Bunch of Amateurs

by Jack Hitt

  These loggers were sloppy, wasteful, and reckless. In the slang of the day, they “cut out and got out.” Rivers churned with what looked like and was the melting sludge of hills dissolving into plains. Ghost towns appeared after an area was “sawed out.” The mountains of sawdust left behind often would catch fire from lightning and smoke for years. Visitors to the South in this time would comment on how no amount of travel could get a tourist away from smoke coming from somewhere.

  The devastation was so extensive that state revenues dropped as taxable forest property had to be reclassified as nontaxable wasteland, thus extending the economic crisis of 1865 into an eighty-year catastrophe.

  Other economies eventually arrived in the mid-twentieth century, such as planting over the old longleaf soils with loblolly and slash pine to feed the paper mills. Historians have written about the paradox of this timber era. It was a culture that was so remote and brutal, it left no songs or slang, no famous workers or evil foreman and barely any written accounts. Almost effortlessly, the shame of this massive clear-cut receded into history, largely without leaving one.

  So the wild primeval swamps and the cathedral stretches of pine forest in the South were sheared into flat farmland by the time Allen and his party headed south. In fact their destination, an 81,000-acre stand of virgin forest, was known as the Singer Tract because the sewing machine company owned it to cut wood to make the cabinets for their sewing machines. It was the last, large section of Dixie’s original forest.

  It’s hard to imagine that it’s a coincidence that the story of the ivory-bill so often involves a re-creation of the outsider coming down and hooking up with a local guide for an expedition into the endless forest. The penitent Northern scientist coming South to find a smart-alecky good old boy from Dogpatch—these two light out for the swamp and find the elusive bird with mythic regularity.

  The ivory-bill’s habitat is the South’s Eden, the haunting swamps, the majestic pine forest. The names of the areas where it’s been sighted—the Big Woods of Arkansas, the Big Thicket of Texas—suggest the very landscape it needs to survive: a large and wild habitat, crowded with patriarchal trees and brimming with wildlife. To see an ivory-bill is to confirm that we haven’t destroyed what feels like the very origin of life. The swamp’s ivory-bill is Noah’s dove, surviving improbably long after a catastrophe we’d rather not remember, to tell us we are pardoned. Lord God Bird, forgive us our trespasses.

  After Tanner returned from his famous 1937 study, a massive effort was launched to save the ivory-bill and its last known address, the Singer Tract. By then, in the middle of World War II, this last and biggest stretch of wilderness was leased by Chicago Mill and Lumber. The company wanted to sell the land, since there was no labor to cut the wood at the beginning of the war. A man named Richard Pough recognized its value and arranged to buy it as a way to conserve it. He would later found the Nature Conservancy. He had four governors sign on to this project, as well as President Roosevelt. He traveled to Chicago to ink the deal. When the president of Chicago Mill entered the room, he apologized and said the deal was off. “We are just money-grubbers,” he explained. He went on to say that they had found some labor. The Chicago Mill learned that German soldiers were being held in Mississippi POW camps and could be used to cut down trees practically for free. The meetings ended, and, despite the intervention of four governors, the last large stand of virgin forest in the Old South was clear-cut by Nazis.

  XIII. Once Again, with Feeling

  The ivory-bill is a bird we’ll be seeing again and again. The story tugs at too much history and too many emotions to be resolved in some neat and tidy way, like a child’s story, happily ever after. Here’s how powerful a tale it is. Almost immediately after the Cornell announcement and as the certainty of their proof began to falter, the bird flew to the northern panhandle of Florida. There, an Auburn professor and ornithologist named Geoff Hill went to the Choctawhatchee River and the satisfaction came quickly. His assistant Brian Rolek, whom Hill describes as a “novice birder,” was the only one to spot the bird.

  “Brian had studied the field marks of a perched Ivory-bill before our trip but not those of an Ivory-bill in flight,” Hill wrote in Bird-Watching magazine. Naturally, he saw the bird in flight and didn’t see the white bill, just “large patches of white only on the back (trailing) portion of both the upper and underwing.”

