Dry Storeroom No. 1

by Richard Fortey

  I hesitate to add yet one more fishy figure, but the story would not be complete without introducing Alwyne Wheeler into the plot. His finest memorial is probably his contribution to cleaning up the River Thames. London’s river was a disgrace after the Second World War—increasing and unbridled pollution and waste had removed oxygen from its lower stretches, until it had a distinct pong in summer, which I can remember sniffing queasily as a child on visits to the Embankment. About the only creature to thrive in the fetid mud was the little red Tubifex worm, which is almost impossible to kill. My father used to dig clumps of it up to use as fish food. Other aquatic life, and especially piscatorial life, was severely on the wane. “Wyn” Wheeler was much more the populist than either Whitehead or Greenwood. He helped set up networks such as the Thames Estuary Partnership, bringing the interests of anglers and industry and government agencies together. Nowadays there is a host of such organizations ranging from the London Biodiversity Partnership to the Thames Salmon Trust, most of them seeking co-operation between partners with an interest in a clean river. Wheeler worked tirelessly identifying fishes brought in by members of the public. Sometimes there were surprises, as when “tropical” fish were found living near the warm-water outlets of power stations. He wrote popular guidebooks. He enjoyed friendly relations with watermen up and down the river.

  The last naturally spawned salmon was caught in the River Thames in 1833. One hundred and forty-six years later the Thames Salmon Rehabilitation scheme attempted to reverse history: fish were introduced artificially. Such was the progress in cleaning up the former “open sewer” that by 1982 a spawning salmon run up the Thames happened once again. There was a tremendous sense of triumph when this was announced, for salmon are choosy fish—they will not tolerate pollution. Now more than twenty species of fish can be found in the Thames. And with the fish comes all the associated bird life: richness has been restored. “Wyn” Wheeler was one of the heroes of this triumph of conservation and habitat restoration, which remains a model for many others around the world. It is not a battle that has been won, however. Exceptional rains in 2005 strained the antiquated sewerage system of London beyond breaking point and raw waste ran into the river once again, which shortly yielded up a slurry of scaly corpses. The price of freedom from pollution is eternal vigilance.

  Wheeler could not bear Peter Whitehead. He hated his aristocratic mien, and regarded his ostentatious cultural breadth as not a little precious and pretentious. Whitehead fully reciprocated the loathing. Fortunately for him, he was the senior employee at a time when seniority counted. The two fish men never talked to one another, if they could possibly avoid it. The upper echelons of the Museum regarded the whole of the fish section as almost unmanageable. In Wheeler’s Annual Confidential Report in 1979, the Keeper described the “problems…inherent in the fish section manned by a number of ‘prima donnas.’” It may have been a response to this perceived management impossibility, but by a dramatic coup de théâtre that could have happened only in the fish group, John Peake decided to reverse the hierarchical structure: he put Alwyne Wheeler in charge of Peter Whitehead. This was a ludicrous thing to do, because even “Wyn” Wheeler’s supporters would have said that he had little talent for managing anything, even his temper. He soon obtained satisfaction for years of slights by vetoing Peter Whitehead’s publications on musical or cultural matters—after all, he would argue, the job has to do with fish, not all this other stuff. It was either hilarious or tragic depending on where you stood: through it all the curators struggled on with their duties. When I talk about those times to the surviving curators, such as Ollie Crimmen, they are recalled with a mixture of affection and exasperation. About “Wyn” Wheeler Ollie said: “He taught me everything I know; he drove me mad.”

