by Lewis Thomas
I can imagine the people moving around the edges of the plastic barrier, touching shoulder to shoulder, sometimes touching hands, exchanging bits of information, nodding, smiling sometimes, prepared as New Yorkers always are to take flight at a moment’s notice, their mitochondria fully stoked and steaming. They move in orderly lines around the box, crowding one another precisely, without injury, peering down, nodding, and then backing off to let new people in. Seen from a distance, clustered densely around the white plastic box containing the long serpentine lines of army ants, turning to each other and murmuring repetitively, they seem an absolute marvel. They might have dropped here from another planet.
I am sad that I did not see any of this myself. By the time I had received the communication on television and in my morning paper, felt the tugging pull toward Manhattan, and made my preparations to migrate, I learned that the army ants had all died.
The Art Form simply disintegrated, all at once, like one of those exploding, vanishing faces in paintings by the British artist Francis Bacon.
There was no explanation, beyond the rumored, unproved possibility of cold drafts in the gallery over the weekend. Monday morning they were sluggish, moving with less precision, dully. Then, the death began, affecting first one part and then another, and within a day all 2 million were dead, swept away into large plastic bags and put outside for engulfment and digestion by the sanitation truck.
It is a melancholy parable. I am unsure of the meaning, but I do think it has something to do with all that plastic—that, and the distance from the earth. It is a long, long way from the earth of a Central American jungle to the ground floor of a gallery, especially when you consider that Manhattan itself is suspended on a kind of concrete platform, propped up by a meshwork of wires, pipes, and water mains. But I think it was chiefly the plastic, which seems to me the most unearthly of all man’s creations so far. I do not believe you can suspend army ants away from the earth, on plastic, for any length of time. They will lose touch, run out of energy, and die for lack of current.
One steps on ants, single ants or small clusters, every day without giving it a thought, but it is impossible to contemplate the death of so vast a beast as these 2 million ants without feeling twinges of sympathy, and something else. Nervously, thinking this way, thinking especially about Manhattan and the plastic platform, I laid down my newspaper and reached for the book on my shelf that contained, I knew, precisely the paragraph of reassurance required by the moment:
It is not surprising that many analogies have been drawn between the social insects and human societies. Fundamentally, however, these are misleading or meaningless, for the behavior of insects is rigidly stereotyped and determined by innate instructive mechanisms; they show little or no insight or capacity for learning, and they lack the ability to develop a social tradition based on the accumulated experience of many generations.
It is, of course, an incomplete comfort to read this sort of thing to one’s self. For full effect, it needs reading aloud by several people at once, moving the lips in synchrony.
THE MBL
Once you have become permanently startled, as I am, by the realization that we are a social species, you tend to keep an eye out for pieces of evidence that this is, by and large, a good thing for us. You look around for the enterprises that we engage in collectively and unconsciously, the things we build like wasp nests, individually unaware of what we are doing. Most of the time, these days, it is a depressing exercise. The joint building activity that consumes most of our energy and binds us together is, of course, language, but this is so overwhelming a structure and grows so slowly that none of us can feel a personal sense of participating in the work.
The less immense, more finite items, of a size allowing the mind to get a handhold, like nations, or space technology, or New York, are hard to think about without drifting toward heartsink.
It is in our very small enterprises that we can find encouragement, here and there. The Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole is a paradigm, a human institution possessed of a life of its own, self-regenerating, touched all around by human meddle but constantly improved, embellished by it. The place was put together, given life, sustained into today’s version of its maturity and prepared for further elaboration and changes in its complexity by what can only be described as a bunch of people. Neither the spectacularly eminent men who have served as directors down through the century nor the numberless committees by which it is seasonally raddled, nor the six-hundred-man corporation that nominally owns and operates it, nor even the trustees, have ever been able to do more than hold the lightest reins over this institution; it seems to have a mind of its own, which it makes up in its own way.
Successive generations of people in bunches, never seeming very well organized, have been building the MBL since it was chartered in 1888. It actually started earlier, in 1871, when Woods Hole, Massachusetts, was selected for a Bureau of Fisheries Station and the news got round that all sorts of marine and estuarine life could be found here in the collisions between the Gulf Stream and northern currents offshore, plus birds to watch. Academic types drifted down from Boston, looked around, began explaining things to each other, and the place was off and running.
The MBL has grown slowly but steadily from the outset, sprouting new buildings from time to time, taking on new functions, expanding, drawing to itself by a sort of tropism greater numbers of biological scientists each summer, attracting students from all parts of the world. Today, it stands as the uniquely national center for biology in this country; it is the National Biological Laboratory without being officially designated (or yet funded) as such. Its influence on the growth and development of biologic science has been equivalent to that of many of the country’s universities combined, for it has had its pick of the world’s scientific talent for each summer’s research and teaching. If you ask around, you will find that any number of today’s leading figures in biology and medicine were informally ushered into their careers by the summer course in physiology; a still greater number picked up this or that idea for their key experiments while spending time as summer visitors in the laboratories, and others simply came for a holiday and got enough good notions to keep their laboratories back home busy for a full year. Someone has counted thirty Nobel Laureates who have worked at the MBL at one time or another.
