The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011

by Mary Roach

  But Henry's brain is more than just an attention-garnering curiosity. And it's more than just a proof of concept, something Annese can use to demonstrate to the world the power of his methods.

  It's an object—2,401 objects now—that contains enduring mysteries still waiting to be solved.

  I remember following my grandfather up a hill. He was usually a sharp dresser—a New York Times reporter once described him as "almost unreal in his dashing appearance"—but on that particular morning I believe he wore a simple gray scarf, a floppy blue hat, and a threadbare ski suit. He was hauling a wooden toboggan behind him. It was either Christmas or Thanksgiving, one of the two holidays when the whole family would get together at his artifact-stuffed house in Farmington, Connecticut. I don't remember the slide down the hill, just the walk up.

  I remember midway through one Christmas dinner, maybe his last one, when he pushed himself up from his chair at the head of the table, wandered back to his study, and came back a few minutes later with a crumpled bullet in his hand. He placed the slug down beside his plate, told us the story behind it. Stamford, Connecticut, turn of the century, a burglar breaks into the home of a young bachelor. The bachelor keeps a pistol by his bedside table but his pistol jams. The burglar's doesn't. A bullet enters the bachelor's chest, where it encounters a deflecting rib, skids away from a lucky heart. The bachelor survives and keeps the bullet as a memento. He eventually passes it down to his son.

  The bullet just sat there for the rest of the dinner, beside my grandfather's plate, and like some of the other artifacts in his home, it was both fascinating and terrible to contemplate. Had it found its target, had its aim been true, then my grandfather, his children, his children's children, most of the people sitting around the table, myself included, would have never existed. It was a matter of centimeters, a fluke of aim, bone, ballistics, and it had made all the difference, its repercussions rippling down through generations.

  An intact human brain sits on a small rectangle of green marble, under a sheet of saran wrap. Annese is wearing khakis and a black button-down shirt, plus a medical smock, blue rubber gloves, and safety glasses. Brains can be full of pathogens. He plucks off the saran wrap, picks up a scalpel, and begins to peel away the pia mater, a thin, sticky membrane that covers the brain.

  He had never met the owner of this brain while she was alive, but he had performed the harvesting himself, so he knew what she had looked like, at least. She was a small lady, in her seventies, had reminded him a bit of a friend of his, and he likes to imagine that their personalities were similar.

  He'd performed Henry's peeling on this same table, on this same slab of formaldehyde-slicked marble. He'd been alone then, music on—the Beatles, mostly—and everything had gone perfectly. He had removed the oxidized clips my grandfather had left behind, set them aside. Then the membranes, the blood vessels, all the obstructing tissue, stripping everything away, until he had been left, finally, with just Henry's naked brain. Peelings usually last three or four hours, but with Henry he took his time, made sure everything was just right, peeled for five hours straight.

  He'd still been on a bit of a high then, still sort of pinching himself. He was part of the group that Corkin convened years ago to decide what to do with Henry's brain postmortem, and so of course Annese knew that the group had decided to give it to him as the cornerstone of his brain observatory—the most important brain of the twentieth century catalyzing a new era of brain research in the twenty-first. But despite all the planning, all the verbal agreements, he hadn't been absolutely sure he'd wind up with his prize until he actually boarded the flight with the cooler in hand. A part of him, the fatalistic Italian part, thought that something would happen at the last minute, that Corkin would change her mind, take Henry back.

  But she didn't.

  He presented the gate agent with two tickets, boarded the plane with time to spare. He gave Henry the window seat. Words he'd black-Sharpied on the cooler, along with his phone numbers and e-mail address: DIAGNOSTIC SPECIMEN. FRAGILE. IF FOUND, PLEASE DO NOT OPEN. CONTACT DR. ANNESE IMMEDIATELY.

  And from then on, everything went just as smoothly as could be. After the peeling, he embedded Henry's naked brain in gelatin, froze it solid. The embedding was, he's not too modest to say, a masterpiece. And the embedding set the stage for the slicing, which, despite the pressure, the sleep deprivation, the four hundred thousand pairs of eyes watching the procedure over the Internet, went off without a hitch.

