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FUTURETHE IS HERE Startling innovations are remaking our brains, bodies and towns—and saving lives worldwide

34 The Body Shop The dream of replacing injured or diseased organs is ancient. Now scientists are getting close to creating live human body parts on 3-D printers BY MATTHEW SHAER

44 Mind Meld Exploring uncharted territory in human communication, neuroscientists are making strides with human subjects who can “talk” directly from brain to brain BY JERRY ADLER

52 Levitation Nation The inventors of a playful Back-to-the-Future- style hoverboard that uses magnetic levitation technology have a surprising social goal in mind: to levitate buildings BY CHRIS COLIN

54 The Sheltering Sky Using satellites to assess the health of farmlands, a U.S. agricultural engineer’s breakthrough research can anticipate where famine might strike next in Africa BY ARIEL SABAR

66 Monolith No one had a sharper sense of the future than Arthur C. Clarke, whose original screenplay for 2001 was just acquired by the Smithsonian Contributors 4 BY BRUCE STERLING Discussion 6 Phenomena 9 American Icon: History, with Fries 68 Plastic Planet COVER: A 1970 Art: Speaking Volumes Artifi cial fl owers. Action fi gures. Plastic pellets. Millions of tons of artifi cial waste vintage toy, a Small Talk: Beth Shapiro combination are swirling in our waters and washing up on Adaptation: The Art of War rocket and boat coasts worldwide PHOTOS BY MANDY BARKER / Artifact: Natural Selections equipped with a TEXT BY ELIZABETH ROYTE television camera Essay: Sheer Madness Photo by Jeff Commemoration: Re-fi ghting Gallipoli Pidgeon / Drawings Ask Smithsonian 74 Welcome to Farmtopia by Iris Gottlieb Viva Manila 25 A new real estate trend has suburban developments planted around working farms. THIS PAGE: Filipinos in Las Vegas are sweetening The harvest, residents hope, is healthy food the pot with Asian fusion fare Keir Dullea in and a stronger community BY FRANZ LIDZ 2001: A Space BY SUE HALPERN AND BILL MCKIBBEN

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Mandy Barker Sloane Crosley The award-winning British photographer The author of the has been collecting objects on beaches since best-selling essay collec- she was a child, but now, instead of seashells tions I Was Told There'd and driftwood, Barker collects plastic—ev- Be Cake and How Did erything from toothbrushes to Transformers You Get This Number (“Plastic Planet,” p. 68). “I wanted my photos was struck, she says, “by to connect with the people of Hong Kong,” the untold philosophical where she visited 19 beaches over three history of nylons” (p. 16). years. “These are objects that are part of ev- “We owe nylons a debt of eryday life. So when the people see where it gratitude, however out of ends up, hopefully, it will help them think fashion they may be for about recycling and reusing—and not buying certain age groups. They as much plastic.” Barker’s work has been ex- made way for tights as we hibited in China, Belgium and England. know them—and if you spend your winters in the Northeast, you know how ILLUSTRATIONS BY Sam Hoh Chris Colin important tights are.” Cros- The San Francisco-based journalist was happy to ley’s fi rst novel, The Clasp, revisit Back to the Future Part II, the sci-fi comedy will be out in October. set in the far-off future year of 2015, for his story about the inventors of the real-life hoverboard (p. 52). “This is a team attempting to defy the most fundamental law of the planet,” Colin says. “I think it’s good for the species to swing for the fences like Elizabeth Royte Kendrick this. Not because I foresee a signifi cant chunk of The Brooklyn-based Brinson and humanity getting to the grocery store on hover- science journalist David Walter boards anytime soon—but because inventions like published Garbage Banks the Hendo keep things exciting and remind us that Land, a 2005 book The photographers, we should never stop trying to shoot the moon.” about what happens who are married and Colin has written for the New Yorker, Outside and to our trash after it live in Los Angeles, Wired. His latest book, co-authored with Rob Bae- Charles Floyd leaves the curb. “I traveled to a biody- deker, is a guide to conversing, What to Talk About. For the illustrator and for- haven’t been able to namic farm to shoot mer art director at Nation- stop thinking about “Farmer D” for “Wel- Bruce Sterling al Geographic, the topic of where things come come to Farmtopia” The renowned bioengineered organs hits from and where they (p. 74). “There's some- American science close to home. Four years go,” Royte says. Still, thing about farming fi ction writer has ago, Floyd underwent she was shocked next to a beach that is always seen Arthur open heart surgery for an by a recent study so rare and beautiful,” C. Clarke as the aortic valve replacement. estimating that 8.8 Banks says. “Farmer iconic futurist (p. Now he looks forward million tons of plastic D was such an inspi- 66). “The passage of to a future where bioen- fl ows into the ocean ration,” Brinson adds, a million years was gineered organs might annually (p. 68). “that after we came nothing to Clarke—he was happy with the re- be a reality. Floyd hopes Royte is also the au- home, we started our mote past and remote future and had profound his illustrations (p. 40) thor of Bottlemania: own compost.” Their insights that other people didn’t have.” Sterling, “help readers understand Big Business, Local work has been fea- author of more than 17 books, won the Arthur C. where in the body the Springs, and the Bat- tured in Rolling Stone, Clarke Award for the best science fi ction novel organs currently being re- tle Over America’s the New Yorker and published in the U.K. for Distraction. Two of his searched for replacement Drinking Water. Sports Illustrated. novelettes also won Hugo Awards. are located.”

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ON ANY ONE (1) BAUSCH + LOMB PRESERVISION ® 120 CT OR LARGER Find it ihin the vitamin i i aisle Nice piece about Via Margutta made famous in #RomanHoli- day #rome #travel via @SmithsonianMag Discussion @lizwarkentin ON TWITTER

FROM THE EDITORS Our story about It is a great idea since the actual cave Lincoln Lessons Rome’s Via Margutta, and the list of is too fragile to allow anyone but select I have read many books and articles other endearing small streets around scientists inside. Sure, we can see the relating to Abraham Lincoln’s assas- the world, triggered an epidemic of wan- reprints and photos, but to be able to sination, but none more personal and derlust. “I really want to visit here one experience the actual scale of the cave intense than “The Blood Relics” in day,” Geni Wojtek says on Facebook. was what was always missing. your March issue. James L. Swanson’s “I fell in love with it in Roman Holiday Chris Hsu engrossing story makes you feel you and I would love to see it FACEBOOK are right there at the time it happened. in person.” Many people I was spellbound. And the photos by nominated their own Bee Comeback Cade Martin gave insight and added to favorite small streets, How about asking if the drama. As Mr. Swanson suggests, such as Ulica Mari- our yards were re- it is sad that until now we have dis- acka in Gdansk, Poland, turned to meadows missed the Ford Theatre historical site Sogukcesme Sokagi [“Field Study”]? There on the April 14 anniversary; but, hope- in Istanbul, Carnaby is a good chance your fully, this article and changes being Street in London and yard was once a pas- made will inspire future generations Kurfürstendamm in ture or a fi eld. Even if to remember that history is more than Berlin. The stunning hedgerows were re- just numbers and dates—it is part of glacier photography established, as they our everyday lives. by Daniel Beltrá gar- once were after the Dust Kitty Pherson nered thousands of likes on Facebook Bowl, and ditches did not get mowed, MACUNGIE, PENNSYLVANIA and hundreds of retweets. As @ZoeRey a huge impact would be made. says, “Awesome, awesome #Climate Theresa Rosado CONTACT US Change images.” Another reader, Rich- FACEBOOK Send letters to [email protected] or to ard Bonomo, was pleased all around. Letters, Smithsonian, MRC 513, P.O. Box “This has to be the best issue I’ve ever Solar Plane 37012, Washington, D.C. 20013. Include a telephone number and address. Letters read, between the Civil War and Lafay- Excellent news here [“The Light may be edited for clarity or space. ette articles. I was fascinated with the Stuff ”]. We hope the solar-cells tech- Because of the high volume of mail we unknown details in those articles.” nology will be refi ned and nano-re- receive, we cannot respond to all letters. duced for commercial use as a source Send queries about the Smithsonian Chauvet Cave of basic energy for everything. Institution to [email protected] or to OVS, Public Inquiry Mail Service, P.O. Box I only wish that technology was more Hernan Saavedra 37012, Washington, D.C. 20013. often used for projects of importance FACEBOOK to the human species as a whole, like FOLLOW US @Smithsonianmag this one. This is an amazing re-cre- This is a great adventure with, I’m Facebook.com/smithsonianmagazine ation that will in turn save the original sure, some benefi ts for mankind in the site for generations to come. future. Bulldozers were an off shoot of EDITORIAL OFFICES: Tricia Rowan Brensinger WWI tanks, and web strapping, nec- MRC 513, Washington, D.C. 20013-7012, FACEBOOK essary to cargo shipping, was a Viet- (202) 633-6090 nam-era enlightenment. I guess the SUBSCRIPTIONS & CUSTOMER SERVICE: Lovely article, but how typical that the trees cut down to widen a landing strip (800) 766-2149, P.O. Box 62170, Tampa, FL 33662-0608, Smithsonian.com men would want to dismiss the female at one stop is a small price to pay for Outside the United States: (813) 910-3609 discoverer of the cave! this adventure if it pans out. MAIN ADVERTISING OFFICE: Mia Tolliver howieone 420 Lexington Avenue, Suite 2335, FACEBOOK ONLINE COMMENT New York, NY 10170, (212) 916-1300

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henomena A CURATED LOOK AT SCIENCE, HISTORY & CULTURE

In 1940, two 75 years of brothers opened life in the a drive-in restaurant in San Bernardino, Cal- fast-food ifornia. It was a success. lane A few years later, Mac and Dick McDonald took a risk. They got rid of carhops, table service and silverware and cut the menu to the items folks ordered most: burgers, shakes, a slice of pie. And there at the foot of Route 66, where it spun out of the Mojave Desert, the nascent Amer- ican car culture met an entirely new thing: fast food. Here was a meal you could get in under a minute and eat one-handed while you drove. The whole thing seemed synchronized to the arrival of the suburb and the automatic transmis- sion, a country hungry and on the move, insatiable, racing after whatever came next. Successes What came next was traveling Multimixer were matched salesman Ray Kroc and his limitless ambi- by failures like tion. America’s genius is its dynamism, its the McLean Deluxe, made mobility, its appetite. No one knew that better with seaweed than Kroc. In 1954 he got the rights to franchise to save calories. AMERICAN ICON History, with Fries by Jeﬀ MacGregor KEVIN BRITLAND / ALAMY KEVIN

May 2015 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 9 McDonald’s from coast to Donald’s stores in 119 coun- coast, and soon oversaw the tries. But there’s a price to founding of Hamburger Uni- dynamism and supersized Speaking versity to teach not culinary growth. Over the years Mc- passion, nor even cooking: Donald’s has been called out Hamburgerology was about for everything from devas- Volumes standardization, the perfec- tated rainforests to child- tion of repetition, speedy hood obesity, from gassy An Iranian artist fi nds her voice in images systems management. Every cattle to empty calories and ART uniform would be spotless, cultural imperialism. In every cheeseburger the same March, new CEO Steve Eas- Poetry infuses Persian culture, from Bangor to La Jolla. terbrook, a Brit, was handed For every success there the keys to the corner of- from its religious mysticism to was a corresponding failure. fi ce the week before it was its contemporary cinema. The For every Filet-O-Fish— announced that sales were launched in 1962 to capture swooning worldwide. The Iranian-born, New York-based Lenten business—there was company issued a statement photographer and filmmaker a Hula Burger, because who referring to its “urgent need doesn’t love grilled pineap- to evolve.” Within a month, Shirin Neshat believes that Iran’s ple on a bun? it had announced plans to history of censorship turned McDonald’s wasn’t the diversify its off erings—a Big fi rst chain or the fi rst drive-in Mac fashion line, a trial run people to metaphor because or even the fi rst drive-thru for all-day breakfast. it conveys “what we cannot say (that was Red’s Giant Ham- But can McDonald’s really burg in Springfi eld, Missouri, change? Licking its wounds overtly.” Women, of course, have 1947-1984). But it was the from dollar-menu wars with felt especially restricted. In only one with Kroc’s fran- Wendy’s and Burger King, chise model, and the fi rst to feeling pressure from “fast Untitled (Women of Allah), one perfect its mass advertising. casuals” like Chipotle, under- from a series on view in a ret- If slogans like “The Closest mined by regional insurgents Thing to Home” were good, like In-N-Out Burger and rospective opening this month even better was “Twoallbee Shake Shack, McDonald’s is at the Hirshhorn Museum, Ne- fpattiesspecialsaucelettuc beset, Goliath on a battlefi eld echeesepicklesonionsona- thick with Davids. shat inscribed selections from sesameseedbun.” And Ad Age And yet 75 years later the a poem by Forough Farrokhzad, called “You Deserve a Break fries are still unrivaled, the Today” the best commercial service mostly effi cient and the celebrated female Iranian jingle of the 20th century. mostly polite. Drive through poet, onto a hand pressed to By the late 1990s McDon- and the whole car smells like ald’s claimed to be opening a your fi rst day at the state fair. gently closed lips. The passage new store somewhere every The cheeseburger—center- compares a woman’s desires to three hours. In Sweden, that piece of a global empire—is as meant a ski-thru. In Sedona, it ever was, a precision system a garden dying in the summer Arizona, turquoise arches. for the delivery of discrete heat. Because traditional Per- Today nearly two million condiment flavors. Onion. people work at 36,000 Mc- Mustard. Pickle. Ketchup. sian society compels women to The last bite always bun, slightly bittersweet, tasting passivity, a simple gesture can of sugar and raw white fl our. have expressive power, Neshat Maybe the McNuggets you ordered were forgotten, your explains . “The hand, the gaze, empty hand grasping those the mouth—the things that are few loose fries at the bottom of the bag. But you’ve gone too allowed to be seen are very

far too fast to go back now. poignant.” –AMY CRAWFORD AND BRUSSELS / HIRSHHORN MUSEUM, SI NEW YORK GALLERY, GLADSTONE / COURTESY BURNS / © SHIRIN NESHAT LARRY BY PHOTOGRAPH

10 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015 May 2015 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 11 The Art of War Researchers have decoded the deadly secret of a snake’s venom

When he returned home to squid and even a few mam- tation can turn them into France after a stay in Costa mals, including the platypus, toxic weapons. Rica in 1983, Jean-Pierre the short-tailed shrew and The French researchers Rosso carried back an un- the slow loris, the world’s don’t know where the coral SMALL TALK usual souvenir—a vial of only venomous primate. snake toxins come from, but deadly snake venom. Three Because of the great vari- once they got hold of enough decades later, after painstak- ety, scientists suspect that material, they figured out Beth ing chemical and neurologi- the adaptation evolved not where the toxins go. The team cal analyses, Rosso and col- once but many times. A ven- radioactively tagged the syn- Shapiro leagues report that two toxins omous jellyfi sh or sea anem- thetic toxins and applied them A biologist at the University of used by Costa Rican coral one probably came first, to isolated bits of rat brain. The California, Santa Cruz explains the snakes act like no others, of- maybe 500 million years ago, compounds bound so tightly to science of de-extinction in How to fering new insight into the and venom arose in snakes receptors for a neurotransmit- Clone a Mammoth, out this month. astonishing array of chemical some 65 million ter called GABA that What animal would be the weapons that have evolved in years ago, fol- the neurons be- most fun to bring back to life? the world’s animals. came overly The dodo. It’s very silly-looking When Rosso’s team, led by excited. and has several weird traits: It can’t fl y, it retains juvenile char- Pierre Bougis, a biochemist acteristics and—obviously— at France’s National Cen- it had no particular fear of ter for Scientifi c Research, humans as predators. identified the six toxins How long until de-extinction within the venom, four of Intrigu- becomes a reality? them worked as expected, lowed by mono- ingly, such The answer depends on what causing paralysis in rodents tremes (such as receptors are you accept as “de-extinction.” and other eff ects. But two the platypus) involved in hu- If you mean a pigeon born with some passenger pigeon traits, were puzzling because they 46 million years man disorders such or an elephant with mammoth- triggered seizures instead. ago. “If we find as epilepsy and chronic like traits, it could happen within The first step to under- complex life on other plan- pain. Bougis is determined a few years to a decade. If you mean 100 percent mammoth, standing the mysterious ets,” says Bryan Fry, head of to continue studying the with all mammoth genes and be- toxins was to obtain more of the venom evolution labo- toxins’ interactions with haviors, that will never happen. the stuff to study in the lab. ratory at the University of neurons, hoping it will lead Humans have long tinkered “I asked many times, ‘Can we Queensland in Australia, “I to a new understanding of with life, what’s the most get more venom?’” recalls bet there’s going to be some- the disorders and perhaps disturbing example ? Bougis. But his Costa Rican thing venomous there.” treatments—even if the Hairless dogs. Apologies to any- collaborators, who had ini- Especially if that alien work takes another decade. one who thinks these creatures are wonderful, but when I see a tially milked the rare reptile, life depends on amino ac- “I am...in French, we say, hairless dog, all I can think is that always replied: “We don’t ids. Venom toxins, it turns tête dure,” he laughs, “hard- I should smear it in sunscreen have snakes.” So the team out, are strings of these ba- headed.” -EMILY ANTHES or wrap it in a blanket. had to synthesize the toxins, sic biological molecules, ADAPTATION How will our relationship with which took a full decade. called peptides or proteins, nature change in the next The planet is home to depending on their size. Sci- century? more than 100,000 animals entists speculate that the If we are going to maintain a rich with venom, much of which toxins in venoms weren’t and biodiverse world, we are going to need to become more ac- is only now being character- created by animals from tive in our approach to conser- ized by scientists. There are scratch but are instead vation. It will not be suffi cient to not only snakes, spiders and slightly altered versions of set aside parks or wild spaces. Why not provide populations a scorpions, but also snails, everyday peptides and pro-

little bit of genomic assistance? fish, caterpillars, lizards, teins. A simple gene mu- MCDIARMID D. KRIS KRÜG; ROY

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MK_APR15141 Natural Selections Darwin transformed our understanding of the world. But an artist along on the famous voyage captured its wonders most vividly

