energy Structures in a Megadimensional Cosmology;' for in­
stance, came from the director of the Alpha Omega Research Foundation in
Palm Beach, Florida. But most favored a more urgent style. Arguments
crescendoed to uppercase type. Words, boxed and colored, squeezed together
on the page like castaways on a homemade raft.
 Notesfrom a Parallel Uni verse 1 19

At times the grandiloquence was so ingenuous it was hard to hold much of

a grudge. "Readers, stretch your imagination to the very limits ! " the inventor
of Wavetron theory implored. "Together we will batter back the barbarous
hordes! " The boldface words in another paper, taken together, read nearly like
verse: "The eye is low I Negative ground I Electricity compressed, dead calm,
displacing space I No one knows the cause I displacing . I repelling . . . I Well
. .

I do." But not every crank is so poetic nor so benign. Arkani-Hamed described
one author whose e-mails had become increasingly virulent. Another physicist
refused to be quoted by name in this article, replying tersely: "There is no guar­
antee that all cranks are harmless:' Still another described his feelings about
cranks as "Neutral. With a touch of fear."
One case in particular has echoed down the years with the force of a small­
town murder. In 1952 a man named Bayard Peakes turned up at the office of the
American Physical Society at Columbia University with a gun. Peakes was frus­
trated at the society's rejection of his pamphlet, "So You Love Physics." Unable
to find any physicists at the society's office, he shot and killed a secretary
instead. ( Just months before, ironically, the society had changed its policy
to open its annual meetings to public speakers and accept all scientific
abstracts-including another by Peakes that aimed to prove that the electron
doesn't exist.)
The Peakes case was unique in degree but not in kind. Scientists have been
heckled, cursed, and harassed at work (one crank faxed love letters to a depart­
ment chair and forged the signature of another scientist at the bottom). A few
have even had cranks turn up at their homes.
It was hard not to have these cases in mind when I began contacting writers
from the X-files, using the information that came with some of the papers. For
the most part the authors were elusive. Phones had been disconnected, e-mail
addresses bounced. The few who did answer were single-minded. One retired
commercial diver answered all my questions with an uninterruptible mono­
logue on gravity (it pushes rather than pulls, he said) . An elderly man in south­
ern California called back half a dozen times, each time hinting at his latest
discovery.
"With psychosis, there's a kind of pressure to push it out;' John MacGregor,
an expert in the "outsider art" produced by mental patients, told me. "Some­
times the manic-depressives don't even use periods. They don't want to stop
writing!" The trouble starts when such zeal is spiked with paranoia. "Schizo­
phrenics have a tremendous desire to prove that they're sane;' MacGregor said.
"It could be that they've adopted science in order to prove just how rational
 1 20 JENNIFER KAHN

and intelligent they are." He paused. "If a paranoid schizophrenic decides that
certain rays are emanating from the physics department, it could be dangerous.
These are the people who might come in and shoot it up."

C o M P A R E D w I T H the people MacGregor described-even compared with

some of the physicists I interviewed-Sittampalam was charming. On the
phone from his home in Sri Lanka, he proved candid but not overbearing, with
crisp, British-inflected English pleasantly free of run-on tendencies. He an­
swered questions about his family (he has five brothers and has never married)
and chatted easily about his current job at ElectroFlow, a Missouri-based
start-up that helps companies optimize their power consumption. He main­
tained that his physics theories were quite accessible; indeed, he hoped to see
them introduced at the high school level.
I liked Sittampalam enough to inveigle a physicist friend to read Sittam­
palam's paper, with the promise that he remain anonymous. I was secretly hop­
ing the paper would have some merit, or if not, that it would contain a clear
error: one that, recognized, would set Sittampalam free from his compulsion.
But when my friend got back to me, the news was bad. "As I read this, I kept
thinking: 'How hard can it be to prove that this paper is incontrovertibly
wrong?' " he said. "But it is hard. Not because his ideas are right. They're not.
But because he's created a self-consistent system of arguments."
Self-consistency is not in itself a valuable trait-the theory that aliens cre­
ated Earth and continue to control its evolution is a self-consistent system­
but it can make things hard to refute. "I'd love to find just one equation in here
and say, 'We have observations proving that's not correct,' " the physicist said.
"But there's no mathematical progression. He starts with some very basic
equations from classical mechanics. He mixes, stirs, spends some time hypoth­
esizing in a very general way about physics, and out pops another familiar
equation: E=mc2• But really, he's just waved his hands. He could never have
gotten to that next equation if he didn't already know what it was-and he
knew what it was only because other people had figured it out for him using
the traditional framework of physics."
Reading Sittampalam's paper feels a bit like being in a hedge maze: Just
when you think you're heading toward some grand, central idea-an explana­
tion of the cosmological redshift, for instance-the discussion loops away for
another, more distant destination. There is the matter of Earth, for example.
Sittampalam claims that his theory is the only way to explain why Earth hasn't
lost enough energy over the years to spiral into the sun. But a physicist who saw
 Notesfrom a Parallel Un i verse 1 2 1

the paper wrote in to note that that's exactly what will happen-j ust billions of
years from now. Sittampalam acknowledged that mistake but attributed it to a
typo. He had mistakenly left the words "under perturbation" out of his hypoth­
esis, he said. Revised, his theory now explained why Earth , subject to the gravi­
tational pull of the rest of the planets, has never wandered out of its orbit.
"First, he's talking about gravitational radiation, which is a real but minute
effect; now he's talking about the solar system being sensitive to small changes,"
the physicist said. "It's true that if you moved the Earth a little bit today, its po­
sition and velocity in a month would become quite different. But that doesn't
mean the shape of the current orbit is going to fall apart. We have simulations
showing just the opposite, actually: that the solar system is stable over an in­
credibly long timescale. But that's what I mean. Every error you find, he's just
going to change the subject. It's never-ending."

T H E T R u T H , dispiriting as it may seem, is that cranks are pretty much never

right. "We'd love it if one of these guys were right," Arkani-Hamed says. "A rev­
olutionary idea that works-great!" But real science tends to advance by incre­
ments rather than by revolutions. The life of working scientists is long on
tedium and short on glory. They write grants, sit on committees, do paper­
work. There is pressure to play it safe and be competitive. Cranks, by contrast,
are free agents. With no career to lose and no scientific framework to restrict
them, they can publish at their own pace and dare to shoot for the moon.
All of which may explain why most cranks aren't scientists and presumably
wouldn't want to be. It may also explain why some scientists, when they talk
about cranks, evince something close to envy. " There's curiosity, excitement, a
kind of purity of purpose," Geoff Marcy says. Unlike conspiracy theorists, sci­
ence cranks inhabit a happy universe: one that's accessible to those who plumb
it ( "Dear universal adventurer! " one postcard about quantum gravity begins) .
To read their ideas i s a vicarious thrill, Arkani-Hamed admits, "but eventually
you go back to what you were doing. In the end, the thing that makes science so
amazing is that it works:'
As for Sittampalam, he suspects that the poor reception for his work is
largely a political matter. "I can easily answer all the critical points he raises:' he
replied, when I forwarded the physicist's critique. " But will he be convinced?"
In the preface to his thesis, Sittampalam quotes Sir Martin Rees, a renowned
astrophysicist and Astronomer Royal at Cambridge University. "Generally, re­
searchers don't shoot directly for a grand goal;' Rees writes. "Unless they are
geniuses (or cranks) they focus on problems that seem timely or tractable."
 1 22 JENNIFER KAHN

When I asked Sittampalam which he is, genius or crank, he was surprisingly

equivocal. "Perhaps I'm a crank, but that's left for history;' he said. "I have no
regrets. When your work is for the future, by necessity you are not understood
in your own days."
In the meantime, he can take comfort from the case of the Indian mathe­
matician Srinivasa Ramanujan. In 1913 Ramanujan was a clerk at Madras Port
Trust-"a short uncouth figure," in the words of one contemporary; "stout,
unshaven, not over clean, with one conspicuous feature: shining eyes." Al­
though largely self-taught in mathematics, Ramanujan had the audacity to
mail 120 of his theorems to the British mathematician Godfrey Hardy at Cam­
bridge University. Hardy dismissed the pages as gibberish at first, only to find,
upon careful consideration, that some of the theorems were truly revelatory.
Five years later Ramanujan was elected to the Royal Society of London.
 MICHE LLE N IJ H U IS

Shadow Creat ures

FROM H I G H C O U N TR Y N E WS

First Yuppies. Now Yuckies-"Youn9 Urban Crows." With suburban sprawl

displacin9 animal habitats, metropolitan areas aren ' t so much pushin9 na­
ture out as creatin9 new nichesfar wildlife-and vexin9 problemsfor mu­
nicipal cjficials and environmentalists alike. The solutions aren 't always
ea-9', as Michelle Nijhuis reportsfrom the Seattle suburbs, where the crows
are practically theJastest-9rowin9 se9ment ef the population.

t doesn't seem too difficult to trap a crow. Especially if you're armed with a

I remote-controlled, rifle-powered, 25-foot-square net and a heap of stale

white bread. Especially if you've seen the crow in question almost every
day for the past six years. Especially if it lives just a couple of wingflaps from
your own suburban backyard.
It's harder than you might think.
"Bastard! " explodes John Marzluff, an otherwise even-tempered wildlife
biologist from the University of Washington. He tosses the remote control for
the net gun on the dashboard of his truck and tries to take a deep breath.
For the second time on this gray, low morning, he's pushed the button on
the remote, and for the second time exactly nothing has happened. No net has
shot out of the ferny underbrush, no panicked crow is struggling for freedom,
no one is running forward to fit the bird with an identifying leg band. Instead,
 1 24 M ICHE L LE N I J HUIS

less than 100 yards down the conifer-edged road, a female crow is strutting well
within range of the stalled net, stuffing her beak with bread.
Marzluff has spent his career studying crows and ravens in Arizona, Maine,
Idaho, Montana, Hawaii and Guam. He and his students have banded about
500 crows in the Seattle area, but the job doesn't get much easier with practice.
"The more you try to trap crows:' he sighs, "the shorter your lifespan."
Crows and their cousins in the corvid family, ravens, jays and magpies, have
spent hundreds of thousands of years taking advantage of our inventions. To­
day, they forage in dumps and on suburban lawns; they follow hunters to prey
and backpackers to campsites; they nest on Alaskan oil rigs and in the ornate
stonework of city libraries. They've been known to perform pitch-perfect imi­
tations of explosions, revving motorcycles and flushing urinals.
They're fiercely, exasperatingly smart.
It's all too easy for crows to survive in the Seattle suburbs, where they have
free access to truckloads of tasty human castoffs. While many species are forced
to flee the expanding rings of development, crows and a few other hardy crea­
tures are rushing in like bargain-hunters on their way to a flea market. Like it or
not, our backyards are hosting an evolutionary showdown, and the odds favor
the coyotes and the crows: The coyote is the only midsize carnivore that is actu­
ally expanding its range in North America; the American crow, once rare in the
Pacific Northwest, is now one of the dominant birds in the Seattle area.
The showdown is pressing many Seattle residents-and the rest of us-up
against an awkward truth. Though we might like our cities neatly separated
from the natural world, nature is having none of that. Wild animals are react­
ing and adapting to us as fast as they can, not j ust to our logging and mining
and ranching and fishing, but also to our fast-food restaurants, golf courses
and campgrounds.
Marzluff and a few of his colleagues are proving as adaptable as the animals
they study. In recent years, they've moved their research out of the wilderness
and into the suburbs. By shadowing the animals that shadow us, they're dis­
covering how we might protect other, less adaptable creatures from being el­
bowed out by the flood of newcomers.
"Crows are a perfect mirror for us:' says Marzluff. "They're a good species
for people to look at, not because crows are doing something wrong, but be­
cause we're doing a lot wrong-and they're taking advantage of it, every step of
the way."
Ever since the late 1800s, when Seattle was little more than a staging ground
for the Klondike gold rush, the city has had an irony-laden relationship with
 Shadow Creatures 1 2s

wildlife. Even then, city boosters were promoting Seattle as nature's next-door
neighbor, a place that provided a quick escape from the distractions of urban
life. Seattleites were also doing their damnedest to control the natural processes
around them, and they dug waterways and filled tidelands as busily as any
beavers.
Despite boosters' best efforts, wildlife refused to cooperate. Muskrats un­
dermined a dam in central Seattle in the early 1900s, causing major damage to
the Fremont Bridge, and so many frogs filled a canal near the Duwamish River
that residents feared for local water quality. In the 1930s, city park officials en­
couraged the feeding of birds, hoping to please nature-loving visitors, but the
mobs of geese and other waterfowl polluted Green Lake with droppings, up­
rooted flowers and shrubs, and created an uproar among local residents.
By the 1990s, the city had transformed itself. It was the hippest spot on the
West Coast, with a Microsoft-powered economy, a caffeinated sensibility and
an influential downtown music scene. More than half a million people moved
to the area during the decade, many of them young, college-educated and eager
to be nature's neighbors.
Instead of the peaceful, outdoorsy life they envisioned, the newcomers en­
countered some very urban problems, including a desperate housing crunch
and some of the worst traffic tangles in the country. They also encountered
crows-lots of them.
Suburban housing developments and landfills "are like a banquet" set espe­
cially for crows, says Marzluff. "We're creating hundreds of acres of crow habi­
tat every single day;' he says. "We're creating habitat faster than the crows can
fill it:'
Like humans, crows tend to breed in the food-rich suburbs. Juveniles with­
out established territories spend more time in the poorer habitat downtown,
moving back into the 'burbs when they find mates. (Marzluff and his students,
who track the movements of their banded and radioed birds, call these adoles­
cent wanderers the Young Urban Crows, or "yuckies:' )
This survival strategy has been a wild success: The area's crow population
has grown by as much as tenfold in the past two decades, and it grew by more
than 30 percent just last year. It's one of the fastest-growing crow populations
in the world, and the birds are getting hard to ignore.
Crows peck at mossy cedar shingles, drink from gutters and find their way
into downtown office buildings. Karen Rillo and Mike Mead, the owners of a
nuisance-wildlife franchise called Critter Control, are on the receiving end of
many of the resulting complaints. They've shooed a crow out of a Barnes and
 1 26 MICHELLE N IJ H U IS

Noble in University Village, used reflective balloons to scare crows off rooftops,
and advised sleepless homeowners to spook the birds by hanging a dead crow
in a tree. But the noisy flocks often prove persistent.
''I'm taking it personally when five pillows over my head won't do the
trick," Seattle resident Susan Brett told the Seattle Times. After a night of toss­
ing and turning, she said, she spent the morning looking at newspaper ads for
air guns.
Matthew Klingle, a history professor at Bowdoin College in Maine who
wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the environmental history of Seattle, says such
conflicts haunt almost every city in the United States-and are particularly
persistent in the West.
"People think about the West as nature's province, and they move to Seat­
tle, Portland, Boise or Salt Lake City to be close to nature;' he says. "But people
also want clear boundaries. They want a divide between nature and culture."
Crows aren't the only animals causing headaches for their human hosts,
and Seattle isn't the only city that's unintentionally making more and more
room for crafty wildlife.
In Phoenix, hungry javelinas-knee-high wild pigs-can't resist the exotic
landscaping in suburban yards. "I tell people that they're just putting an ice
cream parlor on their corner;' says Arizona Game and Fish wildlife biologist
Joe Yarchin. His office, which handles more than i,ooo nuisance-wildlife
complaint calls every year, deals with Gila woodpeckers that hammer at air­
conditioning units, peregrine falcons that smear pigeon guts on downtown
law-office windows, and most everything in between.
His typical call, though, has something to do with coyotes.
Like crows, coyotes have long been associated with humans. They're our
companions and our guides, our jesters and our harassers in legends and
myths. And also like crows, coyotes are having a high time in the suburbs. In
recent decades, their populations have rebounded from the all-out extermina­
tion efforts in the first half of the 20th century, and they've started Dumpster­
diving around urban parks and suburban backyards.
Coyotes tend to keep a low profile. Though the Game and Fish office in
Phoenix gets a lot of complaints about coyotes every year, not many of the
animals are really causing any trouble. But during the painfully dry summer of
2002, a family of seven coyotes kept turning up in a tony Phoenix neighbor­
hood; a group of skinny juvenile coyotes was seen hunting ducks in a suburban
park; and more than a few cats and dogs came home with telltale battle scars.
Coyotes have also made themselves at home in Tucson, San Diego, and
Denver. They're regularly spotted in Oakland, California, and South San Fran-
 Shadow Creatures 1 27

cisco, and U.S. Geological Survey biologist Erin Boydston began to track sev­
eral recently arrived packs in Golden Gate Park. In Portland, Oregon, surprised
public-transit employees found a coyote inside a city light-rail train, calmly
curled up on a seat. The incident even inspired a song, "Light- Rail Coyote;' an
ode to Portland by the ultra-popular band Sleater-Kinney.
Of course, coyotes have moved into Seattle, too. Biologist Timothy Quinn,
whose dissertation research on urban and suburban coyote behavior sent him
striding down Seattle sidewalks with a radio receiver, heard reports of coyotes
in the Woodland Park Zoo (where they were trying to eat some frightened pea­
cocks) and in heavily visited Discovery Park on the edge of Puget Sound. Sev­
eral years ago, a young coyote wandered into a downtown office building,
where wildlife officials cornered it in an elevator. "That was one scared coyote,"
Quinn remembers.
Quinn, now the chief scientist of the habitat program for the Washington
Department of Fish and Wildlife, says the suburbs are as much of a banquet for
coyotes as they are for crows. When Quinn was collecting coyote scat for diet
analysis, he walked the same routes every two weeks. "I always saw all these lit­
tle cat collars . . . at first, it didn't make sense to me;' he says.
His analysis eventually showed that coyotes' single most important mam­
malian prey was the suburban housecat. Then, he says, "all those little collars
started to make sense."
Biologists aren't sure how these urban and suburban coyotes affect their
ecosystems, or how quickly changing, human-dominated ecosystems affect
coyote behavior. Quinn says coyotes in Seattle might be a boon to songbird
populations, since they pick off so many warbler-stalking kitties, but he can
only guess.

J O H N M A R Z L U F F ' s S E C O N D crow-trapping stop of the morning is in a

new subdivision, one packed with trimmed lawns, hopeful landscaping and
cedar-shingled three- and four-bedroom homes. As we pull over to the curb
and hop out, a sprinkler near our feet starts up with a sudden pfft.
Marzluff sets up his net gun, and we quietly settle in for another wait. Al­
most immediately, a flock of juvenile crows starts cawing on the next corner,
and soon a small group of them begins circling the hill of white bread. Marzluff
leans forward, remote control in hand, and-yes!-the blank rifle cartridges
explode, the net soars out, and one young crow is stopped in its tracks.
A woman in a tailored black suit and heels pokes her head out of the near­
est house, taking in the truck, the biologist and the unlucky crow. "What was
 1 28 M I C HE L LE N IJHUIS

that?" she demands. Marzluff explains and apologizes, and the woman shrugs,
her curiosity satisfied for the moment.
Most biologists don't have to consider the effects of nervous neighbors,
speeding cars or ill-timed landscaping work. They've long preferred to work in
big nature, in wilderness areas and other places where nature's gears turn in
relative peace. For decades, many have viewed cities as ecologically dead, places
where natural processes stalled out long ago.
Marzluff likes studying the suburbs, not just because he's fascinated by the
ingenuity of crows ("You get hooked on 'em:' he says) but also because he's try­
ing to figure out how other, less-adaptable species get by in the sea of subdivi­
sions.
The total transformation of this landscape, along with the crows' habit of
aggressive nest predation, should be a death sentence for any forest-loving ani­
mal. But in the struggle between the garbage-eaters and the habitat purists,
some of the purists are turning out to be surprisingly tenacious.
Just a few hundred yards down the wide, curving road, a slender greenbelt
snakes around the edge of the development. This tiny area, barely 45 yards wide
and just over a mile long, is an unexpectedly effective wildlife refuge. Though
the number of birds isn't nearly what it would be in an undisturbed stretch of
forest, every feathered forest-specialist in the region has appeared here at one
time or another. From the well-established trail, Marzluff points out a winter
wren nest, a delicate, grapefruit-sized ball of moss.
This smidgen of forest may not be attractive habitat for long. Invasive
plants may creep in, or curious cats and kids may disturb nesting patterns. But
for now, the greenbelt is like an island with regular ferry service to the main­
land. With a 150-acre University of Washington forest preserve just down the
road, wrens and other birds can usually find the food, mates and habitat they
need by traveling between the two areas. Marzluff and his colleagues at the
University of Washington's Urban Ecology program have found that such well­
managed small areas, interspersed with larger preserves, could go a long way
toward maintaining stable populations of forest birds and other animals.
These hopeful results are probably a happy accident, since parks and green
spaces are most often designed for us, not for wildlife. Parks are intended,
overtly or not, to educate us, enlighten us, or entertain us; animals, if they ap­
pear, are usually just a pleasant diversion for passersby. Marzluff hopes his
work will convince some planners to take a bird's-eye view.
"We don't want to just set aside habitat, we want to set aside functional
habitat:' he says. "We want to make sure we have a good mixture, that it's not all
low-density sprawl:'
 Shadow Creat ures 1 29

He and a few other researchers argue that cities and other human­
dominated places are far from dead environments. They say they're complex
ecosystems, constantly in flux and well worth the attention of a new generation
of ecologists. They hope to flush more of their colleagues out of the woods to
investigate, and they're getting some high-profile support.
The federally funded National Science Foundation, which underwrites the
work of the University of Washington's Urban Ecology program, also oversees
a network of about 20 long-term ecological research stations. In i997, the foun­
dation chose Baltimore and Phoenix for its first urban research stations. The
Phoenix station currently supports more than 50 projects, and many involve
not only biologists but also economists, sociologists and urban planners.
Through her work at the Phoenix station, Arizona State University biolo­
gist Ann Kinzig has found that desert birds can also take advantage of habitat
fragments in the city. Small neighborhood parks-"even places with play­
grounds and baseball fields"-support rich populations of native birds, ones
that seem to coexist with human-associated species such as rock doves and
starlings. When she applied economic and demographic data to her findings,
she discovered that bird diversity is significantly higher in wealthier neighbor­
hoods, a tantalizing pattern she plans to investigate further.
The field of urban ecology still has a long way to go. "This research is where
timber research was 20 years ago;' says Andrew Hansen, an ecology professor at
Montana State University who studies the impacts of rural subdivisions. In the
early 1980s, he says, biologists knew very little about the effects of dear-cutting,
but the lengthening roster of endangered forest species inspired concentrated
research.
"We learned a lot about how the ecosystem worked, and we were able to fig­
ure out how to log more gently;' he says. "We're just now realizing that rural
and urban development is a serious issue in many areas. We're just beginning
to come up with ways to live more lightly on the land."
In 20 years, this research will be even more critical. A recent study in the
journal Bioscience reported that sprawl is already the top cause of species en­
dangerment in the continental United States. In July 2002, the American Farm­
land Trust estimated that 25 million acres of Western ranchland will be
threatened by low-density development within the next two decades.
"Pretty soon;' says Tim Quinn, "we're all going to be urban biologists."
Cities might offer fascinating ecological puzzles to a new breed of scien­
tists, but is "living more lightly on the land"-especially in Seattle or
Phoenix-really worth the trouble of finding out how to do it? After all, most
wildlife habitat in our cities has been more or less permanently paved over, and
 1 30 M IC H E L LE N I J H U IS

what little is left seems to be dominated by crows, coyotes and hungry wild
pigs. It's hard not to see our backyards as sacrifice zones. Even John Marzluff,
who can see hope in 24 acres of scraggly conifers, isn't always optimistic.
"Studying urban ecology makes you a fan of the timber industry," he says
flatly. "The amount of disturbance we create where we live makes all the other
environmental issues we have pale in comparison."
But in the modern metropolis, even small conservation victories can be
meaningful. In Seattle, as in most urban areas, humans have built on top of
high-value wildlife habitat (low-elevation valleys and coastal areas) and pre­
served more scenic but less diverse areas (mountaintops and ridges) .
"People think the wildlife i s out there, i n the national parks;' says John
Kostyack, head of the smart-growth and wildlife program at the National
Wildlife Federation. "Contrary to popular belief, we've found that [the sub­
urbs] are quite rich wildlife areas." His group is delving into the environmental
records of U.S. metropolitan areas, and released a report and a set of recom­
mendations at the end of 2002.
Other national environmental groups, including the Natural Resources
Defense Council and the Sierra Club, have established sprawl-control pro­
grams that include habitat-protection efforts. Many land trusts, most notably
The Nature Conservancy, focus on protecting privately owned wildlife habitat
instead of generic open space. Land trusts of all sizes are using conservation
easements to protect wildlife-friendly lands on the urban fringe.
Thanks to the Endangered Species Act, some city officials are also getting
into the business of habitat protection. Seattle has limited logging and altered
flows in the Cedar River watershed to protect the endangered Puget Sound
chinook salmon. Tucson, like San Diego before it, is embroiled in a massive
habitat-conservation planning process triggered by a suite of troubled species.
In Seattle, the city-funded Urban Creeks Initiative has brought some of the
poorest neighborhoods into closer contact with their nearby rivers, and trans­
formed what were once seen as dumps and drainage ditches. Over the past de­
cade, community groups on the southern end of Seattle have restored a peat
bog and chopped out invasive plants in Longfellow Creek, while city agencies
have piled up woody debris to slow down flows and make the waters more hos­
pitable to salmon. In 2002, about 300 salmon came up the creek, among them a
pair of Puget Sound chinooks.
Part of Longfellow Creek still runs under a Kmart parking lot, but many
stretches are more accessible and more familiar to the whole community, says
creek watershed specialist Sheryl Shapiro. "People are just astonished," she says.
 Shadow Creatures 1 3 1

"They'll say ' Hey, I've lived here all this time, and I never even knew this was
here.' "
In her book Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America, histo­
rian Jennifer Price writes that "we have used a very modern American idea of
Nature Out There to ignore our ravenous uses of natural resources." We have
tried very hard to remain, as Woody Allen put it, "two with nature.''
The Longfellow Creek Project and other community efforts suggest we
may be able to treat our neurotic relationship with the natural world. Perhaps
we can turn capital-N Nature into something we successfully coexist with every
day.
The crows and coyotes might lend us a hand here. They might be able to, in
an odd, roundabout way, help us solve the problem they represent. By busting
through our comfortable ideas about where the city ends and Nature begins,
our annoying, overbearing wild shadows might finally convince us that how
and where we choose to live has a lot to do with the future of the natural world.
They make our options crystal clear: We can continue making endless
habitat for crows and their adaptable colleagues, or we can try to make enough
room for everybody. It's up to us.
 G U N J AN S I N H A

Yo u D i r ty Vole
F R O M P O P ULA R S C I E N C E

What does a rodent have to tell us about love? Researchers studyin9 brain
chemistry and animal behavior havefound that the h umble prairie vole ex­
hibits traits familiar to humans-matin9 and cohabitatin9 to raise chil­
dren, while occasionally strayin9 for fieetin9 encounters with other
partners. Gunjan Sinha has the latestfindin9sfrom the science ef love.

eorge is a typical Midwestern American male in the prime of his life,

G . with an attractive spouse named Martha. George is a devoted hus­

band, Martha an attentive wife. The couple has four young children, a
typical home in a lovely valley full of corn and bean fields, and their future
looks bright. But George is occasionally unfaithful. So, occasionally, is Martha.
No big deal: That's just the way life is in this part of America.
This is a true story, though the names have been changed, and so, for that
matter, has the species. George and Martha are prairie voles. They don't marry,
of course, or think about being faithful. And a bright future for a vole is typi­
cally no more than 60 days of mating and pup-rearing that ends in a fatal en­
counter with a snake or some other prairie predator.
But if you want to understand more about the conflict in human relation­
ships between faithfulness and philandering, have a peek inside the brain of
this wee rodent. Researchers have been studying voles for more than 25 years,
and they've learned that the mating behavior of these gregarious creatures un-
 You Dirty Vole 1 3 3

cannily resembles our own-including a familiar pattern of monogamous at­

tachment: Male and female share a home and child care, the occasional dal­
liance notwithstanding. More important, researchers have discovered what
drives the animals' monogamy: brain chemistry. And when it comes to the
chemical soup that governs behavior associated with what we call love, prairie
vole brains are a lot like ours.
Scientists are careful to refer to what voles engage in as "social monogamy;'
meaning that although voles prefer to nest and mate with a particular partner,
when another vole comes courting, some will stray. And as many as 50 percent
of male voles never find a permanent partner. Of course, there is no moral or
religious significance to the vole's behavior-monogamous or not. Voles will
be voles, because that's their nature.
Still, the parallels to humans are intriguing. "We're not an animal that finds
it in our best interest to screw around;' says Pepper Schwartz, a sociologist at
the University of Washington, yet studies have shown that at least one-third of
married people cheat. In many cases, married couples struggle with the simple
fact that love and lust aren't always in sync, often tearing us in opposite direc­
tions. Vole physiology and behavior reinforce the idea that love and lust are
biochemically separate systems, and that the emotional tug of war many of us
feel between the two emotions is perfectly natural-a two-headed biological
drive that's been hardwired into our brains through millions of years of evolu­
tion.
No one knew that voles were monogamous until Lowell Getz, a now­
retired professor of ecology, ethology, and evolution at the University of Illi­
nois, began studying them in 1972. At the time, Getz wanted to figure out why
the vole population would boom during certain years and then slowly go bust.
He set traps in the grassy plains of Illinois and checked them a few times a day,
tagging the voles he caught. What surprised him was how often he'd find the
same male and female sitting in a trap together.
Voles build soft nests about 8 inches below ground. A female comes of age
when she is about 30 days old: Her need to mate is then switched on as soon as
she encounters an unpartnered male and sniffs his urine. About 24 hours later,
she's ready to breed-with the male she just met or another unattached one if
he's gone. Then, hooked, the pair will stick together through thick and thin,
mating and raising young.
Getz found vole mating behavior so curious that he wanted to bring the an­
imals into the lab to study them more carefully. But he was a field biologist, not
a lab scientist, so he called Sue Carter, a colleague and neuroendocrinologist.
Carter had been studying how sex hormones influence behavior, and investi-
 1 34 G UNJAN SINHA

gating monogamy in voles dovetailed nicely with her own research. The ani­
mals were small: They made the perfect lab rats.
The scientific literature was already rich with studies on a hormone called
oxytocin that is made in mammalian brains and that in some species promotes
bonding between males and females and between mothers and offspring.
Might oxytocin, swirling around in tiny vole brains, be the catalyst for turning
them into the lifelong partners that they are?
Sure enough, when Carter injected female voles with oxytocin, they were
less finicky in choosing mates and practically glued themselves to their part­
ners once they had paired. The oxytocin-dosed animals tended to lick and cud­
dle more than untreated animals, and they avoided strangers. What's more,
when Carter injected females with oxytocin-blocking chemicals, the animals
deserted their partners.
In people, not only is the hormone secreted by lactating women but studies
have shown that oxytocin levels also increase during sexual arousal-and sky­
rocket during orgasm. In fact, the higher the level of oxytocin circulating in the
blood during intercourse, the more intense the orgasm.
But there's more to vole mating than love; there's war too. Male voles are
territorial. Once they bond with a female, they spend lots of time guarding her
from other suitors, often sitting near the entrance of their burrow and aggres­
sively baring their beaver-like teeth. Carter reasoned that other biochemicals
must kick in after mating, chemicals that turn a once laid-back male into a ter­
ritorial terror. Oxytocin, it turns out, is only part of the story. A related chemi­
cal, vasopressin, also occurs in both sexes. Males, however, have much more
of it.
When Carter dosed male voles with a vasopressin-blocking chemical after
mating, their feistiness disappeared. An extra jolt of vasopressin, on the other
hand, boosted their territorial behavior and made them more protective of
their mates.
Vasopressin is also present in humans. While scientists don't yet know the
hormone's exact function in men, they speculate that it works similarly: It is se­
creted during sexual arousal and promotes bonding. It may even transform
some men into jealous boyfriends and husbands. "The biochemistry [of at­
tachment] is probably going to be similar in humans and in [monogamous]
animals because it's quite a basic function," says Carter. Because oxytocin and
vasopressin are secreted during sexual arousal and orgasm, she says, they are
probably the key biochemical players that bond lovers to one another.
But monogamous animals aren't the only ones that have vasopressin and
oxytocin in their brains. Philandering animals do too. So what separates faith-
 You Dirty Vole 1 3)

ful creatures from unfaithful ones? Conveniently for scientists, the generally
monogamous prairie vole has a wandering counterpart: the montane vole.
When Thomas Insel, a neuroscientist at Emory University, studied the two
species' vasopressin receptors (appendages on a cell that catch specific bio­
chemicals) he found them in different places. Prairie voles have receptors for
the hormone in their brains' pleasure centers; montane voles have the recep­
tors in other brain areas. In other words, male prairie voles stick with the same
partner after mating because it feels good. For montane voles, mating is a list­
less but necessary affair, rather like scratching an itch.

O F C O U R S E , human love is much more complicated. The biochemistry of

attachment isn't yet fully understood, and there's clearly much more to it than
oxytocin and vasopressin. Humans experience different kinds of love. There's
"compassionate love;' associated with feelings of calm, security, social comfort,
and emotional union. This kind of love, say scientists, is probably similar to
what voles feel toward their partners and involves oxytocin and vasopressin.
Romantic love-that crazy obsessive euphoria that people feel when they are
"in love"-is very different, as human studies are showing.
Scientists at University College London led by Andreas Bartels recently
peered inside the heads of love-obsessed college students. They took 17 young
people who claimed to be in love, stuck each of them in an M RI machine, and
showed them pictures of their lovers. Blood flow increased to very specific ar­
eas of the brain's pleasure center-including some of the same areas that are
stimulated when people engage in addictive behaviors. Some of these same ar­
eas are also active during sexual arousal, though romantic love and sexual
arousal are clearly different: Sex has more to do with hormones like testos­
terone, which, when given to both men and women, increases sex drive and
sexual fantasies. Testosterone, however, doesn't necessarily ma.lee people fall in
love with, or become attached to, the object of their attraction.
Researchers weren't particularly surprised by the parts of the lovers' brains
that were active. What astonished them was that two other brain areas were
suppressed-the amygdala and the right prefrontal cortex. The amygdala is as­
sociated with negative emotions like fear and anger. The right prefrontal cortex
appears to be overly active in people suffering from depression. The positive
emotion of love, it seems, suppresses negative emotions. Might that be the sci­
entific basis for why people who are madly in love fail to see the negative traits
of their beloved? "Maybe," says Bartels cautiously. "But we haven't proven that
yet."
 I 36 GUNJAN SINHA

The idea that romantic love activates parts of the brain associated with ad­
diction got Donatella Marazziti at Pisa University in Tuscany wondering if it
might be related to obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Anyone who has
ever been in love knows how consuming the feeling can be. You can think of
nothing but your lover every waking moment. Some people with OCD have
low levels of the brain chemical serotonin. Might love-obsessed people also
have low serotonin levels? Sure enough, when Marazziti and her colleagues
tested the blood of 20 students who were madly in love and 20 people with
OCD, she found that both groups had low levels of a protein that shuttles sero­
tonin between brain cells.
And what happens when the euphoria of "mad love" wears off? Marazziti
tested the blood of a few of the lovers 12 to 18 months later and found that their
serotonin levels had returned to normal. That doesn't doom a couple, of
course, but it suggests a biological explanation for the evolution of relation­
ships. In many cases, romantic love turns into compassionate love, thanks to
oxytocin and vasopressin swirling inside the lovers' brains. This attachment is
what keeps many couples together. But because attachment and romantic love
involve different biochemical processes, attachment to one person does not
suppress lust for another. "The problem is, they are not always well linked," says
anthropologist Helen Fisher, who has written several books on love, sex and
marriage.

IN THE wI LD, about half of male voles wander the fields, never settling
down with one partner. These "traveling salesmen:' as Lowell Getz calls them,
are always "trying to get with other females." Most females prefer to mate with
their partners. But if they get the chance, some will mate with other males too.
And, according to Jerry Wolff, a biologist at the University of Memphis, female
voles sometimes "divorce" their partners. In the lab, he restricts three males at a
time in separate but connected chambers and gives a female free range. The fe­
male has already paired with one of the males and is pregnant with his pups.
Wolff says about a third of the females pick up their nesting materials and
move in with a different fellow. Another third actually solicit and successfully
mate with one or both of the other males, and the last third remain faithful.
Why are some voles fickle, others faithful? Vole brains differ from one crea­
ture to the next. Larry Young, a neuroscientist at Emory University, has found
that some animals have more receptors for oxytocin and vasopressin than oth­
ers. In a recent experiment, he injected a gene into male prairie voles that per­
manently upped the number of vasopressin receptors in their brains. The
 Yo u Dirty Vole 1 37

animals paired with females even though the two hadn't mated. "Normally
they have to mate for at least 24 hours to establish a bond;' he says. So the num­
ber of receptors can mean the difference between sticking around and skipping
out after sex. Might these differences in brain wiring influence human faithful­
ness? "It's too soon to tell," Young says. But it's "definitely got us very curious."
How does evolution account for the often-conflicting experiences of love
and lust, which have caused no small amount of destruction in human history?
Fisher speculates that the neural systems of romantic love and attachment
evolved for different reasons. Romantic love, she says, evolved to allow people
to distinguish between potential mating partners and "to pursue these partners
until insemination has occurred." Attachment, she says, "evolved to make you
tolerate this individual long enough to raise a child:' Pepper Schwartz agrees:
"We're biologically wired to be socially monogamous, but it's not a good evolu­
tionary tactic to be sexually monogamous. There need to be ways to keep re­
production going if your mate dies."
Many of our marriage customs, say sociologists, derive from the need to
reconcile this tension. "As much as people love passion and romantic love;'
Schwartz adds, "most people also want to have the bonding sense of loyalty and
friendship love as well." Marriage vows are a declaration about romantic love
and binding attachment, but also about the role of rational thought and the
primacy of mind and mores over impulses.
Scientists hope to do more than simply decode the biochemistry of the
emotions associated with love and attachment. Some, like Insel, are searching
for treatments for attachment disorders such as autism, as well as pathological
behaviors like stalking and violent jealousy. It is not inconceivable that some­
day there might be sold an attachment drug, a monogamy pill; the mind reels
at the marketing possibilities.
Lowell Getz, the grandfather of all this research, couldn't be more thrilled.
"I spent almost $i million of taxpayer money trying to figure out stuff like why
sisters don't make it with their brothers;' he says. "I don't want to go to my
grave feeling like it was a waste."
 T R E VO R C O RS O N

Stalki n9 th e A m eri can L obster

F R O M THE A TL A N TI C M O N TH L Y

Who knows be tter how to protect Maine lobstersfrom oveifishin9-scien­

tists or the lobstermen themselves? A 9roup efecolo9ists, armed with hi9h­
tech equipment and a healthy skepticism ef conventional thinkin9, is
comin9 up with a surprisin9 answer, as the journalist Tre vor Corson un­

"
covers.

s ir, I have a target, distance two hundred meters," the sonar operator
said. "It looks big." The nuclear-powered submarine NR-1 was hovering
600 feet underwater, on the edge of the continental shelf. Robert
Steneck, a professor of marine sciences at the University of Maine, decided to
check the target out. The helmsman nudged the sub forward, and Steneck, a
short, energetic man with a thick red beard, slipped below the control room
into the cramped observation module. There, through a six-inch-thick glass
viewing portal, he was confronted with the biggest lobster he had ever seen. It
was a female, about four feet long, weighing nearly forty pounds. She turned
toward the sub as it came right up to her, nose to nose, and defiantly shook her
claws.
Steneck is an unusual lobster scientist. Many of the leading scientists who
track the North American lobster population do so mainly on computer
screens in government laboratories, and from that vantage point lobsters ap­
pear to be in danger. From the mid-194os to the mid-198os Maine's lobstermen
 Stalkin9 the American Lobster 1 39

hauled in a remarkably consistent number of lobsters. But during the past fif­
teen years they have nearly tripled their catch, raising fears among many scien­
tists about overfishing. The situation recalls the recent history of the cod
fishery in New England, in which an exponential rise in the catch was followed
by a devastating biological and economic collapse. In 1996, as lobster catches
continued to hit all-time highs, a committee of the country's top government
lobster scientists warned of disaster, and they have since recommended drastic
management measures to save the fishery.
A failure in the lobster fishery-which has recently become the most valu­
able fishery in the northeastern United States-would be disastrous. Revenues
from lobstering in 2000 topped $300 million. Nearly two thirds of the lobsters
were caught in the waters off Maine, where some 4,000 fishermen earned $187
million at the dock for nearly 60 million pounds of lobster. And lobstering
doesn't benefit only lobstermen: in Maine, for example, the fishery is a coastal
economic engine that generates some $500 million a year altogether.
Most Maine lobstermen believe that their fishery is healthy, perhaps even
too healthy. They worry not about a population collapse but about a market
collapse. Even the lobstermen who admit that catches could decline don't see
anything wrong with that. They say they're the lucky beneficiaries of a boom
orchestrated by Mother Nature. If lobster catches soon return to more tradi­
tional levels, so be it.
The lobstermen argue that they are better biologists than the biologists are,
and there's something to what they say. Fisheries scientists who gauge the ef­
fects of commercial lobster harvesting do so using techniques originally de­
signed for tracking fish populations. Because fish are elusive and hard to study
in the wild, estimates of how well their populations are faring rely heavily on
mathematical models. But lobsters aren't fish. Many of them dwell in shallow
coastal water and are easy to observe, though until recently few scientists had
bothered to observe them. And unlike fish, lobsters aren't harmed by being
caught. Baby lobsters, oversized lobsters, and egg-bearing lobsters that lobster­
men trap and return to the sea are none the worse for having taken the bait-in
fact, they've gotten a free lunch. Lobstermen know their resource more inti­
mately than do many other kinds of fishermen, and they feel justified in telling
the government that lobsters are doing well enough to be left alone. The trou­
ble is that lobstermen tend not to have advanced degrees and scientific data to
back up their claims, so their opinion carries little weight. But lately a new
breed of lobster scientist has appeared along the Maine coast, epitomized by
Robert Steneck on the NR-1. These scientists are ecologists, and they spend in­
ordinate amounts of time underwater doing things almost no sane fisheries
 1 40 TREVO R C O RSON

modeler with a computer and a comfortable office would ever do. They dig for
days in the ocean floor to count tiny lobsters; they risk life and limb on shark­
infested ledges seventy miles from shore to see how long lobster populations
can survive predation. And they go lobstering with nuclear-powered sub­
marines. Gradually they are concluding that some of the things lobstermen
have been saying may be right.

