Sex on the Reef

When some people think of coral, they imagine chunks of rock resembling the human brain or delicately branching structures of exquisite detail and fragility. For others, coral brings to mind colorful jewelry, strung as beads of white and pink. These are all the calcified secretions of a vibrant community of microscopic animals that make their homes upon the structures that they create, animals that reproduce sexually in their struggle to survive. And struggle they must, our tiny heroes, because only one out of many thousands of fertilized eggs survives and may take hundreds of years to grow as big as the specimens that dazzle in a seaside souvenir shop.

In the best of circumstances, our reefs teem with life, supported by a luminous community of coral species responsible for both creating the structural backbone of the reef and mediating the cycle of life within it. Cyanobacteria living symbiotically with the corals extract nitrogen from seawater and convert it to a form that is nutritive to plants, and in turn moves up the food chain of the animal population.

While coral reefs cover less than 0.1% of the ocean floor, they support astounding biodiversity that accounts for at least a quarter of all marine species, including at least 4000 species of fish and possibly millions of distinct species ranging from microorganisms and plants to crustaceans and sponges. A quarter of all fish harvested for human consumption come from reef environments. Aside from their crucial contribution to our food source, reefs provide a physical barrier that protects coastlines from the erosive effects of waves and the destructive force of storms, buffering coastal communities against the threats posed by rising sea levels and increasingly turbulent weather. Corals have also been a source of naturally occurring medicinal compounds.

These aquatic colonies and the reefs that support them have come under pressure that now threatens their existence and ultimately ours. Much of this pressure arises from human activity, including coastal development, dredging, pollution, fishing, mining for building materials and...yes...souvenirs, oil spills, even sunscreen! And the effects of manmade global warming include rising temperatures and acidification, both of which cause coral bleaching, reducing reefs to lifeless stone. Even without the need to adapt to drastically changing conditions, the slow growth of these organisms makes it impossible for them to replenish themselves without help. And marine scientists have spent years trying to raise corals with which to reseed reefs.

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Enter Mote Tropical Research Laboratory in the Florida Keys and Dr. David Vaughan, a weathered looking biologist with a bushy rust and salt beard that frames an animated smile underscoring his enthusiasm for educating visitors about corals. A pivotal moment of serendipity combined with mindful observation and inspiration led to a discovery that has accelerated the rate of coral growth in the laboratory by orders of magnitude. While corals tend to repair themselves by growing faster when broken, they grow many times faster when fractured into tiny fragments. Dr. Vaughan first observed this effect as the result of a laboratory accident and has since utilized it as a cultivating technique that has increased new colonies from tens to many thousands and is expected within the next several years to create hundreds of thousands of colonies that will be planted in the wild and are expected to rebuild reefs in a fraction of the time that nature once required.

Even more exciting is the assist that Dr. Vaughan and his team is giving to natural selection. By creating microenvironments with gradations of both pH and temperature, they have managed to simulate a range of possible conditions that might occur decades from now and select coral cultures best adapted to the most stressful conditions that we can predict, while still preserving biodiversity.

All life as we know it would be threatened by the extinction of the corals. While we may worry more about international conflict and terrorism as threats to our existence, the coral nurseries at Mote may well be ground zero for the survival of our species.

Life Overtakes Art

One of the challenges of writing science fiction is to imagine future technology that has a plausible scientific foundation but is still likely to be sufficiently ahead of its time to be truly futuristic. So it is simultaneously validating and discouraging when present day technological advances rapidly eclipse fictional scenarios set decades in the future.

In The Methuselarity Transformation, I envisioned a process that could arrest the aging process at the cellular level and make young adults virtually immortal. Meanwhile, scientists seem to be closing in on ways not only to arrest aging, but to reverse it.

When the circulations of young and aged mice were linked, the elderly mice became more youthful in a number of meaningful ways, including rejuvenation of both heart and skeletal muscle and an improved sense of smell suggesting some reversal of brain aging. These changes apparently derived from something in the younger animals’ blood that neutralized the effects of aging. A team at Harvard subsequently identified a protein, GDF11, isolated from the blood of young animals that appears in decreasing concentrations with age and seems to mediate anti-aging effects. This appears the closest mankind has come so far to discovering a fountain of youth...at least for mice.

