by Tim Flannery
Vale Martin
2014
Exegi monumentum aere perennius
(I HAVE MADE A MONUMENT THAT WILL OUTLAST BRONZE)
MARTIN COPLEY WAS born in 1940, during the London Blitz. Perhaps this early scrape with peril was formative, for I’ve never known a man who perfected the art of living as well as he did. When still in his early fifties, Martin moved from London to Perth. Behind him lay a Greats degree from Oxford, and an illustrious career in which he built from nothing an insurance business with 1000 employees. He had decided that the second part of his life would be about spending what he had earned, in ways that would give him genuine pleasure, and create lasting value.
Martin loved Wagner, the Australian outback, and good wine, in equal measure. But it was the outback that would become his all-consuming passion. He realised, after visiting a small wildlife sanctuary in the Adelaide Hills, that the inland plains lacked something. The smaller mammals—the wallabies, bandicoots and such like, had all become extinct, and their absence was leading to further, massive environmental damage. In 1991 Martin set up his own small nature reserve—Karakamia, meaning the home of the black cockatoo in the language of the Noongar people—and stocked it with woylies and other endangered mammals. By the time I met him in 1998, Martin had established his second wildlife sanctuary, at Paruna on the Darling Escarpment just outside Perth. He invited me to fly from Harvard to open it.
When I got off the plane I had expected to meet a besuited millionaire. Instead, the man who picked me up sported a terry-towelling hat and T-shirt. Martin shopped at Marks and Spencer, and laughed when Australians thought it a top-shelf label. Despite the casual clothes there was clearly something very special about him. When I asked about his business success, he told me that it was all about taking care of people. Martin had a genius for friendship—an empathy with those he loved that I’ve never seen as acutely developed in anyone else.
By 1999 I had joined forces with Martin and his accountant Ross Ledger. Eventually we would go on to be the founding directors of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC). From the beginning, Martin’s wisdom, vision and leadership shone through. He had little experience in the not-for-profit sector, but the AWC was soon running a multi-million dollar budget and managing vast acreages for wildlife. Not content with setting up one fabulously successful not-for-profit, Martin went on to establish the Australian Environmental Grantmakers Network, to encourage other wealthy people to experience the joy of environmental restoration.
I remember, in the early days, discussing with Martin which properties AWC should acquire. Two desirable ones came up simultaneously—Faure Island in Shark Bay and Mount Gibson inland from Geraldton. I laid out to Martin the virtues of both, thinking this would help him make up his mind which one to acquire. After a moment’s thoughtful silence, he said, ‘Well, I suppose we’ll have to have both of them!’ In those days Martin was funding acquisitions out of his own pocket, so this utterance carried implications.
When Charnley Station in the Kimberley was under consideration for acquisition, Martin led a group of us on an expedition into the wilderness. For a week we walked the rugged sandstone plateau, seeing wildlife extinct elsewhere and finding rock art and rugged gorges that took the breath away with their beauty. And each evening, Martin and his friend Graeme Morgan would rustle up an exquisite Italian wine or two from a cellar that they had established under a fallen tree. Of course, Charnley had to be acquired. Today it is arguably the most valuable biological reserve in north-west Australia.
Martin was a man of deep emotions. I once took him to the Natural History Museum in London to see the stuffed skins of extinct Australian mammals that had been collected 150 years ago. They are stored away from the public, in great steel cabinets in a darkened hall. As we opened drawer after drawer Martin grew solemn, realising the extent of the damage the European settlement had done to the environment. Later we went to Oxford, where he became boisterous at seeing a college wall he use to scale to avoid the warden after a night out on the town. And together we listened intently through all six hours of Wagner’s opera Zigfried, Martin’s eyes often closed as he scaled the heights of the sublime music.