B R u c E F E R N A L D H A s the ultimate lobsterman's physique: a low center of

gravity and muscular shoulders. He has lived most of his life on an island called
Islesford, off the coast of Maine. A pillar of the local community, he is often the
one who gets a call when an elderly resident has a heart attack, and the one who
rounds up the fishermen for a repair project on the public wharf. Fernald also
takes a keen interest in lobster management and science. Along with several
other Islesford lobstermen he has become one of Robert Steneck's most enthu­
siastic collaborators in the quest to collect data about lobsters. Steneck recog­
nizes that lobstermen like Fernald and his colleagues spend far more time
observing lobsters than he does, and that their knowledge can aid him in his
research.
Fernald has always made his living by trapping lobsters across the 150
square miles of underwater boulder fields, gravel, and mud that surround the
island. So have two of his brothers. He has never been down to see the terrain
he fishes, but like a blind man who can read a face, he knows what it looks
like-each gully, hillock, canyon, and plateau. His understanding of the lobster
population around Islesford, developed during the course of a lifetime on the
water, is similarly precise.
On a pitch-black morning in September 2001 the weather off Islesford was
far from perfect: eddies and storm pulses were rolling in and battling with tidal
currents inshore; the wind was picking up. Nevertheless, by 5:30 A.M. Fernald
was on his boat, with his sternman. Cursing at a swarm of mosquitoes, Fernald
checked the oil and cranked up the boat's 300-horsepower diesel engine. With
the sky brightening, he pulled up to the thick mooring chain that tethered the
boat to a two-ton slab of granite on the harbor floor, freed the vessel, and mo­
tored off. A hodgepodge of screens, instruments, and dials glared at him from
the bulkhead and ceiling: engine readouts, bilge-pump alarms, a compass, a
color Fathometer, a sixteen-mile-range radar, a GPS chart plotter. Also on the
boat was a much less sophisticated bit of technology: a double-edged brass
ruler known as the measure or the gauge. Since 1874 the measure has delineated
 Stalkin9 the A merican Lobster 141

the minimum size of a lobster that may legally be landed. In 1933 the State of
Maine also instituted a maximum legal size. The main section of a lobster's ar­
mor, from the eye socket to the end of the back, is often referred to as the lob­
ster's body but technically is called the carapace. In Maine the carapace must be
no less than three and a quarter inches and no greater than five inches. Lobsters
not meeting the measure are thrown overboard.
Out on the open water, Fernald gunned the boat to cruising speed while his
sternman lifted the lid off the boat's bait bin, filling the cabin with the stench of
herring. As the boat bounced against the chop, the sternman stuffed handfuls
of gooey bait into small mesh bags with drawstrings. These he would soon be
placing in the traps piled in the stern. Fernald had taken the traps up from shal­
low water a few days before and planned to drop them in deeper water this
morning. He maintains 800 traps across a twenty-mile-long swath of ocean.
He knows exactly where to place each one from one week to the next, March
through December. He takes time off during the worst of the winter weather to
repair his equipment.
During the summer Fernald keeps a third of his traps on short ropes near
shore, strategically placed in certain coves and kelp beds, and near underwater
boulders where he knows lobsters like to hide and hunt. In early September,
though, lobsters begin to move offshore, so Fernald had already shifted much
of his gear into middle-depth water-around a hundred feet. This morning's
job was to set the first deepwater traps of the season. Seven miles out to sea Fer­
nald pulled a dirty waterproof notebook from a tangle of electronic equipment
and flipped through several pages of scrawled notes. He grabbed a pencil and
jotted a few numbers directly onto the bulkhead next to his compass; then he
squinted up at the GPS plotter above his head and keyed in a way point. He was
headed for an underwater valley between Western and Eastern Muddy Reef. He
was reassured to see his position confirmed by transmissions from four differ­
ent satellites, but none of that was necessary: he could, if he had to, go back to
navigating with nothing but landmarks and a magnetic compass, as his father
still does.
Shortly, Fernald throttled down and studied the colorful blotches on his
Fathometer screen, which was connected to a transducer on the bottom of the
boat that bounced signals off the sea floor. The screen was painting the bottom
as a thick black line at twenty-two fathoms, or 132 feet, which meant that Fer­
nald was directly over the rocky ledge of Western Muddy Reef. He circled the
boat a quarter turn and motored slowly east, watching the bottom on the Fath­
ometer drop off and go from black to purple to orange, indicating a patch of
 1 42 TREVOR C O RS O N

cobble and then gravel where the ledge ended. Suddenly the line fell precipi­
tously and settled into a mushy yellow haze at forty-seven fathoms, or 282
feet-a deep bottom of thick, dark mud. He was over the valley.

LIKE MOST LOBSTERMEN, Fernald believes that lobsters follow warmth.

Fishermen think that many lobsters migrate in the spring toward land, to
spend the summer in the sun-warmed waters near the shore, and migrate in
the fall out to the mud in deeper water, far from the shallows that will soon be
chilled by cold winds from Canada. The lobsterman must learn the lobsters'
preferred routes along the bottom and intercept the animals on their pilgrim­
ages. To succeed at his profession, Fernald therefore has to be an oceanogra­
pher, a sea-floor geologist, and a detective. Lobsters that migrate along the edge
of an underwater canyon at one time of year may travel on the floor of the
canyon at another time, so for Fernald to set his traps precisely can make all the
difference.
When the lobsters show up near shore every summer, the first thing most
of them do is go into hiding for a few weeks, to shed their old shells and grow
larger ones. This process is called molting, and it is fraught with danger: not
only must the lobster expose its jelly-soft body to the hungry world, but it may
get stuck. The lobster's body shrinks, the old shell splits open, and the animal's
twenty pairs of gills stop beating. The lobster has about an hour to wriggle free
before it suffocates. The hardest part is pulling the large claw muscles through
the narrow tracts of shell between them and the body-if the lobster can't do
so, it will sacrifice one or both claws to live. Free of the old shell, the lobster gets
its gills working again. Then for the next five hours it fills its shriveled body full
of water. Artificially enlarged by liquid, the lobster then secretes the beginnings
of a new shell, which will harden over the coming weeks. The new outfit should
last a year or so, depending on the size of the lobster. The old shell is an excel­
lent source of minerals, so the lobster eats some of it to quicken the hardening
of the new one. What the lobster doesn't eat it buries with mouthfuls of peb­
bles, probably to hide the evidence of its weakness and also prevent rival lob­
sters from raiding its nutrient stash. While the lobsters are molting, Fernald
takes advantages of the lull to haul his boat out of the water briefly for repairs
and a new paint job.
By August "the shedders are coming on;' as the lobstermen say, and the
great autumn harvest begins. Dressed in their new shells, the lobsters are rav­
enous, and now millions of them meet the minimum carapace length for cap­
ture. Lobsters of this size enter the traps in droves. By the time the shedders
 Stalkin9 the A m erican Lobster 1 43

begin to reach deeper water, Fernald must already have traps in place, which is
why he was now setting a gauntlet of traps in the valley.
The task was complicated by the fact that the water had become a sloppy
mess. A wave sloshed through an open panel in the boat's windshield and hit
Fernald in the face and chest. He swore to himself, yanked the window shut,
and shook himself off. Then he reached across the bulkhead and switched on
the Clearview, a circular plate of glass in the boat's windshield that rotates
eighty times a second-fast enough to fling off oncoming walls of water. "It
would have been a lot easier to do this yesterday;' he grumbled, "when it was
flat-ass calm." He and his stern man pulled the first pair of traps from the pile in
the stern and secured them on the rail so that they couldn't roll off before the
buoy line was attached.
Fernald and his sternman arranged bulky coils of rope on the floor at their
feet-carefully, because a tangle could cause mayhem. Fernald tied on a
torpedo-shaped buoy, marked with his signature colors in Day-Glo paint; then
he put the boat in gear and gave his sternman the signal to throw the first trap.
It went over with a splash, and the workday was under way.

F E R N A L D A N D his fellow fishermen on Islesford want to share their knowl­

edge of lobsters, but few scientists have been interested in listening to them.
With the arrival on the scene of Robert Steneck and other ecologists, however,
that has begun to change. Steneck and others have spent long days at sea on the
lobster boats of Bruce Fernald and his brothers, and have used the waters off
Islesford as one of their research stations.
On a gorgeous morning in July 2001 Steneck was out in those waters, con­
ducting a census of large lobsters a few miles from shore, the results of which
might indicate that the lobster population is not in as much danger as some
scientists think. Steneck's first task as an ecologist is to measure the abundance
of lobsters and map their patterns of distribution. Baby lobsters and j uvenile
lobsters are relatively easy to study, because they live in shallow water; all
Steneck needs to conduct his research on them is a scuba tank. But large lob­
sters are another matter-they've been known to live at depths exceeding 1,500
feet, though most of them probably don't venture much deeper than several
hundred feet.
Steneck often explores the sea floor in a submarine, but on this trip he was
using a submersible robot. The robot afforded him the luxury of staying above
water, aboard the seventy-six-foot research vessel Connecticut, operated by the
Marine Sciences and Technology Center of the University of Connecticut. The
 1 44 T R E VO R C O R S O N

robot was a $160,000 piece of equipment known as a remotely operated vehi­

cle, or ROV-an unmanned submarine that transmits video and other data
from the ocean bottom to the mother ship through fiber-optic cables. The
craft, operated with funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Ad­
ministration (NOAA), was called Phantom Ill S2, or, to the team of technicians
accompanying it, just P3S2.
Also out on the water that morning, tending his traps in a forty-foot lobster
boat, was Jack Merrill, an Islesford lobsterman who, like Bruce Fernald, has
been in the business for nearly thirty years. Merrill is gruff, bearded, and
thoughtful, and has dedicated much of his life to making lobstermen them­
selves the lobster's best advocate. To that end he, too, regularly collaborates
with Steneck and other researchers. When Merrill caught sight of the Connecti­
cut in the distance, he changed course and headed toward it. Twenty minutes
later he throttled down and drew up under the Connedicufs looming bow.
As Merrill pulled alongside, he was met by technicians carrying walkie­
talkies and wearing orange flotation vests. Steneck emerged on deck, hailed
Merrill, and pulled a notebook from his breast pocket. Merrill produced a
notebook of his own and read off a few numbers to the scientist-numbers he
would not have shared with his fellow lobstermen. This was one of his many
small contributions to the quest for a better scientific understanding of lob­
sters. "That's where I've seen them," Merrill said. "Big ones, big time."
He then took the wheel of his boat and roared off across the sparkling wa­
ter, back to his traps. Steneck climbed a steep stairway to the bridge, where he
proceeded to map out the corrdinates Merrill had given him on a nautical
chart. He nodded. "Two rock outcrops," he said. "Little underwater mountains.
Just where you'd expect to find big lobsters."
Later in the morning, when the Connecticut was in position and Steneck
was on his third cup of coffee, the ROV was put into the water. In the com­
mand module on the Connecticut the P3S2's pilot, along with a copilot,
Steneck, and one of Steneck's research assistants, monitored a bank oflumines­
cent screens and instruments. The room echoed with sonar pings. Off to one
side, with a video monitor of his own, sat the State of Maine's chief lobster bi­
ologist, Carl Wilson, a former student of Steneck's.
The pilot steered the ROV toward the bottom with a pair of joy sticks. On
the video monitors a rain of plankton gave way to a lunar landscape of pebble
fields and small boulders. P3S2 was hovering at a depth of 104 feet. Its spot­
lights and three video cameras illuminated tall sea anemones growing on the
rocks like stalks of broccoli. Fish darted around mussels, scallops, and the occa­
sional starfish.
 Stalkin9 the A merican Lobster 1H

"This looks like a high-rent district," Steneck said. Steneck's research assis­
tant switched on the video recorder and noted time and depth on a clipboard.
Moments later a lobster antenna became visible.
"There's one;' Steneck said. "He's hiding between those two boulders."
The pilot pressed his joy stick for a slow-motion dive. P3S2 nudged the
boulder, and the lobster's antenna twitched. The pilot pulled the ROV back,
and the lobster emerged, strutting forward, claws extended and antennae
whipping the water. If he had been able to see the ROV, the lobster might have
been unnerved-but despite the fact that they are endowed with some 20,000
eye facets, lobsters have terrible vision. They have sensitive touch receptors,
however, and an acute sense of smell. Two long antennae and thousands of tiny
hairs on their claws and legs give them ample information about their environ­
ment. Like houseflies, lobsters can even taste with their feet. A second pair of
shorter antennae, known as antennules, contain 400 chemoreceptors and give
lobsters most of their hunting and socializing skills. But P3S2 didn't emit a rec­
ognizable scent.
"That's it, baby;' Steneck said to the lobster. "Work the camera." Steneck
wanted a side view, in order to get a laser measurement. When the lobster
turned to walk away, Steneck said, "Paint him with the lasers." A pair of laser
beams hit the lobster squarely on a claw and the tail, providing a gauge of its
size. This routine was more or less what Steneck and his team would be doing
every day, ten hours a day, for the coming week.
"Is that another set of claws right there?" the ROV pilot asked, aiming for
another boulder. "I don't think so:' Steneck said. "That looks like a molt. Empty
shell." But Steneck's attention was attracted by something else: the pebbly
ground at the base of the boulder was a lighter color than the surrounding bot­
tom, and had been carved into a small crater. "Hold it;' Steneck said. "We've got
recent sediment-reworking here. Let's take a closer look." The investigation
paid off. The actual lobster, perhaps still soft from having recently shed its
shell, was hiding around the corner, its presence betrayed by the burrow it had
dug for itself.
The lobster wouldn't budge from its protected spot, but Carl Wilson saw a
retreating shape in a corner of the screen. "Is that one?" he asked. The pilot
changed course, and P3S2 slowly gained on the lumbering lobster. This one
clearly hadn't shed recently-large barnacles grew on its shell, an indication of
its size, because bigger lobsters molt less often. Alerted to a presence behind it,
the lobster spun, faced P3S2 head on, lifted its claws wide, and ran directly at
the ROV. "You're going to lose:' the pilot said. At the last second the lobster
seemed to reach the same conclusion, and it backed off.
 1 46 T R E VO R C O R S O N

THE F I R ST LOB STER L I KE D ECAP O D S probably evolved around 400

million years ago. Today there are thirty or so kinds of clawed lobsters, and
forty-five species of clawless ones. By far the most abundant clawed lobster is
Homarus americanus, or the American lobster. To the European explorers who
arrived on the Maine coast in the 1600s, this greenish-brown crustacean looked
familiar, because European waters are home to the American lobster's closest
cousin: the bluish-black Homarus gammarus. But nowhere else in the world is
Homarus as plentiful as it is in the waters off Maine. The explorers caught lob­
sters easily with long hooks or by dragging nets; later fishermen used a net
hanging from an iron hoop and shaped like a cauldron-thus "pot," a term still
used today to refer to a trap.
The basic design of the modern lobster trap was developed in the 1830s, and
except for a switch from wood to wire, it hasn't changed much since. The num­
ber of traps in the water has changed dramatically, however. Records at the
Maine Department of Marine Resources indicate that 50,000 to 100,000 traps
were in use in 1880. Today some 2.8 million traps blanket the Maine coast.
A lobster trap is a wire- mesh rectangle almost four feet long, divided into
sections: a "kitchen" and one or two "parlors." The bait bag hangs in the middle
of the kitchen. On either side of the kitchen the wire is replaced by a ramp,
made of knit twine, that ends in a small hole. Lobsters have an easy time walk­
ing up the ramp and through the hole into the kitchen; finding the hole and
getting back out is more difficult. Many of those who can't find their way out
are suckered into trying to escape on a third twine ramp--which leads to the
parlor, designed to keep them stuck until the trap is hauled in by a lobsterman.
Little lobsters have a Get Out of Jail Free card: the parlor is fitted with vents
through which they can usually escape. Weather permitting, Bruce Fernald
hauls his traps about every four days, and generally leaves them in the same
area for several weeks. When lobsters begin to migrate elsewhere, he shifts the
traps to follow them.
Today's lobster trap is a remarkably inefficient tool for catching lobsters.
Winsor H. Watson III, a zoologist at the University of New Hampshire, and his
graduate students have developed a device Watson calls a "lobster trap video,"
or LTV, which consists of a trap outfitted with a camera that looks down
through a Plexiglas roof; a waterproof VCR unit; and a red lighting array for
night vision. Watson can set the LTV on the bottom and run it for twenty-four
hours to see how many lobsters enter the trap and what they do once they're
inside.
 Stalkin9 the A merican Lobster 1 47

Soon after a trap i s set, lobsters smell the bait and approach. If the kitchen
is unoccupied, more than half of those that approach will eventually enter and
nibble at the bag of fish for about ten minutes. An astounding 94 percent of
those walk right back out again. Furthermore, while one lobster is eating, other
lobsters are often battling among themselves to be the next to enter, thus re­
ducing the potential catch drastically-especially if the one eating also fights
off any intruders on his meal. In one twelve-hour period recorded by Watson
lobsters in the vicinity made 3,058 approaches to the LTV. Forty-five lobsters
actually entered, and of those, twenty-three ambled out one of the kitchen en­
trances after eating. Twenty prolonged their stay by entering the parlor, but
seventeen of those eventually escaped, leaving just five in the trap. Of those
five, three were under the legal size. When Watson hauled the trap up, he'd
caught a grand total of two salable lobsters.
Lobstermen like it that way. In Maine they have lobbied to outlaw other
methods of catching lobsters, and during the past several years they themselves
have imposed limits on the number of traps each lobsterman may set. Trap­
ping provides a steady year-round job with time off in the winter, and it allows
lobstermen to harvest only certain lobsters and throw back the undersized,
oversized, and egg-bearing animals that are so crucial to the long-term health
of the fishery. Most species that have collapsed from overfishing fell victim to
radical improvements in fishing technology. "It's a very primitive trap we use:'
one lobsterman says, "and that's an important part of Maine law. As long as we
keep using traps, we'll never catch them all. We're traditional in a lot of ways. I
think that's going to save us in the long run."
The faster fishermen at Islesford can haul more than 450 traps in a single
day. It's a demanding, manic routine, and it's dangerous. Most of the lobster­
men on Islesford have tales of getting tangled in an outgoing rope as they race
from one trap to the next; this can drag a man to his death in seconds. Two
years ago a loop of outgoing line caught Jack Merrill around the ankle. He
threw himself down as he was dragged aft and managed to lodge himself under
the stern deck. His sternman rushed to the controls and threw the boat out of
gear, saving Merrill's leg.
Fisheries scientists think that the hell-bent routine of lobstering is part of
the reason lobsters are overfished; the race for profits, they feel, means that too
many lobsters are getting trapped too soon. According to the scientists (though
lobstermen dispute this), almost all of the annual catch now consists of new
shedders-lobsters that have just molted up to the minimum legal size­
instead of a more diverse sampling of sizes, and that doesn't bode well for the
ability of the population to sustain itself.
 1 48 T REVO R C O RSON

J o s E F I o o 1 N E I s employed by the National Marine Fisheries Service

(NMFS), a division of the NOAA, as the chief federal biologist responsible for
lobster. Idoine, who works at the NMFS laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachu­
setts, was not originally a lobster scientist. In college he majored in English lit­
erature, but the biological sciences and math had always captivated him. He
later decided to pursue a degree in fisheries science. The professor with whom
he studied modeled not only fish populations but insect ones as well, and
Idoine realized that he could apply the same modeling techniques to lobsters.
"Lobsters and insects both grow by molting," he says. "They're really not that
different."
One problem Idoine faced-a problem that he continues to wrestle with
today-is that scientists have yet to discover a reliable method for determining
the age of a lobster. This means that although most fisheries scientists can rely
on age data when they model fish populations, lobster modelers have to de­
velop estimates of growth rates. Early in life lobsters molt frequently-up to
twenty-five times in their first five years. After that they molt about once a year
for a while, and when they're bigger, the rate drops again. Complicating the
picture is the fact that female growth slows during reproduction, when energy
goes into producing offspring instead.
In the 1980s Idoine and Michael Fogarty, a colleague at the NMFS, pub­
lished papers that modeled a hypothetical lobster population. Modeling lob­
sters was in itself nothing new. Fogarty had already developed models
describing the population dynamics of lobsters, and lobster scientists else­
where had built careers around similar projects. But the Fogarty-Idoine model
seemed to give scientists a better idea of how lobstermen might be affecting the
lobster population's ability to sustain itself. The model suggested a common­
sense idea: if lobstermen caught too many lobsters of too small a size, not
enough lobsters would get the chance to grow larger, mate, and replace the lob­
sters being caught.
The Fogarty-Idoine model became an important part of a combined fed­
eral and state lobster-management system. Government scientists used the
model to analyze the lobster population in the Gulf of Maine. The analyses led
scientists to conclude that lobstermen were indeed risking the long-term sus­
tainability of the resource by fishing too much. In the 1990s Idoine collabo­
rated with another NMFS colleague, Paul Rago, to refine the model further; in
its current version it is referred to as the Idoine-Rago model.
Lobstermen are suspicious of mathematical simulations like the Idoine-
 Stalkin9 the American Lobster 1 49

Rago model. Jack Merrill, of Islesford, has long been one of the model's tough­
est critics. Like Idoine, Merrill studied both literature and science in college.
When he started lobstering, in the early 1970s, he joined the Maine Lobster­
men's Association (MLA) and soon became its vice president.
In the 1980s Merrill began collecting scientific papers on the lobster fishery.
He noticed something strange: fisheries scientists had been using population
models to predict the crash of lobster stocks for years, and so far not only had
they been wrong but they'd had it completely backward-lobsters had done
nothing but increase in numbers. When Fogarty and Idoine's papers came out,
Merrill and other MLA officers met with Idoine and his colleagues at Woods
Hole. "We asked, 'Why are you telling us we're overfishing?' " Merrill remem­
bers. "They said, 'The formula tells us that you're overfishing: "
The disagreement between Merrill and Idoine-and between almost all
lobstermen and government scientists-boils down to a question of small lob­
sters versus big lobsters. Everyone agrees that in Maine's frigid waters only
about 15 percent of lobsters are sexually mature at the minimum legal size.
Lobstermen are harvesting prepubescents, which suggests to Idoine that very
few female lobsters ever get the chance to mate. "That's what keeps me awake at
night," Idoine says with a laugh. "Thinking about female lobsters:' But the
problem shouldn't be worth losing any sleep over, because a solution seems ap­
parent. Government scientists have long recommended additional controls on
lobster fishing, such as closed seasons and limits on the total number of traps
in the water, but central to most management proposals has been raising the
minimum legal size. That way more females would have a chance to mature
and reproduce before they're caught. "Along with controls on fishing effort,
raising the minimum size gives you a margin of safety;' Idoine explains.
But Merrill and his colleagues in the MLA don't think Idoine's recommen­
dations are necessary. They believe that the scientific models fail to factor in the
margin of safety that lobstermen have built into their fishery for decades: a
pool of large reproductive lobsters, protected not only by Maine's maximum­
size restriction but also by a curious practice known as V-notching.

A c o R N E R s To N E o F Maine's conservation ethic, V-notching dates to 1917

and has been largely self-enforced by Maine lobstermen since the 1950s.
V-notching is all about making babies. The sex life of lobsters does not get wide
public attention, but it has attracted the interest of a small number of re­
searchers. One of these is a biologist named Diane Cowan, a onetime professor
at Bates College who is now the president of The Lobster Conservancy, a non-
 1 50 T R E VO R C O R S O N

profit research center dedicated to involving Maine coastal communities in

lobster science.
Cowan once spent several months observing the behavior of a male lobster
she had named M, which lived with one other male and five females in a tank at
the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, where Cowan later worked
as a graduate student. Every night M would emerge from his shelter, boot all
the other lobsters out of their shelters, and then return home. The females got
the message: M was dominant. The females visited both of the males at their
shelters, but M got far more lady callers than the other male. The visits were
decorous at first: an interested female would insert her claws into the entrance
of M's shelter and wiggle her chemoreceptor antennules to smell him. Then
she'd urinate at him from the front of her head, releasing pheromones. In ap­
preciation M would spread her urine throughout his apartment, by standing
on tiptoe and fanning the water with his swimmerets-little fins along the bot­
tom of the lobster's tail, arranged in five pairs.
Having ascertained mutual interest, the two abandoned all caution. M's
primary concern seemed to be how soon the female would undress for him,
and he would show his impatience by boxing the surfaces of her claws with the
tips of his. Females can mate only after they shed their shells; Cowan thinks
that M's boxing was a way of testing how hollow his lover's shell was in prepa­
ration for molting.
"One day I walked into the lab, and I thought there were three lobsters in
M's shelter;' Cowan says. It turned out to be not a menage a trois but, rather,
evidence of a conventional coupling. It was M, a female, and her molted shell.
When a female that wants to mate is ready to molt, she lets the male know by
placing her claws on top of his head, in a behavior scientists have termed
"knighting." This apparently indicates to the male that he must protect her
while she sheds her shell; scientists think the female may also release a sex
pheromone that discourages the male from simply eating her, as he might un­
der other circumstances. Once the female is undressed, the male gingerly lifts
her soft body, flips her on her back, inserts a pair of rigid swimmerets into a
pair of receptacles at the base of her abdomen, and passes his sperm into her.
It's like the missionary position, but with double the genitalia.
Once the female's new shell had hardened, after a week or so, she moved
out and a new female moved in. It turned out that all the females in the tank
wanted to mate with M, and Cowan discovered that they were able to time
their molts consecutively so that each would get a chance. Cowan describes the
phenomenon as serial monogamy, and she has published papers on it; but she
 Stalkin9 the American Lobster 1 _s- 1

has also learned that females don't always follow its rules. "One night another
female got in the shelter and took a chunk out of the [ resident ] female;' Cowan
says. "Lobsters get PMS-pre-molt syndrome. Before they molt, they have an
activity peak and can go a little berserk." When Cowan altered the sex ratio in
the tank, things got more confused. "When I had three males and just two fe­
males, the females couldn't make up their minds which male to stay with;' she
says. "They kept switching from male to male instead of pair bonding with just
one guy. It was absolute chaos. It was horrible." Cowan altered the ratio further,
and the results were even worse: "I tried to have five males and two females in
the tank, but the males fought so aggressively that I had to take two of them
out. Pretty soon even the remaining males had no legs left. They were walking
around on their mouth parts because they were killing each other."
Lobstermen realize that producing offspring is a big commitment for a fe­
male lobster-up to twenty months of pregnancy and tens of thousands of
eggs. At first the eggs develop inside her body, and she may wait for as long as a
year after copulation to extrude them. Then she finds a secluded spot, rolls over
onto her back, squirts the eggs onto the underside of her tail, and carries them
around for another nine to eleven months. When they finally hatch and be­
come larvae, she releases them into the ocean currents.
Once a female is carrying eggs, she becomes a kind of goddess to lobster­
men. Most Maine lobstermen who find an "egger" in a trap will cut a quarter­
inch V-shaped notch in her tail flipper (if she isn't notched already) before
setting her free, and from then on it's illegal to sell her, whether she's carrying
eggs or not. When she molts, the notch will become less distinct, but conscien­
tious fishermen like Bruce Fernald and Jack Merrill always cut a new notch.
"She's a proven breeder," Fernald says, "so we protect her." V-notched females
and the oversized males that are protected by Maine's maximum-size law form
a pool of reproductive lobsters called brood-stock. Lobstermen are convinced
that brood-stock lobsters more than compensate for any deficiencies in egg
production by smaller lobsters.
They're not necessarily wrong. A female lobster that has mated can extrude
about 10,000 eggs if she has recently reached sexual maturity but ten times that
if she is bigger. An older female lobster is also savvier: she can retain a male's
sperm inside her body, perfectly preserved, for up to several years after copula­
tion. She can use that sperm at will to produce a second batch of eggs. One
Canadian researcher estimates that to achieve the egg production of a single
five-pound female-a common size for a veteran V-notched lobster-more
than ten smaller females would have to be protected. The lobstermen have a
 I .P T R E VO R C o R SO N

different way of saying the same thing: if V-notching were replaced by an in­
crease in the minimum size, the increase would have to be so great that the only
lobsters fishermen could legally catch would be too big to eat.

WHEN R O B E R T S T E N E C K S T A R T E D scuba diving off the coast of

Maine, in 1974, he was studying echinoderms and gastropod mollusks, but he
kept getting distracted by lobsters. He'd been a researcher for the Smithsonian
in the Caribbean, and he remains an internationally recognized expert on
coralline algae, but in Maine he found a new calling. "There were all these lob­
sters and this huge industry that mattered to people," Steneck recalls. "I looked
in the literature and realized that we knew almost nothing about lobsters in
their natural habitats. I said to myself, 'Why the hell am I studying limpets?' "
And there was a bonus in the study of lobsters: "At the end of the day you can
have them for dinner."
At first Steneck's experiments were just for fun: he built underwater houses
for the lobsters and found that the animals were partial to a section of plastic
pipe with a rubber flap over one end. Soon Steneck was spending all his free
time sawing up PVC pipe of different diameters, and the houses formed sub­
divisions. Given choices, the lobsters would shop around. It was almost as if
they were picking out blue jeans: Steneck developed a record-keeping system
that described smaller lobsters choosing "restricted fit" shelters and bigger ones
going for "relaxed fit."
Steneck quickly became disenchanted with the suburban bliss he had cre­
ated for his lobsters. He concluded that neighborly interaction was lacking and
decided to change the zoning. But when he moved the shelters closer together,
smaller lobsters moved out. "I set up video cameras," Steneck says, "and it
turned out the dominant lobsters were fighting with their neighbors and evict­
ing them:' This wasn't as surprising as what Steneck discovered next. When he
brought the shelters even closer together, the larger lobsters moved out, and
smaller ones moved back in.
A complex set of hard-wired behaviors was govering the interactions that
Steneck observed. Lobsters can be aggressive and cannibalistic, but most of the
time they will dance delicately around one another to avoid unnecessary vio­
lence. If two lobsters of similar size are competing for a shelter, though, they
may duel to establish dominance. Each opens its claws wide and spreads them
threateningly. Circling like prizefighters, they urinate at each other and lash out
with their antennae. If this behavior fails to scare away one of the lobsters, the
 Stalkin9 the American Lobster 1 s- 3

next contest is a shoving match. Like bucks locking antlers, the lobsters put
their outspread claws together and push in a test of strength.
When dominance has been established between two lobsters, if they meet
again within seven days they won't bother dueling a second time. The domi­
nant lobster will broadcast its status by secreting chemicals in its urine. Its
swimmerets will pulse constantly to spread the urine into the surrounding wa­
ter, and the losing lobster will recognize the scent and back off. Steneck's exper­
iments revealed that even for a dominant lobster, though, avoiding fights in the
first place was sometimes the best alternative. "If you're surrounded by a huge
number of other lobsters, you have a choice," he says. "You can spend all day
fighting, or you can move from an area of high population density to an area of
low population density." Ironically, Steneck himself would soon be facing a
similar choice.
Steneck was surrounded by fisheries scientists who thought about lobsters
very differently from the way he did. He didn't agree with government model­
ers that lobsters were overfished. He also didn't think that encouraging more
egg production would necessarily result in more lobsters. The complexities of
the ecosystem in which lobsters live suggested to Steneck that any number of
factors were affecting lobster abundance. The historical evidence from catches,
and the large numbers of young lobsters Steneck saw underwater, suggested
that the resource was healthy.
On Islesford, Jack Merrill also felt that the government's lobster experts
were wrong. When he and his colleagues in the Maine Lobstermen's Associa­
tion got wind of Steneck's research, they were intrigued. Ed Blackmore, the
president of the MLA at the time, invited Steneck to a meeting of MLA officers.
Steneck remembers it well. "I'd had very little contact with the industry at that
point," he says, "and I didn't know anything-I showed up in a suit." To the
room full of tough-skinned fishermen in boots and jeans, Steneck may have
looked like just another scientist, but when he started talking, they sat up in
their chairs. "We didn't agree with everything he said;' Merrill recalls, "but it
was the first time we'd heard a scientist say anything that made any sense."
By the summer of 1989 Steneck's claim that lobsters weren't being over­
fished had provoked the ire of government scientists. Steneck was summoned
before a committee of two dozen lobster experts and interrogated. "At aca­
demic conferences my work had always been well received;' he says. "Every­
thing I said to that committee was later published in international journals.
But with the committee it was dead on arrival."
The committee declared Steneck's findings irrelevant, but it was too late.
 1 _s- 4 TREVOR C O RSON

Lobstermen in both the United States and Canada had gotten wind of
Steneck's research, and many of them embraced his ideas. As a result, support
for a four-stage increase in the minimum size, which lobstermen had agreed to
a few years before, evaporated. Negotiations involving President George Bush
and Canada's Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney, failed to save the deal. The first
two increments of the increase had already been enacted, but state legislatures
blocked the remainder. Leading government scientists blamed Steneck.

STENEcK B EGAN to collaborate with two ecologists-Lewis Incze and

Richard Wahle, both with the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, in Booth­
bay Harbor, Maine-to design an alternative to the government's modeling sys­
tem. To gauge the health of the lobster population, the team developed a system
for measuring the abundance of lobster larvae in the water, baby lobsters on
shallow bottom, and brood-stock lobsters in deep water.
In the mid-198os Wahle had realized that there was a huge blind spot in the
understanding of the lobster's life cycle. "Lobster larvae just disappeared into a
black box," he recalls, "and came out four or five years later, when lobsters
showed up in fishermen's traps." He started asking around. From a fellow diver
and lobster researcher he heard about an area where an unusual number of
small lobsters had been seen. The information was old, but Wahle went out
with his scuba gear and had a look anyway. "It was unbelievable," he remem­
bers. "You'd turn over rocks and boulders, and every little rock had a tiny lob­
ster under it. It was clear that we'd hit on something. This was a nursery
ground."
Wahle developed a kind of giant underwater vacuum cleaner for collecting
baby lobsters, counting them, and returning them to the bottom unharmed.
After sampling several locations in this way, he concluded that shallow coves
with lots of cobbles were the ideal habitat for baby lobsters. But not all such
coves actually were nurseries. To determine why, Wahle teamed up with Incze,
whose specialty was catching larvae by towing fine nets behind a research
boat-a job that one of his colleagues has likened in difficulty to collecting in­
sects with a butterfly net towed behind a helicopter. With Incze trawling for
larvae on the surface and Wahle diving below, the two men discovered what
distinguished the best nursery grounds: they had the best conditions for the
delivery of larvae. "The hot spots are where you get a convergence of good
habitat, ocean current, and prevailing winds," Wahle explains. The currents
and winds were delivering larvae to the nursery grounds from wherever they
had hatched.
 Sta lkin9 the American Lobster 1 ss

Surprisingly, lobster larvae themselves have a small say in where they end
up. Most fish larvae are helpless creatures, utterly at the mercy of water flow,
and so are lobster larvae, up to a point. After hatching they progress through
three planktonic stages, a process that probably takes several weeks, during
which they are carried by whatever prevailing current catches them. Then they
molt to a fourth stage, which biologists call post-larval-or, more affection­
ately, the "super-lobster" stage, because like miniature Supermen , these little
lobsters fly through the water with their claws outstretched. "They can swim
around powerfully in a horizontal direction, but it's more the vertical dives
they're able to control," Wahle explains. This is the only period in a lobster's life
when it can swim forward, propelling itself with the swimmerets under its tail,
and it lasts no more than a week or so. "They have a biological clock ticking;'
Wahle says, so the search for protective cobbles is frantic. If a superlobster dives
and can't find a nice spot to settle down, it launches itself back into the current
and tries again.
Once Wahle had mastered techniques for counting baby lobsters in their
nurseries, he and Steneck realized they might be on the verge of a new era in
lobster management. They developed a rigorous sampling protocol, trained a
team of student divers from the University of Maine, and, in 1989, initiated a
series of annual measurements that they thought might work as a predictive
system: a future increase or decrease in lobster catches ought to show up in ad­
vance as a fluctuation in the number of larvae and young lobsters the ecologists
observed.
Meanwhile, the ecologists began to monitor lobster brood-stock as well.
Lobstermen like Bruce Fernald and Jack Merrill had a great deal of data to offer
the scientists-fishermen hauled up egged lobsters in their traps every day.
Steneck put Carl Wilson, his graduate student at the time, in charge of an am­
bitious effort to get university interns out on lobster boats counting lobsters,
especially V-notched lobsters-a technique called sea sampling. At first the
sampling trips took place during the summer months and weren't especially
productive. "Jack kept harping on Bob;' Wilson recalls, "saying that the fall was
when the egged lobsters really migrated offshore-that's when we should do
it:' In the autumn of 1997 Wilson decided to go to Islesford, spend a day on
Merrill's boat, and see for himself. "Jack was right;' he says. "It was just mind­
boggling. Huge eggers, huge V-notchers, all these egg-bearing females that you
never see during the rest of the year, came up in the traps."
While his students worked aboard lobster boats, Steneck descended to the
sea floor in a submarine to quantify brood-stock lobsters, including those too
large to come up in traps. Steneck continues these dives today, using ROVs, and
 1 s6 TREVOR C oRsoN

Wilson, as the State of Maine's chief lobster biologist, now heads an expanded
sea-sampling program. So far the data appear to support the lobstermen's con­
tention that the population of large reproductive lobsters is actually bigger
than mathematical models suggest.
But the data the ecologists have collected on lobster larvae and baby lob­
sters complicate the picture. Through 1994 they observed an abundance of
both larvae and babies on the bottom. As those baby lobsters grew to mar­
ketable size, lobster catches went even higher, hitting records in 1999 and 2000.
In 1995, however, Incze had seen a sudden drop in larvae, and Wahle had seen a
widespread decline in the baby lobsters he was counting on the bottom. The
two teamed up with Michael Fogarty, the population modeler at the National
Marine Fisheries Service, to develop a different kind of model--one that
would use the ecologists' new data to predict future catches. After five years of
low counts of larvae and babies, in the fall of 2000 Incze, Wahle, and Fogarty
announced their findings at a scientific conference. Steneck announced that his
scuba surveys of juvenile lobsters also reflected a downward trend in some
areas.
The ecologists' system had yet to be proved predictive, but Steneck, Wahle,
and Incze decided to issue a press release announcing that they had witnessed a
decline in larval and baby lobsters. They admitted that the implications for
lobstermen were still unclear, but they hazarded a guess that the stunningly
high numbers of legal-sized lobsters that fishermen had been catching might
start to drop along parts of the coast that coming fall. It was the first time a
statement from Steneck had sounded anything like what government scientists
had been claiming for decades.
But what he was saying was quite different. Government scientists had been
arguing that low egg production could lead to a population collapse. Steneck
and his colleagues were suggesting that the decline they had witnessed had
nothing to do with either egg production or a collapse. The ecologists believed
that egg production was reasonably stable-perhaps even at a surplus, thanks
in part to V-notching-but that something was affecting how many eggs sur­
vived. Very probably, they thought, fewer larvae than before were getting to the
nursery grounds. The question was why.

