The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015

by Rebecca Skloot

  Then, as planned, the tag had fallen away and Moore’s e-mail had gone dark with news of Bayla.

  Her whereabouts were unknown.

  On February 1, Moore leaned against the office doorway of his graduate student, Julie van der Hoop. “There’s a dead whale in Florida,” he said.

  She had followed the news of Bayla like everyone in the right whale community, asking Moore each morning if another ping of her coordinates had come in. Her face darkened.

  “Is it the calf?” van der Hoop asked.

  “I don’t know,” Moore said. “There’s a necropsy scheduled. Do you want to come?”

  Moore and van der Hoop arrived in St. Augustine the next day. The following morning they watched as the sun rose over a young right whale beached on the sand.

  She had a black chin.

  A team of researchers cut away Bayla’s shark-mauled blubber with long knives and examined her internal organs. In her mouth they discovered rope that Dodd and Slay hadn’t gotten. It was so deeply embedded, new tissue had grown over it, “like a pig in a blanket,” van der Hoop would later observe in her journal.

  By day’s end the team determined that Bayla had died from severe emaciation and lacerations caused by hundreds of feet of 7⁄16-inch-diameter floating polypropylene rope that connected traps or pots—the sort that NOAA had attempted to restrict.

  Beyond that, there wasn’t any more to be known. The rope could have come from off the coast of New England, or perhaps Canada; by the time Moore’s team had cut it away, she was too weakened to survive.

  There would be no decorous burial for Bayla; her size defied it. An excavator scooped her muscle and soft tissues into a hole dug in the mucky sand. The loader then piled Bayla’s bones onto a truck destined for Atlanta, where her skeleton would be reassembled for display at the Georgia Aquarium and she would be given the Hebrew name Bayla, meaning “beautiful.”

  When the work was done, Moore held a needle. It was the needle that researchers had fired from the rifle to deliver antibiotics to Bayla after her sedation. It was bent at an 80-degree angle. He suspected it had caused Bayla more pain. There were lessons to be learned from why it bent. He would write a paper. His peers would review it. A journal would publish it.

  But that was for another day.

  For now, Moore cried.

  The needle sat on his desk for a year taunting him.

  The paper was hard to write. Harder than any other. When it was done, there was relief. But the relief soon was replaced by creeping doubt.

  A colleague e-mailed him thanking him for his efforts to save the right whales from entanglement. Moore replied that he wasn’t sure the thanks was due. He still had no solution. After all these years, he still didn’t get it.

  A bleak realization had settled, he wrote. “I’ve failed.”

  The winds in the Bay of Fundy were steady and Moore hoisted the mainsail of the Rosita, the sailboat he and Hannah named for a whaling station in the South Atlantic that had been planned but never built. Moore liked to think of the Rosita as embodying the spirit of whales spared the harpoon.

  Every few minutes Moore whipped his head right or left, drawn by the chuff of spouting water. Grand Manan Island spread across the western horizon. Ahead, right whales lolled at the waterline, breathing hard after what must have been deep dives for food. There were dozens of right whales in the bay.

  Almost to a one, they had fishing rope scars.

  Moore and Hannah were at the end of a summer vacation. It was August 2014, more than three years since Bayla’s death. He had continued whale research but often felt he was going through the motions. He was due back in the office at Woods Hole in a few days, but not certain of what he was returning to do.

  Over vacation, an idea had begun swatting at him, one his younger self would have considered heresy. Science had been superb at documenting the problem of entanglement. But science had not been good at finding a solution to end it.

  How many papers had he written? How many necropsies had he performed? How many ideas had led nowhere?

  Sedation had proved workable, but inevitably came too late for whales like Bayla. Moore and others had concluded that prevention was the only answer in cases like hers.

  There were new regulations coming online. Fishermen soon would have to attach a minimum number of traps to a buoy line and they would have to better mark their ropes. And the areas in Massachusetts where right whales congregated were to be closed to gear such as traps and pots for longer periods.

  But fishermen were protesting, and NOAA was revisiting some of the new rules.

  Moore always thought that if dogs walked around the city of Boston with bleeding lacerations, people would become outraged and demand that the source of injury be stopped.

  Whales swam unseen with their wounds.

  He was 57. Retirement was approaching. But there was time yet.

  Maybe if he could communicate what he had felt all those years ago. If people could feel what he felt when he heard the whales singing in his dreams, maybe then they would come to share his heartache, and wake to the need to do more.

  Mist spouted in front of the Rosita. Moore climbed onto the prow. Sun was splintering through the clouds, and the slanted rays met the water in bangles of light. Somewhere out there Picasso swam. Aquarium researchers had spotted her in the bay. Perhaps she was the right whale in front of him, dunking its head and driving its tail into the air until it was perpendicular with the surface, like a salute to the terrestrial world.

  “There’s something about a right whale’s tail that’s just gorgeous,” Moore mused. “Michelangelo could have sculpted it.”

  Moore rested his body against the mast. The ocean spanned before him.

  “We’re surrounded by right whales,” he said.

