Bunch of Amateurs (22 page)

They have developed two strategies. One is to insert GFP, the same glow plasmid in Patterson’s yogurt, and use that as a test for the presence of melamine. One swab on a food sample, and if there’s a trace of melamine, then the Q-tip would glow in the dark under a black light. Another approach is to create a bacteria that, in the presence of melamine, would break it down into ammonia and water. Not all that tasty, but it beats getting sick. Maybe they can make it taste like bananas when they get around to melaminometer 2.0.

As Patterson and all her peers come up with new ideas and start trying them out, the question will get to the public sphere as just what are we permitting here? Patterson would argue that this kind of innovation, when it happens slowly and as the result of folksy methods known by 4-H-ers as “animal husbandry,” is perfectly acceptable. The “dog,” as we currently know him, is a product of the oldest synthetic biology. Thousands of years ago, the occasional wolf brave enough (or tame enough) to approach a human campfire for scraps eventually developed an emotional bond. Dogs seek out alpha dogs to be their leaders and trainers. Early humans quickly figured this out and began the long process of selective breeding that has turned the wolf into all manner of variations of itself—pit bull, collie, Chihuahua. Any major plant humans love to consume—the banana, the ear of corn, the apple, the potato, the tomato, most hot peppers—were all long ago coaxed into becoming the now seemingly fixed bounty of nature we revere. But we made them, using slow-motion synthetic biology.

“Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder,” wrote Freeman Dyson. “There are thousands of people, amateurs and professionals, who devote their lives to this business. Now imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people.”

Of course, that’s already happening. Folks like Patterson aren’t likely to be deterred from their passion by good press or bad.
Jurassic Park
or
Lorenzo’s Oil
—it pretty much doesn’t matter. When we spoke late one night about what it was that kept her awake, she talked—lovingly, I should add—about all the bacteria that live on us or in our gut. To her, this was a universe unto itself. And the one she was now committed to explore.

“It’s called the human micro-biome,” she said, as if referring to some nebula system a hundred thousand light-years away. Amateurs typically gather at every new frontier—colonial America, radio, air flight, the moon, the Internet. Like trendsetters in stores or early adopters with gadgets, amateurs and their fiddling tend to point us toward the next uncharted region. Amateur geneticists are already heading to the next horizon over yonder, the next alluring New World, our bodies, ourselves.

was seventeen years old when I discovered I was the great
⁴⁸
-grandson of Charlemagne—King of the Franks and Holy Roman Emperor. Where I grew up, it’s not unusual to find out such things. The culture of Charleston, South Carolina, is built around the pride associated with a handful of family histories. Like most of my friends downtown, almost without my knowing it, my youth was an unconscious state of perpetual genealogical questing. Might I be the descendent of a signer of the Declaration? Robert E. Lee’s messenger? I bugged my mom and aunts and uncles. Who am I really? Might my childhood friends turn out to be third cousins? In Charleston, that last one’s almost too easy.

My mother grew exhausted with my pestering and sent me to see Mary Pringle, an ancient cousin and amateur genealogist. Primed with curiosity, I arrived at cousin Mary’s elegant antebellum home on a hot summer day. After some iced tea and pleasantries, I was presented with a large, unwieldy sheet of paper, bearing a set of concentric circles. In the center, Mary wrote my name, and in the immediate outer circle, divided in half, she wrote the names of my parents. In the next circle, divided now into fourths, she wrote the names of my four grandparents. We filled it out as far as we could in every direction, and in that area where her family and mine converged—her life’s work—a seemingly unbounded wedge flew backward to Scotland and England, until my ancestors were hobnobbing with William Shakespeare and Mary Queen of Scots. “This line,” Mary said, pointing to one of the ancient British earls we could claim, “leads in a direct line all the way to Charlemagne.”

This revelation was too much past to absorb and too much pride to possess. I wanted to ask her what the Holy Roman Emperor had left me in his will. But Mary’s tone was solemn, nearly religious:

“Understand that you are the direct descendent of King Charlemagne,” she murmured. The room felt still, as the rest of the universe slowly wheeled about on its gyre—around me, just like on the paper.

I left Mary Pringle’s house feeling pretty, well, rooted. It’s an important experience for most people—knowing where they come from. And being heir to Charlemagne would serve me just fine on the young gentleman’s party circuit. Over the next few years, I became as cunning at hefting this lumbering chunk of self-esteem into passing conversation as a Harvard grad slyly alluding to attending “school in Cambridge.”

Roots are important to us—us being all Americans—because they are the source of so much of our national anxiety of not quite belonging. Has any passenger manifest been more fretted over than the
Mayflower
’s? The only use of the Internet by Americans that’s competitive with porn, according to several studies, is genealogy.
The most significant television miniseries,
Roots
, spawned a wave of pride among African-Americans (and arguably even that hyphenated name) and is partly responsible for the ongoing effort to drain the word “white” of its racist intimations by recasting it as “Irish-American,” “Scottish-American,” “Italian-American,” and the like. For everyone—including Native Americans who itchily remind the rest of the nation that they might also be called First Americans—there is a deep anxiety about rootedness and its claims. When Bill Frist was elevated to majority leader of the Senate in 2003, he had just self-published a book. Its title cries out as much with this anxiety as it does with pride:
Good People Beget Good People: A Genealogy of the Frist Family
.

