The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013, Page 2

  “No photographs, okay?” she said. She pulled out a large key from under her desk and escorted me in.

  The walls inside were damp. The one-room cells that had housed the monks were largely bare, save a bed and a wooden desk. The library had about two hundred leather-bound books and a reading chair; scanning it quickly, I found nothing on botany or biology, and certainly no copy of Darwin. Mendel’s room, above the refectory, was also bare, with a bed and a chair in the corner. A single evocative moment passed quickly: the wind blew the window open, and, for a second, the room became a microscope or an observatory, revealing a direct view of the rectangular garden plot below.

  We made our way down a broad staircase and past the refectory. Downstairs, an inner garden was meant to grow hawkweed—another of Mendel’s experimental plants—but was mostly colonized by a tangle of assorted weeds. There was a courtyard, an alleyway into the neighboring church, and a decaying niche for offering prayers. And then, as abruptly as it had started, the visit came to an end.

  “Thank you for visiting the abbey,” the woman said stiffly, ushering me out the door and locking it with the key.

  Back in the lobby, I bought a booklet on Mendel and a T-shirt with his handwritten diagrams reproduced across it. His actual notebooks were housed elsewhere; to access them, I would need another application, possibly in triplicate.

  I gave up. As I left the building, sensing the custodian’s eyes scanning my back, I wondered whether the fuss had been worth it. As pilgrimages go, this had turned out to be a spectacular anticlimax.

  On the train back to Vienna the next morning, I stewed in my seat, ruminating on how disappointing my visit had been. Perhaps I had expected too much. I had gone to Brno seeking something magical: an insight into the soul of the man who had revolutionized biology, a reconnaissance with my own intellectual history—a vivid teleportation into Mendel’s life and times. But the experience had left me cold and uninspired. I felt duped. I had traveled 3,000 miles to the birthplace of genetics, and all I had gotten was a booklet and a T-shirt.

  An hour out of Bratislava, though, my anger cooled. Perhaps the custodians of Mendel’s legacy had—if unwittingly—achieved a rather accurate re-creation, or even a reenactment, of his life in the abbey. The rule-boundedness, the deference to authority, the moral disapproval at the smallest transgressions of discipline—that ever-so-slight shrug at my unfiled application—were all symptomatic; had Mendel himself been asked to curate a monument to his own stifling times, he could not have chosen a more seasoned actor to play its guardian.

  Mendel’s forty-odd-year stint at the Brno abbey was, indeed, deeply constrained by rules, habits, and limits. He began his experiments on inheritance by breeding field mice but was asked to discontinue them because forcing mice to mate was considered too risqué for a monk. He failed his training exams in science—notably in geology and biology—because he was unable to classify rocks and mammals using the elaborate traditional systems of classification. A sympathetic superior, Abbot Napp, allowed him to continue his experiments on peas in his garden plot, but Mendel was held to the abbey’s strict routines and demands. In one of the few letters that survive, a stern note from his watchers instructs him to remember to wear his cap to church services. Mendel, for his part, was all too eager to comply. Far from a boundary-breaking, rule-bending enfant terrible, he was disciplined, deferential, and dull.

  How on earth, then, did this man, in this place, unlock the secret of genes? Newton had his cometary intellect; Einstein was born a rebel and bred to defy convention; Feynman was the comic genius of physics, exposing his discipline’s vanities like a jester in a court of fools. But Gregor Mendel? The founder of modern biology seems, in contrast, to have been born without contrast—a man of habits plodding his way among men in habits.

  At least part of the answer, I think, takes us back to the monastery—to that minuscule rectangle of land by the refectory; to the walled garden; to the indelible image of a monk in wire-rimmed glasses tending plants—stooping, with paintbrush and forceps, to transfer the orange dust of pollen from the stamen of one flower to the pistil of the next. “It requires indeed some courage to undertake a labor of such far-reaching extent,” Mendel wrote in his 1865 paper, describing an eight-year experiment on cross-fertilization that ultimately revealed the existence of genes. But “courage,” I would argue, is the wrong word here. More than “courage,” there is something else evident in that work—a quality that I can only describe as “tenderness.”