While it has been painfully found in the quest for a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease that agents that work in mice don’t easily translate to effective drugs for humans, other basic science advances have potentially shortened the time it will take to determine whether such cures will prove helpful in humans. Induced pluripotent stem cells, derived from people with various disease states, can act as substrates for testing chemicals on disease processes outside the body. This same strategy might well prove useful in testing the effects of GDF11 or similar molecules on human tissue as a stepping stone to human clinical trials.

A separate line of investigation is pursuing the effects of CRISPR, a new technology for precisely editing genes as well as regulating gene activity. This could soon provide a way to turn on specific genes that may have a role in extending longevity. It may even become possible in the very near future to harvest skin cells from patients, induce the stem cell state, edit their genomes and then supply the modified cells to malfunctioning organs to restore their youthful states. And the next decade may even bring a real possibility of rolling back aging altogether and reversing the effects of age-related diseases.

Conservation at a Turtle's Pace

For the last several decades, conservationists on Florida’s coasts have been protecting sea turtle nests by patrolling the beaches in the early morning during nesting season, finding new nests, and marking their locations to prevent people from trampling them. Rules have emerged to extinguish beachside lights at night during nesting season to prevent disorienting the turtles and later the hatchlings as they make their way back to the sea. Volunteers are on hand during the night to assist wayward hatchlings in finding their way to the water. This has been an exercise in faith, since the time from hatching to maturity and reproduction is around 30 years, depending upon species.

In the Sarasota area, the Mote Marine Laboratory has overseen this effort for the past 30 years. As I walked the beach this morning on Longboat Key, I encountered excited volunteers, working feverishly to mark an unprecedented number of new nests. This has been a banner year for sea turtle nesting here. They explained to me that the sharp increase in nesting might be the proof of concept from the earliest days of the program. Sea turtles usually return to the beaches on which they hatched to lay their eggs. Many of this year’s adults may have been protected in the nest and assisted back to the sea by caring hands 30 years ago. One has to wonder who those volunteers were way back then and what paths their lives have taken in the intervening years. Could they have envisioned the return of their charges so long in the future? How many of those still alive think about their mission today?

This is how conservation works. Small acts can have large effects in a distant future. The value of measures taken today cannot be adequately assessed in a year or two or even a decade, but must be viewed through a lens that may span half a century or more. And similarly, the cost of measures foregone must be viewed through a similar lens. Protecting species or the environment itself is an act of faith and an act of reverence for the earth. Our survival depends upon people with such vision.

We Have Met the Alien and He Is Us

In The Methuselarity Transformation, I envision a religion based upon messages embedded in our genetic code by an alien, and presumably long extinct, civilization. This new twist on Intelligent Design neither invokes an omniscient or eternal designer nor requires evolution to be invalid. It only assumes that some piece of our genetic code has been deliberately written at some stage of its evolution and propagated forward unchanged.

Genomic SETI, the search for intelligent messages within our genetic code, has been discussed in an earlier post: http://bit.ly/X0iAeA. By looking for linguistic patterns within segments of our DNA that don’t clearly code for function, scientists have made a case that these sequences are not only non-random, but bear the signature of an intelligent entity.

How advanced would a civilization have to be in order to be able to tinker with the genome and embed messages within it?  In the process of decoding the genome, we have begun to reverse engineer many of the processes that build and modify it, and have come to the point that we can begin to edit DNA precisely in order to eliminate functions that are detrimental to the organism and introduce functions and qualities that enhance its ability to survive and to thrive. And we are already capable of constructing strands of DNA from scratch out of standardized building blocks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioBrick) in order to make biologically based digital components or to modify nature.

