The Rest is Silence (8 page)

Leach's lab at the end of the corridor smelled of growing bacterial cultures — musty, earthy — and the complicated smell of organic compounds mingling in the air. She was alone in the room among the metal and glass, desktop centrifuges, microscopes, and bottles of reagents ranged on the open shelves above each black bench. The benches were covered in bottles and stacked petri plates, some of them new and sterile and ready to be inoculated with bacteria. Others had yellow agar medium and bacterial colonies growing on them. For her this was a room full of promise.

She had been led to this lab by a confluence of events. The first occurred while she was reading the text for her Intro to Plastics course,
Plastics: Their Chemistry and Uses,
at the library at the University of Massachusetts. The chapter on nylon held a brief section on plastic dissolution and degradation with the following reference.

Kinoshita, S., et al., 1975. Utilization of a cyclic dimer and linear oligomers of e-aminocapronoic acid by
Pseudomonas
sp. K172. Agric. Biol. Chem. 39(6): 1219-1223.

She closed the book and went looking for the article in the grey subterranean stacks. Marine bacteria had been discovered feeding off the effluent from a nylon manufacturing plant flushed into a Japanese river. Ridding the planet of plastic wasn't a social problem, she knew that. But here was a technological fix. What they needed were efficient plastic-digesting bacteria. She pictured the recycling symbol, with its three arrows encircling the number 1, as a triad of snakes eating each other's tails. The circle they made shrunk until it disappeared. Perhaps she could engineer them.

Until that point she had been assuming she was headed for an R&D job at one of the many plastics manufacturing companies in Lowell. Before she read that article, the only environmental solution to the problem of plastic pollution she had envisaged, other than recycling, was the creation of biodegradable plastics. The problem with these — plastics made of polylactic acid and cellulose acetate — was that nobody could afford to make them.

Then Melvin Leach came to her college to deliver a seminar, and her path was set. Leach gave his lecture early on a cold February morning in an auditorium. Benny's class had been encouraged to attend by the prof who taught them a short course on the degradation of plastics. She had needed no other encouragement than the poster advertising the seminar:

The Potential Use of Micro-organisms in the Biodegradation of Xenobiotic Compounds:

Digestion of Waste Plastics

Melvin Leach, PhD

Cornell University Medical College, New York

Benny scanned the auditorium for her classmate Alicia. She wasn't there. She sat in the aisle seat, planning to save the seat next to her for her friend if she turned up. Her notebook lay open on her left knee.

Leach was introduced, then went to the lectern, smiling to the audience of drowsy students. He wore a navy suit jacket, a maroon tie, and a white shirt. His thick hair was short, receding at the edges above his temples, and would have been curly if he let it grow. A slide of a landfill site, heaped with discarded plastic bottles, bags, and Styrofoam containers filled the screen.

“This is the heritage we appear willing to leave our children,” he began. The next slide showed what might be the same site, this time without any of the plastic visible. Corn and flowers grew on part of the site. “With bioremediation, this is the heritage we
will
leave them.”

He stood, erect, with confidence, making eye contact with the few students who were paying attention. Benny was rapt as, slide after slide, he explained the work he was doing in his lab. He had adapted soil and water bacteria to eat some of the building blocks of plastic. The newly evolved bacterial strains had genetic changes that altered enzyme activities, allowing catalysis of these xenobiotic compounds.

When Leach ended his lecture, Benny closed her notebook and rose from her seat to jog down the stairs to the front of the lecture hall. Behind her was the noise of restless students, leaving their seats, chatting, the heavy auditorium door repeatedly opening and clicking shut. She was by herself with Dr. Leach at the lectern.

“This is thrilling work. Have you got far with the practical applications?”

“We've thought about them, certainly.” He leaned with one elbow on the lectern and took off his glasses. “But the elucidation of the molecular mechanisms behind these adaptations has taken up most of our time. I hope to push the practical side of things soon.”

“Couldn't you start with nylon digestion? You know, harnessing bacteria and fungi that metabolize amide bonds? Then manipulate their genomes to be more efficient?”

He arched an eyebrow. He told her there were only a few papers and that it was a wide-open field. The funding potential was limitless if they could tap into governments wanting to eliminate garbage and reduce their landfill footprints.

Benny asked if he had room for another graduate student. She told him she had a co-op placement coming up, then her final two semesters of course work. She would be graduating in a little over a year.

“Then you have plenty of time to apply.” He checked her out from head to toe. “Your youthful exuberance is appealing.”

She left the lecture hall as if she were flying among the treetops, seeing the landscape unfold beneath her on her way to the library. She found a copy of Leach's most recent article in
Science
. In the Introduction he had written:

It may be possible, in the near future, to utilize such novel life forms as we intend to generate, to treat much of the plastic waste that ends its life in landfills. There are considerable deficits in any program aimed at the recycling of plastics. It is not possible to recycle many synthetic polymers. For others there is a limited number of times they can be recycled. For those that can be recycled, the array of materials into which they can be remoulded is also limited. These processes are energetically expensive and polluting. Finally, consumer compliance with recycling programs is abysmal.

Ideally, all plastic, including that which currently ends its life in the waste stream, could be refashioned into usable products. However, since this is not possible, those plastics that remain in landfills need to be eliminated in an environmentally sound fashion. Our work is aimed at making this possible in a clean, efficient, and economical manner using novel bacteria to digest the waste into carbon dioxide and water. Biological degradation is attractive because it is energetically neutral and non-toxic, it is self-perpetuating, and it recycles nutrients into the ecosystem. We will design bacteria to break down even the most stable and noxious xenobiotic compounds into molecules that are easily utilized by a vast array of soil-borne micro-organisms. The key is to begin the process of nutrient release. Nature will take care of the rest.

