My Interview with Mark Thomas on Woolly Mammoth De-Extinction

This is honestly a Columbian, rather than woolly, mammoth.

These are notes from my interview with Dr. Mark Thomas, a scientist who has done some excellent work on mammoth genomes. This interview was conducted while I was working on my feature for The Washington Post about problems with bringing woolly mammoths back from extinction.

You were involved with some of the earliest research into mammoth DNA back in the early 1990's. To what extent have you kept up with what is happening in that field?

The last paper I published on mammoth DNA was 2005. That was with the advance. So I watched on the genomic stuff. I've watched it a little bit. But they are doing it from an ancient DNA to analyze details for its evolution. I'm aware that George Church has been taking some, building genomes, approach like that. I'm not completely up to date on the technologies that he has advanced. He is not, as I understand, a kind of press-hungry bullshitter. He's the real thing. If he says he's got technologies to do piece-meal insertions of relevant genes, he's probably got it.

There are a number of approaches you can take to de-extinction. One, you can try to clone a cell. I find it really incredible to imagine that you would have an intact cell from that long ago. If there is a species that you could do it in, it's mammoths. But I still find that difficult to believe. That does not mean that there won't be technologies that can do that in the future. When you have double-strand breaks, most cells don't know what to do with it. In terms of repairing double-stranded breaks on old cells and cloning them up, that is sort of science fiction at the moment.

A second approach, there may be something special about how chromosomes are packaged in sperm. So you could use sperm to cross with an elephant and then back cross until you have a real mammoth. I would still be amazed if you could find a sperm that didn't have a double-stranded break. When you have a double-stranded break, how do you know where to join it back? But there may be some special preservation circumstances. I'm not aware of one...

Do you think that we will ever see mammoth genes functioning in either living mammoths or elephants?

Yes, we will definitely see mammoth genes functioning in elephants. There is no doubt that this will happen. We will definitely see a number of them functioning. I don't want to guess how far in the future but it will happen. Maybe sooner rather than later. Undoubtedly we will see functionally important genes in an elephant that has some mammoth appearances.

The funny thing would be if you did everything but the teeth...

Adrian Lister doesn't think its a good idea..

The Riken Center published a paper back in 2006 announcing that they have cloned mice that had been frozen for 16 years without any special preparation. Since that time, nobody has duplicated those results. Are there any red flags here that should cause people to question the research?

Yes. Of course there are red flags. There are always red flags when it hasn't been replicated, especially for such an interesting target for research. I remember reading it when it came out and thinking, 'really'? We tend to be healthily skeptical when its published in a respectable journal. I still remain today to be surprised. …which does make the whole thing smell a little bit worse. It's not my natural gut reaction to say 'you're wrong' but we tend to hold a lot of things in the cloud of uncertainty.

It's interesting that nothing's been replicated. The fact that the second in command of the lab turned out to be a dirty crook, that makes me even more skeptical. That doesn't mean that I dismiss it entirely.

George Church claims that he has a line of elephant cells living and growing in his lab right now that contain 14 mammoth genes associated with survival in cold weather. However, he has not published a paper about this in a peer-reviewed journal. He is unable to direct me to an independent laboratory that can confirm his claim. Would the mainstream scientific community consider this an acceptable way to conduct and announce research?

There's two things here. So firstly, as far as I'm aware, George Church is a highly credible scientist who is extremely unlikely to make something like that up. Secondly, its an impressive achievement but its not shocking. He's one of the world leaders in, sort of, in synthetic DNA. I would have absolutely no reason to disbelieve that. He's going to get excited about it. It doesn't sound to me like he's gone to the press with this. No I don't think that there's anything wrong with him telling you about that.

It may have smaller ears, it may be furry, it may have some mammoth tooth morphology. Its not a mammoth. It's an elephant with mammoth genes, but it ain't a mammoth.

The third approach we can take is that you build up the genome piecemeal. He is a world leader in that kind of technology. It seems perfectly reasonable. It doesn't sound like a false claim or anything. We don't even know what most of the genome does.

...the RNA genome is seen as increasingly important. Now maybe there are no differences between the RNA of a mammoth and an elephant. We don't know.

It's essentially taking some steps on a path. There is a route to de-extinction. It's a long route, but it's there.

George Church claims that 'gestation without implantation' will be possible in a laboratory setting in time for him to clone a mammoth without using a surrogate mother at all. What is your opinion of this claim?

In the words of one of your politicians, 'there are the known unknowns and there are unknown unknowns'... we are only beginning to learn about how vast and... there are a lot... so he may know something I don't know.

Take a step backwards. I would have thought he would have given a better answer to that. Yes, those early experiments were difficult. No doubt the number of tries are going to come down so there's that. I think he's using a sledge hammer to crack a nut. Maybe, maybe someones got that around the corner as well. No doubt were going to make it a less wasteful process.

What do you see as the primary technical barriers to creating a living mammoth?

When it comes to cloning a mammoth, just DNA damage. When it comes to constructing a genome, it's just a lot of work. Even with today's technology it's just a lot of work. George Church is the leader in the field. 14 genes, that's impressive. But its only a very small drop in the ocean.

In the next few decades, do you think that it will eventually be possible to synthesize a mammal, such as a lab mouse, by artificially generating a genome, putting it into an enucleated cell, and growing it in a surrogate?

By that specific route, artificially making DNA, putting it into a cell and hoping it forms chromosomes, no, not in the next 20 years.

The Last Testament of Betsy

Photo courtesy of Brian Wimer.