  It is a word not typically used to describe science or scientists. It shares roots, of course, with “tending”—a farmer’s or gardener’s activity—but also with “tension,” the stretching of a pea tendril to incline it toward sunlight or train it on an arbor. It describes a certain intimacy between humans and nature—a nourishment that must happen before investigation can happen, the delicacy of labor that must be performed before the delicacy of its fruits can be harvested.

  Mendel was, first and foremost, a gardener; his science began with tending. His genius was certainly not fueled by deep knowledge of the conventions of biology (thankfully, he failed that exam). Rather, it was his instinctual knowledge of the garden, coupled with an incisive power of observation, that brought him to question the nature of inheritance and thereby discover genes. The act of tending—the laborious cross-pollination of seedlings, the meticulous tabulation of the colors of cotyledons and the markings of wrinkles on seeds—soon led him to findings that could not be explained by the traditional understanding of inheritance. Heredity, Mendel realized, could be explained only by the passage of discrete pieces of information from parents to offspring. There had to be atoms of information—particles of inheritance—moving from one generation to the next. Tending generated tension—until the old fulcrum of biology was snapped in two.

  When I witness science in action, I see this tenderness in abundance. On Monday mornings, the graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in my laboratory rush in to work to look at how their cells have grown over the weekend. The best of these researchers have a gardener’s instinct. Some of the cultures need nourishment, they know; others, like ferns, need to be left alone to inhabit the corners of incubators; yet others must be coaxed with growth factors to flourish.

  Look closely among scientists, and you find this quality everywhere. There is tenderness in the chemist measuring and remeasuring salts in the hood; in the mathematician kneading his equations to understand the shape of the cosmos; in the marine biologist learning to talk to dolphins (read Tim Zimmermann’s “Talk to Me”). Newspapers may bring us news of a scientific-industrial complex that is increasingly depersonalized—algorithmic, disembodied, and run by robots. The lab is apparently a factory. Terabytes of data are churned through supercomputers to generate gigabytes of information; the scientist punches numbers into a machine and awaits revelation. But ask a real scientist, and you get a profoundly different image of how “real” science happens. In an age of increasingly mechanized production, the genesis of scientific knowledge remains an unyieldingly, obstreperously hand-hewn process. It is among the most human of our activities. Far from being subsumed by the dehumanizing effects of technology, science remains our last stand against it.

  I have chosen the essays in this volume with an ear for tenderness. Most of the selected essays share a common thread: they describe how science happens. They don’t present facts alone (although facts are abundant in them). They describe the extraordinary process by which scientists extract those facts from the grim soil, roots and tendrils intact, to glean knowledge about the inner workings of nature.

  Listen, then, for tenderness in these essays. It is present, of course, in Katherine Harmon’s sprawling Russian novel of a piece, “The Patient Scientist,” about a prominent New York immunologist with pancreatic cancer who becomes his own experimental subject (I knew Ralph Steinman, the scientist in question, and was struck by Harmon’s devastatingly honest and moving portrait of him). And it can be fou
nd equally in Jerome Groopman’s “The T-Cell Army,” about the once-moribund discipline of cancer immunology coming to life in the laboratory and the clinic.

  It is easy to find tenderness in the remarkable essay “Autism Inc.,” about the parent of an autistic child who starts a company called Specialisterne, Danish for “the specialists”—“on the theory that given the right environment, an autistic adult could not just hold down a job but also be the best person for it.” It may be harder to discern tenderness in Kevin Dutton’s coldly wise “The Wisdom of Psychopaths”—but it’s there, roiling just beneath the surface of this story of a psychologist who seeks to understand the workings of a psychopath’s mind. In talking to dozens of patients confined to a high-security psychiatric prison in England, Dutton emerges with a strangely complex understanding of what psychopathy is and how it defines its obverse: empathy.

