The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories

by Pagan Kennedy

  It is this kind of fun—or, at least, the promotion and packaging of it—that may end up being his greatest invention.

  In a back wing of the MIT Museum, the part that’s closed to the public, a half-dozen kids carom around between a Pac Man machine, a chair made out of a shopping cart, and floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with trash-picked motor parts, soda bottles, lengths of rubber, PVC tubing, scratched CDs, copper wires, magnets. This is the Howtoons club house. Every few months, Griffith and Bonsen throw a pizza party in this cluttered cavern, invite their friends to bring kids and test out projects that might be worthy of a Howtoons cartoon. Tonight Griffith stands at the front of the room, jumping around and waving his hands until he gets the attention of his three-foot-high colleagues. He asks them what kind of machines they would like to invent. A squirmy fellow of about five years raises his hand. “Spirits,” he says. “We could make animal spirits.”

  It’s one of the few requests that Griffith and Bonsen can’t accommodate. A few months ago, when a kid suggested a hovercraft, partygoers jumped right in and built a “hoovercraft” out of a Toro 220 leaf blower and a wood plank, with a tarpaulin skirt that trapped a cushion of air underneath. The hoovercraft was powerful enough to float Bonsen and Griffith across the room.

  Tonight, I watch as two girls, both about six, dab chocolate frosting onto Cheerios and drop their creations, along with some uncoated Cheerios, into a bowl of milk. A mom shakes the bowl gently to get the cereal circulating, and the girls watch, barely daring to breathe, as the pale Cheerios float around and seem to find one another, sticking together in clumps. The chocolate ones do the same. (The Cheerios’ behavior is based on a simple principle: oil and water don’t mix.) If you paint each Cheerio with stripes, you can get even more complicated patterns to bloom in your cereal bowl, flowers and snowflakes, because you have “programmed” your Cheerios to touch each other only at certain points of contact.

  Griffith came up with the idea. It is, in fact, a kiddie version of his PhD thesis. This spring, he put the finishing touches on a demonstration involving an air-hockey table and Lego-like plastic tokens that float on its surface. The tokens skitter around the table, sometimes sticking to each other and sometimes not, slowly resolving themselves into strings of yellow-yellow-blue. Each plastic token contains a logic chip that tells it when to latch on to a blue or yellow partner, and these instructions, taken together, allow many small things to build themselves into one big thing. It’s an insight that has implications in nanotechnology, where subatomic stuff must be pieced together to form bigger stuff. “The way we make everything now is top-down. Machines can only make things that are smaller than themselves. But why not go in the reverse direction and build something bigger than the machine? DNA does it,” Griffith says.

  He may have proved his point on the air-hockey table, but there’s still some technical glitches to be worked out in the cereal bowl. As the girls watch, chocolate begins to flake off the Cheerios. The self-assembling machine is turning to mush. The girls don’t seem to care. They’ve been distracted by a box of Cocoa Puffs, which has been put on the table to encourage further science experiments; they’re reaching out to grab handfuls and stuff their mouths.

  “No Cocoa Puffs,” a dad says. “You’re about to have dinner.”

  “Please?” one of the girls says. “Just one?”

  “No.”

  “Please?”

  For a moment, those girls looked into a cereal bowl and saw science. But now all they can see is the sugar. Griffith has big plans for this generation. He can only hope that his plans fit into their agenda.

  UPDATE:

  Saul Griffith won the MacArthur “genius” grant in 2007.

  What We Mean By Freedom:

  Three ways of looking at alternative fuel

  MY NEIGHBORHOOD, MY TREE FARM

  One day I came up with a scheme to power our house on trash. It was in the middle of summer, and I had just sawed up apple-tree branches and stuffed them into bags; now I was dragging the wood out onto the curb. My boyfriend and I live in a Victorian house in the middle of a city, with nothing but a teeny patch of land around it; nonetheless, our yard generates an enormous amount of timber. And now I was throwing it all away. When I looked down the street, I could see yard bags lined up everywhere; our neighbors were dumping potential firewood too. That was when the “aha” moment came: Why not turn my neighborhood into a tree farm?

  In a fit of enthusiasm, I convinced my boyfriend that we needed a wood stove. I explained that we could grow and harvest trees on our own postage-stamp yard, and we could trash-pick the rest from the neighbors. He tried to mount arguments, but I was not to be talked out of my idea.