It is amazing that such an institution, exerting so much influence on academic science, has been able to remain so absolutely autonomous. It has, to be sure, linkages of various kinds, arrangements with outside universities for certain graduate programs, and it adheres delicately, somewhat ambiguously, to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute just up the street. But it has never come under the domination of any outside institution or governmental agency, nor has it ever been told what to do by any outside group. Internally, the important institutional decisions seem to have been made by a process of accommodation and adaptation, with resistible forces always meeting movable objects.
The invertebrate eye was invented into an optical instrument at the MBL, opening the way to modern visual physiology. The giant axon of the Woods Hole squid became the apparatus for the creation of today’s astonishing neurobiology. Developmental and reproductive biology were recognized and defined as sciences here, beginning with sea-urchin eggs and working up. Marine models were essential in the early days of research on muscle structure and function, and research on muscle has become a major preoccupation at the MBL. Ecology was a sober, industrious science here long ago, decades before the rest of us discovered the term. In recent years there have been expansion and strengthening in new fields; biologic membranes, immunology, genetics, and cell regulatory mechanisms are currently booming.
You can never tell when new things may be starting up from improbable lines of work. The amebocytes of starfish were recently found to contain a material that immobilizes the macrophages of mammals, resembling a product of immune lymphocytes in higher forms.
Aplysia, a sea slug that looks as though it couldn’t be good for anything, has been found by neurophysiologists to be filled with truth. Limulus, one of the world’s conservative beasts, has recently been in the newspapers; it was discovered to contain a reagent for the detection of vanishingly small quantities of endotoxin from gram-negative bacteria, and the pharmaceutical industry has already sniffed commercial possibilities for the monitoring of pyrogen-free materials; horseshoe crabs may soon be as marketable as lobsters.
There is no way of predicting what the future will be like for an institution such as the MBL. One way or another, it will evolve. It may shift soon into a new phase, with a year-round program for teaching and research and a year-round staff, but it will have to accomplish this without jeopardizing the immense power of its summer programs, or all institutional hell will break loose. It will have to find new ways for relating to the universities, if its graduate programs are to expand as they should. It will have to develop new symbiotic relations with the Oceanographic Institute, since both places have so much at stake. And it will have to find more money, much more—the kind of money that only federal governments possess—without losing any of its own initiative.
It will be an interesting place to watch, in the years ahead. In a rational world, things ought to go as well for the MBL as they have in the past, and it should become an even larger and more agile collective intelligence. If you can think of good questions to ask about the life of the earth, it should be as good a place as any to go for answers.
It is now, in fact. You might begin at the local beach, which functions as a sort of ganglion. It is called Stony Beach, because it used to be covered, painfully, by small stones. Long ago, somehow, some committee of scientists, prodded by footsore wives, found enough money to cover it with a layer of sand. It is the most minor of beaches, hardly big enough for a committee, but close enough to the laboratories so that the investigators can walk down for a sandwich lunch with their children on sunny weekdays. From time to time, pure physicists turn up, with only a few minutes to spare from a meeting at the National Academy summer headquarters, tired from making forecasts on classifiedly obscure matters, wearing the look of doom. The physicists are another species, whiter-skinned, towel-draped against the sun, unearthly, the soles of their feet so sensitive that they limp on sand.
A small boy, five-ish, with myopia and glasses, emerges from the water; characteristically, although his hair is dripping his glasses are bone dry; he has already begun to master technique. As he picks his way between the conversations, heading for his mother, who is explaining homology between DNA in chloroplasts and bacteria, he is shaking his head slowly in wonderment, looking at something brown and gelatinous held in his hand, saying, “That is very interesting water.” At Stony Beach the water is regarded as primarily interesting, even by small boys.
On weekends, in hot midsummer, you can see how the governing mechanisms work. It is so crowded that one must pick one’s way on tiptoe to find a hunching place, but there is always a lot of standing up anyway; biologists seem to prefer standing on beaches, talking at each other, gesturing to indicate the way things are assembled, bending down to draw diagrams in the sand. By the end of the day, the sand is crisscrossed with a mesh of ordinates, abscissas, curves to account for everything in nature.
You can hear the sound from the beach at a distance, before you see the people. It is that most extraordinary noise, half-shout, half-song, made by confluent, simultaneously raised human voices, explaining things to each other.
You hear a similar sound at the close of the Friday Evening Lecture, the MBL’s weekly grand occasion, when the guest lecturers from around the world turn up to present their most stunning pieces of science. As the audience flows out of the auditorium, there is the same jubilant descant, the great sound of crowded people explaining things to each other as fast as their minds will work. You cannot make out individual words in the mass, except that the recurrent phrase “But look—” keeps bobbing above the surf of language.