  After a while, the team was hearing about ivory-bills all over the place. “Despite the small scale of our search, we amassed substantial evidence—including more than 300 sound recordings of kent calls and double-knocks—that Ivory-bills were in the forests along the Choctawhatchee River,” Hill wrote. And they had thirteen sightings, nearly twice as many as Cornell. Hill notes without irony or embarrassment: “All of the sightings were of flying birds.” And his “best sighting” occurred “as I watched an Ivory-bill fly away from me.”

  It was as if the team had not read any of the counterarguments or accumulated wisdom of the amateur bloggers. How else could you write something like this: “How could we detect birds so dependably for a full year and not get a photograph? My answer is that the woodpeckers do not want people close to them. They invariably detected us before we detected them.” No other bird in the world is as successful at avoiding trained bird-watchers as the Arkansas and Florida ivory-bills.

  Hill’s team often catches sight of the “diagnostic shape, plumage pattern, or flight behavior characteristics of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers,” but never any of the definitive field marks. At an American Ornithologists’ Union meeting, Rolek presented “a grainy video of a bird that he identified in life as an Ivory-billed Woodpecker.”

  A grainy video? Well, that rounds out the story, doesn’t it? It’s like that scene in Shrek where all the stock characters of all the children’s fairy tales gather at the king’s palace, and you find yourself happily picking out the ones you recognize. Oh, there are the dwarfs. There is a troll. It is comforting when you recognize the ones you know are supposed to be there. When I heard that Hill had a blurry video, I felt oddly warmed by the flush of déjà vu. Of course there wasn’t enough enthusiasm this time, being so close to the Cornell sightings, to fluff interest in a festival. So donors to Hill’s search could only earn a “limited edition collector’s pin commemorating the search for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the Florida panhandle” for $100 and Hill would throw in a “golf shirt with a specially-designed commemorative logo” for $250.

  Although he has only amassed even more of the weak coffee that Nelson’s bloggers so smartly conclude doesn’t make for a strong brew, Hill nevertheless concludes: “Our evidence suggests that Ivory-billed Woodpeckers may be present in the forests along the Choctawhatchee River and warrants an expanded search of this bottomland forest habitat.” He added: “We are going to receive some state and federal funding for the upcoming field season, money that will allow us to have a much larger search team and to deploy many remote cameras.”

  The money flows, and there’s pots of it because the federal government also apparently hasn’t kept up with Nelson’s blog or read Sibley’s articles. The Fish and Wildlife Service had a budget of $27 million to produce a “Recovery Plan” for the ivory-bill and still maintains a website to keep us all updated on the progress: www.fws.gov/ivorybill/. The site boasts that America “has a comprehensive recovery plan ready to implement wherever and whenever it is needed.” We can all sleep soundly now. Meanwhile, Cornell has withdrawn its forces and retreated into determined, if not pathetic, defense: “We found one bird,” said Fitz grimly, and he hasn’t really spoken about it since.

  Prior to the Cornell finding, the official status of the bird was “endangered,” with no definitive sightings since the 1940s. And that is right back to where we are. The government officially holds that the bird may exist in this habitat and is now committed to preserving the habitat to maintain the bird. In one bizarre case in Arkansas, a judge actually halted a development because the construction work woul
d imperil the ivory-billed woodpecker.

  For now, the IBWO officially exists, on paper, and with federal protection to salve our mythic memories. At the very least, the government’s bedrock truth will lay the groundwork for a sighting in the future, when a new generation finds its own bookish intellectual to buddy up with some rustic from Mississippi (“You ought to hear him tell stories, seriously, he’s so funny”) and tell once again the tale of the ivory-billed woodpecker. Only to have it unraveled and unstrung by another band of committed amateurs.

  The man who led the famous 1968 woodpecker hunt in South Carolina, Alex Sanders, says that he still gets questioned about it: “Over the course of the past thirty-five years, I have often been asked, ‘Where is the ivory-billed woodpecker?’ I’ve always answered truthfully, ‘I don’t know where he is now; but I know where he was when we needed him.’ Depending on who is asking, I sometimes add, ‘When we need him again, we’ll find him.’ ”

  4

  A CONFEDERACY OF DABBLERS

  I. A Boy’s Life, Recombinated

  hen I was a kid in Charleston, South Carolina, there weren’t many things more fun than a secret fort. I built them by assembling sofa cushions in the living room or nailing leftover lumber into the branches of my gingko tree. In one case, still notorious in my family, my friends and I used some stolen spray paint to claim a little place by defacing an out-of-the-way wall belonging to the United States Postal Service (apparently some kind of federal crime).