The truth is, this anxiety can never really be quelled. About three years after I had tea with Mary Pringle, I was in a college calculus class when the teacher made a point about factoring large numbers. He decided to dramatize it by giving an example from the real world, explaining how redundancy affected genealogy in a process called “pedigree collapse.” He noted that if you run your line back to a.d. 800, the number of direct ancestors you would have, on average, is 562,949,953,421,312. That’s half a quadrillion people, which is more than five thousand times the total number of humans (106 billion) who have ever lived.

How, he asked, could this be? Well, when one goes back in time, the number of ancestors expands arithmetically: 2 grandparents, 4 great-grandparents, 8 great-great-grandparents. But soon enough, one’s ancestors assume duplicate places on the family tree. Otherwise, the law of arithmetic progression creates all kinds of crowding problems. The number of ancestors one has by
A.D
. 1300 is just over 268 million people, or roughly the total population of humans on the planet at that time. Beyond that year, of course, the whole thing starts to collapse inward, and then it rapidly implodes through super-redundancy into the smaller populations that existed then.

The upshot, the teacher explained, is that nearly everyone currently
living anywhere on the planet can claim (and he paused for emphasis) “to be the direct descendant of Charlemagne.”

The room felt still, if not absurd, as the rest of the universe slowly creaked about me on its gyre, laughing. “The mathematical distinction,” the teacher added, “would be to
not
have Charlemagne as a direct ancestor.”

When we use the term “rank amateur,” the meaning we’re aiming at is this level of silliness. Rank amateurism makes delightful, if often insufferable, sense. I’m talking of the kind of insupportable rant your insane uncle unloads at Thanksgiving Day dinner—until someone pierces the bubble of absurdity.

This kind of amateurism is like so many urban legends. There is a surface logic, which is really an anxiety about some current topic (organ transplants, normalizing homosexuality, black people) that becomes a belief centered on some apocryphal anecdote about a missing kidney, gerbilling, or naming a son Nosmo from a half-obscured No Smoking sign. Then one day, someone—often cruelly—reveals that no actual account of any of these stories really exists, suggesting that you were a schmuck/homophobe/racist for believing anything that stupid and there you are. An amateur at
knowing
.

If “amateur” in Europe still generally means an earnest and uncredentialed aspirant—like, say, an amateur astronomer—then one of the fugitive meanings unleashed when the word jumped the pond is this one: complete dolt.

The intellectual slapstick of the rank amateur can practically be broken down into neat categories, because there are a few ongoing scandals that make it easy to chart the rambling topography of getting lost, amateur-style. Few of them are as ripe as the anthropological pursuit of the answer to any of the “first” questions—such as Who was the First Primate, Human, European, American? Amateur anthropologists tend to flock to these unknowable, ultimately meaningless mysteries.

As a result, the well-worn trails of the lost provide a kind of map
of amateur waywardness. The quixotic way of the amateur is marked by a number of stations, like the road to Golgotha. Maybe the first one is that no matter how often you learn this lesson, it’s easy to fall for the next charlatan’s argument coming down the road.

Not long after swearing off the inanity of long-distance genealogy, I read in the
New Yorker
and
Newsweek
and all the top magazines that some serious amateurs had discovered that my great
⁶⁴⁰
-grandfather was the first man to set foot on the continent of North America some sixteen thousand years ago. Who wouldn’t want those bragging rights?

On a cool leafy hillside above a trickling Cross Creek in remote Pennsylvania, the sun crept through the trees, primordial. Nestled into the slope above, an open rock-shelter seemed just the place where any self-respecting
Homo sapiens
might set down his basketry and spear and light a fire.

Today, there’s a parking lot at the hill’s base and a set of sturdy stairs that lead to a wooden enclosure built by James Adovasio. He’s the Mercyhurt College archaeologist who’s been excavating this controversial site since the mid-1970s. Adovasio was guiding a rare tour for a dozen or so amateurs. A brawny variation of Martin Scorsese, he arrived in full archaeological drag: sleeveless flak jacket, boots, work pants, mystical belt buckle.

Inside the shelter today, there’s an office, electricity, good lighting, and a suspended boardwalk so that visitors and workers don’t stomp over all the evidence. Enormous squared-out holes plunge down into
dense earth where tiny round markers dangle like pinned earrings in the stone. It was here that Adovasio found his controversial evidence, stone tools that carbon-date to 16,000 ± 150 years
B.C
.

This date puts the tools’ owners here four millennia before the end of the last ice age, which is around the time the first humans were traditionally believed to have arrived. Adovasio asked us to notice a pencil-thin black line in the stone. No one could really see it. So Adovasio splashed water on it, and the line darkened into little more than a pencil swipe across the rock.

“This is a fire pit,” he declared. All of us moved closer to the rail to squint and then decided, as with so much prehistoric archaeology, that we’d just take his expert word for it. He described the scene that once occurred here. Folks sat around the fire and cooked deer and squirrel while snacking on hackberries and nuts. Maybe they battered some rocks into spear points or wove some grasses into primitive baskets. In the chilly rock-shelter, it was easy to look around and imagine this ancient gathering. Typically, the prehistoric picture show that plays on the cave wall of our minds involves cavemen pursuing mastodons with spears. Instead, here we were in their kitchen, where people sat around the fire, eating and talking. Away from the picturesque hunt. Quiet time, culture time, story time.