STEN ECK, WA H LE, A N D I N CZE are convinced that the culprit is the
ocean itself. They don't deny that a certain number of eggs is necessary for a
sustainable fishery, but they argue that even if lobstermen were to protect
many more lobsters and allow them to produce eggs, larval biology and ocean
 Stalki n9 the American Lobster 1 57

currents would still have the final say in whether those eggs became new lob­
sters. And, as any fisherman knows, the sea is fickle.
Ocean currents are decisive because they carry the larvae from the place
where their mother hatches them to the nursery grounds where they settle on
the bottom. Lobsters bearing eggs are found in many areas along the coast of
Maine, but Steneck has identified what appear to be special concentrations of
them in certain places. These findings indicate that some larvae are arriving at
their nursery grounds having been hatched just around the corner, but others
are probably coming from hundreds of miles away. Now that the ecologists
have an idea where egg-bearing lobsters are on the one hand and where nurs­
ery grounds are on the other, they hope to track the exact oceanographic links
between the two.
Incze, the oceanographer of the group, speaks of "retention" of local larvae
and "delivery" of distant larvae. He believes that depending on currents, any
given nursery ground can experience both, or one without the other, or-in
the worst case-neither. ''As oceanographic conditions change and steer cur­
rents toward shore, bringing larvae with them, you can have a large increase in
the number of settlers coming from different areas of egg production," Incze
says. ''Alternatively, when those currents steer the water offshore, you can have
an entire region decline in settlement:' That might explain why the number of
larvae and baby lobsters decreased in the second half of the 1990s.
Incze is studying why these changes in oceanographic conditions occur.
"Ice melting in the Arctic, cloud cover, and prevailing winds can all affect how
water moves around the Gulf of Maine in specific ways;' he says. Incze will also
be examining the possible influence of the North Atlantic Oscillation, a varia­
tion in the distribution of high- and low-pressure systems over the Atlantic
Ocean that affects weather patterns and ocean currents. "The North Pacific Os­
cillation has been well studied;' Steneck points out, "and we know it affects the
Hawaiian spiny lobster." If the ecologists can learn why currents vary, and can
track these variations within the Gulf of Maine, their understanding of what
drives the size of the lobster population from one year to the next will dramat­
ically improve.
Scientists will never be able to prevent declines in the lobster population
caused by ocean currents, but Steneck and his colleagues hope to be able to
warn lobstermen of them accurately, by monitoring the abundance of larvae
and baby lobsters. And if Josef Idoine turns out to be right, and egg production
drops off dangerously, that should show up too, as a decrease in the number of
big lobsters being counted by sea sampling and submarine dives. Either way,
the catches of the coming decade will reveal whether the system the ecologists
 I 58 TREVOR C O RSON

have developed is indeed predictive. Steneck is confident it will work. It's not a
ridiculous notion: in recent years a similar system has successfully predicted
catches in the rock-lobster fishery of western Australia.

WH ETH E R oR NoT lobsters are being overfished, lobstermen face some se­
rious problems. If the banner years end and catches return to their previous
levels, overfishing might become a more plausible danger, because there are far
more traps in the water than there used to be. And even if no biological disaster
ever occurs, an economic one might. Fishermen who have invested too heavily
in their equipment will suffer if catches decline, as will families who have
grown accustomed to a higher standard of living. Some lobstermen fishing to­
day have no memory of the slower-paced, less lucrative kind of lobstering that
the older generation knew. That is because they started lobstering recently­
after the collapse of other fisheries. On the whole, however, lobstermen in
Maine are thoughtful and broad-minded stewards of a communal resource,
and they understand that fishing sustainably is in their best interest. As one
Islesford lobsterman puts it simply, "We throw back for tomorrow."
Bruce Fernald's father, Warren, is confident that the lobster population is in
good shape. But given what he's seen in his half century of lobstering, he also
admits that a decline in catches might be just what the industry needs. "I always
relish a shakeout;' he says. "Sometimes scoundrels get into the fishery. After a
shakeout they don't do so well. The guys that have been hanging in there do
okay."
Halfway through the summer of 2001 Bruce Fernald was afraid a shakeout
might already have arrived, too soon for his taste. The lobstering in the spring
and summer had been mysteriously dismal, and some of the Islesford lobster­
men were beginning to worry that the annual run of shedders would never ma­
terialize.
On the July 2001 day when Robert Steneck was exploring with the ROY in
the waters off Islesford, Fernald finished hauling his traps early-there wasn't
much in them-and decided to swing by the Connecticut. The afternoon
breeze was whipping up a light chop, so Fernald had to jockey his boat up to
the side of the Connecticut with agile flicks of the throttle and well-timed twirls
of the wheel. Steneck emerged on deck and traded banter with Fernald across
the trough of seawater splashing between them.
"So far this is the worst season I 've ever had!" Fernald shouted over the
thump of his diesel engine. "But I'm seeing more oversized lobsters, V-notched
lobsters, and eggers than ever."
 Stalkin9 the American Lobster 1 _s- 9

"That's good! " Steneck shouted back. "We're picking up a lot of larvae in
the water. For the long term, maybe things aren't so bad. And I think you're go­
ing to start seeing shedders in your traps any day now. We're seeing them on
the bottom."
"I'll believe it when I see it," Fernald answered. He backed his boat away
from the research ship, leaving a frothy wake. "Come by the island for a beer
sometime!" Fernald shouted, saluting Steneck as he pulled away.
A few minutes later the VHF radio on Fernald's boat sputtered to life, and a
scratchy voice came over the airwaves. It was Jack Merrill, who had earlier in
the day given Steneck coordinates for finding big lobsters. He was calling
Steneck on the Connecticut from where he was fishing, fifteen miles out to sea.
Steneck responded, and after a brief exchange said to Merrill, "I don't know
if it makes any difference to you where you're fishing, Jack, but I just told Bruce
that over here we're starting to see some shedders."
"Oh, yeah?" Merrill said, sounding incredulous. "Throw a few in my traps,
will you?"
"Yeah, right!" Steneck said.
The voice of another Islesford fisherman crackled through on the radio.
"You saw shedders?" he said, his tone almost pleading. "Where the hell are you?
Stay right there, I'm on my way."
As it turned out, the lobstermen of lslesford didn't need submarines to find
their lobsters after all. In the middle of August the shedders came on like never
before. The fishermen counted their blessings and fished like crazy.
 S I D D H ART H A M U K H E RJ E E

Fi9 h ti n9 Ch a n ce
F R O M THE N E W R E P UB L I C

What i s the best wayfor the 9overnment t oJund scientific research: by di­
rectin9 scientists toward a particular 9oal or simply lettin9 them decide
what areas to study? Takin9 a close look at the question, medical researcher
Siddhartha Mukherjee cannot deny that both approaches have brou9ht suc­
cess. As he reports, howe ver, the path one scientist took to the de velopment
ef a potentially effective antidote to the anthrax bacillus may show the
best way.

n the summer of i987, nearly 15 years before words like "anthrax" and

I "bioterror" saturated our vocabulary, an unassuming biology professor

named John Collier went to hear a graduate student give a talk on Bacillus
an thracis. Collier was interested in anthrax because of a peculiar property of
the bacteria. Anthrax, like a few other microbes, extrudes a deadly toxin that is
capable of wreaking havoc on human cells. In fact, anthrax's most frightful
symptoms-the coal-colored dimples that erupt into pustules and the volcanic
hemorrhages that pour out of the organs-are actually just manifestations of
this toxin's actions. And yet, despite decades of intensive military research on
anthrax, little was known about how the toxin worked or how humans could
be protected from its effects.
Collier was actually something of an aficionado of bacterial toxins. In the
mid-196os and i97os, he and a group of colleagues had deciphered the mecha-
 Fi9htin9 Chance 161

nism for the toxin made by diphtheria. In his laboratory at Harvard, Collier
had another set of graduate students tinkering with a toxin produced by a bac­
terium called Pseudomonas aeruginosa. So while listening to that talk in 1987,
Collier decided that anthrax would be his next target. "It wasn't even a con­
scious choice," he recalls. ''As a biologist, you just had to be intrigued."
In the wake of September 11, Collier's reasoning is worth remembering.
Since the World Trade Center fell, there have been numerous exhortations to
the nation's scientists to turn their attention to the terrorist threat. The Penta­
gon and the Department of Health and Human Services have issued calls to re­
searchers for proposals that pertain to the War on Terrorism. Nearly $2 billion
in funding is now available for anti-terror research. Georgia Senator Max Cle­
land has even called for a new anti-terror Manhattan Project to be led by the
Centers for Disease Control (CDC), declaring: "This is a race for the best
minds, the best talent, and the best technology we can find in the realm of bio­
logical, chemical, and radiological warfare."
But Collier didn't embark on a 15-year investigation into anthrax because
he was worried about bioterrorism or germ warfare. In fact, his early scientific
papers and grant applications don't even mention the words. Collier spent
thousands of hours picking the toxin apart, piece by piece, simply because he
was curious about the basic biology and chemistry of the proteins. And in ret­
rospect, there was probably something inherent in that curiosity-in Collier's
becoming "intrigued" with anthrax toxin as a quandary of basic biology-that
ultimately accounted for his success.
All of which suggests a paradox. In the post-September n world, it's tempt­
ing to think of curiosity-driven science as an anachronistic luxury. Wars in­
evitably make nations pragmatic about spending. And so there is already
public pressure to funnel billions of dollars into applied research, into research
that directly intersects with the dramatic changes in the political sphere. But
Collier's story suggests the pitfalls of such an approach: Ironically, Collier may
have cracked the mystery of anthrax toxin precisely because he wasn't out to
curb the threat of bioterrorism. In other words, even in these pressured times,
we may be better off leaving such scientists alone-to follow their curiosities
wherever they lead.

T H I S D I C H O T O M Y -between science driven by curiosity and science

driven by applications-began long before the War on Terrorism. In the im­
mediate aftermath of World War II, Franklin Roosevelt found himself em­
broiled in a similar national debate. Back then, the case against funding
 162 S I D D H A RT H A M U K H E R J E E

curiosity-driven research seemed obvious. For much of the American public,

the Manhattan Project-conducted by scientific SWAT teams in military labo­
ratories-had shown that applied science was far more efficient than the ar­
cane musings of academic namby-pambies tucked away in university labs. On
August 7, 1945-the morning after the Hiroshima bombing-The New York
Times declared, "University professors who are opposed to organizing, plan­
ning and directing research after the manner of industrial laboratories . . . have
something to think about now. A most important piece of research was con­
ducted on behalf of the Army in precisely the means adopted in industrial lab­
oratories. End result: an invention was given to the world in three years, which
it would have taken perhaps half-a-century to develop if we had to rely on
prima-donna research scientists who work alone . . . a problem was stated, it
was solved by teamwork, by planning, by competent direction, and not by the
mere desire to satisfy curiosity."
If the trends augured by that editorial had persisted, Collier would have
never even started work on anthrax toxin. Anthrax-like the Bomb-was, after
all, a military problem. In fact, by the mid- '6os, anthrax research was already in
full swing in the U.S. Army laboratories at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Scroll back
through the early scientific literature on anthrax, and you'll find scores of sci­
entists from Fort Detrick plugging away on various aspects of the microbe.
They produced microscopic studies on how the organism forms spores, and
careful disquisitions on the structure of its outer coat. In 1967 a journal called
Federation Proceedings ran a whole seminar series on anthrax, most of which
emerged from labs at Fort Detrick.
Superficially, these studies were flawless. But it's impossible to compare
them to the rigorous brilliance of Collier's research-to the carefully dissected
experiments, or the complete immersion in the biology of the toxin that char­
acterized Collier's early years at Harvard. Even Collier, who has a reputation for
reticence, agrees. "The military researchers contributed greatly to anthrax re­
search," he says, "but the mechanism of the toxin wouldn't have been so quickly
solved had university labs not gotten involved as well:'
Indeed, in Collier's hands, the search for an anthrax antidote took a com­
pletely different turn. For ten years, beginning in 1987, Collier and his team
delved deeper and deeper into the basic biology of anthrax toxin. For Collier,
anthrax toxin became a sort of intricate wind-up toy, whose inner clockwork
could be solved only by taking the whole unit apart. The toxin itself, it turned
out, was actually a conglomerate of three distinct proteins: Lethal Factor,
Edema Factor, and Protective Antigen. Each member of this trio seemed to
play a critical role in the toxin's action. Protective Antigen led the charge: A
 Fi9htin9 Chance 163

fragment of the protein bound itself to the surface of cells and formed aggre­
gates on the cell surface. Lethal Factor and Edema Factor then bound to these
aggregates, entered human cells through a "pore" created by the Protective
Antigen fragments, and proceeded to poison the cell.
By the late i99os Collier's work on these details began to yield astonishing
payoffs. Once Protective Antigen's critical role had become clear, Collier real­
ized that he might be able to thwart the toxin by blocking Protective Antigen
directly. And last year Collier's team published two landmark papers describ­
ing not just one but two such anti-toxins directed against Protective Antigen .
Preliminary studies with the new drugs far exceeded Collier's modest expecta­
tions. Laboratory animals medicated with either o f the molecules became to­
tally immune to lethal doses of anthrax toxin. If the same sort of drugs worked
in humans, Collier argued, they could potentially combat even the "late stage"
of anthrax, the frightful crescendo of the illness, when the disease can no
longer be curbed by conventional antibiotics or vaccines.
In short, anthrax turned the logic of the Manhattan Project on its head. In
the brief span of 50 years, the paradigm of research had dramatically changed,
with academic scientists-the tweedy "curiosity-driven" professors once
mocked by the Times-playing a critical role in understanding the toxin and
the military researchers lagging behind.

W H AT H A P P E N E D ? The answer lies in the complete overhaul of science

funding that began during Roosevelt's presidency. In 1944 FDR asked the head
of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, an MIT-trained engineer
named Vannevar Bush, to devise a science plan for postwar America. And,
bucking prevailing sentiment, Bush produced a manifesto, entitled Science: The
Endless Frontier, that would transform the compact between science and soci­
ety. Bush's plan rested on one key assumption: that, in the short term, people
would never grasp the true value of basic science. If basic and applied science
were allowed to mix and compete freely, the latter would inevitably drive out
the former. The only way basic science could survive-something Bush wanted
to ensure-would be to completely insulate it from that competition, leaving
basic scientists to pursue their work in peace.
The institutions charged with p rotecting basic science were the National
Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF)-near­
autonomous scientific foundations that grew out of the Bush plan in the i95os.
By that decade's end, both institutions had become independent science­
funding bodies, run for and by scientists. Shielded from political accountabil-
 1 64 S I D D H A RT H A M U K H E R J E E

ity, curiosity-driven scientists were given plush Ivy-league sandboxes and

growing public largesse to spend. They could dismantle the structures of rec­
ondite proteins if they so pleased, or sequence the genomes of fruit flies-as
long as other scientists deemed their goals scientifically worthwhile.
Princeton political scientist Donald Stokes compared Bush's compact to a
"deal" between society and scientists. Society would invest unflinchingly in the
basic sciences without insisting on premature technological rewards. Politi­
cians and bureaucrats wouldn't go up to someone like Collier and say, "Now
wait a second, haven't we funded research on anthrax toxin for five years?
Where's the antidote?" In return, scientists would pursue basic research in
good faith-being broadly receptive to the technological innovations that
might emerge. It was this deal that allowed Collier to sit for 15 years at Harvard,
plumly funded by NIH grants, calmly chipping away at the structure of a bac­
terial toxin, before finally producing a new drug that would block it.

B u T H o w D o w E K N o w T H AT "programmatic" research-research that

aims to find cures for applied problems within specified periods of time­
wouldn't benefit society more? In a provocative article in Nature Medicine in
1997, the physician and scientist Richard Wurtman argued that it almost cer­
tainly does. His case study was AIDS. AIDS, remember, was identified as a clin­
ical entity among gay men in San Francisco and New York just 17 years ago. In
1993, at the heyday of the epidemic, scientists were uniformly pessimistic about
whether HIV would ever be a curable infection. And yet, a mere eight years
later, triple therapy with antiretroviral medicines-for those who can afford
it-has made HIV into a largely treatable disease. That turnaround time of 17
years-between the discovery of AIDS and the discovery of a therapy-is a
truly astonishing accomplishment in the history of medicine.
Wurtman contends that this rapid pace of drug discovery was the result of
a paradigm shift in HIV research. In the early '90s, AIDS activists began cam­
paigning ferociously for federal dollars to combat the disease. But instead of
picketing the NIH for "more research;' they demanded "effective treatments"­
i.e., they didn't demand greater inquiry; they demanded better results. As
Wurtman tells the story, scientists responded to these demands by revising
their own ideas about research. Instead of digging in their heels against
"mission-oriented," or programmatic, research, they began actively scouting
for antiviral therapies-even before much of the basic biology of the virus was
fully understood. Prodded along by impatient activists, HIV researchers some­
how picked up on what Wurtman calls an "implicit call for accountability." And
 Fi9htin9 Chance 1 6s

that combination of public accoun tability and programmatic focus, Wurtman

believes, brought about the effective anti-AIDS drugs in record time.
But programmatic research has problems that Wurtman's parable doesn't
acknowledge. The first is counterintuitive: It may be more expensive. In 1 9 9 9
the NIH ran a complex accounting project in which it attempted to correlate
the amount of money spent on a particular disease with some measure of the
actual years of life that the disease had claimed from Americans (the so-called
disease burden) . The goal was to determine whether federal science money was
being spent in a disease-proportional manner.
The results were astounding. For most diseases-even money guzzlers like
cancer and cardiovascular research-federal spending was more or less pro­
portional to the disease burden. The big exception was AIDS. In 1996 the NIH
spent proportionally more public money on AIDS than on any other disease.
Crudely put, programmatic research had indeed produced remarkable anti­
AIDS drugs, but at an enormous price. And it's not hard to understand why the
cost was so high. Once you declare "war" on a disease, Collier argues, "you
would get plainly bad science-a lot of j unk aimed at getting some of that
pork-barrel money." After all, you have taken the ultimate funding decisions
away from scientists and given them to politicians.

B u T T H E P R o B L E M with programmatic research isn't only that it may be

more expensive; it's that it leaves little room for a critical feature of the discov­
ery process: serendipity. Indeed, the history of HIV research itself offers elo­
quent testimony to the role of serendipity in science. Anti-HIV therapy was
revolutionized in the mid-'9os with the discovery of a novel class of antiretro­
viral chemicals: protease inhibitors. These inhibitors block a critical step in the
viral life cycle, the point when the virus is just about to launch itself out of an
infected cell into another. That process, it turns out, is mediated by a critical
enzyme called HIV protease.
HIV protease closely resembles another such protease found in the human
kidney-renin-which is involved in regulating blood pressure. In fact, re­
searchers had been scouring for an inhibitor for renin long before HIV arrived
on the scene. These kidney scientists and blood-vessel biologists-some in
pharmaceutical companies and some in academic laboratories-had nothing
to do with the much-publicized "War on AIDS." But when the search for pro­
tease inhibitors intensified in i990, it was this prior work that HIV virologists
used to suddenly make the critical connection between the two completely un­
related fields-jump-starting the search for these revolutionary new drugs.
 1 66 S ! D D H A RT H A M u K H E R J E E

ExA M P L Es o F such serendipitous breakthroughs abound in the folklore of

science. Sylvia Wrobel, writing in the scientific magazine FASEB Journal, relates
the story of a mysterious and lethal infection that broke out in New Mexico,
Arizona, Colorado, and Utah in 1993· Within days of the outbreak, the CDC de­
ployed a team of top-notch scientists to ferret out the cause of the infection.
Epidemiologists, virologists, and molecular biologists swarmed the desert
looking for clues to its source. But the observation that clinched the discovery
came from an extraordinarily unlikely source. Ecologists at the University of
New Mexico had been tracking the population of deer mice to collect data for a
completely unrelated project. And looking back at the ecologists' data, the
CDC scientists noticed that the human infections seemed to occur just when
the population of mice in the area swelled. With that clue in place, it took just a
few weeks to discover a novel virus-called hantavirus-from the mice. The
hantavirus discovery has long been considered a landmark CDC achievement.
And yet, had the CDC declared a "War on Southwestern Fever;' it's hard to
imagine it would have funded a project on deer-mouse population ecology as
part of that effort.
The point is that scientific discoveries often happen when they are least ex­
pected. Disparate nodes in knowledge are inexplicably connected through
secret passages. And the danger is that a post-September 11 focus on program­
matic research might demolish this Looking-Glass universe. One of the ever­
lasting quirks of curiosity-driven science is that it allows kidney biologists to
find themselves at the forefront of HIV research or mouse ecologists to become
hantavirus hunters. And perversely, the more narrowly you define a scientific
goal-hoping to focus and streamline discovery-the more you potentially
logjam the discovery process itself, setting technology back as a result.
But for John Collier, there's a final argument for curiosity-driven research,
and it has little to do with science money or scientific serendipity. In fact, it lies
outside the reach of science itself-in the foggy realm of personality. And Col­
lier could only explain it by walking me through a critical fork in his own life.
In 1959 Collier, like any other ambitious college graduate curious about sci­
ence, had to choose between going to medical school and becoming a basic bi­
ologist. He spent an entire year mulling the choice. At the end of his final
summer in college, he chose to spend an extra year working in a laboratory. It
would be "just for a year," he told himself-and then he would consider med­
ical school again.
Collier's year in that laboratory wasn't particularly memorable. There
 wasn't any single moment of scientific epiphany. But something ineffable hap­
pened to him-a transformation he struggles to describe. When application
season came around again, he said, medical school was no longer an option.
Maybe it was "merely inertia," but he had become, as he put it, "somehow
drawn in."
Collier told me all this in his office, a sparse, sunny room on the fourth
floor of the "Quad" of buildings that houses Harvard Medical School. The of­
fice is stockpiled with scientific journals. And just across from his desk, Collier
has hung an enormous poster of the structure of diphtheria toxin, magnified
more than a million times, the way a child might put up a poster of a basketball
star. There is an empty space beside it, he explains, where a similar blowup of
Bacillus anthracis toxin will one day hang.
People like Collier-people who frame bacterial toxins in mega-size
posters on their walls-may never be "drawn in" by programmatic research.
They can't be recruited for an applied research project-a "War on Anthrax,"
for instance. For Collier, and hundreds of eccentrics like him strewn across ac­
ademic campuses throughout the United States, curiosity-driven research isn't
just the best way to do research; it's the only way.
In retrospect, America's fateful decision to provide massive funding for ba­
sic science is deeply ironic. Vannevar Bush's model was adopted-and contin­
ues to be accepted-with scarcely any empirical evidence to support it. Expert
committees weren't appointed to approve it; critics weren't called in to drum
up statistics to illustrate its shortcomings. The everlasting paradox of Ameri­
can science is that it is based on rules that wouldn't survive even the most rudi­
mentary scientific scrutiny.
But nonetheless, the history of anthrax research suggests that the technol­
ogy transfer Bush dreamed of has, indeed, come to pass. This summer, when
Collier and his co-workers found a way to block anthrax toxin with a novel
drug, a group of scientists got together to seed a new pharmaceutical company
based on their discovery. That company will presumably run clinical trials on
the anthrax antidote-perhaps in coordination with medical researchers-in
the hope that the FDA will eventually approve it for human use.
Collier is relieved about this transfer of responsibilities. Drug development
isn't his passion; he wants to return to the laboratory bench, to further explore
the basic structure of anthrax. He has to renew his grant from the NIH. He has
graduate students and postdoctoral researchers to mentor. But as far as finding
a potential antidote to anthrax goes, a scientific cycle may be coming to a close.
And John Collier-who never imagined himself a poster child for curiosity­
driven science-seems deeply satisfied with that.
 MICHAEL KLESIUS

Th e Big Bloom
FR O M NA TI O "fo.'A L G E O G RA P H I C

Flowers beautify, symbolize romance,juel obsessions. For all their ubiquity

in our lives, scientists still are not entirely sure how they orig inated. (Dar­
win called this "an abominable mystery.") Michael Klesius uproots the 1 3 0-
million-year history ef theflowering plant.

n the summer of 1973 sunflowers appeared in my father's vegetable garden.

I They seemed to sprout overnight in a few rows he had lent that year to new
neighbors from California. Only six years old at the time, I was at first put
off by these garish plants. Such strange and vibrant flowers seemed out of place
among the respectable beans, peppers, spinach, and other vegetables we had al­
ways grown. Gradually, however, the brilliance of the sunflowers won me over.
Their fiery halos relieved the green monotone that by late summer ruled the
garden. I marveled at birds that clung upside down to the shaggy, gold disks,
wings fluttering, looting the seeds. Sunflowers defined flowers for me that
summer and changed my view of the world.
Flowers have a way of doing that. They began changing the way the world
looked almost as soon as they appeared on Earth about 130 million years ago,
during the Cretaceous period. That's relatively recent in geologic time: If all
Earth's history were compressed into an hour, flowering plants would exist for
only the last 90 seconds. But once they took firm root about 100 million years
 The Bi9 Bloom 1 69

ago, they swiftly diversified in an explosion of varieties that established most of

the flowering plant families of the modern world.
Today flowering plant species outnumber by twenty to one those of ferns
and cone-bearing trees, or conifers, which had thrived for 200 million years be­
fore the first bloom appeared. As a food source flowering plants provide us and
the rest of the animal world with the nourishment that is fundamental to our
existence. In the words of Walter Judd, a botanist at the University of Florida,
"If it weren't for flowering plants, we humans wouldn't be here." From oaks
and palms to wildflowers and water lilies, across the miles of cornfields and cit­
rus orchards to my father's garden, flowering plants have come to rule the
worlds of botany and agriculture. They also reign over an ethereal realm
sought by artists, poets, and everyday people in search of inspiration, solace, or
the simple pleasure of beholding a blossom.
"Before flowering plants appeared," says Dale Russell, a paleontologist with
North Carolina State University and the State Museum of Natural Sciences,
"the world was like a Japanese garden: peaceful, somber, green; inhabited by
fish, turtles, and dragonflies. After flowering plants, the world became like an
English garden, full of bright color and variety, visited by butterflies and hon­
eybees. Flowers of all shapes and colors bloomed among the greenery."

T H AT D R A M AT I C C H A N G E represents one of the great moments in the

history of life on the planet. What allowed flowering plants to dominate the
world's flora so quickly? What was their great innovation?
Botanists call flowering plants angiosperms, from the Greek words for
"vessel" and "seed." Unlike conifers, which produce seeds in open cones, an­
giosperms enclose their seeds in fruit. Each fruit contains one or more carpels,
hollow chambers that protect and nourish the seeds. Slice a tomato in half, for
instance, and you'll find carpels. These structures are the defining trait of all
angiosperms and one key to the success of this huge plant group, which num­
bers some 235,000 species.
Just when and how did the first flowering plants emerge? Charles Darwin
pondered that question, and paleobotanists are still searching for an answer.
Throughout the 1990s discoveries of fossilized flowers in Asia, Australia, Eu­
rope, and North America offered important clues. At the same time the field of
genetics brought a whole new set of tools to the search. As a result, modern
palebotany has undergone a boom not unlike the Cretaceous flower explosion
itself.
 1 70 MICHAEL K LESI US

Now old-style fossil hunters with shovels and microscopes compare notes
with molecular biologists using genetic sequencing to trace modern plant fam­
ilies backward to their origins. These two groups of researchers don't always
arrive at the same birthplace, but both camps agree on why the quest is impor­
tant.
"If we have an accurate picture of the evolution of a flowering plant:' says
Walter Judd, "then we can know things about its structure and function that
will help us answer certain questions: What sorts of species can it be crossed
with? What sorts of pollinators are effective?" This, he says, takes us toward
ever more sensible and productive methods of agriculture, as well as a clearer
understanding of the larger process of evolution.
Elizabeth Zimmer, a molecular biologist with the Smithsonian Institution,
has been rethinking that process in recent years. Zimmer has been working to
decipher the genealogy of flowering plants by studying the DNA of today's
species. Her work accelerated in the late 1990s during a federally funded study
called Deep Green, developed to foster coordination among scientists studying
plant evolution.
Zimmer and her colleagues began looking in their shared data for groups
of plants with common inherited traits, hoping eventually to identify a com­
mon ancestor to all flowering plants. Results to date indicate that the oldest liv­
ing lineage, reaching back at least 130 million years, is Amborellaceae, a family
that includes just one known species, Amborella trichopoda. Often described as
a "living fossil:' this small woody plant grows only on New Caledonia, a South
Pacific island famous among botanists for its primeval flora.
But we don't have an Amborella from 130 million years ago, so we can only
wonder if it looked the same as today's variety. We do have fossils of other ex­
tinct flowering plants, the oldest buried in 130-million-year-old sediments.
These fossils give us our only tangible hints of what early flowers looked like,
suggesting they were tiny and unadorned, lacking showy petals. These no-frill
flowers challenge most notions of what makes a flower a flower.
To see what the first primitive angiosperm might have looked like, I flew
to England and there met paleobotanist Chris Hill, formerly with London's
Natural History Museum. Hill drove me through rolling countryside to
Smokejacks Brickworks, a quarry south of London. Smokejacks is a hundred­
foot-deep hole in the ground, as wide as several football fields, that has been of­
fering up a lot more than raw material for bricks. Its rust-colored clays have
preserved thousands of fossils from about 130 million years ago. We marched
to the bottom of the quarry, got down on our hands and knees, and began
digging.
 The Bi9 Bloom 1 7 1

Soon Hill lifted a chunk of mudstone. He presented it to me and pointed to

an imprint of a tiny stem that terminated in a rudimentary flower. The fossil
resembled a single sprout plucked from a head of broccoli. The world's first
flower? More like a prototype of a flower, said Hill, who made his initial fossil
find here in the early 1990s. He officially named it Bevhalstia pebja, words cob­
bled from the names of his closest colleagues.
Through my magnifying glass the Bevhalstia fossil appeared small and
straggly, an unremarkable weed I might see growing in the water near the edge
of a pond, which is where Hill believes it grew.
"Here's why I think it could be a primitive flowering plant," said Hill.
"Bevhalstia is unique and unassignable to any modern family of plants. So we
start by comparing it to what we know." The stems of some modern aquatic
plants share the same branching patterns as Bevhalstia and grow tiny flower
buds at the ends of certain branches. Bevhalstia also bears a striking resem­
blance to a fossil reported in 1990 by American paleobotanists Leo Hickey and
Dave Taylor. That specimen, a diminutive 120-million-year-old plant from
Australia, grew leaves that are neither fernlike nor needlelike. Instead they are
inlaid with veins like the leaves of modern flowering plants.
More important, Hickey and Taylor's specimen contains fossilized fruits
that once enclosed seeds, something Hill hopes to find associated with Bevhal­
stia. Both plants lack defined flower petals. Both are more primitive than the
magnolia, recently dethroned as the earliest flower, although still considered an
ancient lineage. And both, along with a recent find from China known as Ar­
chaefructus, have buttressed the idea that the very first flowering plants were
simple and inconspicuous.

L I K E A L L P I o N E E R s , early angiosperms got their start on the margins. In a

world dominated by conifers and ferns, these botanical newcomers managed
to get a toehold in areas of ecological disturbance, such as floodplains and vol­
canic regions, and adapted quickly to new environments. Fossil evidence leads
some botanists to believe that the first flowering plants were herbaceous,
meaning they grew no woody parts. (The latest genetic research, however, indi­
cates that most ancient angiosperm lines included both herbaceous and woody
plants.) Unlike trees, which require years to mature and bear seed, herbaceous
angiosperms live, reproduce, and die in short life cycles. This enables them to
seed new ground quickly and perhaps allowed them to evolve faster than their
competitors, advantages that may have helped give rise to their diversity.
While this so-called herbaceous habit might have given them an edge over
 172 MICHAEL K LESIUS

slow-growing woody plants, the angiosperms' trump card was the flower. In
simple terms, a flower is the reproductive mechanism of an angiosperm. Most
flowers have both male and female parts. Reproduction begins when a flower
releases pollen, microscopic packets of genetic material, into the air. Eventually
these grains come to rest on another flower's stigma, a tiny pollen receptor. In
most cases the stigma sits atop a stalklike structure called a style that protrudes
from the center of a flower. Softened by moisture, the pollen grain releases pro­
teins that chemically discern whether the new plant is genetically compatible.
If so, the pollen grain germinates and grows a tube down through the style and
ovary and into the ovule, where fertilization occurs and a seed begins to grow.
Casting pollen to the wind is a hit-or-miss method of reproduction. Al­
though wind pollination suffices for many plant species, direct delivery by in­
sects is far more efficient. Insects doubtless began visiting and pollinating
angiosperms as soon as the new plants appeared on Earth some 130 million
years ago. But it would be another 30 or 40 million years before flowering
plants grabbed the attention of insect pollinators by flaunting flashy petals.
"Petals didn't evolve until between 90 and 100 million years ago;' said Else
Marie Friis, head of paleobotany at the Swedish Natural History Museum on
the outskirts of Stockholm. "Even then, they were very, very small."
A thoughtful woman with short brown hair and intense eyes, Friis oversees
what many experts say is the most complete collection of angiosperm fossils
gathered in one place. The fragile flowers escaped destruction, oddly enough,
thanks to the intense heat of long-ago forest fires that baked them into char­
coal.
Friis showed me an So-million-year-old fossil flower no bigger than the pe­
riod at the end of this sentence. Coated with pure gold for maximum resolu­
tion under an electron microscope, it seemed to me hardly a flower. "Many
researchers had overlooked these tiny, simple flowers;' she said, "because you
cannot grasp their diversity without the microscope."
So we squinted through her powerful magnifier and took a figurative walk
through a Cretaceous world of tiny and diverse angiosperms. Enlarged hun­
dreds or thousands of times, Friis's fossilized flowers resemble wrinkled onion
bulbs or radishes. Many have kept their tiny petals damped shut, hiding the
carpels within. Others reach wide open in full maturity. Dense bunches of
pollen grains ding to each other in gnarled dumps.
Sometime between 70 and loo million years ago the number of flowering
plant species on Earth exploded, an event botanists refer to as the "great radia­
tion." The spark that ignited that explosion, said Friis, was the petal.
"Petals created much more diversity. This is now a widely accepted notion;'
 The Bi9 Bloom 1 73

Friis said. In their new finery, once overlooked angiosperms became standouts
in the landscape, luring insect pollinators as never before. Reproduction liter­
ally took off.
Interaction between insects and flowering plants shaped the development
of both groups, a process called coevolution. In time flowers evolved arresting
colors, alluring fragrances, and special petals that provide landing pads for
their insect pollinators. Uppermost in the benefits package for insects is nectar,
a nutritious fluid flowers provide as a type of trading commodity in exchange
for pollen dispersal. The ancestors of bees, butterflies, and wasps grew depen­
dent on nectar, and in so doing became agents of pollen transport, inadver­
tently carrying off grains hitched to tiny hairs on their bodies. These insects
could pick up and deliver pollen with each visit to new flowers, raising the
chances of fertilization.

I N s E c T s w E R E N ' T the only obliging species to help transport flowering

plants to every corner of the Earth. Dinosaurs, the greatest movers and shakers
the world has ever known, bulldozed through ancient forests, unwittingly
clearing new ground for angiosperms. They also sowed seeds across the land by
way of their digestive tracts.
By the time the first flowering plant appeared, plant-eating dinosaurs had
been around for a million centuries, all the while living on a diet of ferns,
conifers, and other primordial vegetation. Dinosaurs survived for another 65
million years, and some scientists think this was plenty of time for the big rep­
tiles to adapt to a new diet that included angiosperms.
"Just before the dinosaurs disappeared, I think a lot of them were chowing
down on flowering plants;' says Kirk Johnson of the Denver Museum of Na­
ture and Science. Johnson has unearthed many fossils between 60 and 70 mil­
lion years old from sites across the Rocky Mountain region. From them he
deduces that hadrosaurs, or duck-billed dinosaurs, subsisted on large an­
giosperm leaves that had evolved in a warm climatic shift just before the Creta­
ceous period ended. Referring to sediments that just predate the dinosaur
extinction, he said, " I've only found a few hundred samples of nonflowering
plants there, but I've recovered 35,000 specimens of angiosperms. There's no
doubt the dinosaurs were eating these things."
Early angiosperms were low-growing, a fact that suited some dinosaurs
better than others. "Brachiosaurs had long necks like giraffes, so they were
poorly equipped for eating the new vegetation," says Richard Cifelli, a paleon­
tologist with the University of Oklahoma. "On the other hand ceratopsians and
 1 74 MICHAEL KLESIUS

duck-billed dinosaurs were real mowing machines:' Behind those mowers an­
giosperms adapted to freshly cut ground and kept spreading.
Dinosaurs disappeared suddenly about 65 million years ago, and another
group of animals took their place-the mammals, which greatly profited from
the diversity of angiosperm fruits, including grains, nuts, and many vegetables.
Flowering plants, in turn, reaped the benefits of seed dispersal by mammals.
"It was two kingdoms making a handshake;' says David Dilcher, a paleo­
botanist with the Florida Museum of Natural History. "I'll feed you, and you
take my genetic material some distance away."
Eventually humans evolved, and the two kingdoms made another hand­
shake. Through agriculture angiosperms met our need for sustenance. We in
turn have taken certain species like corn and rice and given them unprece­
dented success, cultivating them in vast fields, pollinating them deliberately,
consuming them with gusto. Virtually every non-meat food we eat starts as a
flowering plant, while the meats, milk, and eggs we consume come from live­
stock fattened on grains-flowering plants. Even the cotton we wear is an an­
giosperm.
Aesthetically, too, angiosperms sustain and enrich our lives. We've come to
value them for their beauty alone, their scents, their companionship in a vase, a
pot, on Valentine's Day. Some flowers speak an ancient language where words
fall short. For these more dazzling players-the orchids, the roses, the lilies­
the world grows smaller, crisscrossed every day by jet-setting flowers in the
cargo holds of commercial transport planes.
"We try to deliver flowers anywhere in the world within 24 hours of when
they're cut;' said Jan Lanning, a senior consultant with the Dutch Floricultural
Wholesale Board, the world's turnstile for ornamental flowers. "The business
has really globalized."
On my way home from Friis's lab in Sweden, I had stopped in the Nether­
lands, the world's largest exporter of cut flowers. I asked Lanning to try to ex­
plain the meaning of his chosen work. He leaned forward with a ready answer.
"People have been fascinated by flowers as long as we've existed. It's an
emotional product. People are attracted to living things. Smell, sight, beauty
are all combined in a flower." He smiled at an arrangement of fragrant lilies on
his desk. "Every Monday a florist delivers fresh flowers to this office. It is a nec­
essary luxury."
Later that day in Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum I spied a group of admir­
ers crowded before a painting. I made my way there and pressed in among
them. Suddenly I was staring at Sunflowers, one of van Gogh's most famous
works. In the painting the flowers lean out of a vase, furry and disheveled. They
 The Bi9 Bloom 1 7s

transported me to my barefoot youth at the edge of my dad's garden on a hu­

mid summer evening alive with fireflies and the murmur of cicadas.
The crowd moved on, and I was alone with Sunflowers. My quest had come
to this unexpected conclusion, an image of the first flower I can remember. Did
van Gogh elevate the flower to an art form, or did the flower harness van
Gogh's genius to immortalize itself in oils and brushstrokes? Flowering plants
have conquered more than just the land. They have sent roots deep into our
minds and hearts. We know we are passing through their world as through a
museum, for they were here long before we arrived and may well remain long
after we are gone.
 S U SAN M I L I U S

Why Turn Red?

