As it happens, GBRMPA has its headquarters in Townsville, in a half-empty mall. On my second day in the city, I walked over to the mall to speak with the authority’s chief scientist, David Wachenfeld.
“If we had strongly acted on climate change thirty years ago, I don’t know that we’d be having this conversation,” Wachenfeld told me. He was wearing a dark-blue polo shirt embroidered with the symbol of the Australian commonwealth, which features a kangaroo gazing at an emu. “We’d be much more likely to be saying, as long as we protect the marine park, we think the reef will look after itself.”
As it was, he said, a more interventionist approach was going to be needed. In concert with various universities and research organizations, GBRMPA was planning to spend at least 100 million Australian dollars (about $70 million in American money) investigating ways it might intercede on the reef’s behalf. These included: deploying underwater robots to reseed damaged reefs, developing some kind of ultrathin film to shade reefs, pumping deep water to the surface to provide corals with heat relief, and cloud-brightening. This last possibility would involve spraying tiny droplets of salt water into the air to create a kind of artificial fog. The salty mist would, according to theory at least, encourage the formation of light-colored clouds, which would reflect sunlight back out to space, counteracting global warming.
Wachenfeld told me that the new technologies would probably have to be deployed in tandem, so that, for example, a robot might deliver genetically enhanced larvae to a reef shaded by a thin film or man-made fog. “There’s all sorts of just amazingly imaginative innovation,” he said.
* * *
—
That evening, I drove back to the SeaSim. Near the parking lot, I noticed a family of feral pigs rooting around. The synanthropes, all fat and sleek, seemed to be having a grand time of it. Gradually, students and researchers drifted over from the dorms. As the simulated sun set over the simulated sea, the place came alive with red lights, zigzagging through the dimness like fireflies.
Everyone from the previous night had returned. In addition to the teams working with Van Oppen, I recognized a group that was planning to freeze coral gametes as an insurance policy against apocalypse and another group looking to genetically manipulate coral embryos. There were some new faces, too. A team of filmmakers had flown in from Sydney. (If the rest of us were coral voyeurs, the filmmakers, it occurred to me, were pornographers.)
The head of the institute that runs the SeaSim, Paul Hardisty, had come for the show, as well. Hardisty, who’s from Canada, is tall and rangy in a cowboy-esque way. I asked him about the reef’s future. He was at once gloomy and gung-ho.
“We’re not talking about coral gardening here,” Hardisty told me. “We’re talking about major, industrial-scale—all-of-reef-scale—interventions. So it’s a really steep curve, but it’s possible—that’s what we’ve concluded—with the best minds in the world, all working together.” To aid in the research effort, the SeaSim was going to be expanded; if I came back in a few years, Hardisty said, it would be twice the size.
“It won’t be a silver bullet,” he continued. “It’s going to be a combination of things, combinations of, for instance, cloud-brightening and assisted evolution. We’re going to need engineering, because we are looking at fast deployment to make a difference. And we’re also going to need to borrow technologies from Big Pharma, because we’ve got to figure out mass-delivery mechanisms. Maybe—I don’t know—we’ll use little pellets.”
The ruby lights swooped and pitched around us. “It’s just absolute hubris and so arrogant to think that we can survive without everything else,” Hardisty said. “We come from this planet. Anyway, I’m getting a little philosophical. I’m going to have to go home and watch a hockey game.”
As we waited for the corals to get in the mood, there wasn’t much to do. Standing around in the dark, I found myself also “getting a little philosophical.” Hardisty was right, of course; it was hubris to imagine that people could drive the Great Barrier Reef to collapse without suffering any consequences. But wasn’t it just another kind of hubris to imagine “all-of-reef-scale interventions?”
When Darwin juxtaposed “artificial” and “natural” selection, there was no question in his mind which was more powerful. Pigeon fanciers had done amazing things, breeding varieties so distinctive that to many they seemed different birds entirely. (All the varieties, from fantails to pouters, were, Darwin realized, descended from a single species, the rock pigeon, Columba livia.) Dog fanciers, similarly, had bred up greyhounds and corgis, bulldogs and spaniels. The list went on and on: the ewes in the barn, the pears in the garden, the corn in the crib—all were products of generations of attentive breeding.
But, in the grand scheme of things, artificial selection was just tinkering at the margins. It was natural selection—indifferent, but infinitely patient—that had given rise to life’s astonishing diversity. In the final, oft-quoted paragraph of On the Origin of Species, Darwin conjures an “entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth.” All of these “elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner,” had been produced by the same mindless, inhuman force.
“There is grandeur in this view of life,” Darwin reassures his readers, whom he imagines still to be skeptical after four hundred and ninety pages. From the very simplest creatures blundering around in the primordial ooze, “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
The Great Barrier Reef might be thought of as the ultimate “entangled bank.” Tens of millions of years of evolution have gone into its creation, with the result that even a fist-sized piece of it is unfathomably dense with life, crammed with creatures “dependent on each other in so complex a manner” that biologists will probably never fully master the relations. And the reef—today, at least—goes on and on.