  Much drama ensued. A craftsman named Vaclav spent days on his hands and knees in our dining room, using old-world techniques to wrap a slate shield into a corner. Zoning laws had to be consulted; a building inspector needed to be charmed. The stove itself—black, warty-looking, and insanely heavy—had to be fetched from a faraway store. It was one of the cleanest-burning models I could find, and even contained a catalytic unit that would re-burn smoke.

  By mid-winter, the stove squatted in its corner, eating like a hog. We fed it wood we’d collected from our yard and our neighbors’; it scarfed the supply in about two days time. And then we had to buy it a huge stack of firewood, delivered to us by a truck that vomited diesel fumes. Things weren’t exactly going as planned. The project had ended up being far more expensive than I can admit, even to myself, and our neighborhood made a lousy tree farm. Still, that stove worked like charm. The downstairs of our 19th-century house used to be so frigid in the winter that we had to wear coats and hats while we cooked. Now we lounged in a ski chalet.

  This past summer, I became obsessed with perfecting my scavenging techniques, so that we would get through the winter on free wood. Had I been a farmwoman in the 1850s, I would have tramped out into the forest and collected armloads of dead wood. This being the 21st century, I decided that I would hunt on the Internet. In the Craigslist “free” section, I typed “firewood.” Bingo. I found a woman in a nearby suburb with the remains of an entire oak in her yard; the tree had been chainsawed into logs, the largest of which probably weighed eight hundred pounds. My boyfriend and I took two carloads of the smallest stuff and barely dented her supply—if we’d owned a truck we could have amassed enough firewood to last for years.

  Then my boyfriend and I spent all summer hand-sawing that wood, along with branches from our yard, into stove-sized chunks. We developed really nice-looking biceps and shoulder muscles. It was the sawing—not the amount of wood—that ended up limiting our supply. Why didn’t we buy an ax and chop the wood? Because we have more in common with Paul Krugman than Paul Bunyan, and we’d be likely to get into a political debate while we chopped and end up losing fingers or toes. Still, we managed to produce enough wood chunks to get us through the winter.

  But how green is our wood heat, really? Our newfangled stove burns about 90 percent cleaner than would its forebears in the Victorian era. When you look up at our steel chimney, blazing against the sky on a cold day, you can’t see much smoke, just a tiny smudge of gray. Even so, that smudge does carry a significant dose of lung-killing particles. Experts argue about how much particulate matter a wood stove generates in comparison to diesel, but it’s almost certain that our super-efficient stove is dirtier than an oil burner. The wood stove wins in other ways. It eats trash that comes from our own region. And it is a carbon-neutral energy source, since the CO2 produced in wood smoke is absorbed by trees, and so on, in a sustainable cycle. Petroleum fuel, on the other, has to be extracted and hauled thousands of miles; it also pumps carbon into the atmosphere that would otherwise stay locked under the ground.

  I latched onto wood heat for its geopolitical appeal; I wanted to find a fuel source that had nothing to do with the war in Iraq. But in the end, the wood itself seduced me. I feel in love with it: the cutting of it and the burning of it.

&n
bsp; When you pick up a split piece of oak, it’s heavier than you expect; it feels in the hand like an encyclopedia from the library of your childhood. Maple cuts easily; you find yourself wanting to stroke its sinuous skin and surprisingly obscene crotches. Apple bleeds when you saw it; on the inside it’s orange and pink as a tequila.

  The split pieces flame fast and sloppy, while the logs bake slow and mellow. My boyfriend and I part with each hand-sawed, hand-gathered piece a little reluctantly. And, when the stove really gets going, we close the pocket doors that divide the living room from the dining room, shutting ourselves in with the stove, to roast like chestnuts.

  ( a version of this piece was published in Dwell magazine)

  THE GREASE QUEST

  “This is really the chunky stuff,” Jason Carven says, lifting up a plastic container of brown ooze. “Without a doubt, you’ve got to pump it through a filter.” We’re standing in his warehouse space, surrounded by silver fuel tanks. It’s freezing in here. Over many sweaters, Carven wears the kind of canvas jacket favored by guys at gas stations. With his wan, bearded face and flashing spectacles, the 25-year-old looks like a tubercular poet in drag as a mechanic. He is, in fact, the inventor of the Greasecar Vegetable Oil Conversion System, which will turn an ordinary diesel car into an ecologist’s dream, available for $795 over the Internet.