In late 1833, with the HMS pounding artist who ex- Beagle anchored in Monte- claims in his sleep ‘think of video and Charles Darwin me standing upon a pinnacle hunting fossils ashore, a of the Andes,’” Capt. Robert British landscape painter FitzRoy wrote in a letter to The day Darwin climbed Patagonia’s Mount Tarn, Conrad named Conrad Martens Darwin. “I’m sure you will Martens painted it from across the bay (top). The desolation “exceeded all description,” Darwin wrote, and the natives joined the crew. He’s a “stone- like him.” About halfway into (above) were “half civilized, and proportionally demoralized.” a nearly five-year journey ARTIFACT that would help him set the could. “It’s a remarkable Darwin would have agreed. foundation for the theory of view of the world. There’s Martens left the voyage after evolution, Darwin must have a freshness, absolutely. You just a year, when costs forced welcomed the new shipmate . just feel like you are there,” FitzRoy to downsize. But the With his 6- by 9-inch sketch- says Alison Pearn, associate three later met up in Sydney, books, pencils and watercol- director of the Darwin Cor- where Darwin purchased ors, Martens, 32, detailed respondence Project, which some of Martens’ paintings. the dramatic vistas, and oc- worked with the Cambridge One of them still hangs at his casionally the inhabitants, University Digital Library to former estate, Down House. -ELIZABETH QUILL in ways that words never put Martens’ images online. (2) CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

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7QMXLWSRMER.SYVRI]WSVK8EMPSV1EHI Risk Life and Limb in Bitter Battle For Nylons.” It was reminiscent of the Dutch tulip craze, when, in Sheer Madness the 17th century, a few tulip bulbs could pay for a house on an Amsterdam canal. To- Nylons were a craze when they debuted 75 years ago—but their run is over day, in a city once known as New Amsterdam, I can buy a bunch of tulips for $12 at my corner bodega. In that same bodega, I can also buy a pair of cheap nylons growing dusty on some unreachable shelf. I know I am part of the reason they’re gathering dust. I wore nylons straight through college—I had tons of them, curled in my sock drawer like oversized garlic knots—but I stopped when I hit proper adulthood. In the past decade or so, the style has been to go bare-legged or wear tights (which can be made of nylon but tend to be much thicker). “Hosiery” is no longer the most popular Today nylon adds stretch to fi shnets (worn here by Shelley Winters) and a variety of legwear. department in the store, if I was born in the late ’70s when I didn’t have them on. wardrobe staple. Then, of it’s a department at all. to a Scarsdale-bred baby Nylons fi rst went on sale course, nylons hit a snag. I must confess I hope they boomer and I took my fash- in October 1939 in Wilming- They were in short supply never come back. My per- ion cues from her. Like all ton, Delaware, home of their because the silky material sonal style still leans vin- little girls, I had my own manufacturer, DuPont. Made was needed for the war eff ort tage, but nylons—the child- style—brighter, weirder and from wool, cotton and silk, (parachutes). Naturally, the hood fashion I held onto the more mothball-scented than stockings had been around paucity of nylons did what longest—have become the my mother’s Escada sweat- since before the invention of paucity always does: makes only one I refuse to revisit. ers and J.Crew cowl necks. the knitting machine. But at people want what they can’t They disguise a woman not Yet I fashioned my outfits a time when hemlines were have. Some of the reactions for the sake of intrigue but after hers: Vintage T-shirts rising yet modesty was still were ingenious . Younger la- for the sake of concealment. tucked in and bloused, lots of foremost, nylons offered a dies compensated for their They made practical and so- belts, purses slung across my smoother, stronger and in loss by drawing seams up the ciological sense 75 years ago, chest. By my teenage years, some cases cheaper alter- backs of their legs with an eye but now I see them as a di- I’d grown out of most of these native to traditional hosiery. pencil (a practice I’m amazed versionary tactic, taking at- habits, except for one: ny- When stores stocked them hasn’t seen a retro resur- tention CONTINUED ON PAGE 20 lons. My mother’s generation nationally, 75 years ago this gence). Other reactions bor- ESSAY constantly wore nylons (or month, their popularity was dered on mania. Nylons sold “stockings,” or the waist-cov- massive. An estimated 64 on the black market for $20 a ering “pantyhose,” if you want million pairs were purchased pair. Betty Grable auctioned to call them that, though I’d in their fi rst year on the mar- a pair at a war bond rally for prefer you didn’t) and thus ket. Because DuPont never $40,000. When nylons went I did too. They were sheer, trademarked “nylon,” “ny- back into production in 1945, nude, taupe, cream, tan and lons” became synonymous the newspaper headlines powder. I cannot recall a sin- with “hosiery.” They were the read like something out of

gle holiday dinner or dance American woman’s greatest the Darwin Awards: “Women VIA GETTY IMAGES PORTFOLIO MONDADORI

16 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015 Steven Skiena, a professor at Stony Brook University and Charles B. Ward, an engineer at Google, have worked together to develop an algorithmic method, based on high- level math, of ranking historical figures according to their historical significance. Their rankings account not only for what individuals have done, but also for how well others remember and value them for it.

For this Smithsonian Collector’s Edition: The 100 Most Significant Americans of All Time, we asked Skiena and Ward to separate figures significant to American history from the world population. We then developed categories and highlighted the most interesting choices. We hope our list will spark a few passionate discussions.

Order online at smithsonian.com/100americans or by phone 800-250-1531 CONTINUED FROM PAGE 16 Russell Crowe’s away from a woman’s real controversial body. By smoothing over ev- Re-fighting ery bump, scratch and vein, new fi lm views how different are they, in the battle from spirit, from the corset? In go- Gallipoli the Turkish side ing completely bare, women are saying that they’re literally more comfortable in story was inspired by a let- their skin. As we become ter from an official at the more honest about who we Imperial War Graves Com- are, more empowered to take mission, who mentions that ownership of our sexuality, “one old chap managed to get we don’t want some false here from Australia, looking taupe landscape wrapped for his son’s grave.” around our thighs. Australians view the bat- Alternatively, with bright tle of Gallipoli as their fi rst cotton tights or blatantly great test on the world stage, patterned stockings, we’re and commemorate April 25, not trying to trick men into the date it began, as a day of thinking we have diff erent remembrance. Like many legs than we do. Women own Aussies, Crowe attends a the ruse. Of course my shins dawn service to remember Crowe’s character has a mystical ability to locate hidden water. aren’t naturally fuchsia. I am the sacrifi ce of the troops. If not part alien. The battle of Gallipoli, which (Australia’s Oscar), but at a he can’t fi nd one, he says, “I’ll Having said all that, I am began 100 years ago, epito- time of renewed violence create one of my own.” But in reasonably glad that nylons mized the senseless carnage stemming in part from per- making the movie he became were once de rigueur. They of World War I. British com- ceived Western interfer- aware of Turkish suff ering. certainly have more innova- manders conceived the cam- ence in Muslim lands, the “I wasn’t quite ready for the tion and history behind them paign as a lightning strike depiction of a Muslim army depth of the emotional con- than most of our accessories. against the Ottoman Empire, celebrating the retreat of nection,” he says. They’ve also served us well but the fi ghting dragged on for Western forces has unset- During a visit to a high culturally. Think of Mrs. nine months and left 433,000 tled certain viewers. Some school in Istanbul, offi cials Robinson, rolling up her soldiers dead or wounded, Australian veterans’ groups told Crowe that the entire thigh-highs in The Graduate. including more than 28,000 and historians have also ac- senior class had been sent And where would Melanie Australian troops among the cused Crowe of going too to Gallipoli, and that “all Griffi th’s character in Work- Allied forces. far—he has characterized but one of them perished.” ing Girl be without her ny- The 1981 fi lm Gallipoli, di- the Gallipoli campaign as A door at the school was lons-and-sneaker look? Even rected by Peter Weir, an Aus- an unprovoked invasion of a painted black to honor their my personal history with tralian, depicts the tragedy “sovereign nation.” sacrifice. It has remained them was not for nothing. of Australians heading into He shrugs off the criticism. that way ever since. “I Last week, I noticed a run in slaughter. Now a new Aussie “Growing up in Australia, started to feel how very im- my tights as I was leaving the fi lm by Russell Crowe, The you tend to see the battle portant it was to see things house. Employing a trick my Water Diviner, radically from only one point of view,” from both sides,” Crowe says. mother taught me before my shifts the perspective. Early Crowe says. “I wanted to have -JOSHUA HAMMER high school prom, I dabbed in the movie, Ottoman troops the audience realize from the COMMEMORATION clear nail polish at either clamber out of trenches to at- fi rst take, ‘Oh, this is not my end of the run to keep it from tack an Allied position, only grandfather’s Gallipoli.’” splitting farther. The nail to discover that the enemy The Water Diviner tells polish worked just as well on has withdrawn overnight. As the story of an Australian my black tights as it used to they watch battleships sail farmer, Joshua Connor, work on my nude nylons. away in defeat, the Turks played by Crowe, who loses Because clear always goes erupt in jubilation. his sons at Gallipoli and trav- with everything. -SLOANE The film won the 2015 els there four years later to CROSLEY AACTA Award for best fi lm fi nd their bodies. The fi lm BROS. PICTURES MARK ROGERS / WARNER

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moisture in the level with no mechanism for Studies, National Air and Your seed and the rapid dispersal. Today, Hi- Space Museum strength of the roshima and Nagasaki have Questions seed covering—the background radiation levels Why are most homes no lon- covering has to be weak well within the world aver- ger equipped with lightning Answered by enough to give way when the age. Tom Crouch, curator, rods? Paul Agathen, moisture expands under heat. aeronautics, National Air Washington, Missouri Our Experts In addition to corn, sorghum, and Space Museum amaranth and quinoa Lightning rods have always How do diving animals that seeds have that felicitous Why is there a lag between been optional equipment; lack sonar, such as sea lions, relationship, so they will the winter and summer though lightning can strike detect their prey in water “pop,” or puff , in a skillet. solstices and the coldest erratically, tall trees or with poor visibility? Happy snacking. Cindy and warmest months of structures tend to protect Anthony Clayton, Brown, horticulturalist, the year? Jennifer Latzgo, shorter structures nearby. Wilmington, Delaware Smithsonian Gardens Fogelsville, Pennsylvania Buildings in open spaces are at higher risk and often The short answer is that Why could Hiroshima and Seasonal changes in have lightning rods. Today, they use their very sensi- Nagasaki be rebuilt so soon sunlight don’t instantly alter homes at higher risk do tive whiskers, called vibris- after they were destroyed air temperatures because have lightning-protection sae, to detect movement in by the A-bomb? Wouldn’t the earth’s oceans and land devices; they’re just not as the water. Rebecca Miller, the fallout remain unsafe masses are slower to cool obvious as a rod jutting into biologist, American Trail, for years? Nancy Davison, down and warm up than the sky. Harold Wallace, National Zoo Sebastopol, California the atmosphere. As the curator of electricity, days shorten in winter, the National Museum of Are there any foods besides Those two bombs were de- oceans release heat they American History corn that have seeds that liberately exploded high in absorbed when the days can be “popped”? the air; as a result, much of were longer; as the days Stan Zukowsky, Syosset, the radioactive debris was lengthen in summer, the ILLUSTRATION BY Jen Corace New York carried aloft and dispersed oceans absorb the heat they by the mushroom cloud. will later release. The time Yes, there are. The key thing Moreover, the amount of lag between each solstice here is the relationship ﬁ ssionable material in both and the maximum high or between the amount of bombs was only about two low temperature varies with pounds. In contrast, the latitude and proximity to the meltdown at Chernobyl oceans. Andrew Johnston, Submit your queries at involved some two tons of geographer, Center for Smithsonian.com/ask material released at ground Earth and Planetary

22 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015 The Everyday Gourmet: Rediscovering the Lost Art of Cooking Taught by Chef-Instructor Bill Briwa THE CULINARY INSTITUTE OF AMERICA TIME LECTURE TITLES ED O T FF I E 1. Cooking—Ingredients, Technique, and Flavor IM R L 2. Your Most Essential Tool—Knives 70% 3. More Essential Tools—From Pots to Shears off 4. Sauté—Dry-Heat Cooking with Fat O 5. Roasting—Dry-Heat Cooking without Fat R 8 D 2 6. Frying—Dry-Heat Cooking with Fat ER AY BY M 7. From Poach to Steam—Moist-Heat Cooking 8. Braising and Stewing—Combination Cooking 9. Grilling and Broiling—Dry-Heat Cooking without Fat 10. Stocks and Broths—The Foundation 11. The Stir-Fry Dance—Dry-Heat Cooking with Fat 12. Herbs and Spices—Flavor on Demand 13. Sauces—From Beurre Blanc to Béchamel 14. Grains and Legumes—Cooking for Great Flavor 15. Salads from the Cold Kitchen 16. Eggs—From the Classic to the Contemporary 17. Soups from around the World 18. From Fettuccine to Orecchiette—Fresh and Dry Pastas 19. Meat—From Spatchcocked Chicken to Brined Pork Chops 20. Seafood—From Market to Plate 21. Vegetables in Glorious Variety 22. A Few Great Desserts for Grown-Ups 23. Thirst—The New Frontier of Flavor 24. Crafting a Meal, Engaging the Senses

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AVAILABLE ON NEWSSTANDS NOW Viva Manila FLAVORS PHILIPPINES

A wave of Filipino families in Las Asian Pacifi c Americans Coalition for Vegas is putting a Pacifi c spin on fried Diversity, which she founded. It’s at the RAPACD’s cultural center, a one-story chicken, hot dogs and Sin City itself bungalow on the grounds of a neighborhood park, that we fi rst met her. f you are a typical American, espe- “This is my baby,” she said with a cially one who was born and raised sweep of her arms, “17 years in the mak- here as we were, you probably believe— ing.” Years before, not long after moving know—as we did that, Americans have to Las Vegas from San Francisco, where a lock on fried chicken. Then we met she lived after leaving the Philippines in Salve Vargas Edelman, who took us to 1980, Vargas Edelman noticed a sign for her favorite Manila chicken joint. But an Asian American center. “I followed this place, Max’s Restaurant, wasn’t in it, looking for the building, but all there Manila. It was in Las Vegas, in a strip was was a sign,” she recalled. Filipinos mall, a few miles past Caesars Palace, are a rapidly emerging demographic and it was there that we were fortu- force in Las Vegas—between 2000 and itously, deliciously, humbled. 2010, the Filipino population in Nevada Vargas Edelman, who was born in reportedly grew by 142 percent, the Philippines, is a singer and band- so that there are now more Fili- leader who has toured the world. She is also a real estate agent, president of the BY SUE HALPERN Lions Club, host of a local television AND BILL MCKIBBEN program called “Isla Vegas, the Ninth Island,” and president of the Rising photographs by Sam Morris of onions, garlic and meat that is at candles and matches—they didn’t once salty, tangy and sweet. Adobo is have electricity—but there were so FLAVORS PHILIPPINES the Spanish word for marinade, but many people who needed help and I it’s what is in the marinade that distin- was running out of money, so I went guishes Filipino adobo from any other: to a Republican Party meeting and the pinos than members of any other Asian one of its main ingredients is vinegar, chairman let me talk and ask for help. nation in the state. When they ask for a which gives the stew its distinctive, People gave me $10, $20, even $100. community center, they get more than a pleasant buzz. Adobo predates the col- I sent it over there and told people to sign: They get a building, too. onization of the Philippines in the 16th take pictures of what they bought with They also get Max’s Restaurant of century, when cooking with vinegar it: chicken, rice noodles, hot dogs.” the Philippines, an institution back was an eff ective way to preserve meat. Hot dogs fi gure in Filipino cuisine, home with 160 outlets, which recently The conquerors gave adobo its name, though in a roundabout way. It starts opened its fi rst branch in Las Vegas. but the colonists gave it its fl avor. with spaghetti, which was adapted And with Max’s comes its signature Edna White puts some adobo on her after being introduced to the Phil- dish, Pinoy fried chicken: unbreaded, plate with fried chicken and pancit, ippine archipelago by the European marinated in fi sh sauce and ginger, declares it “comfort food” and men- traders who sailed along the South then fried till the skin turns cordovan tions that she’s been up all night pack- China Sea. Yet while it may look like and crisp and the butter-soft meat un- ing 20 large containers of clothes and standard-issue, Italian-style spaghetti derneath slips off the bone. supplies for typhoon victims. It’s just topped with marinara, prepare to be It’s at Max’s that we next meet Vargas “a little something” she’s been doing surprised. Filipino spaghetti is sweet— Edelman and a few of her friends, lead- on the side for months while running in place of tomato sauce Pinoy cooks ers in the Filipino community, each, a print shop and working part time at a use banana ketchup, developed during like her, a model of civic engagement, local hospital as a nurse, ever since the World War II when tomatoes were in the kind that Tocqueville celebrated in storm devastated the town where she short supply—and it is chock-full of his 19th-century classic Democracy in grew up and where her sister still lives. not meatballs, but sliced hot dogs. America, the same kind that 20th-cen- “After the typhoon, I tried to fi nd her Which is to say that Filipino cui- tury sociologists said was done for. But for four days. I’d call every night and sine was Asian fusion before there was Asian fusion. It has borrowed and mod- ified elements of Chinese, Spanish, Filipino cuisine was Asian fusion before Malaysian, Thai and Mongolian cook- there was Asian fusion. It has borrowed and ing, to name just a few of its infl uences. “We use rice noodles instead of the modifi ed elements of Chinese, Spanish, wheat noodles that the Chinese use,” Malaysian, Thai and Mongolian cooking. explained Jason Ymson, the afternoon we met him and about 25 other those sociologists, clearly, hadn’t been no one would pick up,” White recalled. Filipino community leaders for lunch to Vegas. “The nice thing is, we brought “Eventually my sister was able to get at the Salo-Salo Grill & Restaurant. our culture here,” Vargas Edelman said. to an area about two hours away from Ymson is the assistant chef at Twin “The bayanihan system. It means unity, where she lived that had not been hit so Creeks steakhouse in the Silverton Ca- solidarity.” A case in point: When Ty- hard and I was fi nally able to get through sino , where he has been slowly work- phoon Haiyan cut across the central to her. I was so relieved. She said she had ing Filipino tastes into his pan-Asian Philippines in November 2013, mem- not eaten in three days. I asked her why creations. “Siopao—our steamed buns bers of the Vegas Filipino community she didn’t eat coconuts, and she told me with meat inside—are a direct trans- mobilized instantly, holding fund-rais- that all the trees had been ripped out literation from the Chinese. Flan is ers that continue to funnel money and of the ground and everything was un- Spanish but we have leche fl an. Adobo goods back home. And speaking of derwater and there were no coconuts. is a common derivative of Chinese soy home, they are also building 20 new I told her not to go anywhere, to stay in sauce chicken. Filipino cuisine is a hy- homes in the area most devastated. that town and wait and I would send her brid, so there is a lot of leeway to They call the project “Vegas Village.” $200. I told her that when she got it, to play with it.” We are dining on a whole Pinoy take the money and buy as much rice as fried chicken and pancit—thin rice she could and then go back and share it noodles tossed with shrimp that often with everyone. Because of course you comes with chicken and pork mixed can’t be eating when no one else is. in as well—and garlic rice (tastes like “At fi rst I was just trying to help the it sounds), and chicken adobo, a stew people I knew, sending money and

