Natural Acts

by David Quammen

  Each of these projects, variously dreamy or doable, represents an effort at cross-species cloning, like the banteng-and-cow work by ACT. This sort of trick raises further issues. What are the physiological consequences of mixing nuclear DNA from a cheetah with mitochondrial DNA (which comes along with the enucleated egg and helps regulate the cell’s biochemistry) from a leopard? What are the ecological implications of mixing mammoths with elephants in a world where the mammoths’ ecosystem no longer exists? What’s the merit or demerit of blurring lines between species (cheetah and leopard, thylacine and devil) by means of laboratory gimmickry, in order to “preserve” a vanishing subspecies or “restore” an extinct species in the wild?

  Lines, their integrity or transgression, are exactly what’s at issue: the line between one species and another that defines biological diversity, the line between one animal and another that constitutes individuality, the line between living and dead that gives meaning—as well as poignant temporal limit—to life. And yet those lines aren’t always easy to draw, let alone to enforce or respect. Even species, even in the wild, sometimes blur into one another: wolves breeding with coyotes, blue-winged warblers with gold-winged warblers, barn swallows with house martins, mule deer with whitetails. True, these natural mongrelizations represent exceptions to the rule of how species are generally demarcated. But they complicate any efforts to think clearly about drawing other lines, such as the line between Felis silvestris lybica and Felis silvestris catus, the line between embryo transfer and nuclear transfer, the line between genetically modified organisms and heirloom tomatoes (which have themselves been genetically modified by generations of careful horticulture), the line between extinct and merely frozen, the line between what we can do and what we should do, the line between nature and ART.

  Recognizing such complications is not necessarily the same as surrendering to a paralyzing relativism. Lines that suggest boundaries of ethical behavior, of judicious balance between opposing concerns, and of precious entities deserving preservation are important even when they reveal themselves, at close inspection, to be smeary zones of gradated gray. The mapping of such boundaries can’t be done by science, which is capable of measuring shades of gray but not choosing among them. That leaves religion, philosophy, social consensus, and common sense. Which of those do we rely on for decisions about assisted reproductive technologies, such as cloning, when the species being assisted is not the banteng or the whitetail deer but Homo sapiens?

  Consider the prospect of germline genetic engineering—that is, fiddling with genes in human embryo cells before those cells are grown into human fetuses. Germline engineering is not yet available as a consumer option, for medical purposes or any others, but soon it may be. Select genes would be added to, subtracted from, or modified in an embryo cell, after which the cell would be cloned into a customized human child. This process would permit the correction of genetic weaknesses—bad eyesight, for instance, or sickle-cell anemia—in advance of birth. When that starts happening, as Bill McKibben has warned in his book Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, “the line between fixing problems and ‘enhancing’ offspring” will disappear, at least for any parents who want their kids to be as bright, robust, good-looking, and competitive as humanly (that is, technologically) possible. If you can repair your future child’s myopia with preemptive genetic tinkering, you might also want to increase her IQ by a few dozen points. Will it lead to a world as utopian as Lake Woebegon, where all the children are above average? Of course not. It will just add genetic manipulation of embryos and child cloning to the means by which affluent, fussy people try to distance themselves from bad luck, disappointment, menial work, death, and poor people.

  McKibben, his ardent humaneness informed by a lot of careful research and thinking, proposes that we should recoil from such possibilities and declare “Enough!” He suggests that somewhere amid the dizzying possibilities of ART as applied to humans, beyond fertility medicine but short of germline genetic engineering, we might locate “the enough line”—that is, the threshold of ugly and corruptive weirdness across which a wholesome person and a wise society do not go.

  As much as I want to agree with him, my own survey of animal cloning forces me to conclude that his “enough” line, like any I might try to draw myself, is as subjective as it is sensible. There is in fact no line. There is only a spectrum, a set of choices among shades of gray. Of course, that’s not to say some choices aren’t nuttier than others.

  Cloning adult humans, for instance. Any thorough discussion of assisted reproductive technologies comes eventually to this topic, which the animal-cloning scientists detest and dismiss but which other people consider central. The animal guys are right—it’s not central—but like a parrot in a cage of canaries, it’s too big and noisy to ignore. What if John Sperling or some other loopy billionaire decides one morning to commission not the cloning of his lovable mutt but the cloning of himself? If that decision hasn’t already been made, quietly in a penthouse somewhere, it probably soon will be; and whatever unique technical difficulties or scientific scruples have so far prevented the consummation of such a desire will soon be overcome. Some people view the prospect of human cloning with great alarm. Bill Clinton labeled it “morally reprehensible.” His presidential ethics commission recommended federal laws to prohibit human cloning. Finding myself less certain than Clinton or those advisers about the moral or legal verities against which human cloning should be measured, I’d simply call it perniciously stupid. Then again, many things people do nowadays are, in my opinion, perniciously stupid. Not all of them are illegal, and so, I suppose, human cloning needn’t be either.

  Down in College Station, I’m reminded of all this during my chat with Duane Kraemer, when we bounce from the subject of endangered species back to companion animals. Isn’t there something misguided, I ask Kraemer, about cloning your pet? Doesn’t it reflect an inclination to deny mortality?

