How Species Save Our Lives

Bothrops jacara (Photo by Daniel Loebmann)

Here’s the latest (and last) column in my Specimens series for The New York Times:

When adding up the benefits from three centuries of species discoveries, I’m tempted to start, and also stop, with Sir Hans Sloane.  A London physician and naturalist in the 18th century, he collected everything from insects to elephant tusks.  And like a lot of naturalists, he was ridiculed for it, notably by his friend Horace Walpole, who scoffed at Sloane’s fondness for “sharks with one ear, and spiders as big as geese!”   Sloane’s collections would in time give rise to the British Museum, the British Library, and the Natural History Museum, London.  Not a bad legacy for one lifetime.  But it pales beside the result of a collecting trip to Jamaica, on which Sloane also invented milk chocolate.

We still scoff at naturalists today.  We also tend to forget how much we benefit from their work.  Since this is the final column in this series about how the discovery of species has changed our lives, let me put it as plainly as possible:  Were it not for the work of naturalists, you and I would probably be dead.  Or if alive, we would be far likelier to be crippled, in pain, or otherwise incapacitated.

Large swaths of what we now regard as basic medical knowledge came originally from naturalists.  John Hunter, for instance, was a colorful London physician, a generation or two after Sloane, and his passion for animals made him a model for Dr. Dolittle.  (He may also have been the original Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for his nighttime work sneaking cadavers in by the back door.) While others were only dimly beginning to contemplate the connection between humans and other animals, he made detailed flesh-and-blood comparisons, discovering, among other things, how bones grow and what course the olfactory nerves travel.

John Hunter (from a portrait by Joshua Reynolds)

Hunter, now regarded as the father of modern surgery, came out of a Scottish tradition that treated the study of nature as essential for developing a doctor’s observational skills, and he drilled this attitude into his students.  Among them was Edward Jenner, a country doctor who spent 15 years studying cuckoos (perhaps one reason he later got labeled a quack).  But this research, combined “with Hunter’s insistence on finely honed observation and cogent presentation, helped prepare Jenner’s mind for his great work,” according to science historian Lloyd Allan Wells.  That work was the development of the world’s first vaccine, for smallpox.  Establishment physicians balked.  But Jenner’s bold idea would lead in time to vaccines against countless other deadly diseases, from yellow fever to polio.   He thus gets credit (with a faint nod to the cuckoo) for saving more lives than anyone in the history of medicine.

You may perhaps be thinking that chocolate milk, Dr. Dolittle, and cuckoos make a very curious case for the importance of species.  But our debt to the naturalists also takes more conventional form: Roughly half our medicines come directly from the natural world, or get manufactured synthetically based on discoveries from nature.  The list includes aspirin (originally from the willow tree), almost all our antibiotics (from fungi that evolved in nature, not a Petri dish), and many of our most effective cancer treatments.  I can remember a pale girl in second grade going off to die of lymphoma or leukemia; children with those diseases almost always died then.  Now they routinely live, because of drugs developed from the Madagascar rosy periwinkle, a flowering plant.  Many patients with lung, breast, uterine, and other cancers

BBC Wildlife on The Species Seekers: “Brilliant, 5 Stars”

A very nice review from the BBC Wildlife, by Rob Dunn:

The Luddite Revolution: Birth of a Brand

An early Luddite protester

This is a piece I wrote for the March issue of Smithsonian magazine:

In an essay in 1984—at the dawn of the personal computer era—the novelist Thomas Pynchon wondered if it was “O.K. to be a Luddite,” meaning someone who opposes technological progress. A better question today is whether it’s even possible. Technology is everywhere, and a recent headline at an Internet humor site perfectly captured how difficult it is to resist: “Luddite invents machine to destroy technology quicker.”

Like all good satire, the mock headline comes perilously close to the truth. Modern Luddites do indeed invent “machines”—in the form of computer viruses, cyberworms and other malware—to disrupt the technologies that trouble them. (Recent targets of suspected sabotage include the London Stock Exchange and a nuclear power plant in Iran.) Even off-the-grid extremists find technology irresistible. The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, attacked what he called the “industrial-technological system” with increasingly sophisticated mail bombs. Likewise, the cave-dwelling terrorist sometimes derided as “Osama bin Luddite” hijacked aviation technology to bring down skyscrapers.

