Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I've Learned

by Alan Alda

  chapter 18

  DIPPING A TOE IN NATURE

  The night the series ended, all of us who had worked together on the show went to the studio and watched the last episode projected on a big screen. The last reel ended for us just as the rest of the country began to see the program on their television screens. We had been affected by the good-byes in the story and the good-byes that were implicit in our lives. There hadn’t been much laughter during the screening. Quietly, we got into our cars and headed for Koutoubia, a Moroccan restaurant a few miles away, to celebrate.

  On the way, I had an eerie feeling as I looked out the window. Something was strange, but I didn’t get it right away. Then I turned to Loretta. “Lorette, look at the streets. They’re empty.”

  At an hour when people were usually on their way out for the evening, the streets were completely quiet. We were quiet, too, for a minute as it sank in. Then someone said, “They’re home, watching.”

  No one really knows how many people were watching that night. They counted the TV sets that were tuned in, as they always did, but many of those sets were watched by large gatherings. In at least one town, people crowded together at the city hall to watch. About half the people in the country—125 million of them—were seeing the same program at the same time.

  The next day, we read in The New York Times that the city’s water supply was strained at every commercial break because so many hundreds of thousands of toilets were flushed at the same time; it was an honor we’d never hoped for.

  Someone from WQXR, the classical music station in New York, said a record number of people were calling in to ask for the name of the piece they’d heard on the show. I had used the Mozart clarinet quintet in the final story, partly because of its sentimental connection to Arlene. She had played it the night we met. The station manager said that more people heard it that night than all the people who had heard it since Mozart wrote it. Unfortunately for Mozart, the story called for it to be played on Chinese instruments, so they heard it in a way he never could have imagined.

  Even though I had been instrumental in ending the show, I felt the finality of its ending more strongly than I had thought I would. We all felt emotional about leaving one another. Late one night, we had sneaked over to a patch of dirt next to the commissary and buried a medical chest with a red cross painted on it. The chest contained a memento from each of the actors, something connected to his or her character: dog tags, a rosary, a surgical clamp. It was a kind of time capsule, and we left a note in the box explaining to whoever found it years in the future who we were and how much meaning these souvenirs had for us. The sentimentality of this gesture was undercut somewhat by the financial activities of Twentieth Century–Fox. A couple of months later, they decided to saw the commissary in half and sell the land under one of the halves to a company that wanted to erect a high-rise office building. A construction worker dug up the box and called us, asking what he should do with it. We had thought the box wouldn’t be found for a hundred years or so, and we thought when it was found, it would be regarded as some kind of treasure. “I found your box,” he said. “You want it?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s yours.”

  “Well, I mean, don’t you want it? What should I do with it?”

  “Keep it.” Keep the damn thing, I thought but didn’t say. Having your time capsule opened while you’re still alive is not a good idea.

  I had the time now to work on other projects. But I didn’t expect the sadness I’d feel not having that familiar place to work every day and the familiar faces to share it with. I got such a case of sadness that I had to keep reminding myself that it had been my idea to end it in the first place.

  One day, I opened a letter like many I’d received before, this one asking if I’d like to host a science program on television. This usually meant reading a narration. But my eye was caught by the title of the show: Scientific American Frontiers. I had been reading almost every issue of Scientific American for about thirty years. This was tempting.

  “Do it,” Arlene said. “Just do it. You’ll love it.”

  I was writing and directing movies, and I was supposed to leave myself free to work on them. But if I didn’t do what interested me, whatever it was, I’d be keeping score according to someone else’s rules. How long was I going to wait to keep score by my rules?

  I talked on the phone with Graham Chedd, one of the producers of the show. I asked him if he thought I’d actually be able to interview the scientists and not just read a narration. The thought of spending whole days talking with scientists got me excited.

  Graham and his partner, John Angier, decided to take a chance, and they pretty much shoved me out in front of the camera and let me ask questions. At first, I had a tendency to prepare for the interview by reading everything I could that the scientist had written. This served two purposes. It kept me from feeling ignorant, and it gave me a chance to look smart. Both of these were mistakes. One day, after interviewing Carl Sagan for a couple of hours, I felt immensely satisfied, having prepared myself so well that I could have an actual conversation about astrophysics with a real astronomer. John invited me to have a cup of coffee before I talked with the next scientist. It’s no good to gloat about things like this, and I tried to prepare myself to take it in stride when he told me how great it had gone. Instead, he looked up from his coffee and said in a very direct way that I had been showing off. And he was surprised that I would do that. Why hadn’t I just asked questions as if I didn’t know the answers and let Sagan be the smart one?

  My ears burned with anger at John. Showing off? What was he talking about? I was trying to be prepared.

  I smarted for a day or so, and then it finally sank in. All the preparation I was doing was making me ask questions that I thought revealed a knowledge of the scientists’ work, but it only got in their way. My questions were based on assumptions that often boxed them in. After that, I began to go into interviews with little or no preparation, which forced me to ask truly basic questions, questions I would have avoided before as dumb, but which let the scientists explain their experiments from the ground up. I could see a change in the scientists’ faces as they answered my questions now that I was willing to look as dumb as I actually was.

