The Human Age (19 page)
Also at work during those years, the American behaviorist B. F. Skinner began developing a pigeon-guided missile. In what was known as Project Pigeon, he trained the birds to steer by pecking at a target. The U.S. Navy revived it after the war as Project Orcon (for “organic control”), and only abandoned the scheme in 1953 because electronically guided missiles proved more reliable. It wasn’t declassified for another six years, just in case.
It’s well known that pigeons, dogs, horses, camels, and elephants
have been drafted for war since ancient days. Apparently pigs served in battle, too. Pliny the Elder, who lived in ancient Rome, tells of herds of grunting hogs being loosed to scare the elephants of invaders. Lately, though, we’ve extended the idea of animal soldiers into the realm of lunacy.
The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—whose “psyops” (psychological operations) division most people first learned of in the book and film
The Men Who Stare at Goats
—trained CIA operatives to practice remote killing on animals. But that was only one of the CIA’s bizarre plans for animal combatants. In Operation Acoustic Kitty, the CIA implanted a bugging device inside a cat, with an antenna hidden in the cat’s tail. This five-year-long, $5 million Cold War project was canceled when the cat, released near a Russian compound, was hit by a car and died while trying to cross a street. Cats were also considered as guidance systems for bombs dropped on ships (the tenuous logic being that since cats hate water they’d steer the bombs they were strapped to toward the deck).
Animals have died in the millions helping us fight our wars, and as our soldiers have become increasingly more technological in recent decades, so have our armed service animals. In 2010, the Chinese newspaper
People’s Daily
accused the Taliban of training monkeys to shoot Kalashnikovs, light machine guns, and fire mortars at NATO forces. Though the Taliban denied the rumor, it leaves disturbing images in the mind, and conjures up the scene in
The Wizard of Oz
when a battalion of flying monkeys attacks from the skies. Even watching the movie as a kid, I was scared not by the monkeys but by the witch evil enough to train animals as goons to wage our wars.
The CIA has experimented with remote-controlled cyber-insects, inserting microchips into the pupa stage of butterflies, moths, and dragonflies because, as a DARPA proposal explained, “through each metamorphic stage, the insect body goes through a renewal process that can heal wounds and reposition internal organs around foreign objects.” The result: cyborg dragonflies and robomoths, and search-and-rescue
cyborg cockroaches. Other plans have included remote-controlled sharks (with electrodes in their brains) designed to sniff out bombs and explosives, bees trained to replace bomb-sniffing dogs, and hamsters stationed at security checkpoints who are trained to press a lever when they smell high levels of adrenaline.
For more than fifty years, the U.S. Navy has trained pods of dolphins to use their elite echolocation skills and low-light vision to spot and clear underwater mines. They’ve served the navy in both Vietnam and the Persian Gulf, by filming, delivering equipment, and capturing enemy divers (by clamping on a leg cuff roped to a buoy). Mine-hunting dolphins learned to identify underwater explosives without detonating them and report back to their handlers, giving yes or no responses to questions. Sometimes they marked the whereabouts of mines by delicately attaching buoy lines to them; other times they disabled the mines by attaching explosives and dashing away. When Iran threatened to mine the Strait of Hormuz in 2012, and block the vital shipping route, NPR asked retired admiral Tim Keating, who commanded the U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, how he’d handle the situation.
“We’ve got dolphins,” he said matter-of-factly.
Prized as the dolphins may be by their handlers, the navy regards them as another form of personnel, without rank but classified in true military fashion. For instance, “Mk 4 Mod 0” is a dolphin trained to detect a mine near the seabed and then attach an explosive charge to it; “Mk 5 Mod 1” is a sea lion used to retrieve mines during practice maneuvers.
However, in the summer of 2012 the navy made a momentous announcement. It plans to retire its squads of minesweeping dolphins and other sea mammals by 2017, and replace some with robotic drones called “knife fish” (a fish known for emitting an electric field). Unlike sea mammals, knife fish won’t be able to neutralize a mine, only locate, film, and transmit data about it. Other pods of robotic underwater drones will be guided by fiber-optic cables. I’d like to believe that compassionate motives inspired this decision, but
I’m sure thrift also played a role. As a military system, robots are cheaper to field than dolphins, who are heavy to transport to battle theaters in water-filled tanks, and require feeding and medical care.
