by Ira Flatow
It’s not an abstract concept, understanding how we are all in this together, says Earle. “It should be just basic to the way we think. You take care of your home. You take care of the air you breathe, the water you drink, the food that you consume.” It ain’t rocket science, just logic.
“The thing that worries me is that people seem to be getting increasingly detached from nature. We need to get reengaged, starting with the youngest kids and finding the kid in the oldest of us to realize that we’re all connected, first of all, as people, but all people are connected to nature.”
How to get reattached to nature? How about simply jumping into the ocean and getting reacquainted? “With knowing, there is the possibility that we can care. If you don’t know, you can’t care. So getting the word out, getting people to go jump in the ocean and see for themselves what’s out there is really critical, but especially kids.”
And if a simple splash on the beach is not enough to inspire you, Earle has a more ambitious idea: “I long for the day when you have little rent-a-sub places where you can go get your pickup truck and put a submarine on the back and go off to the dock or the beach of your choice or the boat. It’s almost there. You know, there are really dozens of options now that people do have. It’s not just for the handful of those who are occasionally lucky enough to penetrate the great depths. The doors are opening. There are passenger subs in Hawaii and Barbados and Bermuda, a few other places, where you can actually buy a ticket and submerge.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CRAIG VENTER GOES FISHING FOR GENES
We’re trying to create a giant database for everybody to use that gives us a chance to catalog the gene pool on planet Earth.
—CRAIG VENTER
There’s a lot of talk about sending humans to the moon and to Mars. These planets hold terrific fascination for us, first because we know so little about them and second because Mars holds the potential for harboring life, perhaps in a form we have never seen.
But if you want to explore a place we know virtually nothing about, you might try looking right here on Earth or more precisely, right here in our oceans.
“Here we are looking for life on Mars and we know less than one percent of life on the planet Earth,” says genomics pioneer Dr. J. Craig Venter, the man known more for his work on the human genome project than for his interest in life beneath the waves. It’s not enough to sequence the genes of humans; Venter will settle for nothing less than the genes of the entire planet. And most of those genes have yet to be discovered, as tiny microorganisms in the oceans making up 70 percent of our planet. “Ninety-nine percent of the species in the ocean, people don’t even know they exist, let alone have a way to characterize them.”
Venter has created an unconventional expedition that he says was inspired by the voyages of Darwin’s Beagle and the HMS Challenger. And like Darwin, he set sail on the seas in the name of science. Venter and scientists aboard his yacht, the Sorcerer II, have been collecting microbes from deep in the ocean, from Maine to the Galapagos, to the South Pacific and back. Their mission: to sequence the genomes of entire microbial ecosystems.
“We’re trying to create a giant database for everybody to use that gives us a chance to catalog the gene pool on planet Earth.”
His 95-foot yacht circumnavigated the globe, collecting ocean samples every 200 miles. “Our view was why not try and get a first-ever assessment of the diversity in the oceans by doing a complete circumnavigation. We think it’s an important part of science education. We’re trying to show young people that science can be extremely fun and extremely rewarding in terms of the discoveries that can be made.”
Traveling the world filtering seawater sounds idyllic, but it’s very fruitful, judging by the results of his first test voyage. Sampling the Sargasso Sea off the coast of Bermuda, Venter and his colleagues discovered a million new genes and thousands of new species of microorganisms. “The biological diversity we found was so vast in the Sargasso Sea; even samples taken a mile apart and a day apart had totally different sets of species in it.”
The embarrassment of riches was highly unexpected. “The Sargasso was supposed to be a simple site. It’s very low-nutrient, so everybody was speculating there were very few species there. We thought, We’ll start with a simple site and make sure these methods really work well. What we found: it was far more complex than most ever imagined.” The organisms in the Sargasso were breaking the rules of nature as we understand them. These organisms were thriving in abundance without the necessary nutrients—the food—that biologists thought that they would need. What Venter discovered was a system far more complex: the ability of the organisms to capture sunlight and use that energy to overcome the lack of nutrients. “So the thinking is now changing. Perhaps the low-nutrient sites might have more diversity” than sites where there’s an abundant source of food for the organisms.
“It means we’ve not really understood at all the biology of the oceans and that sunlight probably plays a far greater role in the most basic life forms than anybody ever imagined.”
It is common for biologists to collect live marine organisms from the ocean and try to keep them alive in the lab long enough to understand what contributions they make to the oceans’ ecosystem. But this technique will never work for the tiny microbes in the oceans. They do not readily survive in captivity. Venter hopes to overcome this limitation by using pioneering methods of gene sequencing he developed for the human genome project and applying them to unlock the genetic secrets of these ocean organisms. No need to grow the organisms in the lab; all you need is their genes.
