The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013
And so Kubota continues to accumulate data on his own simple organism every day of his life.
There is a second photograph on Shin Kubota’s office shelf, beside the portrait of his grandfather. It shows a class of young university students posing on the campus of Ehime University, in Matsuyama. The photograph is forty years old, but the twenty-year- old Kubota is immediately recognizable—the round face, the smiling eyes, the floppy black hair. He sighed when I asked him about it.
“So young then,” he said. “So old now.”
I told him that he didn’t look very different from the young man in the picture. He’s perhaps a few pounds heavier, and though his features are not quite as boyish, he retains the exuberant energy of a middle-schooler, and his hair is naturally jet black. Yes, he said, but his hair hasn’t always been black. He explained that five years ago, when he turned fifty-five, he experienced what he called a scare.
It was a stressful time for Kubota. He had separated from his wife, his children had moved out of the house, his eyesight was fading, and he had begun to lose his hair. It was particularly noticeable around his temples. He blames his glasses, which he wore on a band around his head. He needed them to write but not for the microscope, so every time he raised or lowered his glasses, the band wore away the hair at his temples. When the hair grew back, it came in white. He felt as if he had aged a lifetime in one year. “It was very astonishing for me,” he said. “I had become old.”
I told him that he looked much better now—significantly younger than his age.
“Too old,” he said, scowling. “I want to be young again. I want to become miracle immortal man.”
As if to distract himself from this trajectory of thought, he removed a petri cup from his refrigerator unit. He held it under the light so I could see the ghostly Turritopsis suspended within. It was still, waiting.
“Watch,” he said. “I will make this medusa rejuvenate.”
The most reliable way to make the immortal jellyfish age in reverse, Kubota explained to me, is to mutilate it. With two fine metal picks, he began to perforate the medusa’s mesoglea, the gelatinous tissue that composes the bell. After Kubota poked it six times, the medusa behaved like any stabbing victim—it lay on its side and began twitching spasmodically. Its tentacles stopped undulating, and its bell slightly puckered. But Kubota, in what appeared a misdirected act of sadism, didn’t stop there. He stabbed it fifty times in all. The medusa had long since stopped moving. It lay limp, crippled, its mesoglea torn, the bell deflated. Kubota looked satisfied.
“You rejuvenate!” he yelled at the jellyfish. Then he started laughing.
We checked on the stab victim every day that week to watch its transformation. On the second day, the depleted, gelatinous mess had attached itself to the floor of the petri dish; its tentacles were bent in on themselves. “It’s transdifferentiating,” Kubota said. “Dynamic changes are occurring.” By the fourth day the tentacles were gone, and the organism ceased to resemble a medusa entirely; it looked instead like an amoeba. Kubota called this a “meatball.” By the end of the week, stolons had begun to shoot out of the meatball.
This method is, in a certain sense, cheating, as physical distress induces rejuvenation. But the process also occurs naturally when the medusa grows old or sick. In Kubota’s most recent paper on Turritopsis, he documented the natural rejuvenation of a single colony in his lab between 2009 and 2011. The idea was to see how quickly the species would regenerate itself when left to its own devices. During the two-year period, the colony rebirthed itself ten times, in intervals as brief as one month. In his paper’s conclusion, published in the journal Biogeography, Kubota wrote, “Turritopsis will be kept forever by the present method and will . . . contribute to any study for everyone in the future.”
He has made other significant findings in recent years. He has learned, for instance, that certain conditions inhibit rejuvenation: starvation, large bell size, and water colder than 72 degrees. And he has made progress in solving the largest mystery of all. The secret of the species’s immortality, Kubota now believes, is hidden in the tentacles. But he will need more financing for experiments, as well as assistance from a geneticist or a molecular biologist, to figure out how the immortal jellyfish pulls it off. Even so, he thinks we’re close to solving the species’s mystery—that it’s a matter of years, perhaps a decade or two. “Human beings are so intelligent,” he told me, as if to reassure me. But then he added a caveat. “Before we achieve immortality,” he said, “we must evolve first. The heart is not good.”
I assumed that he was making a biological argument—that the organ is not biologically capable of infinite life, that we needed to design new, artificial hearts for longer, artificial lives. But then I realized that he wasn’t speaking literally. By heart he meant the human spirit.
“Human beings must learn to love nature,” he said. “Today the countryside is obsolete. In Japan, it has disappeared. Big metropolitan places have appeared everywhere. We are in the garbage. If this continues, nature will die.”
Man, he explained, is intelligent enough to achieve biological immortality. But we don’t deserve it. This sentiment surprised me coming from a man who has dedicated his life to pursuing immortality.
“Self-control is very difficult for humans,” he continued. “In order to solve this problem, spiritual change is needed.”
This is why, in the years since his “scare,” Kubota has begun a second career. In addition to being a researcher, professor, and guest speaker, he is now a songwriter. Kubota’s songs have been featured on national television, are available on karaoke machines across Japan, and have made him a minor Japanese celebrity—the Japanese equivalent of Bill Nye the Science Guy.
