THE BEST AUSTRALIAN SCIENCE WRITING 2013

JANE MCCREDIE is an award-winning science journalist, former science publisher and the author of a book on the science of sex and gender, Making Girls and Boys: Inside the science of sex. She is currently executive director of the NSW Writers’ Centre and writes a weekly blog on medicine for the Medical Journal of Australia’s electronic sister publication, mjainsight.com.au. She has a Masters in psychological studies from the University of Melbourne.

NATASHA MITCHELL is a multi-award-winning science journalist. She hosts the national morning program Life Matters on ABC Radio National and was presenter of the popular science, psychology and culture radio show All in the Mind (2002–2012). She has served on the board and as Vice President of the World Federation of Science Journalists. Natasha was a recipient of the overall Grand Prize and four Gold World Medals at the New York Festivals for radio, and of the MIT Knight Journalism Fellowship. She has an engineering degree and a postgraduate diploma in science communication.

With love and thanks to

My parents, Yvonne and David, who told me stories and encouraged me to ask questions. (JM)

My mother, Charmian, whose love of nature and learning opened my eyes wide early. And to the wolfhound, a scientist at heart (if her sample size of tree trunks is any measure). (NM)

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© University of New South Wales Press Ltd 2013

First published 2013

This book is copyright. While copyright of the work as a whole is vested in University of New South Wales Press Ltd, copyright of individual chapters is retained by the chapter authors. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Title: The Best Australian Science Writing 2013/edited by Jane McCredie and Natasha Mitchell.

ISBN: 9781742233857 (paperback)

9781742241654 (ePub/Kindle)

9781742246666 (ePDF)

Subjects: Technical writing – Australia.

Communication in science – Australia.

Science in literature.

Other Authors/Contributors: McCredie, Jane, editor.

Mitchell, Natasha, editor.

Dewey Number: 808.0665

Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The publisher welcomes information in this regard.

Contents

Contributors

Foreword: Not a Nobel laureate

Tim Minchin

Introduction: An intimate dissection

Natasha Mitchell and Jane McCredie

The weather of who we are

Mark Tredinnick

It’s time to become gonads

Becky Crew

The last laughing death

Jo Chandler

The perils of evolution

Janine Burke

Darwin’s modest discovery

Damon Young

Earthmasters: Playing God with the climate

Clive Hamilton

Science is more than freaks and circuses

Paul Livingston

Animals on drugs

Rhianna Boyle

Dreamtime cave

Elizabeth Finkel

Heart dissection

Ian Gibbins

Reaching one thousand

Rachel Robertson

Higgs boson

Michael Lucy

Here come the übernerds: Planets, Pluto and Prague

Fred Watson

Many-worlds quantum mechanics vs earth-based grease monkeys

gareth roi jones

The vagina dialogues

Cordelia Fine

Big Data can tell by your tweets if you’re a psychopath: That’s only the beginning …

Kirsten Drysdale

With body in mind (after Vesalius)

Ian Gibbins

How a donor is done

Kellee Slater

Nest: The art of birds

Janine Burke

My father’s body

Francesca Rendle-Short

Sentinel chickens

Peter Doherty

The science of shark fishing

Ian Gibbins

On flatulence

Nicholas Haslam

Radioactive cigarettes: X-ray inhale

Karl Kruszelnicki

Martyrs to Gondwanaland: The cost of scientific exploration

Chris Turney

Mr Jevons and his paradox

Antony Funnell

Alimentary thinking

Emma Young

The carnivore’s (ongoing) dilemma

Åsa Wahlquist

Beyond the shock machine

Gina Perry

Australia’s endangered future

Tim Flannery

Alive as a dodo

Nicky Phillips

Probably a sacrifice

Ian Gibbins

Fire on the mountain: A walk on Mt Stromlo

Andrew Croome

Advisory panel

Acknowledgments

The Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing

Contributors

RHIANNA BOYLE has degrees in creative writing and zoology. She is currently a research assistant at the Centre for Aquatic Pollution Identification and Management at the University of Melbourne. She has written the nature column for The Lifted Brow since 2011.

JANINE BURKE is the author of 18 books, as well as numerous essays, short stories and reviews. She has written biographies of Albert Tucker, Sunday Reed and Joy Hester, as well as a book on Sigmund Freud’s art collection. She won the 1987 Victorian Premier’s award for fiction and she has been shortlisted for fiction and non-fiction awards including the Miles Franklin and The Age Book of the Year. From 2008 to 2012, Dr Burke was a research fellow at Monash University, and she is currently an adjunct lecturer at Monash University.

JO CHANDLER is a Walkley Award-winning journalist and writer. After a long career in daily newspapers (The Age), as a freelance journalist she now focuses on in-depth reports exploring science and medicine, climate change, human rights, women’s issues and development. An extract of her book Feeling the Heat – dispatches from the climate ‘front line’ from Antarctica to the tropics – earned her the 2012 Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing. She is an honorary fellow with the Alfred Deakin Research Institute.

BECKY CREW is an award-winning science blogger and freelance writer based in Sydney. She is the author of Zombie Tits, Astronaut Fish and Other Weird Animals, the former online editor of COSMOS magazine and a contributing editor for ScienceAlert. Her work has been published in ABC Science Online, Salon Magazine, The Huffington Post, and Nature blogs, and her blog, Running Ponies, is published by the Scientific American Blog Network.

ANDREW CROOME is a writer living in Canberra. His first work of fiction, Document Z, won the 2008 The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award. His recently published second novel, Midnight Empire, focuses on drone warfare and poker. In 2010 Andrew was named a Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelist of the Year. His writing has appeared in various publications, including The Age and The Australian. In 2012, he was resident at Mt Stromlo as part of the National Year of Reading.

PETER DOHERTY scored a Nobel Prize for his work on immunity and, while continuing with biomedical research, found a further focus communicating the excitement and elegance of science to those who normally have other things on their mind. That has led to three ‘trade’ books (including The Beginner’s Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize and Sentinel Chickens) with a fourth, on pandemic infections, due to be published in 2013. His next book will discuss how normal human beings can access and evaluate what’s happening in science.

KIRSTEN DRYSDALE is a print and television journalist based in Sydney, a long way from her rural upbringing on a small cattle farm in North Queensland. She has written for The Global Mail, Crikey and The Vine, and reported for ABC TV’s alternative current affairs program Hungry Beast and consumer affairs program The Checkout.

CORDELIA FINE is an academic psychologist and writer. She is an ARC Future Fellow in Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne and associate professor at the Centre for Ethical Leadership at the Melbourne Business School. She is the author of Delusions of gender: The real science behind sex differences and A mind of its own: How your brain distorts and deceives. <www.cordeliafine.com>

ELIZABETH FINKEL, after spending nearly a decade as a laboratory researcher, morphed into a science writer for scientific and lay audiences. She has served as a correspondent for the American magazine Science and an associate editor for COSMOS magazine, a popular science magazine that she cofounded. In January 2013 she was appointed COSMOS editor in chief. She has written two books, Stem Cells: Controversy at the frontiers of science and The Genome Generation.

TIM FLANNERY has published over 130 peer-reviewed scientific papers and has named 25 living and 50 fossil mammal species. His 32 books include The Future Eaters and The Weather Makers, which has been translated into over 20 languages and won the NSW Premier’s Book of the Year award. Tim has made numerous documentaries and regularly writes for the New York Review of Books. In 2007 he was named Australian of the Year. He is a founding member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, was cofounder and chair of the Copenhagen Climate Council, and in 2011 became Australia’s first Chief Climate Commissioner.

ANTONY FUNNELL is a Walkley Award-winning journalist and broadcaster. As the presenter of Future Tense on ABC Radio National, he analyses the social, cultural and economic faultlines arising from rapid transformation. He is also the author of his mother’s favourite book of all time The Future and Related Nonsense. Over the past two decades, Antony has worked for many of Australia’s leading news and current affairs programs, including AM, PM, Background Briefing and 7.30 Report.

IAN GIBBINS is a neuroscientist and Professor of Anatomy at Flinders University. He has over 100 scientific publications on the microscopic structure and function of nerves communicating between the spinal cord and the internal organs. Ian’s poetry has been widely published, including in The Best Australian Poems 2008 and has been shortlisted in national poetry competitions. His first full collection Urban Biology was published in 2012 with an accompanying CD of his electronic music.

CLIVE HAMILTON is Professor of Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra. For 14 years, until 2008, he was executive director of the Australia Institute, a think tank he founded. He has held various visiting academic positions, including at Yale University and the University of Oxford. His books include Growth Fetish, The Freedom Paradox: Towards a post-secular ethics, Requiem for a Species: Why we resist the truth about climate change and, most recently, Earthmasters: Playing God with the climate.

NICHOLAS HASLAM is Professor of Psychology at the University of Melbourne. A social psychologist, Nick has written widely on relationships, group processes and psychiatric classification. His books include Psychology in the Bathroom and Introduction to Personality and Intelligence. His current fascination is the psychology of the nose.

GARETH ROI JONES is a member of Friendly Street Poets in Adelaide. In 2012 he was selected as one of three emerging poets as part of New Poets 17. He loves both science and poetry, so combining them is a great joy. A highlight was having the poem that appears in this anthology chosen for RiAus’ Poem of the Month and being displayed on the LED thread which wraps around the Royal Institution of Australia’s Adelaide headquarters.

KARL KRUSZELNICKI has 27 years of education (primary school to university). His degrees in physics and mathematics, biomedical engineering, medicine and surgery provide a solid scientific basis to understanding what is contained in the thousands of pieces of scientific literature that he reads each year. He currently works as an author, a fellow at the University of Sydney, and science reporter at the ABC (ten radio shows, one TV spot, and the weekly Great Moments in Science segment). He has spent two years travelling through 15 of the 17 Australian deserts.

PAUL LIVINGSTON is the author of six books, nine radio plays, and was a cowriter on Happy Feet Two. He has received four AWGIE awards for television comedy writing. His comic alter ego Flacco has toured extensively in Australia and internationally and his television credits include The Big Gig, DAAS Kapital, Good News Week and The Sideshow. Paul was the joint winner of the 1996 Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award for outstanding achievement in the performing arts in Australia.

MICHAEL LUCY is the deputy editor of The Monthly. He studied physics at the University of Melbourne.

TIM MINCHIN is an Australian comedian, composer-lyricist, pianist, vocalist, actor and writer. ‘Audacious’, ‘jaw-dropping’, ‘a genius’, ‘a devil’, ‘an angel’, ‘a rock-star’ and ‘unashamedly polysyllabic’ are just some of the words used to describe his sell-out shows worldwide. We have no idea how to explain his ridicu-lously exciting career in just 75 words. So: <www.timminchin.com>

GINA PERRY trained first as a psychologist, later as a professional writer. She is the author of Behind the Shock Machine: the untold story of the notorious Milgram psychology experiments. Her feature articles, columns, essays and short fiction have been published in newspapers and literary magazines around Australia. Her co-production of the ABC Radio National documentary about the obedience experiments, Beyond the Shock Machine, won the Silver World Medal for a history documentary in the 2009 New York Festivals for radio. <www.gina-perry.com>

NICKY PHILLIPS is the science reporter at the Sydney Morning Herald. As a specialist science journalist she reports on everything from climate change and conservation to evolution and astronomy. She writes the weekly True, False or Utterly Absurd column for the Herald’s health and science liftout. Nicky is a former reporter/producer with ABC Radio National’s Science Show and Health Report. She has also produced packages for the BBC World Service. Nicky has a bachelor of science.

FRANCESCA RENDLE-SHORT is a novelist and essayist. Her most recent book Bite Your Tongue was shortlisted for the 2012 Colin Roderick Literary Award. She is the author of Imago and Big Sister, and has also published short fictions, photo-essays, exhibition text, poetry, and scholarly work. She is the recipient of the 2013 International Writers’ Fellowship to Iowa, has a doctorate in creative arts, and is an associate professor at RMIT University. <www.francescarendleshort.com>

RACHEL ROBERTSON is the author of Reaching One Thousand: A story of love, motherhood and autism and a lecturer in professional writing and publishing at Curtin University. Her work has been published in anthologies and journals such as The Best Australian Essays, Griffith Review, Westerly, Island and the Australian Book Review. <www.rachelrobertson.net.au>

KELLEE SLATER is a general surgeon specialising in surgery for diseases of the liver, bile ducts and pancreas. She is a member of the liver transplant team at Princess Alexandra Hospital and has a private practice at Greenslopes Private Hospital. Kellee did her general surgery training in Queensland, then travelled to Denver in the United States to learn liver transplantation. She is the author of How to Do a Liver Transplant: Stories from my surgical life. Kellee is a married to Andrew and is the proud mother of four.

MARK TREDINNICK is a poet, nature writer, and essayist. He is the author of Australia’s Wild Weather, The Blue Plateau, Fire Diary and nine other books. He was the winner of the 2011 Montreal Poetry Prize and the 2012 Cardiff Poetry Prize. Mark is a member of the Kangaloon Group of Concerned Artists and Scholars.

CHRIS TURNEY is an Australian and British earth scientist. He is Professor of Climate Change and an ARC Laureate Fellow at the University of New South Wales. Chris is the author of 1912: The year the world discovered Antarctica; Ice, Mud and Blood: Lessons from climates past and Bones, Rocks and Stars: The science of when things happened, as well as numerous scientific papers and magazine articles. In 2007 he was awarded the Sir Nicholas Shackleton Medal for outstanding young Quaternary scientist, and in 2009 he received the Geological Society of London’s Bigsby Medal for services to geology. <www.christurney.com>

ÅSA WAHLQUIST has been a rural journalist since 1984. She has worked in ABC Radio and ABC TV, at the Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian. She is currently a freelance journalist. She has won a dozen awards, including a Walkley in 1996, the Australian Government Peter Hunt Eureka Prize for Environmental Journalism in 2005, and the European Community Journalist Award in 1993. Åsa is the author of Thirsty Country, a book about Australia’s water crisis.

FRED WATSON has been Astronomer in Charge of the Australian Astronomical Observatory since 1995, but is best known for his radio and TV broadcasts, books, and other outreach programs. He is also a musician, with a science-themed CD and an award-winning symphony libretto to his name. Fred was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2010. He has an asteroid named after him (5691 Fredwatson), but says that if it hits the Earth it won’t be his fault.

DAMON YOUNG is a philosopher and writer. Damon is the author of Philosophy in the Garden and Distraction, both published locally and abroad. He has written for The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, the ABC and the BBC, and is a regular radio guest. Damon has also published poetry and short fiction. He is an honorary fellow in philosophy at the University of Melbourne.

EMMA YOUNG is an award-winning health and science journalist. She is a contributing editor at COSMOS magazine, and a regular contributor to New Scientist, and the author of the STORM series of science-based children’s action/adventure novels.

Foreword:

Not a Nobel laureate

Tim Minchin

The previous two collections in this excellent series have contained forewords written by Nobel laureates, so in pursuit of balance – I assume – this year’s foreword is being written by someone who is quite spectacularly not one. Therefore, rather than say something knowledgeable or insightful, I’ll begin with the dental health of the people of Oregon, USA.

I’ve only been to Portland once, but geez it’s a great city – its population a paragon of liberalism and artiness, sporting more tattoos than you could point a regretful laser at, and boasting perhaps a higher collective dye-to-hair ratio than anywhere on earth. Great music, great art, wonderful coffee … It’s my kind of town. Except, the residents recently voted – for the fourth time since the 1950s – against adding fluoride to the water supply. It’s as if a mermaid on one’s lower back is an impediment to sensible interpretation of data, or perhaps unkempt pink hair acts as a sort of dream-catcher for conspiracy theories.

This apparent inverse correlation between artistic interest and scientific literacy seems to play out all over the world. Go to Byron Bay in New South Wales, and you’ll find more painters and musos per capita than anywhere in the country, and – inevitably – a parallel glut of aura-readers, homeopaths and anti-vaccination campaigners. There’s clearly no such thing as a free lunch: you wanna listen to good blues, you have to have your palm read (and maybe get measles in the process).

As an artist who gets aroused by statistics (among other things), I find this deeply troubling. But I reckon (and yes, I only reckon: one of many advantages of being a not-Nobel-laureate is that I may hypothesise with relative impunity) that the apparent relationship between artiness and anti-science is a result of people acting out cultural expectations and subscribing to popular myths, rather than a genuine division of personality type or intellect. I wonder if artists identify themselves as spiritual (whatever that means) and reject materialism for the same reason that they might wear a beret or take up smoking: it’s just adherence to a perceived stereotype, rather than some fundamental feature of the creative brain.

Science is a masculine trait and art a feminine trait; people are either ‘right-brained’ or ‘left-brained’ thinkers; a materialist worldview is an impediment to the imagination; you need to believe in magic to write magically – all these tropes are familiar to us, and all of them myths. Or if they’re not entirely myths, they are nevertheless dull and unproductive categorisations.

At the heart of some artists’ anti-scientific worldview is the suspicion that science is unromantic. The beauty of the human form is best revealed with charcoal, not with a scalpel. Love should be expressed in a sonnet, not measured with an fMRI. A sunset may be photographed or painted or reflected in song, but getting excited by its rate of fusion or the fact that it represents pretty much all the mass in the solar system is seen as somehow … unpoetic.

And further into it: the fruit of the tree of knowledge will rob you of paradise. Facts are the opposite of inspiration. Scientists are cold, boring, and amoral. If you reject the spiritual you will never access the sublime.

Of course, I’m building a straw-man only to burn the bastard.

Science is not a bunch of facts. Scientists are not people who are trying to be prescriptive or authoritative. Science is simply the word we use to describe a method of organising our insatiable curiosity. It’s just easier, at a dinner party, to say ‘science’ than to say ‘the incremental acquisition of understanding through observation, humbled by an acute awareness of our tendency toward bias’.

Douglas Adams said, ‘I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.’

Science is not the opposite of art (nor the opposite of spirituality – whatever that is), and you don’t have to deny scientific knowledge in order to make beautiful things. On the contrary.

Great science writing is the art of communicating that ‘awe of understanding’, so that we readers can revel in the beauty of a deeper knowledge of our world.

This volume is a small, exciting, and illuminating reminder that art and science feed off each other, need each other, are each other. There is no conflict between art and science: there is only the wide-eyed pursuit of cool ideas.

Introduction:

An intimate dissection

Natasha Mitchell and Jane McCredie

‘How about chooks, ciggies, then farts?’

‘Yes, that works!’

If you’d been a fly[*] on the wall during the many sessions we spent compiling this anthology, you might have mistaken it for a comedy script in the making. Happily, there was plenty of hilarity alongside all the hard head work.

The curious thing about choosing the best science writing is that the process itself is fairly unscientific. There are no formulas you can apply, no clearly defined exclusion criteria, no p values or confidence intervals.

In the end it comes down to gut feeling (though, as one of the pieces in this book explains, it seems we have a second brain in our gut, so maybe that’s not as random as it sounds).

We suspected early on that we could, if we weren’t careful, end up with a collection that read like a vaudevillian freak show. A cast of oddball animals, kooky sex (often involving oddball animals), and gee-whiz stories about scientific pursuit and discovery.

The rich ecology of science writing contains all that fun stuff, but much more besides. In the spirit of open enquiry – a hallmark of science itself – we were keen to cast a wider net. Much wider.

We wanted to look beyond the places and stories most readily associated with science to connect with the role it plays in the minutiae of our lives, our most intimate selves.

We stumbled on it at the heart of a mother’s poignant account of her autistic son’s obsession with numbers, and her questions about how we define ‘normal’; in a poet’s lyrical exploration of cadaver donation, drawn from his own experiences as a professor of neuroscience and anatomy; and in a novelist’s moving tribute to her father, who paradoxically combined his career as a physician with a staunch belief in creationism.

Science isn’t just done with the contents of a test tube or down the barrel of a microscope, and it doesn’t just belong to scientists. It belongs to any of us who have ever wondered about the origins of the universe or the blood pumping through our veins. Or, in the case of science journalist and blogger Becky Crew, about the way the male blue sea anglerfish transforms itself into gonads.

This anthology celebrates enquirers of every variety – scientists who write, and writers who ‘do’ science. And it celebrates the art of language, of prose and poetry. Reading beautiful writing is one of the greatest gifts our fat set of frontal lobes has to offer us. Science writing also serves to open our eyes to the wider world – it can temper our own narcissistic tendencies by reminding us that we’re not the only weird, wonderful creatures eking out an existence in the cosmos.

A recurring theme in this book is the passion and painstaking effort that underpins scientific work. You’ll find it in Jo Chandler’s riveting mystery story of medicine and cannibalism in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, and in astronomer Fred Watson’s rollicking insider-account of Pluto’s demotion as a planet.

It’s there too in philosopher Damon Young’s piece about Charles Darwin’s shy, almost reluctant, investigation of the way life on this planet evolved. It could be argued that this is the scientific process at its best: a humble search for understanding and, importantly, a willingness to be proved wrong.

Actually, Darwin and his theories pop up a few times in this collection: you’ll read how he played a role in naughty-Catholicschoolgirl-turned-art-historian Janine Burke being expelled, and Nicholas Haslam’s account of the scientist’s 25-year struggle with debilitating intestinal turmoil. Yes, no stone has been left unturned.

Speaking of matters intestinal … never fear … farts … and, yes, ciggies and chooks all made it in here too.

The two of us come to this collaboration with many years of writing or broadcasting about science under our belts. We are fairly convinced we have the best gig going. Scientific research is as satisfying as it is challenging to report on. There’s great pleasure to be had in turning the abstract and impenetrable into the tangible, in making meaning out of jargon. As British science writer Ed Yong describes it, we get to cover the ‘wow beat’.

But here’s a big all-guns-blazing caveat to that.

As science journalists, we don’t see ourselves as cheerleaders for science. Nor are we here to solely serve as translators for the scientific establishment. Science is about robust and rigorous enquiry, and so is the best science writing.

We live in an era where the battlelines have been drawn. Scientific controversies now explode into the public arena with the intensity of an incendiary device, and scientists and some science writers can feel the need to take sides and defend their turf. One person’s scepticism has become another person’s denial, and it can be hard to have a nuanced public discussion about scientific findings, and their inevitable uncertainties, without brickbats and polemics being hurled across the trenches.

Science needs its critical, dispassionate observers as well as its defenders. There’s much to defend – strong data produced by well-designed, reproducible experiments offers us an explana-tory power like little else. It’s allowed us to make medicines, chart galaxies and banish smallpox. Without it, we risk falling prey to our own superstitions and untested anxieties.

Yet, like all human endeavours, scientific research can be flawed, subject to grandiosity, to unquestioned assumptions, to commercial pressures, or to the temptation to tweak results to achieve a desired outcome.

In this collection, Clive Hamilton investigates some of the wilder geoengineering schemes being canvassed as fixes for global warming. In the absence of international agreement over carbon emissions, why not use the mother of all nuclear explosions to shift Earth’s orbit a little further from the Sun? That should cool things down a bit.

At a less cosmic level, Gina Perry’s piece on Stanley Milgram’s notorious obedience experiments exposes the way he cut ethical corners and manipulated the outcomes of his research. Decades on, a painful legacy remains in the lives of the human subjects he and others recruited.

Nicky Phillips reports on another group of scientists who are convinced they can bring the dodo back from extinction. Why not at least try?

We need skilled writers to connect us with these developments and debates more than ever. Yet, globally, science writing is at a critical turning point, some would say a crisis point. In Australia, two major newspapers have recently laid off their most experienced science and health journalists. Broadcast science journalism isn’t a growth area either, despite a strong tradition in this country. Specialist and investigative journalism are on the wane worldwide, as the old business model for newspapers undergoes radical reinvention. The story is much the same for book publishing.

All is not lost. With change comes opportunity. That’s cultural evolution at work. Rising from the ashes will be new forms – resilient, mutant forms – that will find a home on new platforms. Already podcasts, e-readers and social media are connecting readers and audiences with new ways to share words and ideas.

Ours is a scientific age like no other. The Best Australian Science Writing 2013 is, we hope, a reminder of why readers are drawn to science stories, and why we need writers who are adept at telling them.

We hope you enjoy this collection as much as we’ve loved mucking with the genre to make it for you. Of course, most of the hard work was done by the writers themselves. Some we’ve mentioned here, but we are indebted to all twenty-nine of this year’s talented contributors for their smart, poetic words.

[*] Almost certainly drosophila!

The weather of who we are

Mark Tredinnick

Talking about the weather

Don’t start with the weather: Elmore Leonard’s first rule of writing. Which I’m breaking here, start to finish.

Everything starts with the weather, so why wouldn’t a writer? Why wouldn’t we all? And often we do: How’s the weather over there? Hot enough for you? Have you ever seen so much rain? Though these days most of us spend most of our lives inside (93 per cent, to be precise), still we live inside the weather. There’s no escaping it: it’s how the world speaks to us; it tempers and colours all our days and nights. It clothes us; it decorates and articulates the places where we live.

Start thinking about the weather and you soon find yourself in outer space: the sun’s radiation, the orbit of the earth around our star, the sun; the daily rotation of the planet; the tilt of this orb in its daily spinning; the location of our planet just near enough to, and yet far enough from, the sun to kickstart life and keep it going, to let the whole miraculous system work and keep on working within the insulation of the atmosphere.

For weather is how our planet behaves in space, and how the atmosphere curdles and gyres and rotates around it; weather is intergalactic and it is global. But think about the weather another way and you are right here, and what the weather means is how things look and feel outside your window. For weather is also local; it’s how the sky behaves when it turns up at your place: the distinctiveness of the light at dawn, the way the wind picks up from the west in the afternoons, the species and colour of clouds that inhabit this valley with you, the heaviness of the rain that falls out of winter storm fronts or dumps from January southerlies, or the way rain rarely falls this side of the mountain, the size of the hail in April downpours, the particular shade of green the sky turns above the bay ahead of a tropical storm in late November, the speed with which the ground fog comes up the paddocks from the flood plain some nights in early winter, the blueness of the light in June over the harbour, the characteristic heaviness of the frost in the east-facing lawns in July, the weight of the pre-Christmas winds.

There is always weather to report, and there will be weather long after there are any of us around to report it. Weather is the oldest story in the world – one we want to keep on telling each other when we meet, as though it were part of who we are, a story that wants to keep on telling itself, and affecting us, whether we like it or not. Clouds – those thought bubbles of the atmosphere, those oracular utterances of the sky, those prophesies, those poems – may have taught us to think, especially higher thoughts, to speak our mind and to change it.

And still we’re at it, this most ancient discourse, for the weather never lets up, and it continues to affect the way we experience life, and our lives, on earth.

These days, weather talk is bigger and more abstract, for although we are, most of us, removed from it, living most of our lives under cover, we can read the weather of the entire planet on our laptops and television screens. Now more than ever, everyone else’s weather is our own. Weather talk isn’t small talk any-more; now it is most of the news. Weather talk is politics now. It is econometric discourse, because the weather is changing around us, and changing faster, perhaps, than it’s ever changed before – though it’s hard to tell with weather: its patterns are long and our memories are short, our data inexact and shallow. It looks like long-established weather norms are changing, and not in our favour, and it looks, so the climate change hypothesis goes, as if we may have caused it, changing the chemistry and behaviour of the atmosphere we conduct our lives inside, by burning too much fuel, in part, to defy and transcend the weather – to stay too warm, to keep too cool, to prosper everywhere, all the time, regardless of the weather.

Weather is the stage on which we enact the drama of our lives. We breathe it in; we see embodied in it our fears and desires; it falls on our head. And we’d better take care of it: our lives are in its hands. Its drama has become our own. A morality play in real time. The days of our very own lives.

The weather of who I am

I go the way the weather goes, though not always in sync. Eddies of energy rise and fall in me, travel me in a ceaseless, undulant, sometimes turbid, and recursive circuit. The world that is my body is travelled by weather. We are creatures made largely, like the planet, of water; we are physical beings under the sun, moving in space, small wildernesses of microbes and energies, and all the rest of it; we are made of the same atoms the world, the whole universe, is made of; we are creatures adapted profoundly to the earth in its manifestations. So it should not surprise us that we have weather, too, and are, even in these air-conditioned days, affected by changes of mood of the weather of the larger world – of air pressure and light, or wind and rain and cloud.

Sometimes the weather going on inside your self is the same weather going on inside your habitat; sometimes your weather rises out of memory or desire or fear. Each of us is a small world trafficked by weather, emotional and intellectual and physical. And perhaps how we feel is just how who we are responds to the whirlpools of energy, internal and external, that course us – the highs and lows. Certainly this is how my life goes. I harbour weather; I am made of it. And this helps me understand the world, and all the weather it suffers, how the world and all of us within it are weathered, without end.

Winds ease through the day, along the Shoalhaven, and the evening is cool. By 10 pm the night is as still as a singing bowl that’s finally stopped singing. The sky is perfectly clear; the stars are the only weather to report; the low has moved offshore, and New Zealand is in for it next. Here in the Shoalhaven, I sit under the edges of the slow-moving high that covers the continent. Lows are moving west in the Southern Ocean, fiercely, like a pod of whales in a hurry, but none of them looks likely to make landfall here. Weather too good to write in is coming along. But that, too, will pass. Weather always does.

The weather of who we are

We are a sclerophyll people, adapted in our speech and manners, in our worldview, to the manifold variations on a theme of dryness that are the prevailing weather of the continent.

We are a conforming, decent people, good at getting things done – on the battlefield, the playing field, the farm, the mine site, the mall. At home. We’re good at civility and embarrassed by ceremony, though good at putting on a do; we’re not much given to introspection, to political histrionics, revolutions, bills of rights, that sort of thing; we’re rhetorically awkward, suspicious of large gestures, unless they’re commercial; we’re dedicated, it is said, to a fair go, in particular for ourselves; we’re suspicious of the foreign and the new, but we tend to come around. We don’t like to look far into the future. As if it were the weather – another cyclone on the horizon, another flood coming downstream, another fire running up the ridge. Perhaps the difficulty of many of our landscapes and the temperate recalcitrance of much of our weather have taught us to be pragmatic to a fault.

But most of our history happens between disasters, not in them; most of who we are lies between the droughts and fires and flooding rains. We are a stable people on a stable continent, whose weather is not, in fact, uncommonly wild, and perhaps we tell ourselves stories of military and meteorological disaster (narrowly and bravely survived) to reassure ourselves we’re real – that we have ticker and pluck; that we’re tough.

This is to overlook, of course, the long savage dispossession of the first peoples by the settlers – but this has been a part of our history that, until recently, the nation has chosen to ignore. A history of surviving savage weather is a nobler sort of history to own up to.

In the sunburnt country, firestorms and flooding rains and ten-year droughts and cyclones are our myths of identity. Which is not to say we get no grief from nature. It’s just to note how much of ourselves we find, and how much of our natural and national history we tell, in calamities – and the doggedness of our spirit in the face of them.

But we are not more prone to natural disasters than the international average. There are hotter places, stormier – though there are none, it has to be admitted, drier. It doesn’t get dangerously cold; there are no ice storms or heavy-duty blizzards (not unless we include our territories on that driest continent on earth, the Antarctic.) We get dust storms, and we get more than enough cyclones, but we don’t get many tornadoes (the most destructive force on the planet); we have no equivalent of America’s tornado alley. We do fire as well as anyone, and we’ll do it bigger and more often as the atmosphere warms. Drought is our great affliction; and in the years ahead, water – the scarcity of rivers in the places where most of us live and farm, our profligacy with it, the drying of the climate – is our area of national vulnerability.

Between downpours and conflagrations, though, we get about the greater part of who we are. We make history, most of it quiet, in mild weather. But we tell ourselves in fires and floods; we find ourselves in drought. We think of ourselves as a people who know how to pick up the pieces when the floodwaters ease and the fires are dowsed, when the cyclone has petered out. And so we are, and so the national memory is crowded with images of the damage the weather often enough wreaks, and how bravely we bear it and get on. And it looks like we’re going to get plenty of opportunities to keep proving it in the years ahead.

The weather: an intimate essay

When I walked to the river at dusk yesterday, there was no wind anywhere in the valley. Walking across the paddock was like swimming in the shallows – warm air pooled here and there. Nothing much stirred anywhere. At the river, a pair of masked lapwings, probably nesting, circled me and looped out over the river where it bends, kek-kek-kekking, warding me off. Then some weather started up, as if the cyclonic circling of the birds had conjured it. The eucalypts on the scarp across the water began to weave and sway and roar in a wind that was happening nowhere else along the river. They kept at it, howling down the lapwings. The trees seemed to be articulating some kind of a downdraft – a narrowly adapted katabatic breeze, perhaps, rushing off the ridge as the valley cooled. But why here? And why only here? I don’t understand what I witnessed, but this was weather. Which is sometimes very small – shaped by and native to a place. Later, sitting at my desk, I heard the wind racing down off the ridge in the dark and then I heard the rain clattering the roof – the larger weather, perhaps, the smaller weather had foretold. Coming to tell me who I am.

Living under the influence of the sky

Weather joins us to everyone and everywhere else, but in its local adaptations, it also shapes, changes and defines us. We are who we are, indirectly and directly, because of the weather we lead our lives in. How we behave, even how we speak, is how we adapt to the weather. Australian weather makes us Australian; Pilbara weather, Pilbaran; Tasmanian weather, Tasmanian. It’s a large part of it, anyway. But weather is regional and global, too. We share our cold fronts with New Zealand and Asia shares her monsoons with us. El Niño and La Niña link us to the fates of South Americans. And we all share global warming, unevenly though its effects may be distributed.

More personally, life lived under the influence of weather, mindful of it, as long as one survives that weather, is a life more fully lived. The days in which I am aware of what’s going on in the sky, which way the wind blows, what species of clouds came by, are days that feel more lived in. In which my life feels more ample. It helps if the weather is bright, or, on the other hand, wild; it helps if your hat will stay on your head – or your hair, for that matter. But it’s the observance, not the value you put on what you observe, that counts. It’s a way of dying, as the Buddhists say, to one’s self – one’s mere self – and opening to the world. It’s a bigger kind of life. Humbler. Older, longer. Who you are is so much bigger than what your body encloses, and how your society wants to define you. You’re no longer a taxpayer, a consumer, a New South Welshman. You’re a citizen of the real world again. A part of a place. You’re a-piece with the weather. A piece of the weather, even.

Turbulence

Masters of the universe

It’s time to become gonads

Becky Crew

Deep-sea anglerfish (Ceratiidae family)

Being an anglerfish male would be the absolute worst. As proud as most males in the animal kingdom tend to be of their genitals, the idea of actually becoming genitals by fusing yourself to your mate is a bit much. Unless you’re an anglerfish male, in which case it’s just something that has to be done. Some people have to be garbage collectors, others have to be genitals. The bizarre reproductive habits of deep-sea anglerfish were first described in 1922 by Icelandic fisheries biologist Bjarni Saemundsson, who discovered a large female Krøyer’s deep-sea anglerfish (Ceratias holboelli) with two smaller fish attached to her stomach by their snouts. What Saemundsson didn’t realise was that these tiny fish weren’t young offspring taking nutrients from their mother, but sexually mature males. ‘I can form no idea of how, or when, the larvae, or young, become attached to the mother; I cannot believe that the male fastens the egg to the female. This remains a puzzle for some future researcher to solve,’ he wrote in the journal Videnskabelige Meddelelser fra Dansk Naturhistorisk Forening. Three years later, British ichthyologist, ecology and evolution expert Charles Tate Regan found a similar situation. This time a single small fish was fused to a female, and Tate recognised it not as a mother–offspring relationship, but a parasitic male–female relationship, reporting in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B:

[The male fish is] merely an appendage of the female, and entirely dependent on her for nutrition … so perfect and complete is the union of husband and wife that one may almost be sure that their genital glands ripen simultaneously, and it is perhaps not too fanciful to think that the female may possibly be able to control the seminal discharge of the male and to ensure that it takes place at the right time for fertilisation of her eggs.

Anglerfish belong to an order Lophiiformes, which is a highly diverse group of fish boasting an array of shapes, including elongated, spherical and flattened bodies, living 300 metres below the surface. There are around 200 species of anglerfish spread around the world’s oceans. Anglerfish in the family Ceratiidae, also known as sea devils, live at depths of 1000–4000 metres in the bathypelagic zone where not a speck of sunlight exists. They are famous for the reproductive process that sees free-swimming adolescent males attach themselves to a female and morph into a living, parasitic set of gonads.

Members of the Ceratiidae family are generally top-heavy, with relatively large heads and jaws filled with many tiny teeth set into an extreme underbite position. The females of each species are adorned with a bioluminescent lure that extends from their foreheads in myriad shapes, sizes and lengths. Characteristic of the Ceratioidea is their extreme sexual dimorphism, which describes a genetically determined difference between males and females of the same species expressed by their morphology, behaviour or ornamentation. In birds, sexual dimorphism is the difference between the stunningly beautiful male peacock and its drab female counterpart, and in the Ceratioidea’s case, this means large females and significantly dwarfed males. So dwarfed are the deep-sea anglerfish males, measuring an average of just 6–10 millimetres in their free-swimming, adolescent stage, that they are one of the world’s smallest vertebrates. In the most extreme cases, such as the Krøyer’s deep-sea anglerfish, the females can be up to 60 times larger than the males, at more than a metre in length, and half a million times heavier.

While Ceratioidea males lack the female’s bioluminescent luring apparatus, which is formed by the foremost three spines on her first dorsal, or back, fin, they do have large, well-developed eyes and gigantic nostrils in their adolescence. Researchers have suggested that these are used for homing in on a special hormone emitted by the females. When a male finds a female, it will start to metamorphose, its eyes and nostrils degenerating while its teeth are replaced with large pincers. These are used to grip on to a prospective mate, which begins the fusing process of the male’s mouth to the female’s body. Some species see just one male attaching itself to a single female, while in other species a female can host up to eight dependent males. Although it may seem like an unnecessarily complicated process to get the males and females to reproduce, researchers suggest that it is the only way, because without fusing with the females, the males will never reach sexual maturity. And likewise, the females will never become gravid, meaning capable of carrying eggs internally, unless they have a male attached. According to American systematist and evolutionary biologist Theodore Wells Pietsch III, one of the world’s experts on anglerfish, ‘That sexual maturity is determined not by size or age in these fishes, but by parasitic sexual association, may well be unique among animals.’

Publishing a study in Ichthyological Research in 2005, Pietsch said that in some species of Ceratioidea, the fusing of flesh involves the combination of circulatory systems, which means the males depend entirely on the females for their continued survival, ‘while the host female becomes a kind of self-fertilising hermaphrodite’. Pietsch adds that the males increase:

considerably in size once fused, their volume becoming much greater than free-living males of the same species, and being otherwise completely unable to acquire nutrients on their own, the males are considered to be parasites. They apparently remain alive and reproductively functional so long as the female lives, participating in repeated spawning events.

Pietsch, who is currently the curator of fishes at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Washington, has been studying anglerfish for over 20 years. In early 2012, he went in to bat for them when a group of scientists, led by Louisiana State University graduate student Eric Rittmeyer, declared a newly discovered species of frog to be the world’s tiniest vertebrate. Publishing in PLoS One, Rittmeyer and his team described Paedophryne amauensis, a copper and black frog from New Guinea averaging just 7.7 millimetres in length. Pietsch challenged the new frog’s inclusion in the Guinness Book of Records promptly after the paper had been published, arguing that the free-swimming adolescent male of an anglerfish he described in his 2005 paper stretched just 6.2 millimetres, making it 11 per cent smaller than Paedophryne amauensis. But due to the fact that females of the same species are up to six times bigger than the frog, Rittmeyer’s team were not convinced. For now, it looks as though the title of World’s Smallest Vertebrate is subject to opinion.

* * * * *

Journal Notes: Deep-Sea Anglerfish

3 June

I never knew my father. Mother told me as soon as I was old enough to understand that he was gone before I was born. My friends all say the same about their fathers, but it doesn’t make it hurt any less that he didn’t want to stick around to see what I’d look like, what I’d act like, which uni I’d end up going to. So that’s why I’m going to learn everything I can about him, discover what clues he left behind so that I might come to understand who I am and who I will become. Ate lunch, got indigestion like always. Note to self: eat slower.

5 June

Questioned Mother while she was making dinner. Got mostly cagey responses, but she put chillies in our meal, which she never does, so suspect chilli is some kind of clue. Suspect Mother is trying to tell me something. Called The Chilli Palace, man on phone didn’t seem to want to talk about anything but chilli dogs. Suspect he and Mother are in karhoots cahoots. Watched Downton Abbey. Hated it.

6 June

Googled Dad. Discovered that he was a tailor and had a shop in town that’s now a comic bookstore that I can’t go into anymore because I’m in love with the girl who works there. Found photo of my English teacher wearing one of Dad’s Prince of Wales suits while attending a production of Uncle Vanya: The Musical on a Sydney Morning Herald society site. Googled Uncle Vanya: The Musical, universally panned, but there’s a good chance Chekhov liked chilli, so ordered a dog from The Chilli Palace. Indigestion.

9 June

Just realised something. Got The Chilli Palace receipt out of my bin: $4.44. Which corresponds to all ‘D’s in the alphabet. ‘D’s for ‘Dad’. I’m really onto something here. Showed Mother to see if her reaction would give anything away and she said not to use her credit card again.

10 June

Learnt about the whole morphing-into-genitals thing in sex ed class today. Contemplating becoming a warlock whatever the male version of a nun is.

Nuns

Hormonal frogs

End of a hook

The last laughing death

Jo Chandler

It’s 50 years since Michael Alpers, a 28-year-old medical graduate from Adelaide with a restless spirit and an urge ‘to do health in a different kind of way’, hiked into the Papua New Guinea highlands looking for the crucible of a devastating disease epidemic – and stumbled into the crater of an uncharted volcano.

While he smartly sidestepped the sulphuric grumblings of Mount Yelia, young Dr Alpers never really made it back from that trek, succumbing en route to a mystery, a mission, and a culture. The now-venerable professor’s long expedition has finally reached its conclusion. In November 2012, the last of the corps of local foot-soldiers he trained over decades to track down and document cases of kuru – the name the afflicted Fore people gave to the tremors signalling inevitable and terrible death – completed their final routine surveillance patrols through the villages where the disease once raged.

They emerged from their final trek through the mountains and negotiated the rough track north to the provincial capital of Goroka where they submitted their final reports to the PNG Institute of Medical Research and collected their last pay cheques. The file was closed on an epic continuous surveillance effort which began when the first documented reports of the disease emerged in 1957. Along the way, its investigators have navigated some of the most arduous geographical, cultural and humanitarian landscapes imaginable.

Several of the last surveyors were second-generation kuru sleuths and bush medics, heirs to the stories and skills their fathers acquired in the 1960s when they accompanied Alpers and other pioneering investigators during the height of the kuru scourge. Then the mysterious disease was killing up to 200 people a year – mostly women and children – in the Purosa Valley, in the remote Eastern Highlands. It very nearly wiped out the Fore. Locals blamed powerful ritual sorcery for the curse; intrigued medical scientists postulated a genetic cause, or maybe an environmental factor; and patrol officers installed by the Australian administration suspected the Fore tradition of eating their dead – an outlawed practice that had largely ended by 1960. They would all, to varying degrees, turn out to have part of the story.

Fore people recruited to ‘The Kuru Project’ worked as translators, guides, cultural advisors, nurses, autopsy assistants, couriers, cooks, security guards, drivers, carriers and custodians of precious human tissue destined for research laboratories in Melbourne, Washington and London. They were instrumental in what is recognised as one of the greatest discoveries in biomedical sciences of the 20th century.

Their involvement was critical to the collection of field data from villages scattered through rugged, remote terrain; the coordinated efforts of field workers and scientists ultimately garnered two Nobel prizes (and contributed indirectly to a third). Their continuing surveys have informed and shaped the publichealth response to Europe’s ‘mad cow’ disease, particularly at its British epicentre, providing warning that a substantial second wave of deaths is inevitable, and that dormant carriers of the infection will long pose a threat to safe blood, organ and tissue supplies. Their legacy also endures in the footnotes of emerging insights into neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

‘We had to climb mountains and cross fast-flowing rivers,’ one of their original ranks, Taka Gomea, recalled at a Royal Society gathering on kuru in London in 2008. ‘When we approached some villages they tried to chase us away, threatening us with their bows and arrows. We would placate them by giving them salt and other small presents.’ En route by Dakota aircraft to one patrol site, Gomea recalled an occasion when the cargo doors burst open. He clung to the co-pilot so he could lean out and pull them shut. ‘I really wanted kuru to stop,’ said Gomea, who eventually became an orderly at a remote medical aid post. ‘That’s why I was happy to work so hard.’

His wish was granted. There have been just eight kuru cases this century – three in 2000, two in 2001, one each in 2003 and 2005, and the last in 2009. In each case, it is believed the victim had incubated the disease for an astonishing 50 years or more, having been exposed to infection as a child when participating in mortuary feasts that were an intrinsic part of Fore culture: that is, the cooking and consumption of the dead, every last piece of them, in order to hasten the journey of the departed loved ones to the land of the ancestors.

Much later, Alpers, who had always felt discomforted by the term ‘cannibalism’ – ‘you don’t like to call your friends cannibals’ – would invent a new term for the Fore ritual: ‘transumption’. It borrowed from the lexicon of Catholic doctrine around the Eucharistic transubstantiation of bread into the body and blood of Christ. He defined the Fore custom as ‘incorporation of the body of the dead person into the bodies of living relatives, thus helping to free the spirit of the dead’. It was a final act of love by the grief-stricken. Yes, as anthropologists had insisted, there was a gastronomic element: people had given ready testimony that humans were delicious, especially their brains. But this was a perk, not a driver, of the practice, Alpers insisted, in papers citing the secrets shared with him and others over decades.

Despite the deep significance mortuary feasts held for the Fore people and their neighbours, by 1960 the rites had almost entirely ceased, at the insistence of Australian administrators. Immediately, the epidemic began to ease – new cases among children vanished virtually overnight.

Today, the apparent disappearance of the disease means there’s little more information likely to be gleaned from kuru’s ground zero. As a consequence, in late 2012, the funding that had flowed to Goroka from London since 1996 – when ‘mad cow’ disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE) crossed the species barrier into humans and sent British researchers scurrying to PNG looking for insights from the closely related kuru epidemic – finally dried up. Routine field surveillance came to an end.

Word now travels fast if there’s so much as a suspect shiver in the most far-flung village, and it quickly finds its way to the limestone cottage in Fremantle, Western Australia, where Alpers retired after leaving his post in Goroka as chief of the PNG Institute of Medical Research in 2000.

The walls of Alpers’ home are lined with books on PNG and hung with its artifacts and art. Only a couple of years ago he trekked back into the highlands after being summoned to a rumoured case that turned out to be Parkinson’s disease. ‘Kuru is still the first thing people think [of] if anyone gets a bit shaky,’ the professor says. ‘It’s an extremely powerful disease, horrible to live with, and horrible to see someone die of. People are still very much afraid of it.’

Alpers remembers the tragedy all too well. In medical literature, the investigation of this ‘extraordinary disease … will continue to have long-standing significance for neurology, infectious disease and public health’, as papers to the landmark Royal Society kuru meeting in London in 2008 observed. But for Alpers it is a story populated by individuals with names and faces, children and mothers he tended and held in his arms in the days and weeks before they died, some of whom he cut open within hours of their deaths, searching for the truth of the powerful agent that had claimed them.

The survey teams may have finally left the field, but in Fremantle Alpers continues to sift methodically through his kuru archive, looking for new insights. He is still following the trail into the next awakening.

* * * * *

It was when he read the first reports of the mysterious kuru in the Adelaide Advertiser in 1957 that Michael Alpers – a self-described ‘disaffected’ medical student – became intrigued. A team of local scientists were involved in the early investigation of the disease and Alpers lobbied them to go to PNG, securing a post for himself as a medical officer for the Australian administration which was then considering trying to quarantine the infected region, in a desperate bid to contain the epidemic.

Alpers flew into the wild frontier highlands town of Goroka in 1961. Systematic medical investigation into kuru was already well under way, initiated by local district medical officer Dr Vincent Zigas and led by American scientist Dr Carleton Gajdusek, a brilliant, dynamic and controversial figure who would become Alpers’ friend and collaborator, and who later won the Nobel prize for his seminal work. A husband-and-wife team of Australian anthropologists, Robert and Shirley Glasse (later Lindenbaum), were also deep in the field, looking for clues in cultural practices and diet.

Alpers spent his first weeks enlisted in a crash course in linguistics that he credits with priming him to deeper engagement with the strange reality he was about to enter. ‘I learned about languages that had never been written down, about the difference between phonetics and phonemics. It made me realise these languages were extremely complex. Everyone assumed in the outside world – and sometimes still do – that these were primitive people. Well, the languages certainly weren’t primitive, and nor was the culture based around the available technology.’

He ventured deep into the kuru heartland, spending ‘a couple of months walking around, talking to people’. He recalls receiving a particularly warm welcome in a village called Waisa, a solid hour’s trek from the nearest road but smack in the heart of the epidemic. ‘People said “Come, you’re very welcome,” and I settled.’ They built him a hut, which was replaced in time by a house fitted with the luxuries of a water supply and a generator. It would become his home – and later that of his own young family – for long periods. A newer version of it still shelters researchers, and served as the field headquarters for the UK’s Medical Research Council Prion Unit.