  Steve Weinberg’s “The Crisis of Big Science” is a cry from the heart that is meant to provoke political action. Sometime in the next decade, Weinberg writes, physicists are going to ask their governments to fund the building of the most powerful linear accelerator ever built. This accelerator—not the Large Hadron Collider but the Even Larger Hadron Collider—will supposedly smash its way through an experimental impasse that particle physicists apparently find themselves stuck in, allowing them to prove or disprove models about the fundamental nature of matter and energy. But notably, Weinberg doesn’t confuse big science with great science. His essay begins with a description of Ernest Rutherford’s discovery of the atomic organization of matter. Rutherford’s experimental team, Weinberg informs us, “consisted of one postdoc and one undergraduate,” and was funded by a grant of £70 from the Royal Society. Rutherford worked largely alone, fussing over his instruments and detectors; he was Mendel in an atomic garden. The particle physicists of tomorrow might indeed need bigger accelerators, as Weinberg argues. But to transform big science into great science, I suspect, they will need to channel Rutherford’s spirit into their much larger atomic gardens.

  One set of essays describes the measurement, reconstruction, and surveillance or restoration of impossibly fragile systems (read David Owen’s “The Artificial Leaf,” Michael Specter’s “The Deadliest Virus,” David Quammen’s “Out of the Wild,” Mark Bowden’s “The Measured Man,” or Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Recall of the Wild”). Robert M. Sapolsky’s “Super Humanity” and Stephen Marche’s “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” converge on a similar and deeply affecting thought—that humans may have created modern environments (including virtual environments) that are peculiarly maladapted for their intended purpose: rather than assuaging anxiety and bringing communities together, these environments provoke anxiety and encourage lonesomeness. Sapolsky’s answer to this quandary is particularly potent: far from rejecting science as dehumanizing, he turns to it as a force of creative regeneration. To tend the wounds of the human psyche—to restore what has been lost—he argues, we need more science, not less.

  And look for tenderness, lastly, in “Shattered Genius,” a profile of the Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman, who solved the infamously thorny Poincaré’s Conjecture but could not be bothered with collecting the million-dollar prize for doing so. Perelman is a purist. He despises the crassness of the world, with its academic competitions and silly prizes; he will not be put up for display like an animal in a zoo. There is something raw about him—a hothouse temperament so delicate that the world bruises it all too easily (the profile reminded me of Marianne Moore’s lines on the student, who is reclusive “not because he/has no feeling, but because he has so much”). When an all-too-eager journalist hunts him down to talk about his uncollected prize, Perelman snaps at him with a sentence that a gardener might be proud of: “You are disturbing me. I am picking mushrooms.”

  SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE

  J.B. MACKINNON

  False Idyll

  FROM Orion

  OF ALL THE feelings said to sweep over us in wild places—awe, peace, a sense of the divine—there are a few that rarely get mentioned. My last two-week trip into the woods, for example, was frankly depressing. The year had been a cold one, and the forest was not its usual refulgent self. A black bear was hanging around, skinny and sickly from the bad berry crop and probably bound for death by starvation in its winter den. Pink salmon had just begun to spawn in a nearby creek, where their battered bodies were a reminder of the grand cycle of life, yes, but were also an intimately dismal spectacle. Then I discovered a colony of bats, the year’s pups just learning to fly. Not a lot is known about the mortality rate of bats in this fledgling period, but I am inclined to predict it is high. The little ones peeped fearfully before their maiden flights, and with good reason—I watched several crash into the tall grass, unlikely ever to make it home again. They might, at least, make easy meals for the garter snake I saw that had somehow lost half its face.

  All of this took place in a valley that, blessed with steep slopes, icy winters, wet summers, and remoteness from the world’s stock exchanges, has somehow retained the full complement of predators, including wolves, grizzly bears, and mountain lions. I do indeed feel awe in that place, but not much peace. By day I carry pepper spray, and by night I sleep with a twelve-gauge shotgun close at hand, because a couple of years ago a bear tried to break into my “cabin”—a ninety-year-old homestead shack that can’t even keep out the rain—in the first light of dawn. If a god is in charge of the area, he is surely of the mercurial, Old Testament variety.

