The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

  Hydrogen is extremely high in energy density; a pound contains almost three times as much energy as a pound of gasoline. But as a fuel, hydrogen has drawbacks, the most significant of which is that its physical density is extremely low. Storing an automotively useful quantity of hydrogen in a container the size of a car’s gas tank requires enormous compression and expensive composite materials. Furthermore, most hydrogen-powered demonstration cars have engines called fuel cells, which are costly and technologically complex and which don’t function at some temperatures. And, of course, the environmental benefit of using hydrogen as a fuel is lost if the hydrogen is manufactured from fossil fuels.

  The low-carbon-energy challenge looks different, however, if you ignore SUVs and think of the billions of people who live in extreme poverty. For them, the main energy concern is not how to accelerate a 4,000-pound vehicle from a stop to highway speed in a few seconds and cruise for hundreds of miles; it’s how to survive from one day to the next. For such people, Nocera told me, the main energy issue isn’t power or efficiency or energy density; it’s cost. “For the nonlegacy world, energy has to be super-cheap,” he said. “If I could make alternative energy that was cheap enough for you to want to use it in your house—and I can’t—it still wouldn’t be cheap enough for the poor.” Providing energy for these people has been Nocera’s goal from the beginning. “In the next forty years, three hundred and fifty million Indians are going to become energy users,” he said. “We’ve got to get them energy, and it’s got to be CO2-neutral, because if they use coal we’re screwed.”

  Nocera’s vision for the world’s poorest people is of a gridless, decentralized energy system, in which every dwelling has an artificial leaf on its roof. When the sun shines, the leaf splits water—about a liter and a half per day—and after dark the residents burn the hydrogen in an inexpensive microturbine, which generates electricity till dawn at an average rate of about a hundred watts. By legacy-world standards, this is a truly minimal power level, but it’s sufficient, Nocera thinks, to transform the lives of people who currently have none, or almost none. And it’s cheap. The components are not particularly efficient, but they are low-tech and commercially available today. And because the fuel is produced in small quantities and used onsite, the hydrogen can be stored in ordinary metal tanks, at modest pressure. Furthermore, the self-repairing cobalt-phosphate catalyst keeps the need for maintenance low—a critical factor, Nocera said, because “you can’t have a bunch of people running around the world fixing stuff.”

  Nocera believes that the benefits of large-scale implementation would extend beyond direct, energy-related gains in users’ quality of life (illumination, cooking without burning wood, telephone charging) and would include a global decline in the rate of population growth, which, historically, has slowed as affluence has risen. “The real issue driving our problems on the face of this planet is population,” he said. “One of the beautiful things about providing distributed energy to the poor is that it’s a positive feedback loop. If I give poor people energy, they become empowered, and every study that’s ever been done has shown that with financial gain and education population drops like a rock.”

  It’s usually argued that complex technological gains trickle down to the poor—that the innovations required to reduce the sticker price of a Tesla Roadster from $110,000 to $80,000 will also eventually improve the lives of people at the bottom of the global income scale. But there’s reason to think otherwise: as energy technology has grown in both sophistication and efficiency, the worldwide gap between richest and poorest has widened, and the richest countries today often treat the poorest ones less as partners in progress than as cheap targets for resource extraction. Nocera believes that simple technology scales up more readily than complex technology scales down. “The poor are helping you,” he told his audience in Aspen, “because they’re going to teach you how to live for the future.”

  Matthew Kanan, the Stanford chemistry professor who discovered Nocera’s cobalt-phosphate catalyst, told me, “Dan isn’t the only one who has made this point, but he’s right that the developing world’s energy trajectory is the one that’s the most important over the next several decades.” Focusing on people whose energy consumption is tightly constrained also reduces the likelihood of certain kinds of unintended consequences. A seldom discussed environmental danger posed by electric cars, for example, is that broad, rapid adoption would hugely increase, rather than reduce, demand for grid-supplied electricity generated by burning fossil fuels, since growth in renewable sources couldn’t conceivably keep up. (“I totally hate the electric car,” Nocera told me.)