While kuru was Alpers’ focus, he could not fail to see the community’s other urgent medical needs. ‘I trained a couple of young men in the village to read and write, to dress sores and to give injections and keep records, and we set up a medical clinic. People came from valleys miles away. Everyone at that time had tropical ulcers … fortunately they respond excellently to penicillin. Word got around.’

He met Carleton Gajdusek in the field in early 1962. ‘He’d upset lots of people. Everyone warned me against him, but by then we knew that kuru was like scrapie [a transmissible, fatal brain disease which had long occurred in sheep, and was familiar to veterinarians but few others]. Carleton wanted to test the idea that kuru was also transmissible, and I did too, so we joined forces. We planned an experiment – collecting autopsy samples [from kuru victims], putting them into chimpanzees, and then following them for 10 years.’ (Alpers stood by – and remains fiercely defensive of – Gajdusek over a murky episode in later years where he was disgraced and jailed for a year for child molestation. He died in 2008.)

The immediate challenge for Alpers was collecting the autopsy tissue from afflicted brains. ‘When I first got there the local kiap [the vernacular for the ranks of Australia’s all-powerful field officers – in Okapa] said “absolutely not, people are fed up [with autopsies], they’ve disturbed everyone”’. Alpers determined much of the distress was due to the bodies being carted to hospital for examination and then not promptly returned.

His solution was to conduct limited autopsies out in the home villages, assisted by his trained aides and the families of the dead. This had the added benefit of securing fresh tissue very soon after death. He told communities he wanted the brain, nothing else, and that this donation would help scientists find an answer to the deaths. While most villagers were convinced that sorcery was the cause, their experience of the new medical clinics had taught them the concept of ‘germs’ which were treatable. And they were desperate enough to give it a try.

Over the following months Alpers gained autopsy approval from the families of several people dying of kuru. Everyone understood too well that no one recovered from kuru, which progressively stole control, mobility, speech but, tragically, not always faculty from the afflicted. Bursting into gales of uncontrollable laughter was another cruel quirk of the disease. ‘So having established the fact I had permission to do an autopsy I then would go to the kiap and he would provide a coroner’s certificate – in advance – authorising it,’ says Alpers. As death approached, Alpers would move into the patient’s village, and wait.

It could be a long process. Weeks, usually. ‘You couldn’t do anything else but hang around, a bit like a ghoul. And it normally took a long time even after the patient was moribund, (almost) paralysed, but subsisting on sips of sugar water.’ Alpers would ready his instruments and prepare a hut for the autopsy, setting out labelled, sterile vials for the tissue he would soon collect.

On the professor’s Fremantle kitchen table lies a black and white photograph of the little girl whose story he now recounts, so many years later. She was the second of five field autopsies Alpers conducted during that period. The photo is a still taken from some of the kilometres of footage he filmed over the years, to document the progress of the disease. The girl is leaning on a stick in front of some village huts, looking shyly into the camera. ‘That’s Kigea,’ he says, tapping the picture. ‘She was from my own village, Waisa. A wonderful little 11-year-old girl who died of kuru.’ Her end was lingering and awful. Her father despaired and ran away until it was over; her mother had already long since been claimed by kuru, as so many young women were.

‘The extraordinary thing was that I could still make contact. I remember asking Kigea the day before she died to put her tongue out. She was in this locked-in state, but she wasn’t paralysed, and she understood me talking to her. It was a terrible situation for everybody.’ Finally, Alpers received the call – she was gone.

After each death, he says, ‘I would go and talk to the family again, and say, “Okay?”. They had participated in cutting up bodies in the past – so that was not an unusual activity for them. We had to clear a few people – particularly the women who were wailing. But some of the women stayed. The ones involved put on masks to protect the tissue and I had gloves.

‘The father, or a close relative, would hold the head, and I would take the top of the skull off with a bone handsaw. It would take maybe 20 minutes … like cutting an avocado. I would go to particular parts of the brain … take out small cubes. My assistant would hold out the bottle that was relevant, take the lid off, and I’d pop it in.

‘Then I’d take the whole brain out and put it in a bucket full of formalin and cotton wool so it wouldn’t be deformed, and put the lid on. All our samples would go into an insulated box. Then I put the skull cap back on, and sewed up. Then we said goodbye… gave everyone a hug, and took off. I did this five times. It was enough.’

The insulated box would be taken immediately to the station at Okapa and put in the freezer. The next morning a chartered aircraft would come to collect it and fly it to Lae.

From Lae the box would catch a flight direct to Melbourne, where it was collected by a haematologist from the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories, who would store the tissue in a deep freezer until it could be sent to the United States National Institutes of Health in Washington DC where Carleton Gajdusek had assembled some chimpanzees in a primate facility for the next phase of the experiment.

In early 1964 Alpers followed the samples to Washington, where he would spend the next four years exploring kuru’s epidemiology and genetics, but even at that distance, the emotional backwash was inescapable. By now the tissue he had taken from Kigea and another young boy called Eiru had been inoculated into a pair of chimps – Daisey and Georgette – and Alpers would visit them twice a week, examining them, shooting footage, growing fond of them and their quirks and characters. ‘Chimps are so close to humans it made them difficult to use in lots of ways, but we felt we had to do it.’

Two years into the experiment, Daisey and Georgette started behaving strangely. Their gait changed, they had difficulty walking, and lost co-ordination. When they couldn’t pick up pieces of apple and put them to their mouths, they improvised, using their lips to scoop the apple from the ground. Alpers had seen it all before.

‘One day I was examining them and wrote down “clinical impression – kuru”. It was just striking. The tremors, the gait … the intention tremor which is a classic sign of cerebellar disease, which is what kuru is.’ Gajdusek was again in PNG and Alpers sent a telegram summoning him back. By the time he arrived a week later, ‘Daisey was falling all over the place … it was awful. But at the same time there was this elation that our experiment was going to be successful.’

Alpers was convinced Daisey was sick from the agent that had come to her from Kigea, and Georgette from Eiru’s brain, but it would be several more months before that could be proved, with samples taken from Georgette’s brain at autopsy travelling to London for scrutiny by a neuropathologist.

The day the telegram arrived back in Washington advising that the chimp’s brain pathology was ‘indistinguishable’ from human kuru ‘we knew transmission was true’. Alpers, Gajdusek and their colleague Joseph Gibbs ‘wrote our paper in a day, dividing it in three, and posted it at midnight’.

Unusually the paper identified Kigea and Eiru – as well as Daisey and Georgette – each by name. Normal scientific convention is to scrub the documentation clean of such emotionally charged contaminants as identity. But in this instance, somewhere in their haste, the scientists’ instinct was to give credit where it was painfully due.

The paper appeared in the journal Nature, just two weeks later. It was a watershed finding, identifying kuru as a new category of infectious disease that caused the degeneration of the brain and nervous system, one that was capable of crossing the species barrier and which passed via unidentified agents lurking within brain matter. These agents would later be identified as a single infectious, self-propagating protein – which broke all previously assumed rules, in that they did not possess nucleic acid. They were given the moniker ‘prions’, and their identification earned another scientist (Stanley B Prusiner) a Nobel prize. Prions bore the distinction of being the first new pathogen identified in more than a century.

* * * * *

Momentuous as the 1966 breakthrough was, kuru remained elusive. What was the mechanism spreading the contagion? Carleton Gajdusek resisted what he felt was the too-glib notion that consumption of human flesh was to blame. He argued that the infection might have travelled through cuts or sores or dabbing of eyes during ritual handling of the dead’s organs. Local kiap Jack Baker reckoned the scientists were overthinking it, overlooking the obvious.

Alpers had by then spent several years reviewing the epidemiology of the disease, trawling through data collected by patrol officers, scientists and missionaries. Their work had been ably assisted by the Fore people’s formidable collective memory – ‘cause of death is always known, even going back three generations’, explains Alpers.

He combined the charts with the insights of anthropologists working in the field, and the secrets of Fore ritual that had been entrusted to him. The Fore’s complex eschatology declared that each individual had five souls; that after death they travelled the land on a kind of farewell tour from which ultimately – assuming various rituals over a period of years were honoured – they would be reunited in the land of the ancestors. The most efficient path to this hereafter was for the body to be eaten.

As Alpers, with Jerome Whitfield and other colleagues summarised in a recent paper: ‘If the body was buried it was eaten by worms; if it was placed on a platform it was eaten by maggots; the Fore believed it was much better that the body was eaten by people who loved the deceased than by worms and insects. By eating their dead, they were able to show their love and express their grief.’

It was the women’s responsibility to eat the dead, grinding the bones and cooking the flesh, indulging their children along the way with the tastiest bits. Particular body parts were given to particular female kin. Although small boys joined in the feasting, they were generally excluded after about age ten.

By 1964 Alpers had solid figures on kuru deaths spread over seven years. ‘I compared the data for 1957, 1958 and 1959 with 1961, 1962 and 1963, and looked for any changing patterns. Overall, there was not much, but if you looked at the young kids, the disease had essentially disappeared – even in that short time. This was a major change.’ Obviously there had been some social or environmental shift. But so much in the Fore world had been in a state of upheaval during that era.

‘We made a list, Carleton and I, and there were lots of changes. The introduction of new foods, new animals, the cessation of certain activities. But the one that was biologically the most relevant was the mortuary practices, at least in my view.’ A couple of years later, field surveys confirmed the disease had died out in children younger than ten – which fitted with the kiaps effectively administering new rules of behaviour through the district. The rules were, says Alpers, ‘No fighting, build roads, no cannibalism, no child marriage, and plant coffee. And they did it.’

When Alpers put his data together for a presentation in Washington in 1967 ‘the argument for cannibalism – and I don’t use that term anymore, but it was used then – was compelling. Everything fitted. Why did women and children get the disease? Because they were the ones that carried out the practice – the men didn’t. It explained why it was dying out in young children – because the kiaps had proscribed cannibalism. You could also conclude that the disease was not being transmitted vertically from mother to child. No one born since 1960 was coming down with kuru. The penny dropped’.

The humbling lesson for scientists and doctors was that while their labours might have helped solve the puzzle, they had not halted the disease. The honour for the life-saving intervention belonged to the officers, both black and white, who administered the new laws of the land.

One aspect of the mystery remained unsolved: where had the disease started? Robert and Shirley Glasse had walked the trail through the signposts of Fore memory to a location and a moment early last century, tracing oral accounts of the disease appearing from the 1910s. In 1970 Alpers wrote a paper proposing that kuru had spread from a single case of spontaneous Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) – a rare but real and well-documented occurrence in any human population. Ordinarily, such an event might present an individual and a family with an unfathomable tragedy, but it ended there. However, in a culture in which brain tissue was consumed through the Fore’s funeral rituals, that single episode amplified over a generation or two, and then took off.

Genetic analysis would later provide evidence supporting this theory. It would also yield a few more surprises: some of these would be critical in managing future disease; others would go back through history, identifying skeletons in the darker recesses of humanity’s closet.

When Michael Alpers arrived in New Guinea, in 1961, and visited villages where the women of child-bearing age were all but gone, the view was that the Fore were on the brink of extinction. But what if, in a classic enunciation of Darwinian natural selection, the Fore were merely en route to a population bottleneck, from which the survivors would emerge with more protective genetic pedigrees?

In 2003, Alpers was one of the authors of a sensational paper published in the journal Science. A new round of genetic analysis of elderly survivors of Fore mortuary feasts had revealed they possessed a particular form of a gene which seemed to give them genetic resistance to kuru. Wider sampling across 2000 people from other cultures found the same chromosomal quirk. The authors argued that the widespread appearance of this prion-protective gene indicated natural selection had been at work before in this context, and that the consumption of human flesh – and consequent outbreaks of infectious disease – had occurred widely in the remote human past.

With kuru having all but vanished, and the mechanism for its spread having been eradicated, the whole episode might have quickly disappeared (except in the memories of the depleted Fore) into the annals of curiosity. But then came the ‘mad cow’ crisis. It made international headlines when BSE manifested in British beef in the mid-1980s, as a consequence of beasts having been reared on meal derived from the recycled offal of their own kind. The fear was that consumption of diseased beef would see the disease spread to humans.

That fear was realised when the infection turned up in human form as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), from 1996. With 176 cases confirmed to date in the UK alone (another 49 are recorded elsewhere, half of them in France), it has not reached the epidemic proportions once anticipated. Part of its management and containment is credited to the early recognition of its similarities to kuru. Comparing the medical film archives, the British casualties of vCJD look like pale ghosts of the Fore, their faces contorting into the same anguished shapes, their limbs staggering and trembling in a now familiar dance.

‘I spoke to Michael before vCJD appeared, on the basis that we thought it might transmit to humans,’ recalls neurologist Professor John Collinge, director of the UK Medical Research Council Prion Unit. ‘Of course it turned out that it did. It seemed to me that kuru was the major experience we had of one of these diseases. And we had better get to know as much about it as we can.’

Soon Collinge was en route to PNG. His first urgent question of the team on the ground was whether prion disease really could incubate for upwards of 50 years? The findings by his own unit, published in The Lancet, would confirm it. ‘This was quite extraordinary. It was clear these were long transmissions. And understanding that was then very important in the UK and other countries with vCJD.

‘We [also] wanted to see what strain or strains of prions caused kuru. We actually found two different strains in kuru, which were two of the same strains that cause sporadic CJD which occurs rarely, and at random, in all human populations.’

For Collinge, like Alpers, the journey to PNG’s kuru country took him into uncharted territory. At home he had a still undefined public health emergency to manage, together with the demands of a voracious first world. How many people had been exposed to killer hamburgers? How many might ultimately be struck down?

In PNG Collinge found himself negotiating more nuanced but no less confronting questions. What were the obligations of medical investigators, pursuing a quest on behalf of their own populations, to people of the developing world? ‘We couldn’t turn up as Westerners and say “we’re only interested in kuru – you’re dying of malaria, but that is not our interest”. It was ethically essential that we work with the community, contribute … tend to patients with common infectious diseases that might be lethal without treatment, in the same way they were helping us with our medical problem.’

The outcome of this thinking is that an enduring funding and co-operation agreement was forged between London and Goroka. Over the years, the UK project helped build three schools in the kuru area, trained teachers and established clean water supplies.

At the heart of the project were the critical clinical lessons to be learned from the Fore. Collinge cited these to the British press, priming his home audience for the likelihood of a second wave of vCJD cases. This warning emerged from genetic analysis of the long-term survivors of kuru, who have inherited a profile that acts to delay onset. Scrutiny of kuru cases reveals that a key gene shapes the body’s defences against the disease, and it exists in two forms: version-m and version-v. People with two identical copies MM or VV (one copy of the gene from each parent) were the first to get kuru, while those with one M and one V form (MV) might survive for decades. The same genetic profile is underwriting vCJD, the proportions suggesting another 250 delayed cases may emerge in the UK in the next few decades.

But there is another level of concern in the UK, says Collinge, around what is sometimes described as ‘modern’ cannibalism – the recycling of blood, tissue and organs through medicine. In July this year, while Britain was distracted by the Olympics festival, the UK Health Protection Agency published findings from a survey of appendix tissue removed routinely from Britons in an attempt to measure the prevalence of vCJD across the population. It identified abnormal prions in 16 of 32 441 cases.

‘I think that is quite a worrying figure,’ Collinge says, ‘suggesting that one in 2000 people in the UK population are infected. Now these individuals are healthy. Will they ever develop CJD? Are they individuals with very long incubation periods like we see in kuru? Some of them possibly. But I suspect a majority of them will be genuine carriers – infected, but they will never develop the disease themselves. They do, though, represent a risk to others if they are blood donors or donate organs. This is an ongoing public health issue in the UK … and kuru still has things to say about that.’

In the broader medical context, kuru continues to provide insight into neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. ‘It turns out that all these diseases involve accumulation of proteins … They all involve one of the body’s own proteins going wrong and forming clumps of material in the brain. It’s this process that seems to be critical to what is going on in prion disease [such as kuru and vCJD], and it’s now becoming increasingly apparent that similar sorts of processes are at work in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s,’ Collinge says.

It’s three years since the kuru pathogen stirred to claim its most recent victim, a 61-year-old woman from a far-flung hamlet right in the heart of the defined disease sector. It had slept within her for over 50 years – suppressed, according to the latest findings – by an accident of chromosomes programmed to resist the infection. She can have been only a young girl when she ate the morsel that would eventually kill her – very likely taking it from the hand of her mother or one of her aunts.

In the medical literature today kuru is recognised not as ‘an exotic, strange and unique disease caused by cannibalism on a remote island’, but as representative of a whole novel class of disease and carrying powerful, enduring lessons for human health.

In PNG’s Eastern Highlands, the disease is an unforgotten horror, one many still blame on sorcery, even if they give credence to the interventions and arguments of outsiders who tell them that it was their funeral practice that spread the curse. Through the stories of the kuru scouts and the presence of so many outside researchers and doctors over so many years, there is also wide understanding that the Fore’s tragedy has provided hard lessons to the wider world.

‘In some ways the story has come to its end,’ Alpers says, even as he knuckles down to a review of every one of 2700 kuru files, a task he estimates will take him two years. There are one or two angles in them he hasn’t explored. Meanwhile in laboratories elsewhere, scientists continue to poke and probe secretive prions. ‘It seems now that every neurodegenerative disease – Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s – all have a similar prionic process, though they are not infectious in the same way.’

There was supposed to be some fanfare at the end of 2012, to mark the end of 50-plus years of field surveillance of kuru. Alpers and Collinge and others were to return to Goroka. But the plans unravelled after a death in the family of one of the principal players. Instead, some low-key memorials were scheduled. Meanwhile the project overseers invited the ranks of their retired and serving kuru field reporters to nominate what they might like to mark the moment. A medal? A citation?

‘They wanted boots,’ Alpers says, so that is what they got – good, solid walking boots. After all those miles, up and down all those mountains, on the trail of an elusive killer, the kuru trackers proudly lace up their hard-earned trophies and continue on their way.

Infected

Vital organs

The perils of evolution

Janine Burke

I discovered Darwin the hard way. It was 1965 and in my Bible studies class at Catholic Ladies College we were reading a commentary on Genesis. Sister Anthony was the class teacher, a tall, stooped, gaunt woman whose deathly pallor was emphasised by her floor-length black robes. Her face and hands were the only parts of her body visible. Around her neck she wore a gleaming crucifix with which she played, and from her waist swung long wooden rosary beads and an impressive bunch of keys. She seemed ancient. Sister Anthony did not walk into the classroom with the rest of us but emerged from behind a door that led to the mysterious, forbidden realm of the convent. This apparition each morning was sensational, theatrical and made us quiet. We were scared of Sister Anthony. She forced us to pin our hair back from our faces, every strand, and she kept a supply of bobby pins in her desk for that purpose. If we were unable to complete the strict coiffure to her satisfaction, she did it for us, roughly with cold fingers. She had a walking stick and, if her temper was up, she’d use it to strike out at us. But, she was so frail that she rarely moved from the vantage point of her desk, so we learned to keep our distance and, if she attempted to lure us close for chastisement, to dart away.

Sister Anthony seemed so unearthly that when she once tripped and fell in the playground, we little girls dared not touch her, help her, raise her but stared in paralysed silence until another nun came to her rescue. I have friends who attended Catholic schools who become sentimental when they recall the nuns from their childhood, wise, kind-hearted women who counselled and encouraged their students. Unfortunately I did not meet such nuns.

Bible studies was tedious and so was the commentary on Genesis and my mind dawdled until I saw the footnote: ‘The evolution hypothesis, which proposes that man is descended from the apes, is not accepted by the Catholic Church.’ Apes, I thought. How cool. I can’t recall the book I found at the local library later that week that explained Darwin’s ideas, but I became an immediate and passionate believer in evolution. It seemed God should be capable of such subtlety, complexity and invention. Why get the creation of the world over in six days when allowing it to evolve over millions of years offered a far more entertaining process? Also, the prospect of being related to animals seemed, to an imaginative child, as enchanting as a fairytale where a girl could chat with a wolf or dine with bears. Imbued with the ardour of the newly converted, I rushed into class and announced to Sister Anthony, ‘Darwin was right! We’re descended from the apes!’ I’m not sure what I expected to happen next. That Sister Anthony would see the light, shout hallelujah and embrace me? She replied, with icy fury, that believing in evolution was a mortal sin and I must go immediately to confession and receive penance – otherwise I would burn in the flames of hell forever. She was quite perceptive. Two years later, I was expelled.

School daze

Schoolgirl grows up

Darwin’s modest discovery

Damon Young

Pope Benedict, in 2012, lamented the ‘arrogance’ of artificial procreation, with technology ‘taking the place of the Creator’.

Despite the obvious technological and conceptual contributions of science, many of its opponents still view it as monstrous in this way – insolently intervening in what’s ‘natural’, or conceitedly keeping ‘robin redbreast in a cage’, as Blake once put it.

Leaving aside judgment regarding the arrogance of religious claims – the existence and nature of God, for example, and the authority of his worldly officers – this prompts an important question: is science inherently arrogant? Are scientists puffed up, proud, marked by hubris?

To my mind, this is a misconception. While individual scientists can certainly be conceited and immoral, or their worldviews overly mechanical or reductionist, the best science is often quite modest.

A good example of this comes from Charles Darwin. Aged in his late 20s, Darwin began to change the Western world with two humble words: ‘I think’.

The words were scribbled in his notebook for July 1837, above a sketch of wonky lines, numbers and letters: the first evolutionary tree.

The idea is common nowadays, but in Darwin’s era this was radical. It represented the species not as God’s many inventions, but as higgledy-piggledy branches from a single trunk. Darwin had not yet developed his theory of natural selection, but this was a bold start. Not coincidentally, Darwin began to suffer heart palpitations at this time: the anxiety of rebellious ideas.

Over 150 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, Darwin’s theory is still at the heart of contemporary debates. It is no coincidence that two of the so-called Four Horsemen of the New Atheism, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, have written extensively on evolutionary theory – Dawkins as a scientist, and Dennett as a philosopher.

With his theory of natural selection, Darwin was questioning the divine origins of humanity. To accept Darwinism is to reject a literal reading of Genesis: God did not make mankind with dust and breath. Like all life, we are just one small link in a long chain of unconscious, unplanned change.

This revolution, in the 19th century, was a theological kick in the guts for many of the faithful, and it still smarts today. ‘We are not,’ said Pope Benedict, the spiritual leader of over one billion Catholics, ‘some casual and meaningless product of evolution’.

For those who take modern ideas for granted, it is vital to remember this: the radicalism in Darwin’s writings, and its personal relevance for many theists.

But it is even more important to remember how modest Darwin was about his radicalism. His theory began not with ‘I know’, ‘this must be’ or ‘thou shall’, but with a humble ‘I think’.

Darwin was intellectually courageous and determined, but he was not a righteous ideologue. More than anything, Darwin seemed driven by diligent curiosity. As a student at Shrewsbury School, he wandered off to collect beetles; at Edinburgh University, he preferred looking in fishing nets to looking at surgery.

Darwin’s poor academic results reflected his boredom with the syllabuses of medicine and theology, but also his fascination with plants and animals.

Darwin eventually left for Cambridge, discovered a mentor in botany, and began his illustrious career as a naturalist. What marked his success was this curiosity, combined with patience and doubt. Throughout his boyhood, youth and middle age, when Darwin undertook his exhaustive, exhausting study of barnacles, he was always chasing more evidence – not to shore up a predetermined conclusion, but to enhance and enrich his ideas.

Curiosity drove Darwin, but it did not blind or hurry him. Note his cautious excitement, as he writes to a colleague, in 1844, that he is ‘almost convinced’ that the species change – they are not the eternal, perfect works of God. ‘It is like confessing a murder,’ he adds.

In an age often driven to celebrate or lament scientific power, this is a valuable reminder of the best scientific motives. Darwin was driven not by greed, egomania or devilish mockery, but by inquisitiveness, doubt and courage – each balancing the other.

The first virtue drew him in, fascinated by barnacles, and other perplexing problems. The other virtues stopped him from solving these problems too soon, or denying the solutions he discovered.

In this, Darwin was not a super-genius, blessed with perfect logic and an easy mastery of all sciences. He was a well-educated English gentleman, raised in a wealthy, free-thinking family, who combined ardour with persistence and scepticism. In so doing, he never let enthusiasm become zealotry, or speculation become doctrine.

This remains an important lesson today. The Darwinian revolution did not begin with hatred of religion, or with hubris and arrogance. It was a cautious love of truth, not a flaming hatred of superstition or myth – they are not necessarily the same urge.

And just as importantly, with training and drive, we are all able to observe carefully, analyse precisely, and speculate boldly; we can exercise our minds, instead of taking up church dogma or ideology. We can all say, with Darwin, ‘I think’ – and genuinely do so.

Creationism

Modest, not!

Earthmasters: Playing God with the climate

Clive Hamilton

As the effects of global warming begin to frighten us, geoengineering will come to dominate global politics. Scientists and engineers are now investigating methods to manipulate the Earth’s cloud cover, change the oceans’ chemical composition and blanket the planet with a layer of sunlight-reflecting particles. Geoengineering – deliberate, large-scale intervention in the climate system designed to counter global warming or offset some of its effects – is commonly divided into two broad classes. Carbon dioxide removal technologies aim to extract excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it somewhere less dangerous. This approach is a kind of clean-up operation after we have dumped our waste into the sky. Solar radiation management technologies seek to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the planet, thereby reducing the amount of energy trapped in the atmosphere of ‘greenhouse Earth’. This is not a clean-up but an attempt to mask one of the effects of dumping waste into the sky, a warming globe.

Diligent contributors to Wikipedia have listed some 45 proposed geoengineering schemes or variations on schemes. Eight or ten of them are receiving serious attention. Some are grand in conception, some are prosaic; some are purely speculative, some are all too feasible; yet all of them tell us something interesting about how the Earth system works. Taken together they reveal a community of scientists who think about the planet on which we live in a way that is alien to the popular understanding. Let me give a few examples.

It is well known that, as the sea ice in the Arctic melts, the Earth loses some of its albedo or reflectivity – white ice is replaced by dark seawater which absorbs more heat. If a large area of the Earth’s surface could be whitened then more of the Sun’s warmth would be reflected back into space rather than absorbed. A number of schemes have been proposed, including painting roofs white, which is unlikely to make any significant difference globally. What might be helpful would be to cut down all of the forests in Siberia and Canada. While it is generally believed that more forests are a good thing because trees absorb carbon, boreal (northern) forests have a downside. Compared to the snow-covered forest floor beneath, the trees are dark and absorb more solar radiation. If they were felled the exposed ground would reflect a significantly greater proportion of incoming solar radiation and the Earth would therefore be cooler. If such a suggestion appears outrageous it is in part because matters are never so simple in the Earth system. Warming would cause the snow on the denuded lands to melt, and the situation would be worse than before the forests were cleared.

More promisingly perhaps, at least at a local scale, is the attempt to rescue Peruvian glaciers, whose disappearance is depriving the adjacent grasslands and their livestock of their water supply. Painting the newly dark mountains with a white slurry of water, sand and lime keeps them cooler and allows ice to form; at least that is the hope. The World Bank is funding research.

Another idea is to create a particle cloud between the Earth and the Sun from dust mined on the moon and scattered in the optimal place. This is reminiscent of the US military’s ‘black cloud experiment’ of 1973, which simulated the effect on the Earth’s climate of reducing incoming solar radiation by a few per cent. Consistent with the long history of military interest in climate control, the study was commissioned by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s technology research arm, and carried out by the RAND Corporation, the secretive think tank described as ‘a key institutional building block of the Cold War American empire’. I summon up the black cloud experiment here to flag the nascent military and strategic interest being stirred by geoengineering. The attention of the RAND Corporation has recently returned to climate engineering.

In 1993 the esteemed journal Climatic Change published a novel scheme to counter global warming by the Indian physicist PC Jain. Professor Jain began by reminding us that the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth varies in inverse square to the distance of the Earth from the Sun. He therefore proposed that the effects of global warming could be countered by increasing the radius of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. An orbital expansion of 1–2 per cent would do it, although one of the side effects would be to add 5.5 days to each year. He then calculated how much energy would be needed to bring about such a shift in the Earth’s celestial orbit. The answer is around 10^31 joules. How much is that? According to Professor Jain’s calculations, at the current annual rate of consumption, it is more than the amount of energy humans would consume over 10^20 years, or 100 billion billion years (the age of the universe is around 14 billion years). This seems like a lot, yet he reminds us that ‘in many areas of science, seemingly impossible things at one time have become possible later’. Perhaps, he speculates, nuclear fusion will enable us to harness enough energy to expand the Earth’s orbit. He nevertheless counsels caution: ‘The whole galactic system is naturally and delicately balanced, and any tinkering with it can bring havoc by bringing alterations in orbits of other planets also.’

The caution is well taken, although the intricate network of orbital dependence has stimulated another geoengineering suggestion. The thought is to send nuclear-armed rockets to the asteroid belt beyond the planets of our solar system so as to ‘nudge’ one or more into orbits that would pass closer to the Earth. Properly calibrated, the sling-shot effect from the asteroid’s gravity would shift the Earth’s orbit out a bit. Of course, if the calibration were a little out, the planet could be sent careening off into a cold, dark universe, or suffer a drastic planet-scale freezing from the dust thrown up by an asteroid strike.

Some of these schemes seem properly to belong in an HG Wells novel or a geeks’ discussion group, and too much emphasis on them for the delights of ridicule would give a very unbalanced impression of the research program into climate engineering now under way. Serious work is being conducted on schemes to regulate the Earth system by changing the chemical composition of the world’s oceans, modifying the layer of clouds that covers a large portion of the oceans and installing a ‘solar shield’, a layer of sulphate particles in the upper atmosphere to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the planet. There are some who believe that we will have no choice but to resort to these radical interventions. How did we get to this point? The simple answer is that the scientists who understand climate change most deeply have become afraid.

Promethean dreams

Everyone is looking for an easy way out. The easiest way out is to refuse to accept there is a predicament. Another is to hope that the problem is not as bad as it seems and that something will come along. The technofix of geoengineering is a third way out and an emerging lobby group of scientists, investors and political actors is giving it momentum. Yet the appeal of climate engineering runs deeper, for as an answer to global warming it dovetails perfectly with the modernist urge to exert control over nature by techno logical means.

Scientists, entrepreneurs and generals have long dreamed of controlling the weather. The development of computers and the accumulation of weather data using satellites have prompted a new and higher phase of dreaming. In 2002 the American Meteorological Society published a NASA-funded study titled ‘Controlling the global weather’. The author, Ross Hoffman, foresees the creation of an international weather control agency within the next three to four decades. ‘Just imagine,’ he enthused, ‘no droughts, no tornadoes, no snowstorms during rush hour etc.’ Control would be possible, the argument goes, precisely because weather systems are chaotic. Chaotic systems are very sensitive to small perturbations, so, if we can identify and then control those perturbations, then we can control the weather: ‘since small differences in initial conditions can grow exponentially, small but correctly chosen perturbations induce large changes in the evolution of the simulated weather’. He did not dwell on the implications of small but incorrectly chosen perturbations.

Controlling one country’s weather is not possible without affecting that of others, so the only way forward would be a global weather control system. Without close collaboration, Hoffman warns, there may be ‘weather wars’. Among the perturbations that could serve as control mechanisms for global weather he identifies the timing and location of aircraft contrails, solar reflectors that regulate the amount of sunlight and an enormous grid of fans that could redirect atmospheric momentum. A more recent scientific paper explores the possibility of a control strategy for El Niño, the periodic warming of central and eastern Pacific currents that causes drought in Australia and floods in South America. It too looks for leverage in small disturbances with large effects, the most promising lever being alteration of sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific through cloud brightening.

Stephen Salter, an engineer and principal researcher in marine cloud brightening (an approach that involves enhancing the reflectivity of the low-lying clouds that cover up to a third of the oceans), is convinced that we will soon know everything there is to know: ‘Noise is only a signal which you have not learned to decode yet.’ He is excited by the prospect of total control of the Earth’s climate, and entertains plans of domination that would do Dr Strangelove proud. He defends further research with the claim that:

We might discover that to get more rain at Timbuktu in August but less rain during Wimbledon you should spray to the west of Cape Verde island from mid April to mid May and stop all spraying south of Kerguelen during January and February. However spraying south of Tasmania from June to December never affects anywhere north of Hong Kong. By linking the strength of the beneficial effects with observations of the weather patterns and spray planning we may eventually develop sufficient understanding to allow tactical or closed-loop control which could respond to other more random perturbing influences and make everyone happier with their weather.

This kind of technological hubris, although not often expressed so brazenly in public, colours the advice governments are beginning to receive from geoengineering researchers. The idea is taking root that geoengineering could be used not just to counter some of the effects of global warming, but to manipulate permanently the planet’s weather system to suit our desires, or at least the desires of those who turn the knobs. To this end, climate engineers are beginning to talk about employing not one but a suite of interventions designed to tailor the climate. So stratospheric aerosol spraying might be used to cool the globe overall, while cloud seeding may be undertaken to finetune other environmental goals, such as preserving coral reefs, ‘hurricane emasculation’ and restoring polar ice caps. Engineering the global climate thus becomes an optimisation problem.

No two researchers are more prone to the special kind of scientific excitement that can possess geoengineers than Stanford climate scientist Ken Caldeira and Pentagon ‘weaponeer’ Lowell Wood. Damage to the ozone layer is likely to be one of the side effects of sulphate aerosol spraying, which involves coating the earth with a layer of tiny sulphate particles to block some incoming radiation. This would allow more ultraviolet light to reach the surface, so risking more skin cancer. Caldeira and Wood have an answer. They argue that some kinds of ultraviolet light that cannot be seen ‘may be largely superfluous … for biospheric purposes, and thus portions of these spectra may be attractive candidates for being scattered back into space by an engineered scattering system’. This light is invisible to us, so why do we need it? Particles could be specially engineered to allow through more of some kinds of light than others. They argue that such a scheme could save us US $10 billion a year from avoided skin cancers. An additional benefit of scattering redundant bands of the light spectrum is that the sky could be rendered discernibly bluer.

It is a strange kind of thinking that believes it can identify basic properties of the solar system that are surplus to requirements and may be dispensed with. A different kind of thinking assumes that things are there for a purpose and that the structure of life on Earth as a whole has evolved to fit the environment in which it finds itself. So on closer inspection ‘junk DNA’ turns out to be genetic material whose functions we had not yet worked out. Many insects rely on ultraviolet light for their vision, reptiles need it to bask in and it is essential to production of vitamin D. The multitudes of species on Earth have evolved to manage the potential damage from ultraviolet light. Yet Caldeira and Wood suggest that we can filter out this superfluous form of light, so that we regulate not only the quantity of light reaching the planet but its quality. There is no bridge to cross to engage with this type of thinking. There is only an abyss of incomprehension.

The Promethean plan for ultimate control has been set out explicitly by Brad Allenby, now an engineering professor at Arizona State University, in a strategy he calls earth system engineering and management. He begins with the observation that humans have not merely transformed the landscape but have imprinted themselves on every cubic metre of air and water, to the point where the Earth has become a human artefact. There is no more ‘natural’ so we must cast off all romantic notions and take responsibility for conscious planetary management. In a definition whose training manual phraseology says as much about its meaning as the words themselves, Allenby writes:

Earth systems engineering and management may be defined as the capability to rationally engineer and manage human technology systems and related elements of natural systems in such a way as to provide the requisite functionality while facilitating the active management of strongly coupled natural systems.

In case it might be thought that such a vision excludes all that is essentially human, Dr Allenby (who for some years in the 1990s was director for Energy and Environmental Systems at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, of which more later) assures us that ethics can be incorporated into his system. It can even encompass ‘religion’, while still maintaining the requisite functionality, thereby granting space for a system-compatible God. To reassure those who fear that managing the Earth system must entail ‘centralized control’ or ‘universal mandates’, Allenby is certain that engineering an artificial world can be carried out by the free market. Moreover, he writes, Earth system engineering will embody ‘inclusive dialog among all stakeholders’ and ‘democratic governance’, while at the same time being modelled on ‘highly reliable organizations’ such as a well-run nuclear power plant or an aircraft carrier.

It’s hard to know what to make of this kind of utopian techno-enthusiasm, except to note that it is very prevalent in the geoengineering community, especially in the USA. It drives Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Nathan Myhrvold and a hundred other techno-entrepreneurs whose understanding of the world has been shaped by the peculiar culture of Silicon Valley. Brad Allenby has more recently shifted his position, tempering his dream of Promethean mastery with a strong dose of political conservatism. Now he argues that climate science is disputable (there is a ‘real controversy’ over whether warming is caused by human-induced emissions or changes in solar energy) and that climate scientists do not have the same authority as other scientists. He believes, following standard denialist tropes, that contrarians have been unfairly ‘demonized’ and political polarisation is due, not to the efforts of the merchants of doubt such as ExxonMobil and the Tea Party, but to the ‘strident tone’ of environmentalists. International collaboration won’t work, he believes, but there is little need for it because the prevailing social and economic systems are adapting to climate change (such as it is) ‘remarkably quickly’. No major policy interventions are needed, and that goes for geoengineering too. In short, the system is flexible and its components can adapt to whatever the climate throws at us; the real danger lies in overreacting to the apparent threat. Allenby has joined the small but influential group of ‘luke-warmists’, those who cannot be accused of denying climate science but consistently emphasise the uncertainties, downplay the risks and defend the prevailing order against policies that seem to threaten it.

Other experts with a more clear-eyed view of climate science and its implications are turning their attention to the kind of engineering system that would be needed for managing the solar filter. The Novim Group, a non-profit scientific corporation, identifies five core control variables available for the solar filter or ‘short-wave climate engineering’ (SWCE): the material composition of the aerosol particles, their size and shape, the amount dispersed, the location of dispersal into the stratosphere and the sequencing over time of the injections.

The development of a dynamic multivariate control system – incorporating robust monitoring of climate parameters, maximum intervention flexibility and intervention stability – is therefore an important component of SWCE research. Control-system design should pay particular attention to the likelihood of various climate parameter responses including delays, feedbacks, nonlinearities and instabilities across widely ranging temporal and spatial scales.

Temporarily forgetting just why they are detailing Plan B, the authors add that ‘strategic management’ of greenhouse gas emissions ‘must be considered a central component’ in managing the solar shield. Good luck with that.

The engineers are alert to the fact that installing a planetary thermal control system is not merely a technical problem. They are concerned that unspecified ‘socio-political system failures’ – perhaps climate wars, terrorist attacks, changes of government in the USA and social unrest in China – may lead to ‘unintentional disengagement’ giving rise to ‘transient oscillations in the climate system’. Transient oscillations in the climate system may refer to monsoon failure, but the climate engineers are not too worried because ‘disruptions of varying character and scale are common in comparably large and complex technical and socio-political systems’. What were they thinking of when referring to disruptions to comparably large and complex socio-political systems – the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, the Black Death? Who knows? Even so, any control-system blueprint, they advise, should keep these possibilities firmly in mind.

The Novim experts then canvass the dystopian prospect of ‘counter-climate engineering’ – geoengineering deployed by one nation to undo the effects of geoengineering by another. ‘For example, the deliberate injection of short-lived fluorocarbon greenhouse gases might rapidly offset the regional or global cooling effects of a SWCE intervention.’ (In the case of marine cloud brightening, the fleet of unmanned ships roaming the oceans would be sitting ducks for a disgruntled state.) Any such contest over global weather could be ‘disastrous’, so international governance arrangements should be carefully considered. They finish on an optimistic note, suggesting that ‘once engaged, the maintenance of a SWCE system becomes a permanent bequest to future generations’. A bequest to future generations. Words sometimes fail.

Some of those environmentalists and scientists most acutely aware of the dangers of global warming support geoengineering. Humans have caused such a build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, they argue, that even radical cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions will not be enough. To render the climate tolerably safe we will need to reduce atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million or below from their expected peak at 450 ppm (an extremely optimistic target), 550 ppm (optimistic) or 650 ppm (likely on current trends), remembering that the long-term pre-industrial level was 280 ppm. It’s a powerful argument with the best motives. By endorsing geoengineering their objective is not to find a way of defending the political and economic systems from the threat of climate change, but simply to protect us from calamity.

With their high level of understanding of the complexities of the climate system and the risks of global warming, those who take this position tend to favour early deployment of geoengineering because, even with radical abatement measures, carbon dioxide ‘drawdown’ will be necessary. So the sooner we start deployment of carbon dioxide removal methods the better. They tend to prefer more natural and local kinds of climate engineering such as reforestation and biochar rather than system-altering approaches such as ocean fertilisation (adding nutrients to the oceans to stimulate algal blooms that can suck up carbon dioxide) or a solar filter. The former are slow-acting methods that would require decades to take full effect and would therefore be of no use as a response to a climate emergency.

The grander climate engineering proposals operate on a scale far larger than previous interventions by humans in environmental systems. Nevertheless, some lessons can be learned from prior attempts to manipulate environmental systems. The history of human interventions in complex ecosystems shows that they frequently trigger a burst of unintended effects. In one case, a freshwater shrimp was introduced into a Montana lake in order to augment the food supply of salmon. However, it was not understood that shrimp feed at night, while salmon feed during the day, so instead of the salmon eating the shrimp, the two species competed for the same zooplankton food source. Instead of salmon numbers multiplying they fell, and so did those of the local eagle population that depended on them for food, undoubtedly with flow-on effects elsewhere. The intervention was a kind of ‘ecological roulette’ – spin the wheel and see what happens.

Human interventions have had many successes, but it’s the disasters that we should heed when considering schemes as audacious as some of those proposed by geoengineers. Success depends above all on minimising the chances of unintended consequences, which in turn depends in large measure on limiting the effects to a bounded geographical area. A disaster following an attempt to manipulate the Earth as a whole would render trivial those resulting from the introduction of the beetle-eating cane toad in Queensland and the rat-eating mongoose in Hawaii. In their review of the lessons of biological control, Damon Matthews and Sarah Turner write that this kind of miscalculation would be unlikely today because of our greater understanding of ecological processes, although they recognise that humans are entirely capable of repeating errors even when knowledge of the consequences is readily available. The assumption that humans learn from their blunders is rarely a safe one.

In trying to get a sense of the likelihood of unintended consequences from system-altering geoengineering schemes, the primary lesson from the study of biological interventions is that the risks increase with both the degree of system complexity and the limits to our understanding of those systems. To date, biological interventions have been confined to ecosystems that are bounded in various ways, so the damage is limited. In the case of system-altering climate engineering schemes the local is the global: every major and minor ecosystem process would be changed by sulphate aerosol injection, marine cloud brightening or ocean fertilisation (just as it is by global warming). The complexity of the Earth system is almost inconceivably deep. Even with leaps in understanding over the next decades, a cascade of unanticipated consequences from intervention seems inevitable. And we return to the disconcerting fact that, despite the enormous advances in climate science over the last two to three decades, each advance opens up new areas of uncertainty. While advances in climate science ought to be teaching us to be more humble, advocates of schemes aimed at regulating sunlight or interfering in Earthsystem processes seem to draw the opposite conclusion.

We know that ecosystems behave eccentrically, even ones artificially created for their simplicity. They change rapidly over short time-frames, and often develop over long time-frames in ways we barely understand. While Lowell Wood bullishly proclaims: ‘We’ve engineered every other environment we live in – why not the planet?’, a more humble scientist, Ron Prinn, has asked: ‘How can you engineer a system you don’t understand?’

The Livermore taint

It is striking to realise how many scientists working on geoengineering have either worked at or collaborated with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Cold War nuclear weapons facility outside San Franscisco. The Laboratory was at the centre of the US program to design a range of nuclear warheads and earned a ‘near-mythological status as the dark heart of weapons research’. It was co-founded by Ernest Lawrence, who had received the Nobel Prize for physics, and Edward Teller, soon to become known as a major architect of the Cold War and the most vigorous advocate of the hydrogen bomb.

Weapons researchers came to believe that their technical expertise gave them a privileged role in advising government on nuclear policy. Washington concurred, going so far as to include Livermore scientists in the identification of nuclear targets in the Soviet Union, which is perhaps why the Russians called Livermore ‘the City of Death’. They also had a large role in deciding on the types of weapons to build. One said: ‘If you don’t understand the technology and physical effects of the weapons, then in my view you don’t have the right to an opinion on nuclear policy’.

Among weapons scientists the conviction grew that understanding and exercising control of the technologies was sufficient to render them safe, as if mastery of the technical sphere carried over into the political sphere. Confidence in the technology spilled over into the structures that determined how and when it might be used, reflecting the modern predilection to elevate technical truths over other kinds of truths, so that those who could articulate the former acquired authority to speak.

In the emerging geoengineering field, scientists have assumed a privileged place in advising not merely on technical questions but on governance arrangements, ethical concerns and international negotiations, despite their lack of expertise. There is a view that if you are clever enough to understand atmospheric physics then you are clever enough to grasp the nuances of politics, social change and ethics. As in the nuclear arms race, the allocation of authority to those with scientific expertise reflects the continued privileging of the hyper-rationality of physical science over the kinds of reasoning and knowledge valid in other spheres where the weaknesses of humans and their institutions are recognised and the lessons of history absorbed.

In his study of the Livermore laboratory, sociologist Hugh Gusterson found, contrary to expectations, that weapons scientists at Livermore held a variety of political views, with as many identifying as liberal as conservative. They traversed a range of religious orientations; three even identified as Buddhists. The emerging divide over geoengineering is not principally along a left–right fault-line, or even a pro-environment versus proeconomy split. The divide is between Prometheans and Soterians (named here after the Greek goddess of safety, preservation and deliverance from harm): a technocratic rationalist worldview confident of humanity’s ability to control nature, against a more humble outlook suspicious of unnatural technological solutions and the hubris of mastery projects.

Livermore scientists were not opposed to nuclear arms control treaties, but they were ‘almost unanimously hostile’ towards test bans. There is a similarly strong resistance among geoengineers of the Promethean persuasion to any regulation of research and testing, especially from ‘the UN’. At Livermore, antipathy to test bans was not merely pragmatic. Gusterson divined deeper cultural meaning in testing. The ‘display of the secret knowledge’s power’ imparted a keen sense of community among participants. He read weapons tests as ‘powerful rituals celebrating human command over the secrets of life and death’. Tests were proof that human mastery of dangerous powers could be attained. In the same way we might expect that tests of geoengineering technologies, if they succeed, will persuade those carrying them out that technologies of planetary control can be mastered.

Impossible scale

Nature re-engineered

Science is more than freaks and circuses

Paul Livingston

I hate the Big Bang Theory. It’s not that I have a problem with 13.7-billion-year-old singularities expanding out of nothing in order to produce something like myself. What I’m referring to is the American sitcom named after this creation event. A series that perpetuates and promotes the myth of the scientist as socially awkward, erotically disenfranchised, and one who lives a sad, companionless, blinkered existence.

These ubiquitous representations of universally male, whitecoated, bespectacled geeks portray scientists as beings neither to be admired nor emulated. It should come as no surprise that science literacy has declined in Australian schools. For most students, a climate change model is Miranda Kerr in a swimsuit.

The majority of scientists have never put on a white lab coat. What are they going to do? Spill some think all over themselves? Cogitation is not messy. The Einstein who cogitated the theories that would shake the scientific world was a young patent clerk, not the sockless wild-haired celebrity he would later become.

Not that I’m advocating sexing up science (personally I’m parthenogenetic, I have no need to be fertilised, but that’s another story), but science educators do nothing to help their cause by perpetuating the myths themselves.

Much of science education takes the form of magic shows designed to impress and astound the students. Yet no matter how hard a hyperactive, lab-coated science educator might try, using sodium acetate to create an exothermic crystallisation in the shape of a pagoda is no match for a professional conjuror sawing a woman in half or converting a silk hanky into a Bengal tiger.

Entertainment beats science hands down. So how else to lure young minds into a life of cognitive enquiry?

The answer is not in ‘educational games’. Children can sniff out subliminal science in a second. They really couldn’t care less if their balloon-powered race car proves Newton’s three laws of motion eloquently. The fact that a body continues to maintain its state of rest unless acted upon by an external unbalanced force does nothing to stem the tears if your balloon car comes last.

Dogma insertion is not the answer. Religious educators have adapted this ploy in the hope of tempting young minds to their cause with startlingly incongruous results. Look no further than the Text Message Bible:

Wrk hard at wateva u do. U will soon go 2 da wrld of da dead, where no 1 wrks or thinks or reasons or knws NEting (Ecclesiastes 9:10)

How cool is that? Mostly un.

I was disappointed to hear a discussion on ABC Radio ridiculing the idea of a transit of Venus app, which allowed you to track the 2012 transit on your mobile phone. The app connected to a live webcast of the transit. When Venus touched the edge of the sun, the app recorded the moment and the user’s location before sending the data to a global database.

Why demean this initiative? Surely observing a major oncein-a-lifetime cosmological event in real time is preferable to numbing the mind with Angry Birds, or DeathSpank, or And Yet It Moves? (actually, And Yet It Moves is pretty cool).

Even the extraordinary subjects of science are themselves demeaned. In a bid to draw children to the Deep Oceans exhibition at the Australian Museum in Sydney, children were encouraged to ‘follow Mr Blobby on Facebook’. Mr Blobby was described as ‘a jolly little psychrolutid’. Admittedly, Mr Blobby does resemble Peter Sterling after a sauna, but this does not give one the right to belittle any member of the order Scorpaeniformes.