  MICHAEL SPECTER

  Partial Recall

  FROM The New Yorker

  ONE MORNING EVERY spring, for exactly two minutes, Israel comes to a stop. Pedestrians stand in place, drivers pull over to the side of the road, and nobody speaks, sings, eats, or drinks as the nation pays respect to the victims of the Nazi genocide. From the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, the only sounds one hears are sirens. “To ignore those sirens is a complete violation of the norms of our country,” Daniela Schiller told me recently. Schiller, who directs the laboratory of affective neuroscience at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, has lived in New York for nine years, but she was brought up in Rishon LeZion, a few miles south of Tel Aviv. “My father doesn’t care about the sirens,” she says. “The day doesn’t exist for him. He moves about as if he hears nothing.”

  Sigmund Schiller’s disregard for Holocaust Remembrance Day is perhaps understandable; he spent the first two years of the Second World War in the Horodenka ghetto (at the time in Poland, but now in Ukraine) and the next two hiding in bunkers scattered across the forests of Galicia. In 1942, at the age of 15, he was captured by the Germans and sent to a labor camp near Tluste, where he managed to survive the war. Trauma victims frequently attempt to cordon off their most painful memories. But Sigmund Schiller never seemed to speak about his time in the camp, not even to his wife.

  “In sixth grade our teacher asked us to interview someone who survived the Holocaust,” Daniela Schiller said. “So I went home after school. My father was at the kitchen table reading a newspaper, and I asked him to tell me about his memories. He said nothing. I have done this many times since. Always nothing.” A wan smile crossed her face. We were sitting in her office, not far from the laboratory she runs at Mount Sinai, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It was an exceptionally bright winter morning, and the sun streaming through the window made her hard to see even from a few feet away. “I long ago concluded that his silence would last forever,” she said. “I grew up wondering which of all the horrifying things we learned about at school the Germans did to him.”

  Slowly, over the years, that silence closed in on her. “It wasn’t so much a conscious thing,” she said. “But I grew
up with that fear in the background. What was he hiding? Why? How do people even do that?” The last question has, to a large degree, become the focus of her career: Schiller studies the intricate biology of how emotional memories are formed in the brain. Now 41 and an assistant professor of neuroscience and psychiatry at Mount Sinai, she specializes in the connection between memory and fear. “We need fear memories to survive,” she said. “How else would you know not to touch that burner again? But fear takes over the lives of so many people. And there is not enough that we can do about it.”

  More than 5 percent of Americans have experienced some form of post-traumatic stress disorder; for combat veterans, like those returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, the figure is even higher. Millions of others suffer from profound anxiety, debilitating phobias, and the cravings of addiction; those emotions appear to be formed in the same neural pathways, which means that a successful treatment for one condition might also work for others. Behavioral therapies, even those which work initially, often fail. Relapses are common, and the need for more successful treatments has never been so acute. New approaches are hard to develop, though, because most of what is known about the human brain has come from studying the neurons of other animals. One can’t simply stick a needle into somebody’s brain, grab a few neurons, drop them in a nutrient bath, and see what happens. PET scans and functional magnetic resonance imaging machines have helped address the problem; they permit neuroscientists to monitor metabolic changes and blood flow in the human brain. But neither of them can measure the activity of neurons directly.

  Even so, Schiller entered her field at a fortunate moment. After decades of struggle, scientists had begun to tease out the complex molecular interactions that permit us to form, store, and recall many different types of memories. In 2004, the year Schiller received her doctorate in cognitive neuroscience, from Tel Aviv University, she was awarded a Fulbright fellowship and joined the laboratory of Elizabeth Phelps at New York University. Phelps and her colleague Joseph LeDoux are among the nation’s leading investigators of the neural systems involved in learning, emotion, and memory. By coincidence, that was also the year that the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was released; it explores what happens when two people choose to have all their memories of each other erased. In real life it’s not possible to pluck a single recollection from our brains without destroying others, and Schiller has no desire to do that. She and a growing number of her colleagues have a more ambitious goal: to find a way to rewrite our darkest memories.

  “I want to disentangle painful emotion from the memory it is associated with,” she said. “Then somebody could recall a terrible trauma, like those my father obviously endured, without the terror that makes it so disabling. You would still have the memory, but not the overwhelming fear attached to it. That would be far more exciting than anything that happens in a movie.” Before coming to New York, Schiller had heard—incorrectly, as it turned out—that the idea for Eternal Sunshine originated in LeDoux’s lab. It seemed like science fiction, and for the most part it was. As many neuroscientists were aware, though, the plot also contained more than a hint of truth.

  Concepts of memory tend to reflect the technology of the times. Plato and Aristotle saw memories as thoughts inscribed on wax tablets that could be erased easily and used again. These days we tend to think of memory as a camera or a video recorder, filming, storing, and recycling the vast troves of data we accumulate throughout our lives. In practice, though, every memory we retain depends upon a chain of chemical interactions that connect millions of neurons to one another. Those neurons never touch; instead, they communicate through tiny gaps, or synapses, that surround each of them. Every neuron has branching filaments, called dendrites, that receive chemical signals from other nerve cells and send the information across the synapse to the body of the next cell. The typical human brain has trillions of these connections. When we learn something, chemicals in the brain strengthen the synapses that connect neurons. Long-term memories, built from new proteins, change those synaptic networks constantly; inevitably, some grow weaker and others, as they absorb new information, grow more powerful.