  I have dwelt on the drama within this group of fish zoologists not only because it makes entertaining gossip, but because it illuminates what Museum science is probably all about. I hazard a guess that if any quality assessment of fish research had been made during the period 1970–90 the Natural History Museum would have come out as one of the world leaders, possibly the world leader. This was while feuding, “primadonnaing,” affaires de coeur, litigation and heaven knows what else were happening in all directions. Management was concerned, as it always is, with what Sir Walter Bodmer called the “right to manage.” This does not have any necessary connection with what actually happens in the scientific arena. It might actually be the case that having an obstructive, disagreeable, temperamental, competitive or even downright anarchic group of people all scrapping and competing is the best way to push knowledge forwards. Should Peter Whitehead have turned his back on important musical discoveries just because it said “fish man” on his label? I usually avoid such rhetorical questions, because they permit of only one answer, but in this case I’ll go ahead: “Of course not!” Research is sometimes a matter of sheer serendipity, but if anything it is more a matter of persistence, of sheer bloodymindedness. The kinds of people who are able to work alone for long periods, often without much encouragement, with modest financial reward, and by remote African lakes with no creature comforts, are actually rather rare. These are ideal employees of a great museum.

  Sometimes individualism merges into lunacy. One of the most striking examples in the zoology part of the Natural History Museum was the case of the sponge and protozoan worker Randolph Kirkpatrick. In William T. Stearn’s official history of the Museum he merits a peripheral mention as an author of The History of the Collections (1906). He actually did some quite respectable work on sponges. But he is known today for one of the more extraordinary intellectual excursions in the history of palaeontology. In the early Tertiary rocks a rather common kind of fossil is the nummulite (see colour plate 8). It is about the size and shape of a coin, and is made, as are so many fossils, of calcium carbonate. It is a fossil of a gigantic single-celled organism, a behemoth of the group known as Foraminifera—which are usually not much larger than a pin head—and for which Kirkpatrick had responsibility in the Museum. Inside the “coins” are a beautiful spiral series of tiny chambers that were secreted by the protoplasm of the simple organism. Limestone rocks containing nummulites polished by the action of the sea can look like nebular maps of some remote corner of the universe. Nummulites are sometimes so abundant as to make cliffs and whole rock formations; they are most celebrated as supplying the nummulitic building stone for the pyramids of Gizeh in Egypt—hence Nummulites gizehensis. I have seen them peeping out of pebbles on beaches in Greece. They are certainly not rare.

  But Randolph Kirkpatrick managed to convince himself not only that they were common, but that they were truly ubiquitous. He believed that all rocks were made of nummulites. The case for sedimentary rocks was at least conceivable because these kinds of rocks are mostly laid down under water, and nummulites lived in shallow seas. But when Kirkpatrick’s ideas took their curious hold on him, he managed to convince himself that even igneous rocks, the kind that are erupted from volcanoes, were made of nummulites. He privately published his ideas in a series of books under the title The Nummulosphere. Thin sections of volcanic rocks like basalt are shown with the nummulites “dotted in.” They remind me of those star maps where Scorpio or Aries are drawn in from among the swath of stars in the sky. All the stars that don’t fit are ignored. Since basalt rocks include patterns of tiny swirling felspar crystals, it is possible to “see” nummulites by ignoring all the little specks in between. I own a precious copy of Part III of The Nummulosphere published in 1906. These outré ideas are possibly the end point of the freedom to pursue a line of enquiry unchecked. Stephen Jay Gould wrote in The Panda’s Thumb: “I respect Kirkpatrick both for his sponges and for his numinous nummulosphere. It is easy to dismiss a crazy theory with laughter that debars any attempt to understand a man’s motivation—and the nummulosphere is a crazy theory. I find that few men of imagination are not worth my attention.” I agree that a few nummulospheres are probably the price that we should all be
prepared to pay to permit intellectual freedom and joyfulness. After all, some ideas initially thought to be crazy turn out to set the course to the future, and their originators then know a special kind of satisfaction. As Francis Bacon put it in one of his essays in 1625: “no pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage-ground of truth.” As we have seen, there are also delusions about the truth, but one wonders whether those that hold them still feel Bacon’s incomparable pleasure.