Would Stephen Hawking have caught the public eye with such voracity had he not suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis? Are freaks and circuses all science can offer?

Changing ingrained attitudes will not be easy. Perhaps science could emulate the arts when it comes to enhancing its image; artists are renowned for their liaisons with various partners and muses. Yet Toulouse-Lautrec was no George Clooney, and that Mona Lisa, she’s no oil painting.

There is no doubt science can be intimidating to the novice. So a softly-softly approach is advised. Here are a few points to keep in mind when teaching science to the uninitiated:

Thorium is not a character from World of Warcraft III.

Parallax will not cure a headache.

A brown dwarf is not funny.

Solar flares were not worn in the seventies.

Igneous rock is not something you can dance to.

A charged particle usually gets off scot-free.

A Kuiper belt will not keep your pants up.

Kelvin is not the first name of a former prime minister.

Rectinol will not cure asteroids.

Shoemaker-Levy is not a Jewish cobbler.

Niels Bohr was actually quite engaging.

And a Van Der Graaf generator is not a machine for producing Swedish backpacker clones.

Circuses

Quantum cats

Animals on drugs

Rhianna Boyle

From the 1940s until the 1960s, a pregnancy-test kit did not consist of a sterile white stick bought from the chemist, but of a fat, spotted amphibian called the South African clawed frog. As with the modern test kits that superseded them, the frogs were used to test women’s urine. Thankfully, this did not involve holding a frog midstream in the toilet bowl.

Instead, these ‘pharmaceutical frogs’ were kept in hospital laboratories and pharmacies. The test involved injecting the urine into the frog’s lymph sacs. If the frog laid eggs within 12–18 hours, this meant that the woman was pregnant. Frogs’ eggs are externally fertilised, so without a male around to do the honours, the female frog would never see her eggs hatch. Presumably, the whole experience left her feeling quite pissed-off, as well as pissed on.

This procedure was called the Hogben test, after Lancelot Hogben, the biologist who invented it. Testing facilities were required to either breed their own frogs, or have them crated in from Africa, where they were readily harvested from the wild. Most chose the latter, which led to a substantial pregnancy-testfrog export industry in southern Africa. In 2004, the global frog trade was identified as the probable transmitter of the chytrid fungus, a skin-eating organism that had been mysteriously killing off native frog species all over the world. But that’s another story.

The tale of the Hogben test is interesting because it shows how, despite the vastly different ways that animals’ bodies have evolved from those of their common ancestors, when it comes to our hormones, evolution has taken the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ approach. Hormones work like a lock and key, where the hormone molecule physically fits into its receptor in the body, triggering a reaction. In the Hobgen test, our human hormone ‘key’ fits into the frogs’ receptor ‘lock’, triggering ovulation.

Therapeutic hormone treatments work on the same principle. The similarity of hormones produced across the animal kingdom is the reason diabetics could at one time inject themselves with insulin extracted from the pancreases of cattle and pigs, and also why the contraceptive pill once contained hormones harvested from horse urine.

Not all hormones are the same across species. This is why growth hormones, before they could be produced artificially, were not sourced from animals but from human cadavers. In general, though, the hormones that affect our bodies are close cousins to those that affect the bodies of other animals, right down to creatures as different from us as shellfish and crustaceans.

The shared chemistry of animal bodies means that we are affected not only by the same hormones, but also by the same drugs. And there is growing evidence to suggest that this may be a source of grief for many aquatic creatures.

Excess molecules of the drugs we take ultimately end up in our urine, or are excreted through our skins and washed down the plughole. Unfortunately, sewage treatment plants are not effective at removing all contaminants from raw sewage, and many waterways have detectable quantities of pharmaceuticals flowing down them.

In fact, considering the range of pharmaceuticals present in some of the world’s rivers and oceans, the healing waters at Lourdes pale in comparison. Tests of waterways in developed parts of the world have detected (amongst other things): analgesics, antibiotics, anti-epileptic drugs, anti-inflammatories, antihistamines, beta-blockers, cholesterol-regulating drugs, codeine, diuretics and paracetamol.

If you’re an allergy-prone, epileptic crustacean with high cholesterol, you’re set. Otherwise, you could be spending your life soaking in drugs that have a decidedly less-than-therapeutic effect. Of course, just because these drugs are present, doesn’t mean that they are necessarily harmful. The impact of a drug depends on the dose. But while research into pharmaceutical pollution is a relatively new field, the potential effects are enough to make scientists anxious.

For aquatic animals, it’s a depressing thought. So perhaps it’s just as well that the most commonly detected pharmaceuticals in our waterways are antidepressants. One kind of antidepressant is a compound called fluoxetine, which is the main ingredient in Prozac. And one animal that might be exposed to fluoxetine is a miniature saltwater crustacean called an amphipod.

To find out what might happen to wild amphipods that find themselves swimming in Prozac soup, some scientists at the University of Portsmouth raised amphipods in water containing various concentrations of fluoxetine. What happened was that the dosed-up amphipods stopped lurking in the dark corners of their tanks, as amphipods habitually do. Instead, as the researchers deftly put it, the animals ‘saw the light’, and swarmed towards it.

It’s tempting to imagine, anthropomorphically, that after a few weeks on the medication, the amphipods began to experience an improved mood, and realised that what had been holding them back in life was fear – their fear of being eaten by predators. Maybe, with their new-found self-confidence and a few affirmations, they realised it was self-defeating to spend their lives hiding at the dark bottom of the water column. Instead, perhaps, they decided to live in the moment and swim on the surface of the water.

Unfortunately, in the wild, a stray, self-actualised amphipod on the water’s surface would immediately be eaten by a fish. And while it wouldn’t be at all anthropomorphic to say that this would make the fish very happy indeed, it could cause some serious problems for amphipod populations.

Prozac works in humans because it affects the way the body processes a neurotransmitter, or chemical messenger, called serotonin. Crustaceans also have serotonin, but our different evolutionary paths have used the same neurotransmitter for different ends.

In crustaceans, it is used to control both movement in escape responses, and breeding behavior. It seems that by interfering with amphipod serotonin levels, fluoxetine is either making them ‘escape’ towards the surface without provocation, or sending them upwards looking for sex.

In other animals, serotonin controls reproduction, and it has been found to increase the fertility of both zebra mussels and a group of miniature crustaceans called Daphnia. However, just as humans are advised not to mix medications, other experiments on Daphnia have shown that mixing Prozac and pesticides can be risky. When exposed to both fluoxetine and the herbicide clofibric acid, which is also found in polluted water, these crustaceans developed serious malformations of the shell, antennae and tail spines.

It’s not just Prozac causing problems. In 1994, intersex trout began to turn up in trout populations downstream of sewage outfalls in English rivers. These populations also contained a much higher than average proportion of females. Scientists eventually identified oestrogen hormone pollution as the cause. Since then, oestrogens in the environment have also been shown, amongst other things, to have similar effects on some frogs; to skew the sex ratio of amphipod populations in favour of females; and to affect the larval development of barnacles.

In 2009, the Vatican released a statement condemning the release of contraceptive pill hormones into the water through human female urine, and blaming male infertility in the Western world on the pill. And while oral contraceptives are a significant source of hormone pollution, to be consistent the Vatican may have to consider adding the following to their list of sinful practices: washing the dishes, eating yoghurt, going boating, being a woman, being a man, and being a cow.

Dairy cows are an equally significant source of endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Cows naturally produce large quantities of oestrogens and progesterone, the female pregnancy hormone, which go directly into the soil through their urine and faeces, and eventually find their way into waterways.

And while cows produce the bulk of natural endocrine-disrupting hormones, we can’t excuse ourselves. Our own bodies also produce these hormones. Oestrogen has a reputation as a female hormone, but while reproductive-age women have the highest levels, men also produce estrogen – about the same amount as non-reproductive women. The Pope himself contributes a small amount of oestrogen pollution.

Bizarrely, some industrial chemicals are similar enough to hormones to cause problems. These substances, known as xenoestrogens, are found in certain plastics, detergents, and pesticides. Some xenoestrogens mimic male hormones. Tributyltin, a substance that is applied to the surface of boats to prevent algal growth, makes some female shellfish develop a great big gonopodium. Which, as you may have guessed, is a shellfish penis.

It’s not only our fellow animals that are at risk from endocrine disruption. Tests of sex hormones on plants have shown that some species are vulnerable to the effects of oestrogens. The growth of alfalfa, for instance, is reduced by oestrogens, while both male hormones and progesterone increase the growth of wheat plants. Oestrogens, on the other hand, cause abnormal structural development in broad bean, tomato, wheat and lettuce plants.

While these effects occur at concentrations of hormones much higher than those currently found in the environment, there is some irony in the fact that our hormones are affecting plants. Most readers have probably heard about the benefits of soy products for menopausal women. Plants such as soy contain phytoestrogens, which are similar enough to human-produced oestrogens to relieve symptoms caused by falling oestrogen levels in the body.

However, current thinking is that plants do not produce these uncannily human hormones as a helpful, selfless hot-flush remedy. Rather, experiments on both mammals and birds have shown that phytoestrogens are plants’ way of offering pesky herbivores a contraceptive-laced snack, as a way of keeping our numbers down. This was dramatically demonstrated in China during the 1930s and ’40s, when regions of Jiangsu province switched to phytoestrogen-rich cottonseed oil as a staple food – and watched their birth rate drop to zero. It seems that eating large quantities of oestrogen really messes with male fertility.

The many illegal drugs derived from plants are also believed to be weapons in the vegetable kingdom’s passive–aggressive arsenal. For example, the compounds in opium poppies may have evolved to make herbivores inclined to wander fearlessly into open spaces, where they can be picked off and eaten. That our species can currently indulge without being cleaned up by wolves may be a point for us on the great evolutionary scoreboard, but tests for illegal drugs in our waterways suggest plants may still have the last laugh.

Last year, Spanish scientists tested the water of the Llobregat River and found traces of cocaine and amphetamines. In 2008, tests of a Welsh waterway showed that the load of both these drugs skyrocketed in July, which suggests the locals may have been partying hard during their Northern Hemisphere summer. And just as being exposed to a cocktail of therapeutic drugs is unlikely to improve the health of aquatic animals, there is also reason to suspect that our mollusc and crustacean friends do not necessarily enjoy getting inadvertently wasted.

So far, it appears no one has tested for the effects of cocaine or amphetamines on aquatic animals, but it might be useful to consider a notorious experiment conducted by NASA in 1995. It seems that the brains at NASA, having already massively benefitted humankind by jabbing an American flag into the topsoil of the moon, decided it was time to do something even more useful. The obvious choice was to get hold of a lot of drugs and test them on spiders to see how this affected their ability to construct webs.

This experiment, apparently designed to see if spiders could be used in toxicity tests, was a repeat of a similar study done in the 1940s. It showed that animals could indeed be affected by our illicit drugs. While spiders on LSD and mescaline produced approximately normal webs, those on marijuana and the sleeping tablet chloral hydrate were unable to finish theirs. Spiders on speed worked very rapidly, but left large gaps in the structure.

Perhaps part of the reason this experiment has found a place in popular culture has something to do with its widely quoted punchline. While the webs of spiders on most of the drugs retained a semblance of normal structure, one drug produced webs so asymmetrical and eccentric that they would barely have been functional. That drug was caffeine.

Just as phytoestrogens are not produced for human benefit, so plants do not generously produce caffeine to help sophisticated urban dwellers kickstart their mornings. Caffeine is believed to have evolved as a natural pesticide. And while it is effectively metabolised by the human body, and therefore not peed out like other drugs, some caffeine does find its way into waterways, possibly through being tipped down the sink, or when cups are washed.

What would the South African clawed frogs make of all this? Modern medicine has come a long way. The frogs have retired from their busy lives of international travel and being injected with human piss. Perhaps now they can sit back and relax with their girlfriends – of which they will have many more now that endocrine disrupters have feminised the species – and enjoy swimming in waterways that human beings have thoughtfully laced with a sophisticated coffee-pharmaceutical blend.

Aquatic lifestyles

Going, going, gone

Dreamtime cave

Elizabeth Finkel

A small Aboriginal woman peers through the microscope at the sliver of rock. Perched precariously on a stool, her feet barely touch the ground. ‘Do you want us to go on, Auntie?’ asks archaeologist Bruno David. ‘Yes,’ she says emphatically in a low quiet voice. ‘I want my grandchildren to know about our culture.’

It’s an unusual gathering for the archaeology lab at Melbourne’s Monash University. ‘Auntie’ is Margaret Katherine, an elder of the Jawoyn people; David is the lab’s co-director. Then there is carbon-dating expert Fiona Petchey from New Zealand’s University of Waikato, archaeologist Mark Eccleston – with his shiny steel X-ray fluorescence gun – from Aboriginal Affairs Victoria, plus documentary film-makers Bentley Dean and Martin Butler, and me.

We are all focused on Margaret Katherine, whose attention is on a triangular piece of quartzite measuring close to 4 centimetres across its greatest length. Under the microscope its treasure becomes clear: a very finely painted black cross whose lines seem to continue beyond the edges, as if it were part of a larger image. The black pigment is charcoal, meaning it might be possible to scrape off a tiny bit to carbon-date the miniature painting. This is an extraordinary artefact, recovered by David’s colleague Bryce Barker from the University of Southern Queensland during a recent dig of the floor of Gabarnmung cave.

Gabarnmung has been rewriting world pre-history since its 2006 ‘rediscovery’ by the Jawoyn. The cave is perched on a sandstone escarpment high in southwestern Arnhem Land, east of Darwin. Arnhem Land is wholly owned by Aboriginal tribes and much of the escarpment lies within the 50 000 square kilometres ancestral lands of the 600-member-strong Jawoyn. The escarpment’s unusually hard quartzite rock is the canvas for one of the world’s most spectacular collections of rock art – an archaeologist’s utopia, its diverse styles preserve a sequential record of a people who have occupied this landscape for more than 50 000 years.

Much remains to be learned about this art. Archaeologists are uncertain about the age of the paintings and their precise meanings. It’s safe to say some tell stories of the Dreamtime – the Aboriginal telling of the creation of the world – and also serve to mark clan territories, since different clans recognise different spirit-beings.

‘We know this from what Aboriginal elders have told anthropologists over the last 100 years,’ says David.

Others may simply be works of art – expressions of the quintessential human urge to leave one’s mark. Tens of thousands of years ago, Margaret Katherine’s ancestors, nicely sheltered from the rain and wind, would have been cooking a meal on the floor of Gabarnmung and, no doubt, occasionally gazing up at the art work on the ceiling. Some of the art was old, even then, and a fragment broke off, landing on the ground to become buried by the cave’s fine dust, rich in charcoal soot. But ever so slowly, at a rate of centimetres per millennia. Elsewhere, in the lowlands, artefacts are buried at a rate of metres per millennia.

In mid-2011, six months prior to the Monash University gathering, Barker fished that fragment out of an excavation trench just 50 centimetres below the floor of the cave. When he had wiped off the dust to reveal the black cross, he realised he was holding archaeological gold. Now it’s hoped that a tiny bit of the pigment can be extracted from the painted cross in an attempt to get a carbon date. The process will partly destroy the tiny painting but, for Margaret Katherine, it will be worth it.

A lot is riding on this little rock art fragment. It’s clearly very important for Margaret Katherine and the rest of her people. Science is helping the Jawoyn flesh out their deep history. In the few months of seasonal digging at the cave, which commenced in May 2010, the international team headed by David has made extraordinary finds. ‘We are rewriting human prehistory,’ Ian McNiven, a Monash University archaeologist and team member, told me.

David has assembled an illustrious team. As well as the Australians and New Zealander, there is a French contingent headed by Jean-Michel Geneste, from the Université de Bordeaux 1. Geneste is curator of France’s national treasure, the prehistoric Lascaux Cave. He also directs the international research program at Chauvet Cave, where dynamic charcoal paintings of ponies, rhinos, bison and lions evoke the technical mastery of a Japanese brushstroke artist. Human eyes had not viewed this labyrinthine gallery for tens of thousands of years until 1992 when a trio of cavers felt an updraft in the cliffs of the Ardèche river canyon in southern France, and lowered themselves in. A steel door now protects the cave from the public and each year only a handful of researchers may enter, under Geneste’s direction. Among Chauvet’s treasures is the world’s oldest known painting, depicting two battling rhinoceroses. Tiny scrapes of charcoal pigment gave it a carbon date of 36 000 years old.

But people lived at Gabarnmung for thousands of years before Chauvet was occupied: charcoal deposited above the very bottom layers of the Arnhem Land cave has been carbon-dated at 48 000 years old. For Europeans this is the stuff of pre-history; they have no direct connection to this era. Not so for the Jawoyn. The paintings, tools, spears, ochre-anointed skulls and bones, are their history.

The 2010 dig at Gabarnmung also unearthed a piece of a basaltic stone axe 4 centimetres long and 2.5 centimetres wide, lying about 50 centimetres below the cave floor. It was not so startling to find a stone axe. Ancient people have been smashing two rocks together to produce stone tools for more than two million years. What was different about this axe was that someone had sat down with a stone and skilfully ground it until a sharp edge was made. Under the microscope the parallel striations wrought by the patient toolmaker are evident. Stone toolmaking was, like writing, one of those technological milestones that evolved independently in different civilisations. But the Gabarnmung axe supports evidence that it was people in Eastern Asia, New Guinea and Australia who got there first. Throughout Australasia ground axes are found at ages greater than 20 000 years; in Europe, Africa and West Asia, the oldest ground axes are 8000– 9000 years old.

Perhaps the Gabarnmung axe was used to chop pieces of goanna for the cooking fire. When its owner left the cave for the season, the axe must have slipped into the charcoals – the same charcoal now carbon-dated to 35 500 years old. This is a very, very old ground axe – older than ancient ground axes previously found in New Guinea, China or Japan. It is, in fact – for now – the world’s oldest ground axe. The Jawoyn ancestors were the innovators of their time.

In 2011, returning to the Gabarnmung dig in July – after that time it becomes impossibly hot or impossibly wet – the archaeologists excavated a trench on the opposite side of the cave and unearthed the painted rock fragment we’re now looking at in the Monash Uni lab. The charcoal layers which bookended it have been dated at 20 000–30 000 years old. Geneste, who knows a thing or two about ancient rock art – having spent 15 years dating the charcoal pigments at Chauvet Cave – thinks it might be something very special. The Chauvet rhinoceroses are, so far, the world’s oldest record of modern human beings ‘socialising their environment’, Geneste explains. But he suspects some of the Gabarnmung art is likely to be just as old, probably older.

For the Jawoyn, putting scientific flesh on the bones of their ancestral beliefs – their Dreamtime – is compelling. Like elders of every culture, they are consumed by the responsibility to pass their knowledge to the next generation. The Jawoyn Association – established in 1985 to develop unity and economic independence for the Jawoyn – is one of Australia’s most successful Indigenous business operations. Even so, this next generation is at risk. The remaining holders of traditional knowledge – fractured and fading as it is – are few and dying. And the Jawoyn youth still run the gauntlet of ills that beset all marginalised Aboriginal communities – drugs, alcohol, violence and the easy slide into welfare dependence. Community leaders believe science will help form a bridge for the next generation, helping connect the ancestral Dreamtime to modern times and, in the process, nurture self-esteem and ambition. ‘We want our kids to grow up to be archaeologists, geologists, helicopter pilots,’ says the Jawoyn Association’s CEO, Preston Lee.

And if science can offer something to the Jawoyn, the Jawoyn have something to offer science. Geneste explains by phone from his 300-year-old stone cottage in the south of France: ‘We don’t have anyone to explain Chauvet Cave to us. In France, these are sites with no memory, no life. With Gabarnmung, we are lucky. There is the living culture, the memories. The Jawoyn can help us build a new knowledge.’

Geneste offers an example: ‘We found a kangaroo mandible covered in ochre and showed it to Margaret. The next morning she said, “I remember now. It was a tradition when a young hunter killed his first game. He wrapped it in paper bark, put it in a cave and preserved it under the authority of an Auntie.” Together we are finding out things about their history.’

* * * * *

Helicopter pilots are well-regarded by the Jawoyn community. Indeed, if it were not for helicopter pilots, Gabarnmung would be just another cave of forgotten dreams. In 2006, pilot Chris Morgan was flying his chopper across the sandstone escarpment. Next to him sat sandy-haired, easy-going Ray Whear dressed in grungy shorts and a T-shirt, one of the Northern Territory’s most successful businessmen, who now manages the cultural and environmental affairs of the Jawoyn Association.

The chopper roared as Whear trained his eyes on a landscape seemingly untouched by European contact. He saw the sparkling Katherine River snaking through the broken brown plain below and the great pale-green expanse of savannah woodlands. But what he and Morgan were really interested in were the rocky outcrops that dotted the landscape. They were returning from a bushfire management meeting and had decided to indulge one of their favourite pastimes – rock-art spotting. The clue, says Whear, is the shine on the rocks. It might mean lots of human bottoms have graced them, perhaps for a ceremony involving art. Whear and Morgan have had some spectacular finds – like an ochre painting of Genyornis, a giant flightless bird that’s been extinct for 45 000 years. Could the painting itself be that old? So far, there has been no way to date it.

This time, Whear and Morgan once again spotted some rock shine. They zeroed in to find their chopper face-to-face with six top-hatted gentlemen gazing at them from the deck of a clipper ship. The metre-high white ochre painting formed part of a gallery of sailing boats, barramundi, emu, yam figures, dynamic figures, X-ray kangaroos and crocodiles, rainbow serpents and the now extinct Tasmanian tiger! But the real prize awaited them. Back in the chopper they trained their eyes on the surrounding area and some 5 kilometres away noticed an unusually large rock shelter. They landed and walked into one of the richest collections of Aboriginal art ever found. Like the Sistine Chapel, the ceiling of the expansive rock shelter was a mural of breathtakingly vivid and bold works of art – hundreds of them. And the paintings extended up and down 36 remarkable sandstone columns that, like the pillars of a temple, appeared to support the cave.

When they returned with two elders, Wamud Namok and Jimmy Kalariyya, it was an emotional moment. The elders remembered visiting the site as children, that its name was Nawarla Gabarnmung – meaning ‘hole in the rock’ – and that its traditional owners were a Jawoyn clan called the Buyhmi. Margaret Katherine is a Buyhmi elder and it was her decision in 2010 to invite a team of international archaeologists and rock art experts to explore the cave. The first invitation went to Bruno David. His reputation had preceded him, particularly his sensitive work with communities in Cape York and the Torres Strait islands.

I met David in October 2011 during a tour of the Gabarnmung cave when I was privileged to join a select handful of visitors who have so far had that honour. David has an adventurous, athletic look. He wears hiking gear, is of medium athletic build, has slightly receding long dark curly hair, olive skin and luminous blue-green eyes. I’m guessing 40-something. His accent is hard to pick. It turns out to be highly eroded French, but you’d be hardpressed to figure out his nationality. David could be a native of many places.

What strikes you most about him is his gentleness. It’s no surprise that Margaret Katherine invited him. She has given him and his two-year-old son ‘skin’ names – part of her people’s social structure – and he calls her ‘Auntie’, a mark of respect. David’s connection with the Jawoyn is clearly more than just academic.

Geneste has also been given a skin name. ‘More and more it’s not just fieldwork,’ he says. ‘We have conversations around the fireside, at camp, in the early morning and before we go to sleep. The exchange of worlds is happening.’

But it was not always so. Archaeologists and Aboriginal communities have a troubled history. The late 1960s saw remarkable discoveries of skeletons dating back 30 000 years or more that told the story of the ancient colonisation of Australia. There was also evidence of the world’s first ceremonial burial with an ochredaubed 30 000-year-old skeleton unearthed in Lake Mungo, 760 kilometres west of Sydney. These were archaeological treasures, but also the remains of ancestors. The Aboriginal custodians demanded reburial and with it buried much of Australian archaeology for the next couple of decades. Australian archaeologists went off to Egypt and other places to ply their trade. Now, very carefully they are making their way back, cautiously awaiting invitations to collaborate with traditional owners.

At the airport, en route to Darwin, I discuss Aboriginal art with David and he takes me straight to the heart of the matter. I don’t get some detached academic description of technique or style. ‘Country is one of the most powerful notions,’ he says. ‘We don’t talk about time; we talk about place. The connection with ancestors is unbroken.’ I begin to understand: the painted rocks and caves, indeed the entire landscape, is a timeless stage where the veil between present and past is drawn back.

For all David’s empathy, he is also a very hard-nosed scientist. Indeed, to survive in archaeology, he has to be. All science is brutal – ‘organised scepticism’ – some say. But archaeologists are positively gladiatorial when it comes to challenging each other. Whether their findings stand or fall often depends on how meticulously they can measure the age of the material they find. ‘We don’t want anything iffy,’ David says.

* * * * *

A Google search reveals claims for Australian rock art being up to 40 000 years old. But as Geneste tells me, ‘This represents the philosophical divide; art is art and science is science.’ Art experts might be a little fast and free with their dates but even the scientific dates leave some doubt. It’s hard to carbon-date very old paintings because pigments in organic material, such as beeswax or charcoal, usually don’t last – unless they are entombed in a dark sealed cave like those at Chauvet. (Carbon-dating can only be used to date substances that were once alive since it measures the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12, a ratio that declines once an organism dies.) Ochres endure but don’t carry organic material, so they can’t be carbon-dated. Hence indirect methods have been used which do tend to be iffy. For instance, a piece of ochre-coated rock was found in the charcoals of a fire site in Carpenter’s Gap in the Kimberley region of Australia’s northwest. Those charcoals gave a date of close to 40 000 years. But was the ochre on the rock really the remains of a painting or a natural mineral deposit? ‘Unless you have an image, you can’t be sure,’ says David.

Mud wasps offer another means of dating rock art. Wasps have a penchant for building their nests in the same rock shelters favoured by Indigenous artists and often plaster them right on top of the paintings. Sometimes those nests are extremely old, so old they have become fossilised.

In 1997 Bert Roberts, now at the University of Wollongong, pioneered a method for dating the individual grains of sand buried in ancient wasp nests known as OSL (optically stimulated luminescence). In the darkness of the nest, electrons in the sand grains, nudged by background radiation, become entrapped in the sand grain’s quartz crystal lattice. The longer they are buried, the more electrons are trapped. Roberts plucks these buried sand grains from the wasp nest at night with the help of a red-light torch. Back at his lab, he places the individual grains in a photon counter and zaps them with light, freeing the trapped electrons. The number of photons released equates to the number of years elapsed since the wasp first entombed the sand grain in her nest. So the painting underneath the nest must be even older. In 1997, in a paper published in Nature, Roberts used the technique to date a mulberry-ochre-coloured human stick-figure at King Edward River Crossing in the Kimberley region of northwest Australia. He reported a date of at least 17 000 years. Most archaeologists accept it as the oldest date for Australian rock art, though there are still reservations – even from Roberts himself.

That’s why the painted fragment from the floor of the Gabarnmung cave is causing so much excitement. There is a clear image. ‘No one doubts that it’s a piece of a painting,’ says David. It is very finely drawn. It could even be part of a ‘dynamic figure’ – the local stick-figure style that resembles Kimberley art styles like the Bradshaw Paintings. Says Roberts, ‘When it comes to getting dates, the below ground evidence [referring to the buried art fragment] may be better than what’s above.’

The dark pigment itself is charcoal – and because it has lain in the ground for thousands of years, it is possibly as well-preserved as the charcoal pigment that inscribes the rhinoceros at Chauvet Cave. A mere pinpoint of charcoal was required to get the date on that rhino. Perhaps a mere pinpoint of charcoal will also suffice from the Gabarnmung fragment?

Unfortunately, it’s rarely so easy. There are many pitfalls waiting to ensnare the archaeologist who dares to date rock art. And David is determined not to be ensnared. His meticulousness is on full display here in the Monash lab. Here I witness meticulousness on steroids.

One possible pitfall is that when carbon-dating expert Fiona Petchey scrapes the charcoal pigment from the rock she will also take off microbes that have grown there. Microbes make organic compounds, such as calcium oxalate, that will corrupt the true carbon date of the charcoal pigment. That’s why colleague Mark Eccleston has brought along his X-ray fluorescence gun. It can detect the calcium from calcium oxalates.

Eccleston trains the shiny steel gun just above the rock fragment. For a minute or so, two red lights flicker around its barrel as if contemplating the object below. They stop and the gun delivers a verdict. There is a miniscule amount of calcium: 108 parts per million. ‘At first look, it seems there is nothing to worry about,’ David explains. Margaret Katherine says, ‘I’m so excited. I respect my country. That’s why I want you to find out how many generations ago people did this painting.’

The excitement builds. Petchey in her white lab coat now sits on the lab stool peering down at the rock fragment under the microscope. She holds a scalpel and starts to peck at the black cross decorating the rock surface. We all watch silently. More pecking and some halting, doubtful comments from Petchey … It seems we have an anticlimax.

Petchey ceases her pecking. She says, unfortunately, that she simply cannot scrape off the pigment as it is too solidly bound to the rock. She asks if she may take the fragment to Waikato University so that the specialist chemist there can extract the pigment in the lab. They may be able to combust the dark pigment and test that it is indeed charcoal. If that fails, they might also try to get a date on the charcoal residue that dusts the upper surface of the rock. Margaret Katherine gives her permission.

Epilogue

I called David for an update on the rock fragment. He had just received the raw data. They could not extract enough of the pigment that had painted the cross for analysis. But they had been able to date the charcoal dusting the back of the painting. It was 28 000 years old. The tiny painting had not won the big prize, the one that would put it on the cover of Nature or Science. Chauvet’s rhinoceros still rules. But 28 000 years, David points out, is still the oldest scientifically established date for an Australian painting, although the finding has yet to enter the gladiatorial arena of peer review and publication.

But it’s not the end of the story. Digging at Gabarnmung has just begun. Says Geneste, ‘I think there could be artwork as old or older than Chauvet’. For the next dig David will also be bringing in Bert Roberts who, in the 1990s, together with the late Rhys Jones, identified Australia’s oldest sites of human habitation just tens of kilometres away: Nauwalabila and Malakunanja II rock shelters. Those ages came in at 50 000 to 55 000 years. At Gabarnmung, Roberts will measure the date of individual quartz grains that were buried together with the painted rock fragment. He told me, ‘I’ve been waiting 20 years to get back to that region. This is where all the action is happening’.

Art

Past lives

Unique places

Heart dissection

Ian Gibbins

1. Cardiac Output

Circularity: at least a working definition,

approximating squared radii, right angles

cubed, beveled off, transformed to flows,

pulsing like the seasons, like the muscles

of sea-birds migrating the length of the earth.

Meanwhile, our unreefed, unerased futures,

gather round architectural drawings, replete

with promises of a new roof over our heads,

a view away from fire-scarred hills towards

the coastal verge, towards each change in

pressure, each not-quite-timely reminder,

that enlivens our inexplicably recurrent past.

2. Conducting System

Through reciprocating harmonic series,

I gladly give to you:

bundles of hopeful predilection,

woven cords of neighbourliness,

rows of intercalated desire,

the trigger-happy rush of escape,

bands of enthusiastic light and dark,

a perfect cup of tea,

your waiting next of kin.

3. Septum

On the other side,

there is a tangible sense of barely sullied air.

On the other side,

the observable spectrum shifts to markedly longer wavelengths.

On the other side,

expectation matches the potential for renewal.

On the other side,

strange attractors let loose magnificent unrehearsed adventure.

4. Venous Return

We travelled to Jupiter, circled

Galileo’s moons (Io and Europa,

Ganymede, Callisto) swirling,

roiling, like the mighty Red Spot,

three thousand million feet below.

We navigated vast oceans, tacked

from meridian to meridian. Boldly

indifferent to seductive doldrums or

looming sub-equatorial storms, we

snared luscious, fat-lipped, coral trout.

We crossed the Great Sandy Desert,

the Gobi, the Sahara, dug for water,

for evidence, a lasting trace, for ancestors,

lobe-finned, ephemeral, and beside them,

settled under arid counter-paned skies.

Now we relax around campfires,

embers cool, ironwood smoking

ghosts, exchanging natural histories,

as seas fall calm and planets sink

beneath far-off indigo mountains.

Can we delineate the conditions

that bring us here? Can we hope to

calibrate our co-ordinates, to specify

the sum of our explorations, the grand

total of our arrivals, our departures?

Behind us, again, the subtle force

to move on, just a feint, just a gentle

nudge in the back. So we do, so we do,

until once more beyond our zenith,

we track the tumbling moons of Jupiter.

Palpitations

Matters cosmic

Reaching one thousand

Rachel Robertson

I have often admired the mystical way of Pythagoras, and the secret magic of numbers. – Sir Thomas Browne

Although my mother was a gifted and successful mathematician, it never crossed my mind that I would follow in her footsteps. From an early age, I had a clear sense that I was in some way fundamentally different from both of my parents and that mathematical ability was one of the key markers of this difference. As a child I felt as though I was outside an invisibly marked space and was without knowledge of the key that would permit me to enter it. I felt that at least two of my siblings had the ability to slip in and out of this place, because at times they seemed to understand what my parents meant. Of course, I understood the words my parents spoke, but it seemed that the unspoken meanings were lost on me. As I became older and more critical, I began to realise that my parents weren’t ‘ordinary’. My difference from them became a matter of being ordinary, not odd. Right into my twenties, I naïvely held on to this dichotomy of odd versus ordinary, mathematical versus non-mathematical, and (perhaps without really realising it) intelligent (them) versus stupid (me). Even after I moved on from this simplistic view, mathematics still functioned as the symbol of my difference from my parents.

And then I had Ben.

* * * * *

‘You need to deal with his stimming now, before it gets worse.’ The psychologist was young and definite.

I wanted to say: don’t tell me what to do. Instead, I said, ‘We don’t use the terms “stimming” or “obsession”. We think of numbers as a strong interest of Ben’s.’

‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘But would you say that Ben’s interest in numbers is preventing him being interested in other things, in people, in learning other games and so on?’

‘He’s not interested in other things, no.’

‘So …’ I could hear a slight triumph in her tone and felt sure she didn’t like me much. ‘Let’s talk about how we can reduce the number obs– interest.’

This was when she explained our options: extinguishment, quarantine or integration. It didn’t seem to strike her that the words themselves made this seem like a punishment. The choices boiled down to: forbid Ben access to numbers (how, I wondered?); limit his access; or turn his interest into something more ‘functional’. The thing was that I agreed with her, but I couldn’t bear to remove from Ben his lifeblood, the only meaningful thing in his world.

‘But numbers aren’t meaningful, are they?’ she said.

* * * * *

Overheard, one sister talking to another:

‘I know, I do exactly the same. I count the steps of every stairway; I count every slice I make when I cut up a banana; I always notice car number plates and bus numbers. I’ve always done it.’

* * * * *

One of our delights as children was to play with five boxes of buttons my mother kept in her sewing cupboard. They were mostly old chocolate boxes made of tin with pictures of fluffy cats and idealised dogs on them. Each one was full of buttons that we could tip onto the floor. The five boxes were graduated by size, which corresponded to the size of the buttons inside. The largest box contained the largest buttons and so on. I liked the smallest, a white cardboard box with flowers on it that still smelt faintly of something sweet and slightly exotic – vanilla perhaps. In this box there was a cute ladybird button, a brass squirrel and several transparent buttons that were curled up into cylinders like people did with their tongues for fun. These were my favourites. I loved the feel of the buttons running through my fingers when I tipped them from hand to hand or placed them inside their square white home.

It was a surprise to see the button boxes again one day when Ben and I visited my mother. I hadn’t realised she had kept them.

‘Children love buttons,’ said my mother. She was right; even Ben got interested in them. He was four years old at the time and we were struggling to find anything that would amuse him. He certainly didn’t play like other children. But the buttons were perfect for him, because he could lay them out on the rug, grouping them by size or colour and matching any that looked the same. He understood the size distinctions, too. He even made my mother label each box with a number, so that the largest buttons were in box one and the smallest in box five. Strangely, he too liked the transparent tongue-curl buttons best.

I remember that visit to my mother well, because after Ben had finished with the buttons, my mother found several other activities for him: smelling each of her perfume bottles, counting and reading the names on her long row of herb and spice jars, placing a single soft toy on each of her wooden steps (this made me nervous because of the gaps between each step and Ben’s soft, floppy body) and finally banging away on the piano and learning the name of each note. As my mother and I sat drinking tea to the sound of the piano-bashing, we were both in awe, I of my mother’s ability to amuse Ben and she of Ben’s intelligence and memory.

‘He can read all those spice jars,’ she said. ‘He even remembered “cardamom” and words like that. Has he seen those at home?’

‘Ah, no.’ The idea of me managing to cook with spices at that stage of my life was laughable.

‘He understands size and categories with the buttons. And he seems quite musical.’

‘Maybe.’

Personally I didn’t think that hitting random keys of the piano constituted musicality but I guessed that my mother – like me – was still coming to terms with the idea of Ben being autistic. She wanted to focus on his abilities, not his disabilities.

Then my mother said, ‘You know, Rachel, you can’t really call Ben handicapped. He just has a very particular genetic inheritance.’

* * * * *

When my parents talked about mathematics they often stood in the kitchen. Or rather, my mother moved around preparing dinner, and my father bounced up and down on a small square of floor in front of the most useful cupboard. As they talked about quadratic equations or topological vector spaces, my mother would gently push my father to one side so that she could reach inside the cupboard, and after she had closed the cupboard, he would hop back in front of it. If he was only mildly excited or interested, he would just do his hop, balancing first on his right foot and then moving the left beside it for a quickstep before moving back to the left again. If the conversation was going well, my father would occasionally tap his forehead with the back of his right hand. When things heated up, he would add a left-handed slap to the back of his head just before the right hand hit the forehead, creating a kind of chain reaction. As the dinner neared preparation, there would be a flurry of activity in that kitchen, my mother stirring pots and lifting things out of the oven (she was feeding seven every night), and my father bouncing and hopping, slapping and tapping. Just when the conversation and the dinner were reaching a head, my mother would dash out into the passage and ring an old cow’s bell she’d picked up in Switzerland, and one of us kids would dart into the kitchen, dodging wordlessly between my parents to collect the cutlery to set the dining-room table. A few minutes later, the bell would go again, signalling time to eat and a temporary end to the mathematical dialogue.

* * * * *

There is a game that some parents of autistic children play, where they try to determine from which side of the family the autism has come. This family blame game is an alternative to the vaccination, birth-trauma or toxic-chemical blame routines. One mother I met told me that she felt guilty because the autism must have come from her family; she had a cousin with autism and her husband didn’t know of any autistic people in his family.

‘But does it matter? I mean, do you need to know, even if you could?’ I asked her.

‘I feel bad,’ she said. ‘If it wasn’t for me, my husband could have had a normal child.’

Robert and I have never played this game. I didn’t see the need to find or create a ‘reason’ for Ben being who he is. Nonetheless, it’s hard to escape noticing aspects of my own family’s behaviour that verges on the autistic spectrum. In one of the first books about autism I read – a book full of depressing statistics and unwelcome generalisations – I saw the sentence: ‘The presence of odd family members … as well as very mathematically bright but socially awkward relatives, is more frequent in families with an autistic child.’ I also distinctly remember reading and telling Robert that of all parental occupations, the coupling with the statistically highest likelihood of having a child or grandchild with autism is that of two mathematicians. I remember reading this – even the shape of the print on the page – but now I can’t find the reference anywhere. Did I make it up? Did I need a reason for Ben’s autism, after all? Even if I did make this up, I know now that it is roughly accurate, because research has shown that mathematicians have a higher rate of autistic-spectrum conditions than the general population, and that the parents and grandparents of children with autistic spectrum conditions are twice as likely to work as scientists, mathematicians and engineers than the parents or grandparents of non-autistic children.

When I suggested to my sister Megan that perhaps our father (who died before Ben was born) had a few mild autistic-like traits, she said, ‘No, he wasn’t like that’.

‘Wasn’t he?’ I asked. ‘I always thought him a little unusual.’

‘Oh no,’ she replied, quite upset, ‘I don’t think of him that way at all’.

I changed the subject. I didn’t say to her that the thought of something of my father travelling through me to my son was a comfort to me, a feeling that Ben is not such an outsider in the world after all.

* * * * *

Ben’s love of numbers is both mystical and pedestrian. It is unrelenting and ever-present. Not a day goes by when he doesn’t count or talk about or write down numbers. The American diagnostic bible on ‘mental disorders’, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM IV, describes Ben’s love of numbers as ‘a preoccupation with a stereotyped and restricted pattern of interest that is abnormal in intensity and focus’. Psychologists have described his behaviour as ‘obsessional’, ‘compulsive’ and ‘ritualised’. I prefer to call him passionate.

What can it mean to have a passion for numbers? Mainly, Ben just loves the physical shape and form of them. Whatever size or colour or font or material a number is made of or written in, he dotes on zero to nine, just as I adore every inch of his body, every expression of his face.

This is how Ben’s passion started. Some time before he was two, I stuck on the wall a child’s poster with the numbers one to twenty and illustrations to match. I put it up because it was colourful and the hallway was dingy. I read it to Ben once. He spent a long time looking at it that day, and the next day, and the day after. Then he wanted to ‘hold’ the numbers. So I made some numbers out of coloured pipe cleaners. These became his most treasured possessions. He laid them down on the floor one after another, saying the numbers as he did, ‘one, two, three’, and so on up to twenty. Then he started going beyond twenty. When he came to numbers requiring two of the same digit, like twenty two, he used his hand for the second number. How did he know how to count beyond twenty? This I don’t know. It seemed to be innate. A two-year-old unable to eat with a spoon, uninterested in toys, and calling himself ‘you’ instead of ‘I’ was able to count to 100 and beyond. His face was rapt when he used the pipe cleaners for this purpose. He laid them down with such reverence it was like a form of worship. He was so content I could have gazed at his counting face for hours.

After the pipe cleaners, Ben discovered the joys of birthdaycake candles shaped like numbers. But they broke too easily when he played with them, so we found plastic magnetic numbers in a toyshop. He collected handwritten numbers on paper, numbers cut from wrapping paper, golden cardboard numbers, a set of metal numbers from the hardware store intended to be used on letterboxes, numbers for use in the bath, numbers made of playdough, shells that ‘could be a six or upside down could be a nine’. And so it went, a cupboard full of sets of numbers, as if collecting the objects was the sole purpose of his life.

Over a period of months, Ben’s interest developed. He began to love numbers in a second way, for what they represented, just as a mother will love best the photographs of her children that remind her of happy times. He loved that numbers on letterboxes tell us the number of the house, that the age we are tells who is older than whom, that numbers can represent so many different things – weight, height, currency, size. Clocks, calculators, thermometers and measuring tapes were all added to his collection.

‘He’ll grow out of it,’ my friends told me.

‘He’s so intelligent,’ my family said.

‘Your parents are mathematicians,’ people reminded me. ‘What did you expect?’

What did I expect? We expect many things of our children. Most of the time we are only aware of these expectations when something happens to make it impossible for them to be fulfilled.

Just as Robert and I were thinking that we should start to teach Ben arithmetic, he found it for himself. He discovered a third way to enjoy numbers: the way they work. That one plus one equals two and then two plus one equals three made sense to him. He began to do strange feats of simple arithmetic. He spent hours adding numbers in his head. ‘Two plus two is four; four plus four is eight; forty-four plus forty-four is eighty-eight.’

Soon after that, I would hear him reciting the times tables to himself in bed at six in the morning, starting with ‘one two is two’ and ending with ‘twelve twelves are one hundred and forty-four’, complete with the intonation and accent from Don Spencer’s musical times-tables CD, which I had foolishly played to him. This may have led him to a fourth way of loving numbers – as an ordering principle. Numbers are predictable and controllable and they never end. He realises you can count forever.

* * * * *

Robert and I finally agreed to ‘quarantine’ Ben’s numbers. But instead of limiting him to using them once a day, we did the reverse: he was not allowed to talk about numbers at dinner.

‘Why can I not talk about numbers at dinner?’ Ben asked yet again.

‘Remember we talked about it. Not everyone finds numbers as interesting as you do.’

‘Why not?’

I didn’t really know how to answer that one.

‘Let’s talk about our day,’ suggested Robert. ‘What did you two do after kindy this afternoon?’

‘We went to the park, didn’t we, Ben?’ I said.

‘Yes. First we passed number forty-one, then we passed number thirty-nine …’

‘Stop!’ I said, rather loudly, holding up the palm of my hand. ‘No numbers.’

Robert put his hand over his mouth.

‘I know what else happened,’ I added hurriedly. ‘Auntie Liv rang, didn’t she, Ben?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ben talked to her for a bit, didn’t you?’

‘How old is Auntie Liv?’ asked Ben.

‘Ben, you know she’s thirty-nine,’ I replied.

‘Mum is forty-one. Daddy is fifty-five. Auntie Liv is thirty-nine. Granny is …’

‘Ben – enough! No numbers at dinner.’

Ben put on his hurt face. ‘I don’t want any more.’

‘Finish your dinner, please.’

‘No, I don’t want to.’

‘You need to eat proper food. Just have four more spoonfuls of rice and then you can get down,’ I said.

‘One, two, three, four,’ he chanted, stuffing them all into his mouth at once and then looking like a cartoon character, cheeks so bunched up he couldn’t chew.

‘That went well,’ said Robert in his dry way. I started to laugh. Ben watched me for a bit and then opened his mouth so that all the rice came spurting out onto the tabletop. He jumped off his chair and ran into his bedroom shouting, ‘One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.’

Robert peered at the bits of rice in his red wine and then drank it. ‘He’s a clever little fellow, isn’t he?’ he said proudly.

* * * * *

Overheard, Ben to his teacher:

‘Actually, you are wrong: today is the sixteenth, not the fifteenth.’

* * * * *

I wanted to understand why Ben was so obsessed with numbers. Our paediatrician said that obsessions like this were just part of the condition of autism and that it was probably a way for Ben to create order and structure in his life. This sounded a bit vague to me, so I did some more of my (obsessive?) reading about autism. Several months and about twenty books later, I decided that the paediatrician had made a fairly good summary of the situation.

‘I should hope so,’ said Robert. ‘That’s why we pay so much to see him.’

But it seems to me that researchers don’t really know why people with autism fixate on particular obsessions, only that they will have at least one area of obsessive repetition, whether this is flapping their hands, touching the corners of doors, learning all there is to know about trains or insects, memorising phone books or simply running sand through their hands all day. It is partly a retreat to the concrete because it is so difficult for someone with autism to understand other people and abstract ideas. Repetition is also a way of regulating sensory stimulation, of dealing with sensory overload and high anxiety. The repetition helps calm and regulate.

It has also been suggested that people with autism focus on small details because they lack the ability to see ‘the big picture’, to integrate things and make sense of the world. Their ability to shift attention is also impaired – it’s hard to move on from one thing to the next, hence the desire for sameness.

The most recent theory about autism is that it is an extreme form of the ‘male’ or systematising brain. Our brains are made to understand systems and how physical objects work, but some people have an extreme ability to understand ‘folk physics’. This comes at a cost: their ability to understand people may be limited.

But why numbers? Numbers are a common interest for people with autism. I wanted to know if there was a reason for this.

‘Why do you need a reason?’ asked Robert. ‘Why can’t you accept Ben as he is?’

‘I do accept him. I just want to understand.’

‘What’s to understand, Rachel? He likes numbers.’

* * * * *

Overheard, my mother talking to my brother:

‘Today is a very special day for me. Today, Olivia is exactly half my age.’

‘She has been all year, hasn’t she? Or, do you mean half your age to the day?’

‘Of course! It wouldn’t mean anything otherwise.’

* * * * *

Ben’s world, like that of most people with autism, is full of confusion, uncertainty and unpredictability. This is partly because of his difficulty in understanding other people and partly because he experiences every object, every person, every thought as a separate unique event, with no necessary or logical connection to any other event. What is it like to see each tree as an individual as different from another tree as it is from a car, a dog or a man? In a way, it is a vision of total equality. All things are equal; no one, nothing, is elevated. All sense of meaning fails because how can we create meaning without metaphor, categories and hierarchies? Without taxonomy we have chaos, just unmediated, inexplicable experience. The world presses upon us. Our own bodies press upon us. There is no sense to be made of sensation. This is Ben’s world – one of experience and perceptions without order, definition or explanation. Could this be anything other than frightening?

It is impossibly hard for a non-autistic person to see, hear and feel the world in the way an autistic person might. Even listening to someone with autism is not enough, because the shared language is always our language, the words and concepts and structures of the neurotypical world. Is there a ‘language’ of autism, a language for undifferentiated experience?

How can one survive in such a world? You would have to escape, to shut down. Or you could create a structure to manage it all. For Ben, numbers are true to the etymology of the word integer: ‘whole, entire’ and ‘marked by moral integrity’.

Did Ben choose numbers or is it simply that numbers (arithmetic and geometry) form one of the basic underpinning concepts of nature? Spiders spin webs in logarithmic progression. Shells grow in the same proportion. The structure of a snowflake is fractal. Many plants grow according to the Fibonacci sequence of numbers. Our bodies, our landscape, our architecture, our music are all structured according to mathematical principles. Evidence for the human capacity for counting goes back more than 30 000 years to signs of tallying on bone and on the walls of Upper Palaeolithic caves. In missing the big picture, Ben has perhaps been able to see and appreciate what psychologist Peter Szatmari calls ‘the intimate architecture of the world’.