26 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015 Advertisement

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Orders subject to $1.00 shipping and handling fee If that was the rule, the exception was Seafood City, a colossal supermarket FLAVORS PHILIPPINES not far from the Las Vegas Strip, which was bustling on a Sunday morning as shoppers young, old and mostly Filipino Even so, “Filipino food is hard,” ob- had a front row seat to this in-migration. snacked on siopao and lumpia (fried served Rudy Janeo, a private caterer She moved in 1979 from Hawaii to Las spring rolls fi lled with ground pork, on- and chef at an Italian restaurant. “Peo- Vegas to join her husband, who had a ions and carrots) as they pushed carts ple don’t order it because they don’t medical practice here at the time. As we along aisles filled with foods whose know it, and they don’t know it because sipped bright orange cantaloupe juice at names were as exotic to us as the items they don’t order it. Serve a fi sh with the Salo-Salo, she took a pen from her hand- themselves. There was bibingka, a head on and no one wants to eat it.” bag and drew on the paper tablecloth. deep purple, sweet rice-based dessert; “Because Americans haven’t been “First the casino and hotel workers and ginataan, a dessert made from exposed to Filipino cuisine, the idea came, followed by the entertainers and coconut milk, potatoes, bananas and is to work in the Filipino elements bit the professionals. Then Filipinos from tapioca. There were duck eggs whose by bit until you have a full-blown dish,” other parts of the country, especially the shells were crayon red , kaong (palm Ymson added. “The most challenging Northeast, started to retire here. In the fruit in syrup), taro leaves in coconut part is nailing the description cor- ’70s and ’80s, you got the middle class. cream, cheesy corn crunch and racks of rectly so you don’t scare people off .” He In the 2000s, you got the rich. And then, shrimp paste, dried herring in oil, dried passes a dish of barbecued squid down after the economic downturn, around salted rabbitfi sh, quail eggs in brine and the table, which we are instructed to 2008, you started to see those who were bottles of banana sauce. And that was eat two-fi sted, skewered on a fork and not doing well, especially in California, before we got to the frozen food case, carved with a spoon, a trick we have come here for jobs.” When Lee stopped fi lled with birch fl ower, frozen banana yet to master. drawing, she had made several parallel leaves, squash fl ower, horseradish fruit, lines. The point, she said, is that these grated cassava, macapuno ice cream Jason Ymson is a pioneer, not only for diff erent groups of Filipinos didn’t nec- and cheese ice cream. And then his mission to introduce Filipino tastes essarily intersect. there was the fish—moonfish, into the mainstream American palate, but also because as a second-generation Filipino, born and raised in Las He passes a dish of barbecued squid down Vegas, he has made the transition into the table, which we are instructed to eat two- the mainstream himself. fisted, skewered on a fork and carved with a “Back in the ’80s—I was born in 1984—Filipinos were a small niche spoon, a trick we have yet to master. community. When you went to a party you always saw the same people. As my generation began to assimilate, we moved out into other communities. The biggest evidence of assimilation is the accent. My mom is very traditional. She has been here since the 1970s and still has a thick accent. My father, who as- similated into American culture, has no accent. When I was fi rst going to school, he would do my English homework too.” Unlike Ymson, the typical Vegas Filipino has moved to the city from somewhere else in the United States. The community’s phenomenal growth is an aggregation, a resettlement from one part of America to another. Rozita Lee, who in 2010 was ap- pointed by President Barack Obama to his Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacifi c Islanders, has Off duty, chef Jason Ymson prepares bistek, a Filipino steak dish, with his son, Enzo.

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Gilbert Stuart, George Washington (Lansdowne Portrait), 1796. Gift to the nation through the generosity of the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian to how you live your life. And then our children are kind of copying it. What- FLAVORS PHILIPPINES ever the eldest does is mimicked.” Deriquito, a board member of Fil- Am Power, is a former nurse—a pro- mudfi sh, pony fi sh, Bombay duck fi sh, family. And by family I don’t just mean fession practiced by many Filipino belt fi sh, blue runner, redtail fusilier, the immediate family. I mean first Americans, including her brother, two Japanese amberjack, cabria bass, yellow cousins, second cousins, fi fth cousins.” sisters, daughter and niece. “Since I stripe, tupig, milkfi sh. We could go on “Our mainstay, as a culture, is our was the fi rst born and my dad died at but won’t, since milkfi sh is the national food,” said Roger Lim, Jing’s husband. 47, I sent my three siblings to nursing fi sh of the Philippines. “That’s what brings families together. school. It’s not unusual. It’s not heroic. Milkfi sh is also the centerpiece of We always eat family-style.” It’s just what you do.” bangus, a dish that has spawned its A cuisine is created not only by in- Another thing you do, especially at own festival, in Dagupan City, where gredients and methods and tastes, but Max’s once you have fi nished your fried people compete in deboning contests also from how that food is consumed chicken, is have halo-halo for dessert. and costumed street dancers re-en- and shared. For Filipinos, that cuisine Imagine an ice-cream sundae, but in- act the milkfi sh harvest. The way it is starts and ends with family. stead of chocolate or vanilla, the ice served at Salo-Salo—wrapped in ba- cream is purple and made from yams, nana leaves and steamed with onions, Family—connection—is what brought and instead of whipped cream, there is ginger and tomatoes—is the way it’s many Filipinos to the United States in evaporated milk, and instead of nuts, prepared in Manila and by islanders the fi rst place, often through a process there are boiled beans—garbanzo, white in Negros Occidental. In other regions called “petitioning,” where one family and red beans. Now add some coconut, it may be grilled or broiled. Pinaputock member could petition the American palm fruit, pounded rice fl akes, jackfruit na bangus—what we are having—is government to allow another family and shaved ice. In Tagalog, the main meaty and mildly piquant; the banana member to follow. After Edna White language of the Philippines, halo-halo leaves have permeated the fi sh. married an American and moved to means “mix-mix” or “hodgepodge.” Now we are sampling laing—taro the States—fi rst to Oregon, then to Ne- This hodgepodge is sweet and rich, dif- leaves cooked in coconut milk with grilled shrimp and chilies that are as green a vegetable as we’re likely to Imagine an ice cream sundae, but instead of see. Amie Belmonte, who runs Fil-Am chocolate or vanilla, the ice cream is purple Power, an organization she started with and made from yams, and instead of whipped her husband, Lee, and other community leaders to translate the Filipinos popu- cream, there is evaporated milk. lation surge into nonpartisan political clout, recalled how when she fi rst moved vada—she petitioned for her mother to ferent yet just at the edge of familiar. It to Las Vegas to run the city’s depart- join her. For Salve Vargas Edelman it reminded us of what Rhigel Tan told ment of senior services, she used foods was her mother who petitioned her, hav- us that afternoon at Salo-Salo. Tan, a she’d grown up with to introduce her- ing been petitioned herself by another professor of nursing at the University of self. “The people I worked with thought daughter who had married an Ameri- Nevada, Las Vegas, is also a founder of I was Hawaiian. I had to explain that can serviceman. “Because I was single, Kalahi, an 80-person folkloric ensem- though I grew up in Hawaii, I was Fili- the family decided I should be the one ble that performs traditional Filipino pino, from the Philippines. So I brought to take care of our mother, who was not dances, songs and stories. “I believe in in lumpia and pancit and shared it. Food well,” Vargas Edelman said. “Part of our the beauty of diversity,” he said, “but I is the avenue into a culture.” culture is that we take care of our elders. don’t believe in the melting pot. I be- That has turned out to be true for My generation didn’t even know what lieve in the stew pot. In the melting pot second- and third-generation Filipi- rest homes were. It’s part of our religion, you lose your identity. In the stew pot, no-Americans, too. As Jing Lim, who too. We believe in the Ten Command- you’re the potato, I’m the carrots, and grew up in a Filipino community in ments: Honor your mother and father.” everyone knows who they are.” Juneau, Alaska, told us, “Pretty much And it is not just parents. “We have everything my three boys know about this very nice Filipino tradition of re- Filipino culture comes from food and specting our elders,” Vargas Edelman’s friend, Cynthia Deriquito, added. “All Get your fi ll of Sam Morris’ delicious halo-halo photos at your siblings, if they respect you, they Smithsonian.com/fi lipino follow you. From your profession down

SMITHSONIAN.COM 33 THE

34 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015 BODY SHOP

AT A LABORATORY IN NORTH CAROLINA, SCIENTISTS ARE WORKING FURIOUSLY TO CREATE A FUTURE IN WHICH REPLACEMENT HUMAN ORGANS ARE GROWN ON DEMAND

Matthew Shaer BY PHOTOGRAPHS BY JEREMY M. LANGE

May 2015 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 35 n the second fl oor of the Wake plastic-framed eyeglasses, grew up in Forest Institute for Regenera- South Korea and trained in mechanical engineering at a university in Pohang. tive Medicine, not far from the At Wake Forest, he is part of a group elevator bank, is a collection that works with the lab’s custom-built bioprinters, powerful machines that of faded prints depicting great operate in much the same way as standard 3-D printers: An object is scanned moments in medical history. In or designed using modeling software. one, an ancient Babylonian phar- That data is then sent to the printer, which uses syringes to lay down suc- macist holds aloft a vial of med- cessive coats of matter until a three-di- icine. Another shows the Greek physician Hippocrates tending mensional object emerges. Traditional 3-D printers tend to work in plastics to a patient in the fi fth century B.C. The prints were doled out or wax. “What’s diff erent here,” Young- to doctors half a century ago by the pharmaceutical company Joon said, nudging his eyeglasses up his nose, “is that we have the capability Parke-Davis, which touted them as a historical highlight reel. But to print something that’s alive.” it’s not hard to read their presence at Wake Forest, home to per- He gestured at the machine to his right. It bore a passing resemblance haps the largest concentration of medical futurists on the planet, to one of those claw games you fi nd as the ultimate in-joke: Can you believe how far we’ve come? at highway rest stops. The frame was heavy metal, the walls transparent. In- When I visited the institute, in the old North Carolina tobacco town of side were six syringes arranged in a row. Winston-Salem, I passed airy laboratories where white-coated staff - One held a biocompatible plastic that, when printed, would form the inter- ers glided back and forth across a tiled fl oor. On one table, arranged as locking structure of a scaff old—the skel- if for an art exhibit, lay spidery casts of kidney veins, rendered in hues eton, essentially—of a printed human organ or body part. The others could be of violet and indigo and cotton candy. Down the hall a machine zapped fi lled with a gel containing human cells sporadic electric currents through two sets of muscle tendons, one or proteins to promote their growth. As the scaff old is being printed, cells cut from a rat, the other engineered from biomaterials and cells. from an intended patient are printed A researcher named Young-Joon Seol met me at the door to a onto, and into, the scaff old; the structure is placed in an incubator; the cells room marked “Bioprinting.” Young-Joon, tousled-haired and wearing multiply; and in principle the object

36 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015 Atala leans against a custom-built 3-D bioprinter. Seventy- four percent of Americans think bioengineered organs are an “appropriate use” of technology. The number of 3-D printers used by medical centers is expected to double in the next ﬁ ve years.

handle. It was light; it rested on my palm like a butterfl y. The external structure of the ear is one of the fi rst structures that the institute at Wake Forest (and other research centers) have tried to master, as a stepping stone toward more complicated ones. Wake Forest staff ers have implanted bioprinted skin, ears, bone, and muscle on laboratory animals, where they grew successfully into the surrounding tissue. To evangelists of bioprinting, who are increasing—the number of 3-D printers shipped to medical facilities is expected to double in the next fi ve years—the trials are a harbinger of a world that is only now coming into focus: a world where patients order up replacement parts for their body the same way they used to order a replacement carburetor for their Chevy. “For me, the demand wasn’t an abstract thing. “Think about it like the Dell model,” It was very real, it was heartbreaking and it said Anthony Atala, a pediatric urol- drove me. It drove all of us to fi nd new fi xes.” ogist and the institute’s director, referring to the computer company’s famous “direct” relationship model is implanted onto, or into, the patient. electronic thrum broken only by the between consumer and manufacturer. In time, the object becomes as much a occasional gasp from the printer—the We were sitting in Atala’s offi ce on part of the patient’s body as the organs release of the compressed air that kept the fourth fl oor of the research cen- he was born with. “That’s the hope, it working. Peering through the glass ter. “You’d have companies that exist anyway,” Young-Joon said. case, I could see the scaff old coming to process cells, create constructs, Young-Joon had programmed one into being by degrees—small, delicate, tissue. Your surgeon might take a CT of the printers to begin the process of extremely earlike. Because the process scan and a tissue sample and ship it to creating the scaff old for a human ear, would take hours to complete, Young- that company,” he said. A week or so and the room fi lled with a comforting Joon handed me a fi nished version to later, an organ would arrive in a sterile

May 2015 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 37 container via FedEx, ready for implan- old from Massachusetts, donated alone waiting for an organ. “For me, the tation. Presto, change-o: A new piece of one of his healthy kidneys to his twin demand wasn’t an abstract thing,” Atala me—of you—made to order. brother, Richard, who was suff ering told me recently. “It was very real, it was “What’s interesting is that there from chronic nephritis. Because the heartbreaking, and it drove me. It drove are no real surgical challenges,” Atala identical Herrick twins shared the all of us to fi nd new fi xes.” said. “There are only the technological same DNA, Joseph Murray, a surgeon Atala, who is 57, is thin and slightly hurdles that you’ve got to overcome to at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (to- stoop-shouldered, with a shock of make sure the engineered tissue func- day known as Brigham and Women’s), brown hair and an easy aff ability—he tions correctly in the fi rst place.” was convinced he’d found an end-run encourages everyone to call him Tony. We’re getting close, with “simple” or- around the problem of organ rejection. Born in Peru and raised in Florida, gans like skin, the external ear, the tube- In his autobiography, Surgery of the Atala earned his M.D. and specialized like trachea. At the same time, Atala Soul, Murray recalled the moment of training in urology at the University of can’t help but look to what might come triumph. “There was a collective hush Louisville. In 1990, he received a two- next. At his most sanguine, he likes to in the operating room as we gently year fellowship with the Harvard Med- envision a vast bioprinting industry removed the clamps from the vessels ical School. (Today, at Wake Forest, he capable of cranking out big and com- newly attached to the donor kidney. As still blocks off at least one day a week plex organs without which the body blood fl ow was restored, Richard’s new to see patients.) At Harvard he joined a would fail, like the liver or the kidney. kidney began to become engorged and new wave of young scientists who be- An industry that could make traditional turn pink,” he wrote. “There were grins lieved one solution to the organ donor transplants—with their long, often fatal all around.” With the Herricks, Murray shortage might be the creation, in a wait times and the ever-present risk of had proved an essential point about our laboratory, of replacement parts. organ rejection—completely obsolete. biological myopia, an insight that drives Among their fi rst big projects was It would be a full-on medical rev- so much of today’s cutting-edge bioen- to try to grow a human bladder—a olution. It would change everything. gineering: There is no substitute for relatively big organ, but a hollow one, And if he’s right, Wake Forest, with its using a patient’s own genetic material. fairly simple in its function. He used purring bioprinters and fl eshy ears and As surgical science improved along a suturing needle to stitch together a multicolored veins and arteries could with the immunosuppressive treat- biodegradable scaff old by hand. Later, be where it all starts. ments that allowed patients to accept he took urothelial cells from the blad- foreign organs, what once seemed all der and urinary tract of a potential pa- The idea that a broken piece of our- but out-of-reach became reality. The tient and multiplied them in the lab, selves might be replaced with a healthy first successful pancreas transplant then he applied the cells to the struc- piece, or a piece from somebody else, was performed in 1966, the fi rst heart ture. “It was like baking a layer cake,” stretches back centuries. Cosmas and and liver transplants in 1967. By 1984, Atala told me. “We did it one layer at Damian, patron saints of surgeons, Congress had passed the National Or- a time. And once we had all the cells were alleged to have attached the leg gan Transplant Act, which created a na- seeded, we then put them back into an of a recently deceased Ethiopian Moor tional registry for organ matching and incubator, and we let it cook.” Within onto a white Roman in the third century A.D., a subject depicted by numer- ous Renaissance artists. By the 20th “You’ve got to think, ‘I only have this much century, medicine had at last begun to time, so what’s going to make the greatest catch up with the imagination. In 1905 possible impact on the most lives?’” the ophthalmologist Eduard Zirm successfully cut a cornea from an injured 11-year-old boy and emigrated it into sought to ensure that donor organs were a few weeks, what emerged was a little the body of a 45-year-old Czech farm being fairly distributed. In hospitals white orb, not so dissimilar-looking laborer whose eyes had been damaged across the country, doctors broke the from the real thing. while he was slaking lime. A decade news as gently as they could—The sup- Between 1999 and 2001, after a later, Sir Harold Gillies, sometimes ply simply is not meeting the demand, series of tests on dogs, custom-grown called a founding father of plastic sur- you’ll have to hang on—and in many bladders were transplanted into seven gery, performed skin grafts on British cases they watched as patients died young patients suffering from spina soldiers during World War I. waiting for their names to tick to the bifi da, a debilitating disorder that was But the fi rst successful transplant top of the list. This basic problem has causing their bladders to fail. In 2006, of a major organ—an organ vital to not gone away. According to the U.S. De- in a much-heralded paper in the Lan- human function—didn’t happen until partment of Health & Human Services, cet, Atala announced that, seven years 1954, when Ronald Herrick, a 23-year- 21 people die each day in this country on, the bioengineered bladders were

38 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015 can take time. Today the bladders At- ala engineered haven’t yet received approval for widespread use. “When you’re thinking about regenerative medicine, you’ve got to be thinking not just about what’s possible, but what is needed,” Atala told me. “You’ve got to think, ‘I only have this much time, so what’s going to make the greatest possible impact on the most lives?’” For Atala, the answer was simple. About eight out of ten patients on a transplant list needs a kidney. Ac- cording to a recent estimate, they wait an average of four and a half years for a donor, often in serious pain. If Atala really wanted to solve the organ shortage crisis, there was no way around it: He’d have to deal with the kidney.