There’s been a lot of public complaint about sending animals to war and research labs, especially big-brained mammals like dolphins, and maybe it hasn’t fallen on entirely muffled ears. In 2013, after years of concerted worldwide lobbying, the U.S. government finally retired nearly all research chimpanzees and listed the species as endangered. This means that the chimpanzees who have weathered countless illnesses on our behalf are finally being released to animal sanctuaries, and no new chimps will have to face such horrors.
Our dominion over animals, ill-treated for eons in our research and wars, is rapidly being replaced by technology, thank heavens. We have pack mule robots designed to supplant horses and trucks in difficult terrain, robot fleas that leap through open windows and spy, and ambidextrous gymnastic robots that can fill in for human soldiers in toxic areas. But no one has figured out yet how to engineer a dog’s superrefined nose. Dogs can smell a man’s scent in a room he has left hours before, and then track the few molecules that seep through the soles of his shoes and land on the ground when he walks, over uneven terrain, even on a stormy night. Thus far a robot can’t match that finesse. So for the time being we still have dog-soldiers, some trained to kill.
If wars must be fought at all, drones at least are heartless. Alas, their targets aren’t.
F
or thousands of years, we’ve left a trail of our preferred traits in the planet’s life forms, in food crops and animals, to be sure, but also in our favorite pets. No other animal is as defined by the long history of its codependency with humans as the dog, so much like us in its capacity for affection and savagery. All dogs trace their ancestry to one canine—the wolf—but you’d never know it looking at Chihuahuas, Bedlington terriers, Belgian griffons, cocker spaniels, Great Danes, boxers, Basenjis, Afghan hounds, or corgis. Over the centuries, we’ve bred dogs for all sorts of jobs and sports: long dachshunds to squirm down badger holes, balloon-chested greyhounds and whippets to race, Entlebucher Mountain Dogs to herd sheep. Lapdogs abound in a fantasia of shapes and colors. Or one can choose a companion dog by intelligence, disposition, or possibly endearing neuroses (tail-chasing, for example). Our feats of selective breeding produce trendy, aesthetically pleasing dogs, including many so inbred that they suffer from about 350 known hereditary diseases, including beagles with weak spinal discs, Dobermans given to narcolepsy, basset hounds with blood-clotting woes, flat-faced Pekingese bedeviled by breathing problems, and Scottish terriers
eighteen times more likely to develop bladder cancer. We design dogs so small that they tend to dislocate their kneecaps, and dogs so large they have trouble with their hips.
But, however misbegotten the result of retooling our fellow creatures by controlled breeding, it is an experiment we’ve been carrying on for so long that we no longer even recognize the results as “unnatural.” Now that we have the technology to reach a steely hand into the machinery of cells and remodel the genes, even human ones, our powers are more disturbing, raising all kinds of ethical and legal challenges.
In 2012, John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka shared the Nobel Prize for the breakthrough discovery of how to persuade adult skin cells to regress into jack-of-all-trades (“pluripotent”) stem cells capable of morphing into any type of cell in the body—heart, brain, liver, pancreas, egg. It’s as if Gurdon and Yamanaka had found a way to reset the body’s clock to early development, enabling it to mint wild-card cells that haven’t chosen their career yet—without using the fetal stem cells that cause so much controversy.
Space may be only one of the final frontiers. The other is surely the universe of human imagination and creative prowess in genetics. “We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” Stewart Brand began his 1968 classic,
The Whole Earth Catalog
, which helped to inspire the back-to-the-land movement. His 2009 book,
Whole Earth Discipline
, begins more worriedly: “We are as gods and
have
to get good at it.”
Among the rarest of the rare, only several northern white rhinoceroses still exist in all the world. But, thanks to Gurdon and Yamanaka, geneticists can take DNA from the skin of a recently dead animal—say, a northern white rhino from forty years ago—turn it into “induced pluripotent stem cells” (IPS), add a dose of certain human genes, and conjure up white rhino sperm. Then, using in vitro, they hope to fertilize eggs from a living female white rhino, producing offspring to add genetic diversity and rescue the species. Thus far, they’ve successfully created embryos.