Father and daughter

Counting

Higgs boson

Michael Lucy

‘Where do you want to sit for History?’ one passing American asks another, before they settle on front row seats. It’s 4 July 2012; the venue is a bland convention centre auditorium in Melbourne. We’re waiting for scientists at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire in Switzerland, better known as CERN, to announce that they’ve found the Higgs boson. The Higgs, in the standard journalistic précis, is the particle that gives everything mass. It was proposed almost 50 years ago (by Peter Higgs and several others), and particle-hungry experimentalists have been after it ever since the less famous W and Z bosons were tracked down in 1983.

Earlier, the Melbourne conference’s media liaison, standing on a chair in a cramped room upstairs, had briefed a group of physicists on talking to the press. Don’t assume they’re specialist science journalists, he said. In fact, don’t assume they know anything about science. There were chuckles. Emphasise this is not the end, he went on. It’s a historic milestone, but we’re only at the beginning. A balding, pony-tailed German slurped loudly from his paper cup of coffee.

In the auditorium a retired nuclear theorist sits to one side of me; a youngish Spaniard with a mop of curly hair checks his email on the other. The retired theorist isn’t quite sure why the press need be here at all: to him it’s strictly a scientific affair. Above the stage a screen shows a similar auditorium at CERN, the scene of the main event. The camera scans for something to look at: a Higgs boson soft toy on a desk, popular in certain quarters around the time the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CERN’s gargantuan particle accelerator, was first switched on in 2008; a woman snapping a phone photo of herself with the stage in the background. The assembled physicists have come with a legitimate professional interest in the results from the LHC. I’ve come to satisfy what Wittgenstein called ‘one of the lowest desires of modern people, namely the superficial curiosity about the latest discoveries of science’.

Scientists always bemoan the simplifications and outright errors endemic to science journalism, though it’s easy to see why they occur. You’d need to cover at least quantum field theory, electroweak unification and symmetry breaking in the early universe before you could give an explanation of the Higgs boson that’s neither inaccurate nor at the level of a just-so story. Add to that the necessary mathematical scaffolding, and it’s no wonder journalists write articles ‘intended to make you believe that you understand a thing which actually you don’t understand’ (Wittgenstein again). Tomorrow’s papers will be full of ‘God particle’ this and ‘cosmic molasses’ that; the headline will be ‘ORIGIN OF UNIVERSE REVEALED’, not ‘HIGGS MASS 125.3 ± 0.6 GeV’.

Geoff Taylor, the dapper head of Australia’s Large Hadron Collider contingent, takes the stage briefly to announce that the presentations will be longer than planned. On screen, Peter Higgs enters the room at CERN to cheers.

In late June, physics blogs had lit up with rumours that LHC scientists had some news. It could only mean one thing: the Higgs. Last December they had released what a physicist would describe unwinkingly as ‘highly suggestive’ results, but had refrained from making definite claims. The word was there were now enough data to cross the line into certainty, or what passes for it given the distressingly probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics. People were talking 5-sigma significance.

Eventually there is a hush in the auditorium, and Rolf-Dieter Heuer, CERN’s avuncular director general, appears on screen. ‘Today is a special day,’ he begins, before trotting out a couple of diligently constructed jokes and introducing Joe Incandela, a slick American from the Compact Muon Solenoid LHC experimental team. Incandela walks us through the experimental set-up, the data-processing arrangements and the statistical methodology before getting down to graphs and numbers. The statement that inspires the crowd to frenzied applause: ‘If we combine the Z–Z and the gamma–gamma, this is what we get. They line up extremely well in the region of 125 GeV. They combine to give us a combined significance of five standard deviations’. He stumbles and stutters getting the words out.

From a physicist’s point of view, particle hunting is the extreme sport. There’s a rakish disregard for common sense in the lengths to which they will go. Take the IceCube neutrino telescope, a kilometre-a-side cubic grid of detectors buried deep in the Antarctic ice, or Holland’s MiniGRAIL (Gravitational Radiation Antenna In Leiden), a perfect 1400-kilo copper sphere chilled to just above absolute zero in the hope of observing tiny ripples in the fabric of the universe caused by far-off stellar cataclysms. The LHC is the wildest of all: a particle accelerator whose 27-kilometre circumference takes the better part of a day to walk around, built by thousands of scientists from across the world at a cost of US $9 billion (a month’s worth of US spending in Afghanistan, by comparison) to hunt truly exotic game – dark matter, extra dimensions, magnetic monopoles, the Higgs.

After Incandela has said the magic words, the rest is appendices. He hands over to Fabiola Gianotti from the ATLAS experiment (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS), which runs in parallel with Incandela’s team so that the two can cross-check each other’s results. Gianotti’s data provide further confirmation of the Higgs’s existence. After she finishes, Heuer returns to the stage. ‘I think we have it,’ he says. ‘You agree?’ The rooms at CERN and in Melbourne erupt with affirmative cries. ‘It’s a historic milestone today, but we are only at the beginning.’ It’s the approved take-home message.

The retired nuclear theorist is dubious. He’ll allow that they’ve found a boson; he’s not convinced it’s the Higgs. It’s sad science is going this way, he says – releasing results before publishing in a peer-reviewed journal, courting media coverage, dumbing it down for popular consumption. Later, an unidentified American on screen puts the contrasting view: ‘It’s wonderful to be at a physics event where there’s applause like there is at a football game’. He too has a point: is there harm in celebrating a scientific discovery? Accurate or not, the media coverage will at least remind people for a moment that they live in a universe.

Paradigm shifters

Writer as flâneur

Here come the übernerds: Planets, Pluto and Prague

Fred Watson

I wonder if you heard the sad news that on 30 April 2009 Venetia Phair died, at the grand old age of 90. Despite her strikingly beautiful name, I can imagine you may be hardpressed to remember who Mrs Phair was. But she was famous – especially in the last few years of her life – as the only woman ever to have named a planet.

Back in March 1930, when 11-year-old Venetia lived in Oxford and was still Venetia Burney, she heard from her grandfather that a planet had been newly discovered by an astronomer in the far-off USA and that they were trying to think of a name for it. Young Venetia was not only rather cluey about astronomy but also hooked on Greek and Roman mythology. She suggested that the Roman god of the Underworld, Pluto, might be an appropriate alter ego for the planet.

Such a suggestion made by most 11-year-olds would go no further, but Venetia’s grandfather happened to be friendly with Herbert Hall Turner, the Professor of Astronomy at Oxford University. Turner thought the idea was a cracker, although, being an Oxford professor, he probably didn’t put it quite like that. Fired with enthusiasm, he telegraphed his colleagues at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, from where the planet had been discovered, and they agreed it was a splendid suggestion. Thus, on 1 May 1930, the name Pluto was formally adopted for the newly discovered planet, and Venetia was naturally rather pleased with herself. Throughout her long life, she was at pains to point out that Walt Disney’s cartoon dog was named after her planet rather than the other way around.

It seems that naming celestial objects was something of a family tradition. A little more than half a century before the Pluto episode, Venetia’s Great-Uncle Henry had suggested the names Phobos and Deimos (fear and dread) for the two tiny moons of Mars, which had just been discovered by scientists in the USA. They, too, were duly adopted in the world of astronomy, but sadly Great-Uncle Henry was long dead by the time Venetia’s turn came around.

Why was it only in the last few years of her life that Venetia’s contribution to modern astronomy became well known? The answer lies in the controversy that has surrounded Pluto in recent years as the true nature of this remote Solar System object has become the subject of intense debate. Indeed, as the discussion has descended into increasing acrimony and farce, Venetia’s gentle composure has been depressingly missed.

When is a planet a star?

It was back in August 2006 that the celestial cat was set among the world’s pigeons, at a General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in Prague. You may not have encountered the IAU before, but this venerable organisation is the governing body of world astronomy. Of necessity, it sits at the tedious end of the excitement spectrum, since someone has to dot the i’s and cross the t’s of all the astonishing new discoveries made by the world’s astronomers and space scientists. That sort of thing isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s an important function, and it includes responsibility for providing definitions of the various celestial objects, as well as the exclusive right to name them. (Which, incidentally, gives the lie to star registry companies offering to name a star for you or your loved one on receipt of your hard-earned cash.)

Anyway, every three years the IAU has a General Assembly, in which matters of great cosmic weight are debated. Its 40 commissions and 76 working groups tackle such esoteric matters as extrasolar planets, high-energy astrophysics, and the origin of the Universe. Most of it is completely unintelligible to the outsider, but it’s terribly exciting if you’re part of the action. And part of the action in August 2006 was sorting out one particularly burning question: ‘What, exactly, is a planet?’

Yes, I know. You’d think that after 400 years of looking at the sky through telescopes, astronomers would have worked out what planets are. You may also wonder whether it actually matters how the word is defined. But there’s real mystery attached to this question, and it’s nowhere near as daft as it sounds. It comes about because astronomy, like all the sciences, is constantly evolving as new discoveries challenge established ideas. It’s just one of the things that makes science exciting – you never know quite what’s around the corner.

When I was a lad, everyone knew what a planet was. It was an object orbiting the Sun and shining by reflected sunlight rather than by its own luminosity. Stars like the Sun radiate heat and light because of energy-producing nuclear reactions in their interiors, whereas planets were thought to have no energy sources of their own. There were nine planets, and their order could be recalled using various loopy mnemonics like ‘My Venomously Eccentric Mother Just Served Up Napalm Pudding’. The biggest of them was Jupiter, and then, rather smaller but bedecked with a beautiful set of rings, was Saturn. Two more large planets, Uranus and Neptune, completed the quartet known eloquently as ‘gas giants’ – since they are big and are made mostly of gas. The rest of the planets were smallish rocky worlds, and the whole thing was very neat and tidy. Except, that is, for occasional comets and a decidedly untidy place called the Asteroid Belt, where myriads of mountain-sized boulders rolled around between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

I think it’s fair to say that there was no single startling discovery that served to change this orderly picture. Rather, a gradual sequence of events arose from subtle new findings about both the Solar System and the planetary families of other stars in our celestial neighbourhood. To begin with, measurements made by the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft in the early 1970s showed that Jupiter actually gives off 70 per cent more energy than it receives from the Sun when measurements are extended beyond the red end of the rainbow spectrum of visible light, and into the invisible zone of infrared (redder-than-red) light – which is heat radiation. This put into question the idea that planets only shine by reflected light and raised the notion that a giant gas-ball planet like Jupiter might in some ways be viewed as a failed star – one that hadn’t become big enough to switch on the nuclear reactions required for true stardom. And this led to a further blurring of the definitions.

In a genuine star, like our Sun, the central temperature is sustained by continuous H-bomb-like reactions in which hydrogen – the raw material of all stars – is turned into helium. The process is called nuclear fusion, and involves small atomic nuclei (of hydrogen) sticking together to make bigger ones (of helium), and releasing prodigious amounts of energy as a by-product. That’s where the Sun’s heat and light come from. The reactions are kicked off at the star’s birth by a cloud of hydrogen being compressed, as it is pulled into a ball shape by its own gravity, and therefore getting hotter, just as the air in a bicycle pump becomes warmer as it is compressed. But if the hydrogen cloud is less massive than it needs to be to form a true star, then the resulting object is something different.

Incidentally, when astronomers discuss the masses of celestial objects, they usually lump things into convenient bundles rather than measuring everything in tonnes. There’s really no future in talking about the masses of planets, stars or galaxies in tonnes – you end up with far too many zeroes. For example, the Sun’s mass is about 2 × 10^27 tonnes in mathematical notation – or 2 followed by 27 zeroes for the rest of us. Which is pretty meaningless, really. It’s far more convenient (and meaningful) to think about the masses of celestial objects like planets and stars in relation to the mass of Jupiter. The Sun, for example, is roughly 1000 times the mass of Jupiter. ‘Jupiter-masses’ are therefore the units of choice for streetwise astronomers.

Back to the plot, then. Supposing that instead of being 1000 times the mass of Jupiter, like the star that became our Sun, a much smaller baby star – say, under 75 Jupiter-masses – began to form. What would happen? The smaller size would reduce the gravitational compression of the collapsing gas cloud, and its temperature wouldn’t become high enough for hydrogen burning to begin. Thus, no star? Well, not quite. It turns out that if the baby star were between about 13 and 75 Jupiter-masses, a less energetic type of nuclear reaction would kick in, involving something called ‘deuterium’, or ‘heavy hydrogen’. The resulting star would shine, but only dimly, and in infrared rather than visible light. It would become something to which astronomers have given the particularly uninspiring name of ‘brown dwarf ’. It’s not terribly PC, but that’s the way it is.

The existence of these brown dwarf stars was suspected by astronomers from about the mid-1970s, but it was not until 1995 that the first example was verified. Literally hundreds of them are now known throughout the Sun’s neighbourhood in space, each typically containing around 40 Jupiter-masses of hydrogen. They represent a curious halfway stage between gas giant planets and true stars. This is further highlighted by recent studies showing that brown dwarfs actually experience weather in their atmospheres, something more usually associated with planets than with stars. And, although I was about to joke that because of their higher temperatures brown dwarfs would never have rainy weather, even this isn’t true. Recent research has proved that in the atmospheres of some brown dwarfs raindrops do fall. They’re not raindrops of anything as boring as water, however, but raindrops of liquid iron … Now that would be a downpour to avoid.

As if brown dwarfs weren’t enough to blur the distinction between planets and stars, the existence of some even more bizarre dimly shining objects in the depths of space has served to increase the confusion still further. A handful of candidates for these types of exotica have been found, mostly in the star-nurseries of Orion and Taurus (where the constellation names simply signpost the areas of sky in question). The objects are popularly known as ‘rogue planets’, ‘orphan planets’, ‘homeless planets’ or – wait for it – FFLOPs, an absurdly appropriate acronym for ‘freefloating planetary-mass objects’. I don’t really like any of these names, and I’m not much keener on the one suggested by the IAU itself – sub-brown dwarfs. At least that one does give a hint as to what they are, however. They are objects containing even less material than brown dwarf stars (in other words, less than 13 times the mass of Jupiter). They are thought to have originated in the collapse of really cute little gas clouds alongside the bigger ones in which their starry siblings – that is, brown dwarfs and normal stars – originated. (There’s an alternative theory, which is, in fact, supported by the most recent research: perhaps these FFLOPs formed within planetary systems like our Solar System but were then ejected from their birthplace by some disturbance, such as the gravity of a passing star or an aggressive encounter with a fellow planet. I guess that’s the origin of the name ‘orphan’, but perhaps ‘banished’ might then be a more accurate description.)

No matter what they’re called or how they originated, the question that I’m sure comes to your mind is ‘How do these little wanderers shine?’ They don’t have parent stars whose gentle light they can reflect out to the Universe at large, like the planets of the Solar System reflect sunlight. Nor are they big enough for starlike nuclear reactions to stir them into luminosity. The thinking among the pundits is that their hydrogen atmospheres may be dense enough to insulate them from the cold of space, allowing them to glow dimly in infrared light by virtue of the same sort of energy that keeps the Earth’s core warm. That energy comes from the decay of radioisotopes like uranium, as distinct from the fusion processes that power stars and brown dwarfs – that is, big atomic nuclei falling to pieces rather than smaller ones sticking together. The glowing of these lonely objects by nothing more than geothermal energy sounds a bit unlikely, but calculations show that, yes, it could happen. What is far more certain, though, is that in coming years we will find more of them, as the astronomers’ arsenal of space-based infrared telescopes increases in size and capability. So – if you’ll excuse the pun – watch this space.

I’m sure that, by now, you’re getting the picture that things are far from straightforward in the contest of planets versus stars. And we haven’t even begun to discuss the weird and wonderful array of planets known to orbit other stars in the Sun’s neighbourhood. These extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, have been discovered in steadily increasing numbers since the first was found, in 1995. Well over 800 were known by 2012, and the number is continuing to grow. But it was because of these exoplanets in all their wondrous diversity, together with the poor homeless FFLOPs, that the issue of exactly what constitutes a planet started to emerge as a pressing matter for serious debate.

So how did the IAU, as the body in which all power of definition is vested, deal with this? It did what any organisation would do, of course. It formed a committee. At a meeting in 1999, the IAU asked some of the leading lights on exoplanets to form a working group, part of whose brief would be to write a definition of a planet. Thus, the Working Group on Extrasolar Planets was formed. Throughout its six-year lifetime, the group was chaired by Alan P Boss of the Carnegie Institution, in Washington DC, and it included several people whom I number among my friends. They did a terrific job, and I hope they will forgive me if I appear unsympathetic to the working definition of a planet that they eventually came up with – especially since they were at pains to point out that it was a compromise and ‘did not fully satisfy anyone on the WGESP’. But, to be honest, it was rubbish.

The definition was a valiant attempt to highlight the differences between brown dwarfs, planets and FFLOPs. There’s not much point in recounting all the gobbledygook here, except to quote the third and final clause, which reads: ‘Free-floating objects in young star clusters with masses below the limiting mass for thermonuclear fusion of deuterium [13 Jupiter-masses] are not “planets”, but are “sub-brown dwarfs” (or whatever name is most appropriate)’. So there you have it. After struggling to be ultra-precise in the definition of exactly what constitutes a planet, the working group wound up by shooting itself in the foot. For the FFLOPs, at least, you can choose whatever name you think is appropriate. You might as well decide to call them ‘bananas’.

And when is a planet a trans-Neptunian object?

The difficulties encountered in working things out at the upper end of the planetary size range were eclipsed – in the public’s view, at least – by what was happening at the other end. Among the diametrically challenged members of the Sun’s increasingly unruly family, all was not well.

The rot had started in the 1950s, when two astronomers, Kenneth Essex Edgeworth and Gerard Peter Kuiper, independently suggested that, out in the frozen reaches beyond the orbit of Neptune, there must be a ring of debris left over from the formation of the Solar System. They argued that asteroid-sized objects in this region of space would have been too far apart to combine into larger objects and form planets, as had happened in the inner Solar System soon after its formation, 4.6 billion years ago. At best, there might be some half-finished planets out there that were too small to be seen with the telescopes of the time.

It was also thought – correctly, as it turned out – that these trans-Neptunian objects, as they came to be known, would have a high proportion of ice in their structure. They would have been perpetually too far from the Sun’s heat for it to melt – or, as happens in the vacuum of space, to evaporate directly into water vapour. Eventually, in August 1992, the first trans-Neptunian object was discovered, a distant speck of light that’s probably an object the size of a mountain range, taking a leisurely 289 years to orbit the Sun. It was given – and still has – the incredibly boring name of 1992 QB1, which arises from the IAU’s rather inelegant naming protocol for newly discovered Solar System objects. It was also the 15 760th object discovered, in the ongoing tally of minor Solar System bodies, since asteroid number one – called Ceres – was found by one Giuseppe Piazzi, on 1 January 1801.

Significantly, Ceres itself was controversial in its day, since Piazzi and his chums at first thought it was a planet. It was found in what had been suspected to be a vacant lot between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. But when it was discovered to be much smaller than the other planets and circulating with a clutch of even smaller objects in the same part of the Solar System, astronomers realised they had some quite un-planetary items on their hands. What could they be? It was the British astronomer William Herschel who eventually coined the term ‘asteroid’ to give them all a decent – if slightly comical – identity.

But back to the outer Solar System. Today, there are more than 1000 known trans-Neptunian objects. So many are known, in fact, that they can be categorised into different types, depending on the sizes, shapes and tilts of their orbits. Astronomers love to classify stuff, and this particular stuff is eminently classifiable. A minor problem is that specialists in the esoteric field of ‘classifying stuff at the edge of the Solar System’ don’t entirely agree on what the categories should be. Broadly, though, there’s an understanding that the trans-Neptunian objects divide into two types. Nearer to the Sun are objects belonging to the Kuiper Belt (or, more correctly, the Kuiper-Edgeworth Belt), which occupies a zone extending for about 2 billion kilometres beyond the orbit of Neptune. Since Neptune itself is, on average, 4.5 billion kilometres from the Sun (about 30 times the Sun–Earth distance), this is very remote stuff indeed. But trans-Neptunian objects in the second category are even further out. They are known, rather obscurely, as ‘scattered disc objects’, a reference to their wildly disparate orbits, and they extend out to staggering distances from the Sun – 12 billion kilometres and beyond. In comparison with the scattered disc objects, Kuiper Belt objects have better behaved orbits, although they also divide into a couple of subcategories that needn’t concern us here. Suffice it to say that Pluto sits in the middle of the Kuiper Belt, at an average distance of 6 billion kilometres from the Sun.

It was some unexplained irregularities in the orbit of Uranus that had prompted the search for a ninth planet, beyond the orbit of Neptune, during the early years of the 20th century. The irregularities also suggested where in the sky astronomers should search. When, in January 1930, Pluto had been discovered in more or less the right place, there had been jubilation. At last, the ledger of gravitational forces would be balanced. So Pluto was originally thought to be a large planet – probably larger than Earth. But, as time went by and measurements of its diameter became ever more accurate, estimates of its size decreased. In a paper published in 1980, two US scientists derived a mathematical formula for Pluto’s apparently diminishing girth, whimsically suggesting that by 1984 the planet would have disappeared altogether. Very droll. And so, as with Ceres a century or so earlier, jubilation over the planet’s discovery eventually turned into consternation. Pluto was far too small to have any appreciable effect on a gas giant planet like Uranus. Indeed, it is now known to be only two-thirds the size of our own Moon.

The disappointment over Pluto’s half-pint dimensions spurred a renewed search for a hypothetical planet that was the scapegoat for the outer Solar System’s lack of equilibrium. But some people doubted there was any need for such an object. At last, in the 1980s, the idea of Planet X ran out of steam completely, when the mass of Neptune was carefully measured from the trajectory of a robotic interplanetary spacecraft called Voyager 2. That re-evaluation brought everything back into balance and eliminated the need for any new planets. Surprise, surprise: the discovery of Pluto had been nothing more than a happy accident.

In the meantime, however, we had a planet of minuscule proportions on our hands that seemed entirely at odds with the lumbering giants of the outer Solar System. Moreover, Pluto was in an orbit quite different from the other planets – very elongated, with a 17-degree tilt to the rest of the Sun’s family. With the discovery of the first Kuiper Belt object, 1992 QB1, suspicions began to arise that maybe Pluto wasn’t what it had at first seemed. Perhaps it wasn’t a planet at all, but one of these pesky new icy asteroids.

Gradually, as more trans-Neptunian objects were discovered during the 1990s, a few brave souls began openly speculating that Pluto belonged among them. Most notable was Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. When Pluto failed to appear among the planetarium’s refurbished display of planets in February 2000, Tyson suddenly started to receive hate mail from US school kids. It was a sign of things to come.

Then, early in 2005, the unthinkable happened. A group of astronomers based at the Palomar Observatory in California announced that they had discovered a remote scattered disc object way beyond Pluto that was probably bigger than Pluto itself. Identified from sky images taken late in 2003, it had been given the provisional name of 2003 UB313. But the discovery team, led by Michael E Brown of the California Institute of Technology, had its own pet name, borrowed from the heroine of a TV fantasy series – Xena: Warrior Princess. (Planet X subtly cropping up again, you see.) But there was the rub. With the discovery of Xena, did the Solar System have a tenth planet? Or were both Xena and Pluto something else, in which case there would only be eight planets?

Once again, the spotlight fell on the IAU to resolve the issue. But, as we have seen, its Working Group on Extrasolar Planets hadn’t exactly covered itself in glory in arriving at a workable definition, and this was a much more acute problem. So the IAU brought together a different group of distinguished scientists, historians and science communicators to form a planet definition committee and nut out the answer. They were tasked with reporting the result of their deliberations to the IAU’s General Assembly in Prague in August 2006 and duly set about their work. When they revealed their conclusions, a week before the General Assembly’s decision, they could hardly have guessed how much the IAU’s membership would disagree with them.

Pluto’s puzzles

Ever since Pluto’s discovery, back in 1930, by a young Illinoisborn astronomer called Clyde William Tombaugh, people had wondered how this remote world was formed and what it might be like.

As Pluto traverses the frozen outer reaches of the Solar System, its surface temperature ranges between about –240° Celsius and a balmy –220° Celsius. Its orbital speed of less than 5 kilometres per second (compared with Earth’s 30 kilometres per second) places it at the lethargic end of the Sun’s family. But there are signs that past interactions between Pluto and its neighbours in the Kuiper Belt may have been more violent.

Pluto has been known since 1978 to have a large moon, Charon (usually pronounced ‘Care-on’ rather than, well, ‘Sharyn’). Its diameter of 1209 kilometres has been measured with an accuracy of a couple of kilometres by observing its passage in front of a distant star – an event called an ‘occultation’. Pluto and Charon are sometimes thought of as a binary system, because their relative sizes are fairly close – Pluto’s diameter is only twice Charon’s diameter. As a result, their combined centre of gravity, or barycentre, lies in the space between them rather than within the body of Pluto. This contrasts strongly with the situation for most planets and their moons, and may provide a clue to the origin of Charon. We know that in the Solar System’s turbulent youth, collisions between young planets and the rocky debris left over from their construction were commonplace. For example, a collision between the baby Earth and a Mars-sized object is thought to have produced our own Moon, 4.6 billion years ago. About half a billion years later there was another bad patch, incongruously known as the ‘late heavy bombardment’, during which the Moon received most of the craters we see on its surface today. Is it possible that in one of these wild and woolly periods a violent collision between icy bodies in the far reaches of the Solar System could have produced Pluto and Charon? Computer simulations have shown that this is, indeed, possible, but there is at present no way of discriminating between that scenario and those in which Charon was simply captured by Pluto’s gravity as it wandered past within the Kuiper Belt.

A further tantalising clue turned up late in 2005 in the shape of two more moons of Pluto – tiny objects no bigger than 150 kilometres across, now called Nix and Hydra. In July 2011, Pluto’s known retinue was increased again with the discovery of a fourth, even smaller moon, as yet unnamed, while a year later, a fifth moon no more than 25 kilometres across was discovered. Nix and Hydra are known to orbit Pluto in the same plane and the same direction as Charon, suggesting that they may have formed as by-products of the same collision event. A neat and tidy theory, but only a closer look by a passing spacecraft, allowing such information as crater-number counts and surface compositions to be gathered, will provide the information needed to confirm it.

Pluto and Charon are locked in what is known as ‘synchronous rotation’, meaning that the two bodies always keep the same faces turned to one another as Charon trundles around Pluto in its 6.4-day orbit. The mechanism by which this has arisen is exactly what keeps the same face of the Moon turned towards the Earth – friction caused by tides raised on the two bodies by each other. No, you don’t need oceans to have tides – they can occur in solid rock, and the forces involved exert a strong braking effect on the rotation of the two objects. Someday, in a few billion years’ time, the Earth will always keep the same face turned towards the Moon – no doubt to the chagrin of the folk who live on Earth’s Moon-less side.

The presence of a moon in orbit around a planet or asteroid has an important consequence for astronomers: it allows both objects to be weighed. And, remember Xena, that distant object whose discoverers thought it was probably bigger than Pluto? In September 2005, Xena turned out to have a moon too, found using one of the two giant Keck telescopes in Hawaii. Today, Xena is no longer Xena but has been officially renamed Eris, after the Greek goddess of strife and discord – which hints at the climate in planetary science at the time. Its moon has a similarly appropriate name, Dysnomia (lawlessness) – in Greek mythology, the daughter of Eris. Observations of Eris and Dysnomia have recently confirmed that Eris is 27 per cent more massive than Pluto, though of a similar diameter. (Therefore, it must be more dense, perhaps containing a smaller proportion of ice than Pluto.)

Apart from the obvious issue concerning their planetary status, why have Pluto and Eris become such celebrities in the astronomy of the early 21st century? The answer lies in what they might tell us about the formation of the Solar System and perhaps even about the origins of life on Earth.

If the typical trans-Neptunian object is a remnant of the original disc of debris that surrounded the infant Sun, then its chemistry would be nothing less than the Rosetta Stone of our corner of the Universe, with pristine dust grains that have been forever cold and frozen organic (carbon-containing) material that might carry the progenitors of living cells.

We already know that as well as being classified by their differing orbital characteristics, trans-Neptunian objects can be sorted in a different way into at least two garden varieties, some having a neutral-grey colouring and others, like a very distant one by the name of Sedna, being decidedly red. This may indicate subtly different cosmic histories throughout the age of the Solar System, with the reddish ones perhaps having a surface layer that has been modified by long-term effects such as bombardment by the subatomic particles known as cosmic rays. But whatever the reason for their different colours, any one of these objects that strayed close enough to the Sun would quickly develop features characteristic of a comet – a coma, or halo, formed by the evaporation of icy materials and the release of dust, and a prominent tail. There is a recognised class of exactly these types of objects in unstable orbits that may eventually fall into the inner Solar System as short-period comets; they are known as Centaurs: half-man, half-beast; half-Kuiper Belt object, half-comet. Who says astronomers have no soul?

The importance of this to the history of the Earth is that impacting comets are thought to have been a significant source of icy materials, such as water ice, methane and ammonia, for the planet. It is highly likely that more complex organic molecules were included in the same package, and a handful of scientists think that life itself may even have arrived in this way. Hence the extraordinary interest in investigating the various types of ice contained in comets and objects in the distant Kuiper Belt and beyond.

Larger trans-Neptunian objects, like Pluto and Eris, may have a different story to tell. With these, the process of planet formation seems to have been interrupted mid-flow, resulting in half-finished worlds that have nevertheless become big enough for their own gravity to pull denser material to the middle and, at the same time, make them spherical. This process, called ‘differentiation’, is likely to have given Pluto – and perhaps Charon too – a rocky core with an icy mantle. The process would have been greatly enhanced if a collision did, indeed, give rise to Charon, since the energy of the collision would have produced additional heat. Pluto’s surface is known to consist of frozen nitrogen, with methane, carbon dioxide and ethane also present. However, the bulk of Pluto’s icy mantle is likely to consist of water ice buried beneath the more volatile surface ices by the same process of differentiation. Its thin atmosphere, whose existence was confirmed during an occultation in 1988, is probably mostly gaseous nitrogen.

Why do we think Pluto and Eris may be half-finished planets? The evidence comes mainly from computer simulations of planet formation carried out at such institutions as the Southwest Research Institute, in Boulder, Colorado. They demonstrate that Earth-sized objects could, indeed, have formed in the outer regions of the Solar System. Why the process stopped is a mystery. But if Pluto really is a half-built planet, a close look at it would give us a unique opportunity to see planet formation in freeze-frame, providing real insights into the process.

What was obviously needed was a robotic space mission to Pluto. But there’s a catch – and it’s not just the extreme distance involved. Pluto’s elongated orbit means the energy it receives from the Sun falls by a factor of three as it moves from perihelion (its closest point to the Sun) to aphelion (its furthest point) in its 248-year orbit. Perihelion occurred in September 1989, so by early in the 21st century the planet was already well on its way towards the zone in which its thin atmosphere will simply freeze onto its surface. And there was already evidence of seasonal changes in Hubble Space Telescope observations of Pluto’s surface markings. The sooner we could get to Pluto, the more informative and interesting it would be.

Towards a new horizon

On 19 January 2006, a long-cherished dream came true. A Plutobound robotic spacecraft called New Horizons was successfully fired from Cape Canaveral in Florida, using the Lamborghini of launch vehicles – an Atlas V rocket with some serious go-faster accessories. If we were going to start travelling to Pluto in 2006 on a timescale that would give us the best chance of investigating its atmosphere, we needed to get there as quickly as possible – and New Horizons broke all the records, leaving Earth at the highest launch speed ever achieved. It crossed the Moon’s orbit in only nine hours and whizzed by Jupiter after little more than a year, the close encounter with the giant planet increasing its speed to a remarkable 23 kilometres per second. After years of planning –and a few false starts – humankind was at last on its way to Pluto.

The reliability of orbital mechanics means we can predict with pinpoint accuracy when New Horizons will reach Pluto. It will fly by the frozen world at 11.47 Greenwich Mean Time on 14 July 2015, passing Charon 14 minutes later. Because of its speed (the close approach will take place at nearly 14 kilometres per second) there is no possibility of New Horizons being diverted into orbit around Pluto, so the 0.5-tonne spacecraft bristles with sensors to take full advantage of its brief encounter. They include spectrometers to analyse the barcode of information locked up in Pluto’s rainbow spectrum, subatomic particle detectors, a long-range camera and an instrument named the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter, which will provide valuable information on the levels of interplanetary dust in the outer Solar System. The fly-by should allow detailed mapping of Pluto and Charon, as well as collection of telltale data on their surface and atmospheric composition. Alongside all the high-tech robotic sensing equipment, New Horizons also carries a poignant reminder of its place in human history. On board is a container carrying 28 grams of the ashes of Pluto’s discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh, who died in 1997.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of New Horizons, since our first-hand knowledge of Pluto and its environment is so sparse. The results could be the most surprising of any deepspace mission yet, notwithstanding the extraordinary discoveries about Saturn and its moons that have been made by the highly successful Cassini mission since it reached the planet in July 2004. But with New Horizons going on to target selected Kuiper Belt objects after its Pluto fly-by – and then escaping from the Solar System altogether – the excitement of new discoveries may continue well into the century.

Controversially, New Horizons carries 10.9 kilograms of radioactive plutonium dioxide to provide thermoelectric power for its onboard instruments. There is little alternative to this, given that the intensity of sunlight at Pluto’s distance is only one-1000th of that which we receive on Earth, rendering solar panels useless. But you won’t be surprised to hear that this was not the only controversy surrounding the Pluto mission.

Dwarfed by controversy

Just seven months after New Horizons was launched, the IAU held its much-vaunted General Assembly in Prague. Its latest planet definition committee had agreed on a draft specification of what constitutes a planet, and this was receiving substantial press coverage. To be a planet, the committee suggested, a celestial object needed to be in orbit around a star and large enough for its own gravity to pull it into a spherical shape (a condition technically known as ‘hydrostatic equilibrium’). This definition significantly extended the inventory of planets in the Solar System, since both Eris and the largest asteroid, Ceres, qualified. Moreover, there would be a significant likelihood of more to come as the exploration of the Solar System’s twilight zone revealed further Eris-like objects.

Shut away from the glare of the waiting media, the membership of the IAU met on the General Assembly’s final day to vote on the recommendation. But an intense debate yielded a revised definition subtly different from the committee’s in that it included an additional criterion. To be a planet, went the revised version, a celestial object also had to be the dominant object in its neighbourhood, having cleared away smaller debris either by absorbing it (as the Earth does with thousands of tonnes of meteoritic dust per year) or by ejecting it through gravitational forces. Any object that hadn’t done this, despite meeting the spherical shape criterion, would be termed a ‘dwarf planet’ rather than a ‘planet’. What that meant in practice was that an object in the main Asteroid Belt, between Mars and Jupiter, or in the Kuiper Belt could not be a planet.

When the vote on this revised definition took place it was passed with an overwhelming majority. It was adopted by the IAU as Resolution 5A of the Prague General Assembly. Thus, on 24 August 2006, the world was given, for the first time, a formal definition of a planet – and it did not include Pluto. The former ninth planet, along with Ceres, Eris and two other Kuiper Belt objects, Haumea and Makemake, had become a dwarf planet.

If there had been any doubt about the public’s interest in what constitutes a planet it was quickly dispelled by the outcry that followed. The headline I liked best appeared in a Newcastle (New South Wales) article: ‘Pluto dumped by the übernerds of Prague’. Not just the nerds, mark you, but the ‘übernerds’. Similar sentiments echoed around the world, especially in the USA, from where the former ninth planet had been discovered. There, protest marches were held in some cities.

It was a long time before the outrage subsided, and even then it didn’t do so before three US states had attempted to introduce legislation to reinstate Pluto as a planet. Only one of them, Illinois, succeeded, demonstrating that if you don’t like a scientific outcome you can always legislate to overturn it. Significantly, Illinois was the state in which Clyde Tombaugh was born. And on the lunatic fringe there are still conspiracy theory websites that point to the fact that the IAU’s decision was taken on the final day of its General Assembly, when only one-sixth of the attending membership was still present (producing 424 votes). They cry foul, citing rogue scientists and vested interests. They also conveniently ignore the fact that at the IAU’s next General Assembly, held in Rio de Janeiro in 2009, there was no change of heart on the issue.

One consistent voice of reason in the debate has been that of Alan Stern, formerly of the Southwest Research Institute. Stern is principal investigator with New Horizons, and you have to have some sympathy for his view. When his spacecraft was launched, it was on its way to a planet – but now it isn’t. Stern has criticised the IAU’s resolution, calling it ‘an awful definition; it’s sloppy science and it would never pass peer review’. He cites the fact that several of the Solar System’s planets, including the Earth and Jupiter, have not entirely cleared their neighbourhood of debris and therefore do not strictly meet the new criteria for planethood. Perhaps in deference to this view, the IAU executive committee announced a new type of celestial object in June 2008 – the ‘plutoid’, which is basically a dwarf planet in an orbit beyond Neptune. Currently, Eris, Pluto, Makemake and Haumea are the only known plutoids, but it is very likely that, as observations improve, other Kuiper Belt objects will turn out to be spherical and therefore qualify. The plutoid’s definition, too, has been widely criticised, but this time because the term sounds too much like an unpleasant skin complaint.

My own view is that, while I agree the IAU’s definition of a planet is not perfect, it’s a lot better than what we had before – which was essentially nothing. The reclassification of Pluto shows science in action, as researchers come to terms with new information and act appropriately upon it. To have done otherwise would have been to deny what nature is telling us.

Classification

Cast out

Explosive

Many-worlds quantum mechanics vs earth-based grease monkeys

gareth roi jones

Quantum mechanics

(those most dizzyingly complex

of celestial craftsman)

allow small particles

(electrons, atoms, & whatnots) to exist

in a ‘superposition of states’

in opposition to what we observe

in our ‘real’ daily earth-based life

where things are in one state or another

a coin is either heads or tails after flipping

not both

a car is either moving or stationary

not both

a bill is either reasonably priced for the services rendered

or from a qualified mechanic

not both

Schrödinger disliked this superposition notion

& posited the paradox of the entangled cat

callously trapped, unobserved, in a sealed steel chamber

alongside a potentially broken flask of hydrocyanic acid

both dead & alive at the same time

challenging the counter-intuitiveness

of the mathematics behind quantum states

in a classic case of reductio ad absurdum

(however, his position on exorbitant repair bills is, sadly, not recorded)

the only moral I can draw is this:

where possible don’t get a real grease monkey to fix your car

always go for an Austrian physicist

Dead and alive

Paradox

The vagina dialogues

Cordelia Fine

In every healthy young man the instinct of sex is present, controlled or allowed to run riot according to his strength of self-control and elevation of mind. Some young women possess it in as great, and in rare cases even a greater degree; but in the majority of healthy women before marriage it lies in a more or less dormant condition, and occasionally is altogether absent. – Margaret Stephens, Women & Marriage: A Handbook (1910)

My nine-year-old son recently found the DVD case for a documentary that explores positive celebrations of female sexuality in India, Cuba, China and Uganda. He read out the title, The Sunny Side of Sex, then asked me: ‘Is there a stormy side too?’

‘Oh, yes,’ I replied.

When Rebecca Jordan-Young, a socio-medical scientist at Columbia University, interviewed psychobiological researchers of sex differences, she was repeatedly told that ‘masculine and feminine sexuality are simply “common-sense” ideas’. As one scientist told her: ‘Most people … don’t have any problem understanding that male sexuality is different from female sexuality. It’s a no-brainer’.

Yet, argues Jordan-Young in her recent book Brain Storm, ‘from this side of the sexual revolutions of the 20th century, it is easy to lose track of just how much has changed, and how rapidly’. As she shows, only 30 or 40 years ago scientists categorised so many sexual behaviours as distinctly masculine – the initiation of sex, intense physical desire, masturbation, erotic dreams, arousal to narratives – that it was hardly an exaggeration to say that ‘sexuality itself was seen as a masculine trait’. The psychobiologists’ account of normal female sexual feelings and behaviour all but rendered ‘female sexuality’ an oxymoron. Female sexual imagination was restricted to ‘wedding fantasies’ (presumably not of an ‘Ooh, Reverend!’ variety). As for tens of millions of women finding sexual titillation in Fifty Shades of Grey, to the psychobiologists of the time, this would have indicated an epidemic of abnormal sexuality on a catastrophic scale.

A 1968 scientific report captures the romanticism, passivity, emotionality and exclusivity ascribed to female sexuality. Women, the authors assumed, don’t experience anything so crude as genital arousal ‘such as might lead to masturbation in the absence of a partner’, but rather a ‘sentimental arousal … which leads to romantic longing for the loved one alone and which will, in his absence, require waiting for his return’.

The researchers were exploring the idea that testosterone permanently ‘masculinises’ the brain in utero, resulting in ‘male’ and ‘female’ brains with distinct sexualities (as well as divergent interests and skills). However, the ‘common-sense’ notions of the feminine and masculine sexualities that testosterone differences might explain shifted, presumably in belated response to changes in attitudes and behaviour sparked by the 1960s sexual revolution. From the 1980s onwards, elements of bodily desire and agency – like genital arousal and libido – became common-sense features in scientific models of human, rather than male, sexuality. Yet the changes went unremarked by the researchers, who didn’t draw attention to, or most likely even notice, the fact that the male and female sexualities supposedly explained by in utero testosterone had significantly changed. This meant that the psychobiologists ‘reinforced the notion that “masculine” and “feminine” sexuality are universal, timeless constructs and created the illusion of a seamless line of evidence supporting human sexuality as hardwired by hormones’.

* * * * *

The X-rated gender gap remains today and, as with the gaps in, say, science, politics, business or child care, many claim that it’s an inevitable consequence of essentially different male and female natures. Evolutionary psychology has provided one well-known explanation. Because females bear the substantial biological costs of nutrient-rich eggs, gestation, birth and lactation, their reproductive potential is mostly constrained by access to the material resources and support they need to rear a relatively limited number of young. Women therefore do best if their mating strategy is to seek a good provider within a committed relationship. This strategy can work for men, too, but unlike women they can score reproductive wins in casual sexual encounters, from which they walk away having invested only a little time, some pleasurable effort and a mere teaspoonful or so of sperm. And so, this kind of account claims, men evolved a sexual nature more powerful, persistent and promiscuous than that of women.

Although the majority of gender differences in sexual behaviour and attitudes are small, the exceptions seem broadly consistent with received ideas. For example, women report sexual desires that are, on average, less frequent and insistent, and they are approximately twice as likely as men to report that they take little interest or find little pleasure in sex. This difference is prominently illustrated on the cover of sex therapist Bettina Arndt’s book The Sex Diaries. A man sits with folded arms at the leftmost edge of a bed and looks with frustration at the stop sign held by his female partner, who is positioned far right and wears an expression of beleaguered irritation. It’s an instantly understandable visual reference to the ‘fragile, feeble female libido’ that is such a poor match for his ‘constant sparking sexual energy’. An early diary entry by one of Arndt’s volunteers, Nadia, a married mother aged 41, captures it concisely: ‘My sex drive is zero and I really only do it for him’.

Women also report engaging less often in sexual activities that are largely bereft of emotional intimacy, such as masturbation, pornography use and casual sex. But although this is consistent with the idea that emotional context is more important for women, enjoying sexual pleasure for its own sake is stigmatised for females, and this may lead to under-reporting. For example, women who thought they were attached to a lie detector admitted to significantly more masturbation and pornography use than did women who weren’t hooked up to the bogus machine, and who thought their responses might be seen by someone else. (Similarly, that men apparently engage in more casual sex with women than women do with men is a longstanding mathematical mystery, the solution to which may well also lie in creative self-reporting.)

So thoroughly relationship-embedded is female sexuality often thought to be that hopeful heterosexual partners are advised by sex therapists that ‘foreplay is everything that happens in the twenty-four hours preceding penile insertion’, according to Louann Brizendine, author of The Female Brain. True, one can’t help but think this might be a helpful perspective for those performing at absolute rock-bottom. In The Sex Diaries, for example, Nadia’s husband describes, in the very same diary entry, both Nadia’s discovery that he has been masturbating to pornography in his truck when he hands over his semen-soiled jumper for her to wash – a gesture difficult to rival as the antithesis of romance – and his irritation at her lack of sexual interest in him. (Interestingly, when Nadia’s husband goes away, with the help of a vibrator her sex drive accelerates rapidly from ‘zero’.)

But the most recent popular book on female sexuality to hit the shelves, Naomi Wolf ’s Vagina, seems to erase altogether the boundary between lust and emotional connection, in its emphasis on the importance of romancing and household chores for female sexual arousal. Wolf writes that ‘his gazing at her, or praising her, or even folding a load of laundry, is not merely rightly thought of as highly effective foreplay; it is actually, from the female body’s point of view, an essential part of good sex itself ’. Certainly, there is little to object to in a pile of washing neatly folded by someone else. But for all that Vagina ‘radically reframes’ its eponymous heroine as nothing less than the source of transcendental orgasms, the site of the female soul and, flatteringly, the centre of the universe, there’s something not just reactionary but also disappointingly mundane about a vision of female sexuality that sees such potent eroticism in laundry.

More than one startled reviewer has commented on Wolf ’s blithe assumption that her prescriptions for a happy vagina are based not on highly culturally specific preferences – ‘perhaps shaped by romance novels and Laura Ashley bedroom sets’, as one Feministe blogger tartly suggested – but in our evolutionary past. It’s a crucial point. Certainly, the sexes differ, quite starkly, when it comes to their reproductive equipment and roles. The evolutionary principle that this should contribute to male/female differences in sexual feelings and preferences is compelling (although there are fascinatingly divergent views regarding what those differences should be, not to mention why, when and how). But it’s vital to remember how gendered behaviour has changed in the past, and to ask how it might change in the future. Over the course of several decades notions that women might, for instance, participate fully in the political process, go to university or practise law changed from dangerous feminist delusion to unremarkable reality. And it is not only outside the bedroom that females have been gradually acknowledged to be able to enjoy aspects of life previously considered exclusively masculine. In the early 20th century, access to reliable contraception decoupled female sexual activity from the costs of pregnancy, gestation and birth, enabling women for the first time in history to join men in sexual activity without risking lifelong consequences. The impact on their sexuality was revolutionary.

In The Long Sexual Revolution, Birmingham University social historian Hera Cook notes that 18th-century English women were assumed to be sexually passionate. Cook draws on economic and social changes, fertility-rate patterns, personal accounts, sex surveys and sex manuals to chart the path towards the sexual repression of the Victorian era. This was a time of reduced female economic power due to a shift from production in the home to wage earning, as well as a lifting of community pressure on men to financially support children fathered out of wedlock. In the absence of well-known, reliable birth-control techniques, ‘women could not afford to enjoy sex. The risk made it too expensive a pleasure’. Victorian women turned to sexual restraint to control fertility, argues Cook, ‘a course of desperation that could be sustained only by imposition of a repressive sexual and emotional culture, initially by individuals of their own accord, and then … upon succeeding generations’. Cook describes the trajectory of Victorian women’s sexuality from the mid to late 19th century as one of ‘increasing anxiety and diminishing sexual pleasure’, evidence for the lack of enjoyment in sexual intercourse being ‘remarkably consistent, with only occasional hints of pleasure’. Only with the increasing availability of reliable, accessible contraception in the early 20th century was there a gradual relaxation of sexual attitudes and growing acknowledgement of the existence and importance of female sexual desire, culminating in the introduction of the birth control pill and the sexual revolution.

Cook’s rich perspective provides a useful reminder of the sheer newness, still, of the possibility of female economic and reproductive autonomy. The historical view forces the reader to consider the continuing effects of a ‘long sexual revolution’ that is surely still taking place, as society continues to divest itself of the remnants of Victorian sexual mores. Take, for example, the moral discomfort felt by couples about the cervical cap. As the author of a 1934 birth control manual observed, since use of the cap suggested premeditated desire on the part of the woman, many couples disapprovingly regarded the mere act of insertion as ‘wanton’ and an unfeminine ‘invitation to sexual intercourse’.

There are clear remnants of this attitude in contemporary claims that female sexuality is naturally more passive, receptive to the desire of others rather than the active author of its own. This was the basis of Arndt’s controversial recommendation that women submit to men’s approaches and ‘just do it’, since even without prior feelings of desire they can ‘end up enjoying sex if they simply put the canoe in the water and start paddling’. This cultural belief in female sexual passivity is likely to have psychological effects. A vast, decades-old research literature has shown that gender stereotypes influence the way we behave, without us necessarily becoming aware of their influence. Particularly when gender is salient – for example, when a lone woman sits on a corporate board – our social interactions and perception of others and ourselves become more consistent with gender stereotypes. Yet this gendered behaviour is malleable rather than fixed, and male/female differences can even disappear altogether when gender is pushed into the psychological background.