The years sped by, and property after property was added to AWC’s assets. Martin would invariably ask me: ‘Well, what do you think of this one?’ Aware that his purse was not limitless I sometimes tried to curb my enthusiasm. But he would inevitably see through me, wince and say, ‘I suppose we must have it, then?’ His last acquisition was not in Australia, but in Tuscany, and it gave him great pleasure. La Fame (the hungry one) was a dilapidated farmhouse atop a hill, surrounded by steep, wooded slopes. Martin explained enthusiastically that they were the habitat of wild boar. He purchased some adjacent land, and managed the whole to benefit the butterflies that are suffering as Italian farming practices change.
I have rarely seen Martin happier than at La Fame. The care with which he planned the placement of his piano, or selected a Barolo to drink while I prepared pollo arosto, was emblematic of his approach to life. By the time of my last visit he had decorated the guest room with painted friezes of Western Australian endangered wildlife. I had hoped to see him flourish there for many years to come. But it was not to be.
A childhood spent in English boarding schools had, he felt, made things difficult for him when it came to women. But in truth there was a great love in his life. He had met Valentine while a student at Oxford. In some ways she was the girl next door—her family living across the park from Martin’s in London. In the swirl of university life, both had gone on to marry someone else. But fifty years on, with both single once more, they met again. For all too brief a span Martin and his Valentine enjoyed life with an intensity and fullness that it is the lot of very few to know. In Australia, London, Costa Rica or La Fame, they explored the world, drinking in life to the full.
How does one fill the gap left by such a one as Martin? Were I able to ask him, I’m sure he’d reply, ‘Mourn a little, but then get out there and make a difference, man!’ The exemplar he was to all who knew him, and the legacy he left to every Australian, make Martin Copley one of the most notable men of his age. Long after the great and wealthy who fill our media are gone and forgotten, Martin will be remembered as the one who gave life to a dying land.
How You Consist of Trillions of Tiny Machines
2015
IN 1609 GALILEO Galilei turned his gaze, magnified twentyfold by lenses of Dutch design, toward the heavens, touching off a revolution in human thought. A decade later those same lenses delivered the possibility of a second revolution, when Galileo discovered that by inverting their order he could magnify the very small. For the first time in human history, it lay in our power to see the building blocks of bodies, the causes of diseases, and the mechanism of reproduction. Yet according to Paul Falkowski’s Life’s Engines:
Galileo did not seem to have much interest in what he saw with his inverted telescope. He appears to have made little attempt to understand, let alone interpret, the smallest objects he could observe.
Bewitched by the moons of Saturn and their challenge to the heliocentric model of the universe, Galileo ignored the possibility that the magnified fleas he drew might have anything to do with the plague then ravaging Italy. And so for three centuries more, one of the cruellest of human afflictions would rage on, misunderstood and thus unpreventable, taking the lives of countless millions.
Perhaps it’s fundamentally human both to be awed by the things we look up to and to pass over those we look down on. If so, it’s a tendency that has repeatedly frustrated human progress. Half a century after Galileo looked into his ‘inverted telescope’, the pioneers of microscopy Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and Robert Hooke revealed that a Lilliputian universe existed all around and even inside us. But neither of them had students, and their researches ended in another false dawn for microscopy. It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century, when German manufacturers began producing superior instruments, that the discovery
of the very small began to alter science in fundamental ways.
Today, driven by ongoing technological innovations, the exploration of the ‘nanoverse’, as the realm of the minuscule is often termed, continues to gather pace. One of the field’s greatest pioneers is Paul Falkowski, a biological oceanographer who has spent much of his scientific career working at the intersection of physics, chemistry and biology. His book Life’s Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable focuses on one of the most astonishing discoveries of the twentieth century—that our cells are comprised of a series of highly sophisticated ‘little engines’ or nanomachines that carry out life’s vital functions. It is a work full of surprises, arguing for example that all of life’s most important innovations were in existence by around 3.5 billion years ago—less than a billion years after Earth formed, and a period at which our planet was largely hostile to living things. How such mind-bending complexity could have evolved at such an early stage, and in such a hostile environment, has forced a fundamental reconsideration of the origins of life itself.
