Deadly Feasts:
Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague
By Richard Rhodes, Simon & Schuster, 259pp
Clone: The Road to Dolly and the Path Ahead
By Gina Kolata, Allen Lane, 218pp
At War Within: The Double-Edged Sword of
Immunity
By William R. Clark, Oxford University Press,
275pp
"Eating people is wrong," according to
a famous comic ditty by Flanders and Swan. Cannibalism is a recurrent anathema
in the Bible. "Therefore in your midst fathers will eat their children, and
children will eat their fathers," warned Ezekiel 5:10. Eating dead family
members was briefly popular in this century among the South Fore women in
highland New Guinea, and it fetched a truly biblical retribution.
The wives and daughters of the Fore were felled in shocking numbers by an
insidious plague, kuru--the shivering--a gruesome `laughing sickness' that
robbed victims of self-control and speech but not awareness, a slow infection
without signs of inflammation or fever. The Fore knew it was sorcery, and as
women died they gathered to plead for an end to magical attacks, hunting down
suspect men and butchering their corpses in retribution.
The tragedy would be an anthropological oddity, for kuru faded with the
arrival of Australian law and the end of cannibal feasts, except that if
Pulitzer-winner Richard Rhodes is correct it might be the shadow of a plague
concocted on an industrial scale.
"Victims' brains go spongy; their minds dim; they lose the ability
to walk, to talk, to see, to swallow; they die slowly... The new disease agent
refuses to die." Smite that agent with hard radiation, soak it for months
in formaldehyde, it remains dormant, surviving "even the fiery furnace of a
700-degree oven". And like kuru, it is spread by animals eating the
processed remains of other animals. We do that, too, of course. We call it beef,
and chicken, and pork. Vegetarians eat plants grown in animal manure.
I was worried at first that Rhodes' compulsively readable book was an
exercise in the gleeful escalation of malignity. Certainly it has its
apocalyptic edge, but Deadly Feasts is not just scare-mongering for the
sake of sales. It is a well-researched sceptical investigation into the
discovery of a new kind of infectious agent, the prion, a mutant protein
fragment that can lure the normal, harmless form into a ruinous copycat cascade.
Dr Stanley Prusiner, the driven, unlikeable, humourless biochemist who coined
the term, won last year's medicine Nobel (and refused Rhodes an interview, which
is a pity).
Novelist Kurt Vonnegut invented ice-nine, a seed crystal that
locks the world's ordinary water into immobile sheets that can't melt. Prion
diseases work that way, crystallising the brain's tissues into gappy, spongy
mats. The most notable recent instances are scrapie in sheep and BSE--mad cow
disease. Another, in humans, is the rare CJD--Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
Alzheimer's might be one.
The protein disorder arises spontaneously, by mutation. Then it can
spread fast if the infected are fed to the healthy. When humans eat meat (or use
medical transplant tissues), we expose ourselves to that risk--although it's a
small risk in Australia, unlike Britain. Rhodes' account of the political
wheeling and dealing in the UK and USA by special agribiz interests is
cautionary, and scary.
At the heart of his tale is Dr D. Carleton Gajdusek (pronounced Guy-duh-chek),
who shared the 1976 Medicine Nobel for his pioneer work on kuru. A brilliant
eccentric more comfortable with the Fore than in the west, Gajdusek adopted 38
Micronesian boys over the years and, says Rhodes, "impoverished
himself" to educate them. Twenty years after winning his Prize, he was in
custody as a paedophile. Among the Fore, "pederastic fellation" was
customary between boys and adults. The unfolding saga of prion disease is
replete with such irreconcilable cultural differences, metaphors of confusion
and corruption.
In a horror movie, Gajdusek would be the mad scientist who released a
fatal disease. In reality, always more morally complex, he is the tainted saint
whose work, and that of his colleagues and rivals, brings light into darkness.