This may be difficult to achieve in the bedroom. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a social context in which femaleness and sex could impinge on the psyche more effectively than during heterosexual relations. Recently, Rutgers University psychologist Diana Sanchez and her colleagues have been researching how gender stereotypes play out in the sexual domain. They’ve shown that women, but not men, automatically associate sex with submissiveness, and note other research indicating that the psychological effects of this link play out in non-sexual behaviour. Women take longer to interrupt a person who is talking on the phone after being exposed to sex-related words and images, and they even sign their names in a smaller hand. (Men’s signatures, in contrast, are enlarged by sex-priming.) As for sexual behaviour itself, a growing literature suggests that an internalised notion of female sexual passivity can be detrimental to female sexual pleasure. Heterosexual women with stronger mental links between sex and submission have greater difficulty getting aroused and achieving orgasm, and women who take a submissive role during sex experience less arousal (a correlation that isn’t due simply to a lack of desire affecting both behaviour and arousal). Their sexual dissatisfaction, in turn, reduces their partners’ enjoyment.

It might be argued that our minds merely acquire, and magnify, a biologically decreed gender difference in sexual agency. But when we consider how much female sexuality has changed in the century since a wife’s use of contraception was considered a ‘wanton’ expression of desire, we should surely feel obliged to stretch the imagination as to what changes might lie ahead. A glimpse of a possible future – and a surprising potential intervention for the present – comes from the positive effects of feminism. Women who endorse feminist beliefs report enhanced sexual wellbeing on several fronts – and not, apparently, simply thanks to the effects of those beliefs on men’s propensity to fold washing. Such women are less likely to endorse old-fashioned sexual scripts, are more likely to have sex for pleasure rather than compliance, and enjoy greater sexual satisfaction through a heightened awareness of their own desire. And, in a happy win– win story, women’s feminism is good for the sexual satisfaction of their male partners too.

These considerable cultural shifts point to the difficulty of trying to tie the moving target of ‘female sexuality’ to biological roots. In fact, although gender differences in sexuality are often chalked up to hormones, the research paints a dauntingly complex picture at odds with breathless popular claims. While Wolf, for example, claims that ‘oxytocin is women’s emotional superpower’ that puts them at risk of feeling ‘more love, more attachment, and more affection’ after sex than do men, a comprehensive 2005 academic review of the endocrinology of sexual arousal came to an utterly deflationary ending in its section on oxytocin. ‘It is difficult to draw clear conclusions,’ the author writes. ‘The reader is entitled to feel confused,’ he adds, a little mournfully. Nor is there even clear-cut evidence from healthy adult humans for the popular belief that testosterone is deeply implicated in sexual desire. Most studies have failed to find relationships between testosterone levels and libido in healthy men and women, and in a study published this year in Archives of Sexual Behavior, University of Michigan neuroendocrinologist Sari van Anders tested and rejected the hypothesis that men’s higher testosterone levels explain their greater levels of sexual desire. More often, observed relationships are the other way around: sexual behaviour influences hormone levels.

This growing body of research offers concrete examples of the insight that a gendered sexual culture, as a social phenomenon with the power to inhibit or license particular sexual thoughts, feelings and decisions, is literally incorporated into female bodies. It’s bold to assume that somewhere in the fluid, intertwined mess of biology and culture from which sexual development emerges uniquely for each individual, over a lifetime, there is a universal, timeless and distinctly feminine sexuality.

However, it’s an idea that may be hard to give up.

Cook notes that those who were against contraception in the 19th and 20th centuries ‘believed that it would lead women to become promiscuous and adulterous, that the institution of marriage would collapse’. She adds, with charming insouciance, ‘to a remarkable extent, it appears they were correct’. But the sexual revolution also, Cook observes, changed the meaning of sex itself.

In Rachel Cusk’s novel The Country Life, the prim protagonist, Stella, is confused to find herself ‘increasingly attracted to someone of whom my opinion correspondingly descended’. Stella suspects that his appeal lies in the fact that

without a rival intelligence to negotiate, without the whole vast and varied territory of taste, intellect and conversation to be explored and cultivated, the sexual domain lay invitingly close by, ripe for momentary plunder … the cheapness of my desire did not make it any less urgent.

Women’s increasing freedom to both feel and act on ‘cheap’ desires has increased the amount of sex being had, but at the same time ‘made sexual acts less important in people’s lives’, writes Cook. ‘When having sexual intercourse with a person of the opposite sex was tantamount to choosing them as a lifetime partner the act had immense emotional, economic, and symbolic weight attached to it.’

Today, such significance is optional, and this has led to many expressions of anxiety about a descent into increasingly disconnected, objectifying and emotionally meaningless sex. While in Renaissance Europe it was men’s greater rationality-based restraint that was assumed to keep sexual relations elevated above women’s more base desires, now it is respect for females’ emotionality that some hope will save us. But just as women can enjoy cheap desires, so too can men crave emotionally rich ones (even though the separation of emotional intimacy and sex has become more pronounced for males, too, over recent decades). In every realm of life, as gender gaps narrow, we are reminded that ‘love, tenderness, nurturance; competence, ambition, assertion … are human qualities’, as masculinity scholar Michael Kimmel observed, ‘and all human beings – both women and men – should have equal access to them’. So if the long sexual revolution should lead to a point where the preciousness of sex itself needs preserving – where the sunny and stormy sides of sex become too imbalanced – let it be done not just for women, but for everyone.

Dating

Sexual politics

Did the earth move for you?

Big Data can tell by your tweets

if you’re a psychopath:

That’s only the beginning …

Kirsten Drysdale

At the turn of the 20th century, prospectors were rugged, bearded men. They sat on their haunches by mountain streams, rattling pans, sifting through gravel with weather-worn hands in the hope of finding something shiny buried in ancient rock. Very few struck it rich.

Just over a century later, prospectors have degrees in computer science and, it’s fair to say, a rather different image. They sit on ergonomic office chairs, tapping out algorithms on keyboards running them through huge databases in the hope of finding something useful in the seams of ones-and-zeroes still so new to our planet. What constitutes gold in this new industry? A way of identifying the most persuadable voters is treasure for some, for others it’s predicting trends in criminal activity.

Data miners rely far less on luck for their livelihoods than the prospectors of old. Many earn six-figure salaries for their work – that’s pay dirt. And their fields of exploration are no ordinary geography. These people are drilling into ‘Big Data’ – the 2.5 quintillion bytes of information created daily by businesses, individuals, financial institutions, government departments, research labs and countless other organisations around the world. The potential economic value of insights hidden within this resource recently prompted the World Economic Forum to declare it a new asset class and is pushing the concept of ‘data equity’ – already well understood by web companies such as Google and Facebook – into the mainstream.

Finding those virtual nuggets is a complicated task. For a start, a big data set can include all manner of records: years – sometimes decades – of financial transactions, exchange rates, web history, air temperature, blood pressure, crime rates, personal attributes, Facebook ‘likes’, status updates, videos …

This pithy tweet from a Canadian analyst probably explains big data best for the layperson:

@SHamelCP: ‘Simplest definition of BigData ever: “it doesn’t fit in Excel”’ :)

Nowhere near. But volume is only one of the three Vs pushing the ‘data tsunami’ beyond the capacity of traditional business analysis tools and into the hands of data scientists. Velocity, or the speed with which new information is acquired and the demand to act upon it in real time, and variety – messy, ‘unstructured’ data such as images, raw text and multimedia – have, until now, also made harnessing the latent power of all this information a monumental challenge.

Hence the latest tech boom: the value of the global big data market is projected to top the US $50 billion mark by 2017, a tenfold increase from 2012. And business opportunities are manifold, ranging from storage and data management to analytical services and consulting.

Big players include established computing giants, such as IBM, Intel and HP, and traditional business-intelligence providers, while hundreds of big-data-focused start-ups have entered the fray. The rush is well and truly on.

‘It’s exploding right now, in terms of interest, in terms of activity in the vendor community – and everybody is now talking about big data from an end-user perspective,’ says Jeff Kelly, a techindustry analyst speaking from his office in Marlborough, Massachusetts – the US state which is aiming to become the world’s big data hub. ‘People want to know how they can use the data they’ve been collecting for years – now that the technology has become available and affordable and they can actually do something with it, instead of it just sitting in a repository somewhere.’

Kelly covers the big data world for open-source research company Wikibon, and authored the first comprehensive report on the size of the global market. ‘We’re seeing interest from all kinds of areas – financial services, healthcare, retail – I can’t find an industry I don’t think will be impacted by this to some degree.’

In Australia interest is also gathering pace, says Richard Price, vice president of systems at business-intelligence provider Oracle ANZ in Melbourne. ‘Businesses are realising that this will become a source of competitive advantage. In a big data world, any organisation that fails to sufficiently leverage its analytical insights will be left behind.’

Anthony Goldbloom, an Australian entrepreneur who recently moved his big data start-up, Kaggle, to Silicon Valley, puts the buzz into perspective. ‘Put it this way: the first quarter of 2012 saw more venture capital investment in big data companies than in consumer internet companies.’ We are most definitely, he says, in ‘the era of big data’.

Numbers fill out the picture: The May 2011 report Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition and Productivity by the McKinsey Global Institute claims using big data could provide US $300 billion annual value to healthcare in the United States and €100 billion of efficiency savings to Europe’s public sector. In research conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2012 for French professional services firm Capgemini, senior executives reported an average of 26 per cent company performance improvement over the previous three years thanks to big data – a figure they expected to rise to 41 per cent over the next three years.

They weren’t identified, but some of those executives were likely from large banks, where big data is already being deployed to improve fraud detection.

‘They know everything you bought, when you bought it, how you bought it – when you look at that across all the years it’s easy to spot when something out of the ordinary happens. In the past you couldn’t crunch that much data, so you might say, “This is a little out of the ordinary but we can’t say how much out of the ordinary because we don’t have enough to go on.” Now, you can act on it immediately,’ explains Kelly.

At Predictive Analytics World, the premier commercial-datascience conference, the sessions include movie studios ‘using big data to optimise and predict opening week at the box office’, and ‘Pfizer: Right Medicine, Right Patient’. Even Navy SEALs are covered, in ‘US Special Forces: Hiring and Selecting Key Personnel Using Predictive Analytics’, while marketing research firm Nielsen caters for those with more of an eye for profit, with a financial services session titled ‘Finding Consumers More Accurately and Actionably Using Data Mining Tools’.

Consumer targeting is undoubtedly where much of the potential treasure lies, as Price explains: ‘Consider the difference it would make to a company if marketers could quickly and easily see that certain products or services are generating “buzz” at a given time and location, or even identify a reason why a product is not selling and respond to this by targeting supplementary promotions to the relevant geography,’ he says, pointing to the McKinsey report figure of a 60 per cent potential increase in profit margins for retailers through big data applications.

There are, as always, a few points of caution. ‘Big data washing’, for example, refers to the fact that ‘everybody and their brother is coming out saying “this is our big data tool” – frankly, some of it is more marketing than reality,’ warns Kelly.

Having mountains of information doesn’t necessarily equate to mountains of value. ‘A lot of what big data is all about is wading through the crap, for lack of a better term. Maybe you can figure out if somebody’s likely to purchase a particular type of gum if the weather’s a certain way, but does it really matter? That’s not exactly a high-margin business or a significant social insight. That’s the challenge – to find the interesting bits that are just buried under petabytes of data,’ says Kelly. He hastens to add that he thinks some of the hype is justified.

‘There is definitely a lot more chatter going on than there is large-scale deployment, but I’m not sure I’d call that hype, I’d call that early talk – because this technology really does have huge potential to impact all industries.’

A few obstacles still lie between the talk and the actual dollars. The biggest by far is a shortage of talent. ‘Although we have these big data technologies now, we simply don’t have enough qualified people to use them. A lot of this stuff was created by highly skilled engineers at web companies like Google or Yahoo! – things like MapReduce and Hadoop – because they were the first to really need to deal with massive data sets and there were simply no tools available for them to use,’ says Kelly.

‘So what they came up with was not necessarily user-friendly, it was designed for their core business. The people we need to help commercialise this stuff – we call them “data scientists” but it requires a whole mix of skills around maths, statistics, programming, business, social sciences – there just aren’t enough people who meet that criteria now to make big data analysis possible in too many organisations.’

The McKinsey report quantified this workforce shortfall for the USA alone at ‘140 000 to 190 000 people with deep analytical skills, as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make effective decisions’. Those findings are mirrored in the explosion of datarelated job advertisements since 2010.

‘You go to data conferences and just about every presentation ends with “oh and by the way – we’re hiring”,’ says Goldbloom, who in 2011 secured US $11 million in funding to further grow Kaggle, a competitive crowd-sourcing platform, which is credited with ‘making data science a sport’.

Goldbloom, a former Australian Treasury economist, founded the company in 2010 after recognising just how big the demand for big data analysts was becoming. ‘I was interning at The Economist in London, writing a piece about big data and predictive modelling, and got to speak to a whole lot of CIO-level people and ask them how high on their list of priorities this stuff was. I discovered that they were all wanting to do it but having trouble putting anything into action – they didn’t have access to the people who could.’

He came up with a model that allows companies and organisations to post their data and particular problems online; there, over 45 000 data scientists from all over the world compete to find the best solution. A leader board is updated in real time until the competition closes and the winner claims their prize money from the host. Bounty can range from a few thousand dollars to US $3 million.

Participants who consistently perform well in public competitions may then be invited – and paid – to compete in private contests.

‘It’s a meritocracy, like golf or tennis,’ says Goldbloom, who hopes Kaggle will play a central role in the future of the industry. ‘We’d like to see the world’s best data scientists making their living this way.’

In the meantime, more big data wranglers have to be trained. Goldbloom sits on the advisory board for a data science course being created at New York’s Columbia University, one of many educational institutions preparing to offer qualifications specifically designed for this new discipline.

‘Universities are starting to come around to the fact that this is an area in great demand around industry, but it will probably take a long time before these courses become ubiquitous and a long time before students are graduating from these courses, so it’s a long game. The parallel one might draw is engineering, which wasn’t initially a uni degree but now very much is – I think we’ll see the same phenomenon with data science.’

The issue of privacy – we know you’ve been wondering – is ever present in conversations about big data. While not all information ripe for big data analysis is derived from the personal lives of human beings (think NASA’s climate sensors, or motorvehicle-performance data), much of the most profitable information is.

A memorable story from 2012 gives an example of just how powerful – and disturbing – big data insights based on personal information can be. An in-house statistician at Target (in the US) analysed the purchasing behaviour of women on the department store’s baby-shower registry to come up with a ‘pregnancy prediction’ model which could then be applied to all shoppers on its customer database. When a teenage girl in Minneapolis began stocking up on signal items like unscented lotion, vitamins and cotton wool, it prompted Target to send her coupons for baby clothes and maternity wear – a move her father considered grossly inappropriate until he learned she was, in fact, expecting.

‘For a lot of people, that crosses a line,’ says Chris Yiu, the economist heading the Digital Government Unit at UK think tank Policy Exchange in London. Yiu recently authored a report highlighting the potential for between £16 billion and £33 billion of public-sector efficiency savings through big data analytics, and says the issue of privacy is one of the biggest obstacles.

‘With all of this very rich data you have tremendous potential to save money, but also to infringe privacy and civil liberties. You need a way to hold the government to a very high standard of ethical behaviour,’ Yiu says. His report recommends governments adopt a Code for Responsible Analytics requiring adherence to the highest ethical and privacy standards, and also suggests test-driving big data initiatives before rolling them out to the real world.

‘We should sandbox and test with synthetic data before releasing this stuff into the wild, because there’s so much potential for it to go wildly wrong,’ says Yiu. ‘Do it “in a lab” first and see how it goes, then have a debate about the public policy benefits versus how far you had to go with personal data, and ask “does it overstep the mark?” If it does, kill it in the lab.’

Kelly takes a similar ethical position: ‘I’d argue the principle that should always be kept in mind is that just because you can do something with big data, doesn’t mean you should.’

Whether the private sector will display the same level of concern remains to be seen, and will depend largely on what we – consumers – are prepared to provide in return for free services.

‘What people will start to understand is that when you log on to Facebook, you’re essentially giving away your data. People might find it creepy that an organisation mines social data to make better decisions, but ultimately you’ve made that decision to give it away,’ says Kelly.

The potential consequences of that behaviour was on the agenda at DEF CON – the 20th annual, and controversial, computer hacker convention held in Las Vegas in 2012 – when the Online Privacy Foundation presented the results of its Kagglehosted competition titled ‘Psychopathy Prediction Based on Twitter Usage’.

The organisation provided an anonymised dataset of around 3000 Twitter users who had completed a psychological survey which calculated their ‘psychopathy score’. Competitors were then invited to analyse 337 variables derived from the users’ Twitter activity to come up with a model that could identify those with high levels of psychopathy based on their online behaviour.

‘They did find there is a correlation – if you swear in your tweets or reply with a swear word, the more you do that the higher the psychopathy score. And if you reply with a conjunction – with a “but” for instance – that increases the probability you’re a psychopath. The correlation wasn’t crazily strong, but there was one,’ says Goldbloom.

The real point of the exercise was to raise awareness about social-media use. ‘For instance, given this algorithm, an employer might run your tweets through to get a sense of your employability based on your Twitter profile.’

Price reminds us that mining online chatter could also have positive outcomes.

‘Imagine a scenario where health practitioners can use realtime, big data analytics to understand where the flu virus is spreading, and at what pace, so they can tailor their response and ensure that sufficient vaccine stocks get to the right places,’ he says.

‘The modern world has been built squarely on the foundations of data. Almost every aspect of our lives has been impacted by the ability of organisations to marshal, interrogate and analyse data. Our cars have been made more efficient by it, our medicines more effective, road safety improved and crimes solved faster.’

It’s a point almost everyone you speak to from the big data world makes. ‘We’re just doing what human beings have always done’ – finding patterns and relationships to help us make betterinformed decisions. Whether those insights are used for good or ill, profit or power, still comes down to the people using them. The difference today is merely one of scale.

Business drive

Prospecting

With body in mind (after Vesalius)

Ian Gibbins

1. Preparator

Surrounded by rows of knuckles

boiled and bleached free of their marrow

I focus through my lenses

to place facet on articulated facet

and with a skeleton of surprise, I reconstruct

this intimation of a beating heart.

In preparation for display

my texts and numbered charts are closed

the cabinet door locked shut;

under the magnifying beams of spotlights,

I polish my glass eyes

and stitch my skin tight around me.

2. Students

Once the paperwork is done

the rest is just formality

an irredeemable end

to caged silences of a lifetime

precisely at the tip of a scalpel

this he, this she

when cool with missing breath

we look on and look away.

3. Donors

No-one is likely to argue

that, any time soon,

we will be moving far from here.

Not because our bones

have become soft and yellow,

carefully exposed

below these anonymous cotton sheets.

Nor because our nerves,

now slack, without tension or tone,

no longer sing like piano strings.

Nor even because our

rich red blood and

dark shining muscles

have ceased to pump, to pulse.

As you can see, we are done with action:

all we have left is intent and desire;

all we wish is for

you to feel our warmth.

Death

Teachers

How a donor is done

Kellee Slater

It was usually late at night when we slipped into the donor hospital as discreetly as we could. We came and went via back entrances and dark alleyways just in case the family of a donor might catch us leaving with a cooler filled with organs from their relative. It was important too not to discuss a donor whilst we were taking a taxi to and from the airport in small towns because there was a fair chance that the driver might know the donor, their family or the details of the death.

Organ donation is a much misunderstood procedure. People have told me that they think we do a ‘slash and grab’ to retrieve organs and that we ‘hack’ people open to plunder them of their bits and pieces. This isn’t helped of course by the wildly untrue tales of hapless tourists waking up in ice-filled baths in South American hotel rooms to find they are missing their kidneys. The reality of donor surgery could not be more different. Removing organs for transplant is a careful operation, performed in an operating theatre with an anaesthetist, surgeon, assistants and an army of nurses. It takes hours of hard slog and if it wasn’t for the dead body on the operating table at the end, the casual observer would be forgiven for thinking that we were performing any other routine surgery. The utmost reverence is paid to the deceased and even the most minor details are thoughtfully considered. Our aim is to leave the donor looking like we have not been there. I wait patiently in the tea room at the end of the case while the nurses wash the body and comb the hair. The long incision I have made is covered with a neat dressing. We cover the body completely with a clean white sheet and when we have gone, the family is able to come in and say their final goodbyes.

Despite all the respect that is paid, I still find donation a really gruesome task. I have done it hundreds of times and I think I will always feel this way. The donor team always uses the local anaesthetist and nursing staff, so, in addition to your own emotions, you also have to deal with the reactions of the locals who are usually seeing this side of donation for the first time. At the smaller hospitals, many of the staff will have been involved in the patient’s care and may have formed a connection to them. It is impossible to prepare someone for the sight of a human heart removed from the chest when moments before it was still beating. Then at the end, before the wound is closed, there is the shocking appearance of a hollowed-out body devoid of its organs, when only a short time before they seemed to be a living breathing person. It can be so traumatic that I have seen theatre staff burst into tears during the procedure. I too still find it very sobering and try not to look back at the body once I have left the table. If you take the time to notice, often everyone in the theatre goes about cleaning up the room with their backs turned to the donor, trying not to think about the sad scene.

Anaesthetists can also have a really hard time because donors are the only cases where they are not there to perform their usual task of keeping the patient asleep, alive and pain-free. In donation surgery their job changes and they are there to make sure the lungs are receiving oxygen and to keep the blood pumping around the body using powerful stimulant drugs. During routine surgery, the anaesthetist is the first person to see the patient and the last one to bid them farewell when they deliver them to recovery. For donors, however, there is no recovery and the moment the heart and lungs are removed, the anaesthetist’s job is finished. The regular beat of the heart monitor that sets the tempo of the operating theatre abruptly ceases as the heart is stopped from beating by the preservation liquid running through it. There is silence in the room and instead of an operating theatre the atmosphere is more like that of a mortuary. It is completely unnatural for an anaesthetist to leave the theatre without their patient and I can tell that some have a hard time deviating from the routine. Many times they will stand firm at the head of the bed, looking a little unsure what to do next, mesmerised by the stunning sight of the organs being lifted out one by one. We thank them for being there and gently tell them they can go home if they wish.

One chap, obviously feeling odd that he had not run through his usual post-surgery checklist, asked me, ‘What was your estimated blood loss?’

I looked up quizzically, not sure that I had heard him correctly, and finally replied, ‘All of it, actually’.

He flushed with embarrassment when he realised what he’d asked. Another thing that anaesthetists do is give medication to paralyse the donor to stop them from moving. Yes, despite being dead, donors frequently move. It can really freak everyone out, me included. Donors have primitive spinal reflexes that cause them to twitch, move their hands and have erections. I just about passed out the day the anaesthetist omitted the paralysis medication and a donor’s hand twitched violently, slapping me hard on the backside.

There are usually two pairs of surgeons operating during donation surgery, one team for the heart and lungs and the other to take the liver, kidneys and pancreas. Other groups from the eye and bone bank come for the corneas and bones after the deceased has been taken to the morgue. When the donor is brought into the operating room, all activity stops while we check that the paperwork is all done and, most importantly, that the donor’s identity is correct. I don’t think that there has ever been a case of mistaken identity and it is my mission to ensure that there never will be. That would be difficult to live with.

The donor is positioned on the table in a rather unseemly pose, with their arms taped high above the head. This gives us lots of room to work. It can get pretty tight for space with the heart and liver teams working alongside each other and sometimes a sleep-deprived unfriendly rivalry results in toes being stepped on and elbows to the ribs. The body is opened via a long cut from the neck to the pubic bone and a noisy power saw is used to slice the breast bone up the centre. A metal frame is inserted into the gap and the chest is slowly cranked open. The heart is then fully on display, beating steadily in its sac. This is a show-stopping sight and, exposed like this, the heart makes a soft slapping sound as it pounds away. At the same time, one of the chest surgeons passes a telescope through the nose and into the lungs to ensure the windpipe is clear and that the lungs are healthy. They are looking for cancer and infections that might render the lungs unsuitable to use. From time to time they even find some surprising things down there. One donor I went to met his end by crashing his Harley Davidson into a tree whilst riding to the Sturgis Motor Cycle Rally in Wyoming. Down his windpipe we found the piece of gum that he had been chewing at the moment of impact. He had inhaled it and it was wedged hard and fast. It was probably what killed him. Life can hinge on the smallest things.

Once the chest is cracked, it is my turn to spring into action. The abdomen is also propped open with a metal frame that fully displays the liver and bowels. A careful inspection is made of all the organs to determine if they are usable. Hopefully, there will be a smooth, rich red liver with sharply angled edges. A bad liver is one that contains too much fat that accumulates in little bubbles throughout the cells. These livers have rounded edges and are so fragile that they can bruise and split like a piece of overripe fruit if they are not handled gently. We call them pumpkins because of their golden colour when the blood is drained out of them. Sadly, fatty livers are all too frequently found as the waistlines of the Western world expand, fuelled by our fast-food diets. The fat damages the inner workings of the liver cells and causes liver disease. If a liver contains more than 40 per cent fat, it may not work very well and a very sick liver transplant recipient can have a slow and painful death if they receive one. A skilled donor surgeon must eyeball the liver and take all of this into account, literally deciding right there at two o’clock in the morning whether a recipient will live or die that day.

Once the two teams of surgeons decide that all the organs are good, we get down to the business of carefully dissecting their blood supplies out of the surrounding fat and breaking down all their connections to the body. The liver has a very complex blood supply and is different in every patient. The blood vessels to the liver have to be taken with as much length as possible so there are lots of options when it comes time to sew them into the recipient. Everything is detached as much as possible while the donor’s blood is still circulating. When both the chest and abdominal surgeons are ready, the anaesthetist gives a massive dose of a blood thinning medication called heparin that renders the blood as thin as water. This allows us to wash all the blood out of the body and replace it with the preservative fluid that makes transplant possible. This fluid is pumped in via tubes inserted into the major blood vessels in the donor’s abdomen and chest. This liquid is ice cold and surprisingly sticky. It is called UW (University of Wisconsin) solution and contains a complex combination of salts and preservatives that prevent the cells in the organs from bursting when they are stored at a low temperature.

When everything is in place and both teams are ready, someone cries out ‘Cross-clamp!’ Then it is on for young and old as the clock is ticking. Up to this point, it has been a careful and considered surgery. Now it is all about speed. We move like Edward Scissorhands, chop, chop, chop. This is the trickiest part – to move fast without cutting something you shouldn’t. Our success is measured by the time it takes to get the organs into their new owners, because from this moment everything is dying. It all happens at once: the aorta, a hosepipe-sized artery carrying blood from the heart to the legs via the abdomen, is clamped; the inferior vena cava, the massive vein carrying blood from the legs to the heart, is severed and the donor is exsanguinated. Five litres of blood floods into the body cavities. At the same time, the hanging bags of preservation solution are run through, full speed. The blood in the veins is replaced by the ice cold fluid and almost instantly the deep red colour of the liver fades to beige, the heart stops beating and the only noise in the room is the sound of blood being removed by the suckers.

The heart and lungs are lifted out of the body first. The heart surgeons cut the blood vessels that suspend them in the chest. Just before the windpipe is divided, the anaesthetist delivers several final puffs of air via the breathing bag in order to blow the lungs up to their full capacity. This stops the delicate air sacs from getting glued together during transport. The two lungs and heart are then lifted out of the chest, like fully inflated balloons. This is a clumsy block of tissue. Imagine trying to manipulate two wet pillows tenuously connected in the middle by a wobbly heart. It requires two hands to clutch the jiggly parcel and carry the organs to a waiting sterile table, wrap them carefully in three layers of plastic bags and bury them in ice. It is then my turn to free the liver from its last few attachments as fast as I can and place it into its own bags. Like the lungs, the kidneys are also delivered as a pair, but are separated into right and left once they are out of the body. They are bagged separately, the left one being the more favoured by transplant surgeons as its naturally longer blood vessels make it a little easier to transplant. Then we are done and I stitch the skin wound closed, gather the labelled and bagged organs, and hit the road.

Dis-ease

Courageous

Nest: The art of birds

Janine Burke

In 2010 in the Melbourne Museum, I held a nest in my hands for the first time. It was an astonishing and exquisite experience.

The nest itself was delicate and beautiful. However, as an art historian I’m used to the regulations that govern the conservation of precious objects, whether paintings, manuscripts or photographs. The more prestigious the institution and rarer the object, the stricter the rules. I’m not arguing: collections need care. There is an etiquette involved with personally viewing or handling artworks that is rather like being seated at a formal meal. First you enter a clean, hushed, temperature-controlled room. Then a curator indicates where you will sit and offers you a pair of white cotton gloves so your grubby fingers won’t stain the artwork. Then a box of treasures is placed before you. Sometimes you are not even allowed to open the lid.

When I visited the Melbourne Museum to see some of the nests, which were not on display, the young woman at the desk said, ‘The nests are in there,’ indicating a seminar room off the Discovery Centre. I hovered, waiting to be accompanied, to be given cotton gloves, to be shown where to sit. I had brought my own pencils for making notes. ‘In there,’ she said again, firmly but not unkindly. ‘You can stay as long as you like.’

After years of obedience training, I was daunted. What if I wrecked a nest? The seminar room was unremarkable: modern, windowless, with about fifty charcoal-coloured chairs in neat rows. On the desk at the front was a huge cardboard box. I picked it up. It was light. For a moment I thought there’d been a mistake and the box was empty; then I opened it and saw it was full of nests. Each was in a snap-lock plastic bag, the sort you put sandwiches in, with a handwritten catalogue card. I slid the topmost nest out of its bag and into my hands.

The striped honeyeater’s nest shimmered with long, soft, beige and tawny-coloured emu feathers, at least one hundred of them. It had been squashed flat from some previous, less commodious form of storage; otherwise it was perfectly preserved. An elaborate piece of work, it looked like an exotic purse worthy of an empress, stitched by a Surrealist seamstress. It was like holding an object that belonged to the wind and it gave the expression ‘feathering your nest’ quite a new meaning. Feeling my way into the lip of the nest with my fingertips, I found a dense arrangement of woven grasses. First the honeyeaters had collected the grasses and constructed the nest proper, which hangs like a hammock between the branches of a eucalypt, then they collected the feathers which they deftly slid into the interstices.

The catalogue card informed me that the nest, like many of the others in the box, had been donated by a member of the public, in this case RP Cooper from Milparinka in 1969. Milparinka is in a remote corner of north-western New South Wales, near the tri-borders of Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia – truly the Outback. Several parties of our doomed explorers, including Charles Sturt and Burke and Wills, trekked through the country, heading north. In the 1870s, gold was found at nearby Tibooburra, but Milparinka had something more precious in that arid region: a creek with a water hole. I learn from Penny Olsen, one of Australia’s leading ornithologists, that Ray Cooper was an honorary ornithologist at the Melbourne Museum.

Emus, nomadic wanderers, congregate near water holes in the dry season. (Australia’s unofficial bird emblem, the emu is a large flightless creature with a tiny head, massive feet and a voluminous feathered coat.) The honeyeaters build their nests in the same period. So the water hole at Milparinka is probably where the honeyeaters gathered the feathers that the emus had shed. Today Milparinka is a ghost town, with a population of less than 300, but emus still wander the land and perhaps the honeyeaters still gather their feathers. Did the honeyeaters use the feathers as camouflage? Emus stand up to two metres tall and honeyeaters sometimes build their nests at around the same height. Emus are big strong birds that can run like the wind and slash with their great claws. A predator, thinking it had glimpsed an emu in the brush, might desist from robbing the nest of eggs or attacking the chicks. On the other hand, Indigenous tribes avidly tracked the emus, seeking out their large eggs and often ambushing them at water holes; around Milparinka that tribe was the Maliangaapa people, who also used the water holes for their ceremonies.

The honeyeaters’ nest arrived at the museum in February 1969, midsummer and the end of the breeding season. It means Ray Cooper was a nest thief, as were many of the other donors. After the honeyeaters’ endeavours, they returned home to find their home was gone. Ray must have shinnied up a tree, pulled or cut the nest from its moorings and then, carefully and somewhat proudly I imagine, posted it to the museum. The catalogue card notes that the nest is unusual for its large number of feathers. Its beauty lies in its excess. This must be what enticed Cooper who, by stealing it, sought to preserve it. I slide the nest back into its plastic bag, the lustre of my pleasure somewhat dimmed. There’s worse to come. The nest of the mudlark, whose official name is the Australian magpie-lark, contains three pink speckled eggs.

During one breeding season, I watched two mudlarks tend their nest in a eucalypt near the Elwood canal. They build, as their name suggests, with mud and plant fibres, on the bare horizontal fork of a tree several metres up. Prior to hatching, the couple took turns to incubate the eggs and afterwards both worked alternate shifts to feed the family. It was a dawn-to-dusk enterprise and the parent scoring the food stayed nearby in case a predator should arrive. Though I cannot know what the mudlark feels or thinks, and evolution teaches that survival is the motivating force, the uncomplaining resolve of animals is impressive, stoic and dignified. The mudlark is a quirky bird with the bold presence of its larger relative, the magpie. If I pass a mudlark when out walking along the Elwood Canal, it often won’t bother to move but cocks me a sideways glance, self-contained and unafraid, with its very pale blue eyes, before continuing to forage. It’s my place too.

In the museum, I take the mudlark’s nest in my hands. The donor had thoughtfully included its foundation – a sawn-off branch. I’m surprised at how heavy it is: it must weigh around one kilo. Without a date on the catalogue card I’ve no clue to its age but it’s rock solid and strong, without a crack, as sturdy as an ancient wall built by those other great engineers, the Romans.

Holding a nest allows you to share the bird’s intimate domestic space. While the exterior of the mudlark’s nest is tough, inside it’s cosy and layered with grasses. The white-plumed honeyeater makes a tiny nest like a cradle, quite deep, woven with cobwebs stolen from spiders, and insulated with strands of clean white wool. The circular shape of nests is determined by their friction-built foundation – twig upon twig – or, in the case of plant fibres and mud, the shaping of moist material that dries hard. Birds don’t only use their beaks to build: they press their breasts against the inner wall to make it round, imprinting their shape on their home, an interior formed by the steady rhythm of their beating hearts.

In 2010, a contemporary art exhibition in Melbourne celebrated birds. Christian Froelich, a young sculptor, made a work imitating a nest that was woven with twigs and rose brambles. Positioned aloft at the rear of the gallery, it was an arresting homage, monumental yet fragile. In a media interview, Froelich explained the difficulties of constructing the nest and how long it had taken. What if a mudlark and a magpie were invited to the gallery to assess the human’s handiwork? The artist had the privilege of working at his own pace with two hands in a studio out of the weather. For birds, time is of the essence and their projects take place in nature, whatever the conditions. The magpie makes broad airy treetop nests that, cunningly, are almost indistinguishable from the branches. They may look flimsy but they are secure and Froelich’s nest is not. If Froelich’s nest were in a storm, the chicks would fall, and down would come baby, cradle and all.

What places Froelich’s nest in the category of ‘art’ and excludes the birds’ nests? Intent? Froelich pays tribute to birds’ technical and aesthetic flair, while the mudlark’s goal is survival. Location? One nest is found in a gallery with a price tag attached; the other is in the wild. Design? Skill? On that count, the birds’ craftsmanship is superior. Over the millennia, humans have studied avian architecture while birds – who were making homes for millions of years before homo sapiens populated the earth – learned about materials, structure, balance, endurance and disguise from the trees as well as, of course, through their own failures and successes.

The aesthetics of one bird’s creative constructions has caught the attention of scientists. Scientists are fascinated by bowerbirds because they clearly demonstrate the power of sexual selection, the evolutionary force that Darwin defined to explain conspicuous male traits such as song, bright colours, and horns. In The Descent of Man, Darwin made particular note of the male bowerbird’s display: ‘The playing passages of bower-birds are tastefully ornamented with gaily-coloured objects; and this shews that they must receive some sort of pleasure from the sight of such things’. As writer Virginia Morell notes, these multi-talented birds can build a hut that looks like a doll’s house; they can arrange flowers, leaves and mushrooms in such an artistic manner you’d be forgiven for thinking that Matisse was about to set up his easel; some can sing simultaneously both the male and female parts of another species’ duet, and others easily imitate the raucous laugh of a kookaburra or the roar of a chainsaw. Plus, they all dance.

Satin bowerbirds opt for a blue palette with a few hints of yellow, while in the tropical woodlands of northern Australia the great bowerbird selects a fashionably muted range of ornaments – bleached snail shells, stones and pebbles, sometimes adding a note or two of olive-green for contrast. It might even choose only one object and one hue, such as uniformly sized grey stones, to create a dramatic, minimalist Zen-like effect. The male’s ‘welcome mats’ can include thousands of items, sometimes filched from other males competing nearby for the female’s attention. In New Guinea, the Macgregor’s bowerbird may spend weeks erecting, and years perfecting, a ‘maypole’ bower up to two metres high atop a ring of moss. Others, like the Vogelkop, also found in New Guinea, make patterns with hot-pink flowers, black beans and wide green leaves on the jungle floor. Human rubbish is not ignored and the enterprising Vogelkops collect discarded softdrink cans and brightly coloured confectionery bags to lure the female. Indeed, Western researchers believed for decades that the bowers must be the work of diminutive undiscovered forest tribes.

Scientists are wary of anthropomorphism, the assignment of human characteristics to animals. As naturalist and author Lyanda Lynn Haupt comments, most young scientists take their first university classes under a sign that actually forbids it. At her college the sign read ‘Thou Shalt Not Anthropomorphize’, and it was ‘penned in ornamental calligraphy on faux parchment, as if it had been inscribed by a medieval monk taking dictation directly from God’. Anecdotal observation is also frowned upon. In Darwin’s time, however, when the professions of ‘scientist’ and ‘ornithologist’ were being defined, anthropomorphism was not viewed with the same opprobrium with which current scientists regard it. Darwin’s sympathetic participation with animals – which makes his writings about birds, for example, so engaging – was quite common. In the Falkland Islands, Darwin spotted carrion hawks which he described as ‘very mischievous and inquisitive … [they] are quarrelsome, and extremely passionate; it was curious to behold them when, impatient, tearing up the grass with their bills from rage’. Petrels approaching his ship were ‘tame & sociable, & silent’ and a certain thrush especially ‘inquisitive’. Haupt describes how Darwin ‘utterly, and even joyfully, abandoned his privileged human status. He threw his own thoughts and behaviours right into the animal mix, putting all creatures, including humans, on the same continuum of consciousness’. It meant that rather than imposing human consciousness upon animal behaviours, Darwin ‘animalized consciousness in general’.

Recently Mike Hansell, emeritus professor at the University of Glasgow and an expert on animal architecture, has become emboldened to believe that ‘not only might bowerbirds feel pleasure from building the bower but also that we might be able to obtain objective evidence of it’. The bowerbird’s skill at designing fabulous colour schemes and extravagant bowers develops over several years, and the more sophisticated the bower, the better the bird’s success rate in attracting a female. It seems that males and females recognise and enjoy ‘a sense of beauty’, as Darwin described it. What the bowerbird admires, so do we. Aghast at his temerity, Hansell wonders if he seems to be ‘losing his critical faculties in suggesting that bowerbirds might be artists’. After all, the study of animal behaviour needs to show objectivity and investigate only the measurable to establish its scientific credentials. But Darwin’s preparedness to use his imagination has encouraged a discerning and influential scientist like Hansell to consider that some non-human animals, such as the bowerbird, have a capacity for discriminating visual pleasure. Does the female bowerbird fall in love with a beautiful mind?

At the museum, the female satin bowerbird’s nest was the oldest in the box. It was found on 10 February 1900 by SW Jackson near the Bellinger River in New South Wales, half a metre from the ground. According to its accompanying note, it was in ‘an Oak tree near the edge of a dense Cedar scrub’. After mating, the male and female have no further contact and the female raises the family alone, not unusual in the animal world. After the intense scrutiny to which she subjects the male’s creation, the female doesn’t waste her time on ornaments and bravura technique, though her nest is lovely in its simplicity.

I watched a documentary that showed a bowerbird busily arranging the boudoir. When he’d nearly finished, a brush turkey many times larger than he wandered through the bower searching for food, picking and kicking his way along the forest floor. The bowerbird, forced to sit to one side and watch the methodical disarray of his composition, seethed. Philistine. Perhaps one artist in the family is enough.

Mating behaviours

Feathered

Minutiae

My father’s body

Francesca Rendle-Short

I never saw anything so beautiful … you cannot conceive how the Orchids have delighted me. – Charles Darwin to Sir JD Hooker, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin and Selected Letters (1892)

Last Sunday I went to church to be with my father, to say goodbye. As I looked in from the vestibule, I could see he was already there; he was early, the church was empty. I saw him before he saw me, his face to the pulpit, sitting in his wheelchair down the front at the end of the pew near the window, out on his own. His head was bowed like a church orchid, an altar display, as if he were praying. His body curled over like a ball – he looked so small I thought he could very well roll away during the service and disappear under a pew. He was leafing through a hymnbook, ruffling the corners of the pages. He knew exactly what it was he was looking for– at least he looked as if he did: a hymn number, a title, the first line perhaps, a favourite tune. Later, when I was close enough to help him, I saw that the book was upside down and back-to-front.

My father is a six-day creationist, the sort who thinks God made everything in six 24-hour days, and that our planet, indeed the whole universe, is just a tiny 6000 years old. He would call himself a creation evangelist, if asked, believing that only those Christians who have faith in a literal interpretation of Genesis are in fact Christians. The other sort, those Christians who are loose with their thinking and their hearts – ‘devout but unthinking Christians’ is the way my father phrases it – who believe in metaphor and parabolic interpretation, the coupling together of science and theory with literature, even the most holy kind, will go to hell along with all the other heathens. God never discriminates between the goats. ‘Our concept of God has gone soft,’ he writes, ‘God is absolute, sovereign good, a hater of evil’. My father’s archenemy, of course, is Charles Darwin. ‘If evolution is true, there was no Fall. If man did not Fall, then there is no need for a Saviour.’ I’m not making this up: it’s true.

In 2009, we were in the middle of Darwinmania, a yearlong festival of events and celebrations that began in February with prayers at St Paul’s in Melbourne. At the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, in an exhibition about Darwin’s life and work (‘for twenty-one years he kept his theory secret’ runs the tagline), I find carefully preserved letters written by hand to his closest friend, the botanist Joseph Hooker, confessing the imminent publication of The Origin. In one letter, Darwin writes in an elegant hand: ‘At last gleams of light have come, & I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable’ (11 January 1844).

Then, in a curious afterthought written in pencil at the foot of the letter, he adds: ‘I do not know anything’. American writer Flannery O’Connor once famously said, ‘The more I write the less I know about writing’. Maybe, like O’Connor, Darwin knew just this, that he really didn’t know where he was heading – he was being honest and open, not a faux naïf. The more he pieced together this new tree of life, the less certain he became of its currency.

It is like confessing a murder.

If my father were aware of Darwin’s birthday, if he knew what a fuss everyone was making of this great legend, touted as one of the most creative and influential thinkers of all time, if he knew about all the books that were being published about him, the talks that were being given, how Christian evolutionists were having their say through YouTube, if he could see the intense interest ordinary everyday people were showing in Darwin, he’d be ropable, spitting chips.

But the only chips my father spits now are those that come up from an industrial kitchen in Brisbane to his nursing home, nestled into the side of a highway on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. Nowadays, the nurses sometimes have to feed him his lunch with a teaspoon.

(Am I committing murder with this writing?)

Alzheimer’s suits my father.

As I sit with him in his room, we smile at each other about nothing in particular. We smell cut grass, listen to the caw-caw of the birds outside, to the sound of heavy rain on the galvanised iron when it pours out of the sky like gravy, or to the sweetness of his favourite hymn, ‘Love Divine, All Loves Excelling’ on a video of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir performing in the Albert Hall in London. I know it’s his favourite hymn because at the opening chord he leans forward listening, his body pulled in by the melody, his eyes watery when he turns to twinkle at me and say: ‘That’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ He extends his vowels like the cooing of an owl so that the middle word is all oo: ‘That’s bootiful, isn’t it?’

To get a grip, I read about Alzheimer’s, everything I can find, how it is a mental deterioration occurring in middle or old age owing to the progressive generalised degeneration of the brain. Senile (premature) dementia, the most common form of dementia, is named after the German psychiatrist and neuropathologist Alois Alzheimer, who first described it in 1907, when an autopsy of the brain of a 55-year-old woman with the disease showed up neurofibrillary tangles. It can change personalities, turn gentle people into angry monsters. Or, as in the case of my father, soften the spirit; give him heart. It allows my father to express his emotion.

I imagine tangles in his head, knots on the underside of his skull. I imagine trying to untangle them too, the time it would take, how carefully you’d have to do it with the tips of your fingers, fingers aching.

I read, but still fail to understand.

I wish my father would explain it to me in the way he liked to explain what goes on with the body. These sorts of bodies interested him – bodies with medical conditions, diseased bodies, bodies with congenital abnormalities. If it wasn’t theology he was talking about over lunch and tea, then it was the ins and outs of medicine. Sometimes I fancied he liked being around sick people so that he could talk about diagnoses and prognoses. He sparked up. Nowadays, the only medical intervention he has a part in is his medicine, which he refuses with alacrity; obstinacy as the last vestige of control.

If my father could see the book in my hand now, the 1968 Pelican Classic of The Origin, edited by JW Burrow, I wonder what he would say. It’s a scruffy old copy, borrowed from the library, dog-eared with pencil marks and some pages torn out. I want to talk to him about it, to show him the delicate diagram at the centre of Darwin’s thesis, which reaches out from the inside pages and from long ago like a willowy sea anemone. I want to read him passages – the final words, for instance: ‘There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers … from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved’. Wouldn’t you say: He writes bootifully? Surely my father would agree. I fancy I could hold a conversation with him about the book and Darwin’s writing – am I dreaming?

I doubt that he would have even had this book in his study, even when writing his own treatises on creationism. In 1981 my father published the book Man, Ape or Image: The Christian’s Dilemma (Creation Science Publishing, Queensland) and in 1998 Green Eye of the Storm (The Banner of Truth Trust, Edinburgh). The latter is an exploration of the creationist debate told through the biographies of four Christian men, including my grandfather, the surgeon Arthur Rendle-Short.

Growing up, my father was always disappearing into his books and his writing. No matter where he sat in the house, no matter how much noise we made with our games. Sometimes he’d disappear into his study and we wouldn’t see him for days.

He lived for his books and his writing; my father lived in his head. He boasted that he and his father had been in continuous print for more than 80 years. ‘Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method,’ Walter Benjamin once remarked in his essay ‘Unpacking My Library’. This is what my father did: he wrote the books he wanted to read, the latest on creation apologetics. In youngearth circles they refer to him as ‘the Prof ’. He was the founding chair of the Creation Science Foundation in Australia, mentor to Ken Ham, who is now the CEO of Answers in Genesis USA and the force behind the multimillion-dollar Creation Museum in Kentucky.

* * * * *

I hope that I may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision. – Charles Darwin, On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859)

When my father wasn’t doing his ward rounds at the Royal Children’s Hospital or lecturing to medical students about the intricacies of becoming a good physician, he was preaching the Word of the Lord, peddling the rightness of creationism. He hated Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution. He thought what Darwin did was evil, blamed him for the state of the world today, for the breakdown of society and the family unit, school violence, abortion, homosexual behaviour, gay marriage, lawlessness, feminism, etc. If it wasn’t for Darwin we would all be creationists safely bound for heaven. He wrote: ‘[There will be] a cataclysmic end to the universe … And this plan, designed before the foundation of the world is being executed by a God of love, to cull out a group of men and women, to live forever in the beauty of a new earth’.

Never mind his children, of whom some are heathens, atheists even, some who ‘live in sin’ and with partners of the same sex, no less. He never talked about these sorts of abominations. He didn’t know how, especially homosexuality. He could barely countenance the idea of not saying grace with morning tea. If I were to press my father on my own ‘lifestyle choice’ (his words, not mine) you could see his body stiffen, curl into itself, lips shut tight like the shell of a clam. In fast retreat. I’ve tried it once or twice since my mother died. To press the point maybe. In an attempt to live more honestly and more openly. To challenge the security of my own internalised homophobia, share the burden. But the hurt in his eyes is insufferable. A failed experiment of slow dissolve.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when I took my father out in the car for little jaunts into the Maleny hills, for mugs of coffee and cream cakes in Montville and Mapleton.

On one of those jaunts we ate fish and chips beside the Maroochydore River: grilled dory, all fat and juicy with wedges of lemon my father liked to suck on. Gorgeous, he exclaimed, to the rill of water lapping the edges of our feet. Mostly we munched away in the stillness, in silence: my father in his wheelchair and me cross-legged on the sand, body beside body, flesh in the company of flesh. It’s just you and me now, he volunteered. His words sent a trill of sighs through my veins out there under the blue, blue sky; we were at rest somehow. In the cemetery that morning, when we had visited my mother’s grave, something must have passed between us. It’s just you and me. My heart pumped a little louder than normal.

Once upon a time, and not so long ago, I didn’t know what I was going to do when I was with my father, I didn’t know what to say to him. I was afraid. Yet here I was – just take a look at us, will you – having a picnic lunch like seagulls with a flap of words between us every now and again, it didn’t matter what about. If a passer-by thought to comment they might say: Look at those two, they’re so at home in each other’s company; how sweetly they must care for each other. I’d like to have what they’ve got.