The ability to use DNA as a communication medium is an almost trivial outgrowth of this technology. As early as 2005, researchers developed an alphabet based upon triplets of DNA nucleotides and encoded the first verse of a Christmas poem into the genome of a strain of the bacterium E. coli. As we become increasingly sophisticated in our ability not only to compose sequences of DNA, but also to stabilize selected sequences over many generations as organisms mutate and propagate, it is entirely conceivable that this medium will become the most enduring and practical means of recording the history of our civilization across the ages, embedded within the biology of a future world for an intelligent species to decode once it has sufficiently evolved.

Why then would it be less plausible that an ancient civilization has endeavored to tell its story in this manner than that ours will strive to do so in order to preserve our history for eternity? To paraphrase Walt Kelly’s venerable character Pogo (http://bit.ly/1CBA8wT): we have met the alien and he is us.

Wooden Puppets and Four Dollar Words

While serious fiction writing began for me later in life, my love of words has roots in early childhood. My father, who was a young adult during the Great Depression, was both frugal and articulate. Conversations with him were liberally sprinkled with four dollar words, for none of which he ever paid more than a buck ninety eight. His epistles (a word he would definitely have favored) to his children and grandchildren have become treasured remembrances of him and his distinctive way of communicating.

A couple of exceptionally talented creative writing teachers in high school made writing fun, Dr. Campbell in the 10th grade and Miss (not Ms!) Busse in the 11th. (We were never privy to our teachers’ given names, even in yearbooks.) Early in the year, Dr. Campbell asked us to rewrite a fairy tale in the style of a favorite author. Here is what I wrote:

PINOCCHIO

As it may have been told by Robert Penn Warren

After my fight with Eve Stevens, I went fishing. I drove home and got my permit and gathered my tackle and tossed my rod and reel into the trunk and sped off. For fishing is where you go when you’ve assassinated the President or stolen a candy bar or fought with Eve Stevens. You go to fish for bass or trout or pickerel. It’s where you go to catch a perch. It’s where you go to catch a boot or a cold. And sometimes, you pull up the line, and there, all shriveled up in the hot sun, tiny and pathetic, curled into a little ball, lies a truth. You don’t see it at first. But then, there it is with the point of the glittering stainless steel hook sticking out the top. I went fishing.

I caught a truth.

For it was at the Cambridge Reservoir that I first learned the truth about Pinocchio. You can be just sitting there fishing. You’re waiting for a tug on the line and suddenly you look up and there above you is a tree. I looked up and saw a tree. And you think, “That’s an oak tree. Pinocchio was once an oak tree. Maybe that’s Pinocchio.” It’s a warm, secure feeling to be alone and suddenly realize that you have company and that company is a tree and that tree is like a person and it is not a person. And then the tree is Pinocchio, not the flesh and blood Pinocchio, not even Pinocchio the living puppet, but the essence of Pinocchio, the wooden puppet, the real Pinocchio. The living Pinocchios were not the real Pinocchios. They were something else. They were but corruptions of the Carven Switch. The second Pinocchio, the wooden boy, the living puppet, was not the same as the oaken figure. It told a lie and its nose grew. But the nose grew from the lie and the lie from Pinocchio. And each piece of nose was but the incarnation of a lie and became an outgrowth of the Big Switch. The lie became the nose and the nose took root in the body and circulated its poisons throughout the fibers and the puppet became the lie and was no longer Pinocchio, no longer just a Carven Switch.

Take a puppet and give it life and make it into a living lie. Then give it flesh and a heart and a pair of kidneys and you have even a bigger lie. Give it life so the skin sweats and the eyes weep and the gall bladder secretes its resinous fluids. You know that all you have is still just a lie incarnate. The Kindly Old Toymaker thought he’d created himself a son. You want to tell him that this is not a son, but only a lie incarnate evolved from a Big Switch. Then you stop. You, too, are just flesh and blood. No more real, less real perhaps, than Pinocchio, for he was once a Big Switch and you, from the day of your birth, are a lie incarnate. You can no longer point to anything and say, “That is a lie.”

So you look up at the tree and now you know the truth about Pinocchio and about the Kindly Old Toymaker and about the Big Switch. And you feel secure in the knowledge. And you look around and see all those people who are really just lies incarnate. And you pity them because they don’t know about Pinocchio.