  He leads me into another room, where he stores the filtered vegetable oil and selects a two-gallon jug. In the parking lot, snow whips in circles like rodeo lassos, stinging my cheeks, getting into my mouth when I talk. Carven heads toward a beat-up diesel VW Rabbit with the vanity plate “VEGPWR.” Popping the hatchback, he reveals his handiwork: in the tire well sits an aluminum fuel tank. He fills it from his jug, sending up a faint smell of Chinese restaurant.

  His car is one of several hundred across the country that has been re-jiggered to run on used cooking oil. In the past two years, the greasecar subculture has sprung up fast as a weed. People are doing it as a radical form of recycling. They’re doing it to promote fuels derived from vegetable oil, which produce far fewer greenhouse gases than petroleum. They’re doing it as a way to protest Big Oil and wars in the Middle East. And they’re doing it for kicks.

  Grease is the garage band of alternative energy. It’s cheap as a beat-up sound system—all you need is a used diesel car and an extra fuel tank. It’s loud: most greasecar drivers plaster their bumpers with stickers that proclaim, “Powered by Veggie Oil.” And it inspires cross-country trips and lots of couch-surfing, because most greasecar drivers feel compelled to show off the awesomeness of their technology, which can turn trashed vegetable oil into 10,000 miles on the odometer.

  Now, Justin and I huddle in the cracked seats of his VW, waiting for heat. He flicks a switch to change fuel tanks, and then we pull out onto the road. We bump along the streets of Florence, Massachusetts, with its Miss Florence Diner and rickety industrial buildings. The VW Rabbit roars, as ancient Rabbits will. Justin has to yell to answer one of my questions. I’m not listening. My mind is choking, sputtering, as I try to convince myself that, yes, we really are being propelled along by the vegetable oil from that jug. We pass a gas station, where salt-smeared cars wait in line for the pump, a sign bearing the price-per-gallon numbers hangs like a prophetic message in the sky. Our gas was free—in more ways than one.

  For a second, I flash back to the car that taught me to drive, a gas guzzler with a Deep Purple tape jammed into the 8-track player and three-on-the-tree gearshift. I remember the first time I pulled it onto the highway alone, my hair whipping into my mouth as I watched familiar landmarks fly away. Back then, I wanted to flee from my family. Now, in this VW Rabbit, I feel as if we’re escaping from something much, much bigger.

  Just past the town of Amherst, Massachusetts, you hang a left onto a narrow road and wind through meadows and apple trees. Soon you’ll find yourself among low-slung cardboard-colored buildings that command a sweeping view of sky and snow. This is Hampshire College, known for its excellent drugs. Here, in the fall of 1999, students wandered into a science classroom and found what looked like the red-painted bones of a dinosaur strewn all over the floor, a disassembled tractor. Their assignment: to rebuild the tractor so that it could rely on green energy. Carven, then a senior at Hampshire, signed up.

  One day a Vermont inventor pulled into the school’s parking lot, his VW Rabbit idling as it burned oil derived from the jatropha nut, which grows in the tropics. As it turned out, West Africans had been running their diesel generators on nut oil for years. Standard wisdom says that you have to prepare oil for the engine by treating it with lye and methanol. But Carl Bielenberg, who sat at the wheel of the VW that day, didn’t bother with the flesh-burning chemicals. While working in Africa, he’d found a way to pump untreated oil straight into his engine.

  “I could smell the vegetable oil, and the implications were incredible,” Carven said. Since then, Carven admits, he has thought of little else besides using “straight” vegetable oil—the kind you can eat—as a fuel.

  If you store your olive oil in the refrigerator, then you can appreciate the problem. Untreated vegetable oil turns solid in the cold, and even at room temperature it can be pretty gooey. So how do you get that ooze to move through the fuel lines? How do you spray it through a nozzle into the combustion chamber without gumming up the works?

  The trick is to install a second fuel tank in your car and a switch on the dashboard. That way, you can start the engine up on conventional diesel while you wait for the veggie oil to heat to about 160 degrees. Once you’re sure the veggie oil is hot enough, you flip the switch to change fuel tanks. As long as it’s liquefied by heat (and well-filtered), the grease will not damage your engine.

