Bunch of Amateurs (16 page)

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 Meanwhile, Cornell has withdrawn its forces and retreated into determined, if not pathetic, defense: “We found one bird,” said Fitz grimly, and he hasn’t really spoken about it since.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 would 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.’ ”

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:

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 science 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.”

It’s not a brave new world that Dyson envisions, but rather the same old mundane one, just gussied up with the middlebrow creations of housewives and teens. And maybe that’s where we’re headed, but make no mistake about how we will get there. Dyson and his co-enthusiasts want to put the designer’s toolbox of life itself into the hands of the amateur. Presumably, an intelligent designer.