For the rest of us, our uneasy protests against technology almost inevitably take technological form. We worry about whether violent computer games are warping our children, then decry them by tweet, text or Facebook post. We try to simplify our lives by shopping at the local farmers market—then haul our organic arugula home in a Prius. College students take out their earbuds to discuss how technology dominates their lives. But when a class ends, Loyola University of Chicago professor Steven E. Jones notes, their cellphones all come to life, screens glowing in front of their faces, “and they migrate across the lawns like giant schools of cyborg jellyfish.”

That’s when he turns on his phone, too.

The word “Luddite,” handed down from a British industrial protest that began 200 years ago this month, turns up in our daily language in ways that suggest we’re confused not just about technology, but also about who the original Luddites were and

The Best Rx: Facing Up to Mistakes

A study from Johns Hopkins reveals that the father of successful neurosurgery, Harvey Cushing, a driven, egotistical figure, was nonetheless also routinely frank about admitting his mistakes.  I profiled Cushing recently (see below) and was also struck that, apart from being meticulously careful in his work, he also relied on methodical record-keeping and self-criticism to improve his results.  In the new study, medical student Katherine Latimer and her co-authors

… were surprised by Cushing’s frank and copious documentation of his own shortcomings. His notes acknowledged mistakes that may have resulted in patients’ deaths, as well as those that didn’t seem to harm patients’ outcomes. They said the documentation took place in an era in which malpractice litigation was becoming a growing concern for doctors. Though malpractice penalties were substantially smaller in Cushing’s day, lawsuits presented a serious risk for physicians’ reputations, the authors noted.

The authors also emphasized that Cushing practiced in a time of enormous surgical innovation. For example, patient mortality from surgical treatment of brain tumors fell from 50 percent to 13 percent during his career. While some of this jump ahead was due to improving technology, the authors propose that part of the reason was open documentation of errors, which helped Cushing and other surgeons develop fixes to avoid them.

The Brain Cutter

Here’s my profile of Harvey Cushing, published recently in the Yale Alumni Magazine:

Deep beneath the stacks of the Yale medical school library, a kind of grotto venerates the human brain. It’s a memorial to an era when surgery on “the closed box” of the human skull was far more mysterious, even macabre, than it seems today. It’s also a celebration of one man who made it less so, essentially inventing modern brain surgery by his odd blend of audacity and painstaking care with scalpel, drill, saw, and clamp.

You get a hint of what lies beneath on the stairway down, where a large photograph from 1930 shows a 24-year-old surgical candidate in hospital pajama bottoms, facing the camera and displaying symptoms of the form of gigantism called acromegaly. Surgeon Harvey Cushing, Class of 1891, stands at his side. He is an older and much smaller man, facing the patient, one knee canted forward, one hand in the jacket pocket of a carefully tailored glen-check suit. With his other hand, he holds the giant delicately by two fingers, as if to lead him to his fate. (The patient, a farm laborer, had been told by another doctor that he would “die if anyone operated on his pituitary.” In fact,

Why Scientists Should Not Be Spies

In a commentary on my “Species Seekers and Spies” column, Lukas Rieppel, a PhD candidate at Harvard, adds some interesting examples to the list of scientists who were also spies.  But I was most impressed with this paragraph, in which Franz Boas gets at the fundamental problem of scientists using their research as a cover:

During World War One, the Columbia University Anthropologist Franz Boas serendipitously learned that Sylvanus Morley and a number of other archeologists were gathering intelligence for the United States Government.  After the war, he wrote a strongly worded letter  denouncing their actions to The Nation that was published in December, 1919.  In it, he argued that espionage work and scientific research were fundamentally at odds, because “the very essence of [a scientist’s] life is in the service of truth.”  As such, anyone “who uses science as a cover for political spying … prostitutes science in an unpardonable way and forfeits the right to be classed as a scientist.”  As a result of their unconscionable actions, he concluded, “every nation will look with distrust upon the visiting foreign investigator who wants to do honest work,” thus making it all but impossible to conduct serious natural history research.  Rather than having it’s intended effect, though, the publication of this letter led to an official censure of Boas by the American Anthropological Association and led to his resignation from the National Research Council.