F R O M S C I E N C E N E WS

Sometimes the simplest questions hal'e the most interestin9 answers. Why do
some leal'e s turn such bri9ht, dazzlin9 shades ef red in the autumn? Susan
Milius catches up with a youn9 botanist in search ef the answer-and
whose modern-day research is re vivin9 an ideafirst proposed in the nine ­
teenth century.

leaf turning red in the fall makes for a much greater mystery than a

A leaf turning yellow does. The yellowing signals simply a dropping of

veils because the yellow pigment has lain hidden in the leaf during its
long, green summer. When summer ends and the green pigments break down,
the yellow shines through. Reds, however, don't loll around all summer. A leaf
with only a few weeks left to hang on its tree summons its faltering resources
for a burst of bright-red-pigment making.
What a time to redecorate. Cell physiologists have found a world inside an
autumn leaf that resembles the pandemonium on a sinking ship. Metabolic
pathways start to fail. Compounds break apart. Doomed cells rush to salvage
the valuables, especially nitrogen, by sending them off to safer tissues. So in this
final crisis, why make a special effort to turn red? Does the red-making
machine turn on by accident, or do the red pigments contribute something
valuable? Why would passengers fleeing the Titanic stop to repaint their state­
rooms?
 Why Turn Red? 1 77

There are plen ty of proposed explanations, says David Lee, a tropical

botanist at Florida International Un iversity in Miami. He and other pigment
researchers say that modern analytical techn iques are enabling them to test
these ideas in new ways-and finally get some answers. The most abundant ev­
idence, he says, has revived a i9th-century notion that the red pigments called
anthocyanins serve as a protective device for falterin g photosynthetic chem­
istry.

Red Start
I R o N I c A L LY , Lee didn't get interested i n anthocyanins until a job took
him to a place without fall. He grew up with the humdrum autumn colors of
the relatively dry landscape of eastern Washington State. "There wasn't much
of an autumn show-a few trees in town turned red," he says. However, in i973,
he left temperate seasons behind when he joined the faculty at the University of
Malaya in Kuala Lumpur.
Some of the tropical trees there burst into astonishing reds, though not all
at the same time or for the same reason as each other. The Indian almond, for
example, blushes brightly j ust before it sheds its leaves. The leaves of mangos
and cacaos do the reverse, turning scarlet when they first sprout.
"A whole tree will quickly flush red;' Lee says. "I saw it and thought, 'Wow,
what's happening here?' "
Anthocyanins provide the red special effects for much of the plant king­
dom. Their fireworks intrigued i9th-century biologists, who discussed the pos­
sibility that a leaf might make anthocyanins during a period of vulnerability, to
shield the green chlorophyll pigments from sunburn. However, these intensely
colorful compounds showed up in little walled-off pockets called vacuoles
within cells. Since physiologists have often considered the vacuole "the cell's
trash bag;' says Lee, the sunscreen proposal faded into disfavor. For much of
the past century, he says, physiologists classed anthocyanins as just some more
trash.
Lee suspected the old idea might have something to it, perhaps in the
screening of especially vulnerable leaves-the extremely young and the ex­
tremely old-from ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Yet anthocyanins have turned
out not to absorb UV as well as some of their own chemical precursors in the
leaf do. Making anthocyanins would actually deplete the store of better UV ab­
sorbers. "I became disenchanted with that hypothesis," Lee recalls, but he still
wondered whether anthocyanins might shield a vulnerable leaf from some
other menace.
 1 78 S USAN M I L I U S

In 1992 at a botanists' meeting in Hawaii, he met plant physiologist Kevin

Gould of the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Over a breakfast in
Woolworth's, they plotted a test of the sunscreen hypothesis using shade­
loving species as examples of light-sensitive plants.
The two researchers focused on certain little plants that dot shaded forest
floors and grow leaves with green tops and red undersides. For example, the
common trout lily of northeastern forests does this, as do some begonias.
Lee had found a Malaysian begonia and a Costa Rican melastome that nat­
urally vary in leaf color, some individuals sprouting all-green leaves and others
putting out leaves with red undersides. Lee and Gould blasted samples of all
these leaves with intense light. Physiologists had already shown that such blasts
overload light-gathering chlorophyll and slow it down, a misfortune called
photoinhibition.
In Lee and Gould's experiment, all-green leaves seemed to suffer greater
photoinhibition than did two-tone ones of the same species. Reporting their
finding in 1995, the two physiologists proposed that random strikes of bright
sunlight on the light-dappled forest floor could pose great dangers. A plant
with a little protection in the form of anthocyanins could off-load some of that
sudden excess energy in the form of its chlorophyll and better withstand a
blast.

R e d S p rea d

I N T H E 1 9 9 o s , other researchers also explored the idea of red pigments

as sunscreen. Debate bloomed over how to devise a test that avoids confound­
ing factors, such as different rates of photosynthesis in different-colored leaves.
In 1999, researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia refined the
bright-light tests performed by scientists including Lee and Gould. In an ex­
periment on the tropical Bauhinia variegata, Robert C. Smillie and Suzan E.
Hetherington flashed an assortment of its red or green pods with bursts of
white, blue-green, or red light. The red pods tolerated the white and blue-green
light flashes better than the green pods did. Yet the red pods didn't show any
superior tolerance to bursts of red light. The researchers contended that in the
latter case, anthocyanins, which can't soak up red wavelengths, weren't protect­
ing the chlorophyll.
Lee then joined Taylor S. Feild and N. Michele Holbrook of Harvard Uni­
versity in a similar experiment on autumn leaves. The researchers chose red­
osier dogwood shrubs because they end the year in multiple colors. In fall,
leaves bathed in brilliant sunlight turn red, but shaded leaves don't develop an-
 Why Turn Red? 1 79

thocyanins and so just turn yellow. The red leaves recovered faster from flashes
of intense blue light, the researchers reported in the October 2002 Plant Physi­
ology. Flashes of red light, the wavelength that anthocyanins can't absorb, had
about the same effect on red leaves as on yellow ones.
The finding dovetails with physiological studies from other labs that sug­
gest that leaves may need special protection during their final weeks. Tests
showed that old leaves are more vulnerable to photoinhibition than younger
but mature ones are. In a color-changing leaf, the plant's metabolic pathways
for making the initial capture of energy don't lose their efficiency as fast as the
subsequent pathways for processing that energy do, a risky imbalance that in­
vites overloads. Seasonal stresses, such as chilling temperatures, also hobble the
leaf metabolism.
Yet during autumn, the aging leaf has to salvage as much nitrogen as possi­
ble and send it to tissues that will survive the winter. So, as decrepit as the pho­
tosynthetic mechanism becomes at the end, it has to keep catching and
processing sunlight if the leaf is to finish the salvage operation.
That scenario prompted William A. Hoch of the University of Wisconsin­
Madison to look at the geographic history of intense red color. He hypothe­
sized that plants would be most likely to manufacture anthocyanins in dimes
where temperatures often plunge during autumn. So, he ranked the intensity
of anthocyanins in fall - coloring in nine genera of woody plants. Some of these
were native to either a cold zone in Canada and the northern United States,
others to a milder, maritime dime in Europe. Out of 74 species, the 41 that
flamed out with reddest leaves all came from the North American chilly zone,
he reported in the January 2001 Tree Physiology.

Blueberries, Etc .

T H E E v I D E N c E H A s B E E N building nicely for anthocyanins as safety

measures against light overdose, according to Gould. Yet he doesn't expect that
to be their only function. "They're very talented molecules:' he says.
He got the urge to test for another benefit, he says, while reading a newspa­
per article touting the health benefits of diets that include blueberries. Antioxi­
dant pigments abound in blueberries, and Gould decided to explore whether
the antioxidizing powers of the leaf anthocyanins that he was studying benefit
their plants.
When purified in the lab, these pigments sop up free radicals, which are
alarmingly energized substances that can damage DNA, p roteins, and mem­
branes. Anthocyanins in a test tube can corral free radicals four times as well as
 1 80 S U SAN M I LIUS

do the well-known antioxidants vitamin C and E, says Gould. He started plan­

ning a test for anthocyanins' antioxidant effects inside a living plant.
"It took us a long time," he says, "but I had some very diligent students."
They borrowed an imaging technique called epifluorescence microscopy from
research on animal cells. With it, they could watch bursts of the oxidizing agent
hydrogen peroxide as it was released in a cell. To observe the actions of antioxi­
dants, the researchers had to figure out a way to trigger such oxidizing bursts in
plant cells.
Gould remembered that one of their study subjects, a New Zealand piebald
shrub called Pseudowintera colorata, developed small red pimples on its leaves
where aphids pricked them to suck sap. When the researchers stabbed the
leaves with a very fine needle, they triggered bursts of hydrogen peroxide in
cells. A steady-handed scientist could induce the bursts and the subsequent
redness as well as an aphid does. "We could write the word 'red; and it came out
red two days later," says Gould.
After patiently perfecting these techniques, Gould's lab made a movie. The
researchers filmed the stabbing of both the all-green and the red-splotched
leaves of P. colorata. In the October 2002 Plant, Cell and Environment, Gould
and his colleagues reported seeing an oxidative burst of hydrogen peroxide a
minute or less after they pushed the needle into the upper layers of leaf tissue.
In red tissues, the burst faded quickly. In green ones, however, it intensified,
and hydrogen peroxide concentrations soared for at least io minutes. Gould
contends that anthocyanins are the compounds most likely to have quenched
the oxidative burst.
Lee welcomes the report enthusiastically. "It's the first evidence [for antiox­
idant behavior] in a living plant;' he says.
A suggestion for yet a third function for anthocyanins in leaves comes from
physiologist Linda Chalker-Scott of the University of Washington in Seattle.
She proposes that the pigments regulate water movement. She has contributed
a chapter on the idea to the book Anthocyanins in Leaves (Kevin Gould and
David Lee, eds., Academic Press 2002) .
Anthocyanins dissolve i n water, whereas chlorophyll and a lot o f other cell
pigments don't, she explains. Water loaded with any dissolved substance has
what physiologists call lower osmotic potential, a decreased tendency to flow
away. Loading water with dissolved substances also lowers the temperature at
which water freezes, potentially an advantage on a frosty fall night.
Chalker-Scott points out that many plants blush red at water-related
stresses such as drought, salt buildup, and heat. Her experiments testing the
idea have been largely on hold since 200 1 , when the building housing her lab
 Why Turn Red? 1 8 1

was firebombed during a protest targeting another researcher's genetic engi­

neering project.
Plenty of other ideas for anthocyanins' function also remain to be tested.
Observers of fungus-farming ants, for example, reported in the i97os that the
ants avoid taking red leaves home to feed to their garden. Researchers have
speculated that anthocyanins might discourage growth of some fungi.
Another hypothesis states that anthocyanins keep leaves from overheating;
an alternative has the pigments protecting leaves from cold. Gould notes that a
birch species he encountered in Finland holds on to its red leaves year-round,
despite temperatures that plunge to 40°C.
-

In 2001, a paper by the late theorist W. D. Hamilton and Samuel P. Brown of

the University of Montpellier in France mused about whether autumn color­
ing shares a communication role with the peacock's tail. The healthiest birds
can grow the most spectacular tails, so a cruising female can get an accurate as­
sessment of a prospective mate's health by checking out his plumage. In a simi­
lar way, Brown and Hamilton speculated that the healthiest trees might put on
the flashiest fall displays. This leaf signal might give fall-active predatory in­
sects, such as aphids, accurate information about which trees have good de­
fenses and which ones might be easy pickings.
Even if none of these or the abundant other suggestions pans out, re­
searchers already know enough to raise anthocyanins from the category of cel­
lular trash to their deserved status as vital molecules. A big question still
remains: If these pigments are so great, why don't all leaves turn red?
 T H O MAS EISNER

Th e Mosq ui to 's B uzz

F R O M WI N G S

In one ef those odd bits ef happenstance thatfrequently occur in the history

efscience, a man whose interests lay in deadly weapons may have discovered
the delicate intricacies ef insect acoustics. The biolo9ist Thomas Eisner ex­
plains.

iram Maxim is best known as the inventor of a machine gun, the

H Maxim gun. He is given little credit for another, much more benign
contribution to humanity, a discovery which was by nature serendip­
itous, but certainly more worthy of recognition than the lethal contraption
that earned him a knighthood from Queen Victoria. Hiram Maxim, I would
argue, was the founder (or at the least, co-founder) of insect bio-acoustics, a
discipline now thriving, but hardly emergent in the late i8oos when Maxim
made his discovery.
Maxim was an electrical engineer whose reputation was at a par with that
of his contemporary, Thomas Alva Edison. He was in high demand for his tal­
ents, at the very time when electrification was coming into vogue. In i878
Maxim was asked to install electricity in the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga
Springs, New York. This was an offer he could not possibly refuse, as Saratoga
Springs was one of the primary resorts of the period, a spa where the munifi­
cent and famous could mingle, while taking in the waters and exchanging for­
tunes at the track. Frequenters of the spa over the years included Mark Twain,
 The Mosq uito 's Buzz 1 8 J

Lily Langtry, Victor Herbert, "Diamond Jim" Brady, Lillian Russell, and count­
less other celebrities. The Grand Union was the largest and best known of
Saratoga's hotels. Its dining hall alone could seat over two thousand. And its
nightly balls, in the great shaded outdoor gardens, were world- renowned. It
was these gardens that Maxim was asked to illuminate, and he complied by in­
stalling arc lights. He put the generators in place, wired things up in appropri­
ate fashion, and on the designated night, turned on the switches. One can only
gather, judging from the illustrated news accounts of the time depicting the
richly attired clustered in awe around the shining fixtures, that the advent of
the electric era in Saratoga Springs was received with acclamation.
Success did not keep Maxim from remaining observant. He was struck by a
peculiar phenomenon. One of the generators, which was emitting a high­
pitched sound when it was turned on, was attracting droves of insects during
the evening hours. Mystified, Maxim availed himself of a loupe, and noted that
the insects were all of one kind. With expert help he was able to ascertain that
they were all male mosquitoes, and he ventured the guess that these had been
attracted because the sound emitted by the generator was imitative of the buzz
ordinarily given off by the female mosquito in flight. The buzz of the female, he
reasoned, was the mosquito's mating call. The idea was new, he thought, and
worth publishing. Scientist that he was, he put pen to paper, and proposed the
notion in a manuscript that he submitted to a technical journal. At the time,
the scientific establishment was resistive to innovative thought, and his paper
was rejected. He eventually wrote up his observations in a letter that he sub­
mitted to The Times of London, which published it on October 28, 1901. The
date is a landmark of sorts in entomological history.
We know now that Maxim was right. Male mosquitoes as a rule are indeed
attracted to the flight sounds of the female, and they have special ears, in the
form of their antennae, for detection of the buzz. A simple experiment can be
carried out by anyone with access to a cage of mosquitoes. Take a tuning fork of
appropriate pitch (humming frequencies of three hundred to eight hundred
cycles per second will do nicely) , tap it so it will hum, and introduce it into the
cage. You will note that the male mosquitoes will take to flight and aggregate
around the fork. They are irresistibly attracted to the sound. While the fork is
humming, you can draw the males from the cage and walk about with them,
leading them by the fork until you are ready to return them into the cage. You
will not lose males as long as the fork is vibrating. Love, one is tempted to
muse, even in the world of mosquitoes, takes priority over freedom.
A more sophisticated experiment can be done by using live females in lieu
of the fork. Female mosquitoes can be glued by the thorax to the end of a fine
 1 84 THOMAS EISNER

wire (using a small dab of wax), and they will "fly" when thus tethered, beating
their wings in normal fashion. Introduce such a buzzing female into a cage
with males, and she will attract them. Set up the female in front of a camera,
and you may have the privilege of recording her amorous antics. Males will
converge, singly or in groups, and eventually one of them will succeed in posi­
tioning himself belly-to-belly beneath the female, like a torpedo under a plane.
The female may help the male secure his hold. Copulation sometimes follows
without the female ceasing to beat her wings. Belly-to-belly is not the usual way
for insects to mate-males tend to mount females in the insect world. In mos­
quitoes, the strategy may have evolved specifically to permit aerial coupling.
Copulation runs its course in a matter of seconds in mosquitoes, attesting to
the extraordinary speed with which sperm transfer can take place in insects. It
takes longer in many insects, but tends to be kept short in species that incur
risks when paired. In mosquitoes, which may copulate in midair, the strategy
appears to be intended to "get things over with quickly."
Mosquitoes, on emergence from the pupa, are not instantly ready for "ac­
tion." The males have a rear end that must first rotate i8o degrees before it lends
itself to belly-to-belly coupling. They are "born" with the genital apparatus ori­
ented the ancestral way, and need about forty-eight hours to twist the appara­
tus half a full circle. During this period the males are kept relatively insensitive
to sound, and as a result resistant to the hum of temptresses nearby. Acoustical
sensitivity in male mosquitoes varies in relation to the degree of deflection of
the bristles on their antennae. The antennae have a swollen segment near the
base, packed with sensory neurons that respond to the vibration of the anten­
na} shaft. The antennae are especially prone to resonate in response to the
sound frequencies emitted by the buzzing female. The bristles on the antenna}
shaft act as an amplifier system. When the bristles are erect, they help "collect"
incoming sound, and the male is acoustically more sensitive. When they are re­
cumbent against the shaft, the male is hearing-impaired. At emergence from
the pupa the bristles of the male are in the recumbent state, hence the male's
relative deafness. By the time the rear has undergone its twist, the bristles have
become erect.
The male's antennae, with their bushy covering, can impose a drag in flight,
which may be energetically costly. Remarkably, in some mosquitoes, the anten­
na! bristles are kept in the recumbent state much of the day, and are erected
only for a few hours at dusk, when the sexes are at play. The bristles in these
mosquitoes are controlled by a circadian clock, which sets the rhythm of their
erection. The clock resides in the thorax, and it is from the thorax that the neu­
ral signals arise that regulate the angular orientation of the bristles. The mech-
 The Mosquito 's B uzz 1 8s

anism of bristle erection is itself interesting, in that it involves the controlled

application of hydrostatic pressure at the hinged bases of the bristles.
Maxim might have enjoyed knowing that not all mosquitoes court on the
wing. In Opifex fuscus, a New Zealand species, mating may begin before the fe­
male has taken to the air. The male Opifex routinely patrols the air space above
waters likely to contain pupae. He has good eyesight and is apparently able to
detect ripples created as pupae surface for air. When he spots a pupa, he seizes
it and remains in attendance as the emergence takes place. He may physically
assist in the extrication process, and if the emergent mosquito is a female, may
attempt to clasp her genitalia before she is even out and about.
Mosquitoes are not everyone's favorite insects, although they are of im­
mense interest. As pests and vectors of disease they have rightfully commanded
considerable attention, but there are doubtless many species, including undis­
covered ones, from which we have an enormous amount to learn. It is also
worth considering the many direct benefits that mosquitoes bring to the envi­
ronments and ecosystems in which they live. As larvae they are an important
food source for fish, and as adults they are similarly useful to other insects and
birds. The adult males are nectar feeders and significant pollinators in some
arctic plant communities.
While mosquitoes live on, the Grand Union Hotel does not. It was razed in
1952, to make way for a supermarket. Grand Union by name, the market was
eventually to proliferate into a chain. The hotel has long since been forgotten.
Hiram Maxim is remembered mainly for his gun.
 LAW R E N C E O S B O R N E

G o t Silk
F R O M THE NE W YO R K TIM E S 1UA G A Z I N E

A 9enetically modified 9oat that can produce the silk ef spiders in its milk
may seem like the stidJ ef science fiction, but thanks to the biotechnoloBY
revolution, it 's a reality. The journalist Lawrence Osborne tours afarm that
may '!!fer a preview ef our trans9enicfuture.

s soon as I walk into the humid goat shed in my Tyvek suit and steril­

A ized boots, a dozen Nubians run up to the fence and begin sniffing at
me, their Roman noses dilated with fervent curiosity. "They're a little
frisky;' a technician explains, shooing them back toward their playpen toys.
"It's artificial insemination time, you know."
The technician, a young woman in galoshes named Annie Bellemare, and
two colleagues are playing a trick on a long-bearded billy goat. Leading him up
to a female in heat, they let him mount her; but at the last moment, they whip
out a warmed, rubber-lined bottle and have him discharge into it. "There;' they
cry, holding up a phial of goat semen. "Good boy!"
I look around the pen. Hundreds of sly-looking, inquisitive goats are star­
ing at me intently. They seem unexceptional enough, but the goats that are be­
ing bred here are far from ordinary. This is a so-called transgenic farm-a
place where animal species are either cloned or genetically mixed to create
medically useful substances-owned and run by a firm named Nexia Biotech­
nologies. It is housed on a former maple-sugar farm in rural Quebec, not far
 Got Silk 1 87

from the remote hamlet of St.-Telesphore. Nexia's facility is one of only three
transgenic farms in the world. (One of the company's rivals, PPL Therapeutics,
runs the farm in Scotland that collaborated in the production of the famous
sheep clone, Dolly. )
Out here in this tough French-speaking farming country, however, hardly
anybody gets worked up about the fact that on the old St.-Telesphore sugar
farm, a new chapter in biotechnology is being written. Nexia scientists are pur­
suing a bizarre experiment straight out of The Island of Dr. Moreau, H. G.
Wells's dark science-fiction fable of a mad scientist who breeds experimental
animals on his private preserve.
"Oh, it's not that weird;' Nexia's president and CEO, Jeffrey D. Turner, says
as we walk around the pens, being nibbled constantly by aroused goats. "What
we're doing here is ingeniously simple," he says. "We take a single gene from a
golden orb-weaving spider and put it into a goat egg. The idea is to make the
goat secrete spider silk into its milk."
Milk silk?
Turner, a bouncy 43-year-old scientist turned biotech entrepreneur, makes
a sweeping gesture at his bleating production units. "Spider silk is practically
the world's strongest material;' he explains. "It's much stronger than steel-five
times as strong. We're going to make fishing lines out of it."
I raise my eyebrows dubiously.
"Yes. Biodegradable fishing lines. Or maybe tennis racket strings." He grows
even more animated. "You could make hundreds of things out of spider silk, if
only you could produce enough of it. Biodegradable sutures for surgery . . . re­
placement ligaments or tendons . . . hemostatic dressings . . . fashion. We call
our product BioSteel."
Turner isn't simply fantasizing. Nexia foresees tapping into the $soo mil­
lion markert for fishing materials as well as the $1.6 billion market for indus­
trial fibers in the near future. And the haute-couture world is already intrigued
by a nearly weightless gossamer-like fabric. But the real gold mine might be
body armor: the Pentagon is working with Nexia to develop a prototype of a
new kind of vest that might be made entirely out of goat silk. The vest would be
only a little thicker than nylon, but it could stop a bullet dead.
"It's nothing short of a revolution;' Turner exclaims. "This special silk is the
first transgenic material ever made. The amazing thing, however, is that we're
changing the world from a tiny low-rent sugar farm, and our only machinery is
a goat."
Turner is very affectionate with his goats. A number of different species are
being tested for the spider-gene project. In one pen a gang of floppy-eared Nu-
 1 88 L AW R E N C E O S B O R N E

bians frolic and duel, raising themselves on their back legs and then clashing
foreheads. Next door live the Saanens from Switzerland, all of them white,
rather meeker and well mannered, quietly cocking their heads at the sound of
human voices. Across the way stand a dozen West African Dwarf goats (once
used by the Hamburg Zoo as food for big cats from Africa) .
"We use West African Dwarf goats because they're sexually active all year
round:' Turner says. "Unlike American goats, which are only active in the fall
and spring." He winks. "The African goats get sexually mature in three months.
This helps reach the output potential quicker."
Turner once again admires his flock. "You could call them Spidergoats:' he
says. "But that would give people misconceptions. They're only 1/70,oooth spi­
der, after all. When it comes down to it, they're just normal goats with one spi­
der gene in them. They're just goats." He pauses. "Mostly."

tinkering with the DNA of animals for years. Re­

S c I E N T I s T s H Av E B E E N
searchers have inserted into rhesus monkeys the gene that makes jellyfish glow
in the dark; they've produced chickens that never grow feathers. But only re­
cently have they begun to develop large-scale industrical plans for these crea­
tures. For example, a company in Georgia called ProLinia has cloned cattle and
hogs to produce more genetically desirable breeding stock. After scientists at
Johns Hopkins produced enormous "supermice" by removing the gene that
limits muscle growth, researchers have scrambled to create the same results in
sheep, pigs and chickens.
Inevitably, some bioethicists are alarmed by these projects. And Turner
agrees that some of these experiments are creepy.
"Why do we need cloned sheep?" he asks. "What the hell's the use of mil­
lions of cloned sheep? Dolly was a scientific stunt." He tells me that Nexia's
project is less about altering nature than harnessing it. The company's goal isn't
to create weird goats; they're merely a means of producing useful quantities of
spider silk, a simple substance created eons ago by natural evolution. Turner
says that what Nexia is really up to isn't mere genetic engineering, it's "bio­
mimicry."
In her 1997 book, Biomimicry, Janine M. Benyus observed that while hu­
mans create synthetic materials by means of high temperatures and pressures
("heat, beat and treat" methods, as they are known) , nature does so under life­
friendly conditions. That is to say, in water, at room temperature and without
harsh chemicals. "Nature's crystals are finer, more densely packed, more intri-
 Got Silk 1 89

cately structured and better suited to their tasks than our ceramics and metals
are suited to ours:' Benyus observes. Inspired by this, materials scientists are
now looking to merge biology and engineering-the natural and human­
made.
"In the future, animals will be our factories," Turner says as we plod
through the facility. "Very cheap factories."
This is a land of silos and bleached cherry-red barns, somewhere between
the St. Lawrence and Ottawa Rivers. "We need to be where people aren't:'
Turner explains. Nexia's converted cabane a sucre and the surrounding land,
purchased five years ago from a local farmer, look sweetly ordinary. But the
new facilities are meticulously decontaminated. The company's corporate
headquarters are just 15 miles down the road, rising from the flatlands of
Vaudreuil-Dorion like a futuristic castle keep. Inside, the corridors are freshly
carpeted and sunlit; the labs are shiny and uncluttered and stocked with the
latest gadgets. These labs are known as "Class-100,000 rooms:' which means
that each cubic yard of air contains less than 100,000 motes of dust. Staff mem­
bers proudly show me the latest PCR (polymerase chain reaction ) machines­
the photocopiers of the gene world-that look like high-tech adding machines.
Pinned to the walls are some curious images derived from what is known as
FISH analysis. ( The acronym stands for Fluorescent In Situ Hybridization. )
These images show the goat genes as ghostly strands of dark orange, inside
which one can clearly see the bright yellow segments of alien spider silk genes.
Nearby are cute pinups of Nexia's original four transgenic goats, Willow, Bay,
Santiago and Zeus.
Nexia used cloning to make its four founder animals, though the descen­
dant animals are allowed to breed sexually. One pie shows Willow, Canada's
first transgenic farm animal, posing coquettishly on a little orange plastic bob­
bin. I am told that she is, in fact, 1 /70,oooth human. This is because she has
been specifically engineered to manufacture proteins for use in medical drugs
like clot-busters, another source of income for Nexia. I look at her closely. Am I
going mad or do I detect a human gleam in her eye?

H o w D O E S a spider gene get into goat milk in the first place? Nexia uses two
common spider specimens, Araneus diadematus (the common garden spider)
and Nephila clavipes (the golden orb weaver, native to many tropical forests) .
The spiders are frozen i n liquid nitrogen, then ground into a brown powder.
Since every cell of a spider contains the precious silk-producing genes, it's easy
 1 90 L AW R E N C E O S B O R N E

to extract them. These genes are then tested in the "Charlotte machine," what
Turner calls a "synthetic goat" that tests whether or not the gene will function
inside an actual goat.
Next, the gene is altered. A "genetic switch" is added, which programs the
gene to "turn on" only inside the mammary gland of its new female host dur­
ing lactation. The altered gene is then pushed on a fine glass pipette into a goat
egg. The baby goat will have a spider gene present in each of its cells (its eyes,
ears and hooves will all be part spider), but only in the mammary glands of fe­
male goats will the silk gene actually spring to life. The goat will eventually start
lactating a kind of silk-milk mixture, which looks and tastes just like normal
milk.
This milk is first skimmed of fat, and salt is added to make the silk proteins
curdle into thin whitish particles that promptly sink to the bottom. After the
residue has been removed from the milk, a little water is added to this sediment
until it turns into a golden-tinged syrup. This silk concentrate is known to sci­
entists as "spin dope" and is more or less identical to what is inside a spider's
belly. Now completely stripped from its milky context, the syrupy raw silk is
ready for spinning.
Nexia's labs are packed with odd machines that replicate a spider's
anatomy. First there is an extrusion machine, a strange-looking three-foot-tall
apparatus bristling with aluminum pipes, designed to force the raw silk mate­
rial through a tiny hole. As the silk comes out through this aperture, it is imme­
diately stretched inside a long steel bathtub-at full tilt, roughly a hundred
yards of it an hour.
Then the silk, which is transparently shiny with a white tinge, is taken to a
spinner and strung out between two spindles a yard apart, which stretch the
threads out as finely as possible. The idea is to do what a spider does naturally:
subject the silk to tremendous stretching, or "shearing." This not only elongates
it but actually strengthens the material as well. After being spun and wound
around a plastic bobbin, some of the threads are then passed to a tensile tester,
which measures their strength. In the production room, Turner hands me a few
20-micron-wide strands, frail as gossamer. The difficulty, he says, is making the
silk as evenly as a spider does.
As we pass through yet more rooms filled with liquid nitrogen tanks where
frozen goat semen and ova are stored, Turner explains to me the enigmatic in­
ner world of spiders and their miraculous silk and their connection to modern
needs.
Four hundred million years ago, he begins excitedly, spiders were doing just
fine as ground hunters until one day bugs started flying. "The spider's evolu-
 Got Silk 191

tion comes out of a kind of arms race between spiders and bugs. The bugs start
flying to get away from the spiders, so the spiders have to come up with a new
weapon." Most spider species died out, but a few developed a new talent,
namely, spinning webs. The silk had to both be invisible to a bug's vision and
virtually indestructible. Only spiders capable of making superfine, powerful
silk survived-a perfect example of evolutionary pressure.
What's special about spider silk, as opposed to silk from worms, is that it is
a unique liquid crystal. And that's what's magical, says Tu rner. "Liquid crystals
are the Holy Grail of material sciences. They make for incredibly tough, light,
strong materials with phenomenal properties. It's way beyond anything we hu­
mans can make. Milled steel pales next to it."
But the complexity of arachnid silk is also what is problematic about it,
from the point of view of biomimicry. Spider-silk proteins consist of very long
strings of amino acids that are difficult to decode, and little is known of how
spiders actually unravel them and spin them into threads. A spider, moreover,
constructs its web methodically out of different kinds of silk. It builds diagonal
support lines called "dragline silk" (which it also uses to hoist itself around its
web) and then inner wheels called "the capture spiral" made from a more vis­
cid, sticky silk. Dragline silk, says Turner, is the "best stopping material you've
ever seen," but how it's actually made inside a small orb weaver's abdomen re­
mains mysterious. And whereas spiders produce up to seven kinds of silk pro­
teins, BioSteel, as yet, contains only one.
As a result, BioSteel doesn't have all the resistant strength of spider silk­
yet. Part of the mystery of spider silk's tremendous strength, current research
suggests, lies in the spinning rather than in the internal chemistry of the silk it­
self. It seems that the silk proteins self-assemble as they are squeezed out of the
spider's glands much like toothpaste being squeezed out of a tube. The stretch­
ing spontaneously causes the proteins to line up and lock into each other.
"That's why we've spent so much money on these extrusion machines," Turner
says. "The secret is in the spinning."
In any case, the properties of spider silk have long been recognized. Fisher­
men in India have always prized it for the making of their nets; American Civil
War soldiers frequently used it as a surgical dressing. The problem lay always in
getting sufficient quantities of it. Whereas silkworms are peaceful herbivores
and can easily be farmed, spiders are aggressive territorial carnivores that need
plenty of space and solitude. In farm conditions, they moodily attack and eat
each other.
Farming zillions of spiders, then, is far too tricky. But farming peaceable
goats is a cinch. Yet how to get the desirable material from a rather nasty preda-
 192 L AW R E N C E O S B O R N E

tor like a spider into the reproductive system of a kindly animal like a Nubian
goat? Enter the odd subject of mammary glands.
The mammary gland is a perfect natural factory for the synthesizing and
production of proteins. It occurred to Turner, who had been working on lacta­
tion at McGill University's animal sciences department in the mid-to-late 'Sos,
that, theoretically, one could introduce foreign genes into an animal's mam­
mary gland and get any given protein out of the animal without killing it,
much as one milks a cow. Given the enormous expense of manufacturing
drugs artificially, transgenic animals offered a brilliant way to make dirt-cheap
drugs; $so,ooo worth of proteins could be extracted from a few buckets of milk
at a cost of about $12 of hay! The logic seemed irresistible: the udder as factory
outlet.
In 1993, Turner was approached by the two venture-capitalist godfathers of
Canada's budding biotech industry, Bernard Coupal and Ed Rygiel. They had
heard of his work at McGill and were interested in finding a way to create a
transgenic goat. But where most transgenics is concentrated on making drugs,
Turner, Coupal and Rygiel eventually wondered if it might not be more practi­
cal, and less risky, to concentrate on materials. For one thing, they realized, it's
almost impossible for small companies to manufacture drugs. But a simple
material that doesn't need FDA approval is quite another thing. And when they
considered the possible uses of spider silk, they were astounded.
"Humans never think about size," Turner says. "If an animal doesn't make
stuff on a scale we understand, we just ignore it. But insects and marine ani­
mals, although they're tiny, make incredible materials that we could use. Who's
to say we can't?"

N E x I A D o E s N ' T o N LY
farm goats in St. -Telesphore. It also has ambitious
plans to turn an old Air Force base on the American side of the border into its
mass-production facility for BioSteel. As I approach this decommissioned base
just outside Plattsburgh, New York, I look through the miles of lonely fencing
at the old concrete bunkers where nuclear missiles were most likely housed.
They rise from the ground like ancient tombs covered with grass. A few floppy­
eared Nubian goats stand incongruously on top of them, wagging their tails
and bleating.
Nexia's sympathetic farm manager, Thomas Ballma, tells me that the goats
just love rolling down the grassy sides in summer. "We can't hardly control
them:' he says as he shows me the inside of a newly refurbished bunker coated
with epoxy paint. Inside the So-foot-long cave our voices echo ominously as he
 Got Silk 1 93

points out with some pride the new ventilation ducts and electric cables. Nexia
is trying to breed as many goats here as it can. From the present 302 goats they
hope to have 1 ,500 a year from now.
We wander into one of the inhabited bunkers, where dozens of mop-haired
Angoras jump to attention. Then they come trundling over to us en masse,
licking our hands and cocking their heads inquisitively. I remark that the coun­
try music playing on the loudspeakers is rather loud. Is that Dolly Parton?
"Oh, they love Dolly Parton," Ballma says. "Country music has the steadiest
beat. It keeps them calm and happy. Heavy metal, though, gets them agitated."
A shipment of goats has just arrived from Georgia, and as we stroll around
the gigantic half-abandoned base, Ballma tells me how Nexia has revitalized
the sagging post-Cold War economy of Plattsburgh. "It's been a godsend," he
admits. "Even though it seems a little improbable. I've been raising goats for
years, I love them, so at first the idea of making them secrete spider silk kind of
weirded me out. But now I understand it. It's not what people think."
"Not Dr. Moreau?" I ask.
"No! We're just making fishing nets here. It's pretty normal, really."
As we stand in the old air-control tower overlooking the base I can hear a
faint bleating of happy goats. From nuclear bombs to transgenic goats, it seems
a strange progression, I say.
"Sure;' he replies. "But perhaps it's just our own cleverness that weirds us
out."
 B R E N D AN I . K O E R N E R

Disorders Ma de t o Order
F R O M M O TH E R J O N E S

Feel shy? Tense? Fri9htened? There's a pillfor you. As lar9e pharmaceutical

companies compete to cash in on the next blockbuster like Prozac, they can
make relatively rare disorders seem like major epidemics. Trackin9 thejull­
scale media blitz that marked the introduction ef one company's antianxi­
eo/ medication, Brendan 1. Koerner exposes the shaky science behind the
marketin9.

ord of the hidden epidemic began spreading in the spring of 2001.