From its origins in the early 1980s, when it was viewed largely as an in- dustrial tool for building prototypes, 3-D printing has grown into a multibil- lion-dollar industry, with an ever-wid- ening range of potential applications, from designer shoes to dental crowns to homemade plastic guns. (Today, you can walk into an electronics store and purchase a portable 3-D printer for less than $500.) The fi rst medical researcher to make the leap to living matter was Thomas A device that Boland who, while one day might a professor of bio- test drugs cir- culates a blood engineering at substitute to Clemson Univer- tiny lab-grown sity, in South Car- organoids that mimic the func- olina, in 2003 fi led tion of the heart, for a patent on a liver, lungs and customized inkjet blood vessels. printer capable of printing human working remarkably well. It was the the co-director of the Harvard Stem cells in a gel mixture. Soon, researchers fi rst time lab-grown organs had been Cell Institute, told me, Atala has “al- like Atala were tinkering with their own successfully transplanted in humans. ways been a visionary. He’s always versions of the machine. “This is one small step in our ability to been quite bold, and quite eff ective For Atala, the promise of bioprint- go forward in replacing damaged tis- in his ability to draw attention to the ing had everything to do with scale. sues and organs,” Atala said in a press science.” Though he’d successfully grown an release at the time, echoing the words of Bladders were an important mile- organ in a lab and transplanted it into Neil Armstrong. It was a representative stone, but they didn’t rank particularly a human, the process was incredibly example of one of Atala’s primary gifts. high in terms of patient demand. More- time-intensive, precision was lacking, As David Scadden, the director of the over, the multi-stage approval process reproducibility was low, and the pos- Center for Regenerative Medicine at required by the U.S. Food and Drug sibility of human error omnipresent. Massachusetts General Hospital and Administration for such procedures At Wake Forest, where Atala be-

May 2015 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 39 Building the CRANIAL PLATE In 2013, the ﬁ rst U.S. patient to receive a plastic cranial implant designed by Connecticut-based Oxford Performance Materials had 75 percent New You of his skull replaced. The company has custom-printed over 500 versions of the FDA-approved device; the holes Need a new part? Someday you’ll be able to get one. encourage tissue growth. Scientists and entrepreneurs are working toward a future of bioengineered organs and tissues custom-made for patients MANDIBLE In 2012, researchers in the Netherlands ILLUSTRATED GRAPHIC BY CHARLES FLOYD replaced a woman’s diseased lower jaw with a 3-D-printed TEXT BY ARIK GABBAI structure of heated titanium RESEARCH BY BY SONYA MAYNARD powder, fused by a high- powered laser and coated in biocompatible ceramics. Within a day she could speak and swallow.

EAR To treat deformities of the outer ear, Jason Spector TRACHEA A 3-month-old boy at Cornell prints an ear- received a 3-D-printed splint shaped mold, ﬁ lls it with a gel that ﬁ t over a weak section of containing bovine cartilage his trachea in a 2012 procedure cells and collagen from rat at the University of Michigan. tails, then later removes the The splint has expanded as tissue and lets it grow before the patient has grown, and it’s attaching it to an animal. designed to eventually dissolve Next up: human cells. as his cells grow around it.

HEART VALVE At Rice University, K. Jane Grande- Allen and colleagues are trying to grow replacement valves from a patient’s own LUNGS In research on cells. They plan to embed lab rats, Laura Niklason two types of live heart at Yale implanted valve cells into a gel-and- engineered lungs fi ber scaff old. The idea is capable of exchanging to get the cells to fi ll and oxygen and carbon cover the gel and help form dioxide—a fi rst. She a working valve. Grande- says it’ll be a “couple of Allen predicts that such a decades” before such bioengineered part may lungs, perhaps derived be ready to test in heart from a patient’s stem patients within cells, are transplanted a decade. into a person. KIDNEY Tiny kidneys engineered by Harald Ott at Massachusetts General Hospital fi ltered blood and discharged urine when transplanted into rats. Most promising, the experiment succeeded partly because some of the lab-grown cells organized themselves eff ectively within the LIVER No one has kidney on their own. bioengineered an entire human liver. In a fi rst step, Wake Forest INTERVERTEBRAL DISK engineers grew a When one of the shock- miniature liver an absorbing disks between inch in diameter our vertebrae breaks and weighing a down, pain ensues. Current fi fth of an ounce . treatments have fl aws; And California- spinal fusion, for instance, based Organovo hinders movement. Robby is selling 3-D- Bowles at the University of printed human Utah is engineering disks liver tissues using sheep cells. The goal (above) for is to restore mobility as testing drugs. well as ease pain.

SKIN Medical BLOOD VESSELS researchers look forward Jennifer Lewis, at to printing skin cells Harvard, studies how directly onto the body, to install vessels within ﬁ lling a wound exactly. engineered organs. In one John Jackson at Wake approach, a “fugitive” gel Forest applied skin a is printed as a vascular centimeter deep onto network into an organ pigs, with positive results. as it’s assembled; when He hopes to try the cooled, the gel turns to treatment on people liquid and pours out. within ﬁ ve years. Hollow channels remain.

BONE (FEMUR) EpiBone, in New York, ANAL SPHINCTER grows bone tissue in Khalil Bitar, now at specialized bioreactors Wake Forest, developed (See “The Skeleton a sphincter made of Crew,” p. 43). The muscle and nerve cells to company implanted lab- relieve urinary and fecal grown jawbones into pigs incontinence, some form and now is testing more of which plagues half of complex facial bones. all elderly Americans. Oﬃ cials hope to try The engineered muscle engineered bone tissue in has been successfully people in three years. implanted in mice.

May 2015 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 41 came the institute’s founding director in 2004, he began experimenting with printing skin, bone, muscle, cartilage and, not least, kidney structures. Within a few years he was confi dent enough in his progress to show it off . In 2011, Atala gave a TED Talk on the future of bioengineered organs that has since been viewed more than two million times. Wearing pleated kha- kis and a courtly striped button-down shirt, he spoke of the “major health crisis” presented by the organ shortage, partly a result of our longer lifespans. He described the medical challenges that innovation and dogged lab work had summarily conquered: devising the best biomaterials for use in scaff olds, learning how to grow organ-specifi c cells outside the human body and keep them alive. (Some cells, he explained, like those of the pancreas and the liver, remained stubbornly diffi cult to grow.) And he spoke about bioprinting, showing a video of a few of his printers at work in the lab and then revealing a printer behind him on the stage, busy building a pinkish spherical object. “Tech is going to have to improve a great deal Toward the end of his talk, one of his colleagues emerged with a large bea- before we’re able to bioprint a kidney or a ker fi lled with a pink liquid. heart . . . and keep it alive.” While the crowd sat in silence, Atala reached into the beaker and pulled out what appeared to be a slimy, oversized you could see that Atala never prom- it directly, pointing instead to why he bean. In a masterly display of show- ised that what he held was a working dislikes putting a time stamp on any manship, he held the object forward organ. Still, critics pounced on what particular project. “We do not want to in his cupped hands. “You can actually they viewed as a high-grade exercise give patients false hope,” he told me. see the kidney as it was printed earlier in special eff ects. The dust-up was neatly illustrative today,” he said. The crowd broke into Last year, Jennifer Lewis, a mate- of one of the central challenges faced spontaneous applause. The next day, rials scientist at Harvard and a lead- by researchers throughout the fi eld of the wire news organization Agence ing researcher in bioprinting (her regenerative medicine: You want to France-Presse gushed in a widely specialty is engineering vascularized stoke enthusiasm about what’s possi- disseminated article that Atala had tissues) seemed to criticize Atala in ble, because enthusiasm can translate printed a “real kidney” on a machine an interview with the New Yorker. “I to press, funding and resources. You that “eliminates the need for donors thought it was misleading,” she said, want to inspire the people around you when it comes to organ transplants.” referring to the TED Talk. “We don’t and the next generation of scientists. The future was coming. want to give people false expectations, But you don’t want to misrepresent and it gives the fi eld a bad name.” what’s realistically within reach. And then it wasn’t. In the aftermath of the TED Talk, And when it comes to big, compli- In fact, what Atala had held on stage Wake Forest issued a press release cated organs, the fi eld still has a way to wasn’t a working human kidney. It was stressing that it would be a long time go. Sit down with a pencil and a piece inert, an extremely detailed model, a before a bioprinted kidney could come of paper and you could hardly dream taste of what he hoped and thought to market. When I asked Atala whether Get a closer look at the bio printing would one day bring. If you he’d learned anything from the con- creations in Atala’s laboratory

watched the presentation carefully, troversy, he declined to comment on at Smithsonian.com/organs TEXAS HEART INSTITUTE

42 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015 up something more architecturally or functionally complex than the human kidney. The interior of the fi st-size organ is made up of solid tissues tra- THE SKELETON CREW versed by an intricate highway system of blood vessels, which measure as SCIENTISTS ARE USING CUTTING-EDGE TECHNOLOGY TO GROW little as 0.010 millimeters in diameter, HUMAN BONES IN THE LAB and approximately a million tiny fi l- ters known as nephrons, which send “Grow your own bone” might not sound like much of a business healthful fl uids back into the blood- slogan, since even children do just that naturally. But EpiBone, a two- stream and waste down to the bladder year-old company based in Harlem, New York, has adopted the slogan in the form of urine. To bioprint a kid- because it sees a big opportunity: Surgeons perform about a million ney, you’d have to be able to cultivate bone grafts in the United States each year, either with the patient’s own and introduce not only functioning bone tissue, necessitating two surgeries, or with synthetic or donated kidney cells and nephrons, you’d also material, which a patient’s body sometimes rejects. need to have mastered how to populate “People are living much, much longer and technology is getting much, the organ with a vasculature to keep much better,” says CEO Nina Tandon, who co-founded EpiBone. “And the organ fed with yet we’re still relying on implants made out of titanium. We’re still relying A “ghost” pig the blood and nu- on painful double surgeries. We need to move things forward.” heart (left) stripped of its trients it needs. Here’s how Tandon, a 35-year-old biomedical and electrical engineer, tissue cells. And you’d have to sees it working: A doctor uses a CT scanner to image the damaged sec- Some research- build it all from tion of bone and takes a small sample of fatty tissue. The scans and the ers hope to transplant such the inside out. sample are sent to EpiBone, which extracts stem cells—undiff erentiated organs into Which is why cells that can essentially be programmed to perform a wide array of people after many research- functions. The cells are applied to a custom-cut scaff old of bovine bone seeding them with human cells. ers are exploring that has been scrubbed of its living cells. EpiBone then places the con- options that don’t struct into a specially designed bioreac- include printing those structures tor, about the size of a can of soda (each from scratch but instead try to use bone gets its own), with a “chamber” those already designed by nature. At cast in the shape of a 3-D-printed bone the Texas Heart Institute, in Hous- model to ensure that the company’s ton, Doris Taylor, the director of the proprietary growth “cocktail” passing institute’s regenerative medicine re- through the chamber seeds the bone search program, is experimenting with tissue uniformly. What emerges, a few decellularized pig hearts—organs that weeks later, is a replacement part that have been stripped of muscle and all not only fi ts the patient’s bone exactly other living tissue cells in a chemical but is made out of the patient’s own cells. bath, leaving only the underlying col- In the future, Tandon says, EpiBone’s lagen matrix. A decellularized organ is technology could be used to treat any- pale and ghostly—it resembles a glow thing from bone loss and broken femurs stick drained of the solution that once to complex facial fractures and genetic made it glow. But crucially, the process defects. leaves the interior architecture of the In March, EpiBone began a study that organ intact, vasculature and all. implanted newly grown cheekbones into Nina Tandon of EpiBone Taylor hopes one day to use decel- plans to begin human 16 pigs at the Louisiana State University lularized pig hearts, repopulated with trials in three years. School of Veterinary Medicine. Tandon human cells, for transplant in human cautions that it will be some time before patients. So far, her team has injected EpiBone, which has only three full-time employees now, is ready to the hearts with live bovine cells and in- move on to human beings. Still, early tests on bits of incubated bone serted them into cows, where they suc- have been encouraging, and plenty of venture capital has already cessfully beat and pumped blood along- poured in. “I think the science is ready, and just as important, the mar- side the cows’ original, healthy heart. ket is ready,” Tandon says. “People understand how much potential For Taylor, this approach skirts the there is in engineering these kinds of living parts.” –MATTHEW SHAER challenges of fi nding ways to print at the

EVAN KAFKA EVAN incredibly ﬁ ne CONTINUED ON PAGE 94

May 2015 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 43 44 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015 Telepathy, circa 23rd century: The Vulcan mind meld, accomplished by touching the temples with the fingertips, is an accepted technique for advancing the plot of a “Star Trek” episode with a minimum of dialogue, by sharing sensory impressions, memories and thoughts between non- human characters. Telepathy, 2015: At the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engi- neering of the University of Washington, a young woman dons an electroencephalogram cap, studded with electrodes that can read the minute fl uctuations of voltage across her brain. She is playing a game, answering questions by turning her gaze to one of two strobe lights labeled “yes” and “no.” The “yes” light is fl ashing at 13 times a second, the “no” at 12, and the diff erence is too small for her to perceive, but suffi cient for a computer to detect in the fi ring of neurons in her visual cortex. If the computer determines she is looking at the “yes” light, it sends a signal to a room in another building, where another woman is sitting with a magnetic coil positioned behind her head. A “yes” signal activates the magnet, causing a brief disturbance in the second

May 2015 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 45 subject’s visual fi eld, a virtual fl ash (a scribed the procedure to me. “Can you “phosphene”) that she describes as get him to play the piano?” akin to the appearance of heat light- Rao sighed. “Not with anything ning on the horizon. In this way, the we’re using now.” fi rst woman’s answers are conveyed to For all that science has studied and another person across the campus, go- mapped the brain in recent decades, ing “Star Trek” one better: exchanging the mind remains a black box. A fa- information between two minds that mous 1974 essay by the philosopher aren’t even in the same place. Thomas Nagel asked, “What Is It Like For nearly all of human history, only to Be a Bat?” and concluded that we the fi ve natural senses were known to will never know; another conscious- serve as a way into the brain, and lan- ness—another person’s, let alone a guage and gesture as the channels out. member of another species—can never Now researchers are breaching those be comprehended or accessed. For Rao boundaries of the mind, moving in- and a few others to open that door a formation in and out and across space tiny crack, then, is a notable achieve- and time, manipulating it and poten- ment, even if the work has mostly tially enhancing it. This experiment underscored how big a challenge it is, and others have been a “demonstra- both conceptually and technologically. tion to get the conversation started,” The computing power and the pro- says researcher Rajesh Rao, who con- gramming are up to the challenge; the ducted it along with his colleague An- problem is the in- drea Stocco. The conversation, which terface between To monitor the will likely dominate neuroscience for brain and computer, brain noninva- sively, Rajesh much of this century, holds the prom- and especially the Rao fi ts study ise of new technology that will dramat- one that goes in participants ically aff ect how we treat dementia, the direction from with EEG caps and adds con- stroke and spinal cord injuries. But it computer to brain. ductive gel so will also be about the ethics of pow- How do you deliver the scalp and erful new tools to enhance thinking, a signal to the right electrodes make good contact. and, ultimately, the very nature of con- group of nerve cells sciousness and identity. among the esti- That new study grew out of Rao’s mated 86 billion in a human brain? The work in “brain-computer interfaces,” most effi cient approach is an implanted which process neural impulses into transceiver that can be hard-wired to signals that can control external de- stimulate small regions of the brain, vices. Using an EEG to control a robot even down to a single neuron. Such de- that can navigate a room and pick up vices are already in use for “deep brain objects—which Rao and his colleagues stimulation,” a technique for treating demonstrated as far back as 2008— patients with Parkinson’s and other may be commonplace someday for disorders with electrical impulses. But quadriplegics. it’s one thing to perform brain surgery In what Rao says was the fi rst infor an incurable disease, and something stance of a message sent directly from else to do it as part of an experiment one human brain to another, he en- whose benefi ts are speculative at best. plication to gross motor movements, listed Stocco to help play a basic “Space So Rao used a technique that does such as hitting a button, or simple yes- Invaders”-type game. As one person not involve opening the skull, a fl uc- or-no communication. watched the attack on a screen and tuating magnetic field to induce a Another way to transmit informa- communicated by using only thought tiny electric current in a region of tion, called focused ultrasound, ap- the best moment to fi re , the other got a the brain. It appears to be safe—his pears to be capable of stimulating a magnetic impulse that caused his hand, fi rst volunteer was his collaborator, region of the brain as small as a grain without conscious eff ort, to press a Stocco—but it is a crude mechanism. of rice. While the medical applications button on a keyboard. After some prac- The smallest area that can be stimu- for ultrasound, such as imaging and tice, Rao says, they got quite good at it. lated in this way, Rao says, is not quite tissue ablation, use high frequencies,

“That’s nice,” I said, when he de- half an inch across. This limits its ap- from 800 kilohertz up to the megahertz (2) JOSE MANDOJANA

46 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015 Researchers are breaching the boundaries of the mind, moving information in and out and across space and time.