Everyone I spoke to in Australia understood that preserving the Great Barrier Reef in all its greatness was beyond what could realistically—or unrealistically—be hoped for. Even settling for a tenth of it would mean shading and robotically seeding an area the size of Switzerland. What was at issue was, at best, a diminished thing—a kind of Okay Barrier Reef.
“If we can extend the life of the reef by twenty, thirty years, that might be just enough for the world to get its act together on emissions, and it might make the difference between having nothing and having some sort of functional reef,” Hardisty told me. “I mean, it’s really sad that we have to talk like that. But that’s where we are now.”
* * *
—
The second night I spent at the SeaSim also turned out to be a bust. A few colonies set, only to release what one researcher referred to as a “dribble.” And so the following evening, I set out for the SeaSim one more time.
Spawning corals release bead-like bundles of eggs and sperm.
By now I knew what to expect. When the sun went down, the researchers would don their headlamps and circulate among the tanks. If they noticed a coral colony set, they would lift it out of its communal tank and place it in a bucket of its own. That evening, so many colonies of Acropora tenuis set that it was difficult to get around. Rows of buckets lined the floor. Some of the colonies were from an area known as The Keppels, in the far south of the Great Barrier Reef; others were from a reef known as Davies Reef, hundreds of miles to the north. In the natural course of events, such distant colonies would have no chance to mate. But the whole point of the experiment was not to leave things to nature.
A post-doc named Kate Quigley was in charge of the couplings and of a team of mostly undergraduate volunteers. She wore her red light around her neck, like a glowing amulet. Quigley had laid out dozens of plastic containers, where, if all went well, t
he inter-reef crosses would occur. Embryos formed in the containers would, she explained, be transferred to little tanks, where they would be subjected to heat stress. Those that survived would then be inoculated with different symbionts, including some of the lab-evolved strains that I’d seen in Melbourne, and then subjected to still more stress.
“We really want to push them to their limits,” Quigley told me. “We’re really looking for the best of the best.”
During my trip to One Tree, I was lucky enough to take a midnight snorkel through a spawning. The scene resembled a blizzard in the Alps, only upside down. Even in a bucket, spawning is a marvel. First, just a few polyps release their bundles; then the rest follow suit, as if prompted by some secret signal. The bundles rise through the water in defiance of gravity. On the surface, they form a rosy-colored slick.
“This is one of the real miracles of nature,” I overheard a scientist on the gene-editing team say, more to himself than to anyone else.
As colony after colony let loose, Quigley marshaled her volunteers. She gave each student a bowl and a fine sieve. With a pipette, she extracted the gamete bundles from the buckets and distributed them among the sieves. Out on the reef, the bundles would break apart in the waves; at the SeaSim, the work of the waves would have to be done by hand. Quigley instructed the students to swish the bundles around until they released their contents. The sperm would drop into the bowls, while the eggs, which are larger, would be caught in the mesh.
The students swirled with grave concentration. The eggs looked like flecks of pink pepper. The bowls of sperm looked like, well, what you’d expect.
“I can take your sperm if you want,” I heard a young woman call out.
“Yes, have a bowl of my sperm,” a young man replied.
“This is the only place where it’s safe to say that,” a third student observed.
Quigley had plotted the crosses she wanted to make in a notebook. Under her supervision, the students mixed sperm and eggs from different parts of the reef. This went on late into the night, until every lonely coral had found a mate.
3
Odin, in Norse mythology, is an extremely powerful god who’s also a trickster. He has only one eye, having sacrificed the other for wisdom. Among his many talents, he can wake the dead, calm storms, cure the sick, and blind his enemies. Not infrequently, he transforms himself into an animal; as a snake, he acquires the gift of poetry, which he transfers to people, inadvertently.
The Odin, in Oakland, California, is a company that sells genetic-engineering kits. The company’s founder, Josiah Zayner, has a shock of dyed-blond hair, multiple piercings, and a tattoo that urges: Create Something Beautiful. He holds a PhD in biophysics and is a well-known provocateur. Among his many stunts, he has coaxed his skin to produce a fluorescent protein, ingested a friend’s poop in a DIY fecal-matter transplant, and attempted to deactivate one of his genes so he could grow bigger biceps. (This last effort, he acknowledges, failed.) Zayner calls himself a “genetic designer” and has said his goal is to give people access to the resources they need to modify life in their spare time.
The Odin’s offerings range from a “Biohack the Planet” shot glass, which costs three bucks, to a “genetic engineering home lab kit,” which runs $1,849 and includes a centrifuge, a polymerase chain-reaction machine, and an electrophoresis gel box. I opted for something in between: the “bacterial CRISPR and fluorescent yeast combo kit,” which set me back $209. It came in a cardboard box decorated with the company’s logo, a twisting tree circled by a double helix. The tree, I believe, is supposed to represent Yggdrasil, whose trunk, in Norse mythology, rises through the center of the cosmos.
Inside the box, I found an assortment of lab tools—pipette tips, petri dishes, disposable gloves—as well as several vials containing E. coli and all I’d need to rearrange its genome. The E. coli went into the fridge, next to the butter. The other vials went into a bin in the freezer with the ice cream.