  Not far from where Humphrey Greenwood used to smoke furiously out at the back*9 of the old building, there is a pair of modern glass doors, which indicate the entrance to the Molecular Biology Laboratory. Passing through these doors from the old collections is an odd experience, and the first-time visitor might briefly wonder whether he is in a natural history museum at all. The whole place exudes a cleanliness that even the best-maintained collection of ammonites never quite manages. White lab coats must be worn at all times. The visitor is subliminally aware of the hum of machines. Peering in through windows into the laboratories he spies legions of chemicals in bottles, and pipettes, and fume cupboards, and laptops: in fact, it is just what the man in the street might think a laboratory should look like. This is where the molecular sequencing work is carried out, and I have already given sufficient examples to show how this work now melds in perfectly with the more traditional research of the Museum on the taxonomy of snails or primitive plants. The old collections and this buzzing, busy laboratory are bedfellows after all. The laboratory has grown and changed as the technology has improved. This is a common story in science: what starts as hand-cranked and time-consuming soon becomes automated and routine. The quantity of tissue material required for DNA analysis has been progressively reduced, most importantly following the development of the PCR technique that “multiplies” even the tiniest gene sample.

  From Kirkpatrick’s Nummulosphere. A thin section of basalt (bottom picture) has the alleged nummulites “dotted in” in the upper picture—some kind of optical illusion.

  Through the several rooms bustles Andy Warlow; he is small, very Welsh, indefatigably cheerful and bursting with proprietorial pride. Like all scientists with a technical bent he refers to machines as “kit,” as in the phrase “this is a nice piece of kit.” It is a fact that most pieces of kit are more or less rectangular boxes with dials on. It is what goes on in the innards that varies enormously. Many pieces of kit are also expensive. The automated sequencer produces the kind of molecular data that help with taxonomy and systematics and costs a quarter of a million pounds; it is served by a robot which now automatically does the kind of work that formerly had to be done by laboratory technicians, such as purifying samples and preparing them for analysis. It has little automated arms like a Dalek. These pieces of kit came into operation in 2003 and 2004, respectively, so they are what the scientific cliché always refers to as “state of the art.” In the modern Museum their services must be purchased by “customers,” that is, scientists, who are charged £2 a sample in-house; any contract from outside will pay four times that sum.

  The technician in charge of the machines tells me that there are something like seventy research projects currently using the facility. One I happen to know about is Dr. Tim Littlewood using sequence data to find out more about the relationships of the mysterious sea spiders, or pycnogonids, which include some of the oddest-looking of the arthropods—all legs and no body. It so happens that Derek Siveter of Oxford University has described the most perfectly preserved fossil of a sea spider from the Silurian rocks, some 425 million years old—it looks for all the world like one still living. Why are they so unchanging? Are they related to scorpions—and the true spiders—or are they simply very odd crustaceans? The molecules will hold the key to answering these questions, for they carry the narrative of common ancestry locked away in the genome. The machines are there to help crack the problem.

  In another room Andy Warlow shows off some giant refrigerators. These include machines storing the frozen-tissue collection: an archive of flesh, the soft parts of organisms that normally decay. At minus 85 degrees centigrade flesh retains its genetic information indefinitely. Hence tissues that once formed the basis of molecular sequencing experiments can be stored here for future investigators. This archive, suspended from the processes of decay, also saves unnecessary culling of wild animals to secure further samples. In the old spirit collections flesh is preserved in the pallid ranks of fish and prawns sitting in their jars. Sadly, the employment of smelly formalin as a preservative also served to destroy the DNA by unhitching all the chemical bonds that hold it together. The curators were unwittingly tearing up the record of the genes even as they sought to defy the effects of time. Ironically, the oldest “wet” collections of all are still often useful as the source of DNA samples. This is because these specimens really were preserved in spirit—in alcohol, no less, and alcohol does not destroy genetic information. Genes, like old soaks, can evidently be pickled in spirits. There are stories of specimens being bottled in gin or brandy when regular supplies of preserving alcohol had run out, which says admirable things about the priorities of the collectors. Dried skins, and even bones, also preserve significant amounts of DNA. The specimens stored in formalin jars are still useful, of course, but only for looking at morphology. On the other hand, neither will the frozen-tissue collection ever replace the whole specimen, because it only tells part of the story. The same cold room houses another freezer that holds the Museum’s part of the Frozen Ark project, rather unfortunately known by the acronym FARC. This initiative is designed to preserve the genetic information of threatened species around the world. Perhaps the idea of resuscitating such species using the frozen genes is beyond current capabilities, but the urgency of having such an archive is obvious already, and will be more pressing in the next century. Andy Warlow tells me that within the freezer lies a sample of Leptodactylus fallax, known as the Caribbean mountain chicken, and now in imminent danger of extinction in its native Montserrat and Dominica, where it lives above 300 metres and feeds on crickets. It is a large frog. But its common name betrays the reason why it is so nearly extinct.