  What came out of this were shows in which you saw a real conversation between us. Most scientists are good teachers, and they often have a love of life and a good sense of humor, and all of that would come out in a true, relaxed exchange. The audience would be able to see in the scientist a vibrant person playing with ideas, instead of someone locked in lecture mode. And if we were lucky, a moment would come while we were on camera in which I finally understood a difficult concept, and the scientist’s excitement, as well as mine, would be palpable. We hoped for moments like these, because the moment of revelation would be an event and not just an explanation. It would be real television.

  All of this was good. The only hitch was that the producers of the show were trying to kill me.

  It was better television if I took part in the scientists’ experiments. And the most visual experiments took place in dangerous locations.

  We did a story on the Leaning Tower of Pisa. As we walked into the tower, the custodian of the tower was telling me that it was still tipping over a little more every year, and unless one of their theories worked to stop it, it wouldn’t just tip over, the pressure on the middle of the structure would make it explode. As he talked, we passed a sign that read, NO ONE PERMITTED BEYOND THIS POINT. As we started up the steps of the tower, I said, “Are people allowed up here?”

  “Oh, no, not anymore,” he said. “But in your case, we made an exception.”

  When we got to the top, we walked out on a ledge where a wind was whipping at us furiously. When I interviewed him, we had to chain ourselves to a wire that ran around the building to keep from being blown off. And in this case, given that I had been dumb enough to go up there, asking dumb questions was easy.

  A week later, w
e did a story about Mount Vesuvius. Graham said, “We just have to climb to the top. Should only take a half hour or so.”

  I said, “Graham, I don’t think we should climb to the top of Mount Vesuvius.”

  “Really?” he said. “Why not?” You could always tell there was trouble when his voice had this innocent tone.

  I said, “The reason we should not climb to the top of Mount Vesuvius is that the story we’re doing is about how the volcano is way overdue to erupt and it could blow at any second.”

  “No, no,” he said, smiling. “The scientist up there has all this monitoring equipment. She knows exactly what’s going on.”

  So I climbed to the top of Vesuvius and sat next to the scientist. As we talked, I kept looking past her down into the mouth of the volcano. There was a grassy patch of ground sitting on its cap, dotted with steaming jets of gases. Vesuvius is not considered an inactive volcano, and it didn’t look inactive. She was telling me that if it blew, a million people in the area would have no way to escape in time because there was only one road out. We would have even less time. We were sitting three feet from the thing.

  “But I hear you have all this monitoring equipment,” I said. “How much do you learn from that?”

  “Oh, not too much,” she said. “We really don’t know when it’ll blow.”

  I became strangely incurious about volcanoes, and before long we were trotting down the mountain again.

  A couple of years later, off the coast of Hawaii, we were doing a story about sharks. When a shark attacks a human, the people in the area often go out in boats hunting for the shark and kill the largest shark they can find. But out on the water, the scientist explained to me that by tracking sharks with radios, we’ve learned that sharks have routes they travel that cover hundreds or thousands of miles, and by the time people are out looking for revenge, a shark is most likely long gone. Large sharks prey on small sharks, and by killing whatever large sharks they find, people only increase the number of small sharks, which prey on fish; this ends up hurting the fishing industry and doing nothing about the shark that caused it all. A fascinating story, but to tell it on camera, someone had to help catch a large shark and then stick a transmitter in its belly. Graham seemed to think I was ideal for this.

  I watched the scientists for a while and decided they knew what they were doing, so I agreed to get in the boat with them. Somehow, they got a shark on the end of a line and hauled him over to the boat. We were in a twelve-foot rowboat, and we had maybe an eight-foot shark. I helped them flip him on his back, and he immediately went to sleep and stopped thrashing around. This was good, because the skin of a shark has the same structure as his teeth. You can use it as sandpaper. If you brush against it in the wrong direction, you can lacerate your hand, which I did. Then someone handed me a kitchen knife and said, “Just make a slit in his belly and we’ll put a transmitter in there.”

  I looked at the knife, and then at the shark, sleeping peacefully but lashed to a boat he could sink with one bite. “You don’t think he’ll mind?” I said.

  I made the slit, slipped in the radio, and sewed him up. They turned him over and he swam away, with a fast boat behind him tracking his route. What was wrong with me? I’m not a brave person; I’m cautious. I don’t even like bugs.

  I had always been terrified of tarantulas. When I was ten I found one in the swimming pool, and in a frenzy of fear I smashed it repeatedly with the end of a stick until its hairs floated eerily to the surface. Before the series had run its course, I would let a tarantula the size of a small grapefruit walk across my hand. I could feel the pads on his feet and could sense the life of a fellow creature in him, something I could never do when I recoiled in fear from these animals.

