The Best Australian Science Writing 2013 (37 page)

‘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.