  Memories come in many forms. Implicit, procedural memories—how we ride a bike, tie our shoes, make an omelet—are distributed throughout the brain. Emotional memories, like fear and love, are stored in the amygdala, an almond-shaped set of neurons situated deep in the temporal lobe, behind the eyes. Conscious, visual memories—the date of a doctor’s appointment, the names of the presidents—reside in the hippocampus, which also processes information about context. It takes effort to bring those memories to the surface of awareness. Each of us has memories that we wish we could erase and memories that we cannot summon no matter how hard we try. At NYU and other institutions, scientists have begun to identify genes that appear to make proteins that enhance memory and genes that clearly interfere with it. Both kinds of discovery raise the tantalizing, if preliminary, hope of a new generation of drugs, some of which could help people remember and some that might help them forget.

  Until memories are fixed, they are fragile and easily destroyed. Who has not been interrupted while trying to remember a phone number or an address? That memory almost invariably slips away, because it never had time to form. (This also explains why accident victims often have trouble recalling events that occurred just before a car crash or other severe trauma.) It takes a few hours for new experiences to complete the biochemical and electrical process that transforms them from short-term to long-term memories. Over time they become stronger and less vulnerable to interference, and, as scientists have argued for nearly a century, they eventually become imprinted onto the circuitry of our brains. That process is referred to as consolidation. Until recently few researchers challenged the paradigm; the only significant question about consolidation seemed to be how long it took for the cement to dry.

  For years, though, there have been indications that the process is less straightforward than it seems. In 1968 a team at Rutgers, led by Donald J. Lewis, published the results of an experiment in which rats were conditioned to retrieve memories that had presumably been stored permanently. First the scientists trained the rats to fear a sound. The next day Lewis played the sound again and followed it immediately with a shock to the head. To his surprise, the rats seemed to have forgotten the negative association; they no longer feared the sound. That seemed odd; if the memory had truly been wired into the rat’s brain, a mild shock shouldn’t have been able to dislodge it. The experiment wasn’t easily repeated by others, though, and few neuroscientists paid much attention to such a singular and contradictory finding.

  Not long afterward, in seemingly unrelated research, the psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, now at the University of California at Irvine, embarked upon what has turned into a decades-long examination of the ways in which misleading information can insinuate itself into one’s memory. In her most famous study, she gave two dozen subjects a journal filled with details of three events from their childhoods. To make memories as accurate and compelling as possible, Loftus enlisted family members to assemble the information. She then added a fourth, completely fictitious experience that described how at the age of five each child had been lost in a mall and finally rescued by an elderly stranger. Loftus seeded the false memories with plausible information, such as the name of the mall each subject would have visited. When she interviewed the subjects later, a quarter of them recalled having been lost in the mall, and some did so in remarkable detail.

  “I was crying and I remember that day . . . I thought I’d never see my family again,” one participant said in a taped interview (available on YouTube). “An older man approached me . . . He had a flannel shirt on . . . I remember my mom told me never to do that again.” These assertions were delivered with a precision and a certainty that few people could have doubted, except that there was no man in a flannel shirt and no admonition from the subject’s mother. Memory “works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page,” Lo
ftus said in a recent speech. “You can go in there and change it, but so can other people.”

  Loftus has been vilified for demonstrating that even the most vivid and detailed eyewitness accounts—a “recovered memory” of sexual abuse, for example—can be inaccurate or completely false. “She changed the world,” Elizabeth Phelps told me recently when we met in her office at NYU, where she is the Silver Professor of Psychology and Neural Science. “The notion of the unreliability of memory has changed courtrooms in America, and it is completely owing to Elizabeth’s persistence in the face of a very harsh backlash.”

  Loftus’s results raised a fundamental question about the biology of the brain: if misinformation can be incorporated so seamlessly into a person’s recollection of an event, what becomes of the original memory? Is it completely overwritten, or merely adjusted somehow, layered with a new trace?

  In the decade following Loftus’s experiment, an answer began to emerge, as LeDoux, Phelps, and others slowly mapped the neural circuitry responsible for many types of memory, particularly memories associated with fear. They began to entertain the idea that in order for an old memory to be recalled, it had to retrace the pathways in which it originated, and that under certain circumstances the memory seems to change. Scientists called that reconsolidation. But reconsolidation, with its eerie implication that our memories are inauthentic or transitory, was highly disputed. To many scientists, while the idea was fascinating, it remained far-fetched.

  By 1996, LeDoux’s lab had demonstrated that fearful memories were particularly durable, but also that when certain parts of the amygdala were destroyed, those fears disappeared. That year Karim Nader joined the laboratory as a postdoctoral researcher. Not long afterward he attended a lecture given by Eric Kandel, the Columbia University neuroscientist who in 2000 received a Nobel Prize for his research into the physiological basis of memory. Kandel spent decades demonstrating how neurochemicals form short-term memories and how more permanent memories are then consolidated into various parts of the brain. Without his findings, none of the research into emotional memory that followed would have been possible.