W Local newscasts around the country reported that as many as 10

million Americans suffered from an unrecognized disease. Viewers
were urged to watch for the symptoms: restlessness, fatigue, irritability, muscle
tension, nausea, diarrhea, and sweating, among others. Many of the segments
featured sound bites from Sonja Burkett, a patient who'd finally received treat­
ment after two years trapped at home by the illness, and from Dr. Jack Gor­
man, an esteemed psychiatrist at Columbia University. Their testimonials were
intercut with peaceful images of a woman playing with a bird, and another
woman taking pills.
The disease was generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), a condition that, ac­
cording to the reports, left sufferers paralyzed with irrational fears. Mental­
health advocates called it "the forgotten illness." Print periodicals were awash
in stories of young women plagued by worries over money and men. "Every-
 Disorders Made to Order 1 9s

thing took 10 times more effort for me than it did for anyone else;' one woman
told the Chicago Tribune. "The thing about GAD is that worry can be a full­
time job. So if you add that up with what I was doing, which was being a full­
time achiever, I was exhausted, constantly exhausted."
The timing of the media frenzy was no accident. On April 16, 2001, the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had approved the antidepressant Paxil,
made by British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, for the treatment of
generalized anxiety disorder. But GAD was a little-known ailment; according
to a 1989 study, as few as i.2 percent of the population merited the diagnosis in
any given year. If GlaxoSmithKline hoped to capitalize on Paxil's new indica­
tion, it would have to raise GAD's profile.
That meant revving up the company's public-relations machinery. The
widely featured quotes from Sonja Burkett, and the images of birds and pills,
were part of a "video news release" the drugmaker had distributed to TV sta­
tions around the country; the footage also included the comments of Dr. Gor­
man, who has frequently served as a paid consultant to GlaxoSmithKline. On
April 16-the date of Paxil's approval-a patient group called Freedom From
Fear released a telephone survey according to which "people with GAD spend
nearly 40 hours per week, or a 'full-time job; worrying." The survey mentioned
neither GlaxoSmithKline nor Paxil, but the press contact listed was an account
executive at Cohn & Wolfe, the drugmaker's PR firm.
GlaxoSmithKline's modus operandi-marketing a disease rather than sell­
ing a drug-is typical of the post-Prozac era. "The strategy [companies] use­
it's almost mechanized by now;' says Dr. Loren Mosher, a San Diego
psychiatrist and former official at the National Institute of Mental Health. Typ­
ically, a corporate-sponsored "disease awareness" campaign focuses on a mild
psychatric condition with a large pool of potential sufferers. Companies fund
studies that prove the drug's efficacy in treating the affliction, a necessary step
in obtaining FDA approval for a new use, or "indication." Prominent doctors
are enlisted to publicly affirm the malady's ubiquity. Public-relations firms
launch campaigns to ·promote the new disease, using dramatic statistics from
corporate-sponsored studies. Finally, patient groups are recruited to serve as
the "public face" for the condition, supplying quotes and compelling human
stories for the media; many of the groups are heavily subsidized by drugmak­
ers, and some operate directly out of the offices of drug companies' PR firms.
The strategy has enabled the pharmaceutical industry to squeeze millions
in additional revenue from the blockbuster drugs known as selective serotonin
reuptake inhibitors (SSRis}, a family of pharmaceuticals that includes Paxil,
Prozac, Zoloft, Celexa, and Luvox. Originally approved solely as antidepres-
 1 96 B R E N DAN I . K O E R N E R

sants, the SSRis are now prescribed for a wide array of heretofore obscure
afflictions-GAD, social anxiety disorder, premenstrual dysphoric disorder.
The proliferation of diagnoses has contributed to a dramatic rise in antidepres­
sant sales, which increased eightfold between 1990 and 2000. Prozac alone has
been used by more than 22 million Americans since it first came to market in
1988.
For pharmaceutical companies, marketing existing drugs for new uses
makes perfect sense: A new indication can be obtained in less than 18 months,
compared to the eight years it takes to bring a drug from the lab to the phar­
macy. Managed-care companies also have been encouraging the use of medica­
tion, rather than more costly psychotherapy, to treat problems like anxiety and
depression.
But while most health experts agree that SSRis have revolutionized the
treatment of mental illness, a growing number of critics are disturbed by the
degree to which corporate-sponsored campaigns have come to define what
qualifies as a mental disorder and who needs to be medicated. "You often hear:
'There are 10 million Americans with this, 3 million Americans with that: "
says Barbara Mintzes, an epidemiologist at the University of British Columbia's
Centre for Health Services and Policy Research. "If you start adding up all
those millions, eventually you'll be hard put to find some Americans who don't
have such diagnoses."

WH E N PAxI L HIT the market in 1993, the drug's manufacturer, then

known as SmithKline Beecham, lagged far behind its competitors. Eli Lilly's
Prozac, the first FDA-approved SSRI, had already been around for five years,
and Pfizer had beaten SmithKline to the punch with Zoloft's debut in 1992.
With only a finite number of depression patients to target, Paxil's sales pros­
pects seemed limited. But SmithKline found a way to set its drug apart from
the other SSRis: It positioned Paxil as an anti-anxiety drug-a latter-day
Valium-rather than as a depression treatment.
SmithKline was especially interested in a series of minor entries in the Di­
agnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM ) , the psychiatric
bible. Published by the American Psychiatric Association since the i95os, the
DSM is designed to give doctors and scientists a common set of criteria to de­
scribe mental conditions. Entries are often influenced by cultural norms (until
1973, homosexuality was listed as a mental disorder) and political compromise:
The manual is written by committees of mental-health professionals who de-
 Disorders Made to Order 1 97

bate, sometimes heatedly, whether to include specific disorders. The entry for
GAD, says David Healy, a scholar at the University of Wales College of Medi­
cine and author of the 1998 book The Antidepressant Era, was created almost by
default: "Floundering somewhat, members of the anxiety disorders subcom­
mittee stumbled on the notion of generalized anxiety disorder," he writes, "and
consigned the greater part of the rest of the anxiety disorders to this category."
Critics note that the DSM process has no formal safeguards to prevent re­
searchers with drug-company ties from participating in decisions of interest to
their sponsors. The committee that recommended the GAD entry in 1980, for
example, was headed by Robert L. Spitzer of the New York State Psychiatric In­
stitute, which has been a leading recipient of industry grants to research drug
treatments for anxiety disorders. "It's not so much that the industry is there in
some Machiavellian way;' says Healy. " But if you spend an awful lot of time
with pharmaceutical companies, if you talk on their platforms, if you run clin­
ical trials for them, you can't help but be influenced."
Smith.Kline's first forays into the anxiety market involved two fairly well
known illnesses-panic disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Then, in
1998, the company applied for FDA approval to market Paxil for something
called social phobia or "social anxiety disorder" (SAD ) , a debilitating form of
shyness the DSM characterized as "extremely rare."
Obtaining such a new indication is a relatively simple affair. The FDA con­
siders a DSM notation sufficient proof that a disease actually exists and, unlike
new drugs, existing pharmaceuticals don't require an exhaustive round of clin­
ical studies. To show that a drug works in treating a new disease, the FDA often
accepts in-house corporate studies, even when companies refuse to disclose
their data or methodologies to other researchers, as is scientific custom.
With FDA approval for Paxil's new use virtually guaranteed, Smith.Kline
turned to the task of promoting the disease itself. To "position social anxiety
disorder as a severe condition;' as the trade journal PR News put it, the com­
pany retained the New York-based public-relations firm Cohn & Wolfe. (Rep­
resentatives of GlaxoSmithKline and Cohn & Wolfe did not return phone
calls. )
By early 1999 the firm had created a slogan, " Imagine Being Allergic to Peo­
ple;' and wallpapered bus shelters nationwide with pictures of a dejected­
looking man vacantly playing with a teacup. "You blush, sweat, shake-even
find it hard to breathe;' read the copy. "That's what social anxiety disorder feels
like." The posters made no reference to Paxil or SmithKline; instead, they bore
the insignia of a group called the Social Anxiety Disorder Coalition and its
 1 98 B R E N DAN I . K O E R N E R

three nonprofit members, the American Psychiatric Association, the Anxiety

Disorders Association of America, and Freedom From Fear.
But the coalition was not a grassroots alliance of patients in search of a
cure. It had been cobbled together by SmithKline Beecham, whose PR firm,
Cohn & Wolfe, handled all media inquiries on behalf of the group. (Today,
callers to the coalition's hot line are greeted by a recording that announces sim­
ply, "This program has successfully concluded.")
There were numerous good reasons for SmithKline to keep its handiwork
discreet. One was the public's mistrust of pharmaceutical companies; another
was the FDA'S advertising regulations. "If you are carrying out a disease­
awareness campaign, legally the company doesn't have to list the product
risks," notes Mintzes, the University of British Columbia researcher. Because
the "Imagine Being Allergic to People" posters did not name a product, they
didn't have to mention Paxil's side effects, which can include nausea, decreased
appetite, decreased libido, and tremors.
Cohn & Wolfe's strategy did not end with posters. The firm also created a
video news release, a radio news release, and a matte release, a bylined article
that smaller newspapers often run unedited. Journalists were given a press
packet stating that SAD "affects up to 13.3 percent of the population," or I in 8
Americans, and is "the third most common psychiatric disorder in the United
States, after depression and alcoholism:' By contrast, the Diagnostic and Statis­
tical Manual cites studies showing that between 3 and 13 percent of people may
suffer the disease at some point in their lives, but that only 2 percent "experi­
ence enough impairment or distress to warrant a diagnosis of social phobia."
Cohn & Wolfe also supplied journalists with eloquent patients, helping to
"put a face on the disorder;' as account executive Holly White told PR News. PR
firms often handpick patients to help publicize a disease, offering them media
training and sending them on promotional tours. In 1994, for example, drug­
makers Upjohn and Solvay funded a traveling art show by Mary Hull, a
Californian who suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder and spoke fre­
quently with journalists about the disorder's toll-as well as her SSRI-aided re­
covery. Not coincidentally, the companies were awaiting FDA approval to
market their SSRI, Luvox, for the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Among the patients most frequently quoted in stories about social anxiety dis­
order was a woman named Grace Dailey, who had also appeared in a promo­
tional video produced by Cohn & Wolfe.
Also featured on thai video was Jack Gorman, the Columbia University
professor who would later make the rounds on Paxil's behalf during the GAD
 Disorders Made to Order 1 99

media campaign. Gorman appeared on numerous television shows, including

ABC's Good Morning America. "It is our hope that patients will now know that
they are not alone, that their disease has a name, and it is treatable," he said in a
Social Anxiety Disorder Coalition press release.
Dr. Gorman was not a disinterested party in Paxil's promotion. He has
served as a paid consultant to at least 13 pharmaceutical firms, including
SmithKline Beecham, Eli Lilly, and Pfizer. Another frequent talking head in the
SAD campaign, Dr. Murray Stein of the University of California at San Diego,
has also served as a SmithKline consultant, and the company funded many of
his clinical trials on SAD.
Retaining high-profile academic researchers for promotional purposes is
standard practice among drug companies, says Mosher, the former National
Institute of Mental Health official. "They are basically paid for going on TV
and saying, 'You know, there's this big new problem, and this drug seems to be
very helpful.' "
Cohn & Wolfe's full-court press on SAD paid immediate dividends. In the
two years preceding Paxil's approval, fewer than 50 stories on social anxiety
disorder had appeared in the popular press. In May 1999, the month when the
FDA handed down its decision, hundreds of stories about the illn ess appeared
in U.S. publications and television news programs, including The New York
Times, Vogue, and Good Morning America. A few months later, SmithKline
launched a series of ads touting Paxil's efficacy in helping SAD sufferers brave
dinner parties and public speaking. By the end of last year, Paxil had sup­
planted Zoloft as the nation's number-two SSRI, and its sales were virtually on
par with those of Eli Lilly's Prozac. ( Neither Prozac nor Zoloft has an indica­
tion for SAD. )
The success of the Cohn & Wolfe campaign didn't escape notice in the in­
dustry: Trade journals applauded GlaxoSmithKline for creating "a strong anti­
anxiety position" and assuring a bright future for Paxil. Increasing public
awareness of SAD and other disorders, the consulting firm Decision Resources
predicated last year, would expand the "anxiety market" to at least $3 billion by
2009. In 2000, the New York chapter of the Public Relations Society of America
named the Cohn & Wolfe SAD campaign "Best PR Program of 1999."

T H E L E s s o N s of "Imagine Being Allergic to People" were also not lost on

Zoloft's manufacturer, Pfizer. In 1999, Pfizer gained FDA approval to market
Zoloft as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) . Until then, the
 2 00 BREN DAN I . K O E R N E R

condition had been associated almost exclusively with combat veterans and
victims of violent crime; now, Pfizer set out to convince Americans that PTSD
could, in fact, afflict almost anyone.
The company funded the creation of the PTSD Alliance, a group that is
staffed by employees of Pfizer's New York public-relations firm, the Chandler
Chicco Agency, and operates out of the firm's offices. The Alliance connects
journalists with PTSD experts such as Jerilyn Ross, president and CEO of the
Anxiety Disorders Association of America, a group that is heavily subsidized by
Pfizer as well as GlaxoSmithKline, Eli Lilly, and other drug-industry titans.
In the months following the launch of Pfizer's campaign, media mentions
of PTSD skyrocketed. Just weeks after the Alliance's founding in 2000, for ex­
ample, The New York Times ran a story citing Pfizer-supplied statistics on
childhood PTSD, according to which 1 in 6 minors who experience the "sudden
death of a close friend or relative" will develop the disorder. Other stories high­
lighted studies promoted by the alliance according to which 1 in 13 Americans
will suffer from PTSD at some point in their lives.
Eye-catching figures are integral to disease marketing campaigns, though
the quality of the data is sometimes dubious. A report published in February
2002 in the Archives of General Psychiatry warned that high estimates on the
number of people suffering mental-health conditions often include people
whose symptoms are so mild as to not require treatment. "When people look at
numbers that say close to 30 percent of the American public has a mental dis­
order and therefore needs treatment, most would say that is implausibly too
high," the study's lead author, William E. Narrow, told the Associated Press.
Many of the statistics used to promote new disorders are taken from studies
published in second-tier journals, which frequently depend on direct corpo­
rate support. One publication that has drawn fire is the Journal of Clinical Psy­
chiatry, whose major funders include GlaxoSmithKline and Eli Lilly. In 1993,
the journal published a study claiming that anxiety disorders cost the United
States $46.6 billion per year, primarily due to lost productivity. That figure was
repeated in countless press releases and made its way into articles in The Wash­
ington Post and USA Today.
The study was produced by the Institute for Behavior and Health, a re­
search firm headed by Dr. Robert DuPont, who served as President Ford's drug
czar. The institute's tax returns indicate that its programs are funded almost
exclusively by industry research grants; in 1999, for example, it conducted clin­
ical trials on behalf of Merck, Pfizer, and Solvay. DuPont was paid more than
$so,ooo that year for 10 hours of work per week, in addition to a $s6,ooo fee
 Disorders Made to Order 20 1

that the institute paid to his for-profit consulting firm. The 1993 anxiety study
was paid for in part by Upjohn, maker of the SSRI Luvox.
Studies published in medical journals are also useful in reaching a key au­
dience for disease-awareness campaigns-doctors. Physicians, especially gen­
eral practitioners, are under growing pressure to make quick diagnoses and to
treat mental-health conditions with drugs rather than refer patients to psy­
chotherapy. Primary-care physicians now write upward of 60 percent of anti­
depressant prescriptions, according to the American Psychiatric Association.
"There is a pressure to have treatments that are perceived as faster or more effi­
cient;' says Dr. Robert Michels, chief of psychiatry at Cornell Medical College.
Drug companies are understandably eager to help physicians identify con­
ditions that can be treated with their products. One widely distributed diag­
nostic checklist, a 15-minute test that promises to screen for 17 different
disorders using special software, was developed by GlaxoSmithKline. Pfizer has
funded a test designed to help obstetricians and gynecologists identify women
with mental-health problems. According to a 2000 study, sponsored by Pfizer
and published in the American Journal of Obstetrics, a full 20 percent of all ob­
gyn patients may need psychiatric treatment for anything from depression and
anxiety to eating disorders.
Most of all, though, pharmaceutical makers seek to build word of mouth
about a condition in the general public-the kind of water-cooler buzz that
prompts people to ask their doctor about a disease, and the drug that might
treat it. To that end, corporations have increasingly embraced patient organiza­
tions that work to publicize mental illness. One such group is the National
Mental Health Awareness Campaign, created two years ago to eliminate "the
fear and shame that is still strongly associated with mental disorders." The or­
ganization is particularly concerned with teenagers, and has run several ads on
MTV that encourage unhappy youths to call a toll-free number or visit its Web
site. A couple of weeks after the September n terrorist attacks, it released the re­
sults of a survey, which found that 30 percent of adults questioned felt their
mental health had worsened since the tragedy. The group's press release urged
"parents and children traumatized by the recent terrorist attacks to avail them­
selves of the opportunity to speak to mental health professionals."
The campaign's brochures say it has received financial support from the
Surgeon General's office. The organization is less forthright about its ties to
FoxKiser, a pharmaceutical lobbying firm whose clients include Bristol-Myers
Squibb and AstraZeneca. Michael Waitzkin, a partner at FoxKiser, is on the
campaign's board of directors, and until recently the campaign was headquar-
 202 B R E N DAN I . K O E R N E R

tered in FoxKiser's Washington office. (It now operates from the office of the
PR firm Health Strategies Consultancy. )
The National Mental Health Awareness Campaign wasn't the only group to
step up its profile in the wake of the attacks. On September 26 the PTSD
Alliance-the group headquartered in the offices of Pfizer's PR agency, Chan­
dler Chicco-issued a statement warning that post-traumatic stress can affect
anyone who has "witnessed a violent act" or experienced "natural disasters or
other unexpected, catastrophic, or psychologically distressing events such as
the September 11 terrorist attacks:' During the following month, according to
the trade journal Psychiatric News, Pfizer spent $5.6 million advertising the
benefits of Zoloft in treating PTSD-25 percent more than it had spent, on av­
erage, from January to June.
But the biggest presence in TV drug advertising after September 11 was
GlaxoSmithKline, which in October 2001 spent $16 million promoting Paxil­
more than it had spent in the first six months of the year combined. In Decem­
ber, the company rolled out a series of new commercials, often broadcast
during prime-time news programs and built around lines such as "I'm always
thinking something terrible is going to happen" and "It's like a tape in my
mind. It just goes over and over and over."

IN TH EI R s EARcH Fo R new uses, SSRI makers are no longer limiting

themselves to disorders with chiefly psychological symptoms. In the March 15,
2002, issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Mayo Clinic researchers funded
by Eli Lilly reported that Prozac "is a realistic alternative to estrogen replace­
ment for reducing hot flashes" in menopausal women. A recent study at the
University of Pennsylvania, funded by the pharmaceutical companies Aventis
and Novartis, indicated that SSRis can decrease the risk of heart attack in
smokers.
But by far the most controversial addition to the list of maladies treatable
with SSRis is a condition whose very existence is in dispute: premenstrual dys­
phoric disorder (PMDD) , a female ailment whose symptoms include sharp
monthly mood swings and physical pain. PMDD has been listed since 1987 in
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual appendix, which catalogs potential dis­
orders "proposed for further study."
According to Paula J. Caplan, a psychologist and visiting scholar at Brown
University who was a member of a DSM committee that evaluated research on
PMDD, proponents of including the condition "claimed they were so careful in
defining it that it wasn't just going to be someone with cramps during their pe-
 Disorders Made to Order 2o3

riod. But they were talking about 3 to 5 percent of [ menstruating] women. If

you do the math as conservatively as possible, 3 to 5 percent gives you one and a
half million women [ in the United States] ." Caplan resigned from the commit­
tee before it voted to list PMDD in the appendix.
Though the condition remains controversial in the medical profession­
one 1992 study found that men and women suffered from PMDD's symptoms
at almost the same rate-its inclusion in the DSM proved a godsend for Eli
Lilly, the manufacturer of Prozac. In 2000, the company gained FDA approval
to market Prozac as a treatment for the condition; Eli Lilly promptly repack­
aged Prozac as a pink-coated pill called Sarafem and launched a PR campaign
warning that "millions of menstruating women" suffer from PMDD. "Does
juggling work, family and personal commitments leave you feeling frazzled
and stressed out?" the Sarafem Web site asks. "We have some tools to help."
The idea of characterizing uncomfortable menstrual symptoms as a mental
disorder troubles Caplan, who wonders where the medical community will
draw the line. "I could say to you, 'Well, your propensity to call people and ask
them probing questions is a disorder,' " she says. " 'We'll call it intrusive ex­
ploratory disorder: "
No such malady is yet listed in the DSM. But the quest for new uses for the
SSRis is continuing. At last year's annual convention of the American Psychi­
atric Association, researchers presented a major study on a new "hidden epi­
demic"-compulsive shopping. Jack Gorman, the Columbia psychiatrist who
had earlier helped publicize anxiety disorders, made another appearance on
Good Morning America to discuss the new condition, which host Charles Gib­
son told viewers could affect as many as 20 million Americans, 90 percent of
them women. In the wake of the new study, Gorman said, scientists would "al­
most certainly" look into treating the disease with SSRis.
The study in question was funded by Forest Laboratories, for which Gor­
man has served as a consultant. A laggard in the SSRI business, the company
hopes to carve out the compulsive-shopping niche for its pill, Celexa. Expect
the publicity machine for something akin to "persistent purchasing disorder"
to rev up soon.
 J OS E PH D ' AGNESE

An Embarrassm en t of Ch i m p anzees
F R O M D I S C O VE R

Alon9 with the ethical quandaries posed by medical research on animals,

there is another issue that is not as widely discussed: What happens to these
nnimals when they are no lon9er needed by laboratories? In the case ef
chimpanzees-humankind's closest cousin-the problem is severe. There
are more than sixteen hundred research chimps in the United States, but
preciousJew establishments that can serve as sanctuariesfor them; resources
are limited, and many communities object to havin9 animals with iefectious
diseases in their midst. The journalist Joseph D 'A9nese makes a heartbreak­
in9 visit to the Fauna Foundation, outside Montreal, where chimps play
cards, watch television, and live out their last yearsJar removedfrom their
past traumas.

first heard the story a year ago. I was interviewing a scientist when he be­

I gan griping about how difficult it is to get a chimpanzee for medical re­
search. "They're expensive;' he said, "and you've got to pay all this money
into a social security plan to take care of them when they retire." Retired
chimps? Just where do they go to retire-and what do they do when they get
there? Eat bananas? Play shuffleboard? "I heard they put them on an island
sanctuary in Liberia;' the researcher said. He didn't know much more than
that, and of course it wasn't his job to know. He is the scientist. He uses chimps
to answer scientific questions. Someone else deals with what comes afterward.
 A n Embarrassment ef Chi mpanzees 2os

For a while I thought about going to Africa to look for that chimp island. In
my mind's eye I envisioned a paradise where repatriated American chimps
lived free of humans, free of the cages that once confined them. But that turned
out to be a pleasant fiction, a tale told to lab workers foolish enough to ask. By
then I had observed chimps in zoos, read about them in the scientific literature,
and immersed myself in a world of animal sanctuaries that is stranger, more
interesting, and more disturbing than I could have imagined.
Eighteen chimps do live on a pair of islands in Liberia, most of which were
bred on-site by an American hepatitis research laboratory. And sanctuaries
throughout Africa shield wild chimps from poachers. None of these places will
accept U.S.-bred lab chimps after we're done with them. That's why sanctuaries
are needed here. At this moment, the United States is up to its ears in chimps.
During the 1980s, laboratory supply companies bred chimps like crazy to meet
the demands of AIDS and hepatitis researchers. That didn't work out too well.
By the late 1990s researchers conceded that while some chimps become HIV­
positive, almost none develop full-blown AIDS. At least 200 chimps have been
exposed to HIV, yet only two may have died of AIDS. The researchers switched
to macaque monkeys. For a short time the National Institutes of Health, which
funds much of the biomedical research in this country, considered killing HIV­
exposed chimps when they were no longer useful. The NIH later decided not
to, in part because the animals are listed as an endangered species. But the sur­
plus has mounted-today more than 1,600 live in various primate facilities in
the United States-and humans have begun to ask themselves a serious ques­
tion: What are we going to do with these animals?
During his last weeks in office, President Clinton signed the Chimpanzee
Health Improvement, Maintenance, and Protection (CHIMP) Act, which
mandates a national system of sanctuaries for chimps who qualify, but it is
likely to be two years before any new refuges are ready. In the meantime many
animals will have to remain in labs. So far, about 200 chimps have been ear­
marked for retirement. When chimps do enter sanctuaries, there will be a
string attached: If a sanctuary owner takes government money, he or she must
be prepared to send the chimps back to the lab for further research if asked to
do so-a stipulation that infuriates those who believe that plucking a chimp
out of retirement negates the concept of sanctuary.

I N 1997 New York University decided to get out of the chimp business and
shut down its Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates.
It's a common story. Around the world, chimp labs are dwindling: The last re-
 206 J OSEPH D ' A G N ESE

maining facility in Europe-in the Netherlands, with 105 chimps-is closing.

New Zealand has banned chimp research, and in the United Kingdom no new
licenses are being granted for this work. The only other nations that still use
chimps for medical research are Japan (370 chimps) , Liberia (18 chimps) , and
Gabon (72 chimps) .
When labs close, chimps are up for grabs. Of the 250 chimps who contrib­
uted, as they say in lab parlance, to experiments at the New York University lab,
90 were placed in sanctuaries; the rest were transferred to other labs. The most
difficult to place were those that had been exposed to HIV or hepatitis, both
transmissible to humans.
Later in 1997 the Fauna Foundation outside Montreal became the first
sanctuary in North America to give retired, HIV-exposed chimps a home.
Fauna had been an animal refuge for close to 10 years, and the chimps joined a
motley crowd of goats, pigs, chickens, rabbits, horses, turkeys, geese and ducks,
cats and dogs, Scottish Highland steers, cows, llamas, emus, rheas, capuchin
monkeys, one guanaco, one Jacob's sheep, one ostrich, and one donkey. Until
Gloria Grow, 46, the owner of the sanctuary, and her husband, Richard Allan,
49, announced their intention to shelter 15 of the chimps from the New York
University lab, eight of them HIV-infected, the refuge had been regarded by
residents of Chambly as a harmless oddity. Suddenly, the local planning board
challenged every variance Fauna requested. When the board saw plans for an
elaborate, secure chimp house complete with cages, they acquiesced. Nonethe­
less, teachers conducted chimp drills at the elementary school, instructing kids
to hide in the classroom closet if a chimp appeared in their midst; and police
laid in a store of Tyvek suits and tranquilizer guns.
Fauna's chimps live in a 9,000-square-foot building that looks a bit like a
day care center. Despite the cages, living conditions beat lab life knuckles down.
The outdoor play area contains picnic tables, chairs, and swings; indoors, two­
story playrooms are packed with toys, blankets, and more swings. Chimps can
also rest in private cages that give them access to the indoor play space but keep
them separated from humans. They can snack on fresh fruit and vegetables, or
page languidly through Victoria's Secret catalogs. The human form enthralls
great apes.
Each day Grow and her staff of three whip up three savory meals. The
menu includes fruit, oatmeal, spaghetti, potatoes, soups, stews, steamed veg­
etables, and rice, as well as the occasional vegetarian pizza and birthday cake.
Staffers mix gallons of concentrated orange juice every day and laboriously
pour it into empty water bottles with plastic lids. "Most of the chimps know
 A n Embarrassment ef Ch impanzees 207

how to unscrew them," an employee explains, "but someti mes they like to stick
a canine in the cap to bite it off."
One day last October, the chimps are lounging around after lunch, picking
at their food, grooming themselves, and playing with toys. Some snatch plastic
cups of hot Tetley tea off the trolleys parked in front of their enclosure, sip
carefully, and return the cups through the bars without spilling a drop. Grow
brushes Tom's back with a small brush. "Let me see your fingernails," she says.
Tom holds them up for inspection. Another chimp, 42-year-old Annie, the old­
est and a surrogate mother to the others, spots the brush and gestures through
the cage for it. "You want the brush?" Grow asks as she slips it to her. Annie
spends a couple of blissful minutes stroking her coat.
A few minutes spent watching chimps manipulate objects like cups, bottles,
and brushes quickly demonstrates why biologists regard them as the top tool
users in the animal kingdom, after us. Besides being dexterous, they are intelli­
gent, strong, and often aggressive, especially as they grow older. Chimps also
seem to have a sense of humor, which any visitor to Fauna notices immedi­
ately: They delight in teasing humans as well as each other. They routinely spit
water at their caretakers, cleverly varying the pattern to confuse them. They
also seem to understand and respect social hierarchies: A beta male accepts his
lot when an alpha male swipes his orange but goes ballistic when a lower­
ranking female does the same.
The chimpanzee's ability to learn can be humbling. In 1967 psychologist
Roger Fouts taught chimps to use American Sign Language, which they mas­
tered and taught to other chimps. Since 1983 psychologist Sarah Boysen has
been teaching chimps at Ohio State University to do simple arithmetic; in 1991
she figured out how to teach them fractions. In 1999 a landmark paper written
by Jane Goodall and eight other prominent primatologists established that
chimps use their smarts to master their environment. Chimps can codify cul­
tural behavior-how to hunt, how to eat ants, how to groom oneself and
others-and pass that knowledge along to their young ones. Chimps that live
in the Gombe forests of Tanzania have been observed dancing, apparently to
make the rain stop.
In the wild, bands of chimps will rove the jungle for six or seven miles a day,
joining together to hunt monkeys, which they eat with relish, usually after
dashing out the smaller creatures' brains. That's the side of chimps humans
rarely see or choose not to see. However, they can also be kind. A chimp was
once observed trying to help a wounded bird to fly at a zoo in England.
At Fauna, there is constant physical contact between humans and chimps.
 208 J OSEPH D, AGNESE

The tiniest scrape or scab on Grow's hand will elicit concern from a chimp,
usually in the form of a kiss. According to the standards of the Centers for Dis­
ease Control, Fauna's chimp house is a biohazard facility. If this were a U.S. lab,
workers would be required to wear Tyvek suits, goggles, masks, or hair nets,
mandatory garb worn by researchers studying HIV or hepatitis. But Grow and
her workers wear street clothes, unless a chimp has an open wound or needs
surgery, in which case they follow aseptic procedures, donning gowns and
gloves just as they would with a human patient. They believe that if the animals
are treated well, they will not harm their caretakers. The theory has proved true
so far, but the chimps do get into fights with each other that require bandages
or surgery.
Now Grow calls to another animal: "Billy Jo, is your show on?" She peeks at
the TV. "Oh, it's Rosie. Don't worry, Oprah will be on soon." Grow agonizes
about keeping the chimps stimulated. Because they remain caged, she wants to
help entertain their restless spirits. Hence the painstaking preparation of
meals, classical music piped over the stereo, hanging spider plants, brushes
and paints, Halloween decorations, Christmas lights, birthday parties, crack­
ling fires in the wood-burning stove, strands of red licorice, and aromatherapy
candles.
In the United States, lab animals fall under the jurisdiction of the Depart­
ment of Agriculture, which inspects labs and enforces the Animal Welfare Act
of 1985. By these standards, the Fauna chimps were treated well in their former
lives: They got adequate food and shelter, their cages were clean, and they re­
ceived the occasional toy or orange. But Grow and others like her consider
those standards weak and seek to do better. "I want them to be happy;' Grow
says. "To treat chimps well, you should treat them as you would victimized
people. Because they have been victimized. Terribly. Oh, it's so awful what
they've been through."
Annie, for example, was born in Africa, probably in 1959, then captured and
sent to the United States. She gave her life to humans for more than 35 years­
at least 15 in the circus, followed by 21 in the lab as a breeder. When she refused
to mate, she was artificially inseminated. Her child was transferred to another
facility at age 3. Another Fauna chimp, Rachel, was born at the Institute for Pri­
mate Studies in Norman, Oklahoma, in 1982. Rachel was sold for $10,000 as a
pet but ended up at the New York University lab when her owners divorced.
Rachel, who had grown up taking bubble baths and prancing around in
dresses, spent the next 11 years isolated in a cage. Today she occasionally bursts
into screaming and scratching fits, lashing out at her own hand, apparently be­
cause she thinks it is attacking her. Her outbursts have diminished somewhat
 A n Embarrassment <if Chimpanzees 2 09

since she arrived at Fauna in 1997, but her body is still covered with self­
inflicted sores.
"Jeannie was going to be euthanized-did you meet her?" Grow asks. Lab
workers had to medicate Jeannie, an HIV-exposed chimp, to stop her seizures,
during which she ripped out her fingernails and thrashed any human or chimp
nearby. "She had a nervous breakdown before she came here, but she has made
lots of strides in her development. They all have. They put on weight, grow
more hair, their coats are shinier. They sleep better at night. We don't have
nearly as many fights as we used to when they first came, and they have learned
to vocalize more like real chimps."
Fauna's annual budget for the entire farm is $60,000. The food bill is
$40,000; the rest covers medicine and necessities such as bedding straw, tools,
and equipment repairs. In a good year, $15,000 of that comes from private do­
nations. Fauna is not eligible for funding under the CHIMP Act because the
sanctuary is in Canada. Grow says she would not apply for funds even if Fauna
were eligible because of the requirement that sanctuary owners return chimps
to labs on demand: "I would never send them back. Who would?" The bulk of
Fauna's operating revenue comes from a dog grooming business and from Al­
lan's veterinary clinic. On the first night of my visit, Allan, a French-Canadian
who has been doctoring animals on the outskirts of Montreal for 27 years, ar­
rived at dinner in scrubs, looking exhausted. Delighted that Fauna would be
the subject of this article, he quipped, "Tell them we need money."

0NE REcENT coLD and wet morning, Grow is chopping fresh vegetables
for the rabbits and pigs when her sister Dawna Smith, who works in the chimp
house, chugs up to the barn in a Volkswagen. "Get in;' she calls to Grow. "I need
you to come look at Pablo."
"What's wrong with him? He was fine last night."
"In."
Up at the chimp house, the 30-year-old, almost 200-pound chimp struggles
to make himself comfortable in his nest-a pile of blankets on a 12-foot-high
platform inside the chimp house. He can find no peace. First he sits, then he
stands, repeating the process over and over: sitting, standing, sitting, standing.
He wheezes constantly.
Since the day of his arrival five years ago, Pablo has been ill. One winter he
developed a cough that X rays showed to be bronchitis. Medication helped, but
each autumn Grow worries that Pablo's cough will return. Still, she has never
seen him behave like this. She dashes up a spiral staircase to offer him more
 2 10 JOSEPH D ' AGNESE

blankets, an antibiotic, and a Tylenol. The big-lipped chimp graciously accepts

the blankets but spits out the pills. Grow runs out to find her husband, who is
busy spreading a load of red cedar mulch someone has just donated to the
farm. Allan's practice, largely cats and dogs, did not prepare him for the variety
of animals with which he now shares his land and board. To prepare for the
chimps' arrival, he spent a few days training at the New York University lab
with veterinarian James Mahoney.
"What do you think is wrong with him?" Grow asks.
"He's dying:' Allan says, staring into the cage.
Grow doesn't want to hear that. Her husband often acts on the premise that
there is only so much one can do for an animal, especially a wild animal who
will not permit a detailed physical exam. But Grow was raised to believe that
she should go to extremes to help sick animals. Her father, an electrician,
thought nothing of stopping his truck in heavy traffic to rescue a wounded
seagull. Now, as Grow looks on, Allan phones Mahoney and leaves a message
on his voice mail, then heads off to resume mulching.
Hours tick by. At lunch, Grow and her sister, employees, and volunteers sip
soup and munch eggplant casserole in silence. When Allan comes in to wash
up, Grow asks, "What do you think we should do?"
"What should we do?" Allan repeats. "We should wait and see how he feels
tomorrow."
"Wait and see? If I were one of your patients, you think I'd want to hear
that?"
"What do you want to do?" says Allan. "Tranquilize him?"
When Allan heads back outside after lunch, Grow asks him again what he
thinks is wrong. He repeats the two words he uttered that morning. The words
stab the air, and then he is gone. Grow is left to ponder their meaning in a con­
gress of women. Pablo can't be deathly ill, she and her staffers decide. He is only
30; captive chimps can live to be 60. Her sister dissents. "The thing is:' Smith
says in a measured tone, "Richard's always right."
Mahoney phones at 2 P.M . The big chimp is down, still breathing hard. He
drank some juice with antibiotics but vomited it up. Mahoney offers possible
diagnoses: pneumonia, a cardiac problem, a twisted intestine. Given Pablo's
past, pneumonia seems likely. Allan is instructed to administer three injections,
one after the other: an antibiotic, a diuretic, and cortisone for shock. If Pablo
has pneumonia he should feel better after the first shot. Allan drops the phone
and dashes to get his bag.
In labs, monkeys and chimps are trained to present their arms for blood
draws. Pablo had always resisted, so he was usually tranquilized-"knocked
 A n Embarrassmen t ef Chi mpanzees 2 1 1

down;' as the lab techs say, with a dart fired from an air pistol. Allan fears he'll
have to break out the darts for the first time ever at Fauna. When Pablo sees the
needle, he thrusts his arm out. Allan is stunned. "This guy never liked needles,
but he gave me his arm. Didn't put up a fight."
Minutes after the injections, Pablo lies back and closes his eyes. His face is
immobile; a black arm hangs limply off the side of his nest. Allan carefully un­
locks the gate to the chimp enclosure, and Grow rushes up a ladder. She grabs
Pablo's hand and feels a twitch. Life shudders out of the great ape's body. She
begins to cry but manages to help carry the body to the floor. Allan confirms
he'd dead, and Grow insists that the humans leave the enclosure to allow the
other chimps a chance to see Pablo.
Normally, when a lab chimp dies, he dies alone in a cage and is whisked
away. Grow believes chimps should be allowed to witness everything. A couple
of times Allan has performed surgery in the kitchen, where all the chimps
could see him. "Someday, when I die;' Grow says, "I want to be placed right
here where they can all see me and know that I am gone:'
So, as Grow and her staff sit weeping outside the enclosure, the chimps ap­
proach Pablo. Alone or in pairs, they tug at his arms, open his eyes, groom him,
rub his swollen belly. Annie pours a cup of juice in his ear. Grow says it might
be an attempt to annoy Pablo and wake him up. Before long, the chimps wan­
der off, hooting. The hoots blossom into screams, and soon the walls of the
chimp house echo with the sound of knuckles pounding steel.

