The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories (6 page)

Smith, 41, has no kids, no car, no retirement plan, and no desire for a PhD. Her official title: instructor. Her life is like one of her inventions, portable and off-the-grid. “I'm doing exactly what I want to be doing. Why would I spend six years to get a PhD to be in the position I'm in now but with a title after my name? MIT loves that I'm doing this work. The support is there. So I don't worry.” It was a good thing that she won the B.F. Goodrich award in 1999, she says, because back then she was stretching a three-month graduate-student stipend to last for a year, and didn't know how she'd pay her rent. The $7,500 came just in time.

Likewise, the inventors who most inspire her will never strike it rich. “There are geniuses in Africa, but they're not getting the press,” she says. She gushes about Mohammed Bah Abba, a Nigerian teacher who came up with the pot-within-a-pot system. With nothing more than a big terra-cotta bowl, a little pot, some sand and water, Abba created a refrigerator—the rig uses evaporation rather than electricity to keep vegetables at 40 degrees.
Innovations that target the poorest of the poor are most effective when they have a certain no-duh quality about them—as soon as you hear an explanation of the way the thingamajig works, you can't believe that it took human beings so long to figure it out.

Smith, of course, aims to design such hidden-in-plain-sight tools and deliver them to the needy. But she also nurses a much grander ambition: to redefine invention itself. To this end, she has co-founded the IDEAS award at MIT; students work with a nonprofit group to solve a problem for the disenfranchised. Last year's winners, for instance, included a team that put together a kit for detecting land mines, so that farmers in places like Zimbabwe no longer have to improvise with hoes and rakes when they tap the ground to see whether it might explode.

Success in the IDEAS competition, as well as in the kind of design that Smith pursues, requires humility, because your masterpiece may end up looking like a bunch of rocks or a pile of sand. And, since you'll be required to do extensive fieldwork to understand the problem you're solving, it also demands the skills of a crack Peace Corps volunteer, someone who remains cheerful even when the truck breaks down, the food runs out, and you're the one who has to sleep next to the goat.

Unlike in other branches of engineering, women have the advantage here. “I know how to be self-deprecating. The traditional male engineer is not taught that way,” Smith says. That engineer, were he trying to figure out an agricultural problem in Botswana, might consult with men—which wouldn't get him very far. “In Africa, the women are the farmers. Women invented domesticated crops. If you're talking to the right people, they should be a group of elderly women with their hair up in bandannas.”

Unlikely as it may sound, Smith's brand of invention is moving into the mainstream. And that's because her clients—the disenfranchised in Africa, Haiti, Brazil, India—are increasingly able to secure loans.

In the late 1970s, Muhammad Yunus, an economics professor in India, tried an experiment: He loaned pocket change to poor villagers who lived near his university so that they could start small businesses. They did. And they paid him back. Grameen Bank grew out of that experiment, loaning to the rural poor in Bangladesh, and—contrary to conventional wisdom—making money. In the 1990s, microfinance caught fire. Thousands of
institutions began extending loans to impoverished people in developing nations so that they could buy or lease the materials they needed to start small businesses.

Recently, commercial banks have been following suit—tailoring their services to poor people who live in remote villages, according to Elizabeth Littlefield, CEO of the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), a donor consortium on microfinance housed in the World Bank. Littlefield believes that the integration of microfinance into mainstream banking could bring billions of new consumers into the global marketplace over the next few decades. There have already been some surprising strides made. In India, for example, banks have set up solar-powered kiosks in out-of-the-way villages, giving clients access to financial services in places where there is not even electricity. But what will they invest in? The rural poor will need machines designed for their environment. And that will create demand for a new kind of technology.