sponse. Yoo says the rat showed no ill of light, from a blow to the head, for in- eff ects, but the safety of focused ultra- stance. If focused ultrasound is proven sound on the human brain is unproven. safe, and becomes a feasible approach Part of the problem is that, unlike mag- to a computer-brain interface, it would netic stimulation, the mechanism by open up a wide range of unexplored—in which ultrasound waves—a form of fact, barely imagined—possibilities. mechanical energy—creates an electric Direct verbal communication be- potential isn’t fully understood. One tween individuals—a more sophis- possibility is that it operates indirectly ticated version of Rao’s experiment, by “popping” open the vesicles, or sacs, with two connected people exchanging within the cells of the brain, fl ooding explicit statements just by thinking them with neurotransmitters, like de- them—is the most obvious application, range, a team led by Harvard radiolo- livering a shot of dopamine to exactly but it’s not clear that a species possess- gist Seung-Schik Yoo found that a fre- the right area. Alternatively, the ultra- ing language needs a more technologi- quency of 350 kilohertz works well, sound could induce cavitation—bub- cally advanced way to say “I’m running and apparently safely, to send a signal bling—in the cell membrane, changing late,” or even “I love you.” John Trimper, to the brain of a rat. The signal origi- its electrical properties. Yoo suspects an Emory University doctoral candi- nated with a human volunteer outfi tted that the brain contains receptors for date in psychology, who has written with an EEG, which sampled his brain- mechanical stimulation, including about the ethical implications of brain- waves; when he focused on a specifi c ultrasound, which have been largely to-brain interfaces, speculates that the pattern of lights on a computer screen, overlooked by neuroscientists. Such technology, “especially through wire- a computer sent an ultrasound signal receptors would account for the phe- less transmissions, could eventually to the rat, which moved his tail in re- nomenon of “seeing stars,” or fl ashes allow soldiers or police—or criminals—

May 2015 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 47 STROKES OF GENIUS NOT IMPOSSIBLE LABS HAS DEVELOPED A BREAKTHROUGH APPROACH TO COMMUNICATION—WRITING WITH YOUR BRAIN

The notion of a nefarious power somehow dictating what many” is one of his mantras. For instance, Ebeling and his individuals say and do by tampering with their brains is, for team 3-D-printed prosthetic arms for amputees in South the moment at least, still fi ctional. But there’s a less diaboli- Sudan, starting with a teenage boy named Daniel. cal kind of mind control and it’s very real, as Mick Ebeling is Brainwriter was inspired by an L.A. graffi ti artist named happy to show you. Tony Quan (tag name Tempt One), who is affl icted by amyo- In his Venice, California, laboratory he is developing a trophic lateral sclerosis and no longer has control over his device that will permit disabled people to write with their muscles. At fi rst, Ebeling and his crew fashioned a device minds—no pencil strokes or keystrokes required. Called out of plastic eyeglasses, a coat hanger and a hacked-open the Brainwriter, it combines new, low-cost headsets that PlayStation 3 camera. “Steve Jobs would roll over in his monitor the brain’s electrical activity with eye-tracking grave if he saw our stuff ,” Ebeling says. In this version, Quan technology and open-source software. By thinking about blinked to enter writing mode and select his drawing tools. a single idea or word, a person can command a computer But as his condition worsened, he could no longer control cursor to enter writing mode, the equivalent of putting pen the device with his blinks . to paper. Then, as the eyes move, the cursor traces their So the next step was to tap into brain waves, monitored path on-screen. via electroencephalogram. A focusing brain produces a par- “I like to see things that are not supposed to be done, be ticular EEG pattern, which the computer software recog- done,” says Ebeling, co-founder of the hopeful-sounding nizes and processes the same way it processes the click of a company Not Impossible. He’s not an engineer himself— mouse. Still in the testing phase, Brainwriter will give patients he’s a fi lm and TV producer—so he recruits technical ex- with paralysis a new way to communicate, more effi cient perts to help him solve real-world problems. “Help one, help than the current method of spelling out words letter by letter. In later iterations, it might be adapted for people with no control over their eye movements. “Mick will unashamedly and unabashedly say that our solution is not the end word,” says David Putrino (left), a neuroscientist who works with Not Impossible. “Our solution is a lesson that it can be done.” Ebeling predicts that someday soon similar technolo- gies will not only help disabled people but will also enhance the way everyone communicates. Ordinary baseball caps studded with EEG sensors will be sold at the mall. You won’t necessarily compose a sonnet with them, but you’ll be able to perform simple actions, like making a dinner reservation. While other developers hack the brain to make a toy robot walk or control a video game, Ebeling strives for a technology more akin to the telephone. “Just being able to convey information,” he says, “is huge.” –ELIZABETH QUILL NOT IMPOSSIBLE LABS NOT

48 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015 to communicate silently and covertly during operations.” That would be in the distant future. So far, the most content-rich message sent brain-to- brain between humans traveled from a subject in India to one in Strasbourg, France. The fi rst message, laboriously encoded and decoded into binary symbols by a Barcelona-based group, was “hola.” With a more sophisticated interface one can imagine, say, a para- lyzed stroke victim communicating to a caregiver—or his dog. Still, if what he’s saying is, “Bring me the newspaper,” there are, or will be soon, speech synthesizers—and robots—that can do that. But what if the person is Ste- Monkeys in a re- phen Hawking, the cent study used great physicist af- their brains to fl icted by ALS, who control a virtual arm and manip- communicates by ulate virtual ob- using a cheek mus- jects. Electrical cle to type the fi rst signals fed back to the brain letters of a word? mimicked the The world could sense of touch. surely benefi t from a direct channel to his mind. What if medical students could download Maybe we’re still thinking too small. a technique directly from the brain of the Maybe an analog to natural language isn’t the killer app for a brain-to-brain world’s best surgeon? interface. Instead, it must be something more global, more ambitious— how much you can cram into your own eton controlled by EEG impulses, en- information, skills, even raw sensory memory. Now we do it with our fi ngers. abling a young paraplegic man to de- input. What if medical students could But is there anything inherently wrong liver the ceremonial fi rst kick. Much download a technique directly from about doing it just by thinking?” of his work now is on brain-to-brain the brain of the world’s best surgeon, Or, it could be your own brain, up- communication, especially in the or if musicians could directly access loaded at some providential moment highly esoteric techniques of linking the memory of a great pianist? “Is there and digitally preserved for future ac- minds to work together on a problem. only one way of learning a skill?” Rao cess. “Let’s say years later you have a The minds aren’t human ones, so he muses. “Can there be a shortcut, and stroke,” says Stocco, whose own mother can use electrode implants, with all the is that cheating?” It doesn’t even have had a stroke in her 50s and never advantages that conveys. to involve another human brain on the walked again. “Now, you go to rehab and One of his most striking experiments other end. It could be an animal—what it’s like learning to walk all over again. involved a pair of lab rats, learning to- would it be like to experience the world Suppose you could just download that gether and moving in synchrony as they through smell, like a dog—or by echolo- ability into your brain. It wouldn’t work communicated via brain signals. The cation, like a bat? Or it could be a search perfectly, most likely, but it would be a rats were trained in an enclosure with engine. “It’s cheating on an exam if you big head start on regaining that ability.” two levers and a light above each. The use your smartphone to look things up Miguel Nicolelis, a creative Duke left- or right-hand light would fl ash, on the Internet,” Rao says, “but what if neuroscientist and a mesmerizing lec- and the rats learned to press the cor- you’re already connected to the Inter- turer on the TED Talks circuit, knows responding lever to receive a reward. net through your brain? Increasingly the value of a good demonstration. For Then they were separated, and each fi t- the measure of success in society is the 2014 World Cup, Nicolelis—a Bra- ted with electrodes to the motor cortex, how quickly we access, digest and use zilian-born soccer afi cionado—worked connected via computers that sampled

NICOLELIS LAB NICOLELIS the information that’s out there, not with others to build a robotic exoskel- brain impulses from one rat (the “en-

May 2015 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 49 coder”), and sent a Robotic a stroke victim regain certain abilities signal to a second skeletons with by networking his brain with that of a tactile sensors, (the “decoder”). held here by healthy volunteer , gradually adjusting The “encoder” rat Miguel Nicolelis, the proportions of input until the pa- would see one light detect chang- tient’s brain is doing all the work. And es in position, fl ash—say, the left temperature he believes this principle could be ex- one—and push the and pressure tended indefi nitely, to enlist millions of left-hand lever for and send that brains to work together in a “biological information to his reward; in the the brain . computer” that tackled questions that other box, both could not be posed, or answered, in bi- lights would flash, so the “decoder” nary form. You could ask this network wouldn’t know which lever to push— of brains for the meaning of life—you but on receiving a signal from the fi rst might not get a good answer, but un- rat, he would go to the left as well. like a digital computer, “it” would at Nicolelis added a clever twist to this least understand the question. At the demonstration. When the decoder rat same time, Nicolelis criticizes eff orts made the correct choice, he was re- to emulate the mind in a digital com- warded, and the encoder got a second puter, no matter how powerful, saying reward as well. This served to reinforce they’re “bogus, and a waste of billions and strengthen the (unconscious) neu- of dollars.” The brain works by diff er- ral processes that were being sampled ent principles, modeling the world by in his brain. As a result, both rats be- monkeys to control a virtual arm; each analogy. To convey this, he proposes a came more accurate and faster in their could move it in one dimension, and new concept he calls “Gödelian infor- responses—“a pair of interconnected as they watched a screen they learned mation,” after the mathematician Kurt brains . . . transferring information to work together to manipulate it to Gödel; it’s an analog representation of and collaborating in real time.” the correct location. He says he can reality that cannot be reduced to bytes,

In another study, he wired up three imagine using this technology to help and can never be captured by a map / REUTERS CORBIS WHITAKER PAULO UPLOAD YOUR MIND THE IDEA IS ABOUT AS SCIENCE FICTION AS IT GETS. BUT SURPRISING PROGRESS IN NEUROSCIENCE HAS SOME ENTREPRENEURS READY TO PRESS “SEND”

In London, Benjamin Franklin once opened a bottle of for- Hayworth’s dream, which he is pursuing as president of the tifi ed wine from Virginia and poured out, along with the refresh- Brain Preservation Foundation, is one version of the “technolog- ment, three drowned fl ies, two of which revived after a few hours ical singularity.” It envisions a future of “substrate-independent and fl ew away. Ever the visionary, he wondered about the possi- minds,” in which human and machine consciousness will merge, bility of incarcerating himself in a wine barrel for future resurrec- transcending biological limits of time, space and memory. “This tion, “to see and observe the state of America a hundred years new substrate won’t be dependent on an oxygen atmosphere,” hence.” Alas, he wrote to a friend in 1773, “we live in an age too says Randal Koene, who works on the same problem at his orga- early . . . to see such an art brought in our time to its perfection.” nization, Carboncopies.org. “It can go on a journey of 1,000 years, If Franklin were alive today he would fi nd a kindred spirit in it can process more information at a higher speed, it can see in Ken Hayworth, a neuroscientist who also wants to be around in the X-ray spectrum if we build it that way.” Whether Hayworth 100 years but recognizes that, at 43, he’s not likely to make it on or Koene will live to see this is an open question. Their most his own. Nor does he expect to get there preserved in alcohol optimistic scenarios call for at least 50 years, and uncounted or a freezer; despite the claims made by advocates of cryonics, billions of dollars, to implement their goal. Meanwhile, Hayworth he says, the ability to revivify a frozen body “isn’t really on the hopes to achieve the ability to preserve an entire human brain horizon.” So Hayworth is hoping for what he considers the next at death—through chemicals, cryonics or both—to keep the best thing. He wishes to upload his mind—his memories, skills structure intact with enough detail that it can, at some future and personality—to a computer that can be programmed to time, be scanned into a database and emulated on a computer. emulate the processes of his brain, making him, or a simulacrum, That approach presumes, of course, that all of the subtleties eff ectively immortal (as long as someone keeps the power on). of a human mind and memory are contained in its anatomical

50 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015 of the connections between neurons the hallmarks of dementia in human is outpacing the ethical discourse at (“Upload Your Mind,” see below). “A beings, the potential of this research this time,” Emory’s Trimper says, “and computer doesn’t generate knowledge, is said to be enormous. that’s where things get dicey.” Con- doesn’t perform introspection,” he says. Given the sweeping claims for the sider that much of the brain traffi c “The content of a rat, monkey or human future potential of brain-to-brain in these experiments—and certainly brain is much richer than we could ever communication, it’s useful to list anything like Nicolelis’ vision of hun- simulate by binary processes.” some of the things that are not being dreds or thousands of brains working The cutting edge of this research claimed. There is, ﬁ rst, no implica- together—involves communicating involves actual brain prostheses. At tion that humans possess any form of over the Internet. If you’re worried the University of Southern California, natural (or supernatural) telepathy; now about someone hacking your Theodore Berger is developing a mi- the voltages flickering inside your credit card information, how would crochip-based prosthesis for the hip- skull just aren’t strong enough to be you feel about sending the contents of pocampus, the part of the mammalian read by another brain without elec- your mind into the cloud? brain that processes short-term im- tronic enhancement. Nor can signals There’s another track, though, on pressions into long-term memories. (with any technology we possess, or which brain-to-brain communica- He taps into the neurons on the input envision) be transmitted or received tion is being studied. Uri Hasson, a side, runs the signal through a program surreptitiously, or at a distance. The Princeton neuroscientist, uses func- that mimics the transformations the workings of your mind are secure, un- tional magnetic resonance imaging hippocampus normally performs, and less you give someone else the key by to research how one brain inﬂ uences sends it back into the brain. Others submitting to an implant or an EEG. It another, how they are coupled in an have used Berger’s technique to send is, however, not too soon to start con- intricate dance of cues and feedback the memory of a learned behavior from sidering the ethical implications of fu- loops. He is focusing on a communi- one rat to another; the second rat then ture developments, such as the ability cation technique that he considers far learned the task in much less time than to implant thoughts in other people superior to EEGs used with transcra- usual. To be sure, this work has only or control their behavior (prisoners, nial magnetic stimulation, is noninva- been done in rats, but because degen- for example) using devices designed sive and safe and requires no Internet

BEATRIZ GASCON J / SHUTTERSTOCK GASCON BEATRIZ eration of the hippocampus is one of for those purposes. “The technology connection. It is, of course, language.

structure—conventional wisdom among neuroscientists, but One immediately thinks it’s still a hypothesis. There are electrochemical processes at of the disembodied work. Are they captured by a static map of cells and synapses? HAL in 2001: A Space We won’t know, advocates argue, until we try to do it. Odyssey. But Koene The initiatives require a big bet on the future of technology. sees no reason that, if A 3-D map of all the cells and synapses in a nervous system is computers continue to called a “connectome,” and so far researchers have produced grow smaller and more exactly one, for a roundworm called Caenorhabditis elegans, powerful, an uploaded with 302 neurons and about 7,000 connections among them. A mind couldn’t have a human brain, according to one reasonable estimate, has about body—a virtual one, or a 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses. And then there’s robotic one. Will it sleep? the electrochemical activity on top of that. In 2013, announcing Experience hunger, pain, de- a federal initiative to produce a complete model of the human sire? In the absence of hormones brain, Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, said and chemical neurotransmitters, it could generate “yottabytes” of data—a million million million will it feel emotion? It will be you, in megabytes. To scan an entire human brain at the scale Hayworth a sense, but will you be it? thinks is necessary—eff ectively slicing it into virtual cubes ten These questions don’t trouble nanometers on a side—would require, with today’s technology, Hayworth. To him, the brain is the most “a million electron microscopes running in parallel for ten years.” sophisticated computer on earth, but only that, and he fi gures Mainstream researchers are divided between those who regard his mind could also live in one made of transistors instead. He Hayworth’s quest as impossible in practice, and those, like Miguel hopes to become the fi rst human being to live entirely in cyber- Nicolelis of Duke University, who consider it impossible in theory. space, to send his virtual self into the far future—a journey as “The brain,” he says, “is not computable.” fantastic as that of those two fl ies that fell into a wine bottle in And what does it mean for a mind to exist outside a brain? America and came back to life in England. –J.A.

May 2015 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 51 LEVITATION NATION

BACK TO THE FUTURE MADE THE HOVERBOARD COOL. GREG AND JILL HENDERSON MADE IT POSSIBLE

BY Chris Colin

52 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015 n a recent Wednesday afternoon, a guy in blue jeans and a T-shirt drifted back Army and becoming an architect, he began thinking about a and forth across a gently sloping half-pipe new way to protect cities and save lives: levitating buildings. in an offi ce park southwest of San Jose. In- With little technical experience but a knack for Internet stead of skating, though, he was hovering: a research, Greg built a prototype. The current model features real-world Marty McFly, the time-traveling four “hover engines” with magnets coordinating to generate teen who glided on air around Hill Valley in a concentrated fi eld, which then generates an opposing fi Back to the Future Part II. in a conductive material below, in the fl eld oor. When the two O The Hendo hoverboard, invented by Greg fi elds repel— lift. (Of course, it’s not simple; tech whizzes at Henderson and launched with the help of Google X reportedly abandoned their hover research.) his wife, Jill, nearly broke the Internet when it appeared in “We made the hoverboard because it’s the perfect way to a Kickstarter video last year featuring company engineer illustrate our ‘magnetic fi eld architecture’ technology,” Jill and resident stuntman Garrett Foshay. A subsequent video said when I met her at the offi ces of Arx Pax, the company starring skateboarding legend Tony Hawk confi founded to advance their technology. In theory, a building the board was real. “That was my fi rmed that alerted to a coming quake could automatically activate the rst 1080 !” Hawk joked, completing almost three spins before tumbling off system; support structures would fall away and the build- For the millions enthralled by the image of Michael . J. ing would fl oat above the trembling ground. Fox as Marty McFly hoverboarding in that far-off “Give us 30 years, and we’ll hover a skyscraper,” Greg yes, 2015, the Hendo fulfi time of, promised. “Or imagine converting HOV lanes into hover lls a long-held desire. Compared with the rigmarole of fl lanes. The potential is limitless.” ying—the fuss, the expense, the actual airplane—hovering is a magical little operation: a For now there are challenges. The hoverboard is wobbly single rider breaking free from the planet’s pull. It’s “deeply and dependent on a copper substrate beneath it, and riders embedded in the public imagination,” says Bob Gale, a have to be content with about 10 minutes of power. But the writer and producer of the Hendersons’ story is, in the end, about getting an invention Back to the Future It was something more serious that inspired trilogy. Greg and off the ground. And they predict that a commercial version Jill, both California natives: San Francisco’s 1989 Loma of the Hendo will come on the market in the next few years. Prieta earthquake. News images of collapsed homes and After fi nishing his latest demo, Foshay powers down the pancaked freeways stuck with Greg, a young Army lieu- board and steps off . He’s logged many hours at the half- tenant stationed in Georgia at the time. After leaving the pipe, but the thrill hasn’t worn off : After all, as he says, “I’m the best hoverboard rider in the world right now.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY TIMOTHY ARCHIBALD

Garrett Foshay rides the Hendo, which hovers about an inch oﬀ the ground. THE SHELTERING SKY

HUNDREDS OF MILES ABOVE EARTH, ORBITING SATELLITES ARE BECOMING A BOLD NEW WEAPON IN THE AGE-OLD FIGHT AGAINST FAMINE Ariel Sabar BY PHOTOGRAPHS BY ZACHARIAS ABUBEKER

54 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015 May 2015 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 55 n early October, after the main rainy season, Ethiopia’s central Rift Valley is a study in green. Fields of wheat and barley lie like shimmering quilts over the highland ridges. Across the valley fl oor below, beneath low-fl ying clouds, farmers wade through fi elds of African cereal, plucking weeds and primping the land for harvest. It is hard to look at such lushness and equate Ethiopia with famine. The f-word, as some people call it, as though the mere mention were a curse, has haunted the country since hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians died three decades ago in the crisis that inspired Live Aid, “We Are the World” and other spectacles of Western charity. The word was on no one’s lips this year. Almost as soon as I’d landed in Addis Ababa, people told me that 2014 had been a relatively good year for Ethiopia’s 70 million subsistence farmers. But Gabriel Senay wasn’t so sure. A scientist with the U.S. Geological Sur- vey, he’d designed a system that uses NASA satellites to detect unusual spikes in land temperature. These anomalies can signal crop failure, and Senay’s algorithms were now plotting these hot zones along a strip of the Rift Valley normally thought of as a breadbasket. Was something amiss? Something aid workers hadn’t noticed?