The imminent prospect of human cloning fills most people with the revulsion felt
for paedophilia. Nations rush to ban a technology that only a couple of years
ago was scorned as `mere science fiction'. Ironically, swift advances in cloning
and gene-hybrid technology might solve the hazard of contamination by prions.
Since the cloned ewe Dolly appeared on the world's TV screens a year ago,
we've faced brand-new ethical and metaphysical quandaries. Kolata's slender
book--a quickie, rushed to market--is packed with interesting tales of
back-biting and fingernail-chewing among experts and blow-ins. Drs Ian Wilmut
and Keith Campbell, who grew Dolly from the udder cell of a mature sheep, were
veterinary embryologists, so their work was ignored until it smacked loftier
experts between the eyes.
Kolata does a fair job explaining the techniques devised to persuade
adult tissue to recover the baby-making prowess of an embryo. On ethics she is
dull. If this technology were to make infant replicas of adults (twins a
generation or two apart in time), "is there a hidden fear that we would be
forcing God to give us another soul, thereby bending God to our will or, worse
yet, that we would be creating soul-less beings that were merely genetic
shells...?" Such barbarous pseudo-questions remind me of the Fore's
helpless delusion that kuru was due to sorcery.
Cloning human copies of the rich and infertile is of less urgent
significance than a whole batch of medical advances. Already, according to The
Lancet, cloned human veins have been grown. Identical transgenic animals
produce pure pharmaceuticals expressed in urine or milk. Pigs grow heart-valves
and other organs pre-adapted to human use, purged of the immune factors that now
cause rejection. Cloning is crucial for the success of these life-saving
programs.
Or will such xenotransplants, as they're called, also pipe in new prion
infections and fresh unknown horrors? All life is a gamble, and knowledge is the
best means to shift odds our way. An accessible introduction to the ambiguities
of health and illness is Clark's tendentiously-titled At War Within: his
language implies boundaries that need armed defence, guards turning against
their patrons. Yet despite deconstructive gnawing at such revealing rhetoric by
recent literary and cultural theorists, the symbolism of swords and shields does
seem appropriate to the immune system.
Even better, though, is the metaphor of communication. The immune system,
for Clark, is a fluid, fluent extension of the brain, sharing messages from body
to mind and back again. Once we unlock its grammar, we'll know how to activate
immunity's benefits, avoid the diseases and disorders that eat us from within
and without in their painful, mindless feasts.
Billions and
Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium
By Carl Sagan, Hodder Headline, 244pp
Carl Sagan's Universe
Edited by Yervant Terzian and Elizabeth Bilson,
Cambridge University Press, 282pp
The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s)
Report
By Timothy Ferris, Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
393pp
Time's Arrow & Archimedes' Point: New
Directions for the Physics of Time
By Huw Price, Oxford University Press, 306pp
Less than a year and a half ago, astronomer and
science populariser extraordinaire Carl Sagan died of cancer at just 63,
reminding poets, philosophers and scientists alike of our cruel one-way passage
through time. Death slams the door shut in our face, as brutally as the collapse
of an exploding star into a black hole. Unless, that is, you believe as Einstein
did that we inhabit a `block universe', where events extend in a frozen
multi-billion year instant from Big Bang to eternity, where past and future are
just negotiable coordinates on a cosmic map drawn in light.
If our petty life-times are the only span that mind's billions of neurons
can yet employ in seizing and cherishing the universe's immensity, the natural
yardsticks of significance are its `billions and billions' of
stars, atoms and years. The phrase, the plosive mantra of Sagan's famous TV
series Cosmos, is already legendary, reverberant but richly comic. And
yet, as Sagan drolly begins his final, posthumous collection (he published a
formidable 30 books): `I never said it. Honest.'
US talk-show host Johnny
Carson said it, adopting a Sagan mop-top wig to amuse his studio with mock
commentaries on the stars. It's a measure of Sagan's fame that people got the
joke. That fame gave him a platform to preach a liberal gospel of rationality,
political conscience and restraint, blended with luscious enthusiasm for the
fruits of his beloved sciences.