At a personal level, Falkowski’s work is also challenging. We are used to thinking of ourselves as composed of billions of cells, but Falkowski points out that we also consist of trillions of electrochemical machines that somehow coordinate their intricate activities in ways that allow our bodies and minds to function with the required reliability and precision. As we contemplate the evolution and maintenance of this complexity, wonder grows to near incredulity.
One of the most ancient of Falkowski’s biological machines is the ribosome, a combination of proteins and nucleic acids that causes protein synthesis. It is an entity so tiny that even with an electron microscope, it is hard to see it. As many as 400 million ribosomes could fit in a single period at the end of a sentence printed in The New York Review. Only with the advent of synchrotrons—machines that accelerate the movements of particles, and can be used to create very powerful X-rays—have its workings been revealed. Ribosomes use the instructions embedded in our genetic code to make complex proteins such as those found in our muscles and other organs. The manufacture of these proteins is not a straightforward process. The ribosomes have no direct contact with our DNA, so must act by reading messenger RNA, molecules that convey genetic information from the DNA. Ribosomes consist of two major complexes that work like a pair of gears: they move over the RNA, and attach amino acids to the emerging protein.
All ribosomes—whether in the most humble bacteria or in human bodies—operate at the same rate, adding just ten to twenty amino acids per second to the growing protein string. And so are our bodies built up by tiny mechanistic operations, one protein at a time, until that stupendous entity we call a human being is complete. All living things possess ribosomes, so these complex micromachines must have existed in the common ancestor of all life. Perhaps their development marks the spark of life itself. But just when they first evolved, and how they came into being, remain two of the great mysteries of science.
All machines require a source of energy to operate, and the energy to run not only ribosomes but all cellular functions comes from the same source—a universal ‘energy currency’ molecule known as adenosine triphosphate (ATP). In animals and plants ATP is manufactured in special cellular structures known as mitochondria. The nanomachines that operate within the mitochondria are minute biological electrical motors that, in a striking parallel with their mechanical counterparts, possess rotors, stators and rotating catalytic heads.
The ATP nanomachine is the means by which life uses electrical gradients, or the difference in ion concentration and electrical potential from one point to another, to create energy. The nanomachine is located in a membrane that separates a region of the cell with a high density of protons (hydrogen ions) from an area with a lower density. Just as in a battery, the protons pass from the area of high density into the area of lower density. But in order to do so in the cell, they must pass through the ATP nanomachine, and their flow through the minute electric motor turns its rotor counterclockwise. For every 360-degree turn the rotor makes, three molecules of ATP are created.
Living things use a great many primary energy sources to create ATP. The most primitive living entities are known as archaea. Though bacteria-like, they are a distinct group whose various members seem to have exploited almost every energy source available on the early Earth. Some, known as methanogens, cause carbon dioxide to react with hydrogen to create the electrochemical gradient required to make ATP, producing methane as a by-product. Others use ammonia, metal ions or hydrogen gas to create the electrochemical gradient. Bacteria also use a variety of energy sources, but at some point a group of bacteria started to use sunlight to power photosynthesis. This process yielded vastly more energy than other sources, giving its possessors a huge evolutionary advantage. Falkowski has spent most of his career unravelling the deep mystery of photosynthesis and how it changed the world.
He calls the photosynthetic process ‘almost magical’. His description gives a flavour of the magic involved:
When one, very specific chlorophyll molecule embedded in a reaction centre absorbs the energy from a photon, the energy of the light particle can push an electron off the chlorophyll molecule. For about a billionth of a second, the chlorophyll molecule becomes positively charged.
The electron ‘hole’ in the chlorophyll molecule is in turn filled by an electron from ‘a quartet of manganese [the chemical element] atoms held in a special arrangement on one side of a membrane’. The electron ‘hole’ thus formed in the manganese quartet is filled with electrons from a water molecule. This causes the water molecule to fall apart, creating free oxygen.