  There's still lots more work to be done. The mounting of about two thousand more slides. The staining of those same slides. But he's getting close. Soon, within months, Annese will release a three-dimensional surface model of Henry's brain, built from the 2,401 high-res "block face" images taken during the slicing. This model will be at least ten times as detailed as anything one could possibly produce in an MRI machine and will have the additional benefit of being derived from images of the actual brain rather than a computerized interpretation of it. And then, bit by bit, he'll supplement that model with imagery of even greater resolution. A custom-built microscope scanner will digitize each of the mounted, stained slides at such a level of magnification that single neurons will be clearly visible. All of this, the resulting petabyte or two, will be accessible for free online to researchers worldwide. Over the last fifty-five years of his life, Henry was hidden away while a select coterie of scientists gathered more data about him, his abilities and his deficits, than any human in history. Now, after his death, Annese is poised to release Henry's brain into the wilds of the Internet, and the whole world will be able to reillumine that unprecedented volume of clinical data in the light of an unprecedented neuroanatomical map.

  One of Annese's assistants pokes her head into the room, tells him that some more slides are ready for staining. A few minutes later, Annese holds one of the fresh-dipped seven-by-five-inch slides up to the light, letting a purplish dye drip off the glass. The dye has adhered to the slide's cross section of pale, almost invisible brain tissue, darkening it, developing it like a photograph.

  A cross section of brain looks a lot like an inkblot, a Rorschach, and this one, at first glance, gives the impression of the head of a vaguely sinister goat. But then Annese starts guiding me through it.

  "You can see here," he says, indicating a spot where the tissue looks darker, the neurons more cramped, "where your grandfather pushed up his frontal lobes."

  We look at another slide, and he points to an area that would have sat a little below and back from Henry's frontal lobes, a portion of the slide where no dye stuck, since there was no tissue for it to adhere to. It's part of the lesion itself, the little bit of nothing that spawned everything. And though Annese doesn't want to go into too much detail, not before his findings are officially published, he tells me, sotto voce, that he's already discovered some surprising new things about what my grandfather destroyed in Henry's brain, and what he spared. For years, memory researchers have assumed that the stump that remained in Henry's brain was completely atrophic and nonfunctioning. According to Annese, however, that doesn't seem to be the case. The little that's left of Henry's hippocampus looks like it's in pretty good shape, actually.

  It's the sort of revelation that could shake up the field of memory science yet again.

  In 1953, when my grandfather closed a door in Henry's mind, did he leave it open just a crack? Does this explain the surprising exceptions to Henry's profound amnesia? So much of our understanding of how memory works is based on our understanding of how Henry's memory didn't work. But were we misunderstanding him, at least in part, all these years? These are the sorts of questions scientists will grapple with and argue over in the years to come, as the Brain Observatory goes online, as Henry's mind is preserved everywhere and nowhere at once, as his cells are counted and his final mysteries come to light.

  Annese puts the slide on a rack to dry, and I look at it again, at the blank spot near the middle, the hole you can see right through. It's just a small
emptiness, a tiny lacuna.

  A matter of centimeters.

  A beginning and an end.

  Emptying the Skies

  Jonathan Franzen

  FROM The New Yorker

  THE SOUTHEASTERN CORNER of the Republic of Cyprus has been heavily developed for foreign tourism in recent years. Large medium-rise hotels, specializing in vacation packages for Germans and Russians, overlook beaches occupied by sunbeds and umbrellas in orderly ranks, and the Mediterranean is nothing if not extremely blue. You can spend a very pleasant week here, driving the modern roads and drinking the good local beer, without suspecting that the area harbors the most intensive songbird-killing operations in the European Union.

  On the last day of April, I went to the prospering tourist town of Protaras to meet four members of a German bird-protection organization, the Committee Against Bird Slaughter (CABS), that runs seasonal volunteer "camps" in Mediterranean countries. Because the peak season for songbird trapping in Cyprus is autumn, when southbound migrants are loaded up with fat from a northern summer's feasting, I was worried that we might not see any action, but the first orchard we walked into, by the side of a busy road, was full of lime sticks: straight switches, about thirty inches long, that are coated with the gluey gum of the Syrian plum and deployed artfully, to provide inviting perches, in the branches of low trees. The CABS team, which was led by a skinny, full-bearded young Italian named Andrea Rutigliano, fanned into the orchard, taking down the sticks, rubbing them in dirt to neutralize the glue, and breaking them in half. All the sticks had feathers on them. In a lemon tree, we found a male collared flycatcher hanging upside down like a piece of animal fruit, its tail and its legs and its black-and-white wings stuck in glue. While it twitched and futilely turned its head, Rutigliano videoed it from multiple angles, and an older Italian volunteer, Dino Mensi, took still photographs. "The photos are important," said Alex Heyd, a sober-faced German who is the organization's general secretary, "because you win the war in the newspapers, not in the field."