Senay had come to Ethiopia to fi nd but it’s a large pie, and to make sure aid manity’s oldest and cruelest scourges. out—to “ground-truth” his years of gets to the neediest, USAID spends $25 In the paved and wired developed painstaking research. At the top of a million a year on scientifi c forecasts of world, it’s hard to imagine a food emer- long list of people eager for results were where hunger will strike next. gency staying secret for long. But in offi cials at the U.S. Agency for Interna- Senay’s innovations, some offi cials countries with bad roads, spotty phone tional Development, who had made a felt, had the potential to take those service and shaky political regimes, iso- substantial investment in his work. The forecasts to a new level, by spotting lated food shortfalls can metastasize United States is the largest donor of food the faintest fi rst footsteps of famine into full-blown humanitarian crises be- aid to the world, splitting $1.5 billion to almost anywhere in the world. And fore the world notices. That was in many $2.5 billion a year among some 60 coun- the earlier offi cials heard those foot- ways the case in Ethiopia in 1984, when tries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. steps, the faster they would be able the failure of rains in the northern high- Ethiopia usually gets the biggest slice, to mobilize forces against one of hu- lands was aggravated by a guerrilla war

56 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015 “My grandparents’ world was 20 kilometers,” says Gabriel Senay (at the U.S. Earth Resources Obser- vation and Science Center), who uses satellite data to assess croplands in places such as Ethiopia, where he grew up.

Lake Turkana in the southwest. About midway along its length, a few hours’ drive south of Addis, it bisects a ver- dant highland of cereal ﬁ elds. Senay, who is 49, sat in the front seat of our Land Cruiser, wearing a baseball cap lettered, in cursive, “Life is Good.” Behind us were two other vehicles, shuttling half a dozen American and Ethiopian scientists excited enough by Senay’s research to want to see its potential firsthand. We caravanned through the gritty city of Adama and over the Awash River, weaving through cavalcades of donkeys and sheep. Up along the green slopes of the Arsi highlands, Senay looked over his strangely hued maps. The pages were stippled with red and orange dots, each a square kilometer, where satellites 438 miles overhead had sensed a kind of fever on the land. From the back seat, Curt Reynolds, a burly crop analyst with the U.S. De- partment of Agriculture in Washington, who advises USAID (and is not known to sugar-coat his opinions), asked whether recent rains had cooled those along what is now the Eritrean border. ilarly spared; the drought had somehow fevers, making some of Senay’s assess- Senay, who grew up in Ethiopian farm skipped over their rainy plateau. ments moot. “There are still pixels that country, the youngest of 11 children, was That you could live in one part of a are really hurting,” Senay insisted. then an undergraduate at the country’s country and be oblivious to mass star- We turned off the main road, jouncing leading agricultural college. But the fam- vation in another: Senay would think along a muddy track to a local agricultural ine had felt remote even to him. The vic- about that a lot later. bureau. Huseen Muhammad Galatoo, a tims were hundreds of miles to the north, grave-looking man who was the bureau’s and there was little talk of it on campus. The Great Rift Valley splits Ethiopia lead agronomist, led us into a musty of- Students could eat injera—the sour pan- into nearly equal parts, running in a ﬁ ce. A faded poster on one wall said, “Cof- cake that is a staple of Ethiopian meals— ragged diagonal from the wastelands fee: Ethiopia’s Gift to the World.” just once a week, but Senay recalls no of the Danakil Depression in the Galatoo told us that several Arsi

GREG LATZA other hardships. His parents were sim- northeast to the crocodile haunts of districts were facing their worst year

May 2015 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 57 in decades. A failure of the spring belg sphere with four chopstick-like radio school—and a father who demanded rains and a late start to the summer antennas—entered orbit, and history, achievement, who called Gabriel “doc- kiremt rains had left some 76,000 ani- in 1957. Today, some 1,200 artifi cial tor” while the boy was still in diapers— mals dead and 271,000 people—10 per- satellites orbit Earth. Most are still propelled him to Ethiopia’s Haramaya cent of the local population—in need of in traditional lines of work: bounc- University and then to the West, for emergency food aid. ing phone calls and television signals graduate studies in hydrology and ag- “Previously, the livestock used across the globe, beaming GPS coor- ricultural engineering. to survive somehow,” Galatoo said, dinates, monitoring weather, spying. A Not long after earning a PhD at Ohio through an interpreter. “But now there smaller number watch over the planet’s State University, he landed a job that is literally nothing on the ground.” wide-angle affl ictions, like deforesta- felt more like a mission—turning Amer- ican satellites into NASA’s fl agship defenders of Af- earth-observing rica’s downtrod- satellite, Terra, orbits pole-to- den. His offi ce, in pole 16 times the South Dakota a day , taking countryside 18 readings of the atmosphere, miles northeast oceans, land, of Sioux Falls, is snow and ice. home to the Earth Resources Obser- vation and Science Center, a low building, ringed by rows of tinted windows, looking a bit like a spaceship that emergency-landed in some hapless farmer’s corn and soybean spread. Run by the U.S. Geological Survey, it’s where the planet gets a daily diagnostic exam. Giant antennas and parabolic dishes ingest thousands of satellite images a Nomads searching for water, villagers battling day, keeping an eye on the pulse of the planet’s waters, the pigment of its land malaria: When they look to the heavens for and the musculature of its mountains. help, Senay wants satellites looking back. Senay was soon living the American dream, with a wife, two kids and minivan in a Midwestern suburb. But sat- In the face of such doleful news, tion, melting glaciers and urban sprawl. ellites were his bridge home, closing Senay wasn’t in the mood for self-con- But only recently have scientists sicced the distance between here and there, gratulation. But the truth was, he’d satellites on harder-to-detect, but no now and then. “I came to know more nailed it. He’d shown that satellites less perilous threats to people’s basic about Ethiopia in South Dakota when could spot crop failure—and its eff ects needs and rights. looking at it from satellites than I did on livestock and people—as never Senay is on the leading edge of growing up,” he told me. As torrents of before, at unprecedented scale and this effort, focusing on hunger and data fl ow through his calamity-spot- sensitivity. “The [current] early warn- disease—ills whose solutions once ting algorithms, he says, “I imagine the ing system didn’t fully capture this,” seemed resolutely earthbound. No- poor farmer in Ethiopia. I imagine a Alemu Asfaw, an Ethiopian economist mads searching for water, villagers bat- guy struggling to farm who never got a who helps USAID forecast food crises, tling malaria, farmers aching for rain: chance to get educated, and that kind said in the car afterwards, shaking his When they look to the heavens for help, of gives me energy and some bravery.” head. “There had been reports of er- Senay wants satellites looking back. His goal from the outset was to turn ratic rainfall. But no one expected it to He was born in the northwest Ethio- satellites into high-tech divining rods, be that bad.” No one, that is, but Senay, pian town of Dangila, in a house with- capable of fi nding water—and map- whose work, Reynolds said, could be “a out electricity or plumbing. To cross ping its eff ects—across Africa. Among game changer for us.” the local river with his family’s 30 scientists who study water’s where- cattle, little Gabriel clung to the tail of abouts, Senay became a kind of rock Satellites have come a long way since an ox, which towed him to the grazing star. Though nominally a bureaucrat in

Russia’s Sputnik 1—a beachball-size lands on the other side. High marks in a remote outpost of a federal agency, he NASA

58 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015 AN EYE FOR TROUBLE FOR GEORGE CLOONEY AND THE UNITED NATIONS, THE NEW FRONTIER IN SATELLITES IS HUMANITARIAN AID

They beam phone and TV signals around the globe. They most suitable places for refugee camps. “We’ll provide them peer into enemy territory. And since 1972, with the launch of information on local conditions, what the ground looks like, the United States’ Landsat 1, satellites have kept watch over where the roads are, where nearby towns are,” says Lars the planet’s natural resources, tracking deforestation and Bromley, principal analyst at UNOSAT. “A lot of that infor- urban sprawl. But they’ve increasingly taken on an urgent mation simply doesn’t exist for the majority of the world— new role as human rights watchdogs. especially not these really rural, really remote areas, which U.N. satellite whisperers watch the migrations of people suddenly have to absorb 50,000 people.” displaced by war in Syria and Somalia to target aid to the right In Iraq, satellite experts identifi ed the site of a massa- places at the right times. The team, known as UNOSAT, also cre from a witness who remembered details of the land- used satellites to monitor the pace of Ebola treatment center scape but little else. “In that case,” Bromley says, “we were construction in West Africa and to confi rm that crowds of told something like, They were taken from a building here, people—members of the Yazidi minority —were stranded on driven a few minutes down a road, then got to something that Iraq’s Mount Sinjar amid attacks by the Islamic State. looked like a garbage dump where the grass looked burned. “We are not Enemy of the State and James Bond speed We say, OK . . . where could this be?” yet,” says Einar Bjorgo, the manager of UNOSAT, which is Andrew Woods, a professor of international law at the based in Geneva. “But when I say real time or near real time, I University of Kentucky, imagines a future in which satellites mean we can have our analysis out within six hours after the reduce war crimes. Focusing on where rebels are marauding satellite fl ew over the area, no matter where on the planet.” in northern Uganda, for instance, the U.N. might drop leaf- The Satellite Sentinel Project, co-founded in 2010 by the ac- lets that read, Warning: Satellites Are Monitoring This Area. tor George Clooney, scrutinizes Sudan and South Sudan from “Like security cameras in a dark alley,” Woods has said, such space, looking for evidence of atrocities and sounding alarms warnings “can send a clear and strong message to potential in social and conventional media. In 2011, satellites tipped perpetrators that someone is watching.” –A.S. Amnesty International to a sharp growth in political prisoner camps in A 2014 UNOSAT analysis of an North Korea, helping “provide irre- Ebola treatment futable evidence of the existence, facility in Guinea. location, and scale” of the camps, “which the government can no longer deny,” the group says. Such advances stem, in part, from greatly improved pho- tographic resolution. The first nonmilitary satellites, which struggled to tell a football field from a forest, have given way to models that can distinguish a sedan from a pickup. Another factor is coverage. From 2011 to 2013, the number of nonmilitary earth-observing satellites in orbit grew by 65 percent, from 92 to 152, according to the Satellite Industry Association. That’s nearly four times the growth rate of all satellites, and it means that more corners of the planet are eyed more closely than ever before. The size of these digital photo albums has soared along with the number of people who can gape at them. In 2008, a U.S. policy change made Landsat images free over the web; more than 20 million have been downloaded. And no longer are mainframe computers needed to handle whopping image fi les. Thanks to leaps in microchip processing speeds, you can thumb through space-borne images on your smartphone. As tens of thousands of South Sudanese streamed into Ethiopia last year, UNOSAT identifi ed for U.N. offi cials the UNITAR / UNOSAT; PP. 60-61 ZACHARIAS ABUBEKER 60-61 ZACHARIAS PP. / UNOSAT; UNITAR

May 2015 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 59 60 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015 Farm kids in the Arsi area of Ethiopia. With a population of 94 million predicted to double in two decades, the nation faces dangerous “food insecurity,” oﬃ cials say.

May 2015 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 61 published in academic journals, taught graduate-level university courses and gave talks in places as far-fl ung as Jor- AMAZON WATCH dan and Sri Lanka. Before long, people were calling from all over, wanting his CAN HIGH-FLYING MODERN TECHNOLOGY PROTECT THE WORLD’S algorithms for their own problems. LEAST MODERN PEOPLE? A U.S. RESEARCHER MAKES THE CASE Could he look at whether irrigation in Robert Walker is making innovative use of satellite imagery to Afghanistan’s river basins was return- assess the last remaining Amazon tribes that have limited or no contact ing to normal after years of drought with the outside world. Walker, a University of Missouri anthropologist who and war? What about worrisome levels previously did fi eld work in the Amazon, has analyzed 27 communities of groundwater extraction in Ameri- of “uncontacted” people in Brazil, and one each in Colombia and Peru. ca’s Pacifi c Northwest? Was he free for Poring over high-resolution images purchased from commercial satellite the National Water Census? companies, he sizes up each village, measuring gardens and counting He’d started small. A man he met on a huts. His goal is to share data with governments and advocates so they trip to Ethiopia told him that 5,200 peo- can better protect villages from threats such as logging, mining, violent ple had died of malaria in three months drug traffi ckers and encounters with outsiders who carry infectious dis- in a single district in the Amhara re- eases against which natives have no immunity. One village, Walker found, gion. Senay wondered if satellites could is only 19 miles from a newly built road. help. He requested malaria case data “It’s a noninvasive way of knowing what is going on on the ground,” from clinics across Amhara and then he said. “If people leave a village, or a village has been attacked, compared them with satellite readings we want to know as soon as possible.” of rainfall, land greenness and ground The Amazon holds the world’s largest concentration of isolated com- moisture—all factors in where malar- munities, with 50 to 100. Some are so small they face another threat: a ia-carrying mosquitoes breed. And there shortage of healthy mating partners. In research published in the journal it was, almost like magic: With satellites, Royal Society Open Science, Walker identifi ed three villages that “face an he could predict the location, timing and imminent threat of falling be- severity of malaria outbreaks up to three low a minimum viable popu- months in advance. “For prevention, lation.” Those villages consist early warning is very important for us,” of no more than nine huts on Abere Mihretie, who leads an anti-ma- nine acres of cleared land. laria group in Amhara, told me. With $2.8 The Brazilian and Peruvian million from the National Institutes of governments rely on satellite Health, Senay and Michael Wimberly, images to monitor isolated an ecologist at South Dakota State Uni- Indians, but the fi ndings aren’t versity, built a website that gives Amhara made public, leaving advo- offi cials enough early warning to order cates in the dark. FUNAI, the bed nets and medicines and to take pre- Brazilian agency that over- ventive steps such as draining standing sees territories inhabited by water and counseling villagers. Mihretie uncontacted tribes, “is under expects the system—which will go live constant attack from the ‘agri- this year—to be a lifesaver, reducing ma- business bloc’ of politicians in laria cases by 50 to 70 percent. Congress who are determined Senay had his next epiphany on a A 2013 satellite view of a settlement to overturn hard-won indige- work trip to Tanzania in 2005. By the of uncontacted people in Acre, Brazil. nous rights,” says Fiona Wat- side of the road one day, he noticed cat- son, of Survival International. tle crowding a badly degraded water Walker’s publications don’t pinpoint where villages are located, but he hole. It stirred memories of childhood, acknowledges that someone might be able to exploit his data to discover when he’d watched cows scour river- the Indians. That possibility worries Glenn Shepard, an anthropologist beds for trickles of water. The weakest at the Goeldi Museum in Brazil: “If anyone can fi nd them, what’s to keep got stuck in the mud, and Senay and his some unethical reality TV producer from trying to go in and make a show?” friends would pull them out. “These Walker defends the research as critical: “We want people to be knowledge- were the cows we grew up with, who able about the problem and thinking about solutions.” –CATHERINE ELTON gave us milk,” he says. “You felt sorry.” Senay geo-tagged the hole in Tanza-

nia, and began reading about violent DIGITALGLOBE BY IMAGE SATELLITE

62 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015 ERITREA YEMEN SUDAN Arabian Sea