Photosynthesis permits a local and temporary reversal of the second law of thermodynamics—the creation of order out of disorder. Magical indeed, but in early 2014 photosynthesis was revealed to be even more magical than Falkowski’s book allows. Physicists based in the United Kingdom demonstrated that quantum mechanics plays a vital part in the photosynthetic process, by helping to transport the energy it captures efficiently, in a wavelike manner.1
If chemistry is not your cup of tea, Falkowski offers an alternative way of thinking about how photosynthesis works—as a microscopic sound and light show. The light is of course the photon that energises the performance, while the sound is provided by the chlorophyll molecule, which flexes with an audible ‘pop’ when it loses its electron. The phenomenon was discovered by Alexander Graham Bell, who in 1880 used what he called the ‘photoacoustic effect’ to make a device he named the photophone. Bell used the photophone to transmit a wireless voice telephone message seven hundred feet, and considered it to be his greatest invention. And perhaps it was, since it was the precursor of fibre-optic communication.
The way that the sophisticated nanomachines Falkowski describes became incorporated into a single complex cell, such as those our bodies consist of, is so incredible that it reads like a fairytale. Using a system known as ‘quorum sensing’, microbes can communicate, and they use this ability to switch on and off various functions within their own populations and within ecosystems composed of different microbe species. Quorum sensing can even operate when one microbe swallows another, as happened over a billion years ago when a larger cell began to communicate with a smaller one that it had ingested. Quorum sensing permitted the potential food item to live inside its host instead of being digested. Then it allowed genes to switch on and off in ways that benefited the new chimeric, or genetically mixed, entity. The two genomes coexisting in the chimera even managed to exchange some genes, further enabling it to operate as a competent whole. As a result of these changes, the organism that was swallowed was transformed into a mitochondria, and began supplying ATP to the first eukaryotic cell—that is, a cell containing a nucleus and other complicated structures.
As impossible as this process sounds, it was followed by an even more outlandish occurrence. Somehow the newly created binary organism swallowed yet another entity—a kind of bacteria that could photosynthesi
se. Again the ingested entity lived on inside the cell, using quorum sensing to somehow synchronise its ‘almost magical’ nanomachinery with those of the binary organism. This newly constituted ‘trinity organism’ became the photosynthetic ancestor of every plant on Earth.
Microbes control the Earth, Falkowski tells us. They created it in its present form, and maintain it in its current state by creating a global electron marketplace that we call the biosphere. Falkowski argues that we can conceive of our world as a great, unitary electrical device, driven by the myriad tiny electric motors and the other electrochemical nanomachinery of cells. Viewing the world this way reveals hitherto unappreciated dangers in some modern science.
Some molecular biologists are doing research on ways of inserting genes into microorganisms in order to create new kinds of life that have never previously existed. Others are busy working out whether the cellular nanomachinery itself might be improved. Falkowski recommends that:
rather than tinker with organisms that we can’t reverse engineer, a much better use of our intellectual abilities and technological capabilities would be to better understand how the core nanomachines evolved and how these machines spread across the planet to become the engines of life.
Just how far we are from obtaining an understanding of the evolution of the nanomachines is conveyed in Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink’s latest book, A New History of Life. Both authors are iconoclasts, and their book is at times breathtakingly unorthodox. Yet their ideas are at the cutting edge of many debates about the evolution of life, making their book challenging and rewarding. The work of the palaeontologist is like that of a restorer of ancient mosaics: the further we go back in time, the fewer tesserae, or mosaic components, we have. Those seeking to understand the origin of the nanomachines have to work with the equivalent of just half a dozen pieces from a picture comprising tens of thousands. Time and our restless Earth have destroyed the remainder. Despite this awesome handicap, Ward and Kirschvink are convinced that, owing to the new technologies, we are at last asking the right questions.