  Providing decentralized energy to the developing world carries a threat of unintended environmental consequences, too, of course. One possibility is that the artificial leaf could turn out to be the energy equivalent of a gateway drug. Historically, more energy has always meant more income, and more income has meant more consumption, and more consumption has meant more energy in every form—as well as increased demand for a rapidly expanding list of environmentally destructive possessions, including, eventually, the ultimate modern consumer good, the automobile. And although distributed energy production eliminates the need for a centralized electricity grid, it encourages the creation and enlargement of other environmentally problematic grids, including the ones used by phone calls, websites, food producers, airplanes, delivery trucks, and cars.

  Among some scientists, Nocera has a reputation for hyping his discoveries. The playing-card-size device truly does split water, but it’s a prop, not a product, since producing enough hydrogen to meet even Nocera’s minimal goal of powering a single 100-watt light bulb through the night would require an artificial leaf the size of a door. Photovoltaic panels have the same size constraint, which arises from the diffuseness of sunlight and from silicon’s ultimately limited ability to absorb it. “One thing the layperson messes up is that you can’t go faster than the sun gives out energy,” Nocera said. The advantage of the artificial leaf is not that it converts more solar energy than a conventional photovoltaic panel. The advantage is that it stores solar energy in a fuel rather than in a battery and is therefore potentially more versatile, as well as being less expensive to acquire, maintain, and exploit—as long as users’ energy requirements are minimal.

  Nocera’s claims have also often been amplified by reporters, and even by his own university’s public relations office. He hasn’t always rushed to correct misimpressions, and at least some of his overselling has been intentional. Attracting funding for renewable-energy research requires showmanship, and the need for shrewd marketing has grown in recent years, as legacy-world interest in carbon-free energy has slackened. A further difficulty is that the science of renewable energy is genuinely daunting. Nocera’s challenge outside the laboratory has been to build enthusiasm for the artificial leaf even though, in anything like its current form, it is designed to meet a level of energy demand that by modern American standards is almost immeasurably low.

  As Nocera concedes, artificial photosynthesis, if it turns out to be practical for anyone, is almost certainly decades from large-scale implementation—a discouraging fact that applies to virtually all renewables. Still, he believes that if scientists and engineers were to apply the kind of effort to developing low-cost fuel cells for third-world homes that they now apply to developing high-performance batteries for American sports cars, they might accomplish something globally significant. They might also eventually find an economical way to replicate the far more challenging second stage of photosynthesis, in which hydrogen and atmospheric carbon dioxide combine to make a nongaseous fuel—a breakthrough that would eliminate the problems associated with storing and transporting hydrogen. “If we all just focused on this, in a coordinated way, I’m sure the science and engineering community could nail it,” he told me. For that reason, he doesn’t mind speculating publicly about outcomes that, realistically, he can’t deliver yet. “A lot of scientists get mad at me for speaking
at things like this,” he said in Aspen, “because they think I’m going to give you hope.”

  MICHAEL SPECTER

  The Deadliest Virus

  FROM The New Yorker

  ON MAY 21, 1997, a three-year-old boy died in Hong Kong from a viral infection that turned out to be influenza. The death was not unusual: flu viruses kill hundreds of thousands of people every year. Hong Kong is among the world’s most densely populated cities, and pandemics have a long history of first appearing there or in nearby regions of southern China and then spreading rapidly around the globe.

  This strain, however, was unusual, and it took an international team of virologists three months to identify it as H5N1—“bird flu,” as it has come to be called. Avian influenza had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of chickens, but there had never been a report of an infected person, even among poultry workers.

  By the end of the year, eighteen people in Hong Kong had become sick, and six had died. That’s a remarkably high mortality rate: if seasonal flu were as virulent, it would kill 20 million Americans a year. Hong Kong health officials, fearing that the virus was on the verge of becoming extremely contagious, acted forcefully to build a moat around the outbreak: during the last week of December, they destroyed every chicken in the city.