This was a hard article to write. I took this on because a dear friend was suffering after Betsy died. I felt a unique sense of responsibility because there was nothing else written about this girl. Whatever I wrote about her would become the immortal record of this person's existence on Earth. And that would be the end of it, because she won't be here to keep making more things happen. I was in charge of creating whatever immortality this woman would ever have. I sure as hell didn't take this one on for the money. I accepted this because I cared about giving Betsy a voice and some kind of immortality. An article ran, but I want the full story to be out there for posterity. I think about people I know in real life. People who could drop dead because of this addiction while I run spell-check.

Interview with friends of Elizabeth 'Betsy' Lilitu. By Jackson Landers Including Corey Croson, Catherine Muse, Adam Steffler, Colin Steffler and Yasmine Vielle.

Recorded on 3/20/2016 at Java Java on the Downtown Mall.

[We talked for a long time off-the-record about Betsy before I made sure that everyone was comfortable with me starting the recorder and going on the record.]

COREY CROSON: My name is Cory Croson. I think one of the core things that drove Betsy was a need to be free. A need to explore. It's what drove her out into the world and pushed her to try new things in a way that I don't think that any of us present did. It gave her the drive to jump into things and make it work as the ball was already rolling. A skill that she mastered over time. It gave her the physical drive to be a performer, a dancer, a hula hooper. She's a... she never wanted to feel tied down and she made that work for her. She was always very upfront and you knew how she felt and what she wanted. But she didn't beat you over the head with it, either. She made all of us feel more free too, by pushing us to explore and do things we were afraid to. She always wanted to keep learning, keep doing new things, keep seeing new places. Life was a challenge and an adventure to her and she never backed away from it.

She was family and even when she was halfway across the country I knew I'd see her again soon.

CATHERINE MUSE: When I first met Betsy she was fourteen. Beautiful long blonde hair. Huge, huge smile. Sparking eyes, We met outside on the patio of the [Twisted Branch] Tea House. And I just remember being completely captivated by her. It was an immediate connection. I think we went to Mudhouse after that. I don't think that we were separated. I started hanging out at her apartment, skipping school with her, which led to some bad stuff. But always, always having fun. Right off the bat, she was my sister. My little sister. And we had so many firsts together when we were growing up. So many things that we experimented and got in trouble for. And so many good times. Some hard times, but mostly mostly just the best times of my life. I'll never forget that. I'll never lose that.

[Question from Jackson to Catherine about how she looked shortly before her death compared to a year earlier]

CATHERINE: Well before it wasn't just, it was her looks. Her skin was bad, she was underweight. It was also her personality. She was just kind of, she was muted. It wasn't like her old sparkly self. She was being very selfish. And it was really hard to be friends with her at that time. She got out of jail, I didn't even know. I was at a show, I can't even remember. It was some show at The Ante Room. They were playing all Grateful Dead songs. I saw Betsy in the front row, dancing. And from the back of the room I saw her dreads and I made a beeline up to her. And she gave me the biggest hug and she had gained about thirty pounds since she'd been in. She looked clean and happy and healthy. She had the biggest smile. And she, you know, it was really that immediate first connection again. It was like we were re-meeting each other. She was old Betsy. She was the way that she used to be. And we started hanging out again. But going to lots of shows together. Stuff like that.

COREY CROSON: This is Corey Croson again. Betsy loved dance, hooping, fire performance. She loved art, she loved making art. She loved consuming art. She loved music, she loved travel. She loved making other people smile and bringing them on adventures with her. She was everything that she had wanted to be, whether she knew it all of the time or not. She loved fashion, too. She reinvented her look a ton of different times and she had fun with it every time. She started off with long blonde hair and pea coats and just New England to the bone and I think I have seen more hairstyles and custom-made clothing and patchwork leather pants than anyone else.

[Laughter from around the table]

COLIN STEFFLER: She had that style you wanted to have.

COREY CROSON: Yes, she really did. She had that style you wanted to have.

[Catherine excused herself to leave for work]

ADAM STEFFLER: My name is Adam Steffler. I've known Betsy for the shortest from all the people at this table. But she definitely impacted my life. From being one of the three girls my wife always would bring up in high school as part of a group; Chelsea, Nikki and Betsy. So many stories I heard always started with “so me, Chelsea and Betsy were hanging out, we went and did this nefarious thing,” you know it always sounded real fun. And I met Betsy within a week or two of becoming serious with Colin, who is now my wife. Something you said earlier when you got here was you were talking about how the Daily Progress didn't want to run the obituary and wanted to act like she wasn't a human basically. Or people treat her like she wasn't a human going through this struggle, this addiction. And you know everybody in this restaurant, everyone on the Downtown Mall knows somebody, even if they don't know it, knows somebody who is struggling with some sort of addiction right now.

I don't think there's any way you can say that Betsy wasn't a human. She was full of humanity and she was full of independence and she did a lot of things in her short twenty five years on this world that, like, so many people will never even have the balls to create for themselves or experience. And just so unique in so many ways, from her style, the way she talked, the energy, the freedom. She had a great dog.

And unfortunately she had this pain that stuck with her that she was trying to mask or cure with her use... Like we said earlier it is this continuous cycle. The only way to get out of this pain that you're in is to use again. But then you feel like so guilty about doing it and it's this continuous cycle. I was really glad when I heard when she got out of jail that she was basically clean. And I really hoped that was something she would keep up for a while, forever. But unfortunately it's just one more in a long line of great people. You know from artists and musicians that inspired me growing up, to friends, to Betsy that lost this struggle by going back to the same level of usage they did from before they quit and their body isn't used to it. It's really unfortunate...