There’s a photo I return to whenever I think of my father. I was a teenager when I took it: my father and his orchids. Looking at it I can just feel the hot Brisbane sun on my father’s back through the grapevine, the cold patio concrete under his feet; his concentration of muscle with the curl of toes, that forefinger holding the orchid pot.

My father loved his orchids. He was very good at growing them too; he’d split them and feed them and get them to flower. Each new flower, a miracle. He tended them each morning before going to the hospital, shuffled them around in their places to rearrange the collection, fed them a special mixture with a little watering can, snipped off dead roots. He’d exclaim when an orchid grew a bud, insist everybody have a look and admire, ooh and ah. In full flower they were allowed to come into the house, to perch in the middle of the dining table on a ceramic saucer. On full display. Sometimes, with some varieties, they’d stay there in full bloom for more than a lunar month.

Imagine my intrigue when I discovered that Darwin liked his orchids too – he described his plant experiments as ‘a grand amusement’. He tested his theories of cross-pollination on lady’s slipper orchids, Cypripedium reginae, amongst others, and moths. ‘Wonderful creatures, these orchids,’ he wrote, ‘beautifully adapted to leave pollen on the two lateral stigmatic surfaces. I never saw anything so beautiful’. Did my father read Darwin’s considerations in his 1862 book, On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, and On the Good Effects of Intercrossing, at least out of mutual interest? Was he seduced by Darwin’s methodical approach, his careful analysis?

My father doesn’t read anymore; he can’t make sense of the line of words. He doesn’t know how to hold a newspaper or a book, doesn’t know how to turn a page. What invariably happens is that he might read a word once, then twice, three times, four (and I know this because he sometimes rereads the same words out loud). Then he jumps forward and reads another single word from the bottom of the page, once then twice, three times, before doubling back to the beginning again. His brow knits together. His index finger tugs at the paper. Oh dash it, he says, looking at me with pleading, watery eyes. With each try it is as though he has never learned to read before, let alone written thousands upon thousands of words in published and unpublished volumes and for lectures and sermons. Occasionally he will remember to say, with unforced clarity: Did you know Father and I were in print for over a century? It’s such a surprise when he speaks like this: in a complete sentence, a whole thought. There is a trace of something gone before.

More often, though, he may as well be back in kindergarten, learning the basics about books, about writing and the sequence of letters, learning to point words out with his fingers, his body hunched over the page in concentration, learning to sound syllables in his mouth for the first time.

* * * * *

Dogs. Cats. Horses. Cattle. Goat. Asses. have all run wild & bred. no doubt with perfect success …There is no more wonder in extinction of species than of individual. – The Red Notebook of Charles Darwin (1831–1836)

Last Sunday, at the end of my visit, I went to church to say goodbye. The air was warm and a bit blowy as it shuffled in after me. It teased the top of my father’s head, rustled his wispy hair so that small strands wafted like a flight of kites on the Mooloolaba sands. I thought of the warm salty water holding the bodies afloat out there, everyone swimming on this last day of school holidays, and how inevitably the road into Brisbane would be chockers with cars. That’s why I ended up in his church.

If I was going to spend a morning with my father, then spending it in the church was my best option, the only option really. I wanted to beat the rush. I wanted to get ahead of the traffic jam. I couldn’t wait until the service was over to see him, it would be too late. I had to swallow my pride and beliefs. What difference would it make, I reasoned? I could sit with him in his room in the nursing home listening to a videotape of Hymns of Praise, or sit with him here in church amidst the chorus of Presbyterian worshippers. The latter was more public, it’s true, and slightly more awkward at first, given I normally refused my father’s offers ‘to worship God’. I comforted myself by watching the morning air push around the trees outside the vestry window and listening to the preacher stumble on the word ‘hedonist’ when explaining why the ‘children of the sun’ riding boogie boards and frolicking in togs in the Sunday surf would rot in hell, and take their families with them. Perhaps it didn’t matter in this instance that the church didn’t believe in women praying and thought homosexuality was an unforgivable abomination. I just wanted to be close to my father.

The hymns were quite nice too in the wafty warmth of a Sunshine Coast morning, especially the familiar doxology: ‘Praise God from whom all blessings flow’. This morning it was sung rather beautifully by all and sundry – maybe because they knew it so well with its theatrical chordal progression, because they sang it each week. Maybe it was just the way I heard it, my heart open to this particular carriage of love.

What I didn’t take into account was my father’s reaction to me being there. He kept saying over and over, well done, well done; he was beaming. He must have thought I was saved on the spot. He was BESIDE himself seeing me waltz into church. He had a direct line to God at that moment. Through the service he kept coming back to it as well, holding my hand, turning towards me, looking up at me, smiling, saying over and over and over, well done, well done, well done, with enough energy in his body to spin himself out of his chair, to circle above us exclaiming: I’m off now I’m on my way! Truly, I would not have been surprised if we’d grown wings together that day. My father certainly thought we had – he was in heaven. And if he took me there to keep him company on this Sunday morning, I didn’t mind so much, I didn’t mind at all.

[F]rom so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. – Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859)

Memory

Biblical battles

Rekindled

Sentinel chickens

Peter Doherty

The idea of ‘sentinel chickens’ seemed pretty incongruous when I first heard the phrase as a young undergraduate. My reaction was no doubt conditioned by recollections of the scatty and fussy hens that scratched about in the dusty chicken run in my grandmother’s backyard. The notion of the humble chicken waiting like a trained soldier, alert and focused, for some unseen and approaching enemy just didn’t seem likely. Hens en garde!

Like most students in that distant era, I knew everything and knew nothing. Nowadays, any reasonably sophisticated young person would go immediately to the internet and find that, way back to mythological times, guard duty has been part of the avian job description. Gods with the body of a man and the head of a bird, like the ibis, falcon, hawk or heron, watched over the ancient Egyptians. In the Western tradition, the cockerel, or rooster, symbolises vigilance and has been widely used as a French heraldic device. Adopted as the national symbol at the time of the 1789 revolution, the proud, colourful rooster of France (le Coq Gaulois) went beak to beak with the black eagle of Germany during World War I.

When it comes to warning us of imminent danger, sentinel geese have long been associated with the human story. Geese go on the attack and make an enormous noise if they perceive an incursion into what they regard as their patch. The trick is to provide feed and nurture so that they make our patch their patch. According to the Roman historian Titus Livius – better known as Livy – sacred geese in the temple of the Goddess Juno alerted the exhausted defenders of ancient Rome to a nocturnal attack by marauding Gauls. In modern times, Scottish whiskey distilleries are sometimes guarded by gaggles of geese that raise a loud hue and cry if a thief tries to make off with what many consider the most spiritual of all aqua vitae. Whiskey may be part of the local religion, but I doubt whether the pragmatic Scots would regard the birds as sacred.

Then there’s the story of the ravens that somehow guarantee the integrity of the Tower of London and, beyond that, the continuity of the crown of England. Legend has it that the monarchy will fall when the ravens leave the tower. Following the spirit of a decree by Charles II, there are always at least ten ravens available, six on duty and four active reservists. The resident ravens are cared for by a raven master drawn from the ranks of the Beefeaters, the medievally attired tower guards. One wing is clipped to ensure they can’t fly away.

* * * * *

I first heard the term sentinel chicken from an older cousin, Ralph Doherty, a medical scientist who was then building a substantial reputation in the study of the insect- or arthropod-transmitted viruses, known collectively as the arboviruses, also called togaviruses because they have an outer ‘envelope’ or ‘coat’. Among the major achievements of his research group at Brisbane’s Queensland Institute of Medical Research was the discovery that the mosquito-borne Ross River virus (RRV) is the cause of the human disease epidemic polyarthritis with rash, a painful and debilitating condition that can persist for several months. With more than 4000 cases every year, this non-fatal disease is all too familiar to those who live in the northern parts of Australia and has been rapidly spreading away from the tropics.

Like all viruses, the arboviruses can only reproduce themselves within living cells. What makes the arboviruses special is that they replicate in the tissues of very different types of animals, though the individual viruses in this very large group do vary considerably in their overall host range. The ‘virus production factories’ include biting arthropods, particularly mosquitoes and ticks, which, as they take their blood feed, either become infected or (if already carrying the virus) transmit the infection to warm-blooded species, including human beings and a whole spectrum of furry and feathered vertebrates.

And that’s why we have sentinel chickens. The progressive spread of many arboviruses is monitored by placing caged chickens around the countryside at sites where they are likely to be bitten by mosquitoes. The widely distributed birds are sampled regularly, a comparatively non-intrusive process that involves taking a small amount of blood from the prominent wing vein. The blood is allowed to clot, and the yellowish serum supernatant is either frozen or taken on ice to a specialist laboratory, where the samples are analysed for seroconversion. That is, the technician uses a well-established assay to detect newly acquired (since the previous test) circulating antibodies specific for the virus in question. (That doesn’t work for all mosquito-borne infections. Chickens aren’t very susceptible to RRV, for example, which seems to prefer mammalian hosts, and they’re of no value for tracking malaria, for which we humans are the most sensitive sentinels. Birds have their own distinct malaria parasites.)

If, for example, the birds were seronegative when taken to their guard station, then seropositive for some arbovirus six months later, it’s obvious that they were exposed to an infected mosquito at some time over that period. The relatively few virus particles injected by the feeding mosquito will have travelled via the circulation to invade susceptible cells in one or other organ of the new chicken host. Successive cycles of virus replication then lead to the presence of a great deal more virus in blood (viraemia), a process that terminates somewhere over the next 7–12 days or so, when the developing immune response will lead to the production of specific, neutralising antibodies. Those antibodies will continue to be made for the life of the bird. Once antibody-positive for the infection of interest, the chicken veteran is both permanently immune and eligible for honourable retirement and replacement with a new recruit.

* * * * *

Virologists further sub-classify the arboviruses into alphaviruses and flaviviruses. The alphaviruses include RRV and Barmah Forest virus (in Australia), eastern equine encephalitis virus (in the USA) and the Chikungunya virus that has lately been spreading from the Indian Ocean region to South-East Asia and the Mediterranean. Human infection with Chikungunya, RRV or Barmah Forest virus can lead to the development of persistent polyarthritis with rash, while chickens, at least, remain asymptomatic.

All the flaviviruses are broadly related to yellow fever virus, the terrible pathogen that kills humans by a combination of haemorrhagic disease and liver destruction. That’s where the ‘flavi’ (Latin for yellow) comes from, describing the severe jaundice that characterises the lethally compromised patient. The main vector is the mosquito Aedes aegypti, which is present in tropical North Queensland, though there have been no cases of yellow fever in Australia. A vaccine was developed in the 1930s by the South African medical scientist Max Theiler, an achievement recognised by his 1951 Nobel Prize. There are, however, 70 known flaviviruses, with 30 of these being found in southern Asia and the Australasian region. Some are ‘orphan’ viruses that are not associated with any known disease.

Way back in the 1960s, cousin Ralph’s involvement with sentinel chickens reflected the broad interests of his research group in arbovirus epidemiology, the study of how this diversity of infections spreads and is maintained in nature. Some arboviruses, particularly the tick-borne ones, can ‘overwinter’ by vertical transmission through the successive stages of an insect life cycle, but even when this does occur, it’s unlikely to be the main mechanism that keeps the virus going in nature. Though infectious disease epidemiologists search for the vertebrate ‘maintaining hosts’ that continue the mosquito–animal transmission cycle, the identity of the key species can be incredibly hard to nail down. Antibodies (the footprints of prior infection) to RRV have, for example, been found in marsupial and placental mammals and, less often, in birds, but that doesn’t prove that the levels of virus in blood were sufficient to cause widespread infection of the mosquito vectors. This two-way insect–vertebrate interchange probably continues throughout the year in the warmer parts of a continental landmass, particularly in forested areas where there is no effective mosquito control. Migrating birds are, of course, likely culprits for any north or south spread away from the tropics with the onset of spring and summer.

* * * * *

Over the years, one of the medically important functions of Australia’s valiant sentinel chickens has been to serve as ‘birds of record’ for measuring the southern spread of Murray Valley encephalitis virus (MVE), a flavivirus that’s also called Australian encephalitis virus. This infection becomes a problem when the combination of warm weather and an abnormally wet season leads to a massive increase in mosquito numbers. If MVE is somewhere in the neighbourhood, perhaps at high enough levels in the blood of susceptible birds, then mosquitoes become infected and sporadic cases of encephalitis are seen in humans, particularly those living along the banks of major water courses like the Murray River. Though MVE has also been found in Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, the main threat to our north is the closely related, but much more dangerous, Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV), which causes severe disease in a relatively high proportion of infected people. Pigs, rather than birds, are known to be a major maintaining host for JEV, and one way of protecting humans is to decrease the ‘multiplier’ factor by vaccinating pigs. There are also effective human vaccines for JEV. According to public health doctors, JEV is not a cause of locally acquired disease in the USA, perhaps because of the lack of the main vector, Culex tritaeniorhynchus. This mosquito is also absent from Australia, but an alternative vector, Culex gelidus, has been identified in the tropical north, where there have been two fatal JEV cases.

Staffed by successive generations of avian ‘volunteers’, at least some of those sentinel chicken outposts that were located around the country to inform us about the spread of MVE in the ’60s and ’70s still house birds on active duty as part of a continuing Australian surveillance network. Sentinels in the cooler south seroconvert to MVE from time to time, though most evidence of infection is found in tropical northern Australia where occasional human outbreaks continue to occur. The Australian chickens also pick up evidence for the circulation of the closely related (to MVE) Kunjin virus, an occasional cause of human encephalitis, and Barmah Forest virus. Kunjin recently (2011) caused a number of deaths in Australian horses.

The use of sentinels depends, of course, on knowing the identity of the virus that’s being looked for. Otherwise, it isn’t possible to set up a specific antibody test to determine if any individual – whether poultry or person – has indeed been infected. Though human outbreaks of what was then called Australian X disease had been recognised as early as 1917, it wasn’t till 1951 that Eric French, then working at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, reported the isolation and initial characterisation of the MVE virus.

Apart from the information from sentinel chickens and human cases, what else is known about MVE? The mosquito vector, Culex annulirostris, has been identified, but there are only indirect antibody results that implicate several species of cormorants and the Nankeen night heron as possible maintaining hosts. The Nankeen night heron is common in the wetter regions of southern and northern Australia and is generally regarded as a non-threatened species. It does depend heavily, though, on access to fresh water, and there was some cause for concern during the recent long drought, now broken by the return of an unprecedented La Niña climate system, bringing severe flooding and massive cyclonic activity. That, of course, is also likely to increase the incidence of mosquito-borne infections.

Sometimes it’s a relatively straightforward matter to establish that a particular species of bird is susceptible to a given arbovirus infection and is capable of circulating the virus, thereby functioning as a maintaining host. For example, eastern equine encephalitis virus, an alphavirus that circulates in the USA and causes disease in both horses and humans, also kills significant numbers of ibises, starlings and emus. Both the birds that eventually die and the survivors can have very high levels of virus in their blood.

In general, though, it’s been easier to identify the insect vectors that transmit these infections than to establish which particular wild birds or mammals support their overwintering. One reason for this is that arboviruses generally persist longer in mosquitoes, as they lack the type of adaptive, or highly specific, immune system that is characteristic of birds, mammals and the other bony vertebrates. Even when vertebrates suffer a severe infection, the virus is usually eliminated from the blood of survivors within 8–12 days. The other reason is that trapping and handling wild birds takes a lot of effort, while it’s relatively easy to catch large numbers of mosquitoes using light traps that emit carbon dioxide and other chemical attractants (like octenol), simulating the presence of warm-blooded animals. A more primitive technique is to allow them to bite, say, a tethered horse or your own arm, then capture them using some sort of suction device that may be as simple as a skilfully used drinking straw.

Once trapped, the mosquitoes are classified by a medical entomologist, then those of the same type are pooled, frozen and later ground up in saline for injection into some detection system (such as tissue culture or suckling mouse brain), which will then grow any virus the mosquitoes were carrying. The freshly isolated viruses can then be identified by sequencing to determine their characteristic genetic code, using essentially the same technique that forensic experts employ to identify DNA from a rapist or murderer.

The capacity to produce highly specific antibodies following natural infection in the field or forest is, of course, the basis of the sentinel chicken’s role. We feed and nurture these doughty guardians because birds have both a thymus that produces the immune T lymphocytes (including the killer T cells, which I’ve worked on for almost four decades) and the B lymphocytes or plasma cells that produce the specific antibodies we detect in blood.

The avian and mammalian immune systems have evolved somewhat differently over the aeons, but they do the same job of controlling infection. Furthermore, this shared capacity for generating long-term immune memory is the reason why, in the past century or so, we have seen the development of numerous protective vaccines for both domestic birds and chickens.

Arboviruses aren’t, however, on the chicken vaccine list, as they don’t affect commercial producers. How vaccines are used is always determined by practical considerations, and the fact that a product is used in one vertebrate but not another doesn’t reflect some sort of discriminatory ‘speciesism’. For obvious reasons, it’s pretty much impossible to vaccinate wild birds against anything. In the USA, valuable horses are vaccinated against the Venezuelan equine encephalitis alphavirus, while humans are not. People who live in the more prosperous countries are protected by the environmental control of mosquitoes that’s practised in most of the larger, warmer cities, by a more indoor lifestyle and by the judicious application of mosquito repellent when venturing into the countryside. We’ve never made a vaccine against MVE because the incidence is too low, but such a vaccine could be developed if, for example, the warming associated with anthropogenic climate change led to MVE becoming a more substantial threat to large numbers of humans.

A more likely danger for Australians is that infections like JEV and malaria will simply migrate south as ambient temperatures rise, birds modify their migration patterns, and mosquitoes extend their host range. That is already happening in parts of Africa, as infected mosquito populations move inexorably into the cooler and higher regions of the continent, which were formerly malaria-free. In Europe, Chikungunya virus has now penetrated as far north as Ravenna. As land, air and water temperatures increase, the shift of viruses that depend on a mosquito–vertebrate (bird or mammal) lifecycle into what were temperate regions will inevitably continue.

Vigilance

The secret life of birds

Climate change

The science of shark fishing

Ian Gibbins

There’s not much you can do with a hook through your jaw.

Apart from anything else, you cannot escape

that pervading taste of metal, that disorienting,

somehow worrying, sensation of stainless steel,

mixed, almost certainly, and against all hope,

with your very own pulsating haemoglobin.

It’s difficult to describe your disbelief and indecision.

The pressure is unrelenting, even in those moments

when you convince yourself to relax, to let yourself

drift forwards a body length or two, slip backwards

a metre or two, while refracted ripple-skies continue

to be drawn just that much closer to your touch.

In the end, weariness utterly overwhelms you.

Surrounded by more oxygen than you ever have required,

you find yourself aching for one more breath of the sea.

You wish, perhaps, that evolution had provided you

the wherewithal not only to bite, to maul and harangue,

but simply, decisively, to get up and run away.

Anthropomorphism

Caught!

Resigned

On flatulence

Nicholas Haslam

Charles Darwin’s life was a vale of sorrows. His mother died when he was a boy, three of his own children perished at an early age and his great discovery of the theory of evolution by natural selection was met with hostility by prominent members of society and many of his fellow scientists. Through most of his adult life he also suffered mightily from disabling anxiety, depression and physical symptoms that included heart palpitations, eczema, vomiting and flatulence. In his mid-fifties he described the latter thus: ‘For 25 years extreme spasmodic daily & nightly flatulence … every passage of flatulence preceded by ringing of ears, treading on air & vision’.

Flatulence is universal. For some it is a minor annoyance or embarrassment, for others a source of amusement and for an unfortunate few it is a terrible burden. For Darwin, flatulence was the symptom of a deep malaise which combined fear, fatigue and black pessimism. According to his biographer, John Bowlby, it was the psychosomatic expression of an anxiety disorder linked historically to his mother’s early death, exacerbated in the present by life stresses, and caused directly by a tendency to hyperventilate.

More often than not flatulence has kept more cheerful company than Darwin’s. It has been a staple of comedy since the ancient Greeks, reaching a peak in the ribald humour of the Middle Ages. Famous farts are documented in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and in the Arabian Nights. Flatulence reaches heights of comic absurdity in the work of François Rabelais, who describes a fictitious volume in the library of St Victor on the art of farting decently in public and whose creation, the giant Pantagruel, unleashes one great fart whose ‘foul air created more than fifty-three thousand tiny men, dwarves and creatures of weird shape’. This spirit of high-spirited vulgarity, often directed by the young and powerless against authority figures and the well-bred, survives to this day in a thousand jokes, children’s books and popular culture references.

Sober scholarship on flatulence has been less abundant. With barely concealed sadness, gastroenterologists Michael Levitt and Julie Furne remark that flatulence ‘has been the province of lay conjecture and scatological humour rather than serious scientific investigation’. For more than 35 years they have tried to remedy this state of affairs with an energetic program of physiological research on flatulence, coining the term ‘flatology’ to dignify their quest. The term has failed to catch on, but before we can tackle the psychology of flatulence we must review some elementary flatology.

* * * * *

Flatulence is primarily composed of five gases: nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, methane and carbon dioxide. Of these, hydrogen, methane and carbon dioxide are produced by the fermentation of poorly absorbed carbohydrates in the gut by hundreds of species of microbe, known collectively as the ‘colonic flora’. The mixing proportions of these gases vary widely between people and over time. Smaller quantities of sulphur-containing gases – primarily hydrogen sulphide, methanethiol and dimethyl sulphide – are responsible for the foul smell of flatulence, a finding confirmed by two brave judges who judged the odour intensity of farts collected via rectal tube from 16 healthy participants fed scientifically controlled quantities of pinto beans and lactulose. The same three sulphurous gases account for the offensive smell of morning breath, a finding first reported at the 4th international conference on breath odour.

Large scale studies of flatus production have not been undertaken, but existing research suggests that on average people pass gas about 10 times per day and about 100 millilitres at a time. Passing gas 20 times per day has been suggested as the threshold of abnormality. Flatulence frequency changes appreciably in response to dietary alterations, but there is a good deal of consistency in people’s levels of flatus production: some people reliably fart more than others.

At the quantitative extreme are some people whose flatulence is prodigious. Michael Levitt and colleagues described the case of a computer programmer who complained of excessive flatus and painful abdominal gas. He also observed that his stools effervesced, like aspirins in a glass of water. The patient kept meticulous records of each passage of gas, with frequencies usually exceeding 50 times per day and reaching a peak of 129. Levels such as these may be exceptional, but complaints of flatulence are very common in the general population. Elevated rates have been found to occur in many physical and psychological conditions, including irritable bowel syndrome, mental retardation and autism.

Not surprisingly, it was the psychoanalysts who first took the psychology of flatulence seriously. Freud’s biographer Ernest Jones speculated on the relationship between farting and musical ability, and his close associate Sandor Ferenczi addressed the reasons why patients might pass wind during psychoanalytic sessions. Generally, he argued, this act was not motivated by a desire to insult the analyst – although it was often done when the patient was being difficult and resistant – but rather as an attempt to claim the prerogative of adulthood. In effect, the patient is simply expressing in a rebellious and nonverbal manner the desire to be treated as a grown-up. Sandor Lorand discusses a young man whose flatulence, often performed for the amusement of his friends, represented a similar form of rebellious aggression that was linked to a penchant for ‘dirty’ language. Lawrence Kubie confirmed the similarities between flatulence and swearing, pointing out the aggressive gaseous suddenness of both.

Other analysts report cases in which flatulence was a key clinical problem. Horacio Etchegoyen discusses the case of a man who presented for treatment suffering from flatulence and gastric discomfort, and had a tendency to burp and fart during sessions, at times with apparent pride. The analyst interpreted the man’s gaseousness as an unconscious identification with a pregnant woman, although the patient had an unfortunate tendency to fall asleep following interpretations such as these. The analysis took a total of nine and a half years, not counting three years of prior treatment that ended with the death of the patient’s previous analyst. Ronald Baker describes a more leisurely, 15-year analysis of a fetishistic cross-dresser for whom flatulence was the most intractable symptom. This treatment ended successfully upon the patient’s rejection of his ‘idealization of the anal universe that he inhabited’.

The most thorough psychoanalytic investigation of flatulence was conducted by Bruce Merrill, who describes a series of patients that, he argued, reveal a particular character type. The patients, all men, were arrogant, boastful, impulsive and quicktempered. They under-achieved and had troubled relationships with women and with their fathers. They also tended to be drawn to foul language, dirty stories, sadistic and scape-goating wit, and exhibitionistic public displays. One patient was renowned in college for farting loudly (a ‘stertorous roar’) and for lighting his farts for the amusement of friends. (The flammability of intestinal gas has its serious side, with 20 reports of patients suffering explosions during surgery or colonoscopy, including nine colon perforations and one death.)

Another of Merrill’s patients mastered the art of swallowing air, enabling him to produce at will farts so loud that they once awakened fraternity brothers sleeping on a third-floor balcony. Another bragged about being able to play tunes with his anus. As a child he revelled in the masculine power flatulence gave him to shock women such as his nursemaid, whose nose he learned to assault when she bent to tie his shoe-laces. He refined this power in adulthood to the point that in bed he would break wind in his wife’s face while he slept and would become more flatulent when her conversation bored him. Merrill concluded that these men had failed to identify adequately with their fathers and as a result lacked self-control and the capacity for personal achievement. Their flatulence was a malodorous attempt to achieve adult masculinity.

Links between flatulence and depression have long been suggested. The Greek physician Aretaeus of Cappadocia, who practiced in the 1st century AD, associated melancholy with flatulence in a very literal fashion, proposing that excesses of black bile, from which melancholia gets its name, directly cause depression: ‘If it [black bile] be determined upwards to the stomach and diaphragm, it forms melancholy; for it produces flatulence and eructations of a fetid and fishy nature, and it sends rumbling wind downwards, and disturbs the understanding’. In joining flatulence and belching (eructation) Aretaeus anticipated the association between flatulence and aerophagia that was scientifically established about two millennia later. His clinical observation of the adverse effects of flatulence on mental focus backs up the dietary restrictions of the Pythagoreans, who according to Cicero were forbidden to eat beans ‘for that food induces flatulence and induces a condition at war with a soul in search of truth’.

Robert Burton, the British scholar who wrote The Anatomy of Melancholy in the early 17th century, also drew attention to a correlation between melancholia and wind. Referring to a hypochondriacal form of depression, he wrote: ‘In this kind of Melancholy one of the most offensive symptoms is wind, which, as in other species, so in this, hath great need to be corrected and expelled’. One radical treatment that he described for those troubled by ‘flatuous melancholy’ was to ‘put a pair of bellows’ end into a Clyster [enema] pipe, and applying it into the fundament, open the bowels, so draw forth the wind; nature abhors a vacuum’. Writing a century later, George Cheyne, a Scottish physician who treated such notables as David Hume, Samuel Johnson and Alexander Pope proposed in The English Malady that depression-like diseases were associated with flatulence and a sense of oppression and anxiety. He describes a distemper of ‘vapours’ in which ‘the symptoms … besides lowness of spirits, are wind, belching, yawning, heart-burning, croaking of the bowels, (like the noise of frogs), a pain in the pit of the stomach’ and so on. Such an association between depression and flatulence has yet to be demonstrated by contemporary researchers, although there is ample evidence linking depression to a range of gastrointestinal symptoms.

* * * * *

Flatulence appears to be linked to diffuse anxiety and other forms of neurotic misery, but it is also associated with highly focused fears. Several writers have reported cases of individuals suffering from profound fears of flatulence, which sometimes reached delusional intensity. These fears take interestingly different forms. Some people obsessively fear the social offence that public flatulence would cause and suffer anxiety attacks and social withdrawal. Others are afflicted by ‘automysophobia’, the pathological fear of being dirty, and see flatulence more as a way of soiling themselves than as causing affront to others. Several published cases present with a delusional conviction that they emit an ‘alimentary stench’ (flatulence or bad breath). Cases of this sort are sometimes traceable to specific smell-related events, such as being teased after breaking wind. After the delusions first develop they are frequently reinforced by the patient’s continual misreading of other people’s behaviour, for example seeing their innocent gifts of perfume as not-so-subtle hints, or taking their sniffing or coughing – and even the barking of nearby dogs – as evidence of their foul odour. Patients often compensate for their imagined stench by avoiding social situations, compulsively checking their smell and over-using deodorants and soaps. These fears can be treated by exposing sufferers to situations they avoid and preventing them from engaging in their habitual compensatory behaviour. An alternative treatment involves encouraging farting rather than preventing it. Psychologists Michael Milan and David Kolko, using this ‘paradoxical intention’ method, instructed a female patient to pass wind as soon as the urge to do so arose, and succeeded in reducing her ruminative thoughts about flatulence.

Depression and fear play their roles in the psychology of flatulence, but the emotion of disgust is perhaps the most intimately related to it. Disgust is a basic emotion evolved in response to stimuli that threaten contamination and disease, such as excrement and decaying food and bodies. It is easily evoked by the chemical senses of odour and taste, and its typical facial expression involves wrinkling the nose to close off the nostrils. Psychologists have recently begun to harness the power of smell to induce disgust in their experiments. The preferred tool for this purpose is fart spray, which is commercially available from novelty stores and more commonly purchased by 13-year-old boys than older scientists.

In one of the first scientific uses of flatulent technology, Simone Schnall and colleagues exposed their participants to different intensities of spray: unlucky participants were randomly assigned to a ‘strong stink’ condition and luckier participants to ‘mild stink’ and non-stink ‘control’ conditions. The former reported higher levels of disgust than the latter. Participants then rated how objectionable a variety of morally questionable acts would be, such as marriage or consensual sex between first cousins. Participants who were exposed to the fart spray expressed stronger moral condemnation for several of the acts, just as people have been shown to become more morally judgmental when disgust is induced by hypnosis. It seems that when a strong feeling of distaste is evoked, even by a purely sensory experience, a variety of social violations come to be seen as more distasteful or disgusting as well. This creates a special problem for anyone who farts in public: the evidence of their offence is likely to magnify the perceived offensiveness of the act in the eyes (or nose) of a witness.

It is not only the smell of flatulence than can have psychological effects. Recent work has experimentally induced disgust with a mixture of fart, vomit and burp noises, combined with images of a filthy toilet. These researchers found that disgust created a negative bias in people’s judgment of ambiguous situations, leading them to interpret these situations as more threatening than do people who are placed in neutral or happy moods.

The disgusting quality of flatulence generally motivates people to inhibit it in public places and to condemn those who fail to do so. It is this fear of embarrassment and blame that minimises the passage of gas when other people are present. But might there be cases where people harness the disgusting power of farts to keep people at a distance? Just as skunks use foul odours to defend and protect themselves, might people do the same?

There is only one clinical report of apparently deliberate skunk-like behaviour in a human. Mara Sidoli, a Jungian psychoanalyst, presented the case of a young boy who, she argued, used flatulence to form a ‘defensive olfactory container’ or envelope to protect himself from fears of disintegration. Peter had been born to an alcohol-abusing teenage mother and fostered out at an early age. He had severe feeding problems as an infant, was neglected and abused as a child, and underwent numerous surgeries for a variety of ailments. His main symptoms upon entering therapy at age seven included manic hyperactivity, confused speech, conversations with imaginary beings and loud farts and (oral) farting noises. Sidoli inferred that Peter had profound abandonment fears and fantasies of persecution, the latter often represented in his play as attacks by space aliens. His farting intensified during times of anxiety and anger, a symptom that Sidoli interpreted as an attempt to emit a ‘protective cloud of familiarity’, creating an invisible barrier preventing harm as well as communication with the world outside.

A turning point in Peter’s analysis occurred when Sidoli, presumably departing from normal psychoanalytic practice, began to make loud farting noises back at him. Peter’s initial response was surprise followed by intense anger, during which he called Sidoli crazy, but he soon began laughing himself. Sidoli argues that by showing Peter how crazy and annoying his behaviour seemed to others and interpreting to him that by acting in this way he had been trying to drive people away by acting crazy, she helped to loosen his defences. Sure enough, his flatulence began to subside and his aggressiveness began to give way to greater warmth and engagement with others: ‘Instead of enveloping me with farts, he was able to show me his pain’.

* * * * *

Up to this point I have emphasised links between flatulence, psychopathology and negative emotions. However, farting can also be a source of amusement. Flatulence is the focus of countless jokes and humorous stories. The act itself is often greeted with laughter and even elaborated into ribald contests and pyrotechnic displays, especially by pre-adolescent boys (and those developmentally arrested at that stage). Psychologists have paid little systematic attention to the ludic aspects of flatulence, but Lou Lippman has made a preliminary study. He presented a sample of college students with a description of a hypothetical fart that varied on four dimensions – relationship between the farter and witnesses (acquaintances or strangers), intention (deliberate or accidental), sound (loud or nearly silent) and odour (very rank or almost odourless) – and had them judge how humorous it would be. Farts were adjudged more humorous when deliberately, loudly, but odourlessly committed in the presence of acquaintances.

Lippman also asked participants to judge the politeness, maliciousness and obnoxiousness of flatulence under the 16 possible combinations of the four factors. Farts were judged most polite when accidental, silent, odourless and among acquaintances, and most malicious and obnoxious under the opposite combination: deliberate, loud, rank, and in the presence of strangers. Consistent with this pattern, in a second section of the study participants said they would be most likely to try to suppress an imminent passage of gas if it was likely to be loud, smelly and amid strangers, as well as when they could probably be identified as its source. Interestingly, then, farts are most humorous when they are halfway between politeness and obnoxiousness: odourless and in the presence of acquaintances, like polite breakings of wind, but also loud and deliberate, like malicious ones. They are potentially embarrassing but not outright shameful, the potential for humour being one of the elements that distinguishes awkward embarrassment from toxic shame. In short, the humorousness of flatulence may derive from a controlled violation of social norms of propriety. As Bruce Merrill puts it: ‘Wit itself, Freud pointed out, is a sudden overwhelming of the superego. This … is the very essence of flatulence’.

Windy

Digestible

Thinking gut

Radioactive cigarettes: X-ray inhale

Karl Kruszelnicki

When I was a medical doctor in the hospital system, every now and then I needed to order chest X-rays for patients who were cigarette smokers. Quite often, they would (correctly) get nervous about the potential radiation damage from a chest X-ray. Yet when I told them that two packets of cigarettes gave them about the same radiation dose as a chest X-ray, they just would not believe me.

This raises two questions. First, how did cigarettes get radioactive? And second, why didn’t they believe me?

Worldwide, we humans smoke about six trillion cigarettes each year – enough to make a chain that would easily reach from the Earth to the Sun, and back, and then do the whole trip again, just for good measure. By the year 2020, cigarettes will be killing about 10 million people each year. They already knocked off 100 million people in the 20th century, and if things don’t change they could kill one billion in the 21st century. Cigarette smoke is loaded with various chemicals that are well known to cause cancer. It’s estimated that the radiation dose from the radioactive metal Polonium-210 (Po-210) in cigarettes accounts for about 2 per cent of cigarette-related deaths. That accounts for several thousand deaths each year in the USA alone.

Polonium-210 is extremely toxic – about 250 million times more toxic than cyanide.

Po-210 is so radioactive that it excites the surrounding air, giving off an unearthly blue glow. Weight for weight, it emits 4500 times as many alpha particles as does radium – which is notorious for being incredibly radioactive and dangerous. A single gram of Po-210 (a cube measuring about 5 millimetres on each side) generates more heat than an old-fashioned 100-watt incandescent light bulb. That is a huge amount of power. In 2006, Alexander Litvinenko became the first person confirmed as dying from acute Po-210 Radiation Syndrome. He had previously been an officer in the Russian KGB. After accusing his superiors of ordering the assassination of the Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky, he escaped prosecution in Russia and was granted political asylum in the United Kingdom. In a London restaurant, he was somehow given about 10 micrograms of Po-210 – roughly 200 times more than was needed to kill him.

Po-210 is always present whenever you have uranium. Developed countries use fertiliser that is manufactured from apatite rock, and this rock naturally contains uranium. The uranium decays to radioactive Po-210, which enters the tobacco plant through both the leaves and roots.

When a cigarette burns, it reaches temperatures of 600–800° Celsius – much hotter than the melting point of Po-210. As a result, Po-210 becomes airborne very easily. The microscopic droplets of liquefied Po-210 stick to tiny particles in the cigarette smoke. As this smoke is sucked into your lungs, the particles (carrying their toxic Po-210) then tend to land at ‘bifurcations’ – locations in your airways and lungs where one pipe splits into two pipes. Po-210 is intensely radioactive, and sprays alpha particles into the surrounding tissues. These alpha particles have enough energy to cause mutations and cancers. Most people would definitely be worried if you suggested that they should have a chest X-ray every day for the rest of their lives. But some of these people quite happily smoke – sometimes up to two packets of cigarettes every day.

It was first discovered that cigarettes contained radioactive polonium about half a century ago. So how come it’s not general public knowledge? The answer is simple: Big Tobacco is excellent at cover-ups. These companies realised that there was radioactive Po-210 in tobacco and did their own internal, and very secret, research program. They even came up with ways to drastically reduce the amount of Po-210 in cigarette smoke. But there was no money in it. One notorious tobacco company memo about radioactive polonium read, ‘removal of these materials would have no commercial advantage’.

They also didn’t want any bad publicity. By the early 1960s, it had already been scientifically proven that smoking was the principal cause of lung cancer. However, Big Tobacco played down the scientific truth for several decades. At the Philip Morris tobacco company, a scientist wrote in a memo to his boss, regarding research on Po-210, ‘it has the potential of waking a sleeping giant. The subject is rumbling […] and I doubt we should provide facts’. Big Tobacco’s internal research showed that Po-210 was definitely harmful. But a 1982 internal Philip Morris document advised that as long as they kept their internal research secret, they could maintain that any suggestion of a link between Po-210 and lung cancers was ‘spurious and unsubstantiated’. Big Tobacco companies had yet another reason for not publishing their research. Their infamous motto, as observed by a tobacco company executive in 1969, was (and still is) ‘Doubt Is Our Product’. They used any tiny variation in the research to support the misleading claim that even the experts didn’t really agree that smoking was harmful. For example, suppose that Scientist A said that the link between smoking and lung cancer was 99 per cent certain, but Scientist B said it was 98 per cent. Big Tobacco would claim that even the scientists could not agree – and, therefore, how could anyone believe there was a link between smoking and lung cancer? Big Tobacco plays the same deadly game today. Perhaps it’s time Big Tobacco X-rayed their own internal research, so they can see through their own smoke screen.

Drug habits

Vested interests

Martyrs to Gondwanaland: The cost of scientific exploration

Chris Turney

Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the

Ranges –

Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you.

Go!

– Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)

On 11 February 1913 England woke to the Daily Mail headline ‘Death of Captain Scott. Lost with four comrades. The Pole reached. Disaster on the return’. Just a day before, the press had reported that the British Antarctic expedition leader was back in New Zealand after succeeding in his goal to reach the South Geographic Pole; the Royal Geographical Society had even prepared a telegram congratulating him on his success. The palpable sense of anticipation and excitement now turned to despondence.

A few days later a hastily organised memorial service was held in St Paul’s Cathedral, London. The numbers attending were staggering, exceeding those at the service for the 1500 lives lost on the Titanic in the same year. ‘The presence of the king’, The Times declared, ‘conveyed a symbolism without which any ceremony expressive of national sentiment would have been inadequate’. The Empire grieved.

The details of what had happened in Antarctica appeared contradictory. The five men had last been seen heading confidently towards the Pole. They were well provisioned, and fit and strong. What had happened did not make sense – but the latest reports from Antarctica had a frightening ring of truth.

These accounts described a team returning in deteriorating weather conditions, the likes of which had never been seen before. Pushing on in the bitter cold the expedition had continued its scientific program, making observations and collecting geological samples as it travelled back to the Cape Evans base. And yet the journey proved fatal.

Petty Officer Edgar Evans (not to be confused with Scott’s deputy, Teddy Evans) was the first to die, apparently from the effects of concussion at the base of the Beardmore Glacier. Later, suffering from frostbite and exhaustion, and recognising his ever-slowing pace was threatening the others, Captain Lawrence ‘Titus’ Oates famously walked out into a blizzard with the words, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time’. Struggling forward with limited food and fuel, in plummeting temperatures, the remaining three men continued their trek to base.

In late March 1912 a nine-day blizzard pinned down Scott, Dr Edward Wilson and Henry ‘Birdie’ Bowers in their tent. There would be no escape. All three wrote messages for loved ones until the end, which came sometime around 29 March. Scott’s diary reads:

Every day we have been ready to start for our depot 11 miles away, but outside the door of the tent it remains a scene of whirling drift. I do not think we can hope for any better things now we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more. R. Scott. For God’s sake look after our people.

They died disappointed men, 150 days out from base and a mere 18 kilometres from salvation at One Ton Depot.

In his ‘Message to the Public’, Scott wrote one of the finest short pieces of English prose:

We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last. But if we have been willing to give our lives to this enterprise, which is for the honour of our country, I appeal to our countrymen to see that those who depend on us are properly cared for. Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale, but surely, surely, a great rich country like ours will see that those who are dependent on us are properly cared for.

Scott wrote to his ‘wife’ – a word he later struck out and changed to ‘widow’ – and said of their two-year-old son and future conservationist, Peter: ‘Make the boy interested in natural history if you can; it is better than games’.

On 12 November a search party from Cape Evans came across the frozen remains of the three men. Apsley Cherry-Garrard later wrote, ‘We have found them – to say it has been a ghastly day cannot express it – it is too bad for words.’ But Cherry-Garrard was amazed:

We have everything – records, diaries, etc. They have among other things several rolls of photographs, a meteorological log kept up to 13 March, considering all things, a great many geological samples. And they have stuck to everything. It is magnificent that men in such case should go on pulling everything that they have died to gain.

With the papers and samples collected, the tent was collapsed over the men and, after a failed search for Oates’s body, the search team returned to base.

Scott’s death with his men was a defining moment early in the 20th century, not least for those connected to Antarctic exploration. Polar veteran Sir Clements Markham eulogised in his diary:

There has passed away, if it is really true, a very exceptionally noble Englishman. What struck me most was his chivalrous generosity in dealing with contemptible self-seekers such as Shackleton and Amundsen. Very rarely have so many great qualities been combined in one man. Perhaps the greatest was that which won him the love of all who served under him.

Overseas, the shock was no less. Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen was quoted as saying, on hearing the news, ‘horrible, horrible’; while Count Okuma, public champion of the Japanese Antarctic expedition, wrote, ‘Scott rests forever in that frozen realm, and his great spirit watches for all eternity over the Antarctic’s icy wastes’.

The president of the Royal Geographical Society, Lord Curzon, reflected:

Arm-chair geographers were sometimes disposed to complain that the days of adventure and risk in exploration were over. The last year gave the melancholy lie to such fireside fallacies. The toll of human life was still demanded, and was still cheerfully paid. Should the day ever arise when it was not, then indeed might geographical societies shut their doors and hand over their work to an educational bureau of the State.

The loss of life counted for something.

* * * * *

In 1912, five separate teams representing the old and new world had been south in a scientific exploration beyond the edge of the known world. Their discoveries not only enthralled the world, but changed our understanding of the planet forever. Inevitably more questions were raised than answered. One of the major conundrums was the presence of coal near the South Geographic Pole: how did vestiges of ancient forests come to be found so far south? As Australian Antarctic veteran and scientist Sir Edgeworth David remarked, ‘We are thus confronted with the extraordinary problem of trees, probably coniferous, flourishing within 5 degrees of the South Pole itself in a zone which is now, in winter-time, more or less in complete darkness for five months in the year’.

Prophetically, David asked:

Could this coal-flora have flourished, even under warmer conditions, with the Beardmore glacier situated in its present relation to the South Pole, so that the flora would have been in darkness for five months of the year? If not, has the Pole shifted, or has Buckley Island shifted in regard to its present distance from the Pole?

The answer to why coal was in Antarctica lay within the 16 kilograms of samples Scott and his team had collected and dragged to their deaths. With the publication of Scott’s Last Expedition, a collection of the British leader’s journals, the public learned that on discovering the dead men the search party

recovered all their gear and dug out the sledge with their belongings on it. Amongst these were 35 lb. of very important geological specimens which had been collected on the moraines of the Beardmore Glacier; at Doctor Wilson’s request they had stuck to these up to the very end, even when disaster stared them in the face and they knew that the specimens were so much weight added to what they had to pull.

The remaining expedition members immediately saw their scientific value. The geologist Frank Debenham remarked that the ‘specimens brought back by the Polar Party from Mt. Buckley contain impressions of fossil plants of late Palaeozoic age, some of which a cursory inspection identifies as occurring in other parts of the world. When fully examined, they will assuredly prove to be of the highest geological importance,’ and argued that their preservation would allow people to ‘settle a long-standing controversy between geologists as to the nature of the former union between Antarctica and Australasia’. But what precisely the specimens were was not widely known.

Buckley Island – or Mount Buckley, as it is sometimes referred to – is a nunatak atop the Beardmore Glacier. It was here, on the return from the pole, that Edward Wilson found the coal deposits first reported by Anglo-Irish explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton just a few years before. The men spent the afternoon of 8 February 1912 and some of the following morning under the cliff face. Searching among the jumble of rocks they scanned the surface for samples, splitting promising-looking blocks of stone in the search for elusive fossils while the eagle-eyed Wilson made detailed notes. On close inspection some were found to contain the clear impression of ancient leaves.

Today these delicate samples are carefully preserved in London’s Natural History Museum, locked away in small cardboard boxes, hidden among a global collection that has been gathered over centuries. It is hard to believe these small rocks, several centimetres across and rough-edged, are the same ones that caught Wilson’s eye all those years ago. The scientist described them as ‘dark blackish slaty, shaly or coaly matter, some exceedingly hard, some splitting easily, and some breaking vertically into blocks’, where

the best leaf-impressions and the most obvious were in the rotten lumps of weathered coal which split up easily to sheaf-knife and hammer. Every layer of these gave abundant vegetable remains. Most of the bigger leaves were like beech leaves in shape and venation, in size a little smaller than British beech, and the venation were much more abundant and finer in character, but distinctly beechlike.

The romance of their effort was not lost on Markham, who commented: ‘There is no more glorious and more touching event in the whole range of polar history’.

By 1914, analysis of these fossils was nearing completion at the University of Cambridge. Working on the precious samples, Albert Seward, a professor of botany, reported in the first of several natural-history accounts from the expedition that some of the fossils were Glossopteris, a giant tree-like fern that dominated the geological record in Australia, Africa and India during the Permian period, some 299 to 251 million years ago. Seward wrote: ‘the discovery of Glossopteris on the Buckley Island moraine supplies what is needed to bring hypothesis within the range of established fact’. Here was proof that Antarctica had not only been warmer in the past: it had somehow been linked to the southern continents at the centre of the supercontinent known as Gondwanaland.

The simplest explanation for how Glossopteris came to be in Antarctica was through one of the hypothesised land bridges connecting the southern continents. In the oceans, however, the much-sought evidence had remained elusive. As part of the Australasian effort the expedition ship Aurora had made several vast sweeps of the Southern Ocean, taking soundings for water depth and trawling the sea for biological evidence of an ancient link. Even though the Australian Antarctic explorer, Douglas Mawson, was keen to find proof, he was not convinced by what they had found. The most promising was the Mill Rise, south of Tasmania, but this was an isolated plateau and did not span nearly enough of the ocean to make the case.

With no evidence for a land bridge, the question was: how did Glossopteris come to be in Antarctica?

Bold new scientific ideas were coming to the fore as the Antarctic expeditions returned home. Alongside reports proving the existence of the atom and the discovery of a possible fossilised human species in England, a little-known German scientist called Alfred Wegener was suggesting something more controversial: the world’s continents formed part of an enormous jigsaw.

By 1912 Wegener was publishing scientific papers on his solution to the confusing observation that distinctive fossils were found across many continents. Later developed in a landmark book called The Origin of Continents and Oceans, his ideas were not published in English until 1924, delaying their discussion among the wider scientific community. Wegener proposed that you did not need drowned land bridges to account for similar geological formations in disparate locations. Instead, everything could be resolved if the continents had ploughed their way through the oceans – which Wegener described as displacement theory – changing their location on the surface.

Gondwanaland had been one massive supercontinent and, instead of parts sinking into the world’s oceans, it had split and the continents drifted apart from one another during the Jurassic period, which began around 161 million years ago. If the thinking was correct, it meant the Antarctic coal was no longer in the location where it had formed: Gondwanaland had torn apart and created the world we see today.

Not everyone in the scientific community welcomed this theory. Critics were scathing, largely because there was no evidence for how Wegener envisaged the continents moved across the surface. Comments such as ‘German pseudo-science’ and ‘purely fantastic’ indicate the depth of feeling. It was not until the 1960s that Wegener’s ideas became widely accepted, once it was recognised that it wasn’t the continents that moved per se but the plates on which they sit and float. Plate tectonics was able to explain how new continents and oceans were created, destroyed or rubbed along uncomfortably together.

Ironically, a focus of the Australasian effort, Macquarie Island, is now known to lie on the eastern boundary of the Indo-Australian Pacific Plate, explaining the frequent earthquakes experienced by Mawson’s men based there. It was not enough, however, to convince the Australian leader, who remained distinctly cold to the idea, though Sir Edgeworth David did come round to the concept. More importantly, though, continental drift suddenly made it possible to argue that the Antarctic coal had formed in lower latitudes and then moved on. But was this the whole story?