T H E N 1 G H T o F Pablo's death, Allan conducts a hasty necropsy, but neither

he nor his colleagues have had much experience handling a large and poten­
tially infectious animal. His veterinary clinic is well-supplied with Tyvek suits
and latex gloves but short on masks and goggles. Everything seems too small
for Pablo's frame: the clinic's back door, the operating table, especially the
freezer into which Allan and a sobbing Grow stuff his body when the proce­
dure is finished.
Eighteen days later, after Grow has pleaded unsuccessfully with different
agencies to perform an official necropsy, the Montreal health department
presses a pathologist into service at the vet school in Saint-Hyacinthe. The im­
mediate cause of death is listed as an acute lung infection, but the physician
who examined the body also found an abdominal infection and mild hepatitis.
Internally, the animal's organs were crisscrossed with thick, fibrous scars, most
likely the remainders of various procedures. To do an animal biopsy, a techni­
cian uses a punch to clip out a chunk of tissue. The procedure leaves a large
 2 1 2 J OSEPH D ' AGNESE

hole that, if infected, can take years to heal. Pablo was also vulnerable to infec­
tion on another front. Darts fired from an air pistol are, by definition, non­
sterile; each penetration carries germs from the surface of an animal's skin into
its body.
According to his research dossier, Pablo, known as Ch-377 at the New York
University lab, had been darted 220 times, once accidentally in the lip. He had
been subjected to 28 liver, two bone-marrow, and two lymph-node biopsies.
His body was injected four times with test vaccines, one of them known to be a
hepatitis vaccine. In 1993 he was injected with 10,000 times the lethal dose of
HIV. The barrel-chested chimp had shrugged off AIDS and kept hepatitis at
bay only to die of an infection aggravated by years of darts, needles, and biop­
sies.
"We always knew the chimps had a lot of problems:' Grow said two months
after Pablo's death. "But we always thought they were problems we could take
care of-because they were on the outside. Now we are learning that there are a
lot of things going on inside them that we may never know about. Annie's sick
now. Jeannie's sick now. What happened to Pablo wasn't unusual; it was aver­
age."
Activists insist that animal-free science is already here-in the form of in
vitro research, data gleaned from autopsies, clinical observation, and epidemi­
ology. But the scientists who work with chimps say that the inoculations, biop­
sies, and knockdowns, though regrettable, are necessary. "I think the idea of
moving to humans is nonsense:' says Alfred Prince, the hematologist who
heads chimpanzee research in Liberia. "Ethics committees in hospitals are get­
ting tougher and tougher, and the work you can do in people is less and less.
We will probably always need animal models . . . I think the answer is, if you're
going to do this work on chimps, you better take really good care of them:'
Other researchers, including primatologist Roger Fouts, believe that the days
when we are willing to imperil an endangered species for our own sake may be
numbered. Until then research will proceed, and people like Gloria Grow will
be left to deal with the results, as she did in January 2002, when Annie, the
grande dame of the chimp house, died. Her body is awaiting a necropsy. Then
the body will be sent, like Pablo's, to a local crematory that donates its services
to Fauna. Grow plans to bury some of the ashes of both animals at the sanctu­
ary. Sometime soon, Jane Goodall will take the rest of the ashes with her to
Tanzania to sprinkle in the forests of Gombe, where chimps dance to stop the
ram.
 D AN I E L L E 0 F R I

Com m on Gr o u n d
F R O M T/ K K UN

Doctors routinely 90 to 9reat len9ths to carefor their patients but, beyond a

dose ef bedside manner, maintain a prefessional distance from their pa­
tients' personal lives. Doin9 so is not always ea-!,Y. however. Danielle Ofri, a
doctor and writer, recollects an episode from the early days ef her career
when her conscience, and her own past experience, prompted her to reach

"
out personally to a patient.

w e are a Catholic medical center, Dr. Ofri." The medical director

leaned back in his chair across from my desk. "Do you have any
issues with that?"
His gray hair was severely parted on the right and I could trace the individ­
ual strands that were tethered down on the side by hair grease. A stethoscope
peeked out of the pocket of his tailored blue suit. He had just finished his long
introductory speech with me, enumerating the vast array of services and the
selling points of his medical group. He was clearly trying to impress me with
his institution. After all, the reason I was doing a temp assignment here was be­
cause they were short-handed and looking to hire.
I was caught off balance by the question. What could he be driving at? Was
my Jewish background an issue here? Was my last name too "ethnic"? I paused
and then slowly asked back, "Should I have issues?"
"Well;' he replied, in his careful New England lilt, "we do not promote birth
 DAN I E L L E 0FRI

control. If a patient requests it, we will provide it. But we do not offer it, pro ­
mote it, or condone it."
Before my super-ego could grab control, my New York sassiness spilled out.
"So, I don't suppose you perform abortions, do you?"
I could not believe I had just said that.
The older physician did not appear fazed. "No, we do not terminate preg­
nancies. Nor do we permit referrals to physicians who do. If a patient requests
that service, we have them call their own insurance company. Their insurance
companies make the referral."
He stood up and put out his hand. "We are glad to have you aboard, Dr.
Ofri. We hope you enjoy your six weeks with us. And," he paused with a smile,
"we hope you consider staying longer."
I remained in my office after he left, a little confused about what I had just
heard and very embarrassed about the sauciness of my retort. I finally brushed
it off, attributing it to high-level politics that I was not a part of.
I had never spent much time in New England before. The town looked just
as I had imagined. Regal Victorian mansions with wrap-around wooden
porches lined the main street. Well-tended rose bushes graced the picket
fences. Manicured shrubbery lined the driveways. A river meandered through
the town and I often saw kayakers as I drove over the small bridges each morn­
ing in my beige rental car. This was a different planet from my native New York
City.
I had been assigned to a small private practice that was short-handed after
two doctors had moved away. The staff members welcomed me warmly. They
gave me a large office with three exam rooms in a separate wing of the suite,
and a nurse, Karen, to work exclusively with me. At the beginning of each ap­
pointment Karen would take a brief history from the patient, check their vital
signs and jot down their medications. When I entered into the room afterward
to see the patient, I would find all the supplies that I might need for that partic­
ular patient neatly laid out. I learned that the walls of the examining rooms
were fairly thin because when I was finished with the patient, Karen would be
waiting outside with whatever vaccines or medications I had discussed with
the patient.
This was nothing like Bellevue Hospital-the city hospital where I did my
residency. Practicing medicine had never been so easy! I noticed that the medi­
cine cabinet was stocked with free samples of birth control pills along with the
anti-hypertensives and cholesterol medications. Apparently, no one took the
contraception rule too seriously.
Nobody ever bothered Karen and me in our little corner. It was as though
 Common Ground 2 1 _s-

we had our own practice. Between patients we would share stories of her life in
New England and my experiences at Bellevue. And I loved that she kept a pic­
ture of her golden retriever, Sam, on her desk.
Three weeks into my assignment I met Diana Makower, a young computer
programmer at a local financial firm. She was wearing a gray suit with a purple
silk blouse. A single strand of pearls hung around her neck. Her carefully ap­
plied make-up had started to smudge from the tears slipping down her cheeks.
"I think I'm pregnant," she spilled out, almost before I could introduce myself.
"I did one of those home pregnancy tests and it was positive. All I need from
you is a blood test."
I put down my stethoscope and pulled up a chair.
"It's a complicated situation," she wept. "I am ending a relationship with
my boyfriend, but it wasn't him. I have an old friend, it's never been more than
that, but I think he and I might be developing a romantic relationship. We slept
together just once, three weeks ago. I really think we could have a serious rela­
tionship, but it is not ready for this. I can't believe this is happening."
"If you do turn out to be pregnant," I asked, "what do you think you would
do?"
"I need to have an abortion. I can't have a kid now; I'm single, I don't have a
stable relationship yet. I'm not ready for it now:'
''Are you sure that's what you want to do? Have you considered other op­
tions, like adoption?"
''Absolutely," she said. "I have made my decision. I just need to know where
to go."
I suddenly thought of the medical director with his slicked-down gray hair.
According to the rules, I was supposed to tell Diana to call her insurance com­
pany. Her insurance company? I had visions of a bored bureaucrat slurping on
his coffee while dispensing advice on a delicate matter to my distraught pa­
tient. How could I send Diana into a situation like that? I excused myself and
went to consult Karen.
Karen did not know which local doctors performed abortions. "I stay out of
that mess,'' she said. The Catholic hospital that the practice was affiliated with
certainly did not. She sympathized with my predicament but warned me not to
let the office manager know what I was doing. "Someone else gave out a phone
number once," she said, "just a phone number. It wasn't even documented in
the chart, but somehow it got out and they got into trouble:'
I stared out the window and could see my rental car parked in front of a
clapboard house across the street. The house was painted bright yellow with
pale blue trim. A wooden porch surrounded three sides of the house. It was
 2 1 6 DAN IE LLE 0FRI

overflowing with hanging spider plants and overripe ferns. Wicker furniture
with floral cushions was arranged around a wrought-iron table. An American
flag dangled from a second-story window. This Catholic medical institution
might choose not to perform abortions, but what about my ethical duty to
provide the care my patient needed? Sending a distressed patient to an 800 tele­
phone number would not hold water under the Hippocratic oath.
It seemed clear to me that my duty was first to my patient, and only second­
arily to some faceless institution. Unfortunately, as a stranger to this small
town, I did not know the local resources. I didn't know the names of the nearby
physicians to even make the referral if I had wanted to break the rules. I sud­
denly pined for Bellevue, where I knew all the doctors and I knew the system. If
I needed help, all I had to do was dial the operator and have the appropriate
doctor paged. I looked back at the yellow and blue house across the road. It
seemed hostile and antagonistic. The small-town civility made me feel claus­
trophobic.
Grinding my teeth, I re-entered the exam room. "As you may know, this
medical practice is Catholic," I told Diana, "so we cannot provide referrals for
abortion. The truth is, I wouldn't know where to send you even if I could. The
rule is that you are supposed to call your insurance company and get the refer­
ral yourself. I would do it for you, but I can't. However, if you get the list of pos­
sible referrals, I will call around to find out which is the best."
Diana nodded, and then asked if she could be alone. I left her with a box of
tissues and told her she could stay as long as she liked.
I called Diana the next day to let her know that the repeat pregnancy test
was positive. When I called, I got her voice mail at work. She had told me that it
was a private line, but suddenly I felt paranoid. I did not indicate that I was a
physician and I left a cryptic message about results being "confirmatory of our
original data."
Diana returned my call a few hours later. Her insurance company had given
her two phone numbers, without names, in the next state over. Her health plan
had no gynecologists in this state who performed abortions. Nobody in the
state? My patient couldn't get the care that she needed in her home state? I was
horrified. How could I send her off into the unknown like that? How could I
abandon her to a couple of random, blank telephone numbers in another
state? I felt like we were back in the 1950s, sneaking around with code words, no
names mentioned, having to go out of state for an abortion.
I plowed through my roster of patients for the day, but I couldn't focus on
the coughs, rashes, and shoulder pains. All I could think about was Diana. I
imagined her driving over the state line, tears pressing at her lid margins. The
 Common Ground 2 1 7

lonesomeness in the car, the bitter highway, the directions scribbled on the
back of a used envelope. I imagined her squinting at the scrawled directions,
the car slipping ever so slightly out of the lane as her mind diffused focus from
the highway median to the second left after the traffic light to the enormity of
what lay ahead. Then she would tighten her grip and the car would even out.
She'd admonish herself to watch the highway. And so she would watch the
highway, look at the highway, stare at the highway, until the yellow lines would
begin to quiver, then shudder, then melt into the saltiness dribbling down her
face.
Between patients I paced around my office, too irritated to sit still. What
kind of place was this where some administrative rule could interfere with pa­
tient care? Wasn't patient care more important than a bunch of rules? I won­
dered when was the last time any of those bureaucrats had actually seen a
patient. When was the last time they'd sat face-to-face with a patient, watching
the tension lines around the mouth tremble, smelling the moist desperation,
accepting the burden and the honor of tender secrets? I fumed all afternoon,
cursing the insurance companies and the politicians whose ideologies and
business concerns were elbowing into my office, into the sacred space that my
patient and I shared.
Then Karen told me that the wife of one of the doctors used to work at a
teen clinic. Grateful for this information, I called immediately. She knew of
those two out-of-state facilities and told me they had reputations for treating
patients like cattle. There was, however, a private women's clinic two hours
north that was professional and reliable. But most insurance companies would
not cover the cost of the procedure.
I called Diana at home that evening. She had already made an appointment
at one of the out-of-state clinics and was very appreciative of my "insider infor­
mation." I gave her the number of the private women's clinic.
"Have you told him?" I asked.
"No. No, I can't tell him. Not yet, at least. Maybe afterward:'
"Is there anyone that you'd feel comfortable talking to, a friend, a family
member? Is there someone who could come with you?"
"No, not really;' she replied. "I mean I have good friends, but I couldn't tell
them about this. They wouldn't understand."
I winced at the thought of her going alone. There was a sense of something
shameful, something to hide. "Bring your own bathrobe," I added, before we
hung up. "It's more comfortable than a hospital gown:'
I called her again the following day. Just to make sure she was okay. We
chatted a bit and it turned out that she had grown up in New York.
 2 1 8 DAN I E LLE 0FRI

"Really?" I asked, excited to uncover a fellow New York native here in the
wilds of New England. "Where were you born?"
"Queens;' she said, "but then we moved out to Long Island, which is where
I really grew up."
"My family did something similar. I was born in Manhattan but then we
moved out of the city to Rockland. I hated the suburbs, though. I never forgave
my parents for leaving the city."
"Me too;' Diana said. "I spent all of my high school years hanging out in the
city, trying to make up for my parents' foolish flight to the 'burbs. My friends
and I would take the train in on weekends and hang out in Greenwich Village."
"So did I;' I said excitedly. "We used to tramp up and down Bleecker Street
then go hear music at Kenny's Castaways."
"I know Kenny's Castaways. The club that never checked ID."
"That's the one. Kenny's Castaways. And you went to Le Figaro Cafe, didn't
you?"
''Absolutely-southwest corner of Bleecker and MacDougal. That's where I
had my first cappuccino. I couldn't bear to drink my parents' instant coffee af­
ter that."
I left work that evening and drove to my hotel. The very act of driving, of
commuting by car, made me feel odd. It had been more than fifteen years since
I'd relied on a car for transportation. In New York I was a regular denizen of the
subway, and an avid bicyclist. I particularly relished gridlock traffic in Manhat­
tan. I adored watching the irate drivers fume inside their cars, locked in the
daily midtown mess, while I whizzed past on my ratty old ten-speed, needling
my way in and out of unloading trucks, yellow cabs, and wayward pedestrians.
And now as I sat in my rental car, idling at a traffic light, I felt confined. I
pined for the freedom of my bike. I yearned for the foot-based culture of New
York, in which everything I needed was in walking or biking distance.
Some people feel nervous in big cities; I feel nervous in small towns. No
pedestrians on the streets. No one to make eye contact with. No one to negoti­
ate personal space on a sidewalk with. No mass of actual human beings on the
street to remind you that you are alive and part of a species. Only cars.
And so I sat in my car, cut off from humanity, isolated in a metal box that
rumbled with diesel heat under my feet as the traffic light languished on red.
Sure, the old houses were beautiful to look at and the landscaping impressive,
but there were no people. I craved people. Stuck in my car, I could think only
about Diana. She was also cut off. There was no one she could confide in, no
one she could bring with her. I realized that I was probably the only person in
this world she had spoken to about this. In the small enclosed space of my car,
 Common Ground 2 19

with that bland smell of whatever they use to make seat stuffing, the heaviness
of that burden weighed onto the cramped muscles of my shoulders. There were
hundreds of people tucked into similar steel automobiles who were riding
along the same street as me-hundreds of cars shuttling human beings within
their tiny isolated orbits-but there was only one that contained Diana
Makower's confidence. As a woman, I felt an almost sisterly duty to be there for
her during this uniquely feminine quandary. As her doctor I felt that I had the
responsibility to make sure she got the medical care she needed and felt guilty
that I couldn't help her more directly. And as a human being, as the driver of
the steel box that held her confidence, I felt the moral obligation to hold that
dear, to treat that confidence with the utmost respect. I couldn't abandon her
during this difficult and lonely period.
When I arrived back at my hotel, I called her again. Just to see how she was
doing. Two days later I called Diana again. I somehow found a pretext to call
her almost every day until her abortion date the following week.
I felt a bit more like a therapist than a physician and I understood why ther­
apists are to keep their personal lives out of the therapy. Therapy is about the
patient, not about the therapist.
I ached to share my own experience, but professionalism, and I suppose
some lingering shame, prevented me. I'd been only seventeen at the time and
just returning home from my first year in college. I had passed my calculus fi­
nal exam and was pretty sure about physics. I had turned in my last organic
chemistry lab report. I was about to go off to be a counselor at summer camp
when I discovered that I was pregnant.
I'd had a steady boyfriend the entire year. Before we got involved I had gone
to Planned Parenthood because I didn't want to be irresponsible. I remem­
bered the long talk with the counselor in the windowless room with the overly
cheery posters. We'd decided together on the diaphragm for birth control. The
package insert listed a 95 percent effectiveness rate. No one ever spoke about
the other 5 percent.
I lived in New York, the most liberal city in the most liberal state. My
friends and parents were all liberal, pro-choice people. But I was too scared to
tell anyone; it just didn't seem possible that it was happening and it didn't seem
possible to tell anyone.
After the pregnancy test I sat in a park and cried alone. It was a park where
my family used to have picnics when I was little. My parents would buy a pre­
cooked chicken from the nearby kosher deli. We'd bring paper plates and the
vegetable salad. And of course, our dog Kushi. This was her chance to run off
the leash. Sitting in that park now I longed for the smell of her soft black fur. I
 2 20 DAN IELLE 0FRI

craved her warm, all-accepting dogness to snuggle up to. Someone to whom I

wouldn't have to explain all the complicated human confusions. But she'd died
the previous year, just before I'd left for college.
I arranged an appointment at a local women's clinic. That night I made a
long-distance call to my boyfriend. The geographical and personal gaps were
apparently too vast to bridge-he couldn't quite accept what I was telling him
over the phone. And he didn't offer to help me pay for it.
The next day I lied to my parents about having a party to go to so I could
borrow the car. The clinic had said to bring a comfortable bathrobe. I snuck my
mother's out of her closet.
The drive was eerily dissociated. The yellow lines in the road didn't seem
parallel to the outer curbs. They listed and buckled, slighting the rules of
Cartesian geometry. They drifted to other planes, to the odd dimensions of ir­
rational numbers. Then they'd swing back with a jolt, clobbering into my fo­
cus. As the car shuffled closer and closer to the clinic, I felt my body shrinking.
It dwindled within itself until there was nothing left but a little girl who des­
perately wanted her dog.
I lugged myself, or what little was left of myself, up the steps. I registered
a name-I think it was mine-and followed the nurse into the back. She
instructed me to change into my bathrobe and wait in the main room until I
was called. The room was filled with eight or so women in different-colored
bathrobes. We could have been at a slumber party, except that no one was smil­
ing. Some magazines were scattered on the table, but the articles were about
beef casseroles and electricity-saving tips. I pulled my mother's flannel robe
around me and concentrated on the orange industrial carpeting. It really was
orange, although if you looked carefully, there were lonely bits of red and yel­
low scattered within.
They gave me a choice of general or local anaesthesia. The budding college­
educated scientist wanted local, wanted to know everything that was going on,
wanted to control the whole biology experiment. But the little girl who yearned
for her dog immediately chose general. I didn't want to know. I didn't want to
remember.
I awoke crying in another room. It was overly bright and the sheets were
stiff. My stomach pulsed with an alien ache. The nurse said to stop acting like a
baby, it didn't really hurt that much. I checked out and went back to the same
park to cry some more.
A week later, a letter arrived from my boyfriend. He told me that he felt ter­
ribly guilty. As "penance" for himself, he said he could never be with me again.
That summer was long and lonely.
 Common Ground 22 1

In the years that have gone by I have told almost no one. Part of me feels
that I should be contributing to the destigmatization of abortion by being
open about my own experience. Yet another part of me feels it is something
personal. Worse yet, someth ing to hide. I feel gu ilty and hypocritical.
Sometimes I think about the child that might have been. At seventeen, I
had precious few resources to raise a child. I would never have finished college,
much less gone to medical school. I might have faced a lifetime of minimum­
wage jobs and food stamps. What would my child's life have been like?
I called Diana after her abortion. She told me that the staff members at the
clinic were extremely kind and supportive, and that it didn't hurt too much. I
breathed a sigh of relief. We spoke a few more times after that. Each time I felt
the urge to share my story, but I couldn't.
I am not a politically active person. So much of what transpires in the gov­
ernment seems to have no bearing on my life; I just want to take care of my pa­
tients and my family. The decision about abortion is a difficult one, not one
that I would wish anyone to face. But when I see teenage mothers in my clinic
with minimal education, no job skills, barely mature enough to take care of
themselves let alone the two or three babies on their laps, I am viscerally aware
that my life was at the mercy of laws that permitted access to safe abortion. A
different time or a different place and the outcome could have been vastly dif­
ferent.
Doctors often unconsciously separate themselves from patients-they are
the sick ones and we, in our white coats, are different from them. It is hum­
bling, and also relieving, to know that we are all made of the same stuff.
 R oA L D H o F F M A N N

Why B uy Th a t Th eory?
F R O M A M E R I CA N S C I E N TI S T

The principle known as Ockham 's razor holds that the right explanationfor
any phenomenon will also be the simplest. The Nobel Prize-winning
chemist Roald H'!!Jmann muses on whether simplicity is all that makes.for a
succesiful theory.

he theory of theories goes like this: A theory will be accepted by a sci­

T entific community if it explains better (or more of ) what is known, fits

at its fringes with what is known about other parts of our universe and
makes verifiable, preferably risky, predictions.
Sometimes it does go like that. So the theory that made my name (and
added to the already recognized greatness of the man with whom I collabo­
rated, the synthetic chemist of the 20th century, Robert B. Woodward) did
make sense of many disparate and puzzling observations in organic chemistry.
And "orbital symmetry control," as our complex of ideas came to be called,
made some risky predictions. I remember well the day that Jerry Berson sent us
his remarkable experimental results on the stereochemistry of the so-called
i,3-sigmatropic shift. It should proceed in a certain way, he reasoned from our
theory-a nonintuitive way. And it did.
But much that goes into the acceptance of theories has little to do with ra­
tionalization and prediction. Instead, I will claim, what matters is a heady mix
of factors in which psychological attitudes figure prominently.
 Why B uy That Theory? 223

Simpli city
A s I M P L E E Q u AT I o N describing a physical phenomenon (better still,
many) , the molecule shaped like a Platonic solid with regular geometry, the
simple mechanism (A-B, in one step}-these have tremendous aesthetic ap­
peal, a direct beeline into our soul. They are beautifully simple, and simply
beautiful. Theories of this type are awesome in the original sense of the
world-who would deny this of the theory of evolution, the Dirac equation or
general relativity?
A little caution might be suggested from pondering the fact that political
ads patently cater to our psychobiological predilection for simplicity. Is the
world simple? Or do we j ust want it to be such? In the dreams of some, the
beauty and simplicity of equations becomes a criterion for their truth. Simple
theories seem to validate that idol of science, Ockham's razor. In preaching the
poetic conciseness and generality of orbital explanations, I have succumbed to
this, too.
A corrective to the infatuation of scientists with simplicity might come
from asking them to think of what they consider beautiful in art, be it music or
the visual arts. Is it Bach's Goldberg Variations or a dance tune where the theme
plays ten times identically in succession? Is any animal ever painted to show its
bilateral symmetry?
Still, there's no getting away from it; a theory that is simple yet explains a lot
is usually accepted in a flash.

Story tellin9
W H AT 1 F the world is complex? Here, symmetry is broken; there, the
seemingly simplest of chemical reactions, hydrogen burning to water, has a
messy mechanism. The means by which one subunit of hemoglobin commu­
nicates its oxygenation to a second subunit, an essential task, resembles a Rube
Goldberg cartoon. Not to speak of the intricacies of any biological response,
from the rise of blood pressure or release of adrenaline when a snake lunges at
us, to returning a Ping-Pong serve with backspin. Max Perutz's theory of the
cooperativity of oxygen uptake, the way the ribosome functions-these re­
quire complicated explanations. And yes, the inherent tinkering of evolution
has made them complex. But simpler chemical reactions-a candle burning­
are also intricate. As complex as the essential physics of the malleability, brittle­
ness and hardness of metals. Or the geology of hydrothermal vents.
 2 24 RoALD H O FFMA N N

When things are complex yet understandable, human beings weave stories.
We do so for several reasons: A-B requires no story. But A-B-C-D and
not A-B-C'-D is in itself a story. Second, as psychologist Jerome Bruner
writes, "For there to be a story, something unforeseen must happen." In science
the unforeseen lurks around the next experimental corner. Stories then "do­
mesticate unexpectedness," to use Bruner's phrase.
Storytelling seems to be ingrained in our psyche. I would claim that with
our gift of spoken and written language, this is the way we wrest pleasure, psy­
chologically, from a messy world. Scientists are no exception. Part of the story
they tell is how they got there-the x-ray films measured over a decade, the
blind alleys and false leads of a chemical synthesis. It is never easy, and
serendipity substitutes for what in earlier ages would have been called the grace
of God. In the end, we overcome. This appeals, and none of it takes away from
the ingenuity of the creative act.
In thinking about theories, storytelling has some distinct features. There is
always a beginning to a theory-modeling assumptions, perhaps unexpected
observations to account for. Then, in a mathematically oriented theory, a kind
of development section follows. Something is tried; it leads nowhere, or leaves
one dissatisfied. So one essays a variation on what had been a minor theme,
and-all of a sudden-it soars. Resolution and coda follow. I think of the sur­
prise that comes from doing a Fourier transform, or of seeing eigenvalues pop­
ping out of nothing but an equation and boundary conditions.
Sadly, in the published accounts of theories, much of the narrative of the
struggle for understanding is left out, because of self-censorship and the desire
to show us as more rational than we were. That's okay; fortunately one can still
see the development sections of a theoretical symphony as one examines an
ensemble of theories, created by many people, not just one, groping towards
understanding.
The other place where narrative is rife is in the hypothesis-forming stage of
doing science. This is where the "reach of imagination" of science, as Jacob
Bronowski referred to it, is explicit. Soon you will be brought down to earth by
experiment, but here the wild man in you can soar, think up any crazy scheme.
And, in the way science works, if you are too blinded by your prejudices to see
the faults in your theoretical fantasies, you can be sure others will.
Many theories are popular because they tell a rollicking good story,
one that is sage in capturing the way the world works, and could be stored away
to deal with the next trouble. Stories can be funny; can there be humorous
theories?
 Why B uy That Theory? 22s

A Roll - o n S u i t c ase

T H E o R 1 E s T H AT s E E K acceptance had better be portable. Oh, people

will accept an initiation ritual, a tough-to-follow manual to mastering a theory.
But if every application of the theory requires consultation with its originator
(that's the goal of commercialization, antithetical to the ethic of science) , the
theory will soon be abandoned. The most popular theories in fact are those
that can be applied by others to obtain surprising results. The originator of the
theory might have given an eyetooth to have done it earlier, but friends should
hold him back-it's better if someone else does it. And cites you.
Relatively uncomplicated models that admit an analytical solution play a
special role in the acceptance and popularity of theories among other theorists.
I think of the harmonic oscillator, of the Heisenberg and Hiickel Hamiltoni­
ans, of the Ising Model, my own orbital interactions. The models become mod­
ules in a theoretical Erector set, shuttled into any problem as a first (not last)
recourse. In part this is fashion, in part testimony to our predilection for sim­
plicity. But, more significantly, the use of soluble models conveys confidence in
the value of metaphor-taking one piece of experience over to another. It's also
evidence of an existential desire to try something-let's try this.

Producti vi ty
T H E B E S T T H E O R I E S are productive, in that they stimulate experi­
ment. Science is a wonderfully interactive way for gaining reliable knowledge.
What excitement there is in person A advancing a view of how things work,
which is tested by B, used by C to motivate making a molecule that tests the
limits of the theory, which leads to D ( not C) finding that molecule to be su­
perconducting or an antitumor agent, whereupon a horde of graduate stu­
dents of E or F are put to making slight modifications! People need reasons for
doing things. Theories provide them, surely to test the theories (with greater
delight if proved wrong) , but also j ust to have a reason for making the next
molecule down the line. Theories that provoke experiment are really valued by
a community that in every science, even physics, is primarily experimental.
A "corollary" of the significance of productivity is that theories that are
fundamentally untenable or ill-defined can still be immensely productive. So
was phlogiston in its day, so in chemistry was the idea of resonance energies,
calculated in a Hiickel model. People made tremendous efforts to make mole­
cules that would never have been made (and found much fascinating chem-
 2 26 RoALD H O FFMAN N

istry in the process) on the basis of "resonance energies" that had little connec­
tion to stability, thermodynamic or kinetic. Did it matter that Columbus mis­
calculated in his "research proposal" how far the Indies were?
As Jerry Berson has written, ''A lot of science consists of permanent experi­
mental facts established in tests of temporary theories:'

Fra m e works for Un ders t a n d i ng

S T E P H E N G . B R u s H H A s recently studied a range of fields and dis­

coveries, to see what role predictions play in the acceptance of theories. Here's
what he has to say about the new quantum mechanics: "Novel predictions
played essentially no role in the acceptance of the most important physical the­
ory of the 20th century, quantum mechanics. Physicists quickly accepted that
theory because it provided a coherent deductive account of a large body of
known empirical facts . . ." Many theories predict relatively little ( quantum
mechanics actually did eventually) yet are accepted because they carry tremen­
dous explanatory power. They do so by classification, providing a framework
(for the mind) for ordering an immense amount of observation. This is what I
think 20th-century theories of acidity and basicity in chemistry (a la Lewis or
Brnnsted) do. Alternatively, the understanding provided is one of mecha­
nism-this is the strength of the theory of evolution.
It is best to distinguish the concepts of theory, explanation and under­
standing. Or to try to do so, for they resist differentiation. Evelyn Fox Keller,
who in her brilliant book, Making Sense of Life, has many instructive tales of
theory acceptance, says this of explanation:

A description or a phenomenon counts as an explanation . . . if and only if it

meets the needs of an individual or a community. The challenge, therefore, is
to understand the needs that different kinds of explanations meet. Needs do

of course vary, and inevitably so: they vary not only with the state of the sci­
ence at a particular time, with local technological, social, and economic op­

portunities, but also with larger cultural preoccupations.

As Bas van Fraassen has incisively argued, any explanation is an answer. If

we accept that, the nature of the question becomes of essence, and so does our
reception of the answer. Both ( the reconstructed question of "why?" and our
response) are context-dependent and subjective. Understanding, van Fraassen
says, "consists in being in a position to explain." And so is equally subjective in a
pragmatic universe.
 Why B uy That Theory? 227

Incidentally, explanations are almost always stories. Indeed, moralistic and

deterministic stories. For to be satisfying they don't j ust say A-B-c-o, but
A-B-c-o because of such and such propensities of A, B and C. The im­
plicit strong conviction of causality, justified by seemingly irrefutable reason,
may be dangerously intoxicating. This is one reason why I wouldn't like scien­
tists and engineers to run this world.
The acceptance of theories depends as much on the psychology of human
beings as on the content of the theories. It is human beings who decide, indi­
vidually and as a community, whether a theory indeed has explanatory power
or provides understanding. This is why seemingly "extrascientific" factors such
as productivity, portability, storytelling power and aesthetics matter. Some­
times it takes a long time (witness continental drift) , but often the acceptance is
immediate and intuitive-it fits. Like a nice sweater.

' Ti s a Gift
T H E R E I S something else, even more fundamentally psychological, at
work. Every society uses gifts, as altruistic offerings but more importantly as a
way of mediating social interactions. In science the gift is both transparent and
central. Pure science is as close to a gift economy as we have, as Jeffrey Kovac
has argued. Every article in our open literature is a gift to all of us. Every analyt­
ical method, every instrument. It's desired that the gift be beautiful (simple
gifts are, but also those that bring us a good story with them) , to be sure. But
that the offering be useful (portable, productive) endows it with special value.
The giver will be remembered, every moment, by the one who received the gift.
The purpose of theory, Berson writes, is "to bring order, clarity, and pre­
dictability to a small corner of the world." That suffices. A theory is then a spe­
cial gift, a gift for the mind in a society (of science, not the world) where
thought and understanding are preeminent. A gift from one human being to
another, to us all.
 L E O NA R D C A S S U T O

Big Tro uble in th e World ef

"Big Physi cs "
F R O M SA L O N

In September 2002, a committee that wasformed t o investi9ate alle9ations

cj'misconduct a9ainst a hi9hj/yin9 youn9 physicist at Bell Labs, Jan Hen­
drik Schon, concluded that he hadfabricated results in several papers pub­
lished in distin9uished journals, invalidatin9 the results ef his cuttin9-ed9e
research on molecular electronics. The committee's report exposed deepflaws
throu9hout the system-from how researchers are recruited by bi9 institu­
tions to the peer review process that 9overns scientific publication. Leonard
Cassuto, whofrequently reports on academic politics, investi9ates how such
a scandal could have happened.

n February 2000, a promising young physicist named Jan Hendrik Schon

I published some startling experimental results. Schon and his partners had
started with molecules that don't ordinarily conduct electricity and
claimed they had succeeded in making them behave like semiconductors, the
circuits that make computers work. The researchers reported their findings in
Science, one of the flagship scientific journals.
The data created an immediate stir. Schon, who works at Lucent Technolo­
gies' prestigious Bell Labs, followed that paper up with another, and then an­
other. In his world of "publish or perish;' he became a virtual writing machine,
 Bi9 Trouble in the World ef "B i9 Physi cs " 2 29

issuing one article after another. His group reported that they could make
other nonconductors into semiconductors, lasers and light-absorbing devices.
These claims were revolutionary. Their implications for electronics and other
fields were enormous, holding the promise that computing circuitry might one
day shrink to unimaginably small size. In the words of one Princeton professo r,
Schon had "defeated chemistry." He had become a modern alchemist, appar­
ently conducting electricity where it had never gone before.
In a field where publishing two or th ree articles a year makes you produc­
tive, Schon started issuing reports in bunches. He was the lead author on
dozens of articles-more than 90 in about three years, most of them appearing
in the industry-leading journals. In 2001, he received an award for scientific
"Breakthrough of the Year:' but most scientists saw this recognition as only the
beginning.
" I saw these results being presented to a German audience," says James
Heath of UCLA, "and they knock on the chairs instead of clapping. It was
incredible-they got a 'standing knocking.' I thought, These guys are going to
Stockholm." Less than five years after finishing graduate school, Jan Hendrik
Schon was in contention for the Nobel Prize.
Then the wunderkind fell to earth. In April 2002, a small group of re­
searchers at Bell Labs contacted Princeton physics professor Lydia Sohn and
whispered that all was not right with Schon's data. Sohn recalls that she and
Cornell University's Paul McEuen stayed up late one night and found some
disturbing coincidences in Schon's results: The same graphs were being used to
illustrate the outcomes of completely different experiments. "You would ex­
pect differences:' she said, "but the figures were identical. It was a smoking
gun."
Once tipped off, McEuen started looking closely at a range of Schon's work,
enlarging the graphs and playing a game of mix-and-match. He found many
duplicate graphs in different papers on different subjects. Schon was appar­
ently using the same sets of pictures to tell lots of different stories.
In May, McEuen and Sohn formally alerted the editors of Science and
Nature-where Schon and his team had published numerous articles-of the
discrepancies. McEuen and Sohn also informed Schon; his supervisor and
coauthor, Bertram Batlogg; and Bell Labs management that they were blowing
the whistle. Schon immediately insisted that his experiments were fine, and
that the duplicated figures were a simple clerical error for which he now of­
fered substitutes. To Nature he declared he was "confident" of his results. To
Science he said, " I haven't done anything wrong." Batlogg mostly said nothing
at all. A scandal had broken out in the world of physics.
 230 LEONARD CASSUTO

Lucent Technologies, which runs Bell Labs, responded swiftly. Cherry Mur­
ray, head of physical science research, acted with other Bell Labs officials and
appointed an independent committee to look into the matter. The panel was
made up primarily of university physics professors, led by Malcolm Beasley of
Stanford. Their mandate, according to Beasley, is to get the facts and "find out
whether scientific misconduct has occurred."
"Big Physics" is a small world. Very few people can understand, let alone
judge, what experimental physicists do. They work in close professional com­
munities of specialists and subspecialists, conducting expensive experiments
and publishing papers with names like "Gate-Induced Superconductivity in a
Solution-Processed Organic Polymer Film."
But physics is also a field in which millions of taxpayer dollars are spent
every year. Now physics has an accountability problem and the only possible
auditors are other physicists. As the field reels from what may be the biggest
fraud in its history, scientists across the world are alarmed: Bad science can cost
lives-think of the untested 0-rings on the space shuttle Challenger that froze
stiff and caused the ship's tragic explosion. But what about phony science?
Jan Hendrik Schon joined Bell Labs in 1998, just before finishing his Ph.D.
in Konstanz, Germany. His international move was typical; the physics com­
munity is a far-flung network within which virtually all practicing researchers
have connections to specialists in other countries.
But if physics is global, the United States is its financial center. There are
more scientists doing expensive experiments in the U.S. than in any other
country. Most work at universities as professors, but walking in step with fac­
ulty members, attending the same conferences and publishing in the same
journals are corporate-funded researchers at places like Xerox, IBM and Bell
Labs.
Like university departments, science labs operated by giant corporations
depend on income from the larger entity (the university maintains its depart­
ments, while the corporation maintains its lab ) . Both also receive government
money, often to conduct joint ventures. Together, the schools and the corpora­
tions make up one large academic community.
Bell Labs, formerly operated by AT&T, is the most famous of all corporate
science centers. In 77 years of existence, the Labs have hired top-flight scientists
from universities and essentially turned them loose to look into whatever
they've wanted, with the corpo ration footing the bill. If their discoveries had
practical use, that was gn:at. Otherwise, the science was, like much university­
based research, a contribution to common knowledge.
Researchers at Bell Labs were like professors without teaching and other
 B i9 Trouble in the World oj "Bi9 Physics " 23 1

administrative responsibilities. Given up-to-date equipment, funding and gen­

erous salaries, these scientists were pointed in the direction of the unknown
and encouraged to work together to explore it.
The results of this policy have been impressive: Bell Labs scientists have
won numerous Nobel Prizes and other awards. But since AT&T decided in 1996
to split into software and hardware compan ies-with the latter, Lucent Tech­
nologies, retaining Bell Labs-the facility has fallen upon hard times. The
Schon affair is a black eye on an already battered company. In one quarter,
Lucent lost a staggering $8 billion and laid off thousands of employees.
Schon himself was set to leave Bell Labs, to become a director at the Max
Planck Institute in Germany, but the job offer was withdrawn when the scandal
broke. When the news of the duplicated graphs first became public, Schon de­
fended himself vigorously until Lucent imposed a gag order on all its employ­
ees about the matter. After that, he could only sit in silent limbo, waiting for the
Beasley panel to issue its findings.
The duplicated graphs are not the only smoking gun. There's also the seri­
ous problem that despite numerous attempts, no other physicist has repeated
Schon's results. If no one else can repeat the results of an experiment, both ex­
periment and experimenter come under suspicion. "It is part of the process of
science;' says investigative committee head Beasley, "that things get winnowed
out because they don't work."
Physicist Art Ramirez of Los Alamos National Laboratory once told Science
that Schon had "magic hands." Now, says Ramirez, "I'm less sure. I'm getting
less comfortable" with Schon's work. Schon himself appears to have lost his
magic touch. He told Science in the wake of the controversy that he was "trying
as hard as [ I ] can" to duplicate his own results, but somehow the experiments
don't work for him anymore.
They haven't been working for other scientists, either. Physicists around the
country and the world have spent tens of millions of dollars-including fund­
ing from the U.S. Department of Energy-trying to reproduce Schon's key re­
sults. Taxpayers have footed the bill for two years' worth of fruitless and
expensive efforts. "It seemed so plausible;' sighs Arthur Hebard of the Univer­
sity of Florida. ''Almost too good to be true:' Now Hebard wonders, "What's the
trick?"
There are an estimated 100 laboratory groups working on Schon's results in
the United States and around the world. For graduate students basing their
Ph.D. research on Schon's experiments, their education is at stake. Postdoctoral
fellows worry about their prospects for future employment. Some j unior pro­
fessors have tied their bids for tenure to experiments based on Schon's find-
 2J2 L E O NA R D C A S S U T O

ings. Their professional livelihoods are literally at risk. If the results are fake,
how can these people get their careers back? Invoking recent headlines, UCLA's
Heath commented that "this is like the opposite of losing your retirement."
Asked one nervous faculty member, "Can we get a class action suit together?"
When Martin Fleischmann and B. Stanley Pons suddenly walked out of the
University of Utah chemistry department in 1989 claiming that they had solved
our energy problems by producing a "cold fusion" reaction (the heat of such
reactions has reserved them for hydrogen bombs) , scientists showed by
straightforward calculation that the experiment couldn't work. Not surpris­
ingly, no one could repeat the results the two claimed. Though the matter re­
ceived a lot of media coverage, it was a case of routine exposure of a couple of
unknowns.
Schon's work has also never crossed the repeatability threshold. Skepticism
about it was rising before the scandal broke. By the time his colleague McEuen
helped find the duplications, says Cornell's Dan Ralph, "We were having seri­
ous doubts about the science." UCLA's Heath described how when a Schon pa­
per would come out, he would get excited, but after a while "I would begin
worrying a little bit." Sohn, who worked with McEuen to make the matter pub­
lic, says, "The data were too clean . They were what you'd expect theoretically,
not experimentally. People were getting frustrated because no one could repro­
duce the results, and it was hitting a crescendo."
Many physicists now wonder about Schon's incredible productivity. "I am
guilty of extreme gullibility," says Nobel laureate Philip Anderson. "I have to
confess it. We should all have been suspicious of the data almost immediately."
Ramirez of Los Alamos says, "I find it hard to even read that many papers,
much less write them."
Why would Schan rush to publish dubious results if he knew others would
attempt to repeat his experiments? Perhaps, says Heath, Schon was "innocent
and naive:' like Utah's Fleischmann and Pons. One physicist gave voice to a
darker possibility: "If the results are fraudulent, Schon would have to have
some kind of psychological problem ."
Like other academic fields, physics polices itself through a peer review sys­
tem. When a physicist submits a paper for publication, the editor sends it out
to be judged by specialists in the author's field. These referees recommend pub­
lication (sometimes with revision ) or rejection. The system is designed to weed
out substandard work, and to improve promising submissions and make them
publishable. It's supposed to keep things honest.
Peer review also governs external funding. Experimental physicists need
labs to work in, and the equipment in a typical condensed-matter physics lab
 Bi9 Trouble in the World ef "Bi9 Physics" 233

costs about a million dollars. Further funds are required for upkeep, and scien­
tists and their staff need salaries. Universities maintain a lot of the country's
physics labs and pay much of the cost out of tuition and endowment income,
but an important part of any physics professor's job is to look for additional
funding. Corporations are one source, and in cases like Bell Labs, the parent
corporation pays most of the researchers' bills.
Perhaps the biggest single source of funding for scientific research is the
taxpayer. The federal government dispenses about $20 billion a year to scien­
tists and mathematicians through numerous outlets. The National Science
Foundation is the most abundant source, awarding about $5 billion annually.
The Department of Defense also supports many a physics lab, as do NASA and
the Department of Energy. How does the government decide who gets the
money? It invites physicists to Washington to read their colleagues' grant appli­
cations and make the j udgments. "There's a certain amount of trust in the
physicists;' said Jonathan Epstein, science advisor to New Mexico Sen. Jeff
Bingaman, chairman of the Senate Science and Energy Committee. The peer
review system is the means by which that trust is maintained.
The Schon affair has besmirched the peer review process in physics as never
before. Why didn't the peer review system catch the discrepancies in his work?
A referee in a new field doesn't want to "be the bad guy on the block;' says
Dutch physicist Teun Klapwijk, so he generally gives the author the benefit of
the doubt. But physicists did become irritated after a while, says Klapwijk, "that
Schon's flurry of papers continued without increased detail, and with the same
sloppiness and inconsistencies."
Some critics hold the journals responsible. The editors of Science and Na­
ture have stoutly defended their review process in interviews with the London
Times Higher Education Supplement. Karl Ziemelis, one of Nature's physical
science editors, complained of scapegoating, while Donald Kennedy, who edits
Science, asserted that "there is little journals can do about detecting scientific
misconduct."
Maybe not, responds Nobel Prize-winning physicist Philip Anderson of
Princeton, but the way that Science and Nature compete for cutting-edge work
"compromised the review process in this instance." These two industry-leading
publications "decide for themselves what is good science-or good-selling sci­
ence:' says Anderson (who is also a former Bell Labs director) , and their market
consciousness "encourages people to push into print with shoddy results."
Such urgency would presumably lead to hasty review practices. Klapwijk, a su­
perconductivity specialist, said that he had raised objections to a Schon paper
sent to him for review, but that it was published anyway.
 2 34 L E O NARD CASSUTO