Betsy was a human being. Betsy was super unique. Even though I didn't know her in my formative years like these guys knew her, I'll always remember a couple of times that we were at festivals and just experiences we had hanging out and doing stuff around town...

Everyone seemed to know Betsy. Everybody that I know. I wouldn't be surprised if Betsy was the single person in the middle of that circle of contact from this huge scene in Charlottesville. Everybody knew Betsy and everybody could say “we don't know anybody else in common but we knew Betsy in common” and I think she introduced a lot of people and brought a lot of people together. And the fruit of those relationships is going to go on for a long time. People who might not have known each if they had never met Betsy. Its really sad to think the things that, the people she's not going to introduce any more. And the things she's not going to do anymore. I will always have good memories of Betsy. She was a human and she wasn't infallible. I've been angry with her and I've been upset with her but I've never disliked her. No matter what, you knew that she was free. She was doing it from choices that maybe you didn't like. She was doing it from a place of freedom. And while you might not like the choices you couldn't fault her for the reasons of making them sometimes. That's all I really have to say.

They talk about the two times people die. You know, when your physical body leaves the earth and the last time someone says your name or tells a story about you. Betsy is going to live for a long long time. She's not going to be forgotten by anybody who really knew her. Colin and I will probably be sharing Betsy stories when we are sixty or seventy years old together. Talking about out younger years. I'm definitely going to miss her. Betsy was good people.

[Question from Jackson about how she felt about her time in jail] 14:32

CORY CROSON: She did share that opinion. When I corresponded with her both times that she was in jail for an extended period of time she was glad that she was able to get clean in there. She had all sorts of plans for when she got out and she would work her way through her situation by exercising and giving herself something to do physically. She would create art, even in jail and she'd mail it to me. She agreed that it helped and in some cases she needed it. Betsy never treated her addiction like it was some shameful secret and I don't think she would want anyone else to either. She owned everything about herself. She recognized it for the problem it was but she didn't shy away from the reality that it was and [from] it's gravity.

COLIN TURNER: This is Colin Turner. I've known Betsy since I was sixteen, seventeen years old. This is so weird to do. I always envied her. In our group of friends I was always the one that was sensible and responsible. But every time I was with her, she made me have fun. She made me let that guard down and stop trying to be the adult in our situations. Even though I'm only a year older than them, I always felt like the mom, “lets make sure we're drinking water!” We all definitely did things with Betsy when we were younger.

We didn't all go down the same path. The last two years or so I did distance myself just because of her addiction and you know my husband, he's been clean for seven years. It stays with you, your addiction. Even being around someone using makes your stomach hurt, makes you want to use and I was becoming more adult. I was married and trying to start my life and I feel horrible that I wasn't there for her. I still love her. I still think she's great. I still hoop and think about her every time that I do. I still have the hoop that she made me. I love that she did whatever she fucking wanted. In a way, that was her downfall in the end. I think that she'd still be happy with the way that everything has gone, honestly. That's all I can say.

YASMINE VIELLE: My name is Yasmine Vielle. I knew Betsy when she was fifteen, sixteen years old. This is short, but she was an absolutely magical person. She drew people to her in such a way that was remarkable. And as this has been said before. but we can agree on it that she did bring people out of their shell and what was holding them back. She's done that to me and I think to everyone at this table. It's remarkable that a person can have that type of magic within them. I saw her Friday night maybe about fourteen hours before I heard [that she had overdosed]. And she looked very happy and just dancing. She hugged me and kissed me on the face. When you're around her, she did put you in a good mood. Even if you weren't, she smacked your butt and hugged you in a very Betsy way. A very unique way... I'll miss her.

ADAM STEFFLER: This is Adam Steffler again. I also think It's also worth saying, or pointing out, that out even though she was clean, looked good, was feeling good, her life had changed for the better where she didn't have this physical addiction any more, and she was dealing with the mental addiction I guess in healthy ways by not using. This says something about the insidiousness of the drug and how tough addiction is and how it really gets its claws into you. The night before, you know potentially five hours before she overdosed, a couple hours before she overdosed, she was looking good, feeling good. Clean. You know its just, that pull is so strong that no matter how much she knew, and how much she had already gone through, and you know thought getting clean, going through jail was the silver lining. going to jail was something, her mom thought it saved her life. Betsy might have thought something pretty similar. It saved her from going down a darker path with it. It just goes to show how much people struggle and no matter how good you're doing or no matter how strong you feel or what you're portraying to others, there's always pain inside. There's always, there's that pull that she just couldn't or wouldn't or didn't want to say no to this time. It's really sad. It worries me.

I've lost my friend, my best friend who had been clean for five or six years. Just relapsed a year and a half ago. He got himself cleaned up again. Now he's probably doing better than he has in his life. We talked the other day. He's running five miles a day and cooking meals for himself. He's getting his life really, he's doing better than I thought he ever would be doing. More adult than I thought him to be. It just worries me, I could get that same call.

No matter how good you're doing there's always that fear. Something she didn't say no to that night. That's one of the last decisions she ever made because of it. The finality of that. It's really scary to me and really unfortunate. That dichotomy of doing good, but. I'm sure in her mind she wasn't thinking, 'here I go again, I'm gonna down this dark path again, things are gonna get bad.' You know it might have just been a one time thing, we'll never know. In her own mind. That just really really bums me out. In her own mind it was preventable. She knew better and could have made a different decision that night. While I don't want to try to lay blame at her feet... the decision was hers. Even though it might have been made subconsciously in her own mind. It might not have been the physical conscience saying it, 'here I go again.' But it was something she couldn't say know to and that's really scary and really sad. I hope she wasn't dealing with a lot of pain the last night she was alive. What ever drew her back to that or, you know, made her want to use again...