  The tactic worked. Bird flu disappeared, at least for a while. “We felt we had dodged a bullet,” Keiji Fukuda told me earlier this year when I visited him in his office at the World Health Organization’s headquarters in Geneva. Fukuda, as the assistant director-general for health, security, and environment, oversees influenza planning. At the end of 1997, when he was the chief influenza epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, he spent a few tense weeks in Hong Kong, searching for clues to how the virus was transmitted from chickens to humans and whether it would set off a global pandemic. “It was a very scary time,” he said, “and we were bracing ourselves for the worst. But by the end of the month nobody else got sick, so we crossed our fingers and went back to Atlanta.”

  Then in 2003, the virus reemerged in Thailand; it has since killed 346 of the 587 people it is known to have infected—nearly 60 percent. The true percentage is undoubtedly lower, since many cases go unreported. Even so, the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which killed at least 50 million people, had a mortality rate of between 2 and 3 percent. Influenza normally kills far fewer than one-tenth of 1 percent of those infected. This makes H5N1 one of the deadliest microbes known to medical science.

  To ignite a pandemic, even the most lethal virus would need to meet three conditions: it would have to be one that humans hadn’t confronted before, so that they lacked antibodies; it would have to kill them; and it would have to spread easily—through a cough, for instance, or a handshake. Bird flu meets the first two criteria but not the third. Virologists regard cyclical pandemics as inevitable; as with earthquakes, though, it is impossible to predict when they will occur. Flu viruses mutate rapidly, but over time they tend to weaken, and researchers hoped that this would be the case with H5N1. Nonetheless, for the past decade the threat of an airborne bird flu lingered ominously in the dark imaginings of scientists around the world. Then, last September, the threat became real.

  At the annual meeting of the European Scientific Working Group on Influenza, in Malta, several hundred astonished scientists sat in silence as Ron Fouchier, a Dutch virologist at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, reported that simply transferring avian influenza from one ferret to another had made it highly contagious. Fouchier explained that he and his colleagues “mutated the hell out of H5N1”—meaning that they had altered the genetic sequence of the virus in a variety of ways. That had no effect. Then, as Fouchier later put it, “someone finally convinced me to do something really, really stupid.” He spread the virus the old-fashioned way, by squirting the mutated H5N1 into the nose of a ferret and then implanting nasal fluid from that ferret into the nose of another. After ten such manipulations, the virus began to spread around the ferret cages in his lab. Ferrets that received high doses of H5N1 died within days, but several survived exposure to lower doses.

  When Fouchier examined the flu cells closely, however, he became alarmed. There were only five genetic changes in two of the viruses’ eight genes. But each mutation had already been found circulating naturally in influenza viruses. Fouchier’s achievement was to place all five mutations together in one virus, which meant that nature could do precisely what he had done in the lab. Another team of researchers, led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka, at the University of Wisconsin, created a slightly different form of the virus, which, while not as virulent, was also highly contagious. One of the world’s most persistent horror fantasies, expressed everywhere from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Jurassic Park, had suddenly come to pass: a dangerous form of life, manipulated and enhanced by man, had become lethal.

  Fouchier’s report caused a sensation. Scientists harbored new fears of a natural pandemic, and biological-weapons experts maintained that Fouchier’s bird flu posed a threat to hundreds of millions of people. The most important question about the continued use of the virus, and the hardest to answer, is how likely it is to escape the laboratory. “I am not nearly as worried about terrorists as I am about an incredibly smart, smug kid at Harvard, or a lone crazy employee with access to these sequences,” Michael T. Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota Health Center, told me. Osterholm is one of the nation’s leading experts on influenza and bioterrorism. “We have seen many times that accidental releases of dangerous microbes are not rare,” he said.