  The idea that nature is a bittersweet and sometimes forbidding place is not, as they say, currently trending. More prevalent is the view reflected in a recent caution from the Chicago Manual of Style editors that capital-N “Nature” is to be used only to denote “a goddess dressed in a flowing garment and flinging fruit and flowers everywhere.” The comment is tongue-in-cheek, but the point is well taken. The natural world is increasingly seen as a gentle and giving realm of the spirit. In some cases, this view is actively religious or quasireligious, whether we are speaking of the biosphere as the provident Earth Mother, the being-of-beings that is James Lovelock’s Gaia, or simply the handiwork of one or another god. But above all else, the actual experience of being in nature seems to affirm its essential holiness. The natural world feels like a spiritual respite: a literal sanctum, where we are safe to reconnect to what is larger than ourselves. Compared to the cosmic rhythms of mountain, sea, and sky, it is ordinary daily life—driving at rush hour, punching security codes, navigating a shape-shifting digital culture—that seems hostile.

  Yet there is a serious problem with our idea of sacred nature, and that is that the idol is a false one. If we experience the natural world as a place of succor and comfort, it is in large part because we have made it so. Only 20 percent of Earth’s terrestrial surface is still home to all the large mammals it held five hundred years ago, and even across those refugia they are drastically reduced in abundance. The seas have lost an estimated 90 percent of their biggest fish. For decades there were almost no wolves, grizzly bears, or even bald eagles in the lower forty-eight, and modern recovery projects have brought them back to only a small fraction of their former ranges. Scientists speak of an “ecology of fear” that once guided the movements and behavior of animals that shared land- and seascapes with toothy predators—an anxiety that humans once shared. In much of what’s left of the wild, that dread no longer applies even to deer or rabbits, let alone us. The sheer abundance and variety of the living world, its endless chaos of killing and starving and rutting and suffering, its routine horrors of mass death and infanticide and parasites and drought, have faded from sight and mind. We have rendered nature an easy god to worship.

  If humankind’s relationship to the wild were to be embodied by just one of the gods we have invented, I would nominate Janus, the twin-faced deity of the ancient Romans. Our sense of the divine can connect us to nature, but it can divide us from it as well. Spirituality can help us see ourselves as kindred to every living and nonlivin
g thing, all sprung from the same celestial dust. This primeval understanding remains deep and broad today, revealed everywhere from the Garden of Eden story shared in one form or another by Christians, Jews, and Muslims; to the Tibetan name for Mount Everest, Chomolungma, the Holy Mother; to $2,995 shamanic journeys of reconnection to Mother Earth in Sedona, Arizona, complete with one-night vision quests, “weather permitting.” On the other hand, spirituality has long been used to place ourselves on a pedestal above the rest of creation. The Garden of Eden story includes instructions to “fill the earth and subdue it” and to “have dominion” over every living thing, among other phrases that amount to a mission statement for latter-day capitalism; Mount Everest is a challenge to be conquered; and that same Arizona wilderness retreat promises to refresh the “natural power that is your birthright.”

  Old Janus has been staring in these opposite directions a long time—the tension between being a part of nature and standing apart from it is elemental to what it means to be human. “The archaeological record encodes hundreds of situations in which societies were able to develop long-term sustainable relationships with their environments, and thousands of situations in which the relationships were short-lived and mutually destructive,” wrote the Arizona State University anthropologist Charles Redman in his seminal 1999 book Human Impact on Ancient Environments. The pattern Redman points to is not, as some might suppose, divided neatly between destructive societies in the lineage of so-called Western civilization and sustainable societies in the more earth-toned traditions often associated with, for example, Native Americans. A recent scientific review of human impacts on the oceans found “overwhelming” evidence that aboriginal coastal cultures “often” depleted their local environments; in fact, the editors speculate that it may have been the struggle to survive in increasingly degraded surroundings that gave rise to the conservation values that many Native Americans appear to have held at the time of European contact. If so, then 1492 was a clash of Janusian timing: European nations reveling in the discovery of God-given riches just as Native American cultures were formulating a spiritual understanding of natural limits.