JACKSON: So we don't know that there was any particular stressful thing?

If there was something else, nobody's willing to speak up about it.

END FIRST RECORDING

[We all talked a lot off the record]

BEGIN SECOND RECORDING

COREY CROSON: Betsy was loved by more people than she or I will ever know. She did a lot to protect the people she really cared about from having to experience her struggle with addiction and drag them through it with her. But that's not really something you can stop and whether she knew it or not, we were right there with her. It was, it was hard but there were times when she was able to get through it and it proves a strength we all knew she had.

ADAM STEFFLER: I just with she'd reached out that night to somebody.

JACKSON: She wasn't in any kind of treatment, was she?

ADAM STEFFLER: No, she was headstrong like that...

How Donated Clothes Hurt Kenya

While traveling in Western Kenya last year, I met a man in the city of Kisumu, who calls himself "Tom Tourist." Tom is a self-taught aquatic biologist who grew up in the hills near Lake Victoria. He recalled hunting zebras and antelope with a bow as a child. Today, the wildlife on dry land is almost completely gone.The lake still harbors crocodiles, hippos, Nile monitor lizards and a variety of birds. The fish are declining due to a combination of pollution, over-fishing and the effects of invasive species.

We spent a day motoring around together in a boat on Lake Victoria. While stopped in a lake-side village, we saw these people selling used American clothes. With the exception of the Maasai, everyone I saw in Kenya was wearing western clothes. Most of it comes from free donations of used clothing in the US and Europe by well-intended people. The clothing is bundled into bales and sold at very low prices through a series of middle-men until it arrives in Africa.

As Tom explains in this very short video that I filmed, these donations have destroyed the Kenyan cloth industry and erased much of their culture. Weaving cloth and sewing clothes used to be a good business that helped Kenyan women support themselves. That whole part of their economy has been destroyed. For thousands of years, these smart, capable people clothed themselves as needed. They don't need our help.

Tom also told me a story about how years earlier he met a Norwegian woman who had hired him to act as a guide for the day. She looked at his shoes and said that they looked exactly like her brother's shoes that he'd gotten rid of several years before in Norway. He removed one of them for closer inspection and the brother's name was still written on it. The Norwegian tried to buy the pair to bring back home and present to her brother.

Tom refused to sell them.

"I really like those shoes," he said.

The Scientist Behind The X-Files

Image courtesy of Anne Simon

One of the interviews that my friends were most jealous of during this past year was my conversation with Dr. Anne Simon, science advisor for The X-Files. The assignment was a short piece for Smithsonian about an upcoming lecture (sorry, you have long since missed it). She has some very strong things to say about anti-GMO paranoia. Here are my complete notes.

Do you want to believe?

I think everyone wants to believe that there's more than just the existence that we see here. Like everyone else, I think it would be wonderful if some of the science fiction that you read becomes fact some day. But do I believe? I don't think there's evidence for it. As a scientist, I keep an open mind.

The bit about Henrietta Lacks in the first episode of the new season -- was that your doing?

I don't know if it was. Certainly it's something like I would say. I felt very strongly about that. I think that they used her cells, the poor woman died and then her cells are used by everybody. Frankly, it should not have been done without the consent of her family. She was a real person. ...the fact that I she was African American played into it.

I email him [Chris Carter] science articles and information every day. He loves it.

How do you feel about the way that science is depicted in television and film? Has accuracy improved since you started consulting for the X-Files?

I think that it has improved somewhat. That also might be because I avoid watching television. I saw The Martian and it was just terrific. You could tell how much they had paid attention to the people who were advising. It just shows that science can be portrayed in the media and be very popular.

In the beginning of episode three of the new season, Mulder does a sort of mea culpa about rational explanations of some of the cases from the era of the original series. Did you have anything to do with that?

No.

During the years between the end of the original series and the start of the new one, did you find yourself still coming across concepts in biology that you wanted to pitch to Chris Carter? Was it frustrating not having any place to take those ideas?

Yeah, that's always the case. I never thought there would be any more. I've known Chris for a long time and after the first series he was just so burned out. It was 24/7 for nine years and he was just very tired. And he said “I will never do another.” When he decided to do more I was surprised by it.

And I pitched an idea. That they found anomalies in the genome, and then it turned into episode 6 [of the new season].

Have you ever done any consulting or other work on any other shows or movies?

No, but I'm more than happy to help other people. The Science and Entertainment Exchange, sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences. ... they had me in a forum where I was there and the guy who did the science for Spiderman was there, and then Jerry Zucker was there. And the guy who did Law & Order SVU was there. And we were talking about how science gets into shows and how it's important to get accurate science in the shows because people don't know the difference between good science and inaccurate science.

Do you think that having this accurate scientific information coming out of Dana Scully's mouth had any impact on the numbers of girls deciding to go into science or medicine?

Yes, I think that had a significant impact. It's called "the Scully effect." When people were telling me about it during the early run, I didn't believe it at first. Then this woman contacted me about her PHd that she was working to study it... So in my next lecture I asked my class, this was probably in 1999, if anyone was influenced to be here by The X-Files. Two thirds of the hands went up. I still get email from people who say that they read my book because they liked The X-Files, someone bought the book for them, and then they couldn't put it down. And they say “I want to be a scientist now!” There are some things that are a little problematic because some people think you are portraying bad science. Like in episode 6 people say “you're making people afraid of vaccines!” but if you think that people are going to avoid vaccinating their kids because of imaginary aliens doing things on a TV show, that is just ridiculous. There isn't any hope to begin with for anyone that dumb.