Species Seekers and Spies

Death's head sphinx moth

Here’s the latest column in my Specimens series for The New York Times:

There’s a scene early in the 2002 film “Die Another Day,” where James Bond poses as an ornithologist in Havana, with binoculars in hand and a book, “Birds of the West Indies,” tucked under one arm.  “Oh, I’m just here for the birds,” he ventures, when the fetching heroine, Jinx Johnson, played by Halle Berry, makes her notably un-feathered entrance.

It was an in-joke, of course.  That field guide had been written by the real-life James Bond, an American ornithologist who was neither dashing nor a womanizer, and certainly not a spy.  Bond’s name just happened to have the right bland and thoroughly British ring to it.  So novelist Ian Fleming, a weekend birder in Jamaica, latched onto it when he first concocted his thriller spy series in the 1950s.

The link between naturalists and spies goes well beyond Fleming, of course, and it might seem as if this ought to be flattering to the naturalists.  While the James Bonds and Jinx Johnsons of spy fiction are trading arch sex talk in the glamour spots of the world, real naturalists tend to be sweating in tropical sinkholes, or wearing out their eyes studying the genitalia of junebugs.  (That’s not a joke, by the way:  Genitalia evolve faster than other traits and often serve as the key to species identification, especially in insects.  The Phalloblaster, a device worthy of Bond, was invented to make the job easier by inflating the parts in question.)  And yet, as I was researching my book The Species Seekers, I found that naturalists don’t actually like the connection at all.  The suspicion that they may be spies

Clean Coal: Happy to Get My Hands Dirty on This One

Writing journalism often feels like shouting down a deep well.  If you’re lucky, now and then you hear an echo.  But look what just came back up and spilling out the faucet.   This video was based on an opinion piece I wrote in 2008 about the myth of clean coal.  Sadly, the coal industry’s spending seems to have paid off, in the utter failure of Congress to pass climate change legislation.

Here’s the original essay, which appeared on Yale Environment 360:

You have to hand it to the folks at R&R Partners. They’re the clever advertising agency that made its name luring legions of suckers to Las Vegas with an ad campaign built on the slogan “What happens here, stays here.” But R&R has now topped itself with its current ad campaign pairing two of the least compatible words in the English language: “Clean Coal.”

“Clean” is not a word that normally leaps to mind for a commodity some spoilsports associate with unsafe mines, mountaintop removal, acid rain, black lung, lung cancer, asthma, mercury contamination, and, of course, global warming. And yet the phrase “clean coal” now routinely turns up in political discourse, almost as if it were a reality.

The ads created by R&R tout coal as “an American resource.” In one Vegas-inflected version, Kool and the Gang sing “Ya-HOO!” as an electric wire gets plugged into a lump of coal and the narrator intones: “It’s the fuel that powers our way of life.” (“Celebrate good times, come on!”) A second ad predicts a future in which coal will generate power “with even lower emissions, including the capture and storage of CO₂. It’s a big challenge, but we’ve made a commitment, a commitment to clean.”

Well, they’ve made a commitment to advertising, anyway. The campaign has been paid for by Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, which bills itself as the voice of “over 150,000 community leaders from all across the country.” Among those leaders, according to ABEC’s website, are an environmental consultant, an interior designer, and a “complimentary healer.” Other, arguably louder, voices in the group include

The Species Seekers Quiz: Getting Batty

Who was Obed Bat?

1.  A student of Linnaeus who became one of his “apostles” in the Far East.

2.  Head of the scientific team aboard the British Navy corvette Challenger on the first great round-the-world oceanographic survey.

3.  A naturalist who was a comic figure in American fiction.

4.  A British ornithologist who was ritually beheaded as a spy.

And the answer is:

The Species Seekers Quiz: Edgar Allan Poe’s Only Bestseller?

What was Edgar Allan Poe’s only bestseller during his lifetime?

Authors can look gloomy when books don't sell.

1.  The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, a sea adventure and his only novel.

2.  The Conchologist’s First Book, a textbook.

3.  The Balloon Hoax, an account of an astounding trans-Atlantic balloon trip.

4.  Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, a collection of his stories, in which “terror has been the thesis.”

And the answer is