She carried on her studies with renewed vigour. In the spring she began a four-month co-op work placement at a plastics manufacturing company in Lowell. Working at EcoPlast taught her what she needed to know about the industry. They made conventional plastics but were benefitting from environmental anxiety by creating and producing biodegradable plastics as well.

At EcoPlast she tested novel formulations for their biodegradability. They made polymers with bonds that were unstable and, unlike conventional plastics, could be digested by bacteria and fungi. Shopping bags tattered in trees because nothing could recycle them back to the soil. EcoPlast strove to make them attractive to microbes by inserting promoters throughout the polymer structure that made the bonds digestible. Benny knew that EcoPlast's claim that they fully broke down was disingenuous. They broke wherever a promoter was eaten, leaving non-visible pieces of plastic that contaminated soil and water.

She came home from her job and studied textbooks from the library:
Biology, Principles of Genetics, Molecular Biology of the Cell, Microbiology
. Her knowledge of biology had been limited to introductory courses in her freshman year. She knew her physics and mathematics, the building blocks for a mechanistic view of the world, and applied them to the workings of the cell. She had studied organic chemistry, including that of long-chain polymers such as silk protein and its synthetic mimic, nylon. She took her GRE, then sent her transcript to Cornell.

While she waited, she studied the ways that enzymes act on natural long-chain polymers to break them down into their constituent parts so that these can be recycled within the cell. Because plastics are long-chain polymers whose structures are unrecognizable to enzymes found in nature, she would need to engineer enzymes capable of digesting the bonds in inert plastics.

She received a thin envelope from the Registrar's Office at Cornell. She turned it over in her hands. That winter, imagining the possibility of rejection, she had searched the literature for other labs, other researchers who were doing anything comparable to Leach's work. There were labs in Japan that had made some of the initial discoveries, but Leach was leading the pack by a long way. And she wasn't about to move to Japan. She tore the envelope open. The single page told her, in the language of academic bureaucracy, that she had been accepted, on a full scholarship plus stipend.

8

Lily Lake Road

Art rolls another smoke. After licking the paper, he picks a fleck of tobacco from his tongue with his thumb and finger. He pulls a stick from the fire and raises the glowing end to his smoke.

“Why are you telling me this?”

The fire pops and a spark shoots into the sky, one flame of orange against the millions of blue stars. After our birth and before our death we spin a web of stories so intricate that it's easy to become tangled within it. There are too many reasons and I don't want to lose the thread, so I pick one and pull it down.

“We tell stories to make sense of our lives. My dad said that we remember what we don't understand. Like you told me about getting bombed near Sicily because you haven't figured it out yet.”

“Phooey. I'm only trying to forget it.” He drags on his smoke, then exhales. “If you're gonna keep talking, you're sure as hell gonna have to lubricate my ears.”

“With what?”

“Whisky. Canadian Club would be nice.”

At least he didn't say gin. He puts his hand on my knee to help him rise from his straw bale. He wipes some chaff from his pants. His hand reaches up to straighten his hat, then grabs his rifle.

“How are you getting home?”

“My truck's parked up the road by Martin's.”

Once he's gone, I piss, brush my teeth, and get into my tent. From my sleeping bag I watch the coals of the fire shimmer. This is a hard life I've chosen, but there are small things, like the freedom of living in a tent, that I love. There is nothing between me and the stars but canvas, thin enough for that orange firelight to throw shadows on it. I am being hardened off, like a tomato transplant, being made ready for whatever is to come.

*

Listening to LPs, Winter 1977

My earliest true memory, not one that I recorded from the telling and retelling by my dad: A black disc spinning, circle of purple paper in the centre, the sound of mandolin, guitars, and an organ.

Learning to skate, 1979

It was cold enough after Christmas to start making the skating rink. Dad rented a lawn roller, filled it with water, and pulled it back and forth over the snow to pack it down. After that he used a sprinkler to turn the snow to ice. Mom was out there every morning, setting up the sprinkler before I was up. After school it was Dad's turn. They did this for a week or more until it was hard enough to stand on. Then he began to flood the ice by hand with a hose, filling the valleys with snow and water, scraping off the hills with a shovel. After two weeks it was ready for skating.

He taught me to skate when I was four, first pushing a chair as he told me Bobby Orr learned, then with a hockey stick in my hand for support. In the beginning I was such a bad skater that Dad stood in front of the net, in his boots, while I wobbled in and tried to score. He never let me get the puck past him that first winter. He poke-checked me whenever I brought the puck too close. But my skating improved, and in subsequent winters, I was good enough that he pulled out his old glove and blocker from when he played goal at teachers' college. Some afternoons the two of us would be out there for two hours after school taking shots. By the time Mom called us in for dinner we could barely see the puck.

Chasing me on the lawn, 1982

There were things he shared only with me and, now that he's gone, I can only rescue them from obscurity by writing them down. He would hold up his two fists and glower at me with feigned menace. “See this,” he'd say, holding one fist higher than the other. “Sudden Death.” Then he held up his other fist. “See this? Kick of a Mule.” Then I ran away, squealing with delight when he caught and tickled me mercilessly.

Sam Peabody, May 1984

We didn't go camping again until I was eight. We were sitting at the dining-room table and Dad was reminiscing about our trip to Bennington. He got a gleam in his eye and looked at me. The next thing I knew we were packing the car with the tent, stove, lantern, and sleeping bags. He looked so excited, like a little boy, that Mom couldn't have said no. And I think she must have been pleased that we were leaving her by herself for the weekend. She packed the cooler for us, my big orange towel, and my bathing suit.