The Lying Stones of Marrakech (47 page)

Hardly anything in intellectual life can be more salutatory than the separation of fashion from fact. Always suspect fashion (especially when the moment's custom matches your personal predilection); always cherish fact (while remembering that an apparent jewel of pure and objective information may only record the biased vision of transient fashion). I have discussed two subjects that couldn't be “hotter,” but cannot be adequately understood because a veil of genetic fashion now conceals the richness of full explanation by relegating a preeminent environmental theme to invisibility. Thus, we worry whether the first cloned sheep represents a genuine individual at all, while we forget that we have never doubted the distinct personhood guaranteed by differences in nurture to clones far more similar by nature than Dolly and her mother—identical twins. And we try to explain the strong effects of birth order solely by invoking a Darwinian analogy between family status and ecological niche, while forgetting that these systematic effects cannot arise from genetic differences, and can therefore only demonstrate the predictable power of nurture. Sorry, Louis. You lost your head to the power of family environments upon head children. And hello, Dolly. May we forever regulate your mode of manufacture, at least for humans. But may genetic custom never stale the infinite variety guaranteed by a lifetime of nurture in the intricate complexity of our natural world—this vale of tears, joy, and endless wonder.

16
This essay, obviously, represents my reaction to the worldwide storm of news and ethical introspection launched by the public report of Dolly, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, in early 1997. In collecting several years of essays together to make each of these books, I usually deep-six the rare articles keyed to immediate news items of “current events”—for the obvious reason of their transiency under the newsman's adage that “yesterday's paper wraps today's garbage.” But in rereading this essay, I decided that it merited reprinting on two counts: first, I don't think that its relevance has at all faded (while Dolly herself also persists firmly in public memory); second, I fancy that I found something general and original to say by linking Dolly to Sulloway's book, and by relating both disparate events to a common theme that had puzzled me enormously by being so blessedly obvious, yet so totally unreported in both the serious and popular press. As King Lear discovered to his sorrow, the absence of an expected statement can often be far more meaningful than an anticipated and active pronouncement. Since these essays experience a three-month “lead time” between composition and original publication, I must always treat current events in a more general context potentially meriting republication down the line—for ordinary fast-breaking news can only become rock-hard stale in those interminable ninety days.

17
Science moves fast, especially when spurred by immense public interest and pecuniary possibilities. These difficulties have been much mitigated,' if not entirely overcome, in the three years between my original writing and this republication. Cloning from adult cells has not become, by any means, routine, but undoubted clones have been produced from adult cells in several mammalian species. Moreover, initial doubts about Dolly herself (mentioned in this essay) have largely been allayed, and her status as a clone from an adult cell now seems secure.

18
My deep puzzlement over public surprise at this obvious point, and at the failure of media to grasp and highlight the argument immediately, has only grown since I wrote this essay. (I believe that I was the first to stress or even to mention—in commentary to journalists before I published this article—the clonal nature of identical twins as an ancient and conclusive disproof of the major ethical fears that Dolly had so copiously inspired. No argument of such a basic and noncryptic nature should ever be first presented by a magazine essayist with a lead time of several months, rather than the next day by a journalist, or the next minute in cyberspace.) I can only conclude that public misunderstanding of environmental impact upon human personalities, emotions, and distinctivenesses runs much deeper than even I had realized, and that barriers to recognition of this self-evident truth stand even higher than I had suspected in the light of current fashions for genetic explanations.

L
ONG, STAGNANT, AND COSTLY WARS TEND TO BEGIN
in idealistic fervor and end in cynical misery. Our own Civil War inflicted a horrendous toll of death and seared our national consciousness with a brand that has only become deeper with time. In 1862, the Union Army rejoiced in singing the year's most popular ditty:

Yes we'll rally round the flag, boys, we'll rally once again
Shouting the battle cry of Freedom
,
We will rally from the hillside, we'll gather from the plain
,
Shouting the battle cry of Freedom …
So we're springing to the call from the East and from the West
And we'll hurl the rebel crew from the land we love the best
.

By 1864, Walter Kittredge's “Tenting on the Old Camp Ground” had become the favorite song of both sides. The chorus, with its haunting (if naive) melody, summarizes the common trajectory:

Many are the hearts that are weary tonight,
Wishing for the war to cease;
Many are the hearts looking for the right
To see the dawn of peace
.

But nothing can quite match the horrors of World War I, the conflict that the French still call
la grande guerre
(the Great War) and that we labeled “the war to end all wars.” America entered late and suffered relatively few casualties as a consequence—so we rarely appreciate the extent of carnage among soldiers or the near certainty of death or serious maiming along lines of stagnant trenches, where men fought back and forth month after month to take, and then lose again, a few shifting feet of territory. I feel chills up and down my spine whenever I look at the “honor roll” posted on the village green or main square of any small town in England or France. Above all else, I note the much longer lists for 1914–18 (often marking the near extermination of a generation of males) than for 1941–45. Rupert Brooke could write his famous poems of resignation and patriotism because he died in 1915, during the initial blush of enthusiasm:

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed
.

An actual gas attack in World War I
.

His fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon, who survived and became a pacifist (a condition first attributed to shell shock and leading to his temporary confinement in a sanatorium), caught the drift of later realism:

And when the war is done and youth stone dead
I'll toddle safely home and die
—
in bed
.