This fine, final book roams across space and time but pays special
attention to today's crises: the (averted?) threat of nuclear winter, the menace
of ozone depletion and greenhouse warming, and other urgent matters where morals
meet fact: abortion's ethics, the need we Pleistocene hunters retain for supple
education. And it closes most poignantly with Ann Druyan's account of her
husband's last months.
Space probes bear messages into deep space, awaiting extraterrestrial
readers who will not find them for billions and billions of years. Years ago,
Druyan taped a EEG-EKG brain/heart read-out for such a probe while meditating on
Earth's life and history, in the faint hope that wise minds in some distant
epoch might reconstitute these electric traces. `Toward the end I permitted
myself a personal statement of what it was like to fall in love.' Her loving
text is now beyond Pluto.
Sagan's spectacular range of interests and competencies is also
celebrated in a symposium devoted to his life and work, ranging impressively
from planetary space exploration (he helped map Mars), the origins of life, the
search for its presence elsewhere, teaching and the dangers of pseudoscience,
nuclear winter and climate change. In the most startling chapter, notable
scientist Kip Thorne describes how Sagan's science fiction novel Contact
led advanced physics to a new understanding of wormholes in spacetime. These
bizarre geometric links might permit time travel and virtually instantaneous
transport--but only to a science well beyond our own.
Such speculations get a healthy workout in Timothy Ferris's excellent and
up-to-date excursion through physics and cosmology. From the Big Bang to quantum
physics and its weird paradoxes, the lucid and sometimes poetic
journalist-astronomer carries forward the program Sagan initiated in such early
popular books as The Dragons of Eden. What kind of universe is this whole
shebang? Relativity theory insists that nothing can reach out faster than light,
while quantum mechanics shows that when a particle changes its state, its
`entangled' partner must do so too, instantly, however far apart they are.
How can these perspectives be reconciled? The universe, Ferris observes,
`was not always big and classical. Once it was small and quantum, and possibly
it has not lost the memory of those times. It may well turn out that... marbled
through the very fabric of the space that is in turn marbled through every
material object--the universe remains as it was in the beginning, when all
places were one place, all times one time, and all things the same thing.'
If this sounds like mystical hogwash, or New Age quackery, Huw Price
argues powerfully that it's quite the reverse--that logic obliges us to see
effects extending backwards as well as forward in time, modifying their own
causes. A Sydney University professor of philosophy, Price tells a difficult but
intriguing tale that's bound to unsettle complacent physicists.
In the spirit of Sagan and Thorne, only more so, Price notes that at its
smallest level the world is radically symmetrical. Down there with the quanta,
you can switch almost any arrow left and right, or from future to past, with
impunity. While this is accepted doctrine in the labs, Price pushes it further
into a `perspectival view' of time and causality.
Yes, we certainly feel as if we're moving relentlessly into the future,
carried by time's flow--but that's just a result of a conventional asymmetry, an
accidental consequence of starting your universe with a smooth, highly ordered
Big Bang. For all we know, the universe might also end in a smooth Big Crunch.
Switch perspectives and a Big Crunch, time-reversed, might look like a cosmic
origin (although Stephen Hawking denies this). In fact, Price argues, every
particle we're built from weaves its message in a ceaseless Masonic hand-shaking
from past to future and back again.
If this story makes any sense--and it can't be easily summarised into
slogans--does it imply psychics can, after all, see the future, or that time
machines flicker unseen through history? Probably not. The price of Price's lack
of prejudice about time's direction is that you can't change what's happened.
The future already knows, and therefore its past already partakes in that future
history, at least to the extent that later records show what happened. There are
no retrospectively fading Back to the Future photographs as the past
changes.