“We take all the DNA from a section of the ocean—in the case of the Sargasso Sea, two million sequences—and we analyze it.” The highly successful technique, tested out on the Sargasso Sea organisms, will be applied to the rest of the microbes sampled around the world.
THE OCEANS: A SOLUTION TO GLOBAL WARMING?
In this era of renewed interest in global warming, Venter and his colleagues at the Institute for Biological and Energy Alternatives feel that the ocean creatures may hold a key to understanding and solving the role of the greenhouse gas CO2. Scientists know that the ocean is one of the most important absorbers of CO2. It plays an essential role in how nature moves carbon in and out of the atmosphere. “I think one of the biggest findings we had” in studying marine organisms “is all these new photoreceptors,” genes that allow plants and organisms to soak up sunlight and inhale the CO2 to make food and energy. “Maybe half or more of the organisms deal with the sunlight for their source of energy or metabolism versus what was thought to be only a tiny handful of the organisms doing that.”
Venter believes that some of these organisms are so exciting that they’re going to give us a new view of life. “For example, we’re finding that a theme is used over and over and over again in evolution. It’s not like we have a million different solutions for each problem. These cells found something that worked really well. Each new cell, each new life form that came along picked up those same elements, modified them a little bit, but didn’t change them much over billions of years of evolution. So we think we can actually get down to maybe what was the basic working set in the gene pool that all life derived from.”
PART VIII
SCIENCE AND RELIGION
CHAPTER TWENTY
FITTING GOD INTO THE EQUATION
I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
Not long ago, I moderated a panel discussion at the TriBeCa Film Festival in New York. The festival doesn’t normally invite science journalists to host a panel discussion, but the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation had sponsored a prize for screenwriters who had penned the best screenplay with a science theme, and I was asked to bridge the science and the arts divide.
Sitting on the panel, beside the usual film folks, was Dr. James Watson, the famous codiscoverer, with Dr. Francis Crick,
of the three-dimensional structure of the DNA molecule, 50 years before. Not only had they gone on to win a Nobel Prize for their discovery but also a film about the effort was made in Great Britain some years later starring Jeff Goldblum as the notorious Dr. Watson. (The science–arts connection on the panel…)
The public was invited to sit in the audience and ask questions, and having Watson right in front of them, perhaps the most famous biologist in the world, was an opportunity hard to resist. One questioner in particular was most memorable. She walked up to the microphone, politely introduced herself to the panel, and with great reverence quietly directed a question to Watson about what motivated him in his research. “Did your religious beliefs influence your work?” she inquired very politely. Little was she—or the rest of us prepared—for the tirade that followed.
Watson lashed out at the poor woman for bringing God into the picture. His voice rising to the occasion, he lectured that the main reason he chose to unlock the secret of DNA was to take God out of the picture. He would show how life is created without the need to include the deity. How dare she insult him in such a manner? And in a torrent of insult, profanity, and histrionics, Watson proceeded to verbally beat this woman to a pulp. Crushed, she retreated to the safety of the audience, silenced and in a state of shock and awe.
Over the course of the next few months, I would have the opportunity to interview Watson many times and see a similar spectacle: Ask him about religion and he flies off the handle. (After watching this repeatedly, I’ve come to the conclusion that Watson is a showman and this is his act.)
Other scientists, such as Steven Weinberg and Richard Dawkins, are as opinionated about science and religion as Watson. And they take no prisoners either, though they lack the flair for the dramatic that Watson has cultivated. All of which raises the questions: Just how much does a person’s faith influence his or her work in science? Can a person with serious religious beliefs also be a serious, respected scientist?
These questions are especially relevant in the current religious climate. Has there been a time, in the past hundred years, where science and religion have clashed more forcefully than we are witnessing now? Not since the Scopes trial in 1925 have we seen such vocal clashes between opposing forces of science and religion.
From President George W. Bush and his “the verdict is still out” when it comes to the validity of evolution, to the Pennsylvania judge who wrote the definitive ruling against teaching creation in biology class, to the debate over embryonic stem cell research, science and religion have been in the news almost every week. Which again highlights the issues: Can science and religion coexist? Can religious scientists also be good scientists? What does religion inform scientists about their work? What does research inform scientists about their beliefs?
The answers are not simple. Over the many years that I have interviewed scientists, I have never seen a wider range of views by scientists and theologians about religion and science than I do now. The opinions tend to fall into three broad categories:
• Religion is antiscience, and as long as the two maintain a distance, the better. Many who hold this view are atheists.
• Extreme fundamentalist views of religious beliefs, where the bibles, of many faiths, are taken to be literally true and thus cannot accommodate modern scientific beliefs such as evolution, age of the Earth, and the equality of the sexes.
• Religious views are not in opposition to science and can bend as science makes new discoveries. An interesting corollary to this places God outside of the natural world so that God and science don’t intersect except in unusual circumstances called miracles.