  In hot sunshine, the two Italians worked together to free the flycatcher, gently liberating individual feathers, applying squirts of diluted soap to soften the resistant gum, and wincing when a feather was lost. Rutigliano then carefully groomed gum from the bird's tiny feet. "You have to get every bit of lime off," he said. "The first year I was doing this, I left a bit on the foot of one bird and saw it fly and get stuck again. I had to climb the tree." Rutigliano put the flycatcher in my hands, I opened them, and it flew off low through the orchard, resuming its northward journey.

  We were surrounded by traffic noise, melon fields, housing developments, hotel complexes. David Conlin, a beefy British military veteran, threw a bundle of disabled sticks into some weeds and said, "It's shocking—that you can stop anywhere around here and find these." I watched Rutigliano and Mensi work to free a second bird, a wood warbler, a lovely yellow-throated thing. It felt wrong to be seeing at such close range a species that ordinarily requires careful work with binoculars to get a decent view of. It felt literally disenchanting. I wanted to say to the wood warbler what St. Francis of Assisi is said to have said when he saw a captured wild animal: "Why did you let yourself be caught?"

  As we were leaving the orchard, Rutigliano suggested that Heyd turn his CABS T-shirt inside out, so that we would look more like ordinary tourists taking a walk. In Cyprus it's permissible to enter any private land that isn't fenced, and all forms of songbird trapping have been criminal offenses since 1974, but what we were doing still felt to me high-handed and possibly dangerous. The team, in its black and drab clothing, looked more like commandos than like tourists. A local woman, perhaps the orchard's owner, watched without expression as we headed inland on a dirt lane. Then a man in a pickup truck passed us, and the team, fearing that he might be going ahead to take down lime sticks, followed him at a trot.

  In the man's backyard, we found two pairs of twenty-foot-long metal pipes propped up in parallel on lawn chairs: a small-scale lime-stick factory of the sort that can provide good income for the mostly older Cypriot men who know the trade. "He's manufacturing them and keeping a few for himself," Rutigliano said. He and the others strolled brazenly around the man's chicken coop and rabbit cages, taking down a few empty sticks and laying them on the pipes. We then trespassed up a hillside and back down into an orchard crisscrossed by irrigation hoses and full of trapped birds. "Questo giardino è un disastro!" said Mensi, who spoke only Italian.

  A female blackcap had torn most of its tail off and was stuck not only by both legs and both wings but also by the bill, which sprang open as soon as Rutigliano unglued it; it began to cry out furiously. When the bird was freed altogether, he squirted a little water in its mouth and set it on the ground. It fell forward and flopped piteously, pushing its head into the mud. "It's been hanging so long that its leg muscles are overstretched," he said. "We'll keep it tonight, and it can fly tomorrow."

  "Even without a tail?" I said.

  "Certainly." He scooped up the bird and stowed it in an outer pocket of his backpack.

  Blackcaps are one of Europe's most common warblers and the traditional national delicacy of Cyprus, where they're known as ambelopoulia. They are the main target of Cypriot trappers, but the by-catch of other species is enormous: rare shrikes, other warblers, larger birds like cuckoos and golden orioles, even small owls and hawks. Stuck in lime in the second orchard were five collared flycatchers, a house sparrow, and a spotted flycatcher (formerly widespread, now becoming rare in much of northern Europe), as well as three more blackcaps. After the team members had sent them on their way, they wrangled about the tally of lime sticks at the site and settled on a figure of fifty-nine.

  A little farther inland, in a dry and weedy grove with a view of the blue sea and the golden arches of a new McDonald's, we found one active lime stick with one living bird hanging from it. The bird was a thrush nightingale, a gray-plumaged species that I had seen only once before. It was deeply tangled in lime and had broken a wing. "The break is between two bones, so it cannot recover," Rutigliano said, palpating the joint through feathers. "Unfortunately, we need to kill this bird."