  My friend Parker and I had lots of forts in those days. They were squirreled away atop garages, in the narrow spaces between old houses, or in neglected corners of collapsing warehouses. We gave them cool secret-fort names, depending on who worked near them: Under the Realtor’s Nose, Under the Painter’s Nose, and the aforementioned, Under the Postman’s Nose. Most of what happened there, other than an occasional water-gun fight, was … nothing. I’d get a call from Parker—“Let’s meet Under the Old Lady’s Nose”—and I’d speed off on my bicycle as fast as possible.

  What drew us there was that intoxicating sense of possibility. It’s what keeps those places vivid in my mind. It didn’t really matter that not long after both of us arrived there on our bikes, we drifted off to do something else. The idea was that in those special places, almost anything could happen. Occasionally something incredible did happen. After we stole the spray paint from Mr. Reynolds, whose backyard abutted the post office, we each spray-painted our futures on the wall. Todd, a future visual artist, painted a naked woman. I annotated it with a thesaurus of Anglo-Saxon obscenities. Parker, the musician, declared his love for a girl we all adored and wrote both his full name and hers right on the wall, making the case pretty easy for the local police to crack.

  So when I was recently in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hanging with a couple of amateur biologists, I practically suffered a flashback when Mackenzie Cowell invited me to see the secret meeting place where his crowd of local homebrew geneticists teach the basics of DNA extraction. Under the Recombinant Geneticist’s Nose was where, as Cowell suggested, we could extract DNA from “tuna, banana, cow heart.”

  We parked on a side street not all that far from Harvard Square. The place was an average-looking brownstone. He asked me not to reveal the actual address. (As if. I’m Jack, not Parker.) We unlocked the door and went up to the second floor. Three programmers were sitting at desks lined up in front of a kitchen counter. It was lunchtime, and sandwiches were unwrapped and some Second Life action was breaking out on a couple of screens. Awkward hellos were exchanged. One person knew Cowell, but the others didn’t really. The place was a coworking arrangement, the kind you see among freelancers, especially programmers, nowadays. One guy rents a spacious apartment and then sublets room access for $400 a month to people who need a quiet place to sit and get lost in hours of furious programming (or play Second Life while convincing themselves that they are programming furiously).

  Only a few weeks before, Cowell had led a meeting of his new Do-It-Yourself Biology group or DIYbio, here at the kitchen counter, and he showed me how it went. From the space where most people kept a few supplies, Cowell pulled out a box—his homemade genetics laboratory—all created from a few easily obtainable supplies. Typically, lab trays are filled with a gel into which is set a lab “comb.” In any university lab, this is done with expensive equipment. Here, it was a small Tupperware container jimmied with a cut-up subway fare card. The methylene blue, needed to dye the DNA to see its movement, had been purchased at the local pet shop, where it’s sold as an anti-algae chemical for fish tanks. And then there is the glycerol, which is also needed to extract the DNA.

  “You can get glycerol from the CVS pharmacy,” Cowell said. “They sell it as a suppository.” The glycerol comes in squishy tubes. “We were trying to be serious about it, but that was definitely not happening.”

  Not really all that different from life Under the Grocer’s Nose, except: the outcome of Parker and me squirting water at each other wasn’t the creation of new life forms. But that is what the latest crew of amateur scientists are, ultimately, up to. Once known by its former noms de plume of genetic engineering, recombinant DNA, or bioengineering, synthetic biology—as it’s known today—is fairly new. Polish geneticist Waclaw Szybalski coined the phrase “synthetic biology” in a 1974 research paper. But the modern use of it probably dates to the first International Meeting on Synthetic Biology, in 2004 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  When you ask anyone in the field what it is, the answer you get will typically involve a metaphor. It’s like computers (genes get “programmed”) or it’s like old-school manufacturing (bacteria will be microscopic “factories” pumping biofuel) or it’s like toys (parts will snap together, genes are like LEGOs). The most revealing metaphor, when you first come to it, belongs to Stanford’s Professor Drew Endy.