It is one thing to accept the premise of an alien life form or bio-engineered bees, but how do you feel about the depiction of things like telekinesis on the show?

It's science fiction so I don't have any problem with that. What I would have a problem with would be if they depicted GMO food making people sick.

Cryogenically preserved heads communicating with each other, that's just absurd. But nobody sees that and thinks it is real science.

So yeah, I think what this is doing through social media is get people to look at science. Don't just listen to what people say. Especially about GMOs. People from organic food companies are saying things about GMOs that are just wrong. This stuff about GMOS on social media is just lies. It's like Donald Trump on Facebook. This is the only way that they can make money. We've got 3 to 6 million children dying each year so that they can make profits. You've got something like golden rice that alleviate [???] cases of blindness each year from vitamin deficiencies. And they are fighting tooth and nail to stop access to golden rice and children are dying because of it.

People are basing their opinions on fake, retracted data. We're basing ours on peer-reviewed studies. Who should you believe?

I've had almost zero connection with industry. I work on viruses. I have no financial stake in it -- I have an ethical stake in it. These people don't understand that they are like Donald Trump. Whether the things they say true or not, they don't care. And their supporters don't care.

I've heard that you were a fan of the show before you started consulting on it. How did it feel the first time you watched an episode of the X-Files and saw something on the show that you were responsible for?

Chris was working on the last episode of the first season, so I helped him a lot with that episode. All of the science in that episode came from me. I was such a big fan of the show. I hadn't realized that the Chris Carter I'd known for years was the same Chris Carter who made the show!

[I asked some type of follow-up question here but I'm not sure exactly what it was.]

I felt really good about it. And I didn't tell anyone. Because I'm a serious scientist and I didn't want anyone to think that I wasn't. ... The last thing you want is for people to be discussing, "well she's doing this stuff for The X-Files." I was worried that I would have trouble getting grants or getting published. But now I already have an established resume. But now, seeing my name in the credits last night, it made my heart jump. To see that actually on the screen.

Now it's really a way to communicate science. And when you have all of this misinformation we have to find a way to counter that. ...

Anything that says "GMO free," I won't buy. Because they are using fear-mongering and lies to sell products. That's just the worst thing that they can do. By spreading all this GMO stuff on social media I feel that I'm doing some good.

Can you name a species or biological concept that you've always wanted to work into the show but it just didn't happen?

I'd love to use crinkle virus. The virus that I work on happens to infect plants. I work on them because they are excellent models. They are small and easy to work with but they do the same thing that animal viruses do. They aren't dangerous.

Other than The X-Files, what films or television shows do you think have been depicting good science lately?

Outbreak was good. Outbreak and The Martian.

Can you give us a preview of your upcoming talk at Smithsonian?

For years I did a science of the X-Files talk. I'm going to start out by talking about how I got involved. I will show pages of the original script and how we went through corrections. I'll talk about some funny stuff with making the movie. And then I'll talk about the science behind the sixth episode. But you don't even have to know The X-Files to come and get something out of it. ... It's very funny.

[I asked a question here. Not sure what it was exactly]

The first time I was in the credits was the movie. He wanted to put “Dr. Anne Simon," I didn't want him to put “doctor.” One of the things you are supposed to do at a university is outreach and this is a form of public outreach.

I just don't think that this title that I have is meaningful. Doctor Anne Simon is the scientist. Anne Simon is the science adviser.

A Daring BLM-esque Banner from the Civil War

Image courtesy of National Archives.

Even in the Union Army, I am amazed that Philadelphia artist David Bustill Bowser got away with making this banner for a colored regiment during the American Civil War. 

I stumbled across Bowser while interviewing Tim Winkle, a historian and curator at Smithsonian's Museum of American History for a short article about a firefighting exhibit that Winkle had put together. Winkle mentioned a fireman's hat that Bowser had hand-painted. 

"He was creating these works of art for a white fire company even when" he wasn't allowed to join because of the color of his skin, Winkle said. "Fire companies mirrored society at the time."

After getting off the phone with Winkle, I started researching Bowser, who was black, and came across the image of the banner shown here (image courtesy of the National Archives). I'm not sure where the original is today, or if it still exists.

The 22nd Regiment (or "22th", as the banner reads) was raised in Pennsylvania in 1864. They were black soldiers led by white officers. The image of a black man with a rifle pointed at the chest of a white man on the ground is powerful and arresting. Note how Bowser (presumably with instructions from members of the Regiment?) has borrowed and subverted the motto of The Commonwealth of Virginia -- "sic semper tyrannis," which is Latin for "Thus always to tyrants."

The banner may express an attitude in common with today's Black Lives Matter movement. We see a black man who does not tolerate violence against his people and is pointing a gun at a white officer who had oppressed him. Thankfully, the gesture appears to have resulted in the officer's surrender rather than his death.

The resulting article for Smithsonian mentioned Bowser only in passing. Because the assignment was to write about the fire fighting exhibit, there wasn't a good reason to include the image of this banner in the article.

Thomas Watters on Researching the Geology of Mercury

Image courtesy of NASA

Back in September I wrote an article for Smithsonian Magazine about the discovery that Mercury has a system of plate tectonics. This gave me the opportunity to interview Dr. Thomas Watters about his discovery. Here is my interview with him in full.

As always, the ellipsis indicates that he was either talking too fast for me to type or was saying something that I knew I didn't need for the article. The only questions written down were those that I wrote in advance of the interview. My follow-up questions and comments didn't get typed in. A question mark mid-sentence means that I missed a single word.

This is super-specialized stuff that I realize most readers won't be able to follow. I am putting it online in case some day another writer might be working on a book or article about the history of space exploration and can use this as source material.