Klapwijk points out that the duplicated figures were in separate papers that
weren't necessarily sent to the same people for vetting. But as one physicist ad­
mits, "It's hard to criticize someone else's productivity without sounding like
you're full of sour grapes."
Another reason for the breakdown is the hypnotizing effect of reputation.
When the names of eminent people and places appear on the top of submitted
papers, says Florida physicist Hebard, "reviewers react almost unconsciously"
to their prestige. "People discount reports from groups that aren't well known;'
adds University of Maryland physicist Richard Greene.
"Part of the reason the work was accepted;' says Greene, was because
Schon's coauthor and one-time supervisor Bertram Batlogg put his impri­
matur ( and that of Bell Labs) on it. Batlogg has been a respected superconduc­
tivity physicist for more than two decades.
Batlogg left Bell Labs for a job in Switzerland before he became a cause
celebre. He now stands accused of harboring, if not abetting, scientific fraud.
In his only public pronouncement about the scandal, in a German magazine,
Batlogg said, "If I'm a passenger in a car that drives through a red light, then it's
not my fault."
Most other scientists feel very differently. "People don't want to hear this.
They want to hear a mea culpa. Batlogg allowed this to happen;' says Art
Ramirez of Los Alamos. "Batlogg signed on;' Hebard says. "He's a collaborator,
not a casual passenger. He's been benefiting all along, riding the public wave."
Adds Princeton's Sohn, "If a young driver has a learner's permit, then who's re­
sponsible for him? Batlogg was the licensed driver, and Schon was the student
driver."
"If my student came to me with earth-shattering data, you wouldn't be able
to pry me out of the lab," says Rice University's Douglas Natelson. "I'd be in
there turning the knobs myself." Heath echoes this sentiment: "I'd sit down
there to see how this is being done. I 'd demand to see it several times."
Siegfried Grossman, head of a German research consortium, told a Ger­
man publication that Batlogg is simply making excuses. Coauthors, Grossman
said, must take full responsibility for the contents of their publications. Sohn
says flatly, "I am responsible for what my students publish. If my name is going
to be on a paper, I want to make sure it's right."
Batlogg recruited Schon while Schon was still a graduate student. He
brought Schon into his lab. He sponsored Schon's experiments. And rather
than formally withdraw any papers he might have considered suspicious, he
gave many well-received talks at elite international conferences on the results.
Wonders one American physicist, "What did Batlogg know and when did he
 Bi9 Trouble in the World oj "Bi9 Physics " 23s

know it? I don't see how he can work as a scientist any longer." Added Allen
Goldman of the University of Minnesota, " Batlogg's going to take his lumps on
this one."
What do we as a society expect from our scientists? We equate the scientific
method with abstract inquiry, but as biologist Stephen Jay Gould was fond of
pointing out, you have to be looking for something in the first place-and your
goal is bound to affect your search. Science, Gould suggested, involves a bal­
ancing act between objective methods and subjective goals.
There is one shin ing rule, though: no cheating. Science, like any academic
field, demands scrupulous, rational honesty. "My goal may be to win a prize;'
says Nobel laureate Horst Stormer, "but my duty is to report what I have ob­
served in the most objective way that I can. I say this in the strongest terms.
This is what I expect from my colleagues, from my graduate students, at all lev­
els of the field."
American intellectual culture hasn't exactly been showcasing that sort of
rectitude and responsibility lately. The late Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns
Goodwin, two historians who admitted to plagiarism in their books, have seen
their individual reputations suffer for their acts, and they've tainted their disci­
pline at the same time. Now we may have to make room for another in the pub­
lic stocks. Schon, his colleagues say, is also risking the reputation of an entire
field.
Physicists everywhere are relying heavily on the Beasley committee to set
things right. Some hope to polish tarnished reputations. Christian Kloc, for ex­
ample, is a chemist on the Schon team whose job was to supply tiny crystals for
the experiments. Kloc's work appears to be unrelated to the disputed data, but
as one physicist put it, "Who knows anymore?" But there is more at stake than
the careers of individuals. If the accusations turn out to be true, says Cornell's
Dan Ralph, "This is the biggest fraud in the history of modern physics."
McEuen, the man who helped to expose the problem, has confidence in the
investigation. Beasley himself is more circumspect. Acknowledging that the
physics community may be expecting more from his committee's report than
its mandate suggests, Beasley says only that "at the end of the day, we need to
demonstrate that we took this very seriously and that we did a good job."
More immediately, Dan Ralph of Cornell remains concerned about the ca­
reers of younger physicists that may have been jeopardized, and by the unrelia­
bility the whole system now shows. "Checks and balances didn't work the way
they should have;' he said. As a result, "The fallout from this will hurt," accord­
ing to Hebard. Many fear that Bell Labs will not recover. Because Schon's re­
sults are now suspect, Hebard and other scientists worry that funding for a
 2 36 LEONARD CASSUTO

highly promising area will now dry up. But Hebard sees the effect of the scan­
dal extending beyond the matter of organic superconductivity. "We thought we
were inviolate;' Hebard said. "Scientists are easy to fool because you believe
what your colleagues tell you. I would hope that the public wouldn't conflate
this with Enron and WorldCom, but it is inflating the profit statement:'
And when the news reaches the nation's high school physics classrooms?
"Science is scientists," said William Wallace, teacher and head of the science de­
partment at Washington's Georgetown Day School. "It's a human activity."
Still, Wallace concedes that "A little trust is chipped away every time something
like this happens." Pointing to the "heroes I had growing up"-like Richard
Feynman, the maverick Nobel Prize winner who inspired generations of
physics students-Wallace notes that now "there's an incredible amount of
pressure on young and midcareer scientists. They always need to know where
the next grant is coming from." The result is "careerism;' not heroism or pur­
suit of the truth. And that leaves the teacher with a question: "In the end, if
there isn't respect for scientific truth, then what have you got?"
 D E N N IS OvERBYE

Ha wki ng 's Breakth ro ugh Is

Still a n Enigm a
F R O M TH E NE W YO R K TIM E S

Stephen Hawkin9, perhaps the world 's mostfamous scientist, is known to the
worldfor his best-sellin9 books andfor his brilliant mind, undimmed by his
failin9 body. Jn the world ef physics he is known for somethin9 else-his
startlin9 discoveries about the nature ef those most mysterious celestial ob­
jects, black holes. Thirty years qfter his key insi9ht, scientists are still 9rap­
plin9 with its implications. Dennis Overbye reports on their proaress.

n the fall of 1973 Dr. Stephen W. Hawking, who has spent his entire profes­

I sional career at the University of Cambridge, found himself ensnared in a

horrendous and embarrassing calculation. Attempting to investigate the
microscopic properties of black holes, the gravitational traps from which not
even light can escape, Dr. Hawking discovered to his disbelief that they could
leak energy and particles into space, and even explode in a fountain of high­
energy sparks.
Dr. Hawking first held off publishing his results, fearing he was mistaken.
When he reported them the next year in the journal Nature, he titled his paper
simply "Black Hole Explosions?" His colleagues were dazzled and mystified.
Nearly 30 years later, they are still mystified. When they gathered in Cambridge
in January 2002, to mark Dr. Hawking's 6oth birthday with a weeklong work-
 23s DENNIS OvERBYE

shop titled "The Future of Theoretical Physics and Cosmology:' the ideas
spawned by his calculation and its aftermath often took center stage.
They are ideas that touch on just about every bone-jarring abstruse con­
cept in modern physics.
"Black holes are still fundamentally enigmatic objects:' said Dr. Andrew
Strominger, a Harvard physicist, who attended. "In fundamental physics, grav­
ity and quantum mechanics are the big things we don't understand. Hawking's
discovery of black hole radiation was of fundamental importance to that con­
nection."
Black holes are the prima donnas of Einstein's general theory of relativity,
which explains the force known as gravity as a warp in space-time caused by
matter and energy. But even Einstein could not accept the idea that the warp­
ing could get so extreme, say in the case of a collapsing star, that space could
wrap itself completely around some object like a magician's cloak, causing it to
disappear as a black hole.
Dr. Hawking's celebrated breakthrough resulted partly from a fight. He was
hoping to disprove the contention of Jacob Bekenstein, then a graduate student
at Princeton and now a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, that
the area of a black hole's boundary, the point of no return in space, was a mea­
sure of the entropy of a black hole. In thermodynamics, the study of heat and
gases, entropy is a measure of wasted energy or disorder, which might seem like
a funny concept to crop up in black holes. But in physics and computer science,
entropy is also a measure of the information capacity of a system-the number
of bits that it would take to describe its internal state. In effect, a black hole or
any other system was like a box of Scrabble letters-the more letters in the box
the more words you could make, and the more chances of gibberish.
According to the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy of a closed
system always stays the same or increases, and Dr. Hawking's own work had
shown that the hole's surface area always increased, a process that seemed to
ape that law.
But Dr. Hawking, citing classical physics, argued that an object with en­
tropy had to have a temperature, and anything with a temperature-from a
fevered brow to a star-must radiate heat and light with a characteristic spec­
trum. If a black hole could not radiate, it could have no temperature and thus
no entropy. But that was before gravity, which shapes the cosmos, met quan­
tum theory, the paradoxical rules that describe the behavior of matter and
forces within it. When Dr. Hawking added a touch of quantum uncertainty to
the standard Einsteinian black hole model, particles started emerging. At first
he was annoyed, but when he realized this "Hawking radiation" would have the
 Hawkin9 's Breakthrou9h Is Still an Eni9ma 2 39

thermal spectrum predicted by thermodynamic theo ry, he co ncluded his cal­

culation was right.
But there was a problem. The radiation was random, Dr. Hawking's theory
said. As a result, all the details about whatever had fallen into the black hole
could be completely erased-a violation of a hallowed tenet of quantum the­
ory, which holds that it should always be possible to run the film backwards
and find out the details of how something started-whether an elephant or a
Volkswagen had been tossed into the black hole, for example. If he was right,
Dr. Hawking suggested, quantum theory might have to be modified. Black
holes, he said in his papers and talks in the late 1970s, were ravagers of informa­
tion, spewing indeterminacy and undermining law and order in the universe.
"God not o nly plays dice with the universe:' Dr. Hawking said, inverting the
phrase by which Einstein had famously rejected quantum uncertainty, "but
sometimes throws them where we can't see them:' Such statements aroused the
attention of particle physicists. Weird as it may be, quantum theory is nonethe­
less the foundation on which much of the modern world is built, everything
from transistors to CDs, and it is the language in which all of the fundamental
laws of physics, save gravity, are expressed. "This cannot be;' Dr. Leonard
Susskind, a theorist at Stanford, recalled saying to himself.
It was the beginning of what Dr. Susskind calls an adversarial relationship.
"Stephen Hawking is one of the most obstinate people in the world; no, he is
the most infuriating person in the universe;' Dr. Susskind told the birthday
workshop, as Dr. Hawking grinned in the back row.
In the ensuing 20 years, opinions have split mostly along party lines. Parti­
cle physicists like Dr. Susskind and Dr. Gerard 't Hooft, a physicist at the Uni­
versity of Utrecht and the 1999 Nobel Prize winner, defend quantum theory
and say that the information must get out somehow, perhaps subtly encoded in
the radiation. Another possibility-that the information was left behind in
some new kind of elementary particle when the black hole evaporated-seems
to have fallen from favor.
Relativity experts like Dr. Hawking and his friend the Caltech physicist Dr.
Kip Thorne were more likely to believe in the power of black holes to keep se­
crets. In 1997, Dr. Hawking and Dr. Thorne put their money where the black
hole mouth was, betting Dr. John Preskill, a Caltech particle physicist, a set of
encyclopedias that information was destroyed in a black hole.
To date neither side has felt obliged to pay up.
 2 40 DENNIS OvERBYE

Wr i t i ng o n t h e Wa ll

D R . S u s s K I N D A N D O T H E R S have argued that nothing ever makes it

into the black hole to begin with because, in accord with Einstein, everything at
the boundary, where time slows, would appear to an outside observer to
"freeze" and then fade, spreading out on the surface where it could produce
subtle distortions in the Hawking radiation.
In principle, then, information about what had fallen onto the black hole
could be read in the radiation and reconstructed; it would not have disap­
peared.
The confusion had arisen, Dr. Susskind explained, because physicists had
been trying to imagine the situation from the viewpoint of God rather than
that of a particular observer who had to be either in the black hole or outside,
but not both places at once. When the accounting is done properly, he said,
"No observer sees a violation of the laws of physics."
The information paradox made it important for theorists to try to go be­
yond thermodynamic analogies and actually calculate how black holes store
information or entropy. But there was a catch. According to a well-known for­
mula developed by the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (and engraved on
his tombstone), the entropy of a system could be determined by counting the
number of ways its contents could be arranged.
In order to enumerate the possible ways of arranging the contents of a
black hole, physicists needed a theory of what was inside. By the mid-199os
they had one: string theory, which portrays the forces and particles of nature,
including those responsible for gravity, as tiny vibrating strings.
In this theory, a black hole is a tangled melange of strings and multidimen­
sional membranes known as "D-branes." In a virtuoso calculation in 1995, Dr.
Strominger and Dr. Cumrun Vafa, also of Harvard, untangled the innards of an
"extremal" black hole, in which electrical charge just balanced gravity.
Such a hole would stop evaporating and would thus appear static, allowing
the researchers to count its quantum states. They calculated that the entropy of
a black hole was its area divided by four-just as Dr. Hawking and Dr. Beken­
stein said it would be.
The result was a huge triumph for string theory. "If string theory had been
wrong, that would have been deadly;' Dr. Strominger said.
The success of the Harvard calculation has encouraged some particle
physicists to conclude that black holes can be analyzed with the tools of quan­
tum mechanics, and thus that the information issue has been resolved. But
 Ha wkina 's Breakthrou9h Is Still an Eni9ma 24 1

others say this has yet to be accomplished-among them Dr. Strominger, who
added, "It remains an unsettled issue."

D e9rees ef Freedom
P E R H A P S T H E M O S T M Y S T E R I O u s and far-reaching consequence
of the exploding black hole is the idea that the universe can be compared to a
hologram, in which information for a three-dimensional image can be stored
on a flat surface, like an image on a bank card.
In the 1980s, extending his and Dr. Hawking's work, Dr. Bekenstein showed
that the entropy and thus the information needed to describe any object were
limited by its area. "Entropy is a measure of how much information you can
pack into an object;' he explained. "The limit on entropy is a limit on informa­
tion."
This was a strange result. Normally you might think that there were as many
choices-or degrees of freedom about the inner state of an object-as there
were points inside that space. But according to the so-called Bekenstein bound,
there were only as many choices as there were points on its outer surface.
The "points" in this case are regions with the dimensions of 10-33 centime­
ters, the so-called Planck length, that physicists believe are the "grains" of
space. According to the theory, each of these can be assigned a value of zero or
one-yes or no-like the bits in a computer.
"What happens when you squeeze too much information into an object is
that you pack more and more energy in;' said Rafael Bousso, a physicist at the
Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa
Barbara. But if it gets too heavy for its size, it becomes a black hole, and then
"the game is over;' as he put it. "Like a piano with lots of keys but you can't
press more than five of them at once or the piano will collapse:'
The holographic principle, first suggested by Dr. 't Hooft in 1993 and elabo­
rated by Dr. Susskind a year later, says in effect that if you can't use the other pi­
ano keys, they aren't really there. "We had a completely wrong picture of the
piano;' explained Dr. Bousso. The normal theories that physics uses to describe
events in space-time are redundant in some surprising and as yet mysterious
way. "We clearly see the world the way we see a hologram;' Dr. Bousso said. "We
see three dimensions. When you look at one of those chips, it looks pretty real,
but in our case the illusion is perfect."
Dr. Susskind added: "We don't read the hologram. We are the hologram."
The holographic principle, these physicists say, can be applied to any space­
time, but they have no idea why it works.
 242 DEN N IS 0VERBYE

" It really should be mysterious;' Dr. Strominger said. "If it's really true, it's a
deep and beautiful property of our universe-but not an obvious one:'

Th e Fron t i ers ef B e a u ty
T H AT B E A u T Y , however, comes at a price, said Dr. 't Hoo ft, namely cause
and effect. If the information about what we are doing resides on distant imag­
inary walls, "how does it appear to us sitting here that we are obeying the local
laws of physics?" he asked the audience at the Hawking birthday workshop.
Quantum mechanics had been saved, he declared, but it still might need to
be supplanted by laws that would preserve what physicists call "naive locality."
Dr. 't Hooft acknowledged that there had been many futile attempts to
eliminate quantum mechanics' seemingly nonsensical notions, like particles
that can instantaneously react to one another across light-years of space. In
each case, however, he said there were assumptions, or "fine print;' that might
not hold up in the end.
Recent observations have raised the stakes for ideas like holography and
black hole information. The results suggest that the expansion of the universe
is accelerating. If it goes on, astronomers say, distant galaxies will eventually be
moving away so fast that we will not be able to see them anymore.
Living in such a universe is like being surrounded by a horizon, glowing
just like a black hole horizon, over which information is forever disappearing.
And since this horizon has a finite size, physicists say, there is a limit to the
amount of complexity and information the universe can hold, ultimately
dooming life.
Physicists admit that they do not know how to practice physics or string
theory in such a space, called a de Sitter space after the Dutch astronomer
Willem de Sitter, who first solved Einstein's equations to find such a space. "De
Sitter space is a new frontier;' said Dr. Strominger, who hopes that the tech­
niques and attention that were devoted to black holes in the last decade will en­
able physicists to make headway in understanding a universe that may actually
represent the human condition.
Dr. Bousso noted that it was only in the last few years, with the discovery of
D-branes, that it had been possible to solve black holes. What other surprises
await in string theory? "We have no idea how small or large a piece of the the­
ory we haven't seen yet;' he said.
In the meantime, pt:rhaps in imitation of Boltzmann, Dr. Hawking de­
clared at the end of the meeting that he wanted the formula for black hole en­
tropy engraved on his own tombstone.
 R I C H A R D C . LEWO N T I N
AN D RICHARD LEVIN S

Stephen Jay G o uld: What D oes It

Mean t o Be a Radical?
FROM M O N TH L Y R E VIE W

A 9reat scientist who also strived to reach the wider public, Stephen Jay
Gould achieved the ni9h-impossible, doin9 9roundbreakin9 work in evolu­
tionary biolo9y while writin9 essays and books ef9reat ele9ance and broad
popular appeal. In this appreciation ef his life and career, two ef his col­
lea9ues at Harvard reflect on how Gould's work demonstrated the value ef
takin9 a radical approach to science.

n early 2002, Stephen Gould developed lung cancer, which spread so

I quickly that there was no hope of survival. He died on May 20, 2002, at the
age of sixty. Twenty years earlier, he had escaped death from mesothe­
lioma, induced, we all supposed, by some exposure to asbestos. Although his
cure was complete, he never lost the consciousness of his mortality and gave
the impression, at least to his friends, of an almost cheerful acceptance of the
inevitable. Having survived one cancer that was probably the consequence of
an environmental poison, he succumbed to another.
The public intellectual and political life of Steve Gould was extraordinary,
if not unique. First, he was an evolutionary biologist and historian of science
whose intellectual work had a major impact on our views of the process of evo-
 RICHARD c. LEWONTIN AND RICHARD LEVINS

lution. Second, he was, by far, the most widely known and influential expositor
of science who has ever written for a lay public. Third, he was a consistent po­
litical activist in support of socialism and in opposition to all forms of colo­
nialism and oppression. The figure he most closely resembled in these respects
was the British biologist of the 1930s, J. B. S. Haldane, a founder of the modern
genetical theory of evolution, a wonderful essayist on science for the general
public, and an idiosyncratic Marxist and columnist for The Daily Worker who
finally split with the Communist Party over its demand that scientific claims
follow Party doctrine.
What characterizes Steve Gould's work is its consistent radicalism. The
word radical has come to be synonymous with extreme in everyday usage:
Monthly Review is a radical journal to the readers of The Progressive; Steve
Gould underwent radical surgery when tumors were removed from his brain;
and a radical is someone who is out in left (or right) field. But a brief excursion
into the Oxford English Dictionary reminds us that the root of the word radical
is, in fact, radix, the Latin word for root. To be radical is to consider things from
their very root, to go back to square one, to try to reconstitute one's actions and
ideas by building them from first principles. The impulse to be radical is the
impulse to ask, "How do I know that?" and, "Why am I following this course
rather than another?" Steve Gould had that radical impulse and he followed it
where it counted.
First, Steve was a radical in his science. His best-known contribution to
evolutionary biology was the theory of punctuated equilibrium that he devel­
oped with his colleague Niles Eldridge. The standard theory of the change in
the shape of organisms over evolutionary time is that it occurs constantly,
slowly, and gradually with more or less equal changes happening in equal time
intervals. This seems to be the view that Darwin had, although almost anything
can be read from Darwin's nineteenth-century prose. Modern genetics has
shown that any heritable change in development that is at all likely to survive
will cause only a slight change in the organism, that such mutations occur at a
fairly constant rate over long time periods and that the force of natural selec­
tion for such small changes is also of small magnitude. These facts all point to a
more or less constant and slow change in species over long periods.
When one looks at the fossil record, however, observed changes are much
more irregular. There are more or less abrupt changes in shape between fossils
that succeed each other in geological time with not much evidence for the sup­
posed gradual intermediates between them. The usual explanation is that fos­
sils are relatively rare and we are only seeing occasional snapshots of the actual
progression of organisms. This is a perfectly coherent theory, but Eldridge and
 Stephen Jay Gould: What Does It Mean to Be a Radical? 245

Gould went back to square one, and questioned whether the rate of change un­
der natural selection was really as constant as everybody assumed. By examin­
ing a few fossil series in which there was a much more complete temporal
record than is usual, they found evidence of long periods of virtually no change
punctuated by short periods during which most of the change in shape ap­
peared to occur. They general ized this finding into a theory that evolution oc­
curs in fits and starts and provided several possible explanations, including
that much of evolution occurred after sudden major changes in environment.
Steve Gould went even further in his emphasis on the importance of major ir­
regular events in the history of life. He placed great importance on sudden
mass extinction of species after collisions of large comets with the Earth and
the subsequent repopulation of the living world from a restricted pool of
surviving species. The temptation to see some simple connection between
Steve's theory of episodic evolution and his adherence to Marx's theory of his­
torical stages should be resisted. The connection is much deeper. It lies in his
radicalism.
Another aspect of Gould's radicalism in science was in the form of his gen­
eral approach to evolutionary explanation. Most biologists concerned with the
history of life and its present geographical and ecological distribution assume
that natural selection is the cause of all features of living and extinct organisms
and that the task of the biologist, insofar as it is to provide explanations, is to
come up with a reasonable story of why any particular feature of a species was
favored by natural selection. If, when the human species lost most of its body
hair in evolving from its ape-like ancestor, it still held on to eyebrows, then eye­
brows must be good things. A great emphasis of Steve's scientific writing was to
reject this simplistic Panglossian adaptationism, and to go back to the variety
of fundamental biological processes in the search for the causes of evolution­
ary change. He argued that evolution was a result of random as well as selective
forces and that characteristics may be the physical byproducts o f selection for
other traits. He also argued strongly for the historical contingency of evolu­
tionary change. Something may be selected fo r some reason at one time and
then for an entirely different reason at another time, so that the end product is
the result of the whole history of an evolutionary line, and cannot be ac­
counted for by its present adaptive significance. Thus, for instance, humans are
the way we are because land vertebrates reduced many fin patterns to four
limbs, mammals' hearts happen to lean to the left while birds' hearts lean to the
right, the bones of the inner ear were part of the jaw of our reptilian ancestors,
and it j ust happened to get dry in east Africa at a crucial time in our evolution­
ary history. Therefore, if intelligent life should ever visit us from elsewhere in
 2 46 RICHARD C. LEWONTIN AND RICHARD LEVINS

the universe, we should not expect them to have a human shape, suffer from
sexist hierarchy, or have a command deck on their spaceship.
Gould also emphasized the importance of developmental relations be­
tween different parts of an organism. A famous case was his study of the Irish
elk, a very large extinct deer with enormous antlers, much greater in propor­
tion to the animal's size than is seen in modern deer. The invented adaptation­
ist story was that male deer antlers are under constant natural selection to
increase in size because males use them in combat when they compete for ac­
cess to females. The Irish elk pushed the evolution of this form of machismo
too far and their antlers became so unwieldy that they could not carry on the
normal business of life and so became extinct. What Steve showed was that for
deer in general, species with larger body size have antlers that are more than
proportionately larger, a consequence of a differential growth rate of body size
and antler size during development. In fact, Irish elk had antlers of exactly the
size one would predict from their body size and no special story of natural se­
lection is required.
None of Gould's arguments about the complexity of evolution overthrows
Darwin. There are no new paradigms, but perfectly respectable "normal sci­
ence" that adds richness to Darwin's original scheme. They typify his radical
rule for explanation: always go back to basic biological processes and see where
that takes you.
Steve Gould's greatest fame was not as a biologist but as an explicator of
science for a lay public, in lectures, essays, and books. The relation between sci­
entific knowledge and social action is a problematic one. Scientific knowledge
is an esoteric knowledge, possessed and understood by a small elite, yet the use
and control of that knowledge by private and public powers is of great social
consequence to all. How is there to be even a semblance of a democratic state
when vital knowledge is in the hands of a self-interested few? The glib answer
offered is that there are instruments of the popularization of science, chiefly
science journalism and the popular writings of scientists, which create an in­
formed public. But that popularization is itself usually an instrument of obfus­
cation and the pressing of elite agendas.
Science journalists suffer from a double disability: First, no matter how
well-educated, intelligent, and well-motivated, they must, in the end, trust
what scientists tell them. Even a biologist must trust what a physicist says about
quantum mechanics. A large fraction of science reporting begins with a press
conference or release produced by a scientific institution. "Scientists at the
Blackleg Institute announced today the discovery of the gene for susceptibility
to repetitive motion injury." Second, the media for which science reporters
 Stephen jay Gould: What Does It Mean to Be a Radical? 247

work put immense pressure on them to write dramatic accounts. Where is the
editor who will allot precious column inches to an article about science whose
message is that it is all very complicated, that no predictions can be made, that
there are serious experimental difficulties in the way of finding the truth of the
matter, and that we may never know the answer? Third, the esoteric nature of
scientific knowledge places almost insuperable rhetorical barriers between
even the most knowledgeable journalist and the reader. It is not generally real­
ized that a transparent explanation in terms accessible to the lay reader re­
quires the deepest possible knowledge of the matter on the part of the writer.
Scientists, and their biographers, who write books for a lay public are usu­
ally concerned to press uncritically the romance of the intellectual life, the
wonders o f their science, and to propagandize for yet greater support of their
work. Where is the heart so hardened that it cannot be captivated by Stephen
Hawking and his intellectual enterprise? Even when the intention is simply to
inform a lay public about a body of scientific knowledge, the complications of
the actual state of understanding are so great that the pressure to tell a simple
and appealing story is irresistible.
Steve Gould was an exception. His three hundred essays on scientific ques­
tions, published in his monthly column in Natural History Magazine, many of
which were widely distributed in book form, combined a truthful and subtle
explication of scientific findings and problems, with a technique of exposition
that neither condescended to his readers nor oversimplified the science. He
told the complex truth in a way that his lay readers could understand, while en­
livening his prose with references to baseball, choral music, and church archi­
tecture. Of course, when we consider writing for a popular audience, we have
to be clear about what we mean by popular. The Uruguayan writer Eduardo
Galeano asked what we mean by writing for "the people" when most of our
people are illiterate. In the North there is less formal illiteracy, but Gould wrote
for a highly educated, even if nonspecialist, audience for whom choral music
and church architecture provided more meaningful metaphors than the scien­
tific ideas themselves.
Most of the subjects Steve dealt with were meant to be illustrative precisely
of the complexity and diversity of the processes and products of evolution. De­
spite the immense diversity of matters on which he wrote there was, under­
neath, a unifying theme: that the complexity of the living world cannot b �
treated as a manifestation of some grand general principle, but that each case
must be understood by examining it from the ground up and as the realization
of one out of many material paths of causation.
In his political life Steve was part of the general movement o f the left. He
 248 RICHARD C. LEWONTIN AND RICHARD LEVINS

was active in the anti-Vietnam War movement, in the work of Science for the
People, and of the New York Marxist School. He identified himself as a Marxist
but, as with Darwinism, it is never quite certain what that identification im­
plies. Despite our close comradeship in many things over many years, we never
had a discussion of Marx's theory of history or of political economy. More to
the point, however, by insisting on his adherence to a Marxist viewpoint, he
took the opportunity offered to him by his immense fame and legitimacy as a
public intellectual to make a broad public think again about the validity of a
Marxist analysis.
At the level of actual political struggles, his most important activities were
in the fight against creationism and in the campaign to destroy the legitimacy
of biological determinism including sociobiology and racism. He argued be­
fore the Arkansas State Legislature that differences among evolutionists or
unsolved evolutionary problems do not undermine the demonstration of evo­
lution as an organizing principle for understanding life. He was one of the au­
thors of the original manifesto challenging the claim of sociobiology that there
is an evolutionarily derived and hard-wired human nature that guarantees the
perpetuation of war, racism, the inequality of the sexes, and entrepreneurial
capitalism. He continued throughout his career to attack this ideology and
show the shallowness of its supposed roots in genetics and evolution. His most
significant contribution to the delegitimation of biological determinism, how­
ever, was his widely read exposure of the racism and dishonesty of prominent
scientists, The Mismeasure of Man. Here again, Gould showed the value of go­
ing back to square one.
Not content simply to show the evident class prejudice and racism ex­
pressed by American, English, and European biologists, anthropologists, and
psychologists prior to the Second World War, he actually examined the pri­
mary data on which they based their claims of the larger brains and superior
minds of northern Europeans. In every case the samples had been deliberately
biased, or the data misrepresented, or even invented, or the conclusions mis­
stated. The consistently fraudulent data on IQ produced by Cyril Burt had al­
ready been exposed by Leo Kamin, but this might have been dismissed as
unique pathology in an otherwise healthy body of inquiry. The evidence pro­
duced by Steve Gould of pervasive data cooking by an array of prominent in­
vestigators made it clear that Burt was not aberrant, but typical. It is widely
agreed that ideological commitments may have an unconscious effect on the
directions and conclusions of scientists. But generalized deliberate fraud in the
interests of a social agenda? What more radical attack on the institutions of
"objective" science could one imagine?
 Stephen Jay Gould: Wh a t D oes It Mean to Be a Radical? 2 49

Being a radical in the sense that informs this memorial is not easy because
it involves a constant questioning of the bases of claims and actions, not only of
others, but also of our own. No one, not even Steve Gould, could claim to suc­
ceed in being consistently radical, but, as Rabbi Tarfon wrote, "It is not incum­
bent on us to succeed, but neither are we free to refrain from the struggle."
 A b o u t t h e C o n tr i b u t o rs

NATA L I E A N G I E R , whose science writing for The New York Times won her the
1991 Pulitzer Prize, started her career as a founding staff member of Discover
magazine, where her beat was biology. In 1990 she joined the Times, where she
has covered genetics, evolutionary biology, medicine, and other subjects. Her
work has appeared in a number of major publications and anthologies, and she
is the author of three books: Na tural Obsessions, about the world of cancer re­
search ( recently reissued in a new paperback edition) ; The Beauty of the
Beastly; and the national bestseller, Woman: An Intimate Geography, published
originally in 1999 and now available in paperback. She was the editor for
Houghton Mifflin's The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2002, and
she is currently working on a new book, The Canon: What Scientists Wish That
Everyone Knew About Science. She is also the recipient of the American Associa­
tion for the Advancement of Science-Westinghouse Award for excellence in
science journalism and the Lewis Thomas Award for distinguished writing in
the life sciences. She lives in Takoma Park, Maryland, with her husband, Rick
Weiss, a science reporter for The Washington Post, and their daughter, Kather­
ine Ida Weiss Angier.
''As children," she reports, "my younger brother and I sneaked in a middling
amount of junk television. I say 'sneaked' because, should my father happen on
us watching, say, Gilligan's Island or The Flintstones, he could match King Lear
 252 A b o u t t h e Co n tr i b u t ors

in howling rage, once going so far as to throw a heavy object against the televi­
sion screen. Yet through that cracked screen our entire family each week
watched the one show that my father loved: Star Trek-the original series, of
course. I, too, adored all things Enterprise : Bones McCoy and his eye bags, Cap­
tain Kirk and his ever- ripping shirts, the cosmic love-ins, the beehive hairdos,
the Star Fleet-issue miniskirts.
"I wrote my story about interstellar space travel as a kind of paean to Star
Trek. Despite the seductive scenarios described in the story, I'm skeptical that
we'll get very far in our space travels, and more doubtful still that we will ever
encounter alien civilizations. The distances between stars are just too huge.
Nevertheless, I can't help wishing that someday, one of my descendents will
have cause to utter, in all seriousness, that magic command: 'Beam me up,
Scotty. Beam me up now.' "

PETER CANBY, the head of fact-checking at The New Yorker, is the author of
The Heart of the Sky: Travels Among the Maya. He has written articles and re­
views relating to Latin America and the natural world for numerous publica­
tions. In addition to traveling extensively throughout the world, he has worked
on a scallop dragger and built a solar-heated house. He lives in New York City.
"Since my trip through Nouabale-Ndoki, much has changed:' he says.
"There is now not just a road to Makao; Makao has become a logging depot
with Central African traders, prostitutes and wild price inflation. New sawmills
ring the park and a capillary network of logging roads creeps ever closer. So far,
however, thanks to outstanding cooperation between the Wildlife Conserva­
tion Society (the primary park administrator) and Congolaise Industrielle des
Bois (the logging company that is cutting most of the land surrounding
Nouabale-Ndoki), the park itself has held up pretty well. But who knows how
long that will last? Nouabale-Ndoki's preservation is the result of a distress­
ingly thin act of institutional faith.
" For this reason, several readers told me they found this piece depressing. I
hadn't thought of it that way. Consider that studies of the oldest Nouabale­
N doki trees show a uniform age of a thousand or so years. Consider also that
the park's sandy streams contain numerous small, black, petrified oil-palm
nuts that have been carbon-dated to the same period. The fact that oil palms
are not indigenous to the Nouabale-Ndoki area and are a marker of West
African civilization leads researchers to suspect that the Nouabale-Ndoki river
valleys were settled and then abandoned a thousand years ago. By whom is not
at all clear. Everything changes. Everything is mysterious."
 A b o u t t h e Con t r i b u t ors 2 _s- 3

LEONARD CAssuTo is an associate professor of English at Fordham Univer­

sity. He is the author of The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American
Literature and Culture (1997) , and the editor of two other volumes. Currently at
work on a literary and cultural history of twentieth-century American crime
fiction, he also writes frequently on academic politics. He lives in Washington,
D. C.
"The scandal at Bell Labs;' he writes, "is at least as much about the process
by which scientific knowledge is endorsed and disseminated as it is about sci­
ence itsel( The story of the Jan Hendrik Schon affair initially intrigued me be­
cause I thought it m ight lead to a scientific version of the culture wars, with
scientists coming under hostile scrutiny from groups that help finance them. It
didn't turn out that way.
"The Beasley commission (whose report is available online at http://
www. lucent.com/news_events/researchreview.html) found that Schon had
committed scientific misconduct. Lucent Technologies immediately fired him
and he remains disgraced. After a brief flurry of editorializing by the general
press, any further outward ripples from the scandal were contained. Over a pe­
riod of months following h is dismissal, many of Schon's papers-not just the
ones cited in the Beasley report-were formally retracted. The crisis passed.
"The Beasley report has provoked some salutary reform efforts by physi­
cists. In particular, the committee stressed their discomfort with Schon's for­
mer mentor and supervisor Bertram Batlogg's role in the affair, even as they
noted that he hadn't violated any existing guidelines for scientific misconduct.
The report essentially called for new guidelines to be written to cover what Bat­
logg did-and what he didn't do. The American Physical Society duly ap­
proved a set of supplementary guidelines for coauthors and collaborators in
late 2002, and at the same time endorsed a proposal for all aspiring physicists to
take a course in scientific ethics. The American federal government, whose
guidelines for scientific conduct remain the international standard, hasn't
done anything yet. Batlogg himself reversed his previous course of denial and
elusiveness after the Beasley report came out. He circulated an apology by
email to many physicists, including those who had publicly criticized him. This
effort at rehabilitation has not exactly succeeded for him; a vocal group in the
physics community, led by Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin of Stanford, con­
tinues to hold Batlogg accountable for lack of scientific professionalism.
"There's also the matter of peer review. Most scholars in the humanities
view the peer review system the same way that Winston Churchill viewed
democracy: as the worst form of government, except for all the others. Physi-
 2 54 A b o u t t h e Con t r i b u t ors

cists, on the other hand, trust the system as a way of separating good work from
bad, and they want to protect it. Some of my sources wrote to me after Schon
was fired to express relief that peer review had worked after all. But had it? It
seems to me that Schon was exposed not by the formal peer review process, but
by conscientious whistle-blowers in his profession. The inability of his fellow
scientists to duplicate his results would presumably have come a cropper at
some point, but that hadn't happened yet. Who knows how long it would have
taken? And what about the next time?"