  Osterholm’s anxiety was based in recent history. The last person known to have died of smallpox, in 1978, was a medical photographer in England named Janet Parker, who worked in the anatomy department of the University of Birmingham Medical School. Parker became fatally ill after she was accidentally exposed to smallpox grown in a research lab on the floor below her office. In the late 1970s, a strain of H1N1—“swine flu”—was isolated in northern China near the Russian border, and it later spread throughout the world. Most virologists familiar with the outbreak are convinced that it came from a sample that was frozen in a lab and then released accidentally. In 2003 several laboratory technicians in Hong Kong were infected with the SARS virus. The following year, a Russian scientist died after mistakenly infecting herself with the Ebola virus.

  Biological labs are given four possible biosafety-level security grades, ranging from BSL-1 to BSL-4. Research on the most lethal and contagious organisms is carried out at BSL-4 laboratories. Under U.S. guidelines, BSL-3 facilities contain microbes that cause “serious or potentially lethal diseases” but do not easily pass among people or for which there are easily accessible preventives. BSL-4 laboratories house agents that have no preventives or treatments. The labs in Rotterdam and in Wisconsin where the H5N1 ferret work was conducted were both BSL-3 facilities that had been enhanced with additional security measures. In such laboratories, scientists are typically subjected to security checks; they wear space suits and breathe through special respirators. Although no safeguards are absolute, negative air filters attempt to ensure that no particles accidentally escape from the lab.

  Last December the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, a panel of science, defense, and public-health experts, was asked by the Department of Health and Human Services to evaluate Fouchier’s research. The panel recommended that the two principal scientific journals, Science and Nature, reconsider plans to publish information about the methods used to create the H5N1 virus. It was the first time that the advisory board, which was formed after the anthrax attacks of 2001 to provide guidance on “dual use” scientific research, which could both harm and protect the public, had issued such a request. “We are in the midst of a revolutionary period in the life sciences,” the advisers wrote. “With this has come unprecedented potential for better control of infectious diseases and significant societal ben
efit. However, there is also a growing risk that the same science will be deliberately misused and that the consequences could be catastrophic.” The New York Times published an editorial that echoed the advisory board’s concern and even questioned the purpose of the experiments: “We believe in robust research and almost always oppose censorship. But in this case the risks—of doing the work and publishing the results—far outweigh the benefits.” The journal New Scientist agreed:ONE MISTAKE AWAY FROM A WORLDWIDE FLU PANDEMIC. Television talk shows and the Internet pulsated with anxiety.

  The widespread alarm led Science and Nature to agree to postpone publication. Fouchier’s virus, which now sits in a vault within his securely guarded underground laboratory in Rotterdam, has fundamentally altered the scope of the biological sciences. Like the research that led to splitting the atom and the creation of nuclear energy, the knowledge that his experiment has provided could be used to attack the public as well as to protect it.

  “Terror is not an unjustified reaction to knowing this virus exists,” Osterholm, who serves on the advisory board, told me. “We have no room to be wrong about this. None. We can be wrong about other things. If smallpox got out, it would be unfortunate, but it has a fourteen-day incubation period, it’s easy to recognize, and we would stop it. Much the same is true with SARS. But with flu you are infectious before you even know you are sick. And when it gets out it is gone. Those researchers have all of our lives at the ends of their fingers.”

  Fouchier, a lanky forty-five-year-old man with intense blue eyes, works at one of the most highly regarded virological laboratories in Europe. “I have spent many years, and this institution has paid millions of dollars to insure that this research was carried out in the safest possible manner,” he told me when we met in a conference room in the grim research facility that houses his laboratories at the Erasmus Medical Center. The center devoted several years to constructing a special lab for Fouchier’s research. From the windows, one can see barges and hulking gray cranes; Rotterdam is Europe’s busiest port. It is an industrial cityscape whose bleakness, on the day I visited, seemed to match Fouchier’s mood. As he spoke, he stared at his hands, which he clenched nervously. “People are acting like I am some mad scientist,” he said.