  Deny mortality? “We do that every day!” he says brightly. “We get up and brush our teeth. Why do we do that? Because we want to live as long as we can. So denial of mortality is, yeah, it’s in our being. And it’s not only natural. It’s necessary.”

  Two other voices of wisdom echo through my head, addressing aspects of the question why. One of these voices belonged to J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist and founding director of the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory. Trust me on this seeming digression. Having helped build the first atomic bomb, Oppenheimer resisted the notion that America should rush ahead to build a thermonuclear superbomb. It was fission versus fusion, uranium versus hydrogen, kilotons versus megatons, and the global political context of 1943 versus the context of 1951. His resistance was swept aside by a clever design principle concocted by two other physicists, one of whom was Edward Teller. Asked later by an inquisitorial panel about how the H-bomb decision was made, Oppenheimer declined to speak about technical details. “However,” he said mordantly, “it is my judgment in these things that when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success.” This scary truth, which might be thought of as Oppenheimer’s Axiom, explains many controversial gambits in whizbang scientific engineering. Why do some scientists crave to clone animals? Not just because they can but because they can do so, with an elegant medley of ingenious laboratory moves, in a way that is technically sweet. And therefore irresistible.

  The other voice comes from Louis Armstrong, as recorded in 1931:

  Duane Kraemer is right in noting that this problem-solving approach isn’t unique to assisted reproductive technologists.

  On the morning after our conversation, Dr. Kraemer welcomes me to his home, in a neighborhood just north of the A&M campus, to meet the famous cloned house cat, CC. As we enter, she crosses a living room of draped-over furniture and leaps onto a carpeted cat perch, presenting herself for Kraemer’s gentle petting. She’s no longer a kitten. She ar
ches her back to my touch, then carefully sniffs my hand. Her fur is soft and clean. She looks like any normal cat. The most striking aspect of her appearance, which I wouldn’t notice if I hadn’t read some background, is that she’s a tiger-tabby shorthair, mottled black-and-gray with a white chest and legs. It’s striking because she was cloned from a calico.

  That is, CC’s color pattern differs utterly from that of Rainbow, her DNA donor. The cause of this difference is complicated (involving random inactivation of one of her two X chromosomes, which in a female such as CC are redundant, though each may carry a distinct gene for color). But those complications can be reduced to a single, simple word: random. The application of one color program and the inactivation of the other, in such circumstances, is determined by chance. And by chance CC’s coloring is unlike Rainbow’s. Cloning isn’t resurrection, as the man said. It isn’t even, quite, duplication.

  On CC’s right cheek, otherwise white, I notice a small patch of tan fur, like a birthmark. Yes, says Kraemer, that wasn’t present in Rainbow either. The genotype may be identical in a clone, but it gets expressed differently. Maybe one day when she was a fetus, inside the surrogate mother, CC rubbed her little face against the wall of the womb. A smudge. Things happen.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  First publication of each of the pieces was as follows: “Sympathy for the Devil,” Outside (June-July 1981); “Has Success Spoiled the Crow?,” Outside (October 1983); “The Widow Knows,” Outside (April 1982); “The Troubled Gaze of the Octopus,” Outside (July 1984); “Avatars of the Soul in Malaya,” Outside (March 1984); “Rumors of a Snake,” Outside (April 1984); “Wool of Bat,” Outside (August-September 1982); “The Excavation of Jack Horner,” Esquire (December 1984); “The Lives of Eugène Marais,” Outside (October 1981); “The Man with the Metal Nose,” Outside (June 1983); “Animal Rights and Beyond,” Outside (June 1984); “Alias Benowitz Shoe Repair,” Outside (December 1983); “The Tree People,” Outside (January-February 1984); “Love’s Martyrs,” Outside (September 1983); “A Deathly Chill,” Outside (December-January 1983); “Is Sex Necessary?” Outside (October 1982); “Desert Sanitaire,” Outside (February-March 1983); “Jeremy Bentham, the Pietà, and a Precious Few Grayling,” Audubon (May 1982); “Yin and Yang in the Tularosa Basin,” Audubon (January 1985); “Planet of Weeds,” Harper’s (October 1998); “The River Jumps Over the Mountain,” National Geographic Adventure (February 2002); “The Post-Communist Wolf,” Outside (December 2000); The Megatransect series, I. “Into the Forest,” National Geographic (October 2000), II. “The Green Abyss,” National Geographic (March 2001), III. “End of the Line,” National Geographic (August 2001); “A Passion for Order,” National Geographic (June 2007); “Citizen Wiley,” Smithsonian (October 2006); “Clone Your Troubles Away,” Harper’s (February 2005).