TREVOR C O RS O N began journalistic writing as a teenager traveling in Asia

and was among the first generation of American students to attend college in
the People's Republic of China. He went on to earn a B.A. from Princeton Uni­
versity in East Asian Studies and lived for several years in Buddhist temples in
Japan. When he returned to the United States he moved to a small island off the
Maine coast and worked as a commercial fisherman. Subsequently he was
managing editor of Transition, a journal based at Harvard University; under
his direction Transition won the Alternative Press Award for international re­
porting three times and was nominated for a National Magazine Award in gen­
eral excellence. His articles and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly,
The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and other publi­
cations. His first book, to be published by HarperCollins next summer, will
take up where the article in this volume leaves off. The book tells the story of an
unusual collaboration between a community of Maine lobstermen and an ec­
centric group of scientists, detailing along the way shocking and often humor­
ous revelations about the secret life of the American lobster.
"During the summers of my childhood:' he explains, "I lived with my
grandparents on Islesford, the Maine island described in 'Stalking the Ameri­
can Lobster.' As a teenager I yearned to work aboard a lobster boat. After at­
tending college and spending five years in East Asia I returned to Islesford and
became a 'sternman.' For the next two years I woke at four-thirty and worked
ten- and twelve-hour days hauling up traps. It was a grueling routine, but an
exciting time to be lobstering, because the catch in Maine was skyrocketing.
While the scientists charged with managing the lobster resource warned of
overfishing, I witnessed the homegrown conservation techniques the lobster­
men practiced. When I traded in my fish-oily gloves for a pen and wrote the ar­
ticle, I learned more about lobsters than I imagined there was to know, but I
learned a more basic lesson as well. Despite a childhood on Islesford my back­
ground is as far away from commercial fishing as you can get-my father was a
 About the Contributors 2ss

scientist, and a staunch conservationist. The lobstermen of Islesford taught me

that people who aren't scientists, but whose daily lives depend on an intimate
understanding of the natural world, can be conservationists too:'

J o s E P H D ' A G N E S E is a journalist and children's book author who lives in

Hoboken, New Jersey. He is coauthor, with Nell Newman, of The Newman's
Own Organics Guide to a Good Life (Villard/Random House) .
H e writes: "This story was suggested t o me b y a hematologist who hap­
pened to remark on the high costs associated with using chimps in research.
Scientists I approached were unwilling to be interviewed about their biomed­
ical work with primates, presumably because they feared exposure or reprisals
from activists. Still hoping to put a human face on the issue, I visited the Fauna
sanctuary. I happened to be there the day one of the chimps took sick and died.
I came back and wrote about what I'd witnessed. In the end the faces at the cen­
ter of the piece were not human at all."

T H O M A S E I S N E R was born in Germany and grew up in Uruguay. He received

his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard, and has been a mem­
ber of the Cornell faculty since 1957. An enthusiastic entomophile, he has writ­
ten over four hundred papers on insects, their behavior, communicative skills,
and survival strategies. A widely acclaimed photographer, and recipient of
many scientific awards, he is an avid musician and dedicated conservationist.
He has helped make award-winning film documentaries and received the Na­
tional Medal of Science in 1994.
"I have long been fascinated by mosquitoes and their seeming ability to
defy humanity on all fronts,'' he says. "To most people, mosquitoes are deserv­
ing of extinction-period. I thought they could stand a bit of positive public­
ity, so I decided to write about their sexual antics for Wings, the official
magazine of the Xerces Society, the only organization dedicated to the preser­
vation of invertebrates. I was always intrigued that it should have been an engi­
neer, rather than a biologist, who discovered that mosquitoes get their high
from a buzz as they buzz up high, and the story seemed worth telling, at least to
the reasonably inclined."

ATu L G AWA N D E has been a staff writer on medicine and science for The New
Yorker since 1998 and recently completed his surgical training. He is now a gen­
eral and endocrine surgeon on the staff of the Brigham and Women's Hospital
in Boston and an assistant professor of health policy at the Harvard School of
 2s6 A b o u t the Co n tr i b u t ors

Public Health. He is also the author of Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an

Imperfect Science, which was a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award for
Nonfiction.
"The learning curve is something you think about from the very first day
you put on a white coat:' he explains, "and for good reason. It has terrors, im­
portant consequences, and vexing moral dilemmas. A perfect subject for an es­
say, I thought. I was nervous taking on the topic, though. There are only untidy
solutions to the dilemmas. And no matter how carefully I explain why the op­
portunity to practice upon human beings is vital to good medicine, I (and
many of my colleagues) feared the essay would just increase the number of
people turning up in doctors' offices insisting that only the most experienced
take care of them. But in truth, people have already figured out that experience
matters. And offering an understanding of where it comes from and how
seemed to me the only chance of leading anyone to accept the limits inherent
in what we do and also our constant need to learn."

M A RC E L O G L E I S E R holds the Appleton Professorship of Natural Philosophy

and is professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College, where he
leads an active research group in theoretical physics. To date, he has published
over sixty-five papers in refereed journals and has participated in many domes­
tic and international conferences as an invited speaker. He is the recipient of
the Presidential Faculty Fellows Award ( PFF) from the White House and the
National Science Foundation and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
His first book, The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths to the Big Bang
(Dutton, 1997), received the 1998 Jabuti Award, the highest literary award in
Brazil. He has appeared in several science documentaries, including the
PBS/BBC Stephen Hawking's Universe. He received the 2001 Jose Reis Award for
the Popularization of Science, offered every two years by the Brazilian Research
Council ( CNPq) . His second book, The Prophet and the Astronomer: A Scien­
tific Journey to the End of Time (W. W. Norton, 2002) , received the 2002 Jabuti
Award. Since September 1997, he has written a widely popular weekly column
in Falha de Sao Paulo, one of the top newspapers in his native Brazil.
He writes, "When Charles Harper invited me to contribute an essay to the
volume celebrating Sir John Templeton's ninetieth birthday, I was elated. He
suggested I write on the general topic of'emergence' from the point of view of a
physicist. Nothing could be more appropriate; the emergence of form from
substance, be it of living matter from inorganic molecules, of mind from brain,
or of the universe itself (from nothing? ) , is a topic at the forefront of scientific
research. And it is also a very old question, much older than what we today call
 About the Contributors 2n

science. As such, it represents very uniquely the drive we all have to ask ques­
tions about Nature's mysteries and to try and answer them as best we can. This
essay is an effo rt to communicate my own personal drive, a scientific drive fu­
eled by a sense of awe which is also much older than science!'

R o A L D H O F F M A N N was born in 1937 in Zloczow, Poland. Having survived the

war, he came to the United States in 1949 and studied chemistry at Columbia
and Harvard Universities. Since 1965 he has been at Cornell University, now as
the Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters. He has received many of
the honors of his profession, including the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
(shared with Kenichi Fukui) . "Applied theoretical chemistry" is the way Roald
Hoffmann likes to characterize the particular blend of computations stimu­
lated by experiment and the construction of generalized models, of frame­
works for understanding, that is his contribution to chemistry. Dr. Hoffmann
is also a writer of essays, nonfiction, poems, and plays. The latest of his four po­
etry collections is Soliton, published in 2002. His nonfiction writing includes a
unique art/science/literature collaboration with artist Vivian Torrence, Chem­
istry Imagined: The Same and Not the Same, a thoughtful account of the duali­
ties that lie under the surface of chemistry; and, with Shira Leibowitz Schmidt,
Old Wine, New Flasks: Reflections on Science and Jewish Tradition, a book of the
intertwined voices of science and religion. Dr. Hoffmann is also the p resenter
of a television course, The World of Chemistry, aired on many PBS stations and
abroad. A play, Oxygen, by Carl Djerassi and Roald Hoffmann premiered at the
San Diego Repertory Theatre in 2001, and has h ad several productions since.
"This one was easy;' he comments. "Have I not been peddling theories all
my life? I should know what I preach.
"It was easy, but not for that reason. S cientists are mostly unreflective about
what they do as they do it. Oh, they're very good at spotting lack of logic, ob­
fuscation, and hype in other scientists. But not in their own work. And perhaps
it's just as well-we all know too much thinking and talking about the process
undermines creation. There is cognition and thought, mind working with
hands, in the heat of making the new, yes. But not all that much stand-back­
and-ponder-why thinking. At some point, it's j ust 'do it! '; as other theorists, I
did what comes naturally. Does the reflective tone of this article then mean that
I am through doing real science?
"I am not going to answer that question.
"I have been fortunate to have to rise to the occasion of writing American
Scientist columns for a dozen years, alternating between popularized chemistry,
chemical stories with a point, h istory or social issues, and amateur philosophy
 2s8 A b o u t t h e Con tributors

of science. 'Why Buy That Theory?' belongs to the last category. Michael Weis­
berg, a young philosopher of science and a friend, invited me to a symposium
at the Philosophy of Science Association meeting in 2002, on the theme 'Causa­
tion and Explanation in Chemistry: It was also high time for my next American
Scien tist column. I wrote 'Why Buy This Theory?' to . . . see where it would take
me, as I had trouble beginning my talk. And because I was inclined to fight a lit­
tle with all too rational ways of looking at science by philosophers and scientists.
"What may not be so obvious is the personal conflict ( read: inconsistency)
revealed in this article. First of all, the success of my early theoretical work with
Woodward was based in substantial part on some risky predictions. Second, I
have made a good living teaching people in chemistry simple orbital pictures
of the driving forces for shape and reactivity. Respectful of complexity, I've still
simplified-some would say oversimplified-the world.
"But in 'Why Buy This Theory?' I set off, bang, by dismissing the impor­
tance of risky predictions in theory acceptance. And I come out, desperately
trying to restrain myself, for complexity.
"Why am I fighting myself? Is it that I've just gotten older? And as one ages
one loses (some people do) the simple, strong convictions of the young? And
sees shades of gray, the shadows that lurk around simple worldviews.
"No doubt that's part of it. But also that I've learned something from the
ambiguity that gives a poem (or prose) meaning beyond simple meaning. That
I just know more chemistry, more stories. And more people, who make won­
derful molecules and build ornate theories, blissfully ignoring the Ockham's
razor they idolize. People who give us the gift of new means of looking. Their
way there is rife with tension, paved with inconsistencies as they craft provi­
sional ( all the while subtly claiming absolute) knowledge. Telling stories, not
fessing up to it, telling them anyway, because they have. Just people, perforce
fallible, relentlessly curious, driven to create the new."

JENNIFER KAHN writes about science and other subjects for Discover, Harper's
Magazine, and Wired magazine, where she is also a contributing editor. She is
based in Berkeley, California, and was recently awarded the American Academy
of Neurology's 2003 journalism fellowship.
"A decade ago," she writes, "as an undergrad in the Princeton physics de­
partment, I remember seeing a crank letter pinned to the basement bulletin
board. It was a long letter, written entirely in capitals and very neat, asking
whether anyone knew about the government's ability to transmit radio mes­
sages through silver fillings. What struck me at the time was how reasonable the
question was. Why couldn't fillings act like antennae at some frequency? I
 About the Con tributors 2 _s- 9

mean, how would you account fo r voices that seemed to originate inside your
own head? Because I was in lab at the time, and struggling to explain the bizarre
data that my experiments inevitably generated, I had a lot o f sympathy for the
idea that rogue electromagnetic waves permeated the universe. They had to be
mostly undetectable, of course-but really, it would have explained a lot."

M I C H A E L K L E s r n s is a staff writer at National Geographic magazine, where he

has spent the last ten years researching and writing science articles. He holds a
master's degree from the Johns Hopkins science writing program in Washing­
ton, D.C. During his undergraduate years at the College of William and Mary,
he excelled at languages and the written word, but found himself continually
drawn to science courses and lectures for their mind-bending facts, theories,
and controversies. During his j unior year in France he crisscrossed much of the
European continent and has returned to it a dozen times. On assignment for
National Geographic, he has worked in China, Russia, South Africa, Syria, Thai­
land, Turkey, and Zambia. Haiti counts as one of his most rewarding stops, due
to the limitless spirit of its people amid abj ect poverty. Topics he has covered
for National Geographic include Neolithic cultures, the global AIDS pandemic,
Iron Age ships excavated from Danish peat b ogs, and new technologies in avia­
tion, for which he flew aerobatics in the F-16 and F-18. Among his most memo­
rable experiences, was trekking above Mount Everest's base camp to the peak of
Nepal's Kala Pattar. Michael and his wife, Giuliana, live in Arlington, Virginia.
"Writing about science offers me a constant lesson in humility," he says,
"both because the people I interview are orders of magnitude smarter than I
am, and because I 'm always left with the reminder of humanity's brevity and
unremarkable place in the cosmos. I've always shared National Geographic's
fascination with things ancient. So I eagerly accepted this assignment chroni­
cling the rise of the angiosperms, or flowering plants. Reporting the story from
Sweden to China to Wyoming's Big Horn Basin, I encountered paleobotanists
as passionate about their calling as any scientists I 've known. They showed me
how flowering plants, extant and extinct, have played a critical role in the rise
and sustenance of humans, and not just physiologically. As a flower dealer in
the Netherlands said, 'People have been fascinated by flowers as long as we've
existed. It's an emotional product. People are attracted to living things. Smell,
sight, beauty are all combined in a flower. Every Monday a florist delivers fresh
flowers to this office. It is a necessary luxury.' "

BRENDAN I . K O E R N E R is a contributing writer for Mother Jones, a contribut­

ing editor at Wired, and a fellow at the New America Foundation. He was for-
 260 A b o u t the Con tributors

merly a senior editor at U. S. News & World Report, where he covered every­
thing from paleontology to cybercrime. His work has appeared in The New
York Times Magazine, Harper's Magazine, Slate, The Washington Monthly, The
New Republic, The Christian Science Monitor, and Legal Affairs. He also writes
the "Mr. Roboto" technology column for The Village Voice. Koerner was named
one of the Columbia Journalism Review's "Ten Young Writers on the Rise" in
2002, and he recently won the National Headliner Award for magazine feature
writing. A 1996 graduate of Yale, he lives in New York City.
" 'Disorders Made to Order' was something of a mea culpa on my part;' he
writes. "As a novice journalist, I was assigned a story on the 'hidden epidemic'
of social anxiety disorder, a malady with which I was not familiar. An editor as­
sured me that it was a seriously underreported phenomenon, and that the So­
cial Anxiety Disorder Coalition could point my reporting in the right
direction. Indeed, the Coalition was only too willing to assist, eagerly providing
interview subjects, scientific data, and enough colorful anecdotes to fill several
magazines.
"Yet as I delved more deeply into the story, I began to sense the taint of
drug-industry money. The Coalition's flacks doubled as press agents for
SmithKline Beecham; the interviewees appeared in Paxil marketing videos;
and the scientific talking heads were all paid consultants of one pharmaceutical
giant or another. The kicker was the fact that the Coalition's creation was suspi­
ciously timed to coincide with the Food and Drug Administration's approval of
Paxil to treat SAD. Rather than write a heartfelt portrait of extremely shy souls
who'd been helped by psychopharmacological treatment, I opted for a piece
that focused on the drug industry's sly marketing tactics-and vowed to write
a more in-depth account when I had the chance. It took three years to find a
magazine willing to indulge my little quest.
"The trick was to write something more substantial than a cynical take on
pharmaceutical flackery. Rather, we wanted to take a hard look at how the drug
industry not only sells pills, but diseases as well. It can take upwards of a decade
to discover and test a new drug; creating a new disorder, or expanding the pa­
tient base for an old one, is a far more cost effective process. Creepier, too."

For the last forty years RICHARD C . LEWONTIN and RicHARD LEVINS have
worked in the same academic institutions, first at the University of Rochester,
then the University of Chicago, and currently at Harvard University. Richard
Lewontin is a population and evolutionary geneticist who has investigated the
forces operating on genetic variation in natural populations, and works in the
philosophy of science and in the political economy of agricultural research. He
 A b o u t t h e Con t r i b u t ors 26 1

has been active in the radical science movement, including Science for the Peo­
ple and the Sociobiology Study Group. At present he is research professor in
the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. Richard Levins is an ex­
farmer turned ecologist. His primary interest is the study of processes in com­
plex biosocial systems. He has worked in evolutionary ecology and population
genetics with application to agriculture and public health, biomathematics,
and philosophy of science and has been active in the New World Agriculture
and Ecology Group and the New York Marxist School. At present he is a profes­
sor of population sciences at the Harvard School of Public Health and works at
the Cuban Institute of Ecology and Systematics.
They write: "Over the last forty years we have worked both together and in
parallel to attempt to create a coherent evolutionary population biology, with
Dick Lewontin emphasizing the intricacies of genetic systems and Dick Levins
focusing more on ecology. We have also worked to promote a critical science,
aware of its insertion into the larger society, and a science politics that consid­
ers the organization, uses, political economy, recruitment, socialization and in­
ternal content of science. Our views on these matters are expressed in the
essays contained in The Dialectical Biologist.
"In both the scientific and the political sides of our efforts we intersected
with Steve Gould in many ways. He shared our view of the complex and histor­
ically contingent nature of living systems and their evolution, and he was a po­
litical ally. One or the other of us, or both, taught j ointly with Steve in courses
on evolution and on biology and society. We worked together with him in Sci­
ence for the People and the Sociobiology Study Group, struggling against naive
biological determinism. All three of us shared a feeling of distance from many
of our colleagues and from Harvard as an institution. It seemed appropriate,
then, that the editor of the Monthly Review should ask us to write a joint me­
morial to him."

C H A R L E S C . MAN N , the author or coauthor of four or six books ( "depending

on whether you count writing the text for books of photography;' he says ) , is a
correspondent for Science and The Atlan tic Mon thly.
"The genesis of '1491; " he explains, "may lie in the day in 1984 when, writ­
ing an article about a NASA group that was monitoring the atmosphere, I
landed with their specially equipped plane in Merida, on the Yucatan Penin­
sula in Mexico. The atmospheric scientists had a day off in Merida, and we all
took a decrepit Volkswagen bus to Chichen Itza. I knew nothing about
Mesoamerican culture-somehow the true inventors of zero had been skipped
in my math classes. But purely in aesthetic terms I thought these ruins were
 262 A b o u t t h e Con tributors

much more interesting than those I had seen in Europe. On my own-some­

times for vacation, sometimes on assignment-I went back to the Yucatan
five or six times. For the German magazine Geo, photographer Peter Menzel
and I made the fourteen-hour drive down a one-lane dirt road to the then­
unexcavated city of Calakmul. We stayed in a chiclero's shack in the midst of
broken stelae. I still remember my amazement when our Maya guide, Juan de
la Cruz Briceno, emerged from the forest with a wild turkey that he had caught
by sneaking up to it and lopping its head off with his machete.
"In other words, the article stems from a long-standing though rather
formless personal interest. This interest only snapped into anything resem­
bling focus in September 1992, when by chance I saw a college library display­
ing the special Columbian quincentenary edition of the Annals of the
Association of American Geographers, which contained Bill Denevan's mani­
festo, 'The Pristine Myth.' A year or two later, at the annual meeting of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, I attended a forum
called something like 'The Genesis of the Amazonian Forest; which featured
William Balee of Tulane University and Anna C. Roosevelt of the Field Mu­
seum in Chicago. In his fascinating talk about anthropogenic forests, Bill Balee
mentioned the explosive impact of Hank Dobyns, whose demographic work
sounded interesting enough to send me back to the library. 'Gee: I thought as I
read Their Number Become Thinned, Dobyns's account of native American de­
mography, 'someone ought to put this stuff together. It would make a really in­
teresting article.' I kept waiting for that article to appear. The wait grew more
frustrating when my son entered school and was taught the same things I had
been taught-ideas that I knew had long been sharply questioned. Since no­
body else appeared to be writing this article, I finally decided to take a stab at
writing it myself. '1491' is the result of my efforts, part of a larger work in
progress.''

S u sAN M1 Lms says she has learned to enunciate carefully when explaining
that she writes about organismal biology on the staff at Science News. She re­
members as a kid fantasizing about becoming a nineteenth-century plant ex­
plorer, but she ended up falling into journalism instead. After some initial
bouncing around various niches ( even working as magazine food editor for a
while, although she freely admits she's a dreadful cook) , she has focused on
writing about biology for magazines, newspapers, and wire services.
"I fret about creeping far-ism in the science press," she adds, "a subtle ten­
dency to publish more stories about animals than about plants. I'm guilty of it
myself because I find it hard to convey botanical excitements that compete
 A b o u t t h e Co n t r i b u t ors 263

with cute furry faces and weird habits of procreation. Thank heavens this proj ­
ect had plants doing things about as dramatically as they can, what with turn­
ing fire-engine red and hovering on the brink of death, and thank heavens
especially for plant physiologists who're fun to talk to.
"I remember when molecular biology took over the world for a while dur­
ing the last century, and if you wanted to fit in with the smart kids yo u admit­
ted interest in ants and flowers and newts only as childhood memories. It's
such fun now to see the borders blurring and the molecular people talking to
the whole-organism people."

S m o H A RT H A M u K H E RJ E E was born in New Delhi, India, in 1970. He was

graduated from Stanford University in 1993 with a degree in biology, and then
completed his D.Phil. in Biological Sciences at the University of Oxford as a
Rhodes scholar. He finished his M .D. at Harvard Medical School in 2000 and
joined the Massachusetts General Hospital as a resident in internal medicine.
He is currently a Clinical Fellow in Oncology at the Dana Farber Cancer Insti­
tute/Partners HealthCare System, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical
School. His research focuses on the biology of cells in early development, in­
cluding stem cells; his writing focuses on the intersection between science,
medicine, and politics.
''As a graduate student in biology," he writes, "I was often asked what sort
of research I 'worked on' in my laboratory. Answering that question-I
discovered-meant making a devil's choice between the simplistic and the eso­
teric. On one hand, I had the option of a sweeping, glib and vague response: I
worked on viruses that caused 'cancer; I could say, stressing that incandescent
word, and hoping that all conversation that followed would become illumi­
nated in its glow. Cancer research, after all, was a scientific talisman, a sancti­
fied area that floated singularly above doubt and derision, a field that no one
could call abstruse or academic.
"But the other answer-and perhaps the more accurate one-was infi­
nitely more detailed: as a matter of fact, I spent most of the time meticulously
picking apart a specific protein, from a specific virus, that happened to be
linked to cancer. By the time I had finished that story my audience's eyes would
often glaze over with boredom. Yes, my research was linked to finding a cure for
cancer-but it was only obtusely, distantly linked. I wasn't testing chemothera­
pies; I wasn't tracking rates of lung carcinoma among smokers. Between my
laboratory bench and a cure for cancer there lay a long, long stretch.
"This tension-between curiosity-driven science and science driven purely
by application-is felt by almost every biologist. And the question inherent in
 2 64 A b o u t the Con tr i b u t ors

this piece-what is the right formula for finding a balance between these two
goals?-is nearly unanswerable, partly because you couldn't easily design a
study to answer it. In June 2000, while I wrestled with that question in my own
career, I suddenly came upon Collier's example. As a medical student at
Harvard, I remembered thinking of Collier as a quintessential example of a
curiosity-driven scientist-and here, right before my eyes, he was becoming a
champion of application-driven research. Vannevar Bush had envisioned this
conversion nearly fifty years ago. And the prospect of this happening within
the lifetime of a scientist was obviously heartening to a young biologist holed
up in a laboratory with mice-who hoped to someday practice medicine
among humans."

L1zA M u NDY is a staff writer for The Washington Post Magazine. She grew up
in Roanoke, Virginia, and received her undergraduate degree from Princeton
University and a master's in English literature from the University of Virginia.
Before coming to the Post she worked at the Washington City Paper, where,
among other topics, she wrote about the deaf pride movement at Gallaudet,
the world's only university for the deaf. There and at the Post, she has also writ­
ten about ethics and reproductive technology. She has freelanced for Lingua
Franca, The Washington Monthly, Redbook, and Slate.
"It must be such a strange thing to be written about;' she writes. "I think
about this every time I report a magazine feature. For a private citizen, to agree
to be profiled requires a leap of faith; a surrendering of control; a willingness to
trust (and spend time with) a stranger whose job it is to ask intrusive ques­
tions; a laying-open of your life to the judgment of the reading public. This is
true for anybody, but it was truer still for Sharon and Candy, who knew that
their efforts to have a deaf child would attract opinion from many quarters.
Sure enough, within days after the article appeared, their computer crashed
from the number of emails they received from around the world. Some mes­
sages-from hearing and deaf alike-were critical. Many-from hearing and
deaf alike-were galvanized, thoughtful, enlightened, supportive. Throughout,
Sharon and Candy bore this scrutiny with graciousness and good humor, qual­
ities that were severely tested when, shortly after his first birthday, their beloved
son died, tragically and unexpectedly, of pulmonary hypertension, a congenital
disease unrelated to his deafness. I hope that this story will now stand as a
memorial to Gauvin. Precisely because his mothers were brave enough to be
written about, and to let him be written about, his life touched more people­
started more conversations, challenged more minds-than many that last
much longer."
 A b o u t t h e Con t r i b u t ors 26s

M 1 c H E L L E N 1 J H U 1 s is a contributing editor of High Country News, an envi­

ronmental bimonthly that has covered the wonders and tragedies of the west­
ern United States for more than thirty years. Her freelance work has appeared
in The Christian Science Monitor, Audubon, the online environmental maga­
zine Grist, and other regional and national publications. In her life before jour­
nalism, she studied biology at Reed Co llege in Portland, Orego n, and spent
several years working as an itinerant frog and tortoise biologist in the South­
west and California. She's now settled in a small town in western Colorado,
where she lives and writes in a straw-bale house built by her husband, Jack.
''After I wrote 'Shadow Creatures,' I became a magnet for urban wildlife
stories," she says. "Every city dweller, it seemed, had spent at least some time
shooting air guns at crows, or spying on coyotes, or yelling at sedentary Canada
geese. One reader, who had watched javelinas graze on his landscaping in Tuc­
son, marveled at their ability to swallow even his prickly-pear cacti. There was
exasperation in most of these stories, but always more admiration than annoy­
ance. These animals, after all, have figured out how to survive in modern hu­
man society-something every human knows is no small feat."

DAN I E L L E 0 F R I is the author of Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at

Bellevue ( Beacon, 2003), a n d is editor in chief a n d cofounder of the Bellevue
Literary Review. Her stories have appeared in both medical and literary jour­
nals, as well as several anthologies. She is the recipient of the 2001 Missouri Re­
view Editor's Prize for the essay Merced, which was selected by Stephen Jay
Gould for Best American Essays 2002. She is also associate chief editor of the
award-winning medical textbook, The Bellevue Guide to Outpatient Medicine.
An attending physician at Bellevue Hospital and on the faculty of New York
University School of Medicine, she lives in New York City with her husband
and two children.
Of "Common Ground," she says: "If it is unsettling to write about the pri­
vate affairs of a patient, it can be agonizing to write about one's own. For my
patients, I am acutely cognizant of, and troubled by, the ethical issues and so
take pains to alter names and identifying characteristics. For myself, this is not
so easy. Before I'd written 'Common Ground,' I'd never shared this episode
with anyone, save one close friend. Well into my late thirties, married, with
children and several advanced degrees, I still hadn't told my parents about what
had occurred when I was seventeen. When I'd initially written this essay, I cre­
ated two versions: one with, and one without, my own experience contrasted to
the patient's. I wrestled with which version to publish, then finally decided to
include myself. As a writer, I realized that I have no choice but to seek the truth,
 266 A b o u t t h e Con t r i b u t ors

and that overrode my personal queasiness and lingering doubts. And as a

physician who brings the agonies and deepest vulnerabilities of her patients to
paper, I can be no less brutal with myself. If my patients have their guts revealed
to the world, how can I hide behind a white coat or a writer's pen?"

LAW R E N C E O S B O R N E was educated at Cambridge and Harvard. He is the au­

thor of a novel, Ania Malina ; the travelogue, Paris Dreambook; a collection of
essays about Catholicism, The Poisoned Embrace; and, most recently, a book
about autism, American Normal. His The Accidental Connoisseur will be pub­
lished by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2004. Osborne lives in New York City,
where he is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Salon, and
The New York Observer.
"I wanted to write this piece," he reports, "because genetics is the most
glamorous frontier of contemporary science, but also the most fraught with
anxiety. It seems that cloning, transgenic animals and genetic engineering are
where our deepest nightmares and optimistic dreams come together. Yet, at the
same time, there may well be a pragmatic invention that binds them together
very simply. Such seemed to be the case with spider-goat silk: human ingenuity
at its most quietly daring. To me, it was irresistible."

D E N N I S OvERBYE is a science correspondent for The New York Times. Born in

Seattle, he majored in physics at MIT before deciding that writing was the only
thing he was fit for. His first job in journalism was as a part-time assistant type­
setter at Sky and Telescope magazine. His articles have appeared in a variety of
publications and he is a two-time winner of the American Institute of Physics
Science Writing Award. He is the author of Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The
Scientific Search for the Secret of the Universe ( HarperCollins, 1991 ) , which was a
finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Einstein in Love: A Sci­
entific Romance (Viking, 2000) . He lives in Manhattan with his wife, Nancy
Wartik, and their daughter, Mira Kamille.
"My article;' he says, "was written on the occasion of Stephen Hawking's
sixtieth birthday, which was celebrated with a weeklong series of scientific talks
and parties in January 2002. It was a moving event, full of traditional English
fare such as butlers, toasts, and Marilyn impersonators. Hawking is arguably
the most famous and most recognizable living scientist, St. George in a wheel­
chair battling the black-hole dragon to the millions of readers of his books.
That he had a career at all and made it to the age of sixty after being diagnosed
with Lou Gehrig's disease back in his twenties is amazing, a testament to his
grit and the divine whims of providence. Scientifically, his greatest legacy, be-
 A b o u t t h e Co n t r i b u t ors 267

sides his students, is likely to be his discovery in 1973 that black holes are not
really black and will in fact eventually explode due to quantum effects. A quar­
ter of a century later that discovery is still reverberating; the tale of its adven­
tures is an example of how the meaning of a powerful insight can change and
grow with time."

G u N J A N S I N H A was born in Bihar, India, but grew up in Brooklyn, New York.

She earned a graduate degree from the University of Glasgow, Scotland, in mo­
lecular genetics. Her first j ob was in an organ transplant lab, which turned o ut
to be surprisingly dull. After months of careful thought, she decided to try her
hand at jo urnalism and graduated from New York University's Science and En­
vironmental Reporting Program in 1996. She has been writing about science
ever since. She was life sciences editor of Popular Science for five years and also
wrote about general science and technology. In 2000, she was awarded the Ray
Bruner Science Writing Award that honors reporters who demonstrate excep­
tional ability early in their career. She is now a freelance journalist in Frankfurt,
Germany, where she is often seen whizzing around on her bicycle.
"One Valentine's Day," she writes, "a friend sent me a story from The Boston
Globe she thought I'd find 'amusing.' We'd just had a long conversation about
relationships and office crushes and the story was a short, fun, fluffy piece
about the biochemistry of love. I thought it would make a great feature. I
looked into it some more and was fascinated by the progress scientists were
making on the subject. 'Isn't this cool?' I thought. ' For millennia, love has been
the domain of poets and philosophers. But now, for the first time in history,
scientists are coming up with their own biological understanding of love.' But
of course, there's much more to the potent biochemical stew that makes and
breaks lives. Scientists continue to study fine distinctions of the emotion, such
as how the love between mother and child differs from the love between hus­
band and wife, for example. For me, the most interesting aspect of all this re­
search is that it suggests there's another reason people screw around, one that
has nothing to do with the love you didn't get as a child or other analysis of
your psyche. The behavior is hardwired-a primal drive that's perfectly natu­
ral, even if it is hugely destructive."

F LO Y D S K L o o T is the author of nine books. His most recent is a memoir of

living with brain damage, In the Shadow of Memory ( University of Nebraska
Press) , which was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection for
summer 2003. In spring 2005, Louisiana State University Press will publish his
fourth collection of poetry, The End of Dreams. Skloot's work has been in-
 268 A b o u t the Con tribu tors

eluded in The Best American Essays 1993 and 2 000, The Best American Science

Writing 2000, The Best Spiritual Writing 2001, and The Art of the Essay 1999. He
lives in rural western Oregon with his wife, Beverly Hallberg.
" 'The Melody Lingers On' is from my book-in-progress, Fragmentary
Blue," he comments. "It's a memoir counterpointing the relentless destruction
of my mother's memory with the slow reassembling of fragments of my own
memory, which was shattered by brain damage following a viral illness. In the
year and a half since 'The Melody Lingers On' was written, my mother's condi­
tion has continued to worsen, but song remains. There are fewer songs left
now, and their snatches of lyric or melody are even less coherent, but on occa­
sion her face will still light up and her voice will fill the room for a moment."

M A R G A R E T W E RT H E I M is the author of Pythagoras' Trousers, a history of the

relationship between physics and religion, and The Pearly Ga tes of Cyberspace:
A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. Originally from Australia and
now living in Los Angeles, her articles have appeared in many magazines and
newspapers, including The New York Times, The Sciences, New Scientist, The
Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, and Salon. She writes the "Quark
Soup" column for LA Weekly and is a regular contributor to The Los Angeles
Times Book Review. She has also written a dozen television science documen­
taries, including the PBS special Faith and Reason and the award-winning Aus­
tralian series Catalyst, which was aimed at teenage girls. She and her husband
have just completed a new documentary, It's Jim's World . . . We Just Live in It,
on visionary outsider physicist James Carter. She is currently working on a new
book, Imagining the World, about the role of imagination in theoretical
physics.
Of "Here There Be Dragons;' she writes: "This piece has a rather strange
history. I was taken to the Mirror Lab at the University of Arizona by Father
George Coyne, the Jesuit priest and astronomer who is head of the Vatican Ob­
servatory. I was writing a profile of Coyne for Wired magazine and one day he
suggested a visit to Roger Angel's lab, where the mirror for the Vatican Ad­
vanced Technology Telescope was cast. Although Wired published the piece,
they had just run a long story on telescope technology and decided to cut the
section on the Mirror Lab. But it's such a superb location and Angel has such
an incredible story that I felt the material had to be used somewhere, so I
rewrote it for my 'Quark Soup' column. It was one of those lovely serendipitous
ideas that came out of left field and then ended up somewhere very unex­
pected. Sometimes pieces take on a life of their own, and I feel that's very much
what happened with this one."
 A b o u t t h e Con t r i b u t ors 269

FRA N K W 1 LC Z E K is a theoretical physicist aspiring to become a natural

philosopher. He is currently the Herman Feshbach professor of physics at MIT.
He's won prizes for both science and writing, including recently the Lorentz
Medal of the Netherlands Academy and the Lilienfeld Prize of the American
Physical Society. He is a product of the New York City public schools.
"A lot of my best work deals with the basic mathematical laws that govern
the interactions of elementary particles," he writes. "It's not easy to explain this
kind of material in an honest way to anyone who lacks either extensive training
or unusual patience. But I'm often asked to give public lectu res, or to write for
a general audience. And I think this is an important thing to do, since I believe
frontier science is a most valuable and beautiful production of our culture, one
that ought to be widely shared. Wrestling with this challenge, I had the happy
thought that the important message of my work is not this or that arcane fact,
but that Nature, though She speaks an unfamiliar language, is not only com­
prehensible but brilliantly logical. That's what this essay tries to convey."
 A ck n o wl e d9 m e n ts

"The Forest Primeval" by Peter Canby. Copyright © 2002 by Peter Canby. Reprinted by permission.
" "
First published in Harper's Magazine. 1491 by Charles C. Mann. Copyright © 2002 by Charles C.
Mann. All rights reserved. Reprinted by kind permission of the author. First published in The Atlantic
Monthly. "The Learning Curve" by Atul Gawande. Copyright © 2002 by Atul Gawande. Reprinted by
kind permission of the author. All rights reserved. First published in The New Yorker. "A World of
Their Own" by Liza Mundy. Copyright © 2002, The Washington Post. Reprinted with permission.
"The Melody Lingers On" by Floyd Skloot. Copyright © 2002 by Floyd Skloot. Reprinted by permis­
sion of the author. Originally published in Southwest Review. "The World's Numerical Recipe" by
Frank Wilczek. Copyright © 2002 by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Reprinted by per­
mission of Daedalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, from the issue titled,
"On Inequality," Winter 2002, Vol. 131, No. 1. "Emergent Realities in the Cosmos" by Marcelo Gleiser.
Adapted with permission of the Templeton Foundation Press from the forthcoming Spiritual Infor­
mation: ioo Perspectives, edited by Charles L. Harper. Copyright © 2004 by the Templeton Founda­
tion Press. "Scientists Reach Out to Distant Worlds" by Natalie Angier. Copyright © 2002 by The New
York Times Co. Reprinted with permission. "Here There Be Dragons" by Margaret Wertheim. Copy­
right © 2002 by Margaret Wertheim. All rights reserved. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
First published in the "Quark Soup" column of LA Weekly. "Notes from a Parallel Universe" by Jen­
nifer Kahn. Copyright © 2002 by Jennifer Kahn. All rights reserved. Reprinted by kind permission of
the author. First published in Discover. "Shadow Creatures" by Michelle Nijhuis. Copyright © 2002 by
Michelle Nijhuis. All rights reserved. Reprinted by kind permission of the author. First published in
High Country News. "You Dirty Vole" by Gunjan Sinha. Copyright © 2002 by Popular Science.
Reprinted by permission. "Stalking the American Lobster" by Trevor Corson. Copyright © 2002 by
Trevor Corson. Reprinted by permission of the Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency, Inc. This article
o riginally appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in April 2002. "Fighting Chance" by Siddhartha Mukher­
jee. Copyright © 2002 by The New Republic, LLC. Reprinted by permission of The New Republic.
"The Big Bloom" by Michael Klesius. Copyright © 2002 by the National Geographic Society.
Reprinted by permission of National Geographic Image Sales. Originally published in National Geo­
graphic, July 2002. "Why Turn Red?" by Susan Milius. Reprinted with permission from Science News,
 272 A ckno wled9 m e n ts

the weekly news magazine of science. Copyright © 2002 by Science Service. "The Mosquito's Buzz" by
Thomas Eisner. Copyright© 2002 by Thomas Eisner. All rights reserved. Reprinted by kind permis­
sion of the author. First published in Wings, the journal of the Xerces Society. "Got Silk" by Lawrence
Osborne. Copyright© 2002 by Lawrence Osborne. Reprinted by kind permission of the author. First
published in The New York Times Magazine. "Disorders Made to Order" by Brendan I. Koerner. From
Mother Jones ( July/August 2002). Copyright © 2002 by the Foundation for National Progress. "An
Embarrassment of Chimpanzees" by Joseph D'Agnese. Copyright © 2002 by Joseph D'Agnese. All
rights reserved. Reprinted by kind permission of the author. First published in Discover. "Common
Ground" by Danielle Ofri. Copyright © 2002 by Danielle Ofri. All rights reserved. Reprinted by kind
permission of the author. First published in Tikkun. "Why Buy That Theory?" by Roald Hoffmann.
American Scientist, Vol. 91, pages 9-11. Copyright© 2002 by Sigma Xi , the Scientific Research Society.
Reprinted by permission of American Scientist, magazine of Sigma Xi , the Scientific Research Society.
"Big Trouble in the World of 'Big P hysics' " by Leonard Cassuto. Copyright © 2002 by Salon.com.
Reprinted with the permission of Salon.com. "Hawking's Breakthrough Is Still an Enigma" by Dennis
Overbye. Copyright © 2002 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission. "Stephen Jay
Gould: What Does It Mean to Be a Radical?" by Richard C. Lewontin and Richard Levins. Copyright
© 2002 by Monthly Review Press. Reprinted by permission of Monthly Review Foundation.