Confused? It's all done with mirrors, of course, information reflected
back and forth in the great mirrored vaults of Einstein's timeless block
universe. Would Sagan have been appalled by this audacious proposal? Maybe--but
I suspect he'd embrace it with a smile, and dig out billion and billions of
startling implications.
By Richard P. Feynman, Allen Lane, 133pp
Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to
Evolution
By Michael J. Behe, Touchstone/Simon &
Schuster,
Lamarck's Signature
By Edward J. Steele, Robyn A. Lindley and Robert
V. Blanden, Allen & Unwin, 286pp
Life Signs: The Biology of Star Trek
By Susan Jenkins, MD and Robert Jenkins, MD,
PhD, HarperCollins, 189pp
Three funerals and a scientific marriage.
Richard Feynman, here with yet another posthumous work, won a Nobel Prize. Ted
Steele and Mike Behe figure they deserve one apiece, but colleagues mostly think
they're dead in the water. Dr and Dr Jenkins just wanna have fun.
Feynman was charming and feisty, one of the deepest minds of the century
yet with a gift for limpid explanation. Behe has something of the same gift. He
can discuss molecular biochemistry's blood-clot cascade proteins and keep you
smiling. The Jenkinses boldly go where no basic biology has gone before, a fun
journey and instructive, enlivened by bulgy Klingons and other silly life-forms
devised on the run by dopey scriptwriters. Poor Steele and his collaborators,
crammed to the cruppers with real science, abandon their general audience at the
outset. They extrude acronyms, illustrate their stodge with unreadable diagrams
in tiny print, then jumble the mutated result into something evolution would
never select.
One way or another, all four book quest after the meaning of it all.
Feynman's three brief, crystalline 1963 public lectures look unblinkingly at
science's impact on politics and religion. Science is a special method of
finding things out, a knowledge archive, and a set of derived technologies. The
method `involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability... tightropes
of logic', and the practical trial of observation. You make a guess at how
things work, then go and see if you can knock down your guess by looking hard at
the relevant bits of the world. A guess that survives makes it into science.
So science is based on imagination, but not an artist's. You try to
`imagine something that you have never seen, that is consistent in every detail
with what has already been seen, and... different from what has been thought
of.' But your guess must be definite, not vague or slippery.
Where does that leave religious and other non-scientific intuitions?
Feynman is generous: just because a claim `cannot be subjected to the test of
observation, this does not mean that it is dead, or wrong, or stupid.' Some such
claims, he agrees, `are, in fact, in many ways the most important': ethical
dictums, say. Actually, in the last three decades, evolutionary psychology has
probed deep into the biological sources of ethics, but Feynman's modesty is
refreshing.
Michael Behe is a Roman Catholic associate professor of biochemistry who
became a US media celebrity a couple of years ago when his ingenious assault on
Darwinism first appeared. Now it's out in paperback, we can compare his curious
claims with rejoinders from defenders of orthodoxy. He was lambasted by witty
experts such as H. Allen Orr, Russell F. Doolittle and Jerry A. Coyne, finding
support in others such as James Shapiro (all of whom may be sampled on the
web-site http://www-polisci.mit.edu/bostonreview/evolution.html).
Behe is a deft, entertaining writer. His relentless attack on Darwinism
stems from his claim that certain systems at the sub-cellular level are
`irreducibly complex', so that their development cannot be explained by
evolution. The way blood clots to close an injury requires a vast cascade of
enzymes. None can be left out of the feedback loops but each is worthless by
itself. Reaction paths where you need chemicals A, B, C and D can lead, in the
Darwinist story, to an organism evolving a way of making spare D from C if the
supply of D runs out. Simple, Behe notes scathingly: `after all, they're right
next to each other in the alphabet'. Real chemistry is not so convenient: it's
harder to credit that `carboxyaminoimidazole ribotide was sitting around waiting
to be converted to 5-aminoimidazole-4-(N-succinylocarboxamide) ribotide'.