  Many people help a magazine writer along his way. The pieces gathered here span more than twenty-five years of effort, and in that time I’ve accumulated debts of gratitude to more patient scientists, unsuspecting subjects, editors, friends, loved ones, colleagues, consulting experts, and casual informants than I can list here or remember. I reaffirm my thanks to all those mentioned in the first edition of this book, and I add thanks to the many more who have been helpful and generous to my later work—in particular these trusted and trusting editors, with whom I’ve worked in recent years: Luke Mitchell, Colin Harrison, and Lewis Lapham at Harper’s; Oliver Payne, Kathy Moran, Bill Allen, and Chris Johns at National Geographic; Rebecca Maksel at Smithsonian; Hal Espen at Outside; Steve Byers and John Rasmus at National Geographic Adventure. Maria Guarnaschelli at W. W. Norton has once again been my vital editorial partner in shaping these pieces into a book. My deep gratitude to Renée Wayne Golden won’t end with her retirement. And it was Betsy Gaines who brought Wiley, as well as so much else, into my life.

  PARTIAL SOURCES

  As the years passed, my style of research evolved, and the progressively greater abundance of sources consulted for each piece, as recorded here, reflects that. One thing hasn’t changed much: I’ve always favored careful reading of the scientific literature—the journal papers scientists write for one another—over the option of simply telephoning experts and asking them to explain or comment. When I do call scientists, it’s usually to ask them: May I come to see you, watch you, talk with you within your working context? Such contacts are in many cases recounted in the texts of the pieces reprinted in this book. I’ve found that most scientists, though they have good reasons to be wary of the popular press (reasons such as chronic inaccuracy, slapdash research, oversimplification, failure to double-check facts), are quite helpful and forthcoming if you’ve done your homework (again, that means reading the literature) before you begin making demands on their time and patience.

  In a very few cases, among the citations below I have shown the original date of publication (in parentheses) as well as the date of the edition I used. Those cases are books, such as Playfair’s popularization of James Hutton, for which the original date reflects a particular historical context within which the work should be understood.

  Sympathy for the Devil

  Bates, Marston. 1949. The Natural History of Mosquitoes. New York: Macmillan.

  Gillett, J. D. 1972. The Mosquito: Its Life, Activities, and Impact on Human Affairs. New York: Doubleday.

  Harrison, Gordon. 1978. Mosquitoes, Malaria and Man: A History of the Hostilities Since 1880. New York: Dutton.

  Horsfall, William R. 1972. Mosquitoes: Their Bionomics and Relation to Disease. New York: Hafner.

  Marinelli, Janet. 1980. “Eco-Crime on the Equator.” Environmental Action, March.

  McNeill, William H. 1976. Plagues and Peoples. New York: Anchor.

  Myers, Norman. 1980. Conversion of Tropical Moist Forests. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences.

  Has Success Spoiled the Crow?

  Angell, Tony. 1978. Ravens, Crows, Magpies, and Jays. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

  Coombs, Franklin. 1978. The Crows: A Study of the Corvids of Europe. London: B. T. Batsford.

  Ficken, Millicent S. 1977. “Avian Play.” The Auk, vol. 94, July.

  Goodwin, Derek. 1976. Crows of the World. Ithaca: Comstock.

  Simmons, K.E.L. 1957. “A Review of the Anting-Behaviour of Passerine Birds.” British Birds, vol. 50, October.

  ———. 1966. “Anting and the Problem of Self-Stimulation.” Journal of Zoology, vol. 149.

  Wilmore, Sylvia Bruce. 1977. Crows, Jays, Ravens and Their Relatives. London: David and Charles.

  The Widow Knows

  Milzer, Albert. 1934. “On the Great Abundance of the Black Widow Spider.” Science, vol. 80, November 2.

  Thorop, Raymond W., and Weldon D. Woodson. 1976. The Black Widow Spider. New York: Dover.

  The Troubled Gaze of the Octopus

  Cousteau, Jacques-Yves, and Philippe Diolé. 1973. Octopus and Squid: The Soft Intelligence. Translated by J. F. Bernard. New York: Doubleday.

  High, William L. 1976. “The Giant Pacific Octopus.” Marine Fisheries Review, vol. 38, September.

  Wells, M. J. 1978. Octopus: Physiology and Behaviour of an Advanced Invertebrate. London: Chapman and Hall.

  Wells, Martin. 1983. “Cephalopods Do It Differently.” New Scientist, vol. 100, November 3.

  Avatars of the Soul in Malaya

  Bänziger, Hans. 1968. “Preliminary Observations on a Skin-Piercing Blood-Sucking Moth (Calyptra eustrigata (Hymps.) (Lep., Noctuidae)) in Malaya.” Bulletin of Entomological Research, vol. 58.

  ———. 1971. “Blood-sucking Moths of Malaya.” Fauna, vol. 24.

  Bänziger, H., and W. Buttiker. 1969. “Records of Eye-frequenting Lepidoptera from Man.” Journal of Medical Entomology, vol. 6, January 30.

  Borror, Donald J., and Dwight M. DeLong. 1971. An Introduction to the Study of Insects. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

  Buttiker, W. 1959. “Blood-feeding Habits of Adult Noctuidae (Lepidoptera) in Cambodia.” Nature, vol.
184, October 10.

  Sandved, Kjell B. 1976. Butterflies. Photographs by Kjell B. Sandved, text by Jo Brewer. New York: Abrams.

  Smart, Paul. 1976. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Butterfly World. London: Hamlyn.

  Rumors of a Snake