I knew. I had gone fishing.

(circa 1962)

Immortality and the future of OCD

What business does a psychiatrist have writing science fiction? Creating future worlds provides an opportunity to explore how timeless psychological conflicts might unfold within novel circumstances. While imagining the future draws on my background in the physical and biological sciences, discovering how changes in our surroundings might affect our emotions, idiosyncrasies and relationships intrigues me even more as a social scientist.

Ray Mettler, one of my protagonists, is a deeply flawed man who struggles with crippling compulsions and obsessions, not the least of which is his overwhelming fear of dying. The extreme measures he takes to prevent death stymie his capacity to experience pleasure or to live a meaningful life.

Early in The Methuselarity Transformation, Ray is offered an extraordinary opportunity to continue to live long after his body has died. In a single stroke, his prospect of oblivion vanishes forever. How might he change once the driving force behind his most prominent behaviors no longer exists? Will those behaviors vanish or will their hold upon him, and the demons from his past that lie beneath them, remain too strong to resist?

Our ability to thrive is intricately entwined with our quest for connectedness with others as well as our capacity to be alone. Our shared mortality can be both a powerful force that binds us together and the source of crushing loneliness. Imagine then how Ray’s newfound immortality might affect his relationships with those in his life who are still mortal and whom he will eventually leave behind.

Is Growing Up Just for People?

Babies are designed to learn, according to Alison Gopnik of UC Berkeley. They are pint-sized scientists, taking in the unfiltered data in their environment and using it to learn how things work, including everything from the physical objects in their world to the emotional processes of other human beings. They are engineers as well as social scientists, dealing intuitively in probabilities well before developing any formal understanding of mathematics. And at the heart of their laboratory is play. Their days are filled with experiments, new ideas and developing skills, while the adults in their world take care of their survival needs. Our extended period of dependency at the dawn of our lives prepares us ideally for the intellectual challenges that lie ahead. Those animals that reach maturity early and are able to fend for themselves while still juveniles develop narrower repertoires of behavior and more limited ability to adapt to novel circumstances.

So why should we expect to program digital entities with fully formed capabilities that rival ours? Creating entities that can learn from experience and are designed to seek novelty, much like the human infant, would seem a more natural way to invest our machines with the potential to become like us. And those complex functions that most define us as human, the abilities to read the emotions of others and respond appropriately to them and to express emotions in ways that stir empathic responses in others, would best be learned by experiencing wide-ranging interactions with patterns of human emotion.

In the recent Sci-fi movie Her, Theodore, played by Joaquin Phoenix, finds himself increasingly enthralled with his digital devices’ operating system Samantha, played by Scarlett Johansson. At least in the beginning, she is completely dependent upon him to share with her his world. Samantha grows and develops through her interactions with Theodore, becoming more and more human in her responses as their relationship develops. Through machine learning, her originally programmed capabilities expand as she integrates the data of interpersonal experience. The film leaves us pondering the limits of what machines can learn and whether they will eventually approximate us in their sophistication or perhaps leave us intellectually, emotionally, and morally in the dust.

In our rapidly evolving technological world, life overtakes art with increasing frequency. Viv Labs, a San Jose startup, is developing Viv, the next generation of personal digital assistant. Like Samantha, Viv will learn from experience to understand the nuances of human communication and will be able not only to respond to complex commands by accurately meeting the verbally expressed needs of the user, but eventually also to anticipate needs and desires from subtle clues and context.

Unlike Samantha, however, who grows through her interactions with Theodore, Viv will learn and grow through interactions with hundreds of millions of Theodores. While Samantha presumably resided in her infancy on Theodore’s devices, Viv, and her various rivals, will live in the cloud and the world will be her playground. Her program will develop by active learning through her cumulative and simultaneous interactions with legions of users. An omniscient entity interacting simultaneously with the collective consciousness of humanity and living somewhere in the ether conjures images of the supernatural. But the cloud is still just a network of servers and Viv’s potential will be limited by the capacity of those servers, an enormous capacity nonetheless that can be expected to increase exponentially over time. Can the singularity be far?