Sassoon met Wilfred Owen, the third member of this famous trio of British war poets, in the sanatorium. But Owen went back to the front, where he fell exactly one week before Armistice Day. Sassoon published his friend's single, slim volume of posthumous poetry, containing the most famous and bitter lines of all:

What passing-bells for these who died as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons
.

Among the horrors of World War I, we remember not only the carnage caused by conventional tactics of trench warfare with bombs and bullets but also the first effective and large-scale use of newfangled chemical and biological weapons—beginning with a German chlorine gas attack along four miles of the French line at Ypres on April 22, 1915, and ending with 100,000 tons of various chemical agents used by both sides. The Geneva Protocol, signed in 1925 by most major nations (but not by the United States until much later), banned both chemical and biological weapons—a prohibition followed by all sides in World War II, even amid some of the grimmest deeds in all human history, including, and let us never forget, the most evil acts ever committed with poisonous gases in executing the “final solution” of the Holocaust in Nazi concentration camps. (A few violations have occurred in local wars: by the Italian army in Ethiopia in 1935–36, for example, and in recent fighting in Iran and Iraq.) The Geneva Protocol prohibited “the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices.”

A recent contribution to
Nature
(June 25, 1998), the leading British professional journal of science, recalled this episode of twentieth-century history in a remarkable letter entitled “Deadly relic of the Great War.” The opening paragraph reads:

The curator of a police museum in Trondheim, Norway, recently discovered in his archive collection a glass bottle containing two irregularly shaped sugar lumps. A small hole had been bored into each of these lumps and a glass capillary tube, sealed at its tip, was embedded into one of the lumps. A note attached to the exhibit translated as follows: “A piece of sugar containing anthrax bacilli, found in the luggage of Baron Otto Karl von Rosen, when he was apprehended in Karasjok in January 1917, suspected of espionage and sabotage.”

Modern science to the rescue, even in pursuit of a mad scheme that came to naught in a marginal and forgotten outpost of a great war—the very definition of historical trivia, however intriguing, in the midst of great pith and moment. The authors of the letter removed the capillary tube and dumped the contents (“a brown fluid”) onto a petri dish. Two columns of conventional scientific prose then detailed the procedures followed, with all the usual rigor of long chemical names and precise amounts: “After incubation, 200μ1 of these cultures were spread on 7% of horse-blood agar and L-agar medium (identical to L-broth but solidified by the addition of 2% Difco Bacto agar).” The clear results may be stated more succinctly, as the authors both grew some anthrax bacilli in their cultures and then confirmed the presence of DNA from the same organism by PCR (polymerase chain reaction for amplifying small amounts of DNA to levels that can be analyzed). They write: “We therefore confirmed the presence of
B. anthracis
[scientific name of the anthrax bacillus] in the specimen by both culture and PCR. It proved possible to revive a few surviving organisms from the brink of extinction after they had been stored, without any special precautions, for 80 years.”

But what was the good baron, an aristocrat of German, Swedish, and Finnish extraction, doing in this forsaken area of northeastern Norway in the middle of winter? Clearly up to no good, but to what form of no good? The authors continue:

When the Sheriff of Kautokeino, who was present at the group's arrest, derisively suggested that he should prepare soup from the contents of the tin cans labeled “Svea kott” (Swedish meat), the baron felt obliged to admit that each can actually contained between 2 and 4 kilograms of dynamite.

The baron's luggage also yielded some bottles of curare, various microbial cultures, and nineteen sugar cubes, each containing anthrax. The two cubes in Trondheim are, apparently, the only survivors of this old incident. The baron claimed that he was only an honorable activist for Finnish independence, out to destroy supply lines to Russian-controlled areas. (Finland had been under loose control of the Russian czar and did win independence after the Bolshevik revolution.) Most historians suspect that he had traveled to Norway at the behest, and in the employ, of the Germans, who had authorized a program for infecting horses and reindeer with anthrax to disrupt the transport of British arms (on sleds pulled by these animals) through northern Norway.

The baron, expelled after a few weeks in custody, never carried out his harebrained scheme. The authors of the
Nature
letter, Caroline Redmond, Martin J. Pearce, Richard J. Manchee, and Bjorn P. Berdal, have inferred his intent:

The grinding of the sugar and its glass insert between the molar teeth of horses would probably result in a lethal infection as the anthrax spores entered the body, eventually facilitated through the small lesions produced in the wall of the alimentary tract by the broken glass. It is not known whether reindeer eat sugar lumps but presumably the baron never had the chance to carry out this piece of research.

As anthrax cannot be transmitted directly from animal to animal, the scheme probably would not have worked without a large supply of sugar cubes and very sweet teeth in the intended victims. But the authors do cite a potential danger to other participants: “However, if the meat from a dying animal had been consumed without adequate cooking, it is likely that human fatalities from gastrointestinal anthrax would have followed.” The authors end their letter with a frank admission:

This small but relatively important episode in the history of biological warfare is one of the few instances where there is confirmation of the intent to use a lethal microorganism as a weapon, albeit 80 years after the event. It did not, however, make any significant difference to the course of the Great War.