  It seemed likely that the thrush nightingale had been caught on a stick overlooked by a trapper who had taken down his other sticks that morning. While Heyd and Conlin discussed whether to get up before dawn the next day and try to "ambush" the trapper, Rutigliano stroked the head of the thrush nightingale. "He's so beautiful," he said, like a little boy. "I can't kill him."

  "What should we do?" Heyd said.

  "Maybe give him a chance to hop around on the ground and die on his own."

  "I don't think there's a good chance for it," Heyd said.

  Rutigliano put the bird on the ground and watched as it scurried, looking more mouselike than birdlike, under a small thornbush. "Maybe in a few hours he can walk better," he said, unrealistically.

  "Do you want me to make the decision?" Heyd said.

  Rutigliano, without answering, wandered up the hill and out of sight.

  "Where did it go?" Heyd asked me.

  I pointed at the shrub. Heyd reached into it from two sides, captured the bird, held it gently in his hands, and looked up at me and Conlin. "Are we agreed?" he said, in German.

  I nodded, and with a twist of his wrist he tore the bird's head off.

  The sun had expanded its reach across the entire sky, killing its blue with whiteness. As we scouted for an approach from which to ambush the grove, it was already hard to say how many hours we'd been walking. Every time we saw a Cypriot in a truck or a field, we had to duck down and backtrack over rocks and pants-piercing thistles, for fear that somebody would alert the owner of the trapping site. There was nothing larger at stake here than a few songbirds, there were no land mines on the hillside, and yet the blazing stillness had a flavor of wartime menace.

  Lime-stick trapping has been traditional and widespread in Cyprus since at least the sixteenth century. Migratory birds were an important seasonal
source of protein in the countryside, and older Cypriots today remember being told by their mothers to go out to the garden and catch some dinner. In more recent decades, ambelopoulia became popular with affluent, urbanized Cypriots as a kind of nostalgic treat—you might bring a friend a jar of pickled birds as a house gift, or you might order a platter of them fried in a restaurant for a special occasion. By the mid-1990s, two decades after the country had outlawed all forms of bird trapping, as many as ten million songbirds a year were being killed. To meet the restaurant demand, traditional lime-stick trapping had been augmented by large-scale netting operations, and the Cypriot government, which was trying to clean up its act and win membership in the European Union, cracked down hard on the netters. By 2006 the annual take had fallen to around a million.

  In the past few years, however, with Cyprus now comfortably ensconced in the EU, signs advertising illicit ambelopoulia have begun to reappear in restaurants, and the number of active trapping sites is rising. The Cypriot hunting lobby, which represents the republic's fifty thousand hunters, is this year supporting two parliamentary proposals to relax antipoaching laws. One would reduce lime-stick use to a misdemeanor; the other would decriminalize the use of electronic recordings to attract birds. Opinion polls show that while most Cypriots disapprove of bird trapping, most also don't think it's a serious issue, and many enjoy eating ambelopoulia. When the country's Game Fund organized raids on restaurants serving the birds, the media coverage was roundly negative, leading with an account of food being pulled from the hands of a pregnant female diner.

  "Food is sacred here," said Martin Hellicar, the campaigns manager of BirdLife Cyprus, a local organization more averse to provocation than CABS is. "I don't think you'll ever get someone convicted for eating these things."

  Hellicar and I had spent a day touring netting sites in the country's southeast corner. Any small olive grove can be used for netting, but the really big sites are in plantations of acacia, an alien species there's no reason to irrigate if you're not trapping birds. We saw these plantations everywhere. Long runners of cheap carpeting are laid down between rows of acacias; hundreds of meters of nearly invisible mist nets are strung from poles that are typically anchored in old car tires filled with concrete; then, in the night, birdsong is played at high volume to lure migrants to rest in the lush acacias. In the morning, at first light, the poachers throw handfuls of pebbles to startle the birds into the nets. (A telltale sign of trapping is a mound of these pebbles dumped by the side of the road.) Since it's a superstition among poachers that letting birds go free ruins a site, the unmarketable species are torn up and dropped on the ground or left to die in the nets. The marketable birds can fetch up to five euros apiece, and a well-run site can yield a thousand birds or more a day.