Genetic engineering is, by now, middle-aged. The first genetically engineered bacterium was produced in 1973. This was soon followed by a genetically engineered mouse, in 1974, and a genetically engineered tobacco plant, in 1983. The first genetically engineered food approved for human consumption, the Flavr Savr tomato, was licensed in 1994; it proved such a disappointment it went out of production a few years later. Genetically engineered varieties of corn and soy were developed at around the same time; these, in contrast to the Flavr Savr, have, in the United States, become more or less ubiquitous.
In the last decade or so, genetic engineering has undergone its own transformation, thanks to CRISPR. CRISPR is shorthand for a suite of techniques—most of them borrowed from bacteria—that make it vastly easier for researchers and biohackers to manipulate DNA. (The acronym stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.”) CRISPR allows its users to snip a stretch of DNA and then either disable the affected sequence or replace it with a new one.
The possibilities that follow are pretty much endless. Jennifer Doudna, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the developers of CRISPR, has put it like this: we now have “a way to rewrite the very molecules of life any way we wish.” With CRISPR, biologists have already created, among many, many other living things: ants that can’t smell, beagles that grow superhero-like muscles, pigs that resist swine fever, macaques that suffer from sleep disorders, coffee beans that contain no caffeine, salmon that don’t lay eggs, mice that don’t get fat, and bacteria whose genes contain, in code, Eadweard Muybridge’s famous series of photographs showing a racehorse in motion. A few years ago, a Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, announced that he had produced the world’s first CRISPR-edited humans—twin baby girls. According to He, the girls’ genes had been tweaked to confer resistance to HIV, though whether this is actually the case remains unclear. Shortly after he made the announcement, He was placed under house arrest in Shenzhen.
I have almost no experience in genetics and have not done hands-on lab work since high school. Nevertheless, by following the instructions that came in the box from The Odin, I was able, over the course of a weekend, to create a novel organism. First I grew up a colony of E. coli in one of the petri dishes. Then I doused it with the various proteins and bits of designer DNA I’d stored in the freezer. The process swapped out one “letter” of the bacteria’s genome, replacing an A (adenine) with a C (cytosine). Thanks to this emendation, my new and improved E. coli could, in effect, thumb its nose at streptomycin, a powerful antibiotic. If it felt a little creepy engineering a drug-resistant strain of E. coli in my kitchen, there was also a definite sense of achievement. So much so, in fact, that I decided to move on to the second project in the kit: inserting a jellyfish gene into yeast in order to make it glow.
* * *
—
The Australian Animal Health Laboratory, in the city of Geelong, is one of the most advanced high-containment laboratories in the world. It sits behind two sets of gates, the second of which is intended to foil truck bombers, and its poured-concrete walls are thick enough, I was told, to withstand a plane crash. There are five hundred and twenty air-lock doors at the facility and four levels of security. “It’s where you’d want to be in the zombie apocalypse,” a staff member told me. At the highest security level—Biosafety Level 4—are vials of some of the nastiest animal-borne pathogens on the planet, including Ebola. (The laboratory gets a shout-out in the movie Contagion.) Staff members who work in BSL-4 units can’t wear their own clothes into the lab and have to shower for at least three minutes before heading home. For their part, the animals at the facility can’t leave at all. “Their only way out is through the incinerator,” is how one employee put it to me.
Geelong is about an hour southwest of Melbourne. On the same trip that I met with Van Oppen, I paid a visit to the laboratory, which goes by the acronym AAHL (rhymes with “maul”). I’d heard about a
gene-editing experiment going on there that intrigued me. As a result of yet another biocontrol effort gone awry, Australia is besieged by a species of giant toad known familiarly as the cane toad. In keeping with the recursive logic of the Anthropocene, researchers at AAHL were hoping to address this disaster with a further round of biocontrol. The plan involved editing the toad’s genome using CRISPR.
A biochemist named Mark Tizard, who was in charge of the project, had agreed to show me around. Tizard is a slight man with a fringe of white hair and twinkling blue eyes. Like many of the scientists I met in Australia, he’s from somewhere else, in his case London.
Before getting into amphibians, Tizard worked mostly on poultry. Several years ago, he and some colleagues at AAHL inserted a jellyfish gene into a hen. This gene, similar to the one I was planning to plug into my yeast, encodes a fluorescent protein. A chicken in possession of it will, as a consequence, give off an eerie glow under UV light. Next, Tizard figured out a way to insert the fluorescence gene so that it would be passed down to male offspring only. The result is a hen whose chicks can be sexed while they’re still in their shells.
Tizard knows that a lot of people are freaked out by genetically modified organisms. They find the idea of eating them repugnant and of releasing them into the world anathema. Though he’s no provocateur, he believes, like Zayner, that such people are looking at things all wrong.
“We have chickens that glow green,” Tizard told me. “And so we have school groups that come, and when they see the green chicken, you know, some of the kids go, ‘Oh, that’s really cool. Hey, if I eat that chicken, will I turn green?’ And I’m, like, ‘You eat chicken already, right? Have you grown feathers and a beak?’ ”
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