It helps that in Japan, the nation with the world’s oldest population, the immortal jellyfish has a relatively exalted status in popular culture. Its reputation was boosted in 2003 by a television drama, Fourteen Months, in which the heroine takes a potion, extracted from the immortal jellyfish, that causes her to age in reverse. Since then Kubota has appeared regularly on television and radio shows. He showed me recent clips from his television reel and translated them for me. In March Morning No. 1, a Japanese morning show, devoted an episode to Shirahama. After a segment on the onsen, the hosts visited Kubota at the Seto Aquarium, where he talked about Turritopsis.“I want to become young, too!” one host shrieked. On Love Laboratory, a science show, Kubota discussed his recent experiments while collecting samples on the Shirahama wharf. “I envy the immortal medusa!” gushed the hostess. On Feeding Our Bodies, a similar program, Kubota addressed the camera: “Among the animals, the immortal jellyfish is the most splendid.” There followed an interview with 100-year-old twins.
But no television appearance is complete without a song. For his performances, he transforms himself from Dr. Shin Kubota, erudite marine biologist in jacket and tie, into Mr. Immortal Jellyfish Man. His superhero alter ego has its own costume: a white lab jacket, scarlet-red gloves, red sunglasses, and a red rubber hat, designed to resemble a medusa, with dangling rubber tentacles. With help from one of his sons, an aspiring musician, Kubota has written dozens of songs in the last five years and released six albums. Many of his songs are odes to Turritopsis. These include “I Am Scarlet Medusa,” “Life Forever,” “Scarlet Medusa—an Eternal Witness,” “Die-Hard Medusa,” and his catchiest number, “Scarlet Medusa Chorus.”
My name is Scarlet Medusa,
A teeny tiny jellyfish.
But I have a special secret
that no others may possess
I can—yes, I can!—rejuvenate.
Other songs apotheosize different forms of marine life: “We Are the Sponges—a Song of the Porifera,” “Viva! Variety Cnidaria,” and “Poking Diving Horsehair Worm Mambo.” There is also “I Am Shin Kubota.”
My name is Shin Kubota
Associate professor of Kyoto University
At Shirahama, Wakayama Prefecture.
I liv
e next to an aquarium
Enjoying marine-biology research.
Every day, I walk on the beach
Scooping up with a plankton net
Searching for wondrous creatures
Searching for unknown jellyfish.
[I] dedicate my life to small creatures
Patrolling the beaches every day.
Hot spring sandals are always on,
Necessary item to get in the sea.
Scarlet medusa rejuvenates,
Scarlet medusa is immortal.
“He is important for the aquarium,” Akira Asakura, the Seto Lab director told me. “People come because they see him on television and become interested in the immortal medusa and marine life in general. He is a very good speaker, with a very wide range of knowledge.”
Science classes regularly make field trips to meet Mr. Immortal Jellyfish Man. During my week in Shirahama, he was visited by a group of 150 ten- and eleven-year-olds who had prepared speeches and slide shows about Turritopsis. The group was too large to visit Seto, so they sat on the floor of a ballroom in a local hotel. After the children made their presentations (“I have jellyfish mania!” one girl exclaimed), Kubota took the stage. He spoke loudly, with great animation, calling on the children and peppering them with questions. How many species of animals are there on Earth? How many phyla are there? The karaoke video for “Scarlet Medusa Chorus” was projected on a large screen, and the giggling children sang along.
Kubota does not go to these lengths simply for his own amusement—though it is clear that he enjoys himself immensely. Nor does he consider his public educational work as secondary to his research. It is instead, he believes, the crux of his life’s work.
“We must love plants—without plants we cannot live. We must love bacteria—without decomposition our bodies can’t go back to the earth. If everyone learns to love living organisms, there will be no crime. No murder. No suicide. Spiritual change is needed. And the most simple way to achieve this is through song.
“Biology is specialized,” he said, bringing his palms within inches of each other. “But songs?”
He spread his hands far apart, as if to indicate the size of the world.
Every night, once Kubota is finished with work, he grabs a bite to eat and heads to a karaoke bar. He sings karaoke for at least two hours a day. He owns a karaoke book that is 1,611 pages long, with dimensions somewhat larger than a phone book and even denser type. His goal is to sing at least one song from every page. Every time he sings a song, he underlines it in the book. Flipping through the volume, I saw that he had easily surpassed his goal.
“When I perform karaoke,” he said, “another part of the brain is used. It’s good to relax, to sing a heartfelt song. It’s good to be loud.”
His favorite karaoke bar is called Kibarashi, which translates loosely to “recreation” but literally means “fresh air.” Kibarashi stands at the end of a residential street, away from the coastal road and the city’s other main commercial stretches. He’d given me clear directions, but I struggled to find it. The street was silent and dark. I was ready to turn back, assuming I’d made a wrong turn, when I saw a small sign decorated with an illuminated microphone. When I opened the door, I found myself in what resembled a living room—couches, coffee tables, pots with plastic flowers, goldfish in small tanks. A low, narrow bar ran along one wall. A karaoke video of a tender Japanese ballad was playing on two televisions that hung from the ceiling. Kubota stood facing one of them, microphone in hand, swaying side to side, singing full-throatedly in his elegant mezzo-baritone. The bartender, a woman in her seventies, was seated behind the bar, tapping on her iPhone. Nobody else was there.