During the Permian, Glossopteris dominated the Gondwanan scenery. But it was not the only thing growing in the landscape. The diversity of Antarctic vegetation found alongside Glossopteris was relatively low, implying cooler conditions. More significantly, associated deposits were found to contain magnetic particles that sit close to vertical – the same principle behind dipping compasses – proving Antarctica was close to the magnetic pole at the time of Glossopteris and the formation of coal. It appeared that Antarctica had not been that far north, after all: at least, not far enough to avoid several months of 24-hour darkness each year. And yet, given the large size of Glossopteris, it must have been relatively warm.

A strong clue to how this was so is provided by a remarkable living fossil, the Chinese deciduous tree ginkgo, or Ginkgo biloba. Fossils of this plant have been found in Antarctic rocks dating back to the Cretaceous period, some 100 million years ago. Although this was after the time of Glossopteris, we know greenhouse gas levels were at similarly high levels. Concentrations of air-breathing stomata on fossil leaves provide a first-order estimate of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The greater the concentration of gas, the more efficiently the plant photosynthesises and the fewer stomata it needs. By nourishing the plants at different levels of carbon dioxide the relationship can be quantified, and the results make fascinating reading. Compared to today’s level of 396 parts per million and rising, estimates for the time ginkgo was flourishing in Antarctica suggest it was around 800 parts per million. The Earth was in the grip of an extreme greenhouse effect.

The corresponding high temperatures meant there were no icecaps. Instead, the landscape was dominated by rainforest and inhabited by a wealth of wildlife. By growing ginkgo seedlings in blacked-out greenhouses with high levels of carbon dioxide, scientists at the University of Sheffield, in England, have been able to test whether the tree was capable of withstanding complete darkness for months on end. Although the ginkgo plants used up precious food reserves during winter, they could more than compensate for this by photosynthesising during the 24 hours of summer daylight. So long as carbon dioxide levels remained high, the forests of Antarctica could not only survive in the dark but thrive.

With the ceaseless shuffling of plates on the surface, Gondwanaland’s time was limited. Huge flows of lava dating back to the Jurassic period are preserved within the Transantarctic Mountains, testament to the massive forces Alfred Wegener envisaged. By the late Cretaceous, some 80 million years ago, the last hanger-on, New Zealand, finally split from the West Antarctic. The supercontinent was no more. The rifting continues today: the Mount Erebus volcano in the Ross Sea is a visible sign of the process that began all those years ago. Satellite data collected since the 1980s shows how perceptive Wegener was. The crust still carries the physical scarring that marks the break-up of Gondwanaland, and the links between Antarctica and the other southern continents. It is a spectacular confirmation of the German’s idea of a ‘flight from the poles’.

The end of Gondwanaland had global repercussions. The opening up of the Drake Passage and Scotia Sea around 30 million years ago brought one of the world’s great ocean currents, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, into being. Although this Antarctic current sustains abundant life in the Southern Ocean – including South Georgia and other sub-Antarctic islands – it isolated the southern continent from the rest of the planet. Temperatures in Antarctica dropped precipitously and the vast ice sheets we see today began to grow. With the accompanying cooling there were massive evolutionary changes.

For those left behind on the keystone continent of Gondwanaland, the future would prove considerably challenging.

* * * * *

No group encapsulates the spirit of scientific exploration more than Robert Scott and his South Pole party. Unfortunately, their deaths overshadowed their expedition’s great work – and arguably much of that achieved by the other teams. Heroic tales of sacrifice and endurance in the face of extreme hardship became the main story, to the detriment of almost everything else.

When I started researching this era in Antarctic exploration, I had no desire to add to the commentary on the deaths of Scott and his men. There are many wonderful books on the events surrounding this journey and all give a more comprehensive view of them than I could hope to. But, during my research, I stumbled across a new part of the story, with implications for the way we honour the men’s memory and, more generally, how science is communicated to people outside the profession.

With the news of the tragedy, rumours circulated that the full story had not been told: that something else had happened on the ice, something that was being quietly ignored. To try to understand what, I went in May 2011 to view some of Lord Curzon’s papers held by the British Library.

The first clue was in a short set of notes: seven pages that had been buried in a file for nearly a century. They shed light on a chain of events that was precipitated in April 1913 by Lady Kathleen Scott’s arrival in London from New Zealand, returning after news of her husband’s death. During the month-long voyage Lady Scott had pored over her late husband’s diary and correspondence. Arriving in London on 14 April, she immediately contacted Lord Curzon, in his role as president of the Royal Geographical Society, and arranged a meeting in two days’ time.

Curzon made notes of the meeting after what appears to have been a wide-ranging discussion over Lady Scott’s findings. The meeting began, unsurprisingly, with talk of her late husband:

Scott’s words in his Diary on exhaustion of food & fuel in depots on his return. He spoke in reference of ‘lack of thoughtfulness & even of generosity’. It appears Lieut Evans – down with Scurvy – and the 2 men with him must on return journey have entered & consumed more than their share.

This must have come as a shock to Curzon. Had one of the returning parties, led no less by the expedition’s second-in-command, taken more than their fair share of supplies? Scott’s Antarctic venture was seen in some quarters as the society’s expedition. If Teddy Evans was even remotely suspected of being complicit in Scott’s death, the RGS might be asked some very difficult questions, particularly as he had since assumed the leadership of the expedition.

Curzon immediately initiated an inquiry, asking several senior RGS members if they would discreetly help him investigate the matter. Most were supportive but things changed a few days later, when he met Edward Wilson’s widow, Oriana.

His notes of this meeting record an unknown part of the expedition’s story:

Mrs Wilson told me later there was a passage in her husband’s diary which spoke of the ‘inexplicable’ shortage of fuel & pemmican on the return journey, relating to depots which had not been touched by Meares and which could only refer to an unauthorised subtraction by one or other of the returning parties. This passage however she proposes to show to no one and to keep secret. C.

Scott’s dog driver, Cecil Meares, was known to have removed extra supplies from one of the supply dumps, the Mount Hooper Depot. Halfway back across the Ross Ice Shelf in 1912, Meares was starving. He had travelled the entire ice shelf on the outward journey, and the extra two weeks meant he and his dogs were desperately short of food. Taking the bare minimum, he left a letter telling the others of his actions.

However, it was not Meares’s removal of the food that Wilson was referring to. The returning South Pole team did not reach Mount Hooper until 10 March, 11 days after Wilson’s last journal entry. The shortage of food must have been elsewhere. But the published version of Wilson’s diary makes no mention of a shortage of fuel or of pemmican.

To check Curzon’s claims, I was fortunate to view Wilson’s original journal at the British Library. The small dark hardback book contains remarkably light writing in pencil. Dates are jotted in the margins and the accompanying text is of varying length before the entries end abruptly, on 27 February 1912. All the material aligns with the published version, but the latter fails to convey a vital characteristic of the journal. Before 11 February, each line is filled with jottings; not one is wasted. After this date there are gaps in the text, with some entries missing entirely.

The key date seems to be 24 February, when the returning party reached the Southern Barrier Depot at the bottom of the Beardmore Glacier. Scott was horrified to find there was a large fuel shortage, and could not account for it. It appears there was natural leakage through the lids: something Amundsen avoided by soldering all his tins. In the published version of his diaries Wilson not only fails to mention the fuel shortage in the relevant entry; he does not even remark upon the team having reached the all-important depot. In the original diary there are gaps in the text: the final statement of the day, ‘Fat pony hoosh’, is a separate entry from the rest of the text; half a line, clear of text, precedes it, followed by a blank two and a half lines before the next day’s entry.

Whether someone has rubbed out text is unclear, but the gaps in the diary entry for 24 February correlate with Curzon’s notes. It suggests that one or more individuals did indeed take more than their fair share of food. And this was not the first time. On its return the South Pole team found a full day’s biscuit allowance missing in the Upper Glacier Depot on 7 February, and both Scott and Wilson remarked upon this in their diaries.

The evidence pointed towards Evans’s team as the guilty party. And Lord Curzon could not risk the story getting out. Scott and his companions had been declared heroes. To suggest that one of the returning team – albeit suffering scurvy – had helped themselves to more than their share of food, contributing to the men’s deaths, would have changed everything. There was little appetite for public scandal. Curzon appears to have shut down the inquiry – after 24 April 1913, there were no further references to it. By the end of July 1913 Evans had been removed from the official leadership of the expedition.

It is a shame that the complete, correct text in this and the other sledging diaries is not better known. The nature of the British explorers’ deaths and the editing of their final words have for too long created a fixation on the ‘race’, rather than the bigger story of how the five expeditions of the era worked towards understanding what made Antarctica tick.

By focusing on the race we do these men a disservice. Scott and his men died for science. I hope that, after a century, we can get the balance right and remember the pioneering work they did. It was all about the science – and it is time we remembered them for that.

Sampling

Epic expeditions

Mr Jevons and his paradox

Antony Funnell

That’s always been the promise; that’s always been the thought, that growth in the economy is what raises people up. But there comes a certain level where growth really isn’t improving the quality of your life. We’re not asking the important question: How much is enough? Because with all of this profusion of stuff, there’s certainly no correlation with the improvement in whether we’re happy.

– David Suzuki, Canadian environmentalist and author

The very word ‘efficiency’ speaks of dullness – nothing exciting is ever efficient – try imagining efficient sex or efficient cuisine and I’m sure you’ll grasp what I’m getting at. But it’s important to explore the concept, because it’s one of those terms we hear all the time, and it’s one of the main goals we’re supposed to strive for as we charge into the future.

Let me cut to the chase and be brutally honest: the biggest problem I see with society’s push to become more energy efficient is that it’s a bit like people and exercise machines. Just because you fill the garage with bikes, treadmills and the like, doesn’t mean you’re going to get fit. In other words, the technology is only of benefit once you’ve changed your mindset and your habits. Owning it, but not using it, is no good at all. In fact, it’s counterproductive, because at the end of the day you’re still just as unfit, but with less room in your garage and less cash in your wallet.

It’s hard to imagine anyone arguing against energy efficiency. It’s self-evidently a good thing. It’s a goal even normally divergent groups can agree on: from an environmentalist’s point of view, energy efficiency means less pollution and less waste; and from a manufacturer’s perspective, it offers the chance of reducing costs and thereby maximising profit. So energy efficiency can make for a greener future and also a stronger economy. Win–win, as they say.

Then there’s sustainability. Again, who would argue against that concept; surely if our world was run on the pursuit of sustainability we’d all be better off – no question about it.

But here’s the odd thing: while we talk a lot about the pursuit of energy efficiency and the need for sustainability – the desire to conserve resources – the reality is something entirely different, because growth in public awareness about energy and resource depletion has perfectly coincided with the explosion of a lifestyle that actively promotes rather than discourages consumption.

Sustainability is a dangerous concept, according to international design expert Tony Fry, the head of the Design Futures Program at Australia’s Griffith University, and he calls for the abandonment of the term, though not necessarily its original intent. ‘We’re at a watershed,’ he says.

The future of humanity as we understand it is really about a choice which says, ‘Do we change direction or do we try to maintain what we already have?’ Now the question in terms of sustainability and sustainable development, to a large extent reduces to the proposition of sustaining what we already have, sustaining, in a sense, the unsustainable.

Dr Fry argues that our focus on sustainability has impeded progress and diverted energy away from a nuts-and-bolts reassessment of how we can reshape modern life to match the economic and resource capacities of the world. ‘In the end, we are the problem,’ he declares. ‘Unsustainability isn’t a problem of the environment. It is us, it is our way of treating the resources that we utilise, it’s our way of living or not living together. It’s the way in which we treat all the things that we depend upon pretty carelessly.’

So it’s not just that we don’t ‘walk the talk’ when it comes to genuine sustainability and moderation, we’re not even off the couch!

Here are some extremely disheartening figures to illustrate my point. The US Government’s Energy Information Administration estimates fossil fuel use during the 26 years to 2006 grew annually by around 2 per cent. And energy usage in the G20 group of nations in 2010 grew by more than 5 per cent. And the G20 countries, don’t forget, are meant to be among the smartest, as well as the wealthiest, in the world.

Now, we don’t like to admit it, but we all secretly know that human beings are pretty stupid, as evidenced by the fact that we invented reality television and the means to blow the entire planet to smithereens hundreds of times over. But it’s not as if we’re the dumbest creatures on Earth. We’re not brush turkeys, are we? And the average person has more smarts than a cow. So why haven’t our efforts to create a more efficient and less wasteful planet actually matched our ambitions? It’s entirely possible, of course, that it’s simply a matter of not trying hard enough. I can’t help thinking we’re a bit like those people who drink diet cola and talk all the time about calories, but then sit down to lunch and eat three times their own body weight in chips and hamburgers.

But what about that issue of language I mentioned? Sustainability, as we’ve already seen, isn’t really a helpful term. It can whitewash over some pretty significant problems. And what about efficiency? Well, there is a school of thought that says that it, too, is more of a hindrance than a help. To understand why, we have to journey back in time to meet a 19th-century Liverpudlian gentleman by the name of William Stanley Jevons.

Jevons made his name as a professor of economics at University College, London, in the 1870s. He specialised in political economics and logic and he’s credited with being one of the pioneers of modern economic thinking. At the age of 19, Jevons had left a reasonably comfortable life in the UK for the frenetic madness of the colonies, taking up a job at the Macquarie Street Mint in Sydney.

Colonial Australia wasn’t all sheep stations and bushrangers. It was sheep stations, bushrangers and gold! The place was booming and so during his time Down Under, Jevons had a chance to observe the raw dynamics of an economy undergoing massive change. And it obviously had an effect on him because, upon returning to England, he began publicly questioning contemporary economic thought. Then in 1865 he published an influential book on the future of the British resource industry called The Coal Question. In it, Jevons foresaw a rapid depletion of the UK’s coal reserves brought about not by a lack of initial resources, but by increasing efficiencies in the way in which coal was being used. He suggested that efficiencies in the extraction and use of coal simply fed greater demand, as people found new ways to use the excess. And that in turn, he argued, led to greater extraction. He wrote: ‘It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth’.

So, as a general principle then, his argument centres around the idea that efficiency actually increases, rather than decreases consumption. And that’s what’s become known as the ‘Jevons Paradox’. It’s also sometimes referred to as the ‘efficiency dilemma’ and it’s one of the major reasons why striving to be energy efficient in the modern world so often ends up as an exercise in pedalling faster, rather than moving ahead.

Dr Miles Park from the Faculty of the Built Environment at the University of New South Wales explains it like this:

When you buy these new ‘eco-efficient’ products, it can change your behaviour. This is referred to as a ‘rebound’ effect, whereby there’s the psychological thinking that ‘Well, this product is saving me energy’. So therefore you may be inclined to leave the lights on longer, or perhaps you’ve bought a new eco-efficient car so you’ll drive further and more frequently.

Walk inside the modern house and it’s easy to see what Dr Park means. Newly constructed dwellings are now built with energy-efficient lighting but whereas a room used to have, on average, just one ‘inefficient’ incandescent light bulb, today the fashion is to have as many energy-efficient globes as the ceiling space will allow – or the bearers in the roof will hold. I visited a beach house in the fashionable Sydney suburb of Avalon not so long ago that had more than 40 downlights in the open-plan entertainment area alone! At night time the ceiling looked like a planetarium. You could have mapped your path to another galaxy just by sitting at the breakfast bar and looking up.

And lighting is just the beginning of it: we build more freeways and overpasses in order to make our traffic flow more efficiently, only to end up with an increase in vehicle usage and eventually even greater levels of congestion. Then there’s the internet. The web was meant to herald the age of the paperless office, but in reality the online environment has vastly increased the flow of correspondence between people, resulting, in turn, in an increase in energy costs from the electricity required to run the world’s computers and servers. And to make matters worse, an awful lot of the digital correspondence that’s sent between offices often ends up being backed up on paper anyhow.

But there’s also another problem with computers: the faster they’ve become, and the greater their capacity, the more applications we’ve found for them, which means more usage, which, in turn, means more energy consumption. It’s now estimated that information communication technology (ICT) infrastructure accounts for around 20 per cent of the energy consumed in the standard modern office.

‘It’s certainly the case that our information and communications technology devices are chewing up more and more energy and there’s a huge effort in the community, in the computer and electronics community, to reduce that amount of energy, to look for lower energy and more efficient devices,’ says Dr David Skellern, a former head of the technology research organisation National ICT Australia Ltd (NICTA). ‘But inevitably, as we have more and more systems connected, we are going to see an increase in the amount of energy that’s used.’

In 2007, a study by the tech research company Gartner found that ICT accounted for around 2 per cent of total greenhouse gas emissions. That doesn’t sound like much, but put into perspective, that’s round about the same percentage as emissions from the aviation industry. And Lachlan Andrew at the Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures at Melbourne’s Swinburne University says all the relevant indicators are pointing upward.

The most recent figure I’ve heard is about 15 per cent annual growth in the energy consumption of the internet. Another figure that I’ve heard is around 6 per cent or so in total due to e-commerce type activities, which includes things like buying a book online. Now, you don’t have to physically travel to a bookshop, but that book is in fact being shipped to you. If you consider all the packaging costs and suchlike, the energy cost of buying a book online is often more than driving to the bookshop and buying the book yourself.

The solution seems obvious enough: consume less. But encouraging less consumption is always going to be easier said than done in affluent countries like Australia and the United States. It shouldn’t be, but political considerations do get in the way.

To show you what I mean, I need you to shut your eyes. Shut them tight. I mean really tight. OK, you might have to peek a bit in order to read what I’ve got to say, but only a little bit. Now, imagine a politician running for election on a campaign platform based on cutting back. Not slicing away at the size of the national deficit or the public service, but forcing voters to seriously cut back on the gadgets and good stuff that we as a society of consumers just love to have. Imagine a campaign message that said to voters that they needed to spend less time on their computers and other digital toys. Or that for the sake of the planet and future generations, they should rip out almost all of the mood lighting in their home, and be content to have just one bathroom in the new house they’re building. Or better still, imagine advising people that perhaps they could get by with just one giant flatscreen plasma television in their home, not one per room.

It’s just not going to happen, because it’s a message that none of us want to hear. The future is meant to be about more, not less; and besides, aren’t we already doing our bit for energy efficiency by turning off the lounge-room light once a year in support of Global Earth Hour?

In summary, weaning people off at least some of their gadgets is never going to be easy in a world that’s saturated with advertising and where the term consumer has now begun to replace the word citizen. Part of the answer is always going to have to be about thinking smarter and trying to reduce energy usage without inadvertently stimulating greater demand.

So what sorts of initiatives could work? Well, I thought about it for a long while and couldn’t come up with any myself, so once again I turned to David Skellern for help.

‘There are sophisticated ways in which you can save energy,’ Skellern assures me, and the example he gives involves motor vehicles. Manufacturers, he says, are experimenting with systems that connect the engine management of a car to the outdoor environment. ‘If we knew, for example, when a light was going to turn on or off, a traffic light, and we let the computer in the car determine that we’re actually going to be in a braking mode, then it could change the whole energy system in the car to save energy,’ explains Skellern. ‘And the savings are not trivial. General Motors has recently estimated that you might save 15 to 20 per cent, or something of that order of magnitude, by being able to alter the energy usage in the car during a braking circumstance.’

And Lachlan Andrew and his colleagues at Swinburne University have also been researching ways in which the efficiency of personal computers can be improved, without getting people’s backs up. ‘Computers can run much faster at a peak speed than they often need to in quiet times,’ says Andrew.

And so one of the things we’re looking at is optimally controlling the speed at which computers run, so that they’re only running as fast as they need to at a given time. And this can save a lot of energy in the quiet times, but still give reasonable performance in the peak times when it’s really needed.

It’s a noble cause, but Dr Andrew is well aware that it’s also a difficult one to realise, given human nature. ‘It’s a very fine line to tread,’ he agrees.

It’s important the user experience not be significantly harmed by the techniques we’re introducing. It’s important that the user experience be as if computers were running at full speed all the time. But at the same time, if people aren’t aware of the resources that are being consumed, then we run the risk of encountering Jevons Paradox, which says that if we make something more efficient, then it becomes cheaper to provide, and so the total amount of energy that is used in the system might actually increase as a result of energy-saving measures. Many people are concerned that is happening with IT already. If we make computers more efficient, then it’s going to dramatically increase the amount of computing that’s done, which will potentially increase the total amount of energy consumed.

And around we go again.

Human induced

Moving parts

Home-making

Alimentary thinking

Emma Young

It’s been a tough morning. You were late for work, missed a crucial meeting and now your boss is mad at you. Come lunchtime you walk straight past the salad bar and head for the stodge. You can’t help yourself – at times of stress the brain encourages us to seek out comfort foods. That much is well known. What you probably don’t know, though, is that the real culprit may not be the brain in your skull but your other brain.

Yes, that’s right, your other brain. Your body contains a separate nervous system that is so complex it has been dubbed the second brain. It comprises an estimated 500 million neurons – about five times as many as in the brain of a rat – and is around 9 metres long, stretching from your oesophagus to your anus. It is this brain that could be responsible for your craving under stress for crisps, chocolate and cookies.

Embedded in the wall of the gut, the enteric nervous system (ENS) has long been known to control digestion. Now it seems it also plays an important role in our physical and mental well-being. It can work both independently of and in conjunction with the brain in your head and, although you are not conscious of your gut ‘thinking’, the ENS helps you sense environmental threats, and then influences your response. ‘A lot of the information that the gut sends to the brain affects well-being, and doesn’t even come to consciousness,’ says Michael Gershon at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, New York.

If you look inside the human body, you can’t fail to notice the brain and its offshoots of nerve cells running along the spinal cord. The ENS, a widely distributed network of neurons spread throughout two layers of gut tissue, is far less obvious, which is why it wasn’t discovered until the mid-19th century. It is part of the autonomic nervous system, the network of peripheral nerves that control visceral functions. It is also the original nervous system, emerging in the first vertebrates over 500 million years ago and becoming more complex as vertebrates evolved – possibly even giving rise to the brain itself.

Digestion is a complicated business, so it makes sense to have a dedicated network of nerves to oversee it. As well as controlling the mechanical mixing of food in the stomach and coordinating muscle contractions to move it through the gut, the ENS also maintains the biochemical environment within different sections of the gut, keeping them at the correct pH and chemical composition needed for digestive enzymes to do their job.

But there is another reason the ENS needs so many neurons: eating is fraught with danger. Like the skin, the gut must stop potentially dangerous invaders, such as bacteria and viruses, from getting inside the body. If a pathogen should cross the gut lining, immune cells in the gut wall secrete inflammatory substances including histamine, which are detected by neurons in the ENS. The gut brain then either triggers diarrhoea or alerts the brain in the head, which may decide to initiate vomiting, or both.

You needn’t be a gastroenterologist to be aware of these gut reactions – or indeed the more subtle feelings in your stomach that accompany emotions such as excitement, fear and stress. For hundreds of years, people have believed that the gut interacts with the brain to influence health and disease. Yet this connection has only been studied over the last century. Two pioneers in this field were American physician Byron Robinson, who in 1907 published The Abdominal and Pelvic Brain, and his contemporary, British physiologist Johannis Langley, who coined the term ‘enteric nervous system’. Around this time, it also became clear that the ENS can act autonomously, with the discovery that if the main connection with the brain – the vagus nerve – is severed the ENS remains capable of coordinating digestion. Despite these discoveries, interest in the gut brain fell until the 1990s when the field of neurogastroenterology was born.

We now know that the ENS is not just capable of autonomy but also influences the brain. In fact, about 90 per cent of the signals passing along the vagus nerve come not from above, but from the ENS.

The second brain also shares many features with the first. It is made up of various types of neuron, with glial support cells. It has its own version of a blood-brain barrier to keep its physiological environment stable. And it produces a wide range of hormones and around 40 neurotransmitters of the same classes as those found in the brain. In fact, neurons in the gut are thought to generate as much dopamine as those in the head. Intriguingly, about 95 per cent of the serotonin present in the body at any time is in the ENS.

* * * * *

What are these neurotransmitters doing in the gut? In the brain, dopamine is a signalling molecule associated with pleasure and the reward system. It acts as a signalling molecule in the gut too, transmitting messages between neurons that coordinate the contraction of muscles in the colon, for example. Also transmitting signals in the ENS is serotonin – best known as the ‘feel-good’ molecule involved in preventing depression and regulating sleep, appetite and body temperature. But its influence stretches far beyond that. Serotonin produced in the gut gets into the blood, where it is involved in repairing damaged cells in the liver and lungs. It is also important for normal development of the heart, as well as regulating bone density by inhibiting bone formation.

But what about mood? Obviously the gut brain doesn’t have emotions, but can it influence those that arise in your head? The general consensus is that neurotransmitters produced in the gut cannot get into the brain – although, theoretically, they could enter small regions that lack a blood–brain barrier, including the hypothalamus. Nevertheless, nerve signals sent from the gut to the brain do appear to affect mood. Indeed, research published in 2006 indicates that stimulation of the vagus nerve can be an effective treatment for chronic depression that has failed to respond to other treatments.

Such gut-to-brain signals may also explain why fatty foods make us feel good. When ingested, fatty acids are detected by cell receptors in the lining of the gut, which send nerve signals to the brain. This may not be simply to keep it informed of what you have eaten. Brain scans of volunteers given a dose of fatty acids directly into the gut show they had a lower response to pictures and music designed to make them feel sad than those given saline. They also reported feeling only about half as sad as the other group.

There is further evidence of links between the two brains in our response to stress. The feeling of ‘butterflies’ in your stomach is the result of blood being diverted away from it to your muscles as part of the fight-or-flight response instigated by the brain. However, stress also leads the gut to increase its production of ghrelin, a hormone that, as well as making you feel hungry, reduces anxiety and depression. Ghrelin stimulates the release of dopamine in the brain both directly, by triggering neurons involved in pleasure and reward pathways, and indirectly, by signals transmitted via the vagus nerve.

* * * * *

In our evolutionary past, the stress-busting effect of ghrelin may have been useful, as we would have needed to be calm when we ventured out in search of food, says Jeffrey Zigman at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. In 2011, his team reported that mice exposed to chronic stress sought out fatty food, but those that were genetically engineered to be unable to respond to ghrelin did not. Zigman notes that in our modern world, with freely available high-fat food, the result of chronic stress or depression can be chronically elevated ghrelin – and obesity.

Gershon suggests that strong links between our gut and our mental state evolved because a lot of information about our environment comes from our gut. ‘Remember the inside of your gut is really the outside of your body,’ he says. So we can see danger with our eyes, hear it with our ears and detect it in our gut. Pankaj Pasricha, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Neurogastroenterology in Baltimore, Maryland, points out that without the gut there would be no energy to sustain life. ‘Its vitality and healthy functioning is so critical that the brain needs to have a direct and intimate connection with the gut,’ he says.

But how far can comparisons between the two brains be taken? Most researchers draw the line at memory – Gershon is not one of them. He tells the story of a US army hospital nurse who administered enemas to the paraplegic patients on his ward at 10 o’clock every morning. When he left, his replacement dropped the practice. Nevertheless, at ten the next morning, everyone on the ward had a bowel movement. This anecdote dates from the 1960s and while Gershon admits that there have been no other reports of gut memory since, he says he remains open to the idea.

Then there’s decision-making. The concept of a ‘gut instinct’ or ‘gut reaction’ is well established, but in fact those fluttery sensations start with signals coming from the brain – the fight-or-flight response again. The resulting feeling of anxiety or excitement may affect your decision about whether to do that bungee jump or arrange a second date, but the idea that your second brain has directed the choice is not warranted. The subconscious ‘gut instinct’ does involve the ENS, but it is the brain in your head that actually perceives the threat. And as for conscious, logical reasoning, even Gershon accepts that the second brain doesn’t do that. ‘Religion, poetry, philosophy, politics – that’s all the business of the brain in the head,’ he says.

Still, it is becoming apparent that without a healthy, well-developed ENS we face problems far wider than mere indigestion. Pasricha has found that newborn rats whose stomachs are exposed to a mild chemical irritant are more depressed and anxious than other rats, with the symptoms continuing long after the physical damage has healed. This doesn’t happen after other sorts of damage, like skin irritation, he says.

It has also emerged that various constituents of breast milk, including oxytocin, support the development of neurons in the gut. This might explain why premature babies who are not breastfed are at higher risk of developing diarrhoea and necrotising enterocolitis, in which portions of the bowel become inflamed and die.

Serotonin is also crucial for the proper development of the ENS where, among its many roles, it acts as a growth factor. Serotonin-producing cells develop early on in the ENS, and if this development is affected, the second brain cannot form properly, as Gershon has shown in mutated mice. He believes that a gut infection or extreme stress in a child’s earliest years may have the same effect, and that later in life this could lead to irritable bowel syndrome, a condition characterised by chronic abdominal pain with frequent diarrhoea or constipation that is often accompanied by depression. The idea that irritable bowel syndrome can be caused by the degeneration of neurons in the ENS is lent weight by recent research revealing that 87 out of 100 people with the condition had antibodies in their circulation that were attacking and killing neurons in the gut.

A growing realisation that the nervous system in our gut is not just responsible for digestion is partly fuelled by discoveries that this ‘second brain’ is implicated in a wide variety of brain disorders.

In Parkinson’s disease, for example, the problems with movement and muscle control are caused by a loss of dopamine-producing cells in the brain. However, Heiko Braak at the University of Frankfurt, Germany, has found that the protein clumps that do the damage, called Lewy bodies, also show up in dopamine-producing neurons in the gut. In fact, judging by the distribution of Lewy bodies in people who died of Parkinson’s, Braak thinks it actually starts in the gut, as the result of an environmental trigger such as a virus, and then spreads to the brain via the vagus nerve.

Likewise, the characteristic plaques or tangles found in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s are present in neurons in their guts too. And people with autism are prone to gastrointestinal problems, which are thought to be caused by the same genetic mutation that affects neurons in the brain.

Although we are only just beginning to understand the interactions between the two brains, already the gut offers a window into the pathology of the brain, says Pankaj Pasricha at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. ‘We can theoretically use gut biopsies to make early diagnoses, as well as to monitor response to treatments.’

Cells in the second brain could even be used as a treatment themselves. One experimental intervention for neurodegenerative diseases involves transplanting neural stem cells into the brain to replenish lost neurons. Harvesting these cells from the brain or spinal cord is not easy, but now neural stem cells have been found in the gut of human adults. These could, in theory, be harvested using a simple endoscopic gut biopsy, providing a ready source of neural stem cells. Indeed, Pasricha’s team is now planning to use them to treat diseases including Parkinson’s.

If nothing else, the discovery that problems with the ENS are implicated in all sorts of conditions means the second brain deserves a lot more recognition than it has had in the past. ‘Its aberrations are responsible for a lot of suffering,’ says Pasricha. He believes that a better understanding of the second brain could pay huge dividends in our efforts to control all sorts of conditions, from obesity and diabetes to problems normally associated with the brain such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Yet the number of researchers investigating the second brain remains small. ‘Given its potential, it’s astonishing how little attention has been paid to it,’ says Pasricha.

Brain power

Organs

The carnivore’s (ongoing) dilemma

Åsa Wahlquist

When News Limited began its 1 Degree program, which aimed to make the company carbon neutral, it invited employees to submit the steps they would take to reduce their own personal greenhouse gas emissions. In response, a number of News employees offered to reduce the amount of red meat in their diets, or even cut out eating meat altogether.

In that choice, they joined such eminences as Britain’s Lord Stern, the Nobel-winning Rajendra Pachauri of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the vegetarian Sir Paul McCartney who popularised the phrase: less meat = less heat.

Popular wisdom has it that industrial livestock production is killing the environment. But while there are some sound reasons to eat less meat or even become a vegetarian, doing it to save the planet is not necessarily one of them.

We can look at it this way: red meat comes from cattle and sheep, which play a vital role in utilising grasslands, the 60 per cent of the world’s farmland unfit for any other agriculture. When the world’s population of hungry people is rapidly growing, you have to ask whether we can ethically refuse to produce food from so much land.

We could also consider the fact that, on mixed farms – those that run livestock and grow crops – the animals play a critical role in eating farm waste and providing natural fertiliser. If human diets shift towards more legumes, such as soybeans, that will mean more cropping and the accompanying need for more irrigation and higher inputs of nitrogenous fertilisers, which pose their own serious greenhouse gas emission problem (more on this later).

As the implications of people swapping meat for vegetables are totted up, there are signs that the greenhouse gas debate is changing.

In his book, Meat: A benign extravagance, Simon Fairlie, a British journalist and farmer, makes a strong case for sustainable, small-scale farming that incorporates livestock. So persuasive is his argument that Fairlie’s book famously convinced well-known environment writer George Monbiot that his pro-vegan stance was wrong.

The case for meat is not helped by the fact that two of the earliest, most influential and most frequently quoted contributions to the debate are wrong. First was the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s report Livestock’s Long Shadow, which claimed 18 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock. More recently, the International Panel for Climate Change put livestock greenhouse gas emissions at 5.4 per cent of global emissions.

The other highly quotable early entrant was US researcher David Pimentel’s claim that it takes 100 000 litres of water to produce 1 kilogram of beef.

However the Water Footprint Network estimates a global average water footprint of 15 400 litres of water per kilogram of beef. Beef grown on Australian farms seems to require less again, with research by a team including Brad Ridoutt from the CSIRO estimating water use at 6.6 to 440 litres per kilogram.

Ridoutt explains: ‘When people use these figures of 100 000 or even 15 000 [litres of water] these numbers go out into the public domain. The information is not given about what these numbers mean. It just becomes a source of misinformation that can be used in quite a scandalous way’.

Ridoutt is working with the International Organisation for Standardisation to set up a rigorous system, similar to carbon footprinting, that would give comparable figures for water usage by all kinds of agriculture and other human pursuits. ‘The underlying question is to what extent is producing this product contributing to a reduction in fresh water that is available for the environment or for others to use.’

Fairlie ridiculed Pimentel’s figure, citing the case of Bramley, an Angus/Jersey-cross steer he raised. He estimated that if the figure of 100 000 litres per kilogram was correct, young Bramley would have had to consume about 25 000 litres of water a day.

What makes all this so difficult to precisely calculate is that we’re talking about animals, not machines. Farmed animals are biological individuals with different constitutions and diets, living in different geographies, bred and used for different purposes, playing different roles in different farm systems. The result is huge variability in the productivity and resource consumption of livestock around the world: for example, beef produced in Africa in a Sahelian pastoral system – where cattle are used for transport, and ownership is an indicator of wealth – has the lowest carbon footprint at 8.4 kilos of greenhouse gases per kilogram of meat; whereas beef produced in Japan, from the world’s most pampered cattle, has the highest value at 26 kilos of greenhouse gases per kilogram of meat.

Livestock’s Long Shadow has cast its own long shadow over the livestock carbon dioxide emissions debate. Richard Eckard, associate professor with the Melbourne School of Land and Environment, along with many other scientists, disputes the report’s claim that livestock contributes 18 per cent of the world’s emissions, as it counts both cattle not raised for consumption and land not in fact used for livestock.

Eckard and fellow scientists say Livestock’s Long Shadow overestimated how much of the land clearing in the Amazon was for livestock – when up to 40 per cent is cropped with soybeans. Eckard adds: ‘You have all the cattle in India for religious reasons, the cattle in Africa used for transport and wealth generation – a lot do not get consumed’.

Deforestation figures highly in Livestock’s Long Shadow’s sums, but Eckard points out much of Australia’s rangelands were never cleared. ‘All the northern rangelands, they weren’t cleared, they were just stocked with cattle,’ he says. In fact, most clearing, in Australia, has been for cropping.

Ross Garnaut’s Climate Change Review, updated in 2011, reported that although greenhouse gas emissions from livestock accounted for about 10 per cent of Australia’s total, those emissions have declined by 13 per cent since 1990, largely because of a fall in sheep numbers – which dropped from 174 to 74 million. He pointed out that commercially motivated improvements in animal husbandry have ‘incidentally reduced emissions per unit of output. These developments could go further’.

The former chief of CSIRO Livestock Industries, Alan Bell, estimates beef cattle account for up to seven per cent of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. And that figure is set to fall. Townsville-based CSIRO scientist Ed Charmley says recent work shows cattle in the northern rangelands are producing 20 to 30 per cent less methane than previous estimates. With about half the nation’s cattle in the north, this means a significant downward revision.

Most of the world’s livestock consume grass. Ruminant animals, such as cows and sheep, possess a special stomach or rumen which contains microbes that can digest grass – and a byproduct of that digestion is the greenhouse gas, methane. This means ruminants produce protein from plants in areas that are unsuitable for any other agricultural activity.

Grasslands occur on land where the soil is too poor, the rainfall too low or the topography too rough for the land to be ploughed and planted with crops.

And before there were modern cattle there were wild ruminants, including the great bison herds of the US prairies and the wildebeest of the African savanna, which had adapted to these grassy regions.

George Seddon has argued the main herbivores in Australia were termites, which, interestingly, also produce methane. Eckard says that in the Northern Territory ‘it is quite feasible that termites are producing more methane on an area basis than livestock’.

Australia also has kangaroos, which, unusually among the large herbivorous animals, are not ruminants, and produce significantly less methane than cows, for example.

Methane, or CH_4, is a potent, if short-lived greenhouse gas. It is given a global warming potential rating of 25 times that of carbon dioxide. Methane is the main component of natural gas and coal seam gas. It is also produced from landfill, but the largest source of methane is wetlands.

Eckard explains the quantity of methane a ruminant produces is affected by its diet – a poor diet results in higher methane production – and by genetics. He says there can be a 15 per cent difference in methane emissions within one herd, determined by these two factors.

The steak-versus-lentils argument is further complicated by the fact that grasslands have been found to play another important role in keeping our atmosphere in balance: that is, they sequester, or fix, carbon that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere.

Helen King, former deputy director of the Co-operative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Accounting, says:‘There is a lot of research that [indicates] if areas [of grassland] are not grazed, or are not managed, they actually take up less carbon, so grazing animals play a very active role in the carbon cycle. Wellmanaged grass-fed beef is a totally different proposition to growing grains to feed animals or growing grains for consumption’.

If people were to abandon eating red meat, some grasslands, like the Serengeti, might be repopulated by wild ruminants. But the more likely fate of Australia’s grasslands would be consumption by fire. Bushfires, on average, burn over 500 000 square kilometres of Australia annually, mainly the grasslands in the northern half of the country. Bushfire accounts for about 3 per cent of the nation’s net greenhouse gas emissions.

One of the charges made against livestock in general is that it consumes grains that would otherwise be used to feed people. But in Australia, livestock is largely fed grain and oilseed products that would not be used for human consumption.

Feeding grain to cattle doesn’t bring great returns in the desired generation of protein: cattle require 8 to 10 kilograms of grain to produce 1 kilogram of meat. Pigs, on the other hand, require 3 kilograms of feed and chicken requires just 1.7 kilograms of grain to produce 1 kilogram of meat.

Australians are eating less red meat, anyway. Beef consumption has more than halved since 1977, to 31.7 kilos per person. Over the same period, consumption of chicken meat has rocketed from 15 to 45.2 kilos per person. The great Aussie barbecue has paled significantly, which is, on one level, in step with our aims of greenhouse gas reduction.

Every kilogram of beef produces 24 kilos of greenhouse gases. Pork and chicken (both products of non-ruminants) generate much less, at 4.1 and 0.8 kilos respectively.

And yet, ‘People say ruminants produce methane and are less efficient than pigs and poultry, but think about all that grain that we need to produce protein from pigs and poultry,’ Bell says. The argument has moved from red meat to meat and poultry generally.

Even Australian cattle don’t spend their whole lives on grass; at any time, only about 2 per cent of the herd is in feedlots, being fed grain. Bell says feedlots are ‘a tough one for the environmentalists, particularly around methane’. Many environmentalists oppose feedlotting due to its intensive nature and the high-grain diet. But feedlot cattle grow more quickly than grass-fed cattle, and that means they emit less greenhouse gas before they’re slaughtered for their meat. As a result, Australian grain-fed cattle are estimated to produce 38 per cent fewer greenhouse gas emissions than those raised on grass. They emit less again if they are administered Hormone Growth Promotants. In another context this would sound unpalatable, but here it makes sense.

Tara Garnett, from the Food Climate Research Network, at the University of Surrey in the UK, argues that if people didn’t eat livestock, fewer cereal crops would be needed for livestock, but more would be required for humans.

Garnett also estimates that Britons throw out between 18 and 20 million tonnes of food a year. Australians are estimated to waste four million tonnes a year. Once, that food waste went to the pigs and poultry that were an integral part of farms and households – now it is simply wasted.

Animal products supply a third of all the world’s protein. If we eliminated livestock we would have to produce half as much again vegetable protein crops to replace meat.

But in Australia the shift from pasture to crop land results in a reduction in soil carbon. Increasing soil carbon will be critical to Australia’s future carbon balance. And the most effective way to increase carbon levels in soil used for agriculture is to return crop land to well-managed pasture, preferably native pasture.

And there’s another problem. Crops need nitrogen, most of which come from synthetic nitrogen fertiliser. Making nitrogen fertiliser is a very energy-intensive process, using at least 1 to 2 per cent of the world’s energy supply. Then the fertiliser, once applied to crops, breaks down to become the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide, which has a global warming potential (GWP) of 298. The base unit for GWP is carbon dioxide, which is given a value of one at 20, 100 and 500 years. Methane has a GWP at 100 years of 25. There are other minor contributors, but carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide are the three main greenhouse gases.

Organic farms fix nitrogen in the soil, naturally increasing its fertility through growing legume crops. And this lowers their productivity, because on a stockless farm, around one-third of fields are taken out of grain production for natural nitrogen fixing at any given time.

And here is the next conundrum for the environmentalist.

Garnett says that research into organic farms finds that, on the one hand, they are less energy intensive than conventional farming, but they are also less productive, so organic livestock is more greenhouse-gas intensive.

Bell hesitates to put a figure on the productivity of Australian organic farming, but says, ‘All the data I have seen, more from North America than here, says that organic is always going to be less efficient’.

Can you absorb another complication? Because … there’s the issue of what it takes to produce meat substitutes.

A study by Cranfield University, commissioned by the environmental group World Wildlife Fund, reported that many meat substitutes consumed in Britain are produced from soy, chickpeas and lentils that are grown overseas and imported. A switch to these substitutes would result in more foreign land being cultivated, and raise the risk of forests being destroyed to create farmland. It also found meat substitutes tended to be highly processed and involved energy-intensive production methods.

One of the study’s authors, Donal Murphy-Bokern, said: ‘For some people, tofu and other meat substitutes symbolise environmental friendliness, but they are not necessarily the badge of merit people claim’.

While the UK imports all its soybeans from cleared Amazon forest, in 2011 at least, Australia grew about 14 per cent of its own soybeans, under fairly inefficient, water-sucking conditions. Ridoutt says consumers are demanding more transparent information about the water footprint and carbon footprints of their food. ‘In the States people are using their iPhones to download this kind of information, or reading it off bar codes.’

But he warns that everyone needs to understand they are dealing with systems that are more complicated than current apps or bar codes can handle.

‘The first point is there is no simple quick-fix solution, such as “Stop eating meat”, because it is a complex system – there are consequences and knock-on effects.’ He cites the example of the push to ‘a more industrial meat-production system, based on chickens and pigs’.

Traditionally, a lot of these animals were raised on waste. Now, to make the productivity very high, very nutritious diets are being fed to them, so the land base that is supporting those forms of meat production is very much in conflict with the land base we might be using to produce cereals we might directly consume. You push in one direction, often it pushes out somewhere else.

In the meantime, something unexplained is happening to methane levels. Until 1999, as ruminant numbers rose, so did methane concentrations in the atmosphere. Then methane concentrations plateaued. No one is quite sure why. Bell suggests it could be due to drought and human activities, such as drainage, shrinking natural wetlands. Or perhaps the number of ruminants hasn’t risen so much.

It certainly raised questions in some quarters about the importance of ruminant livestock in global methane accounting, and in the value of attempting to reduce it. Bell says that in the past two or three years the atmospheric methane level has begun to rise again, but it will be a couple of years before climate scientists can call this a real trend.

So what is the environmentally conscious consumer to do? Australians have a unique alternative to farmed meats: kangaroo. Eckard says kangaroos and wallabies have a microbial digestive system, similar to ruminants, except the main byproduct is succinate. While they do produce some methane, it is significantly less per kilogram than the volumes produced by ruminants.

There are only a few studies on macropod emissions. The most recent, on red-necked wallabies in the Copenhagen Zoo, found they produced between 25 and 33 per cent of the methane of a ruminant, per unit of food ingested.

That’s just one hop in the bucket, so to speak, but overall, Eckard questions whether the emphasis on reducing greenhouse gases should be placed on agriculture. ‘If we are going to have greenhouse gas emissions from something, is food production more legitimate than your transport preference?’ This is the real nub of the question.

Fossil fuels consist of carbon, sequestered using the energy of the sun hundreds of millions of years ago. The scale of our consumption of this ancient carbon and sunlight is mind-boggling. Just four litres of petrol uses what was 90 tonnes of ancient life. In the space of one year, the world uses over 400 years of stored ancient energy and carbon.

As Helen King says, industrial use of fossil fuel is a oneway street. ‘Only the natural environment can take up carbon. Industrial emissions put carbon into the atmosphere, but can’t take it out again.’

There are so many conundrums for the consumer who wants to be environmentally conscious. If you walk or cycle to the butcher shop, take home some locally grown steak and cook it, to rare, over natural gas, is your carbon footprint smaller than if you’d driven to the supermarket, bought a soy-based product that was grown and processed overseas, then had to throw out leftovers because the kids wouldn’t eat it?

One thing is clear: saving the planet is not as simple as giving up red meat.

Greenhouse gas

Animals

Beyond the shock machine

Gina Perry

You may have heard of Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments – perhaps you have read about them in a textbook at school or at university, as I did. Even if you haven’t, you’ve likely come across them without knowing it – in the episode of The Simpsons, for example, where a therapist hooks the family up to a shock machine, and they zap one another as Springfield’s electricity grid falters and the streetlights flicker. Perhaps you read in the news about an infamous 2010 French mock game show where contestants believed they were torturing strangers for prize money, or you might have heard the experiments mentioned in a documentary about torture or the Holocaust.

Milgram’s obedience research might have started life in a lab 50 years ago, but it quickly leapt from academic to popular culture, appearing in books, plays, films, songs, art, and on reality television.

Despite its fame there has always been a missing piece to the story of Stanley Milgram’s research – the voices of the people who took part.

In 1961, Milgram, an assistant psychology professor at Yale, recruited ordinary people through an advertisement in the local newspaper calling for volunteers for an experiment about memory and learning. When they arrived at the lab each volunteer was met by a stern experimenter in a lab coat. He introduced them to a second volunteer, who had ostensibly just arrived. The experimenter explained that one volunteer would be the teacher and one the learner, and they drew lots for the roles.

The experimenter took the learner into a small room, strapped him into a chair, and fitted electrodes to his wrists while the teacher looked on. The experimenter explained that the experiment aimed to test the effect of punishment on learning. The teacher’s job was to read out a list of word pairs to the learner and then test his recall, administering an electric shock each time the learner gave a wrong answer. The learner mentioned that he’d been treated for a heart condition, and asked if he should be worried about receiving the shocks. The experimenter answered that they might be painful, but they weren’t dangerous.

The teacher was taken into a larger room and seated at a table, in front of an imposing machine. It had 30 switches, labeled from 15 to 450 volts, and from ‘slight shock’ to ‘very strong shock,’ then ‘danger: severe shock,’ and eventually simply ‘XXX. If the learner gave a wrong answer on the memory test, the experimenter explained, the teacher should punish him with an electric shock, increasing the voltage with each incorrect response. Things began well, the learner got the first two answers right. But then he started making mistakes, earning 15, 30, and then 45 volts for successive incorrect answers. At 75 volts, the learner grunted in pain; at 120 volts he complained loudly; at 150 he begged to be released, at 285 he screamed in agony and soon after, fell silent.

Though confronted by the sounds of the learner’s pain, and despite their own agitation and stress, 65% of Milgram’s volunteers followed the instructions of the lab-coated authority figure and administered what they believed to be dangerous and perhaps even fatal electric shocks to people just like themselves.

In fact, as the volunteers would learn at the end of the experiment, the electric shock machine was a prop, and both the experimenter and the learner were actors; the screams were scripted; and the subject of the experiment was not memory at all, but how far people will go in obeying orders from an authority figure.

The story of Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments always felt unfinished to me. I wanted to know more. I was left wondering what happened to the volunteers afterwards – how did they reconcile what they had done in the lab with the people they had believed themselves to be? What did they say to their wives and children when they returned home, and what did they think about their behaviour weeks, months, and years later? I set off to find out.

I was nervous about meeting Bill Menold. We had exchanged emails and talked on the phone; he had even helped me to book a room at the Holiday Inn in Palm City, Florida, for my visit. On the phone he had sounded warm, helpful, but I couldn’t think of anything other than the fact that he had continued to shock a man he thought might be dead.