  For all the anxiety I had about doing the show—and I actually had some real anxiety—I loved the program because it gave me a look at nature I would never have had in any other way. What I hadn’t expected, though, was the look it would give me into my own brain. In Marilyn Albert’s lab in Boston, her assistants slid me into the claustrophobic tube of a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine. I was told to try to remember pictures flashed on a screen. In the other room, Marilyn watched a seahorse-shaped region of my brain, called the hippocampus, flashing on and off as I worked on storing the images. About a half hour later, they slid me back out and I went into the room where Marilyn was looking at images of my brain on her monitor. “How did I do?” I asked.

  She turned in her chair and smiled. “You have a plump hippocampus!” she said. I had never received that compliment before, and I couldn’t tell if it was what she told all the boys, but I grinned with pride anyway.

  In older people, she told me, especially if they don’t exercise their brains with puzzles and learning new things, the hippocampus gets less and less active. The hippocampus is crucial in laying down memory. Your ability to recall memories already stored can stay the same, while your ability to make new memories can diminish, and this is why there’s a tendency to remember what happened to you when you were twelve but not what you had for breakfast. “It’s really a case of use it or lose it,” she said.

  I hadn’t lost it, and I was feeling pretty good about my plump hippocampus. Then I met Daniel Schacter.

  Schacter, a professor of psychology at Harvard, and I were walking in a Boston park. As we moved down serpentine paths beside a lake, we chatted about the intricate web of paths in the brain that gives us memories. He mentioned casually that even a healthy memory is an unreliable aid for autobiography. And then, to show me what he meant, he actually made me remember some things I had never seen.

  We sat on a bench and for ten minutes we watched a couple having a picnic. It wasn’t a real picnic, but a scene he had staged for our science show. After a while I left, and without my knowing, he restaged the picnic and took photographs. The pictures were of some activities I had actually seen and some that I hadn’t but that could take place at a picnic. Two days later, he showed me the photographs, and I could see immediately that the man and woman in the photos were doing some things they hadn’t done while I was watching.

  But a while later, he showed me the pictures a second time.

  Again, I was certain I knew which pictures were of things I had seen and which had been staged for the camera after I’d gone. But as certain as I was, I was dead wrong about 15 percent of the time. He’d made me feel sure I had seen in person what I had seen only in photographs. I had the memory, but I couldn’t remember the source of the memory. This was a shock.

  I wondered how much of what I remembered of the Eden of my childhood was real. Was I actually remembering my past the way it happened? Was I remembering it at all?

  I’d always been surprised at how far back my memories go and the detailed scenes I’d been able to call up. I felt I had the raw material for understanding my beginnings. But now I began to wonder.

  There are images I’m certain I remember correctly: the stripper tossing her clothes at my feet in the wings; standing with my face in the chorus girls’ silk garments; crouching in the safe and peeking through the slits in the wood; waking up on the seats of the train, the impression of the cane basket weave still on my cheek.

  But I was also this certain of my memories of Daniel Schacter’s picnic—memories that turned out to be false. Come to think of it, how could I have a memory of the basket weave on my cheek? I couldn’t have seen my cheek at the time. I remember my mother rubbing my face, but I also think I see the pink impression on my skin. Somehow I’m seeing myself in this memory from a point outside myself, as if I were in a movie.

  I wondered how much of my childhood really happened, and this shook me up a little.

  I was learning things on Scientific American Frontiers that made me question my most dearly held assumptions, but the biggest shift in my thinking came from talking to Kári Stefánsson in Iceland.

  I hadn’t been in Reykjavík since the polar flight with my mother when she thought I wanted to throw her out
of the plane. All I saw then was a shed in the snow where we refueled. When I went back with Scientific American Frontiers, I saw a modern country where researchers were extending the reach of science. Kári has a company that combs through the human genome looking for genes that are associated with certain diseases, and he uses a quirk of the Icelandic population to make his work go faster. The quirk is that among the world’s populations, the Icelandic people have been isolated for so long that almost all of them can trace their genetic inheritance back to a few people who settled there a thousand years ago. As a result, when a gene is associated with a disease, it is much easier to identify. And one of the first genes Kári tracked down was neuregulin 1, which is implicated in schizophrenia.

  He told me about this when I interviewed him, but I didn’t really hear it. It was painful for me to think about my mother’s illness, and I was still shielding myself then from knowing more about her disease. A few years later, I decided I needed to talk with him again. I was reading about his work on the Web, and I learned that neuregulin 1, the gene associated with schizophrenia that he’d identified, signals brain cells to receive several types of neurotransmitters, the chemicals that carry messages between nerve cells. He was suggesting that a defect in neuregulin 1 might lead to a growing number of badly formed synapses in the brain.

  I wanted to understand this now. I wanted to know exactly what my mother had gone through. I got in touch with Kári, knowing that if he had the time, he could help me understand at least the biology of her illness.

  But Kári is a sensitive man as well as a scientist, and he drew me into the emotional side of his research almost immediately.

  “I think I may understand how you feel about your mother’s illness,” Kári said. “My oldest brother is a chronic schizophrenic, and he’s been sick since he was seventeen.” It was why the genetic link to schizophrenia was the first one he set out to find. Kári told me his brother was two years older than him.