Am I correct in summarizing your evidence by saying that the presence of long escarpments means that there is geological activity, because otherwise they would have been erased by meteor impacts millions of years ago?

You're close. I can understand where it gets confusing. It's really what's new here is, the big news finding in these low-altitude final campaign Messenger campaign images is that we found very small versions of these big scarps that we've known were on Mercury since Mariner 10. Mariner imaged less than a full hemisphere, but a good chunk. There big thrust fault scarps that indicate that the crust had been fused together and contracted was evident in those images. With Messenger, we saw the other hemisphere and the scarps were there, too. Then we went into orbit and mapped them some more. One of these is as long as the San Andreas fault. These are monsters even by Earth standards. So we knew that Mercury had contracted to form these. The planet had literally been shrinking.

What we didn't know was how long this had been going on and more importantly if it was still going on. Because we really couldn't resolve even... sort of the smoking gun to determine whether this contraction is still going on is these very small scarps. And it sort of connects to the Moon. Because when Messenger was heading for Mercury, we had the lunar reconnaissance going around the Moon. Imaging the Moon with the highest resolutions ever from orbit. Down to a meter. In those, I found evidence of these very small fault scarps. We saw them globally on the moon, which means that the moon is contracting. Very slowly. …it indicated that, and the reason again, I'll preface it, that these small ones are so important is that the Moon and Mercury are airless bodies and there is nothing to protect them from constant meteorite bombardment. That bombardment will erode land forms very quickly. Seeing these small scarps means that these bodies are tectonically active...

...you had to keep moving the spacecraft. Burning fuel to keep the spacecraft from falling. And then we decided near the end to let the spacecraft go lower. ...when we started to reach this level of about 20 meters per pixel, suddenly these small scarps started to pop up. And that tells us what is happening on Mercury. In scale, they are identical to the ones we found on the Moon. The flux of meteors on Mercury is probably at least 3 times higher than around the Moon. ...this tectonic activity is still happening. Mercury is still forming new faults.

These very young faults occur in clusters. If you continue to contract the surface...

What is causing the contraction?

It is the cooling. It is the way Mercury is cooling down. We have known from even before we got Messenger there. We knew and had evidence that Mercury still had a molten core. We know that also because when Mariner 10 got there it had an active magnetic field, just like the Earth's. It was confirmed through other means and through Messenger's orbit that the liquid core was there. So you know you've got this heat source inside of Mercury which is slowly cooling. As it cools, the internal volume changes and the crust of the planet has to adjust to that change. That is what causes the contraction.

It has shrank by 1 to 2 kilometers in 3.9 billion years.

When the spacecraft descended that low, was it then doomed?

Yeah. We had a choice to either expend the available fuel to keep it in this mapping orbit or just allow it to become lower. The solar tides, there is no way you could keep a spacecraft in an orbit around Mercury that will just drag it down. The idea was that why don't we use that fuel to keep us in an orbit low where we can get these images of at least the northern hemisphere. ...it was highly eliptical. We couldn't put it in a circular orbit or it would get cooked. It was a decision to say this would give us an opportunity to see the surface at much higher resolution that we could see otherwise. …when we lowered the altitude we got down to 1 to 2 meters per pixels in some places. It was like a new mission. It meant that the spacecraft was doomed, but that was going to happen anyway.

The other thing I want to mention is that we got fortunate. My real goal was to find evidence for these young small scarps. But we got lucky and were able to image some of the bigger scarps in higher resolution. We imaged one particular large scarp at very high resolution and found evidence that that large scarp was currently active... the other thing is one of the really important observations we made with this low-altitude campaign was with the magnetometer. … what we were able to do was get low enough, close enough to the surface that now we could start measuring fossils of the magnetic field that got locked into the volcanic rock when it cooled. Sure enough, we detected in these ? billion year old rocks the remnants of a magnetic field, which was incredible. We thought that because of its size Mercury must have cooled quickly in the early days of the solar system. When the magnetic field was detected by Mariner 10, they thought it was a late stage, temporary thing. But finding this evidence of a magnetic field in 3.6 billion year old rocks, means that like Earth's magnetic field it has been around for billions of years. Together with the tectonic history, it paints a whole new picture of what Mercury's history must have been like. ...it puts Mercury very close to Earth in terms of very slow cooling that allows the outside to remain cool and the inside hot.

Do you think that Mercury has a system of tectonic plates like Earth's, or are there differences that need to be pointed out?

There's very definitely a difference. The Earth, with this mosaic of plates, everyone immediately thinks of plate tectonics. Earth's shell is broken up among about a dozen plates that cause most of the tectonic activity on Earth. On Mercury, we don't have any evidence for a series of plates. Mercury seems to be a one-plate planet. That shell is uniformly contracting. We don't really understand why the Earth developed this mosaic of plates. But it's what keeps the Earth from contracting. ...

How recently has there been volcanic activity on the surface of Mercury?

It's not really, I think, well-known. There isn't any evidence in the Messenger data of what you could describe as recent volcanic activity. Mercury had its last really massive global scale volcanic resurfacing event back where it locked in the fossil magnetic fields over 3 billion years ago. But there's probably been more recent events than that. There's evidence of localized pyroclastic eruptions but it's really hard to figure out if those are very recent. ...there are studies going on looking at that very thing.

Given the extreme temperature fluctuations, do you think that it will ever be possible to send probes to the surface of Mercury for more data?