  “I became obsessed,” Carven says. While his classmates drifted off to play Ultimate, he holed up in the lab, hacking engines late into the night. By the end of the year he and his cohorts had transformed a van so that it would burn straight vegetable oil. In the summer of 2000, Carven and a buddy took to the highway on a grease-quest, Dumpster-diving behind restaurants for used oil. “You read about Lewis and Clark, and realize it’s hard to have that kind of adventure these days, living off the land as you go,” he says. Carven was promoting not just bio-fuels but also a new way to discover America.

  “We stopped in Utica to grease up,” reads an entry from his friend’s Web diary. “McDonalds’s warned us their grease was too nasty to use (too many bits of burgers and fries). Wendy’s was out of grease, so we hit a local place, Lotta Burger. They said we could have all we wanted but as we were checking it out the cook came out and warned us that there may be lots of water in it so we said, ‘bag this,’ and hopped over to see the Burger King. We scored 5 gallons.”

  After a transcendent summer of Amory-Lovens-meets-Jack-Keroauc adventure, Carven decided to make grease his business. Two years ago, he set up shop, selling the fuel-tank-and-toggle kits. He estimates that he’s served about a hundred customers. “People call me and say, ‘I’m leaving on a cross-country trip in one week and I need a kit.’” He goes all out to comply.

  Once, two groups pulled into his parking lot, both demanding service, ASAP. Group 1 had decided that they needed to be in the High Sierra music festival by Friday in a truck they bought yesterday. Group 2: The Liberty Cabbage Theater Troupe, touring with a play about genetically modified food. “I stayed up half the night,” Carven says, in order to convert both vehicles to grease and get them on the road.

  Now, he’s swiveling in a stained desk chair in his warehouse office, showing me the website that belongs to one of his competitors. They sell cheapo versions of the greasecar kit. “That will melt,” he says, pointing to the plastic tank pictured on the screen. Carven wants you to know that his kits may be more expensive, but there’s no way—no possible way—he could cut costs without cutting quality. I believe him. It’s 40 degrees in his office and my feet have gone numb. Carven suffers from a wracking cough, brought on by long hours of soldering aluminum in meat-lo
cker temperatures.

  “I almost forgot to show you this,” he says, handing me an issue of People magazine, folded to Daryl Hannah. The actress has just turned her SUV into a greasecar. “Who sold her the kit?” Carven agonizes, staring at the glossy page. “You’d think Daryl Hannah, of all people, would have been able to afford one of mine.”

  (a version of this story appeared in Details magazine)

  THE ALTERNATIVE ALTERNATIVE FUEL

  Three years ago, Justin Soares stood in the kitchen of the group house he lived in, consulting a recipe as he measured out methanol (a.k.a. wood alcohol), Red Devil brand lye, and some fry grease he’d begged off a local restaurant. He poured the ingredients into a blender and punched “puree.” Later, he took the blender out to his driveway and tipped its contents into the tank of his 1981 Volkswagen pickup. Soares, then a student at Oregon State University, had just made his own fuel.

  Eventually, he moved his operation to the backyard—partly out of consideration for his seven housemates, who assumed he had been making soap. As his batches got bigger, he began sharing the fuel, called biodiesel, with friends. “I got them hooked,” Soares says. In September 2001, he and his friends started a fuel-making co-op called Grease Works, one of perhaps a dozen such groups that have formed around the country in the last few years. To join, you have to own a vehicle with a diesel engine—most likely a VW or a Mercedes—because biodiesel does not work in gasoline engines.

  By the following year, the group decided to buy commercially produced biodiesel in bulk. “In the beginning, it might seem romantic to make your own fuel, but pretty soon you realize it’s greasy and grimy work,” Soares says. Ready-made biodiesel costs about a dollar more per gallon than gasoline, but advocates argue that this is a small price to pay. People who drive around with “No Blood for Oil” bumper stickers feel like hypocrites whenever they gas up at the local Shell station. For them, veggie fuel represents an end to cognitive dissonance. If some of our fuel was grown in Iowa rather than imported, they argue, America might pursue a different kind of foreign policy in the Middle East. And, of course, burning vegetables creates far fewer greenhouse gases than does petroleum.