Behe asserts that intelligent design is the sole plausible account for
such living structures. My own mind closes down with a palpable bang as I reach
these assertions, and I feel a powerful urge to cast the book against the wall.
But that is no rebuttal to his strongly-presented case. I am not persuaded--in
some places because his argument is flawed, as Orr and Coyne show, in others
because it is surely premature--but I do think it deserves a hearing. Who knows,
Earth life might have been designed by aliens (as Nobelist Francis Crick
suggested).
Ted Steele's heresy is not quite on that scale, but it got him drummed
out of the UK twenty years ago, and almost out of science. Today he's associate
professor of biology in Wollongong, where he and colleagues try to prove that
Darwin's ideological rival Lamarck was also right. Lamarck argued for the direct
transmission to offspring of physical changes acquired during a parent's life
(as did Darwin's own early theory of `gemmules'). Mendelian and DNA genetics
show that life (mostly) doesn't work that way. Germ cells mutate, grow slightly
variant offspring, and natural selection sieves the contenders. Somatic or body
cells from the parents don't get a look-in.
Steele and others reveal that probably isn't true of some immune system
cells. His important book makes shockingly heavy work of explaining this,
loading the poor reader with heaps of detail shuffled out of logical order.
Oddly, arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins gave a fine precis back in 1982, in The
Extended Phenotype, but is treated with outraged indignation by Steele. If
you wish to learn about somatic hypermutation, the few paragraphs in Behe or
Dawkins make far more sense than the clotted garble in this latest volume from
an otherwise notable series edited by Paul Davies. (Revealingly, perhaps, Davies
declined to write an introduction to Steele's volume.)
Steele's trek has been arduous, made painful by stick-in-the-muds, but
his stronger claims still elude replication. It's hard to see how the limited
immune retrogenes and `mutatorsomes' he describes could have genuinely
Lamarckian effects--imprinting the gains of a short giraffe's straining neck on
the genome of its offspring, say.
The Jenkinses approach biology in a more user-friendly fashion, borrowing
the much-loved characters and technobabble of the TV series Star Trek as
a framework for their informed stroll through real science. Mostly they deploy
the right stuff as a counter to the ignorant blather of the box, but
affectionately. In an era when people prefer fantasy to hard thinking, their
charming book might help science live long and prosper.
Consilience:
the Unity of Knowledge
By Edward O. Wilson, Little, Brown, 374pp
Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the
Appetite for Wonder
By Richard Dawkins, Allen Lane, 337pp
Darwinism Today chapbooks
By sundry authors, Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
50-70pp
The Enlightenment, that wonderfully hopeful,
doomed European age of critical and encyclopaedic reason, perished 200 years ago
with the French Revolution and the rise of egocentric Romanticism. Our own
century of science, for good and ill, has been a sardonic re-run of the first
Enlightenment. Impressive scholars like Richard Dawkins and Edward Wilson now
wish to prevent its second fall, arguing with a certain desperation that we
still might get it right this time around.
Wilson is a world authority on insects, and more controversially the
founder of sociobiology, the Darwinian doctrine that genes, bodies, minds and
cultures evolve together. Dawkins is the superb explainer of science who coined
that celebrated and much misunderstood term, `the selfish gene'--and another
important concept, the `meme'. That's his proposed unit of culture which
propagates from brain to brain like a virus or indeed a useful computer program.
The allure and embattled significance of this renewed Enlightenment seems
pitched against two foes, themselves enemies: a redemptive environmental holism
with roots in sublime mystery, and the ruinous cupidity which gladly rapes the
planet's future in the name of no creed beyond the short-term bottom line.