Yeah, I think so. There's a couple of ways you could approach it. Its certainly a challenge. One thing I haven't talked about is the implication for seismic activity... all these young faults are all growing, developing, directly with slip events, connected with Mercury-quakes. So if you wanted to put a lander down or something similar to what we're going to do on Mars in 2018 with INSIGHT to put a real seismometer. It's going to be a challenge because the day side of Mercury gets up to 800 degrees F. And the other side gets down to minus ? degrees F. … it's going to be tough but it's not impossible. And there are areas on Mercury near the poles that are permanently shadowed like we have on the Moon. So you could find areas in craters [that aren't so hot] where you could put landers that wouldn't be as thermally challenged. But we're getting better at that. We're talking about probes that would land on Venus. They wouldn't last for a terribly long time, operating for a decade or better like on Mars. …but the technology is getting better and better. In the future it will be possible to do this and put probes on the surface. I'm very hopeful that this paper might stimulate thinking about putting a seismic network on the planet.

Where do we go from here to gather more data about Mercury? What else could be done?

We've got a mission, the space crafts are built and being prepared to be launched for an ESA mission called Bepicolombo. It has slipped a few times and I don't know where they are on the launch date. ...it's going to continue, if everything is successful, the studies that Mariner 10 and Messenger have begun and one thing in particular that I'm looking forward to is higher res imagining in the southern hemisphere because that's where we have the poorest imaging.

Is it hard to get attention and funding for Mercury?

Funny you bring this up. On Monday, NASA, I was happy they thought this was significant enough to do a piece on NASA's website. I thought great, not a big science news-worthy day so maybe Mercury will get the spotlight! But later that day, I found out that NASA just made an announcement that Hubble had found evidence of plumes coming from Europa. So it was like, great, Mercury is not going to compete with water vapor plumes coming from a deep ocean that might have life. I get this picture of geysers on Europa ejecting the poor life forms way up in the air...

The one thing Mercury has, is, we're pretty confident that we've got water in these permanently shaded craters. But Mercury is not a habitable world and we have a lot of focus on habitable worlds. Mars is certainly the most hospitable for past life or current life. And of course its a much easier place to, you're not going to have to deal with the kind of extreme temperatures that you're looking for on Venus or Mercury. It's a challenge to get missions to planets that don't have this habitability element.

What we've found now from Mercury is that there's no other planet we know of that is tectonically active. Trying to understand how rocky planets evolve in this solar system. This whole notion of what is the spectrum of evolution on a rocky body? Is plate tectonics a necessary element of developing life on a rocky planet? There are some really important things to learn about. What the evolution of rocky bodies are. Mars, at the opposite end of this, its core froze very early in its history. Its magnetic field, also recorded as a fossil, is billions of years old. From what we can tell volcanic activity shut down on Mars a long time ago. The freezing of the core and the loss of the magnetic field is probably connected to when Mars's climate changed. Because it no longer had a magnetic field to protect its atmosphere from being swept away by the ? wind. …it really does beg the question of how much we really know about how rocky planets form and evolve.

My Interview with Teller

Image in public domain

Several months ago I had the privilege of interviewing Teller, the great magician from the duo of Penn and Teller. This was for an article I wrote for Smithsonian Magazine about Harry Houdini's legacy as an American innovator. Teller was so knowledgeable about Houdini's biography, methods and historical context that it seemed like a shame for me to leave so much of what he said on the cutting room floor. 

This is pretty much the entire text of the interview. Where I use the ellipsis, he was talking too quickly for my hands to keep up typing (this was a phone interview and I type in real time during phone interviews). In places where you see a question mark mid-sentence, there was a single word I couldn't make out. The written questions are only those I had prepared in advance. I talked more than you see in writing here, but I don't usually bother to type out my follow-up questions and comments when transcribing in real time. If Teller seems to lurch unexpectedly from one topic to another, probably he was responding to something I said.

When in your life did you first get interested in Harry Houdini?

I believe the Philadelphia public library was my great friend in magic from the time I was a small child until I went to college. They had many books including some by Walter Gibson. He wrote a number of books on Houdini's behalf. I think that was the first place I encountered him. You are immediately and romantically in love with this guy who has the imagination who is terribly driven and brilliant.

By the time I saw the Tony Curtis movie I was just annoyed by it.

Have you ever had the chance to examine some of the things that Houdini made? Like his Chinese water torture chamber? And without asking you to give any specific secrets away about his or your tricks, have you learned anything from seeing how he built things?

Yes, I have in fact had a very close look at the water torture cell, which is shockingly small. You picture it as this towering thing. But it was a compact, efficient thing. It was destroyed by fire and restored by a guy named John Gaugn [?]. It's a brilliant piece of mechanics. It's a marvelous thing. A lot of the things in the [?] books turnout to be accurate. Penn and I have done, and may some day return to, a version of one of his tricks. …

Houdini's real stage was less the stage than it was the newspapers. He knew how to make a performance happen in people's minds by means of reportage. When you think about him escaping from jail cells and switching the prisoners around and showing up in a distant location, he was a maker of stories in addition to being a performer who was electrifying to see.

I have the first letter he wrote to his brother after the death of his mother. And it contains the phrase, 'Deshi, it's tough and I can't seem to get over it. Sometimes I feel all right when a calm moment happens it's as bad as ever.' So the only time he can get over the death of his mother is when he is working.

Another letter I have is one to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. They became friends because he admired education. Doyle admired Houdini's American manliness, you could say. They became great friends. [Teller mentions a photograph] Houdini was visiting Atlantic City. Houdini was on the beach in Atlantic city, so they are muffled up with all their winter clothing. And while there, a very famous episode happened. Lady Doyle, who was an ardent spiritualist, they were mostly because their son died horribly in ? And she thought she could do automatic writing. And she went into a trance and had a supposed message from Houdini's mother. …he was moved by it and touched by it, but in this letter he had an uneasy feeling about it. Because the letter from his mother didn't have anything evidentiary in it. And it was in English, which she never spoke. …and it commenced with a cross, which was odd because she was the wife of a rabbi. And there were other things in there that Houdini found rational explanations for after he got out of the moment of passion.