In a barbeque pit near the MIT student center, pale blue smoke streams out of a trashcan and twists in the direction of the tennis courts. It smells of caramel. Shawn Frayne, a gangly guy with a shock
of black hair and a skateboard tossed nearby, sticks a lighter down into the trashcan. He's trying to get a real fire going in the shredded sugarcane husks inside. He holds up one of his finished products—a piece of cooking charcoal that looks like a jet-black hamburger patty. It's made out of the parts of the sugarcane that aren't edible—that is, trash. These humble wads could help to solve a number of problems in Haiti: Poor people would be able to make their own charcoal rather than having to pay for the pre-fab variety; forests would no longer have to be cut down to make wood charcoal; and local entrepreneurs could use the recipe to set up small businesses.

Frayne graduated from MIT last year. He didn't like school much—except for Smith's design class, to which he is so devoted that he volunteered to put finishing touches on several inventions the class started last year. “I learned in an economics class that if someone has a good idea and they can implement it in a third-world country, they can dramatically change the economy of the country. I was surprised by how much technology can affect the well-being of a people. Amy showed me that someone's actually trying to make that kind of technology.”

Smith herself stands by, trying to keep the wind from whipping her blond hair into her face. “We're working on a portfolio of
designs like this charcoal that we can show to the Peace Corps or to NGOs, groups that are trying to help people start up small businesses,” she says. In an era when rural people in Haiti increasingly have access to small loans to experiment with new machines and techniques, Smith hopes to supply the blueprints.

Frayne ducks down, pointing to the base of the trashcan. “If we were in Haiti, we'd use dirt to seal up the bottom of the can,” he said. “But I couldn't find any dirt around here, so I used duct tape.”

“In Cambridge, duct tape is the equivalent of dirt,” Smith says, meaningfully. She loves duct tape and all it stands for. Last year, she taught a workshop on duct tape. She knows how to make a hammock and a kaleidoscope and full suit of armor out of duct tape. It's a very useful material, no doubt, but if she were on her two-dollar-a-day budget, she'd probably have to buy it on lay-away.

 

 

 

UPDATE:

The day after this story appeared in the
The New York Times
Magazine, Kofi Annan called Amy Smith and invited her to meet with him at the United Nations. A few weeks later, I heard from an administrator at the MacArthur Foundation. As a result of my story, the MacArthur people had decided to consider Amy for a “genius” award. She won. These days, she presides over the International Development Initiative at MIT.

Call him Alex—just Alex. This celebrity goes by one name. Personal assistants swirl around his perch, offering him water, a massage, a toy. He eats only vegan food, of course, breakfasting on broccoli cooked for him by his personal chef. Japanese film crews want to shoot him. Visiting scholars want to watch him at work. Alex the parrot lives in a room at the Brandeis University Foster Biomedical Research Lab, where a team of grad students, a.k.a. “parrot slaves,” cater to his every whim.

It's not his looks that got him here: an African Grey, Alex is covered in feathers the color of a sweatsuit. Rather, Alex has made it as far as a parrot can go in academia by proving himself to be exceptionally smart, or at least better educated than just about any bird on the planet. Dr. Irene Pepperberg, an adjunct professor of psychology at Brandeis, has been training him for 27 years, using a unique method that she calls the model/rival technique. Alex watches interactions between his trainer and another parrot or a human being, learns to answer questions correctly, and competes to show he knows the right answer—it's something like being a contestant on a parrot version of
Jeopardy.
And the technique works, dazzlingly. In the 1980s, Alex made headlines for being able to identify objects by shape, name and color with an 80 percent or better accuracy rate. Since then,
Pepperberg has managed to teach Alex the rudiments of spelling, addition, subtraction. Next year, she will publish a paper in which she argues that Alex can understand a simple form of the concept of “zero.” Because of his sophisticated ability to communicate, Alex gives us a new window into the mind of a bird—in fact, Pepperberg is now working with another researcher to compare Alex's performance to that of human children. His walnut-sized brain, which evolved along a different evolutionary path than our own, may turn out to function in remarkably similar ways.