We sang for the next two hours—Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Beastie Boys, and countless Japanese ballads and children’s songs. At my request, Kubota sang his own songs, seven of which are listed in his karaoke book. Kibarashi’s karaoke machine is part of an international network of karaoke machines, and the computer displays statistics for each song, including how many people in Japan have selected it in the past month. It seemed as if no one had selected Kubota’s songs.
“Unfortunately they are not sung by many people,” he told me. “They’re not popular, because it’s very difficult to love nature, to love animals.”
On my last morning in Shirahama, Kubota called to cancel our final meeting. He had a bacterial infection in his eye and couldn’t see clearly enough to look through his microscope. He was going to a specialist. He apologized repeatedly.
“Human beings very weak,” he said, “Bacteria very strong. I want to be immortal!” He laughed his hearty laugh.
Turritopsis, it turns out, is also very weak. Despite being immortal, it is easily killed. Turritopsis polyps are largely defenseless against their predators, chief among them sea slugs. They can easily be suffocated by organic matter. “They’re miracles of nature, but they’re not complete,” Kubota acknowledged. “They’re still organisms. They’re not holy. They’re not God.”
And their immortality is, to a certain degree, a question of semantics. “That word ‘immortal’ is distracting,” says James Carlton, the professor of marine sciences at Williams. “If by ‘immortal’ you mean passing on your genes, then yes, it’s immortal. But those are not the same cells anymore. The cells are immortal, but not necessarily the organism itself.” To complete the Benjamin Button analogy, imagine the man, after returning to a fetus, being born again. The cells would be recycled, but the old Benjamin would be gone; in his place would be a different man with a new brain, a new heart, a new body. He would be a clone.
But we won’t know for certain what this means for human beings until more research is done. That is the scientific method, after all: lost in the labyrinth, you must pursue every path, no matter how unlikely, or risk being devoured by the Minotaur. Kubota, for his part, fears that the lessons of the immortal jellyfish will be absorbed too soon, before man is ready to harness the science of immortality in an ethical manner. “We’re very strange animals,” he said. “We’re so clever and civilized, but our hearts are very primitive. If our hearts weren’t primitive, there wouldn’t be wars. I’m worried that we will apply the science too early, like we did with the atomic bomb.”
I remembered something he had said earlier in the week, when we were watching a music video for his song “Living Planet—Connections Between Forest, Sea and Rural Area.” He described the song as an ode to the beauty of nature. The video was shot by his eighty-eight-year-old neighbor, a retired employee of Osaka Gas Company. Kubota’s lyrics were superimposed over a sequence of images. There was Engetsu, its arch covered with moss and jutting oak and pine trees; craggy Mount Seppiko and gentle Mount Takane; the striated cliffs of Sandanbeki; the private beach at the Seto Laboratory; a waterfall; a brook; a pond; and the cliff-side forests that abut the city, so dense and black that the trees seem to be secreting darkness.
“Nature is so beautiful,” Kubota said, smiling wistfully. “If human beings disappeared, how peaceful it would be.”
STEPHEN MARCHE
Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?
FROM The Atlantic
YVETTE VICKERS, A former Playboy playmate and B-movie star, best known for her role in Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, would have been eighty-three last August, but nobody knows exactly how old she was when she died. According to the Los Angeles coroner’s report, she lay dead for the better part of a year before a neighbor and fellow actress, a woman named Susan Savage, noticed cobwebs and yellowing letters in her mailbox, reached through a broken window to unlock the door, and pushed her way through the piles of junk mail and mounds of clothing that barricaded the house. Upstairs she found Vickers’s body, mummified, near a heater that was still running. Her computer was on too, its glow permeating the empty space.
The Los Angeles Times posted a story headlined MUMMIFIED BODY OF FORMER PLAYBOY PLAYMATE YVETTE VICKERS FOUND IN HER BENEDICT CANYON HOME, which quickly went viral. Within two weeks, by Technorat
i’s count, Vickers’s lonesome death was already the subject of 16,057 Facebook posts and 881 tweets. She had long been a horror-movie icon, a symbol of Hollywood’s capacity to exploit our most basic fears in the silliest ways; now she was an icon of a new and different kind of horror: our growing fear of loneliness. Certainly she received much more attention in death than she did in the final years of her life. With no children, no religious group, and no immediate social circle of any kind, she had begun, as an elderly woman, to look elsewhere for companionship. Savage later told Los Angeles magazine that she had searched Vickers’s phone bills for clues about the life that led to such an end. In the months before her grotesque death, Vickers had made calls not to friends or family but to distant fans who had found her through fan conventions and Internet sites.
Vickers’s web of connections had grown broader but shallower, as has happened for many of us. We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible. Over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact for a fraction of a moment. In 2010, at a cost of $300 million, 800 miles of fiber-optic cable was laid between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange to shave three milliseconds off trading times. Yet within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.