Not many institutions can produce this spontaneous music at will, summer after summer, year after year. It takes a special gift, and the MBL appears to have been born with it. Perhaps this is an aspect of the way we build language after all. The scale is very small, and it is not at all clear how it works, but it makes a nice thought for a time when we can’t seem to get anything straight or do anything right.
AUTONOMY
Working a typewriter by touch, like riding a bicycle or strolling on a path, is best done by not giving it a glancing thought. Once you do, your fingers fumble and hit the wrong keys. To do things involving practiced skills, you need to turn loose the systems of muscles and nerves responsible for each maneuver, place them on their own, and stay out of it. There is no real loss of authority in this, since you get to decide whether to do the thing or not, and you can intervene and embellish the technique any time you like; if you want to ride a bicycle backward, or walk with an eccentric loping gait giving a little skip every fourth step, whistling at the same time, you can do that. But if you concentrate your attention on the details, keeping in touch with each muscle, thrusting yourself into a free fall with each step and catching yourself at the last moment by sticking out the other foot in time to break the fall, you will end up immobilized, vibrating with fatigue.
It is a blessing to have options for choice and change in the learning of such unconsciously coordinated acts. If we were born with all these knacks inbuilt, automated like ants, we would surely miss the variety. It would be a less interesting world if we all walked and skipped alike, and never fell from bicycles. If we were all genetically programmed to play the piano deftly from birth, we might never learn to understand music.
The rules are different for the complicated, coordinated, fantastically skilled manipulations we perform with our insides. We do not have to learn anything. Our smooth-muscle cells are born with complete instructions, in need of no help from us, and they work away on their own schedules, modulating the lumen of blood vessels, moving things through intestines, opening and closing tubules according to the requirements of the entire system. Secretory cells elaborate their products in privacy; the heart contracts and relaxes; hormones are sent off to react silently with cell membranes, switching adenyl cyclase, prostaglandin, and other signals on and off; cells communicate with each other by simply touching; organelles send messages to other organelles; all this goes on continually, without ever a personal word from us. The arrangement is that of an ecosystem, with the operation of each part being governed by the state and function of all the other parts. When things are going well, as they generally are, it is an infallible mechanism.
But now the autonomy of this interior domain, long regarded as inviolate, is open to question. The experimental psychologists have recently found that visceral organs can be taught to do various things, as easily as a boy learns to ride a bicycle, by the instrumental techniques of operant conditioning. If a thing is done in the way the teacher wants, at a signal, and a suitable reward given immediately to reinforce the action, it becomes learned. Rats, rewarded by stimulation of their cerebral “pleasure centers,” have been instructed to speed up or slow down their hearts at a signal, or to alter their blood pressures, or switch off certain waves in their electroencephalograms and switch on others.
The same technology has been applied to human beings, with other kinds of rewards, and the results have been startling. It is claimed that you can teach your kidneys to change the rate of urine formation, raise or lower your blood pressure, change your heart rate, write different brain waves, at will.
There is already talk of a breakthrough in the prevention and treatment of human disease. According to proponents, when the technology is perfected and extended it will surely lead to new possibilities for therapy. If a rat can be trained to dilate the blood vessels of one of his ears more than those of the other, as has been reported, what rich experiences in self-control and self-oper
ation may lie just ahead for man? There are already cryptic advertisements in the Personal columns of literary magazines, urging the purchase of electronic headsets for the training and regulation of one’s own brain waves, according to one’s taste.
You can have it.
Not to downgrade it. It is extremely important, I know, and one ought to feel elated by the prospect of taking personal charge, calling the shots, running one’s cells around like toy trains. Now that we know that viscera can be taught, the thought comes naturally that we’ve been neglecting them all these years, and by judicious application of human intelligence, these primitive structures can be trained to whatever standards of behavior we wish to set for them.
My trouble, to be quite candid, is a lack of confidence in myself. If I were informed tomorrow that I was in direct communication with my liver, and could now take over, I would become deeply depressed. I’d sooner be told, forty thousand feet over Denver, that the 747 jet in which I had a coach seat was now mine to operate as I pleased; at least I would have the hope of bailing out, if I could find a parachute and discover quickly how to open a door. Nothing would save me and my liver, if I were in charge. For I am, to face the facts squarely, considerably less intelligent than my liver. I am, moreover, constitutionally unable to make hepatic decisions, and I prefer not to be obliged to, ever. I would not be able to think of the first thing to do.
I have the same feeling about the rest of my working parts. They are all better off without my intervention, in whatever they do. It might be something of a temptation to take over my brain, on paper, but I cannot imagine doing so in real life. I would lose track, get things mixed up, turn on wrong cells at wrong times, drop things. I doubt if I would ever be able to think up my own thoughts. My cells were born, or differentiated anyway, knowing how to do this kind of thing together. If I moved in to organize them they would resent it, perhaps become frightened, perhaps swarm out into my ventricles like bees.