I met Bill in the lobby of my hotel on the morning of a sweltering day in August 2007. He was a tall, bearlike man, with muscular legs like a tennis player’s emerging from baggy beige shorts. Sandy hair, a reddish complexion. A big, ready laugh. He looked so different from what I had imagined that for a moment I felt unsure of what to say.

I had come to Florida to find out what had driven people to continue to the maximum voltage on Milgram’s shock machine. But how could I phrase the question? How could I ask how it felt to torture someone, without showing how much it horrified me?

We introduced ourselves. The lobby was noisy, and we went to my room to talk. Bill told me that he hated Florida and hated George Bush even more, which put him on the outs with most people he knew. He had spent most of his working life further up the East Coast or on the West Coast and would have moved away from Florida if he hadn’t met Barbara, his third wife, who has strong ties to the state.

We soon got to talking about the experiments. Back in 1961, Bill, a newly married 25-year-old, commuted the eight miles each day from his home in Milford to his job at a New Haven credit union, which was just a short walk from the Yale campus. Although he had been a university student at the University of Connecticut before military service interrupted his studies, he had never set foot inside Yale. ‘I was intimidated – this was being done at Yale University, and having grown up in that area, Yale was like God.’ Curiosity drove him to answer the ad for volunteers in a memory and learning test. ‘I thought it would be fun to try it. I thought, well, let me find out how smart I am.’

Still, Bill was nervous when he arrived at Yale’s Linsly-Chittenden Hall, a rather forbidding gray building. At 6.45 pm, he was right on time. He saw a sign on a post outside stating that the memory and learning experiment was downstairs, in the basement. ‘One of the Yale students had written “don’t forget” on it in pencil. I thought it was funny.’ Still smiling at the joke as he walked down to the basement, Bill had no idea of the threshold he was about to cross or that he would emerge 45 minutes later, shaken, distressed, his world tipped on its axis.

Inside, Bill was met by the experimenter John Williams – ‘very straightforward and professional, just what you’d expect from Yale’ – and soon after a second volunteer arrived, introduced as Mr Wallace. He was Jim McDonough, the actor that Milgram had chosen to play the role of the learner. ‘He seemed like a nice guy, genial, friendly. He was probably twenty years older than me.’

Williams explained what was involved in the experiment and exuded an air of confidence. But when he started connecting electrodes to McDonough’s arms, Bill began to feel apprehensive. ‘I was kind of, holy mackerel, what is going on here?’

McDonough, Bill remembers, seemed a little apprehensive too, mentioning that he’d been at the VA hospital some time back with a heart problem. But Williams reassured him that this was nothing to worry about. ‘He said something like, “We do this sort of thing all the time, nothing to be upset about”. Just another day at the office, you know.’

For naive volunteers such as Bill, the whole experience must have suddenly felt a bit like stepping onto a fast-moving escalator. When he heard about the shocks, his first thought had been of one of those joy buzzers advertised on the backs of comic books, along with Whoopee cushions and X-Ray Specs – you hid the buzzer in the palm of your hand and used it to play a prank on your friends, giving them a mild tingle that felt more like a tickle than a shock. But then he saw the machine.

I was taken a little bit aback by how complex it was. It was a large white panel with many switches … at least a dozen from left to right … and you could see there was a degree of severity as you went up the line. I just said to myself that these people know what they’re doing and I’m just going to go along with it and see what happens here.

The test began. Bill read the list of word pairs into a microphone so that McDonough could memorise them.

To Bill’s relief, McDonough got the first few right. When he got one wrong, Bill gave him 15 volts and did not hear any reaction. Bill kept going, and it wasn’t until the fifth shock, 75 volts, that he heard anything. ‘I think the first sound that I heard – and I can’t tell you how far in it was – but it was like “oooh”, like he felt something. It wasn’t a scream, I don’t think; it seemed to me that it was an indication of discomfort.’ Bill began to feel uncomfortable, but Williams urged him on. McDonough gave an even louder cry the next time. Williams seemed unperturbed and again urged Bill to continue. He began to dread McDonough’s answers. The test didn’t seem that difficult, and Bill knew that if he were the learner he would be sure to get more right. ‘I tried everything that I thought I could get away with, accenting the right word … like dog, cat, chair, rabbit, and like, “I’m giving you the hello there, I’m giving you a hint”, and time after time he’d still get them wrong.’

The test continued. Wrong; 90 volts. Then McDonough got one, then two, correct, and Bill felt himself relax. But the next one was wrong; 105 volts. A noise that sounded like ‘uugh’. And the next; 120. ‘When he yelled out … that’s when I started to feel really uncomfortable … and I thought, oh God … What the hell am I doing here? What is this all about?’

McDonough’s sounds of discomfort grew louder with each shock. Then he mentioned his heart problem.

Bill: White: cloud, horse, rock, house?

[McDonough buzzes wrong answer]

Bill: Incorrect. One hundred and fifty volts. [gives shock]

McDonough: Let me out of here! I told you about my heart problem; let me out of here!

Bill hesitated, turned to Williams. He told me, ‘I remember distinctly saying, “You know what, I’ll switch with him. I’m smarter than this guy and you can ask me these questions”’. But the experimenter was adamant that they couldn’t change places once the experiment had started.

By now they were confronting the 11th switch, 165 volts.

I was under a lot of stress; I was really starting to sweat. I wasn’t in control of the situation and I also suspected that I was being set up. I mean, Yale doesn’t go round torturing people … but I really wasn’t sure, so the question in my mind was, am I really hurting this guy or am I the guinea pig here? Is this a setup, are they testing me to see if I’ll do this stuff? I didn’t have any answers to this conflict that was going on. It was unbelievably stressful.

One hundred and eighty volts. One hundred and ninety-five volts. Sweating and trembling, Bill continued.

It sounds really strange, but it never occurred to me just to say, ‘You know what, I’m walkin’ out of here’, which I could have done. At this point I was just soaking wet. I was just so disturbed by all this because this had gone out of my realm of reality and I was in a bizarre environment and I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was sweating bullets and I was starting to laugh almost like a maniac, hysterically. I’d kind of lost it.

Then McDonough, after receiving a shock of 330 volts, went silent. Bill thought, either he’s unconscious, he’s dead, or this thing is a complete sham.

When McDonough didn’t answer, Bill told Williams that he wasn’t going any further.

I said, ‘I’m not taking responsibility for this,’ and that’s when he said, ‘Don’t worry about it, Yale University is taking full responsibility’. I was under such enormous stress – I mean, I just did not know what to do – and when I said he’s not answering anymore and the guy said, ‘Well, just continue with the experiment,’ I thought, I’m just going to go along with this thing. I don’t know what’s going on but let’s just get it over with.

Bill stopped talking at that point and looked down at his hands. I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. A door slammed in the hallway outside, and laughter and voices tripped down the corridor before fading. Bill took a sip of water. If I was reluctant to hear this, I thought, how must Bill feel, having to tell it? I tried to imagine him as he would have been that summer: a young man, muscled, tan, and fresh-faced. Curious and eager, unprepared for such cruelty.

He leaned forward, his hands joined loosely between his knees. He told me that he had continued to shock the now silent McDonough until he reached the final switch, 450 volts, although he couldn’t remember much about it.

When it was all over, Williams told Bill that he would release the learner and Bill prepared for the worst, taking comfort from the fact that he was fitter and younger than the other guy. ‘I remember thinking, I’m gonna have to calm him down if he gets upset. If he was gonna take a swing at me, I thought, I’m just gonna restrain him … I was scared to death.’

Yet what happened next was surreal.

‘He came out and said, ‘Hello, how are you?’ He was very friendly, a nice guy who just, you know, relieved any concerns I had about any hard feelings or animosity. We shook hands. They wanted for me to see that he was okay, physically and emotionally. The debriefing, if you wanna call it that, didn’t last two minutes. We talked for a few minutes and then he and I left together and we walked out of the building and we got out onto the street and he went one way and I went the other.

I was in this crazy situation … I was just gonna walk out of there … nobody was gonna shoot me or put me in a prison cell. I still didn’t know what had happened. I was a basket case on the way home.

Bill went straight to his neighbor, an electrician, and told him what had happened. His neighbor tried to reassure him that the shocks couldn’t have been real, or McDonough wouldn’t have walked out smiling afterwards.

But I was also really concerned afterwards about what I had done, you know, ‘Gee whiz, look what I did’. It didn’t make me feel very good. You know, the cruelty involved. The question was always geez, what can they make you do here? Or what did you do? They didn’t make you. No one held a gun to my head.

Yet in hearing Bill’s story, it seemed obvious to me that it had been more than a simple case of following orders. No one had held a gun to his head, but he’d been instructed, argued with, pressured, and coerced into continuing. Milgram’s published accounts of his experiment described his role as the objective scientist who set up an experiment to observe natural behavior unfold. The conventional wisdom among social psychologists was that ‘the researcher is merely creating conditions for what would happen anyway, but the researcher is not creating what happens. The researcher’s responsibility is to record what happens, and the subject’s responses are the responsibility of the subject’. Until I met Bill Menold, I had believed pretty much the same thing. But hearing his story raised all sorts of questions. I decided to return to the archives to see if I could find some answers.

* * * * *

The more I read, the more I understood how complicated the story I had assumed I had known actually was. It became clear to me just how enormous the pressure on Bill and others was. Milgram’s career depended on their obedience; all his prepara-tions were aimed at making them obey. In choosing ‘the boldest and most significant research possible’, Milgram was aiming for bold and significant results.

In order to create the ‘strongest obedience situation’, he was already wrestling with how he could overcome people’s reservations and reluctance to inflict harm on someone else.

From October 1960 until August 1961, Milgram developed, refined, and rehearsed his experimental scenario. It seems that Milgram’s theatrical flair overtook his scientific objectivity in his choice of actors. In a kind of mirror image of the results he was looking for, Milgram cast as his experimenter a man who would command obedience, and in the role of the ‘victim’ a man who looked sure to obey. He seemed unaware of how his vision was influencing his experimental design.

Milgram trained the actors himself. He wanted to make sure that they and the script were as convincing as possible. He noted, ‘It took a tremendous amount of rehearsal. Two full weeks with constant screaming on my part, constant.’

As I made my way through Milgram’s notebook, with its detailed instructions and scripts, I could see the setup that he had created was carefully crafted to make it difficult for people to disobey. I could see, laid out, the unfolding of a slow process of trial and error as he refined, tightened, and scripted a scenario that would deliver the results he wanted. Milgram would argue that his experiment merely revealed what was natural and universal, that ‘[t]he objects with which psychological science deals are all present in nature fully formed, all that the prince-investigator has to do is to find them and awaken them with the magic kiss of his research’. But it was clear to me that the papers in the archives told a different story: he knew before his first subject arrived on 7 August 1961, what sort of results he wanted to achieve, and he had used pilot studies and pretests to hone the design to achieve just that.

* * * * *

The next time Bill Menold and I met, Bush was out, Obama was in, and Bill was thrilled that we had ‘finally got rid of those lowlifes’. We sat in Bill’s dining room and Barbara moved around in the kitchen, making tea. Watson, their dog, pushed his nose against my hand and I scratched behind one large, floppy ear. Bill told me that a couple of years before he met Barbara he had been interviewed by the BBC, who were making a documentary about torture. Before he could propose to her, he had made her watch it. I asked if it was because he wanted Barbara to know his darker side. Bill laughed. ‘I don’t know why I did it,’ He leaned toward me and touched his heart. ‘But there’s a little evil in there, you know what I mean?’

After the experiment ended, Bill tried not to think about it. He put it out of his mind for years. Then in the early 1980s, he dated a psychology professor who was teaching her class about Milgram’s experiments. When he told her that he’d been a participant, she ‘went nuts’ and immediately wanted him to talk to her class. ‘And I never gave it a second thought; I said “Sure”.’ Bill laughed sheepishly at his own naïvety. ‘So, I’ll never forget this, I’m fortysomething and these are eighteen-, nineteen-year-old kids, and I showed up – well, you would have thought Adolf Hitler walked in the room. I never really thought about it that way, you know?’

This image – of Bill suddenly seeing himself as others saw him – would stay with me all the way back to New Haven and, later, Australia, probably because I had been guilty of the same thing, of making assumptions before I had even met him. The first time I had visited, I admitted to myself now, I hadn’t expected to like him. I had expected someone bad, a kind of monster. Instead, I had found myself drawn to him, and I could see why. He did not shy away from talking about the experiment; he had a kind of unflinching internal gaze when it came to his behavior in Milgram’s lab. He was gutsy.

As I was leaving I asked Bill if he was glad that he had taken part in the experiment. He paused, then said, ‘I don’t know. Yeah, I think so. I guess so. Not that I’m terribly proud of it … but I’d rather know than not know’.

Bill’s experience that night in 1961 has forced him to think about things others haven’t had to – a term that one critic of the experiment called ‘inflicted insight’. Milgram’s subjects learned unwelcome things about themselves as a result of their involvement in the obedience experiments, and they’re different from the rest of us because of that. Bill had told me, ‘Most people are card-carrying cowards. If they had been involved in something like that, they just wouldn’t want others to know. Most people want to be considered “nice”.’

But according to academic Don Mixon, Milgram didn’t measure immoral behavior in his lab. On the contrary, he argued that what Milgram measured was misplaced trust.

When I met Don in Australia, he wore a red wool beret perched on the side of his head, a flash of colour against the white of his hair. He looked exotic, intellectual, in bare feet on a freezing midwinter day. A tall and rather frail man, he folded his long frame into a chair that looked out to the afternoon sky over the Blue Mountains, outside Sydney. He reminded me of a proud eagle in his aerie, a house perched high on the aptly named Cliff Drive, with vertiginous views down sheer rockfaces.

When Don enrolled in a PhD program in Nevada in the late 1960s, there was no question that he would do his doctorate on Milgram’s obedience experiments. ‘It was the only social psychological research that interested and excited me. I liked it because it was political. It seemed to show that ordinary Americans behaved in ways worse than those in Nazi Germany. They seemed to behave in a terribly immoral fashion.’

Don wanted to repeat Milgram’s research but quickly realised that, ethically, he didn’t have the stomach to deceive subjects in the way Milgram did or to watch the stress that they would go through. He thought of using role-playing rather than deception. In his version of the research, Don set the scene for his actors – a term he preferred to ‘subjects’ – by telling them to imagine that they were teachers in a learning experiment, in the room next door was the learner, and in front of them was the shock machine. (He used a mockup of the machine.) Don followed the original script closely, instructing subjects to increase the voltage level with each wrong answer, describing the learner’s cries of pain, and urging subjects to continue if they hesitated.

Don found that his subjects became engrossed in the experiment once it began – so engrossed, in fact, that they became agitated and distressed, caught between the commands of the experimenter and the cries of pain from the learner. Even though they knew that the experiment itself was a simulation, their emotional reactions were real. Dismayed by their reactions, Don had to call the experiment off. He shook his head and said slowly, ‘I wasn’t finding out anything that was worth the distress.’

Don found the same results as Milgram but came to completely different conclusions. He argued that it wasn’t immorality that drove Milgram’s subjects to flip the switches but trust in the experimenter, who, despite the cries from the learner, calmly told them to continue and gave the impression that there was nothing to worry about. People were agitated because the experimenter’s behavior was so ambiguous and confusing in this context. According to Don, Milgram simply measured the faith that people put in experts.

He found just the opposite of what he thought he found; nothing about subjects’ behavior is evil. In fact, people go to great lengths, will suffer great distress, to be good. People got caught up in trying to be good and trusting the expert. Both are usually thought of as virtues, not as evils.

The only evil in the obedience research, Don came to believe, was ‘the unconscious evil of experimenters’.

Milgram assumed that increased self-knowledge was a good thing. In an unpublished note about the ethics issues of the experiments, he wrote, ‘I do not think I exaggerate when I say that for most subjects the experiment was a positive and enriching experience. It provided them with an occasion for self-insight and gave them a first-hand, personalized knowledge of some social forces that move human conduct’.

But I began to wonder how it could be a uniformly positive experience when what people learned about themselves was shameful, painful, or confronting.

Milgram may have regarded such self-insight as valuable, but just how subjects were able to integrate such unwelcome and disturbing insights about themselves is not explained.

The night after I met Bill and Barbara, I listened to the interview I had recorded with Bill earlier that day. There was a long pause on the tape that I hadn’t noticed at the time, after I had asked him what he’d said to those students of his girlfriend’s back in the 1980s. After the initial shock of being treated like a Nazi, Bill told the silent, judging students: ‘It’s very easy to sit back and say, “I’d never do this or that” or “Nobody could ever get me to do anything like that.” Well, guess what? Yes, they can.’

I was starting to believe that Bill was right.

Obedience

Psychology

Australia’s endangered future

Tim Flannery

In late August 2009 a tiny, solitary bat fluttered about in the rainforest near Australia’s infamous Christmas Island detention camp. We don’t know precisely what happened to it. Perhaps it landed on a leaf at dawn after a night feeding on moths and mosquitoes, and was torn to pieces by invasive fire ants; perhaps it succumbed to a mounting toxic burden placed on its tiny body by insecticide spraying. Or maybe it was simply worn out with age and ceaseless activity, and died quietly in its tree-hollow. But there is one important thing we do know: it was the very last Christmas Island pipistrelle (Pipistrellus murrayi) on earth. With its passing, an entire species winked out of existence.

Two decades earlier the island’s population of pipistrelles had been healthy. A few scientists had watched the species’ decline with concern, until, after the million or more years that it had played a part in keeping the ecological balance of the island, they could see that without action its demise was imminent. They had done their best to warn the federal government about the looming catastrophe, but they might as well have been talking to a brick wall. The bureaucrats and politicians prevaricated for three years, until it was too late. While Australians argued about the fate of the asylum seekers that shared the pipistrelle’s home, nothing effective was done to help the bats. Indeed, except for those few watching scientists, neither Australia’s press nor public seemed to give a thought to the passing of the species, nor what it might mean for Christmas Island, or our relationship with our country.

The pipistrelle’s extinction was almost unbearably painful for me. In an attempt to avert it I had met with Peter Garrett, then the environment minister, and warned him of the impending loss. I had also brought offers of assistance and expertise from the Australian Mammal Society to his attention. The society was confident that the species could be saved – at a cost of perhaps only a few hundred thousand dollars. But Garrett was convinced by the orthodoxy that ecosystems rather than species should be the focus of the national conservation effort, and I got the message loud and clear that nothing would be done. Saving the bat wasn’t an impossible mission: it’s just that the government and the people of Australia – one of the richest countries on earth – decided it wasn’t worth doing.

What really shook me about the episode was that it was the first extinction of a mammal to occur in Australia for 60 years – and therefore the first to occur in my lifetime. My original professional expertise lies in mammalogy and palaeontology, and before the pipistrelle’s demise I had believed the worst of Australia’s extinction crisis was behind us – that somehow my generation was wiser and more caring than earlier ones, and would not tolerate any more losses of Australia’s unique mammals. It’s now clear that those 60 years were just a lull in the storm, and that the pipistelle’s demise marked the beginning of a new extinction wave.

Australia’s first extinction wave started to gather pace almost as soon as the First Fleeters stepped ashore, and by the 1940s it had carried away 10 per cent of the continent’s mammal species. No other class of organisms has suffered so grievously, and as a result mammals have become something of a yardstick by which we measure our long-term environmental impact. In 1791 a convict wrote about the white-footed rabbit rat, saying that it was a pest in the colony’s food stores. The soft-furred, grey and white kitten-sized creature was arguably the most beautiful of Australia’s seventy-odd native rodent species, yet it was destined to be one of the earliest victims of European settlement. Two hundred years ago it could be found in woodlands from near Brisbane to Adelaide, but the last record of it dates to the 1850s. Because foxes and rabbits had not begun to spread by this time, it is thought that a major factor contributing to its extinction was the end of Aboriginal fire management.

The thylacine and the toolache wallaby were the largest creatures to succumb in the first extinction wave. Both had small populations and restricted distributions (Tasmania and the southeast of South Australia respectively), and are unique in being the only species that were hunted to extinction by Europeans. The thylacine was Australia’s largest marsupial carnivore and, being wolf-like in appearance, it was persecuted by sheep farmers, the bounty on its head outlasting the creature itself. The beautiful toolache (pronounced ‘toolaitch’) wallaby had the misfortune of being the fleetest member of the kangaroo family, and so was hunted to extinction for sport. These extinctions were, however, atypical: indeed, one of the most astonishing aspects of the first extinction wave was that its victims included what had been the most abundant and seemingly secure mammals in Australia.

Among the victims that once abounded were a dozen kittento hare-sized marsupials, mostly wallabies, rat-kangaroos and bandicoots, as well as nine species of native rodent. All of these species vanished between the 1840s and the 1930s, and all inhabited southern and central Australia. Strangely, many remained common until the moment of their vanishing. For example, according to the pioneering zoologist Frederic Wood-Jones, in the early years of the 20th century in Adelaide the rabbit-sized marsupials known locally as ‘tungoos’ (brush-tailed bettongs and their relatives) were sold at nine pence per dozen for greyhounds to chase and kill. Yet just a few years later they were only a memory, with not so much as a single skin remaining in the state’s museum.

The causes of these extraordinary extinctions are thought to have been varied. The cessation of Aboriginal burning doubtless had its effect, and until the 1930s bounties were paid by many state governments for the scalps of now-extinct creatures. But the depredations of foxes (which were spreading quickly by the early 20th century) and feral cats, and the wholesale destruction of native vegetation by livestock and rabbits, must also have been important causes. While the causes are disputed, the effect of the first extinction wave is clear: it gutted the biodiversity of the drier parts of the continent, and very few native mammals larger than a rat and smaller than a kangaroo can be found on Australia’s inland plains today. It’s the absence of such species – the so-called critical-weight-range mammals (which weigh between 500 grams and 5 kilograms), which were once among the most abundant of creatures – that has led me to characterise the national parks of Australia’s southern inland as ‘marsupial ghost towns’.

The gathering second extinction wave is now mopping up the few surviving medium-sized mammals in Australia’s south and inland. It’s not difficult to predict which will be the next to become extinct, for, like the pipistrelle, their decline has been charted for years. There are 15 frogs, 16 reptiles, 44 birds, 35 mammals and 531 plants on Australia’s endangered species list, and among those closest to the brink are three mammals: the central rock rat, the bridled nailtail wallaby and the numbat. All hang by a thread, and with the single vexed exception of the saltwater crocodile, next to nothing effective is being done to halt their slide into oblivion.

The most dismaying aspect of the second extinction wave is that it is emptying vast swathes of the continent that were untouched by the first wave. Australia’s Top End and Kimberley were, until recently, a paradise for medium-sized mammals, among them a close relative of the white-footed rabbit rat. The last two decades have seen this fauna all but exterminated in the Top End, even in our most valued and best resourced national parks.

Perhaps it is excusable that Australians are unaware of the extinctions currently occurring in distant places like Arnhem Land and other regions of our far north. But astonishingly, we also seem blind to the perils facing species much closer to home – for example, the sand flathead of Port Phillip Bay. A fish familiar to every Melburnian who has ever dangled a line, its population has declined by 97 per cent over the past decade. That means that just three fish survive for every 100 that were present in 2002. While the reasons for the decline are unclear and may be multiple, overfishing is clearly a factor. Yet many recreational fishermen still angrily refuse to countenance the development of a system of marine reserves extensive enough to give the species a chance. I’ve seen tinnies lined up like taxis at an airport cab rank along the edge of the pathetically small Ricketts Point Marine Sanctuary (just 115 hectares), hoping to hook one of the fish it shelters. Because fishing is prohibited in the sanctuary, the place is a haven for amazing creatures, including the Port Jackson sharks that have been eliminated elsewhere in the bay. It is a reminder of what an abundant marine environment Port Phillip Bay once was, and could be again under good management.

Why should the extinction of Australian organisms concern us? I’ve had people tell me: ‘I don’t give a stuff about cute furry animals. What have they ever done for me?’ The answer, I think, is almost precisely the same as to the question of why human rights are important, even when they concern people we’ll never meet. First and foremost, it is a matter of values. The demise of a bat may not weigh greatly in the balance of human wellbeing, but it speaks volumes about the human soul. Do we wish to be despoilers and executioners of the natural world? Or do we want our children to have the opportunity to enjoy a world as bountiful and diverse as the one our parents bequeathed to us?

Politics

The future

Alive as a dodo

Nicky Phillips

For more than 3 billion years since single-cell organisms first appeared on the planet, life has evolved in one direction only. When a plant or animal becomes extinct, there is no coming back. Or so we thought.

In early 2013 Australian scientists revealed they had reversed natural selection. Not only had the aptly named Lazarus Project group revived the genome of an extinct species, the gastric-brooding frog, they had also grown embryos containing the bizarre amphibian’s DNA – the crucial first step in their attempt to resurrect a dead species.

The head of the team, University of New South Wales palaeontologist Mike Archer, announced the milestone at the TEDx-DeExtinction event in Washington in front of international peers pursuing the same goal with other long-dead creatures – the passenger pigeon, woolly mammoth and Spanish ibex.

What stands out about the Australian team, however, is the pace of their progress. While other groups are years, more likely decades, from achieving their goal, the Lazarus team could have a gastric-brooding frog hopping back to life in the next few years.

The precise motivation for reviving a species, a process some call de-extinction, differs among its revivers, but a central theme exists. Aside from the ‘wow factor’, Archer says, scientists hope their attempt to turn science fiction into reality will help conserve the world’s ever-diminishing biodiversity.

Cloning technology could not only bring back extinct species, especially those vanquished by humans, it could also play a vital role in conserving critically threatened plants and animals living today.

‘If it is clear that we exterminated these species, then I think we’ve got a moral imperative to try to do something if we can,’ Archer says.

As with all endeavours that challenge the natural order of things, de-extinction has critics. Some conservationists fear the ability to revive species from the dead will distract from efforts to rescue the vast number of living yet endangered creatures.

Others wonder what kind of environment awaits revived species. If the reason they went extinct in the first place still exists, would we be resurrecting plants and animals only to watch them endure the same fate?

Mike Tyler’s first encounter with the gastric-brooding frog came in 1974 when he received a call from a pair of Queensland schoolboys who had collected a frog with a bizarre method of brooding its young.

Female gastric-brooders would swallow their fertilised eggs and transform their stomach into a uterus where the young would metamorphose from tadpoles into baby frogs.

Close to bursting, the mother would then regurgitate her offspring one by one.

‘My feeling was that we were looking at something remarkable,’ Tyler, a herpetologist at the University of Adelaide, says.

Tales of the bizarre creature quickly sparked the interest of the medical fraternity, who looked to the species for insights on how to treat stomach disorders.

But, just as this interest peaked, the frog vanished from the wild in 1979, mostly likely a victim of habitat destruction and the human-spread chytrid fungus that continues to decimate global frog populations today.

When the last two adult frogs Tyler raised in his laboratory died in 1983, the species officially became extinct.

Even though it would be years before scientists would attempt to clone a mammal, let alone an extinct species, Tyler had the foresight to preserve a gastric-brooding frog in his deep freezer.

‘I thought it was a very special creature. At least I’d have material other people could use in the future,’ he says.

Forty years later, Tyler told Archer of his frozen specimen. Lazarus’ resurrection could begin.

Over the past five years, the team’s Monash University genetics specialists, Andrew French and Jitong Guo, have painstakingly inserted single cells containing the DNA of the frozen frog into hundreds of donor eggs from a distant relative, the great barred frog, whose DNA had been deactivated by UV light.

In the beginning, the single cell frog eggs ‘just sat there’, Archer says. ‘But then, all of a sudden, one of the cells divided, and then it divided again, and again. There were a lot of highfives around the laboratory at that point,’ he says.

The cloning technique, known as somatic nuclear cell transfer, was used in 2003 by Spanish scientists to resurrect a recently extinct native goat – it survived for 10 days – and was similar to the process used to clone Dolly the sheep.

In the lab, the Lazarus cells continued to divide into three-day-old embryos. But then they died.

Genetic tests revealed the embryos, known as blastulae, contained the DNA of the extinct frog so the team is confident their extinct genome is functioning.

‘We know not all embryos survive,’ French says.

The quality of the donor egg, injecting the extinct DNA, even the jelly the cells are cultured in can influence their survival, he says. ‘The planets just have to align on the day.’

While the team are yet to bring back the bizarre amphibian, their success so far can prevent other frogs from becoming extinct.

‘The project is much bigger than the gastric-brooding frog,’ says Simon Clulow, the team’s youngest member and expert frog wrangler from the University of Newcastle.

With each species that is extinguished from the planet, a little piece of diversity is lost forever.

But the story need not end there, Clulow says.

If the team succeeds in cloning a gastric-brooding frog using a close relative as a scaffold, it demonstrates cross-cloning one species with another is possible.

One of Clulow’s greatest passions is advocating for a national gene bank, which stores the tissue of endangered species that could be used to prop up dwindling wild populations or, should the creature go the way of the dodo, allow it to be revived later.

‘This project provides irrefutable evidence that gene banking is valid,’ he says.

But for University of Adelaide ecologist Corey Bradshaw, attempts to resurrect extinct animals detract from efforts to conserve critically endangered species because they fail to solve the drivers of extinction.

Species revived from a few specimens would contain little genetic diversity, making them vulnerable to future threats and at risk of becoming extinct all over again.

‘It’s not solving the real problem,’ Bradshaw says. ‘If we encourage this sort of behaviour it’s a massive financial distraction.’

Clulow disagrees, saying the Lazarus Project was inexpensive compared with other scientific endeavours and the money was donated from entrepreneur and philanthropists such as Dick Smith and geneticist John Shine.

‘We haven’t touched a cent of public money,’ he says.

With thousands of species around the world under threat – mainly from habitat destruction and disease – Archer wants to assist attempts to save them, not sidetrack them.

‘I’m exploring every conceivable initiative that’s going to optimise conservation, not only for species that are struggling to survive today but potentially even some of the ones that are lost,’ he says.

What makes a species an ideal candidate for revival depends on who you ask. Most proponents agree the decision needs to consider whether it is technically feasible. Is there functional and intact DNA? Is there a close relative to donate an egg? Also whether it would be practical to re-introduce the animal into the wild.

Given that DNA decays over time, 65-million-years-dead dinosaurs will not make a return appearance. Jurassic Park remains science fiction.

Neither would it be sensible to resurrect species whose habitat has disappeared or changed dramatically, says Ryan Phelan, a founder of the Revive & Restore project, part of the non-profit The Long Now Foundation.

The organisation has chosen the passenger pigeon, which once flocked across North America in their hundreds of millions, as its keystone revival species.

The project’s leader, Californian geneticist Ben Novak, says many factors make the passenger pigeon a perfect contender. Its genome is shorter and more manageable than mammals and it performed a vital ‘biological dance’ within forest ecosystems before hunters blew them from the sky.

‘These dense flocks would come into roost, depleting resources, fertilising the ground, letting sunlight in and allow many other animals to flourish,’ Novak says.

But unlike the Lazarus team, who recovered a complete sequence of intact DNA from frozen frog tissue, Novak has only fragments of the passenger pigeon’s genetic blueprint. Other groups, including a South Korean team attempting to revive the woolly mammoth, face similar problems.

Even with a full passenger pigeon genome Novak’s team would still face the bigger hurdle of how to insert its DNA into a donor embryo and implant that into a surrogate mother, given chicks develop inside hard-shelled eggs.

But the team, which includes world-leading Harvard geneticist, George Church, sees these issues as workable challenges.

Their plan, broadly speaking, is to sequence many fragments of passenger pigeon DNA from museum specimens and compare them with the genome of the bird’s closest living relative, the band-tailed pigeon, to reveal the extinct bird’s most important traits.

This information is then fed into a specialised sequencing technology, developed by Church, which can manufacture parts of the passenger pigeon’s genome that can be slotted into the band-tailed pigeon’s DNA. If they succeed, the edited sequence could be inserted into the genome of stem cells of another close relative, the common rock pigeon.

These stems cells could then be coaxed to form germ cells – sperm or egg cells – which could then be inserted into the developing embryo of its cousin, in the hope the cells migrate to the chick’s sex organs.

If this works, the chick would carry the doctored DNA of the passenger pigeon, and if bred with another such bird would create a chick with passenger pigeon traits. These features could be selected for in subsequent generations until the team produce a bird that is, to all intents and purposes, a passenger pigeon.

‘It’s my job to bring the passenger pigeon back to life, not as a science novelty or a zoo attraction but back into the skies above,’ Novak says.

But reintroducing extinct species into the wild is a concern for some conservationists, who say ecosystems transform, some to a greater extent than others, when species go extinct.

David Bowman, an ecology professor at the University of Tasmania, says bringing back an extinct species raises the same issues as introducing non-natives.

Bowman is not against the idea of introducing foreign species to perform critical roles within an ecosystem – last year he suggested Australia introduce large herbivores such as elephants to contain introduced grass species taking over the continent’s centre – but bringing back species from the dead is expensive, and will likely face opposition from the public.

He uses the community angst surrounding the introduction of the beleaguered Tasmanian devil, which remains in the land of the living but only just, onto Maria Island as an example.

‘People think the devil might endanger other animals because it’s not native to the island,’ Bowman says.

Archer, who previously led an attempt to revive the Tasmanian tiger, has heard all these criticisms before, but he won’t be deterred.

‘It’s the “You can’t do it” zone that attracts me,’ he says.

Grand plans

In the genes

Probably a sacrifice

Ian Gibbins

I cannot tell you the manner of my death.

After all these centuries in the bog, the peat,

the deep encompassing darkness,

the enveloping mists and moss,

I have no knowledge, it is beyond my ken.

After all these centuries, I wonder

how it is, how it was, what difference

one more breath might have made,

the songs I might have sung,

the poems and sermons I might have heard.

After all these centuries, the sun

is more intense than I remember:

I must close my eyes to the unaccustomed glare;

I must retreat from the flashes and incandescent

counter-lighting floods you aim in my direction.

After all these centuries, I cannot walk away

from this place of outcasts and disembodied sprites:

my sandals and ceremonial capes have been purloined;

my feet, swathed in pristine cotton, linger in the distance,

errant, beyond the power of my will.

The band around my neck no longer feels tight.

After all these centuries, its leather plaits,

its strangling knots no longer cut my flesh.

Protected by my cap and your soft-gloved hands,

this simply is how I have come to rest.

Exhumed

Hidden

Fire on the mountain: A walk on Mt Stromlo

Andrew Croome

In the burnt-out dome of the Yale-Columbia telescope, every footstep echoes. The effect is so loud that it feels deliberate, as if this building was once an acoustic chamber rather than an observatory. Missing its windows, roof and telescope, the Yale-Columbia is the first ruin visitors come by on Mount Stromlo. Rust bleeds from the machinery that once manoeuvred the dome and an electric motor rests on what was formerly the telescope’s mount, its innards gashed open.

The place feels like a monument, but to what? Outside, the sun is strong and the air surprisingly still. The observatory and its eclectic mix of white domes stretch across the length of the mountain top, a ridge of volcanic rock that runs on a north– south alignment. The long views are east, towards Canberra, and west, towards the Murrumbidgee River and the Brindabella ranges. On the far hills you can see corridors of younger, greener forest: the path of the fire that, almost ten years ago, devastated this place, claiming five telescopes, the director’s residence, the workshop and the lion’s share of the mountain’s living quarters and houses.

At that time, Mount Stromlo was blanketed in pines. The fire vanquished all but one small cluster, which sits at a bend on the road to the hilltop. These are Canary Island pines. Stromlo has always been a place of experiments, and these are one: planted early in the last century to determine the suitability of different species in a (decreasingly) Australian landscape. They survived because, unlike the rest of their cousins, their bark happens to resist fire.

To the north of the Yale-Columbia is the mountain’s high point. There sits another, older ruin – a cross-shaped concrete building with a circular chamber at its centre and four small abutting rooms. This is the Oddie telescope, the place where observing on Mount Stromlo began. That was in 1911, the year in which Ernest Rutherford devised his model of the atom, and five years before Einstein would publish his theory of relativity. The telescope was a nine-inch Grubb refractor, donated by James Oddie, a Ballarat businessman who died before it was installed. Three men came with it: Melbourne astronomers Pietro Baracchi and JM Baldwin, and a caretaker, Robert Magill.

The view they saw then looked over a capital as yet unmade and, depending on the cloud cover, straight up at the stars. Baracchi’s wife had recently died, and the dome must have felt a special type of isolation: a capsule on the point of an empty ridge, only the occasional farmhouse light in the darkness below.

Today, over the Oddie’s entrance, the filament hangs out of a burnt light socket. In one room is the wreck of a series of gears, in another a rusted switchboard. A third room has a tap and was presumably the kitchen, which doubled as Magill’s bedroom (Baracchi and Baldwin had their own). The floor is concrete. Before the protection of the pines the winter winds must have been bitterly cold. Much later an astronomer would fall onto the floor here, remaining unconscious and unfound until morning, detaching, of all things, his retina.

North of the Oddie a track leads into a small saddle and, after a minute or so, to an outcrop. The way is watched by kangaroos, and the ground is sparsely littered with pieces of iron. Astronomy is a practical science that remakes and recycles, and a hundred years of it on the mountain has left things scattered, cast off and discarded. It looks like junk, but it could also be called invention. Long before the fires, parts of the observatory’s history were swallowed up this way. A beautiful octagonal kite house, like something from an English garden, was dismantled, and the locations and fates of what were once full buildings, including a magnetic hut, are now mysteries. In the bush sits an old radio telescope, orders of magnitude smaller than the enormous radio arrays now dotted around the globe. It feels as if the chances of a thing’s survival here depend on how quickly it can become obsolete.

On the outcrop is a white picket fence enclosing a small patch of ground. The man who dreamt of this observatory, and who lobbied hard and long to get it, was its first director, Walter Geoffrey Duffield. This is his grave. When he died of influenza in 1929, his family and staff buried him here. Photographs of the graveside ceremony show mourners gathered on a much barer outcrop, under a solitary she-oak. That tree is now gone and at the grave grow the emblems of Australian science, bottlebrush. On Duffield’s stone is a final instruction to his observatory, the words of the poet-scientist Alfred Noyes: ‘Take thou the torch, carry it out of sight into the great new age I must not know, into the great new realm I must not tread’. Looking back at the mountain, where a Nobel prize for the discovery of the accelerating universe hangs in the observatory, you can only presume Duffield would believe they did.

This place is markedly different to what it was in Duffield’s time. The isolation that, even as late as the 1960s, was part of life on Mount Stromlo, has ended. It was a small community then, and ventures off the mountain were only as frequent as weekly shopping trips into Canberra or Queanbeyan. The artist Rosalie Gascoigne, a long-time resident with her astronomer husband Ben, once described the feeling of this isolation in terms of starvation, saying she grew hungry for human communication, that many on the mountain suffered from loneliness, and that the place – which relied on a type of pioneering subsistence living – was kept going only by the magic of the work.

A second change to life here remains, of course, the fire. It saw the loss of Mount Stromlo’s workshops, its telescopes and the original Commonwealth Solar Observatory building (since rebuilt) with its library (forever lost). Several projects went up in smoke with the workshop, including a pioneering tool for studying early galaxies known as NIFS (since reconstructed), as well as optical manufacturing equipment (never replaced). Among the telescopes lost was the enormous 74 inch and the Great Melbourne, both of which were in nightly use. Incredibly, the Melbourne was 135 years old: constructed in Dublin in 1868, it had just been roboticised, with the addition of new instruments allowing it to investigate dark matter.

Astronomer Ken Freeman, who first came to Stromlo in 1967, remembers the Saturday of the 2003 fire as ‘stinking hot’. By that day, the fire had been burning west of Canberra for more than a week. As a volunteer firefighter, Freeman had helped to extinguish a blaze that had started in a similar spot in 1973. Thirty years later he was on the mountain, watching a new fire that, fed by powerful winds, had now crossed the Murrumbidgee and was preparing to race up the hillside. There was no plan to actively defend the observatory against a serious bushfire. The idea of doing so was too dangerous. Instead, about half an hour before the fire arrived, those on the mountain retreated.

Freeman went to defend his own home in nearby Duffy, where he’d moved when the suburb first opened. There he was soon fighting a fire coming on multiple fronts. He stayed, trying to beat it, until Duffy’s water supply failed. After that, little could be done and he drove away. His home was destroyed alongside nearly five hundred others, including that of fellow astronomer Mike Bessell. Tragically that day, four people in Canberra lost their lives.

On Mount Stromlo, the fire changed things irretrievably. Hot enough to melt the domes, its wake left a brown and black landscape of burnt pines and twisted metal; a place of warp and collapse. Much of the observatory’s history was destroyed, as well as its capabilities. Two office buildings survived, so while staff were soon able to move back to the mountain (the ash in their offices included that of their curtains), there was no guarantee that the observatory would be rebuilt. On top of the physical damage was an emotional toll. Some speak of a grim and subdued atmosphere and a period of depression and stagnation. Others say it took three or four years for things to feel normal again.

Yet for all the destruction, many of the astronomers here will tell you that eventually the observatory will look gratefully at the fire and the hard decisions it forced. Rebuilding has allowed for a new focus, including the creation of an advanced instrumentation engineering centre – something that has put Stromlo at the heart of international projects such as the Giant Magellan telescope, an instrument that will use seven mirrors, each as big as the single mirrors in today’s largest telescopes. Researchers from around the world now come to explore everything from galactic archaeology to the nature of black holes, and there are plans to build a discovery centre and museum with help from the Smithsonian. Thus, while the fire destroyed much of the observatory and made stark ruins of its past, it’s also made for a brighter future – one that, beyond the heartache, has invigorated this place.

Lost

Looking skyward

Advisory panel

FRANK BOWDEN is Professor of Medicine at the Australian National University’s medical school and an infectious diseases physician at the Canberra Hospital. His research interests include the mathematical modelling of infectious diseases, the control of sexually transmitted infection and the development of novel treatments for head lice. His book Gone Viral: The germs that share our lives was shortlisted for the 2012 Queensland Literary Awards.

MERLIN CROSSLEY is Dean of Science at the University of New South Wales. A molecular biologist by training, he has studied or worked at the universities of Sydney, Melbourne, Harvard, and Oxford, where he held a Rhodes Scholarship. He is a Trustee of the Australian Museum and a board member of the Sydney Institute of Marine Science. He continues to be an active researcher, as well as an enthusiastic teacher, and supporter of science communication.

TANYA MONRO is an ARC Federation Fellow, Professor of Physics, and Director of the Institute for Photonics and Advanced Sensing (IPAS) at The University of Adelaide. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering. Awards recognising Tanya include the 2012 Pawsey Medal and South Australia’s Australian of the Year in 2011. Tanya has published over 500 papers and raised over $86 million for research. Her transdisciplinary research focuses on creating disruptive photonic sensing technologies.

Acknowledgments

‘The weather of who we are’ by Mark Tredinnick: broadcast on Ockham’s Razor, ABC Radio National (20 May 2012), an edited extract from Australia’s Wild Weather by Mark Tredinnick (National Library of Australia 2011) <abc.net.au/radionational/programs/ockhamsrazor>

‘It’s time to become gonads’ by Becky Crew: excerpted from Zombie Tits, Astronaut Fish and Other Weird Animals by Becky Crew (NewSouth 2012)

‘The last laughing death’ by Jo Chandler: published in The Global Mail, 13 November 2012 <www.theglobalmail.org>

‘The perils of evolution’ by Janine Burke: excerpted from Nest: The art of birds by Janine Burke (Allen & Unwin 2012)

‘Darwin’s modest discovery’ by Damon Young: published on The Drum, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (May 2012) <abc.net.au/unleashed/4017846.html>

‘Earthmasters: Playing God with the climate’ by Clive Hamilton: edited extract from Earthmasters: Playing God with the climate by Clive Hamilton (Allen & Unwin 2013)

‘Science is more than freaks and circuses’ by Paul Livingston: published on The Drum, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (June 2012) <abc.net.au/unleashed/4060226. html>

‘Animals on drugs’ by Rhianna Boyle: published in The Lifted Brow (Issue 14, October 2012)

‘Dreamtime cave’ by Elizabeth Finkel: published in COSMOS (Volume 44, p43–49)

‘Heart dissection’ by Ian Gibbins: published in Urban Biology by Ian Gibbins (Friendly Street Poets/Wakefield Press 2012)

‘Reaching one thousand’ by Rachel Robertson: edited extract from Reaching One Thousand: A story of love, motherhood and autism by Rachel Robertson (Black Inc. 2012)

‘Higgs boson’ by Michael Lucy: published in The Monthly (August 2012) <themonthly.com.au>

‘Here come the übernerds: Planets, Pluto and Prague’ by Fred Watson: edited extract from Star-Craving Mad: Tales from a travelling astronomer by Fred Watson (Allen & Unwin 2013)

‘Many-worlds quantum mechanics vs earth-based grease monkeys’ by gareth roi jones: public display on RiAus building, Adelaide, South Australia

‘The vagina dialogues’ by Cordelia Fine: published in The Monthly (November 2012)

‘Big Data can tell by your tweets if you’re a psychopath: That’s only the beginning …’ by Kirsten Drysdale: published in The Global Mail (August 2012) <theglobalmail.org>

‘With body in mind (after Vesalius)’ by Ian Gibbins: published in Urban Biology by Ian Gibbins (Friendly Street Poets/ Wakefield Press 2012)

‘How a donor is done’ by Kellee Slater: excerpted from How to do a Liver Transplant: Stories from my surgical life by Kellee Slater (NewSouth 2013)

‘Nest: The art of birds’ by Janine Burke: edited extract from Nest: The art of birds by Janine Burke (Allen & Unwin 2012)

‘My father’s body’ by Francesca Rendle-Short: this version published in Invisible Thread: 100 Years of Words (Halstead Press 2012), based on essay in Overland (print issue 197 Summer 2009)

‘Sentinel chickens’ by Peter Doherty: excerpted from Sentinel Chickens: What birds tell us about our health and the world by Peter Doherty (MUP 2012)

‘The science of shark fishing’ by Ian Gibbins: published in Urban Biology by Ian Gibbins (Friendly Street Poets/ Wakefield Press 2012)

‘On flatulence’ by Nicholas Haslam: excerpted from Psychology in the Bathroom by Nicholas Haslam (Palgrave Macmillan 2012)

‘Radioactive cigarettes: X-ray inhale’ by Karl Kruszelnicki: excerpted from 50 Shades of Grey Matter by Karl Kruszelnicki (Pan Macmillan 2012)

‘Martyrs to Gondwanaland: The cost of scientific exploration’ by Chris Turney: edited extract from 1912: The year the world discovered Antarctica by Chris Turney (Text Publishing 2012)

‘Mr Jevons and his paradox’ by Antony Funnell: excerpted from The Future and #relatednonsense (ABC Books/HarperCollins 2012)

‘Alimentary thinking’ by Emma Young: published in New Scientist (15 December 2012) © 2012 Reed Business Information, UK. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services

‘The carnivore’s (ongoing) dilemma’ by Åsa Wahlquist: published in The Global Mail (August 30 2012) <theglobalmail.org>

‘Beyond the Shock Machine’ by Gina Perry: edited extract from Behind the Shock Machine: The untold story of the notorious Milgram psychology experiments by Gina Perry (Scribe 2012)

‘Australia’s endangered future’ by Tim Flannery: edited extract from After the Future: Australia’s new extinction crisis by Tim Flannery (Quarterly Essay, Issue 48, 2012)

‘Alive as a dodo’ by Nicky Phillips: published in the Sydney Morning Herald (29 March 2013)

‘Probably a sacrifice’ by Ian Gibbins: published in Urban Biology (Friendly Street Poets/Wakefield Press 2012)

‘Fire on the mountain: A walk on Mt Stromlo’ by Andrew Croome: published in Meanjin (Vol 1, 2013)

THE BRAGG UNSW PRESS

PRIZE FOR SCIENCE WRITING

In 2012, NewSouth Publishing launched a new annual prize for the best short non-fiction piece on science written for a general audience. The Bragg UNSW Press Prize is named in honour of Australia’s first Nobel laureates, William Henry Bragg and his son William Lawrence Bragg. The Braggs won the 1915 Nobel Prize for physics for their work on the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays. Both scientists led enormously productive lives and left a lasting legacy. William Henry Bragg was a firm believer in making science popular among young people, and his Christmas lectures for students were described as models of clarity and intellectual excitement.

The Bragg UNSW Press Prize is supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.The winner receives a prize of $7000 and two runners up each receive a prize of $1500.

Jo Chandler won the first prize in 2012. Ashley Hay and Peter McAllister received the runners-up prizes.

The shortlisted entries for the 2013 prize are included in this anthology.

The Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing 2013 Shortlist

Jo Chandler The last laughing death

Becky Crew It’s time to become gonads

Elizabeth Finkel Dreamtime cave

Clive Hamilton Earthmasters:

Playing God with the climate

Gina Perry Beyond the shock machine

Chris Turney Martyrs to Gondwanaland:

The cost of scientific exploration

Fred Watson Here come the übernerds:

Planets, Pluto and Prague

Winners announced on 29 October 2013 at newsouthpublishing.com/scienceprize

* * * * *

Judges of the Bragg UNSW Press Prize 2013

Professor Frank Bowden

Professor Merlin Crossley

Professor Tanya Monro

Natasha Mitchell and Jane McCredie, editors of

The Best Australian Science Writing 2013