With vase-shaped dark faces haloed in soft silver fur, as if even their foreheads were bearded or their auras were permanently visible, silver-maned drill monkeys are the most endangered African primates, swinging through tiny swatches of jungle in West Africa. The few survivors are riddled with diabetes. As a joint project, the San Diego Zoo and the scientists at the Scripps Research Institute are hoping to find a cure for the disease and also enrich the drills’ gene pool: they recently created IPS from the silver-maned drills and coaxed the stem cells to become brain cells.
The same brew of magicians at Scripps is hatching IPS therapies for humans, with the first long-awaited human clinical trials for Parkinson’s disease starting soon. That’s a far cry from dinosaurs grazing in Central Park. Not that dinosaurs are on the table; they’ve been extinct so long that their DNA is no longer viable. But lots of other animals, from passenger pigeons to great auks, are contenders. Curiosity is a natural torrent in humans, one it’s hard as a mudslide to resist. Hosts of people meet avidly at conferences and in research centers to discuss who, how, when, and why to de-extinct. Russia’s Pleistocene Park, where look-alikes of ancient cattle and horses already roam, awaits a shaggy herd of woolly mammoths, even if the grassy steppes they once grazed no longer exist. For some, de-extinction is a moral quest dusted in eco-guilt; for others, it’s a burning scientific challenge. A candid few openly admit that, for them, it’s just too cool an idea to pass up.
At Harvard, the molecular geneticist George Church has pioneered ways to ramble through orchards of DNA, cherry-picking individual genes to produce desired traits or remove harrowing ones. I’ve always found Tasmanian devils endearing, maybe because they’re raucously bad-tempered and quarrelsome to a laughable extreme, and stand up like hairy sumo wrestlers when they fight. Their wild population has been ravaged by contagious facial tumors, and about 80 percent of them have died. Church could pinpoint the gene that’s causing the tumors and erase it from the bloodline. He could recreate extinct passenger pigeons by cobbling together bits of
their DNA, if he wished, writing a formula using DNA’s four bases: A, T, G, and C. Despite the futuristic science and lab settings, the vocabulary he and his cohorts use is mechanical and pure Industrial Age. To build a cell, a bioengineer consults a registry of parts, chooses the bio-bricks he wants, and goes through an assembly process: loading bricks of DNA onto a chassis (the
E. coli
bacterium, for example) in a foundry.
It’s astonishing that we’ve come far enough as a species to think,
We’ve driven all these animals extinct . . . how can we restore them?
We have a sense of deep nostalgia about the animals that surround us, and the possibility of de-extincting them. We used to think we had simple dominion over the animals. Today, as we watch plant and animal gene pools dwindling, and pluripotent stem-cell technology zooming, we know that our role is far more complex and that ingenious mistakes require even more ingenious responses.
AS THE EAST
Midlands train glides from London toward Nottingham, we pass a show-stopping array of giant old horse chestnut trees with domed crowns and wide shady skirts. Covered in cone-shaped blossoms that sway like incense, they scent the air with a heavenly smell that’s fierce as lilac but more animal. Not barnyard horsey exactly, but leather-sweet and slightly sweaty. Soon the suburbs give way to brilliant yellow stripes: fields of flowering rapeseed whose oil once lubricated our heavy machinery and now enters our trucks as biodiesel and our gullets as canola oil. Around a bend, tall termite mounds sprout in the distance, but as we draw closer they become smoke-gushing volcanoes, and then finally loom as the seven cement chimneys of a coal power station. Clustered together, they’re a monument to the Industrial Age, and the tallest landmark (some say eyesore) for many miles. For two hours, we’ve been escorted by an endless tribe of metal stick men, each with three arms from which steel pinecones dangle, who stride across the land holding up wide skeins of power lines.
All this sparsely settled farmland is what we call the “countryside,” and it fills the eye with bucolic English grandeur, even though some of it is far from native (Canada geese), some has been genetically engineered (canola rapeseed), and much has been machined from lyrical spurts of steel. Even the horse chestnut trees, so synonymous with England, have Balkan ancestry and an industrial secret. During World Wars I and II, British children collected their seeds—the deliciously smooth conkers that we carry in our pockets and serenely rub, polishing them with body oil until they look like mahogany knobs—and donated them to the war effort, where they helped to brew cordite for explosives.