ETHIOPIA DJIBOUTI

Addis Ababa SOMALIA

SOUTH SUDAN CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

UGANDA READING THE EARTH KENYA Recent satellite analysis of evapotranspiration, or water emanating DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC from both land and vegetation. OF THE CONGO RWANDA COOLER, WETTER WARMER, DRIER THAN NORMAL THAN NORMAL BURUNDI TANZANIA

conflict among nomadic clans over In remote parts of the world, even good- access to water. One reason for the enough data can go a long way toward confl icts, he learned, was that nomads were often unaware of other, nearby “helping solve big important issues.” holes that weren’t as heavily used and perhaps just as full of water. such liaisons may soon go the way of the tive programs to feed the hungry in lean Back in South Dakota, Senay found switchboard operator. Angerer is seek- years. But other things have been slower he could see, via satellite, the particu- ing funding for a mobile app that would to change: 85 percent of Ethiopians work lar Tanzania hole he’d visited. What’s draw on a phone’s GPS to lead herders the land as farmers or herders, most at more, it gave off a distinct “spectral to water. “Sort of like Yelp,” he told me. the subsistence level, and less than 1 per- signature,” or light pattern, which he Senay was becoming a savant of the cent of agricultural land is irrigated. That could then use to identify other water data workaround, of the idea that good leaves Ethiopia, the second most popu- holes clear across the African Sahel, enough is sometimes better than per- lous country in Africa, at the mercy of from Somalia to Mali. With informa- fect. Doppler radar, weather balloons, the region’s notoriously fi ckle rains. No tion about topography, rainfall esti- dense grids of electronic rain gauges country receives more global food aid. mates, temperature, wind speed and simply don’t exist in much of the de- Famine appears in Ethiopia’s histor- humidity, Senay was then able to gauge veloping world. Like some MacGyver ical record as early as the ninth cen- how full each hole was. of the outback, Senay was proving an tury and recurs with an almost tidal Senay and Jay Angerer, a rangeland “exceptionally good detective” in fi nd- regularity. The 1973 famine, which ecologist at Texas A&M University, ing serviceable replacements for labo- killed tens of thousands, led to the soon won a $1 million grant from NASA ratory-grade data, says Andrew Ward, a overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie to launch a monitoring system. Hosted prominent hydrologist who was Senay’s and the rise of an insurgent Marxist on a U.S. Geological Survey website, it dissertation adviser at Ohio State. In government known as the Derg. The tracks some 230 water holes across Af- remote parts of the world, Ward says, 1984 famine helped topple the Derg. rica’s Sahel, giving each a daily rating of even good-enough data can go a long Famine often has multiple causes: “good,” “watch,” “alert” or “near dry.” To way toward “helping solve big import- drought, pestilence, economies over- get word to herders, the system relies ant issues.” dependent on agriculture, antiquated on people like Sintayehu Alemayehu, of And no issue was more important to farming methods, geographic isolation, the aid group Mercy Corps. Alemayehu Senay than his homeland’s precarious political repression, war. But there was and his staff meet with nomadic clans food supply. a growing sense in the latter decades at village markets to relay a pair of sat- of the 20th century that science could ellite forecasts—one for water-hole lev- Ethiopia’s poverty rate is falling, and a play a role in anticipating—and head-

MAP BY GUILBERT GATES; SOURCE: EROS GUILBERT GATES; MAP BY els, another for pasture conditions. But new generation of leaders has built eff ec- ing off —its worst iterations. The United

May 2015 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 63 Nations started a basic early-warning NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites how fast you saw it, how little it cost— program in the mid-1970s, but only carry infrared sensors that log the wasn’t lost on his bosses. “Some more after the 1980s Ethiopian crisis was temperature of every square kilome- academically oriented people reach a more rigorously scientifi c program ter of earth every day. Because those an impasse: ‘Well, I don’t know that, I born: USAID’s Famine Early Warning sensors have been active for more can’t assume that, therefore I’ll stop,’” Systems Network (FEWS NET). than a decade, Senay realized that a says James Verdin, his project leader at Previously, “a lot of our information well-crafted algorithm could fl ag plots USGS, who was with us in the Rift Val- used to be from Catholic priests in, of land that got suddenly hotter than ley. “Whereas Gabriel recognizes that like, some little mission in the middle their historical norm. In farming re- the need for an answer is so strong that of Mali, and they’d say, ‘My people are gions, these hotspots could be bell- you need to make your best judgment on starving,’ and you’d kind of go, ‘Based on wethers of trouble for the food supply. what to assume and proceed.” what?’” Gary Eilerts, a veteran FEWS Scientists had studied evapotranspi- FEWS NET had just one other re- NET offi cial, told me. Missionaries and ration with satellites before, but their mote test of crop health: satellites that local charities could glimpse conditions methods were expensive and time-con- gauge land greenness. The trouble is outside their windows, but had little suming: Highly paid engineers had to that stressed crops can stay green for grasp of the broader severity and scope manually interpret each snapshot of weeks, before shading brown. Their of suff ering. Local political leaders had a land. That’s fi ne if you’re interested in temperature, on the other hand, ticks clearer picture, but weren’t always keen one tract of land at one point in time. up almost immediately. And unlike the to share it with the West, and when they But what if you wanted every stitch green test, which helps only once the did, the West didn’t always trust them. of farmland on earth every day? Senay growing season is underway, Senay’s The United States needed hard, thought he could get there with a few could read soil moisture at sowing time. objective data, and FEWS NET was simplifying assumptions. He knew that The Simplifi ed Surface Energy Bal- tasked with gathering it. To comple- when a fi eld was perfectly healthy—and ance model, as it is called, could thus ment their analyses of food prices and thus at peak sweat—land temperature give offi cials and aid groups several economic trends, FEWS NET sci- was a near match for air temperature. weeks’ more lead time to act before entists did use satellites, to estimate Senay also knew that a maximally sick families would go hungry and live- rainfall and monitor land greenness. fi eld was a fi xed number of degrees hot- stock would begin to die. Scientists at But then they heard about a guy in ter than a maximally healthy one, after FEWS NET’s Addis offi ce email their small-town South Dakota who looked tweaking for terrain type. analyses to 320 people across Ethio- like he was going one better. So if he could get air temperature pia, including government offi cials, aid Senay knew that one measure of crop for each square kilometer of earth, workers and university professors. health was the amount of water a fi eld he’d know the coldest the land there Biratu Yigezu, acting director gen- gave off : its rate of “evapotranspiration.” could be at that time. By adding that eral of Ethiopia’s Central Statistical When plants are thriving, water in the fi xed number, he’d also know the hot- Agency, told me that FEWS NET fi lls soil fl ows up roots and stems into leaves. test it could be. All he needed now was key blanks between the country’s an- Plants convert some of the water to oxy- NASA’s actual reading of land tempera- nual door-to-door surveys of farmers. gen, in photosynthesis. The rest is “trans- ture, so he could see where it fell within “If there’s a failure during planting pired,” or vented, through pores called those theoretical extremes. That ratio stage, or if there’s a problem in the stomata. In other words, when fi elds are told you how sweaty a fi eld was—and fl owering stage, the satellites help, be- moist and crops are thriving, they sweat. thus how healthy. cause they’re real time.” Satellites might not be able to see the Senay found good air temperature land sweat, but Senay wondered if they datasets at the National Oceanic and One afternoon in the Rift Valley, we could feel it sweat. That’s because when Atmospheric Administration and the pulled the Land Cruisers alongside water in soil or plants evaporates, it University of California, Berkeley. By fi elds of slouching corn to speak with cools the land. Conversely, when a lush braiding the data from NASA, NOAA a farmer. Tegenu Tolla, who was 35, field takes a tumble—whether from and Berkeley, he could get a computer wore threadbare dress pants with drought, pests or neglect—evapotrans- to make rapid, automated diagnoses holes at the knees and a soccer jersey piration declines and the land heats. of crop conditions anywhere in the bearing the logo of the insurance giant Once soil dries to the point of harden- world. “It’s data integration at the AIG. He lives with his wife and three ing and cracking, its temperature is as highest level,” he told me one night, in children on whatever they can grow on much as 40 degrees hotter than it was the lobby of our Addis hotel. their two and a half acre plot. as a well-watered fi eld. The results might be slightly less This year was a bust, Tolla told Senay, precise than the manual method, which who chats with farmers in his native See more photographs of Senay’s work in Ethiopia at factors in extra variables. But the up- Amharic. “The rains were not there.” So Smithsonian.com/satellite sides—how much of the world you saw, Tolla waited until August, when some

64 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015 rain fi nally came, and sowed a short-ma- scrublands north Gofa Hundie, mobile app, he thought, farmers could turing corn with miserly yields. “We will of the Kenyan bor- a farmer in the report on the land beneath their feet: Arsi area. Sci- not even be able to get our seeds back,” der, a place of ba- entists predict instant ground-truthing that could Tolla said. His cattle had died, and to feed nana plantations Ethiopia will be help scientists sharpen their forecasts. his family, Tolla had been traveling to Ad- and roadside ba- “hard hit” by What farmers lacked was the big pic- climate change, ama for day work on construction sites. boons and throngs with crop yields ture, and that’s what an app could give We turned onto a lumpy dirt road, of cattle, which of- plunging 22 per- back: weather predictions, seasonal fore- into a fi eld where many of the teff ten marooned our cent by 2080 . casts, daily crop prices in nearby mar- stalks had grown just one head in- vehicles. At times, kets. Senay already had a name: Satellite stead of the usual six. (Teff is the fi ne the road seemed a province less of autos Integrated Farm Information, or SIFI. grain used to make injera.) Gazing at than of animals and their child handlers. With data straight from farmers, experts the dusty, hard-packed soil, Senay had Boys drove battalions of cows and sheep, in agricultural remote sensing, without one word: “desertifi cation.” balanced jerrycans of water on their ever setting foot on soil, would be a step The climate here was indeed show- shoulders and stood atop stick-built closer to fi guring out exactly how much ing signs of long-term change. Rainfall platforms in sorghum fields, flailing food farmers could coax from the land. in the south-central Rift Valley has their arms to scare off crop-devouring But soil engulfed us now—it was in dropped 15 to 20 percent since the queleas, a type of small bird. our boots, beneath our fi ngernails— mid-1970s, while the population—the Almost everywhere we stopped we and there was nothing to do but face number of mouths to feed—has mush- found grim alignments between the farmers eye to eye. roomed. “If these trends persist,” FEWS red and orange dots on Senay’s maps “Allah, bless this fi eld,” Senay said to NET wrote in a 2012 report, they “could and misery on the ground. Senay was a Muslim man, who’d told us of watch- leave millions more Ethiopians exposed gratifi ed, but in the face of so much ing helplessly as drought killed off his to hunger and undernourishment.” suff ering, he wanted to do more. Farm- corn crop. Over the next few days we spiraled ers knew their own fi elds so well that “Allah will always bless this fi eld,” down from the highlands into harder-hit he wondered how to make them play- the man replied. “We need something

ZACHARIAS ABUBEKER ZACHARIAS maize-growing areas and ﬁ nally into ers in the early warning system. With a more.”

May 2015 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 65 National Treasure Monolith

The newly acquired archives of Arthur C. Clarke shed new light on a futuristic giant

I was once a teen from Texas, living cled, round-shouldered man, joked in southern India during the early with me in a donnish fashion as he 1970s (my father had been dispatched signed a tall stack of my paperbacks. abroad in the petrochemical-employ- I’d innocently brought along my entire ment diaspora). That was how, as a Arthur Clarke fi ction and nonfi ction science fi ction-obsessed kid, I ended collection, which fi lled a large bag. up in an audience in Madras when Sir Now it’s 2015. An Indian satellite or- Arthur C. Clarke arrived in the city on bits Mars, while I’m in my home study An early draft of the novel a lecture tour. Clarke, a British expat poring over pages from the Arthur 2001: A Space Odyssey who made his home in the nearby is- Clarke personal papers, sent to me in a land nation of Sri Lanka, was the fi rst form Clarke would have appreciated: as science fi ction writer I’d ever met. electronic fi les. As it turns out, Sir Ar- ticularly keen on H.G. Wells and Edgar I stared in awe at the visionary sage thur C. Clarke, CBE, is likely the only au- Rice Burroughs, as indeed I was at his as he addressed a crowd who included thor of fi ction whose papers happen to be age—except that I had the benefi t of the city’s businessmen, clad in white archived in a repository devoted to outer reading heaps of Arthur C. Clarke. cotton dhotis and jubbahs, sitting in space—the Smithsonian National Air I noted, also, a few choice items wooden chairs in an air-conditioned and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Cen- related to that famous business with hotel ballroom. Clarke told his audi- ter. Smithsonian curator Martin Collins Stanley Kubrick. (Among the new ence two important things: Informa- and archivist Patti Williams recently Smithsonian holdings are an early tion should no longer be printed on acquired some 85 cubic feet of Clarke’s draft of the novel 2001: A Space Od- paper, and Indians should keep up the paper data, including photographs, yssey.) The two of them, director and good work with their space program. shipped from Sri Lanka by FedEx. novelist, are conspiring to make what After his speech, Clarke, a bespecta- One of the oldest and most numi- Kubrick describes in a letter to Clarke nous items is a battered high-school as a “really good science fi ction movie,” notebook. Its pages feature neat, hand- because they both know that there is by Bruce Sterling lined grids in which an adolescent no such thing—not yet. Clarke lists his precious science fi c- As they worked together, conjuring tion possessions. He rates the works, up the novel and the fi lm, correspon- too—“good,” “very good” and the rare dence reveals a preoccupation with PHOTOGRAPH BY Cade Martin “very very good.” Young Arthur is par- “the Cube” (later transmuted into the

66 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015 Monolith). Responding to Clarke’s idea blow everybody’s minds a full 20 the island where he really lived, de- suggestion in 1966 that the Cube com- years later. Lags of that length were spite the risks of Sinhalese typhoons, municate directly with the man-apes rather typical in the visionary’s life. tsunamis and civil war. His soul was who would one day populate the fi lm, Clarke, a British émigré in Sri British, while his mind was frankly ex- Kubrick instead advocates an enig- Lanka, must have been an ideal col- traterrestrial; eventually the lore had matic presence: “We see only the hyp- laborator for Kubrick, an American to go where the heart was. Now that notic image appear and the spellbound émigré in Britain. In his limpid, clear, cache resides in the museum where faces of the man-apes.” well-typed correspondence, Clarke history probably wants it to be. The “really good science fiction briefs Kubrick on a dazzling panoply There were two kinds of fantasies movie” was supposed to take two of severely weird topics: paleo-anthro- in the Space Age: rocket-powered geo- years to complete (it took four); it was pology, extraterrestrial intelligence, political fantasies with budgets of bil- $4 million over budget; the fi lm nearly scuba diving, the proper choice in lions of dollars and rubles, and poetic bombed in American theater chains home telescopes. Clarke cares not one paper fantasies made up by science before hippies fl ocked to watch it—a bit for Hollywood glamour. He’s always fi ction writers, especially one lone tale of spine-tingling terror, almost. informative, yet never intrusive. genius with an aqualung and a sarong. 2001: A Space Odyssey bears the im- Sri Lanka was kind to Clarke. For As decades pass, it gets harder for pos- print of its source, Clarke’s short story years, he shipped his personal papers terity to tell those world views apart. “The Sentinel.” Clarke dashed off that back to Britain for alleged safekeeping, But Clarke always knew there was no lunar tale in 1948, only to have his big then fi nally took the entire lot back to real diff erence.

May 2015 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 67 PLASTIC PLANET

A BEACHCOMBING ARTIST’S STUNNING IMAGES SHOW WE’RE IN A SEA OF TROUBLE

So much plastic is discarded around the world that 8.8 million tons end up in the ocean every year, according to a recent analysis of waste disposal in 192 coastal nations, the most comprehensive study of its kind. China contributes the most, an estimated 2.4 million tons a year, followed by Indonesia at nearly 900,000 tons. The United States ranks 20th , contributing some 80,000 tons. If trends continue, the researchers predict, the toll worldwide will double by 2025, PHOTOGRAPHS BY to about 100 million pounds per day. The plastic swirls in giant gyres in the open oceans, collecting in “garbage patches” Mandy (though concentrations are too low to resemble piles of trash). Most of the plastic is degraded into small particles, eaten by Barker sea creatures or submerged. In remote waters off Kamchatka , researchers scanning the fl oor three miles below the TEXT BY surface found as many as 185 tiny plastic litter pieces TRANSFORM ELIZABETH per square foot . The disaster is largely invisible but for Barker collected debris from some ROYTE one place—shorelines. For Hong Kong Soup: 1826 (the 30 Hong Kong number refers to the metric tons of plastic added beaches, averag- to the city’s landfi lls each day), Britain-based art- ing fi ve toys a day. ist Mandy Barker photographed plastic from Hong Kong beaches and layered her images for a phantasmagori- cal, deep-space eeriness. “I wanted to create the feeling of no boundaries,” she says, “because plastic just goes on and on.” See more of Barker’s project at Smithsonian.com/plastic

68 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015 May 2015 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 69 SPILT During Typhoon Vicente in 2012, containers ﬁ lled with plastic pellets top- pled from a freighter into the South China Sea. Called “nurdles,” the pellets had to be vacuumed from beaches.

70 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015 May 2015 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 71 72 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015 POLYSTYRENE (left) LOTUS GARDEN (this page) Hong Kong ﬁ shermen store their daily catch in plastic foam containers, and plastic ﬂ owers decorate homes, temples and parks. Other debris that commonly washes ashore: shoes, novelty pens, toilet seats and TVs. “You couldn’t possibly pick up everything,” says Barker.

SMITHSONIAN.COM 73 WELCOME TO

74 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015 A NEW KIND OF FOOD- FOCUSED SUBURB IS SPROUTING ACROSS AMERICA. BUT IS IT BY SUSTAINABLE? Franz Lidz

PHOTOGRAPH BY BRINSON + BANKS May 2015 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 75 t the cusp of the Great Depres- sion, the humorist S.J. Perelman and his wife moved from Manhat- tan to a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Fifteen years of rusticating left him with ‘’a superb library of mortgages, mostly ﬁ rst editions, and the ﬁ nest case of sacroil- iac known to science.’’ Perelman recounted his picturesque mis- eries as a country squire in the 1947 collection Acres and Pains, which introduced readers to his real estate agent (Dewey Naïveté), his attorney (Newmown Hay, of Ashen, Livid & Hay) and his farm (Rising Gorge), which he describes as “an irregular patch of nettles bounded by short-term notes containing a fool and his wife who didn’t know enough to stay in the city.” Perelman’s rueful tale gained its widest cultural currency when it was adapted into the 1960s sitcom “Green Acres,” about a New

York lawyer who pines for a simpler life, and, over the objections of Possibly the most enthusiastic em- brace of farm livin’ these days is found his socialite wife, buys a farm, sight unseen. His own dewy naiveté deep in the woods of Chattahoochee Hill was neatly summed up in the theme song: Green Acres is the Country, southwest of Atlanta. There lies Serenbe, a 1,000-acre suburban place to be / Farm livin’ is the life for me / Land spreadin’ out so far Eden comprising two neighborhoods (and counting) bunched around Ye and wide / Keep Manhattan, just give me that countryside. Olde English village-style town centers.