I’ve collected some of the more cogent and vocal lines of reasoning to illustrate the three views above and to give you a flavor of the various and creative ways that scientists have come to terms with religion in their lives, both welcoming its influence and forcefully shunning it.
Just as religions provide you a buffet of choices out of which to find a belief that fits your worldview, so do the following personalities, opinions, and ideas, out of which I’m sure you’ll find some with which you agree. Maybe even a few!
The debate about religion and science is sure to be a topic for years to come, as it has been for the last four centuries.
THE FLAMETHROWERS
On one end of the spectrum lie those scientists who show little accommodation for religious points of view. James Watson, mentioned above, is a good example. But he is not alone. “I grew up without religion, and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more and more inclined to dislike the influence of religion in the world and to hope that the human species will eventually outgrow it,” says Dr. Steven Weinberg, professor in the Department of Physics, University of Texas at Austin, and winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize in physics. Weinberg is an avowed atheist. “I’m in physics because I love physics. But I do hope that the advance of science in general and physics in particular will in the long run continue, as it has in the past, to weaken the hold of religion on people’s minds.”
When I first heard Weinberg’s acid critique of religion and those who are believers I was shocked. It is not unexpected that some scientists harbor these beliefs. But here was someone who, like Watson, hardly sugarcoated his message. And he never shied away from telling just how he felt about it. For example, while Weinberg said in a 2005 appearance on Science Friday that he is in favor of a dialogue between science and religion, he said that such an exchange would not be a constructive dialogue. “There is no conflict between science and religion on the level where religion is simply a matter of ethnic identification or habitual practice or aesthetic enjoyment. But when it comes to belief in things being true or not true, as, for example, that there is something beyond the physical universe, that there is an afterlife, that there is a deity, it’s on the level of belief that science and religion come into conflict. That’s not all of religion, by any means, but it is an important part.”
The most famous case of religion intruding on science and seeking to influence its findings is the one involving Galileo reporting that he had seen the moons of Jupiter revolve around that planet. That put him at odds with the Catholic Church and he was forced to retract what his eyes told him to be true on the threat of excommunication by the pope. Weinberg says that as science has advanced through the centuries, it has caused religion to retreat from areas in which it used to make very definite statements of belief about science and nature. “I think that’s a good thing.” But, he says, it still has not been a full retreat.
“There are still idiots out there in the world who think the world was created six thousand years ago and that all the species were created at the same time.” He is willing to admit that those folks represent a minority opinion, though.
THE MODERATES
Dr. John Haught doesn’t believe that the purpose of religion is to compete with science. “If religion were in the business of trying to give out scientific information, then surely it’s going to compete with science, and there could only be a retreat if that was the function of religion,” says Haught, professor of theology and director of the Georgetown Center for the Study of Science & Religion at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. “I grew up as a Roman Catholic and I also came from a family of scientists, and so I’ve always had a love of both science and theology, and as a Catholic, I’ve never had any problem reconciling the two.”
Here is the typical middle ground of the moderate view: “In many ways, the coming of science has delivered religion from the moonlighting job of trying to provide anything similar to scientific information. Religion is in the business of doing something quite, quite different. And as such, there can be no conflict. In a very broad sense, you could say religion is belief in something of ultimate importance, and even the scientist has religion in that sense. Or in a more narrow sense, you could say religion is belief that there’s some sort of incomprehensible mystery that surrounds the universe. Einstein himself accepted religion in that sense of the
term.”
Einstein’s God was a spiritual God, one whose secrets were there to be discovered. A “cosmic religion,” as he called it. He dismissed the idea of a “God conceived in man’s image, so there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it.”
“Where I think the rubber hits the road and things really get sticky,” says Haught, “and I think Steven Weinberg would probably agree with this, is where religion is understood as belief in what Steven calls an interested God or a personal God. I think what religion is attempting to do in using the symbol of a personal God is to get across the belief or the conviction that the universe ultimately is undergirded by a principle of care, by a principle of intelligence, by a principle of meaning. And you know, science doesn’t do anything like that. Science is in the business of gathering a much more limited kind of information, and as such, I don’t think it can conflict with religion as I’ve understood it.”
Does Weinberg agree? “There still is perhaps not a conflict but a tension, as Susan Haack, the philosopher, calls it between science and religion, on two levels. It’s certainly true that science is never going to disprove the existence of an interested God or an afterlife. But when you learn the way the world works, as you learn more and more about the laws of nature and their chilling, impersonal quality, as you learn more and more about the irrelevance of human life to the general mechanism of the universe, the idea of an interested God, of a path that has been laid out for human beings, of a cosmic drama in which human beings are playing the starring role, becomes increasingly implausible; not disproved but just implausible.