After he spoke to the press, he said he thought that lady Doyle was sincere but not in touch with his mother. Lady Doyle was ? Houdini wrote this letter saying that 'I think you are sincere but...' that was Houdini's turn from any possible idea of spiritualism being real.

He collected a lot of stuff. Sid Radner, who was the biggest collector, had an auction in Los Angeles, which was how I got those things. I also got a big black wooden cross. Which I thought wouldn't go for much at auction... I bought the thing thinking this was a good souvenir. After I had bought it, Sid came up and said, 'be careful you don't have kids around this thing.' I said 'why not?' He said, 'you don't want them sticking their fingers in here.' …It has holes where you lash a person to it and they try to escape. What I didn't realize is that it is an elaborate mechanism... which a simple movement of your foot you could sever all of the ropes simultaneously.

One of the things about Houdini that people rarely comment on, Houdini was in an age that is somewhat parallel to our age in this way... in his age people had worked on farms for years and years and now they worked in factories and offices. They were growing soft. There was a movement towards making people who were fit into stars... Houdini seemed to capitalize on the fact that he was extremely fit, he was quite an athletic guy. A lot of the shots that you see in newspapers are just showing off, with a lock that covered his genitals, because he represents this thing that people don't have.

For several decades we've seen people getting very soft. People who look like Brad Pitt in his prime, their fitness makes them stars.

Is there any object that Houdini left behind where you look at it and just cannot figure out what this thing was for or how it worked?

I have not encountered such a thing... Certainly he was obsessed with being at the cutting edge of everything. Aviation which was kind of an odd choice, because it was the new thing. He was super aware of what trends are happening and tried to stay on top of them. Silverman calls him an icon of modernity. When he escapes from a straight jacket, it's in front of a skyscraper.

No, in terms of inventions, some of the things that, he was also obviously, he knew that the cinema was the next thing and tried to become a movie star. And he kind of did. …there's a great deal of charm. He's acting quite naturalistically and I was surprised by that. …obviously what he was outstanding at was ?

As I look at some of what Houdini said and wrote, I keep finding some things that are sort of off. Like he claimed to have invented a working robot that was used in his first major movie, but looking at that with modern eyes we can see that this is definitely a guy in a suit. How reliable is Houdini as a historical source?

Not terribly. His job, although he had hopes of becoming an author and historian, his job was to be a show man and that's what he was. He was very interested in the history of magic. And one of the things he did consistently was search out the graves of magicians and when they were people he admired he would restore those graves. He collected a lot of information but I wouldn't look to him as a historian because historians have standards.

What you and Penn do seems to sort of refer to Houdini's legacy at times without trying to imitate it. How, if at all, does Houdini's work inform what you have done in your own career?

Houdini was the outstanding exponent of the idea that magicians are uniquely qualified to detect fraud. And uniquely qualified to be skeptics. We're not the first ones to do this. The Amazing Randi is someone of considerable powers who focused on the skeptical angle. When you are a professional magician you want to see your art respected for what it is, not misused to mislead people about the universe. Houdini really brought, in his style, he disposed of the point that booga-booga thing that magicians had carried for a long time. He wasn't the first to take it out of the black arts thing. Robert-Houdin was. But particularly the escape stuff, it comes out of a history, a spiritualist history. In seances, mediums were typically restrained in some way. Even locked up in boxes... at least tied and sometimes chained or handcuffed. He would escape to do their manifestations and get locked up again. Houdini said, 'there are no spirits, I'm just a clever guy getting out of stuff.' It was a major transformation. There's a great quote from him in Congress where they ask, 'nothing is done by supernatural means?' He said, 'I do tricks that nobody can find out.' I love that, there's such balls in this.

He did go through a period earlier where he did a fake mind reading act. ...he was fundamentally honest with the audience. Doyle drove Houdini crazy by saying things like, 'all you did was de-materialize yourself on the inside and re-materialize yourself on the outside!' It drove Houdini crazy.

...is the fact that he always left the thing that he got out of exactly as he left it. …if you left me in a trunk or safe, when I got out it would be wide open. But Houdini would leave the thing still intact.

As an innovator, he's the guy who kind of figured out how to use the press. When you think back, he's the first prominent person that you see doing co-promotions with corporations. If he's coming to your town and you are centered around the beer industry, he would talk to the brewery and arrange to escape from a giant beer keg or something …he is really the guy who made a whole thing out of co-promoting with a major corporation.

I know that there are some people who are trying to keep the idea of an escape artist alive, but why do you think that this stopped being something that most Americans care about? Why don't we have mainstream escape artists anymore?

I think there's the big picture psychological reason which is that everybody was an immigrant and everyone was fleeing from the chains of oppression in another country. The idea was you could be a tough little immigrant and no matter how hard the big guys came down on you, like the police or the big company in your town, he would take the symbol of authority and defy it in the act of self-liberation. … and the idea of self liberation has more appeal to people than mere escape.

Is there anything that Houdini did that has stuck with you, where you could never figure out how he did that?

I've read a lot. There are still some things that are unknown, although people have strong suspicions. In a lot of cases Houdini would do whatever was necessary to make something happen. And what was necessary included some of the uglier things in magic. Like collusion or bribery. None of those were very heroic, but he would resort to those. Nothing in my head comes to mind...