  As synthetic biology’s most effective evangelist, Endy is boyish-looking, energetic, and smart. He can connect his new science to old ones in a way that makes the near future of engineering DNA sound absolutely inevitable.

  Endy tells the story of William Sellers, an engineer who wrote an important paper around the time the Civil War was winding up. Sellers suggested that American engineers abandon the age of hand-forged materials and adopt a standard for all nuts and bolts. He proposed a formula that would create a standard pitch of screw thread conformed to the screw’s diameter:

  P = 0.24 √(D + 0.625 – 0.175)

  Today Americans still screw, more or less, by the Sellers system. But the key feature of this new screw, Endy argues, was not only the convenience of knowing that every screw was the same size, but here is what was most crucial: Every Sellers nut, when screwed into a Sellers bolt, behaved the same way. “When you pull on the nut,” Endy says, “it stays put. It doesn’t come flying off of the bolt.” It does what it is supposed to do, a feature that engineers like Endy call “reliable functional composition.”

  This predictability is one of those structural changes to American manufacturing in the nineteenth century that drove its rapid progress. And that is what Endy is trying to do with DNA. He and his colleagues, when they discuss their fresh new science, take up this engineering metaphor. MIT, for instance, maintains a Registry of Standard Biological Parts, a kind of Radio Shack of DNA. Geneticists can order various plasmids or other strings of DNA known to cause, say, glowing in the dark or other biological features. And it works the other way, too: You can register a new DNA strand with a novel functionality—for instance, a “biosynthetic device” that changes the nasty manure-like odor of growing lab bacteria into the sweet satisfying aroma of a banana. This bio-widget or “banana odor biosynthetic system” has been standardized and registered, available in the catalogue as part BBa_J45400.

  The idea is that the Registry will become your one-stop shop for DNA parts, so that folks like Cowell and his friends at the coworking space will start playing and creating, advancing the science quickly. Synthetic biology is now under way, not just as a new scie
nce but also as a window into what happens when a new enthusiasm lures weekenders to try it on their own, form new clubs, introduce new ideas, and push new terms into the daily lives of the (often nervous) middle class.

  The number of standard biological parts doubles every year, and Endy says, “the same thing is happening with the number of teenagers who would like to do genetic engineering; it’s doubling every year.” This rapid expansion has a lot to do with Endy’s salesmanship. Endy predicts a time (soon) when someone will rewrite the DNA of an acorn to include George Jetson–like instructions that direct the future oak to create its own tree house. Or new souped-up ocean coral will suck carbon out of an overloaded Gaia. Apply this concept to the human genome and you’re looking at a coming generation who will choose their genetically enhanced superhero powers as one of life’s routine decisions, like what college to attend or whom to marry. Endy likes to coin hackerlike jargon that sounds super-hip. It hasn’t caught on widely yet, but if you listen carefully on the Stanford campus, maybe you’ll hear someone referring to the shifting of a gene from one life form to another as “DNA bashing.”

  In fact, most of the boosters of synthetic biology are quite skillful at mining these kinds of metaphors. The elder statesman of theoretical physics and a big synthetic biology fan, Freeman Dyson, wrote an influential essay in the New York Review of Books addressing the learned class. Like Endy, he imagines that the real breakthrough will occur once professional scientists make enough of the basics available to a new and much larger class of people who will take over the creative function of synthetic biology.

  “Now imagine what will happen,” Dyson wrote. “There will be do-it-yourself kits for gardeners who will use genetic engineering to breed new varieties of roses and orchids. Also kits for lovers of pigeons and parrots and lizards and snakes to breed new varieties of pets. Breeders of dogs and cats will have their kits too. Domesticated biotechnology, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures, rather than the monoculture crops that the big corporations prefer. New lineages will proliferate to replace those that monoculture farming and deforestation have destroyed. Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art form as creative as painting or sculpture.”