  Another laboratory is dedicated to working on the schistosome parasite. The disease caused by this particularly unpleasant organism, schistosomiasis, is perhaps better known as bilharzia. More than three hundred million people are infected by this debilitating condition, so this is one case where I do not have to explain the wider significance of Museum research. The name recalls the discoverer of the parasite, Theodore Maximilian Bilharz. Poor Bilharz died young in 1862 from another complaint altogether—typhus, caused by a malevolent micro-organism. There has been a long tradition of studying bilharzia and its causes in the Museum. The man in charge when I joined the Museum was Chris Wright, a very effective scientist who was also definitely a toff in the tradition of old-style Museum employees, but with none of the superior airs of Peter Whitehead. Like Bilharz, he died tragically young, of cancer, in a way unrelated to parasites. Vaughan Southgate, who succeeded him, is still in vigorous health: he is bluff and florid, affable and clubbable, dedicated to game fishing, with a laugh like a steam train going uphill, and one feels that there is no malevolent parasite that he could not slough off with the aid of a couple of stiff gins. Nonetheless, he often returned from African fieldwork during the 1980s harbouring a parasite or two, which provided much entertainment for the experts at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. On one occasion I asked him anxiously on his return what he had brought back with him this time. “No idea, old boy,” he chortled amiably. “It hasn’t hatched out yet.” David Rollinson is currently head of the schistosome group; it used to be known as “Experimental taxonomy,” because the biologists used their work as a testing ground for all manner of new molecular and computational techniques. The laboratory is currently a World Health Organization reference centre for the identification of schistosomes and their snail hosts. I always hoped that the head of this laboratory would be known as Doctor WH
O.

  I should explain the life cycle of the parasite at this point. Schistosoma is a specialized kind of flatworm that lives in the bloodstream in humans, and many other species can be infected. Unlike any other parasite it has separate sexes. Adults have been known to live for up to forty-three years; the body is about a centimetre long. Once paired with a male, the female Schistosoma lays thousands upon thousands of minute eggs. These are what cause the pathological symptoms, for they fetch up in the liver. The immune system “wraps them up” in what is known as the granuloma immune response. Eventually this causes severe organ damage, sufficient to cause jaundice and liver failure. In children, distended bellies provide a characteristic sign of infection. There are nineteen or twenty Schistosoma species, of which three commonly infect humans: the S. mansoni species group; the S. haematobium group; and S. japonicum. As the name suggests, the last is characteristic of the Far East, but was eradicated from Japan in the 1940s, persisting today in Cambodia and Laos. Bilharzia poses the biggest health problem in the wetter parts of Africa, although the disease was also carried to the Caribbean as another unwelcome consequence of the slave trade. The parasite burrows out through the gut or bladder wall to distribute its eggs—blood in the urine may well indicate its presence. Once in the water, the larval schistosome seeks out its next host, a freshwater snail. Inside the host’s mantle it completes the next stage of its life cycle. Then it swims out as a “fluke” again to find a human victim, boring in through the skin to enter the bloodstream, where it can stay long enough to ensure the continuation of the lethal cycle. Biologically speaking, it is an elegant way to feed off other organisms while ensuring the survival of the parasitic genes—or “shellfish genes”!