Wilson is an ardent reductionist--that is, he holds that our explanations
of nature and humanity will be reduced ultimately to the austere laws of physics
and mathematics. He deplores the woolly and ill-informed thinking of New Agers,
but is (no doubt to their astonishment) a prophet of `biophilia', reverence for
global biological diversity. And Dawkins, for all his steely atheism and even
more devoted reductionism, urges union between science's relentless curiosity
and the expressive, searing power of the arts. This hoped-for synthesis is aptly
caught in Wilson's term `consilience'--the unity of knowledge, a conjectured
coherence in diverse realms of understanding, especially a deep consistency
between testable sciences and artistic domains of feeling.
The first Enlightenment considered the mind an open slate made afresh
with each generation, so humankind might be perfected by purified thought. It
failed because its dream of clarified reason ran into the wilful passions of
stubborn humans. It's even arguable, as Wilson admits, that it had a
`dark-angelic flaw', its noble idealism leading directly to this century's
totalitarian nightmares. The Darwinian variant is more open-eyed. Wilson and colleagues claim we are shaped by `epigenetic
rules', which are our standard brain pathways and regularities in mental
development, the tool-kit `by which the individual mind assembles itself'. But
the linkage between genes and culture is flexible. We weave our own patterns,
but on a loom built by evolution: in a word, human nature.
That loom endures because its cloth is suited to the world we live in.
Wilson's deepest assumption, unprovable and perhaps absurdly ambitious, is that
our brains and bodies echo fundamental motifs in the cosmos. The world is always
already unified, even if we are not smart or sensitive enough to learn its
grammar. So Wilson is an admitted reductionist. `I plead guilty, guilty, guilty.
Now let us move on...' While his grasp of theory in the humanities is insecure,
out of date, even naive, I find that ambition admirable.
Dawkins, too, is besotted by diverse yet unifiable knowledge and its
continuing promise. The tragedy of our time is the shattering of that
Enlightenment link between science, law and poetry. When Newton teased white
light into a spectrum by passing it through a prism, the poet John Keats
deplored the `unweaving' of the rainbow. For Keats, it reduced the rainbow's
glory to nothing more than a lab experiment. Yet that assessment is itself a
vulgar and unimaginative error.
In his customary clear and, yes, poetic voice, Dawkins leads us into a
world hugely grander than anything known to the Romantics--much of it opened to
us in this splendid unweaving. The Enlightenment impulse does not break down and
unweave in drunken revelry, for the sake of harm. It re-weaves, builds up
secular cathedrals--the entire vast, ancient cosmos itself--for the admiration
of our hearts and minds. Its goal is consilience. Its enemy is not appropriate
scrutiny, but gullible or arrogant mystification. While Dawkins is scathing
about the usual suspects--astrology, the New Age, superstition--more valuable in
both Dawkins and Wilson is their humane search for communal cooperation in a
world built from the blind scurrying of selfish genes.
Is the tide turning back toward a recovered Enlightenment? One indication
that it is, at least among the hungrily reading public, is a series of small
stocking-stuffers based on talks given for the Darwin@LSE program at the London
School of Economics. These briskly apply evolutionary theory to diverse and
often hair-raisingly controversial topics. Still, compare these gift-sized
volumes with another new marketing venture, individual books from the Bible
(prefaced by such unlikely explicators as literary bad boy Will Self) selling
for a third the price. Those ancient prophets still hold the pulling power.
Kingsley Browne, in Divided Labours, suggests that, as a
gene-shaped group, women really do, after all, have different work skills and
priorities from those of men. Colin Tudge's Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers
whips through the traumatic founding of agriculture. Shaping Life, by
John Maynard Smith, shows that simple chemical diffusion guides genes in
building our bodies. In The Truth About Cinderella, Martin Daly and Margo
Wilson summarise their scary case, based on evidence and theory, for a special
Darwinian bond between parents and their genetic children (you're about 100
times as likely to be abused or killed by a step-parent). These claims, and the
theories behind them, remain immensely contentious. The old Enlightenment
philosophers would have been aghast, but might have knuckled down to the hard
task of adjudicating the evidence. Perhaps we shall have the courage to do the
same.