I first came across Alex on the Web, when a friend called me over to her laptop and said, “You've got to see this.” Together we watched a postage-stamp-sized video of the parrot. He cocked his head at a green key and a brown key. “Tell me what's different?” someone asked from off-screen. “Color,” the parrot said in his little-girl voice.

After I saw his videotaped performance, Alex continued to perch in my brain and I couldn't seem to get him out. He was disturbing in the best sense of the word, one of those oddities that convinces you to expand your notions about what might be possible in this world. But I must admit that I was also hooked by Alex's star power; in that video, he spoke in an impossibly sweet whisper
that reminded me of the loyal (and fictional) flipper in
Day of the Dolphin,
who cooed “Fa loves pa” to its trainer and then swam off to its death; my eyes had welled up with tears even as I cursed myself for being manipulated by a stupid dolphin movie. What is it about talking animals that gets us right here?

In real life, Alex turns out to be nothing like the vulnerable naïf I had imagined. I find him squatted on a perch with his beak tucked into his neck, glaring at me with a half-hooded eye. Bits of feather, like aimless snowflakes, float in the air. Two other parrots—Griffin and Arthur, a.k.a. “Wart”—are mellowing out on their own perches. Dr. Pepperberg, a woman with a dramatic sweep of dark hair, sits in a desk chair nearby. She begins fussing with Griffin's perch, lowering it on its adjustable stand. “Alex has to sit as high or higher than the other birds,” she explains. Of course—top billing.

“Want nut,” Alex snaps.

Pepperberg decides this means he's ready to work. She arranges six blue, four red and two yellow blocks randomly on a tray. “What color two?” she asks, proffering the tray under his beak.

Alex bobs his head this way and that, gazing at the blocks suspiciously. Pepperberg repeats the question a couple of times. Alex seems to space out. Finally, he whispers, “Yellow.”

“Good boy,” she says.

Alex has performed feats such as this one correctly over and over again—allowing Pepperberg to argue that he can recognize quantities from one to six. But he has also thrown some hissy fits in between his star turns, and it was during one of these that he made his most recent breakthrough. When Alex refused to cooperate one day, Pepperberg decided to try something new. “OK, Alex, tell me, what color 5?” she asked, holding before him a tray with a set of two, three and six colored objects on it—but no set of five.

“None,” Alex shot back.

Alex knew the word from other contexts. However, he had never been taught to find a word for an empty space, a zero. Pepperberg believes he improvised the answer. In a series of trials, Alex continued to use “none” over and over again, correctly, to mean zero.

Today, Pepperberg considers putting Alex through his “none” paces for me, but decides he's too cranky.

Alex, in fact, is winding himself up into a four-star, Hollywood huff.

“Want cork,” he squawks. Pepperberg offers him a piece of the best damned cork a parrot could ask for—$75-a-bag sterilized primo that won't infect sensitive beaks. Alex chomps down on it,
enjoying its chewing-gum-like texture. But in a matter of seconds, the cork goes flying across the room.

“Want cork!” he bleats. Pepperberg sighs and fetches it for him.

“Want cork! Want cork!”

Throughout the visit, Alex continues to spit out the cork and Pepperberg tirelessly retrieves it. “Hold it with your foot, Alex,” she says at one point, but otherwise exhibits the profound patience of a woman who has been training parrots for decades.

In her forthcoming academic article—to be published in the
Journal of Comparative Psychology
in May—one paragraph reveals just how frustrating it must be to study parrot intelligence year in and year out. “Alex completely balked during testing for approximately two weeks,” she reports. “He would, for example, stare at the ceiling, reply with a color or object label not on the tray, fixate on that label, and repeat it endlessly, interspersed with requests to return to his cage.” Whether or not Alex understands nothingness is still up for question. But he clearly knows how to act like a star.

 

 

 

UPDATE:

Alex the parrot died in 2007, on the same day as the actress Jane Wyman, who had so deliciously played the villainess on
Falcon Crest.
I don't know why the two deaths immediately seemed to connect in my mind, but they did.