76 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015 Daron “Farmer D” Joﬀ e climbs a compost heap at the nonproﬁ t farm he runs in California. His new project includes a suburban “food forest” linked to a public trail.

not least, a farm that produces 350 varieties of organic fruit, vegetables, herbs and fl owers. “When I fi rst visited here, I thought Serenbe felt artifi cial,” says E.C. Hall, a resident and retired college professor. “I thought of the prefabricated town in The Truman Show, created to exist sep- arately from the rest of the world. That changed when I walked around and met people every few yards. I realized we all had a similar desire for community.” Serenbe is perhaps the country’s most popular and profitable “agritopia,” the leafi est, farmiest of all the nascent trends in real estate, in which agrarian-focused housing schemes are anchored by farmland rather than, say, greenswards, man-made lakes or golf courses. Ranches, gardens and vine- yards are major selling points. There are already dozens of agritopian developments and, fueled by the local-food movement, emerging widespread environmental consciousness, Perel- manesque romanticism and good old American marketing chutzpah, more are in the works—enough to qualify as a trend in America’s preeminent rural community paper, the New York Times. Agritopias are popping up like dan- delions across the country, and why The hamlets are shaped like omegas to built to energy-effi cient EarthCraft not? Developers are nothing if not at- conform to the undulations of the land. specs. Waste water is fi ltered in a bi- tuned to their customers, and what the Peach and pecan trees shoot up from the ological treatment system and reused customers want is increasingly clear. sidewalks; goats and llamas browse in for irrigation. The town centers are At Serenbe, that’s eight acres of farm- dells; and lambs caper along the walking dotted with upmarket galleries, and land, which produce enough veggies trails that curl through glens and glades. a nonprofi t cultural institute stages to supply a half-dozen restaurants Everything has been assiduously plays and sponsors artists in resi- (three onsite), a farmer’s market and

BRINSON + BANKS planned. Cottages and co-ops are dence. There are stables, spas and, a Community-Supported Agriculture

May 2015 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 77 program with 120 members (most of ies, proposing that agriculture woven an urban farm. Raised pea-patch beds whom live in outlying towns). into urbanism represented the future of fronting each unit recall World War II “The thing I like about the farm is our cities. “Sustainability to the point of victory gardens. Banks of berry bushes that it’s as real as any I’ve ever worked self-suffi ciency is where the market is line the walkways. The 42 homes and on,” says Serenbe resident Rebecca Wil- going,” he wrote. But Garden Cities was apartments are, for the most part, liams, a 31-year-old Atlanta native who meant to be more than a market-indi- wedged tightly together, the better worked at a variety of farms before she cator. It was a warning: “To make a dif- to make use of limited space and en- and her husband, Ross, purchased a 145- ference in the campaign against climate courage social interaction. Exteriors acre sheep’s milk dairy just outside the change,” he wrote, “agrarian urbanism are Northwest Modern patchworks of development. “It’s not a toy farm,” she must succeed in being profi table, pop- board-and-batten cladding, and panels says. “It’s serious agriculture.” Serenbe ular and reproducible—with no down- of concrete and corrugated steel. The Farms is indeed professionally run, by sides if possible.” cedar siding, I’m assured, comes from a young idealist named Ashley Rodgers, Which could be a tough row to hoe. sustainably managed forests within who makes a comfortable living and has 500 miles. There’s so much talk of four full-time interns to boot. (They get a Ever watch the “Portlandia” sketch “leaving small footprints” that I feel monthly stipend and free housing.) in which a couple of earnest diners like I’m in a colony of elves. Williams calls Serenbe the “leading ask their server not only about the For all its aff ectations and lack of edge” of the new suburbs, propelled diet of the chicken they are about to racial diversity (Lotakis: “There are a by a history of what’s been shown to consume, but exactly how much land lot of white people”), Grow Commu- make people happy: physical close- it lived on, and its name? The server nity is an honest attempt to change ness, which encourages human inter- returns with pedigree papers to prove the way we live—a contemporary reaction; proximity to amenities, which that Colin was raised on a woodland boot of an old-fashioned American creates the sense that what you need diet of sheep’s milk, soy and, yes, local utopia. During the 19th century, when is readily at hand; green spaces, culti- hazelnuts. Ultimately, the diners leave Utopianism had its heyday, the tap- vated and wild, that provide places to the table to visit the farm and see for estry of sects included Brook Farm’s play and explore; and varied architec- themselves how Colin was brought up. Transcendentalists, the free lovers of ture, which fosters a feeling of secu- The residents of Bainbridge Island Oneida, New York, and the Shakers, rity, because it creates the sense that a have some of the do-it-ourselves ur- religious cultists so called because place has existed for a long time. “All of ban progressive preciousness associ- they trembled during worship. The these things create a genuine sense of ated with the food scene in Portland, Shakers’ biggest problem was that they safety,” she says, “which is the most ba- Oregon, some 200 miles south. Within practiced celibacy, hence they are no sic element of community and without fi ve minutes of entering a downtown longer with us. For them, at least, the which happiness is impossible.” coffee shop (where doughnuts are road to Utopia was a dead end. The agritopia takes these principles “hand-forged”), I hear enough buzz- At Grow, Utopian living takes some and cleverly folds in agriculture. Ev- words—fair trade, house-made, artis- getting used to. Though berries are erything new is invariably old. Ameri- anal, locally sourced—to start a com- there for the taking, some residents cans have romanticized farming since post heap. are reluctant pluckers. “Folks who the country began. In 1787, Thomas A gossamer-fi ne rain falls steadily weren’t involved with the gardens Jeff erson wrote to George Washington across the Puget Sound, the kind of day tend to be harvest-shy,” says resident that “Agriculture... is our wisest pur- Bainbridge Islanders call balmy. Hap- Ron Kaplan. “Some berries went bad suit, because it will in the end contrib- pily, downtown is a fi ve-minute stroll on the vine.” So Kaplan put up signs: ute most to real wealth, good morals from Grow Community, at eight acres “Pick Me.” & happiness.” Today’s successful sales the largest planned solar settlement in Some Village people—resident vol- pitch includes snipping arugula from Washington state. “The population is 30 unteers—would like to install a public the garden and then picking apples and percent environmentalists, 30 percent composting machine; others cluck strawberries on the stroll home from lawyers and 30 percent people who are about henhouses that are solar-powered work. The only thing missing from concerned about the environment and and self-propelled. When chicken coops this fantasy are the bluebirds that take have lawyers,” says project manager do come to Grow, don’t be surprised if your coat as you walk in the front door. Greg Lotakis. “Somehow, that adds up one of the roosters answers to Colin. A few years back, the pioneering to 100 percent.” architect and urban planner Andrés Lotakis escorts me to the Village, Of all the many things we learned Duany wrote a manifesto, Garden Cit- Grow Community’s first completed from watching the fi rst season of “The residential neighborhood. Streets Real Housewives of Orange County,” See more photographs of life on the suburban farm at are named Seed Path, Root Path and the most jarring may be the fact that, Smithsonian.com/farms Sprout Path, as befi ts the setting for at the time, seven million American

78 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015 hour drive up Interstate 5. The surrounding hillsides are speckled with tens of thousands of fruit trees. Inside, an immense property map hangs over a shelf of plastic lemons and avocados. “Homebuyers can enjoy the exclusive vistas of the citrus groves,” the Guest House greeter tells me, handing me a plastic bottle of water that bears the label: “The Ranch. Drink It In.” Some might see the nearer roots of developments like Rancho Mission Viejo and other suburban agritopias in the community of Prairie Crossing, the Illi- nois hamlet founded in 1993 with a 100- acre organic farm and a reconstructed plain at its heart. But the closer prototype might be Columbia, Maryland. In 1967, the visionary developer James Rouse led several hundred disil- lusioned city dwellers on a pilgrimage to Columbia. “There will be complete integration of races and economic groups,” he declared. Rouse’s Prom- ised Land, midway between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., was founded on 14,000 acres of cow pasture. He called it the Next America. Rouse conceived nine villages ring- ing a shared town center, with clustered housing that encouraged neighborli- ness, a scheme later Grow Commu- picked up by the nity’s “edible leaders of the New landscaping” Urbanism move- includes pea patch garden ment. “Columbia is beds. Residents a garden for grow- like Lisa Ellis ing people,” was volunteer to tend to the Rouse’s description. gardens. Yet lurking behind Rouse’s egalitarian “The autumn harvest produced lots of beans pronouncements was a shrewd cap- and squash. It wasn’t exactly the Soviet Union italist. When he was not playing the Pied Piper, he was a mortgage banker. model of centralized planning.” He made his fortune assembling other people’s money and charging interest for it, and Columbia’s ﬁ rst wave of families lived in gated developments. Today I’m touring Rancho Mission utopians were followed by specula- These modern suburban for- Viejo, a massive, partially gated com- tors buying homes for 5 percent down tresses are the kinds of places that munity assembled on a swath of amber and getting equity as fast as possible. mostly white and affluent Americans hills and grasslands where the Real As Rouse’s people garden bloomed— choose to live in when they want to Cattle of Orange County still graze. A Columbians now number about feel safe—from crime, from economic brilliant mid-winter sun blooms over 100,000—housing prices swelled as if uncertainty, from Americans who are the Guest House, a welcome center not dosed with Miracle-Gro.

MICHAEL HANSON; PP. 80&81: ANDRES GONZALEZ MICHAEL HANSON; PP. not mostly white and affluent. unlike the one at Disneyland, a half- By the early ’80s, New Urbanism had

May 2015 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 79 Serenbe’s founder, Steve Nygren (with daughter, Garnie), discovered the property on an outing to the countryside. The 420 residents include Rebecca Williams (right), who owns sheep.

80 SMITHSONIAN.COM May 2015 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 81 sprung up to pitch itself against what “Rancho Mission Viejo cultivates real Joff e was born in South Africa and it saw as the lifeless, land-guzzling community and an authentic, fresh grew up in Atlanta. During his fresh- sprawl of suburbia. It proposed that new way of living,” the greeter says, as man year at the University of Wiscon- beauty—a virtue low on planners’ agen- we drive through a bewildering maze sin-Madison, a deli sandwich changed das for much of the last century —mat- of gingerbread casitas and Span- his life. As he was about to bite in, he tered as much as function. In model ish-style condos. paused to ponder the ingredients: the New Urbanist towns like Florida’s Eventually, we reach a cul-de-sac turkey, the tomato, the lettuce, the Celebration and Seaside (the latter de- with no exit, no parked cars, no people slice of Swiss. He wondered why he signed by Andrés Duany and his wife, on the sidewalk. In fact, no sidewalks. knew so little about how that sandwich Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk), America’s At the end of the street is a raised plot came to be. “I was inspired to grow a alienating car culture was replaced by for growing vegetables, herbs and sandwich from scratch,” Joff e says. a matrix of foot and bike paths; porches fruits. It’s enclosed by a daunting iron He dropped out of school to appren- returned to the street-facing side of fence and protected by a security sys- tice at a biodynamic farm. Within a homes; and parks and playgrounds be- tem requiring an access code. couple years, he used his bar mitzvah came communal meeting grounds. At Gavilán, even the cabbages and money to make a down payment on 175 Among New Urbanism’s snarkier jer- caulifl owers live in their own gated acres in southwest Wisconsin. Since emiads was James Howard Kunstler’s development. then he has set up dozens of organic 1993 book The Geography of Nowhere, which savaged the burbs’ “immersive “The thing I like about the farm is that it’s as ugliness”—and then it got mean. His catalog of the “brutal” and “spiritually real as any I’ve ever worked on. It’s not a toy degrading” landscapes of suburbia en- farm. It’s serious agriculture.” compassed “the jive-plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast While moonlighting as a gentleman farms and gardens in prisons, schools parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel farmer, S.J. Perelman made several and resorts; opened a retail urban farm complexes, the ‘gourmet mansardic’ important discoveries. One was that store in Atlanta; put out his own line junk-food joints, the Orwellian offi ce there are no chiggers in an air-condi- of sawhorse coff ee tables; and written ‘parks’ featuring buildings sheathed in tioned movie theater. Another, “that a gardening handbook called Citizen the same refl ective glass as the sun- a corner delicatessen at dusk is more Farmers, which includes a meditative glasses worn by chain-gang guards, exciting than any rainbow.” section on “composting for the soul.” the particle-board garden apartments Daron Joff e concedes the fi rst point, (Equal to Joff e’s passion for farming is rising up in every meadow and corn- but quibbles with the second. The 38- his passion for Judaism.) fi eld, the freeway loops around every year-old agricultural consultant—or, Joff e was also the fi rst farm manager big and little city with their clusters of as he puts it, entre-manure—lives to at Serenbe, but he left after two years. discount merchant marts, the whole make a diff erence in the world one “I moved on,” he says. He’s still high destructive, wasteful, toxic, agorapho- homegrown organic heirloom tomato on agritopias, if not all of their mani- bia-inducing spectacle that politicians at a time. Joff e, who goes by the han- festations. “Agriculture can be a hard proudly call ‘growth.’” dle Farmer D, is lean and wiry, with concept for developers to wrap their Asked recently if he had a solution skin the color of butter toff ee. He has heads around,” he told me. The farm to our problems, Kunstler said, “I don’t about him a sort of intimation of abun- itself is too often “an unintegrated af- like talking about ‘solutions.’ I prefer dance, as if, like a magician, he might terthought,” squeezed into a corner of talking about intelligent responses.” suddenly reach into a pocket and draw the development, and the hired farmers Under the sprawling California sun- forth a goat’s horn overfl owing with have little incentive to feel like a part of shine at Rancho Mission Viejo, the cherries, violets and spinach. the community. Joff e says the mental- Guest House greeter drives me through Under a stingy brim straw hat of ity of agridevelopers tends to be, “Let’s the village of Gavilán, an exclusive en- indeterminate age, Joff e strolls past get a random local farmer, tell him he clave reserved for residents aged 55 and a wild meadow of nasturtiums, beets, can use the land for free and just let him older—a Tomorrowland for housewives carrots and celery—a cover crop med- farm”—essentially feudal serfs working and househusbands with rapidly dwin- ley based on the feedback of food banks the fi elds of wealthy landowners. dling tomorrows. near the nonprofi t farm he runs in En- “The farmer wants to have equity Gavilánters enjoy privacy behind cinitas, a small coastal town north of and something to call his own,” says an electronically monitored, dou- San Diego. He gathers some fl owers Joff e, who is married with two small ble-gated entrance and amenities like and lays them in the crook of his right kids. “You want to raise your family in a lounge with tapas and a happy hour. arm. The sun is shining. these neighborhoods—a lot of which

82 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015

are not aff ordable. When you plant a asked Jana Swenson, who’s married to work for a fi ve-acre food forest that fruit tree, you want to know that your the retired professor E.C. Hall and has will be layered with plants like plum, grandkids are going to eat off it. In lived in a couple of houses in the com- date and pistachio trees and link up to these communities, those things can be munity. “That is, if you could aff ord it.” a public trail. Whatever isn’t donated real challenges.” According to the U.S. Money—or lack of it—is no longer to charity will be free for the taking. Department of Agriculture, 91 percent the main obstacle to Joff e. Last year “Our farm project is driven by social of American farm households—those the Leichtag Foundation, a Jewish values,” Joff e says. “It’s not driven by which devote their livelihoods to the philanthropic nonprofi t organization, a real estate developer. It’s not about practice and lifestyle on agricultural put him in charge of its new commu- selling houses. It’s about getting people land far from urban centers—have at nity agricultural center in Encinitas. reconnected to food.” least one family member working a The foundation had purchased the re- Developers eager to cash in on Jof- non-farm job to make ends meet. maining 68 acres of the once vast Ecke fe’s cachet often approach him about “It’s well known that local specialty Ranch, the nation’s largest producer of brand partnerships, and when I ask crop farming is difficult at best and poinsettias, whose other 850 acres had him how he feels about real estate pretty much not profi table anywhere,” been sold to developers in the 1990s to people jumping on the agritopia band- says Quint Redmond. “It’s why there are transform the farmland into neighbor- wagon, he tenses his body, as from a very few farmers.” Redmond sees him- hoods and shopping centers. blow. “I have some concerns,” he says. self as a prophet of a true agritopian Serenbe has future. Or, rather, three restaurants in additon an agriburbian fu- to its eight-acre ture: He and his farm. The chef wife, Jenny, run of the Farm- house, Thaddeus Agriburbia®, a Col- Barton, picks orado land-plan- through freshly ning company. They harvested beets. launched the operation hoping to transform the nation’s burbs by converting 31 million acres of idle lawn to food production. Redmond envisions sowing golf course fairways with kale and corn and edging greens in chives and basil—maximum effi ciency, while more or less turning a day on the links into an exercise in salad making. So far his schemes have been unre- alized. After 12 years, he’s developed one three-quarter-acre model garden outside Denver and has proposals in the design phase for thousands of acres of other people’s private farmland— stock- The new property is smack in the “I hear the jargon used and think, ‘This piled by eager agritopians-to-be in an- middle of a jumble of tract homes, but is coming from the wrong place. These ticipation of the coming Agriburbia®. Leichtag promised to use it for the people don’t get it. This makes the en- I thought back to the enlightened common good, not for an uncommon tire movement look bad.’ By the same souls at Serenbe, full of confi dence and profi t. “We’re introducing a farm into token, you hope there are well-consid- communal feeling. Rebecca Williams, an existing suburb in a grassroots ered models out there that people will the sheep farmer, was sure that the way,” says Joff e, who grows produce look to and learn from.” model was reproducible. “All it takes for the needy as part of the organi- Perelman, for his part, said his time is a handful of people with a shared zation’s food pantry outreach and in the tall rhubarbs had made him a vision, and a willingness to invest in commitment to the concept of tikkun new man. His cheeks “developed the the kind of development that people olam, a Hebrew phrase meaning “re- ruddy vitality of a pail of lard,” his fi n- are enamored with and willing to pay pair the world.” About a quarter of the gers were “permanently knotted with for,” she said. Custom-built homes in county’s population can’t cover the arthritis” and his life-insurance bene- Serenbe can run as high as $3 million. area’s high cost of living. fi ciaries discussed him “openly in the

“Who wouldn’t want to live here?” Last fall, his team laid the ground- past tense.” ANDRES GONZALEZ

84 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015 Chicago Doctor Invents Affordable Hearing Aid Outperforms Many Higher Priced Hearing Aids

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© 2015 Aging In The Home Remodelers 82008 Whale Watching Cabot Trail Chéticamp Cape Anne of Green Gables 2 Breton New 2 P.E.I. Baddeck *REWARD* The skin-cell printer is one of sev- Brunswick 2 eral active projects at the institute that Flowerpot Rocks Fortress of receives funding from the U.S. De- Bay of Fundy Louisbourg 1 $5,000.00 partment of Defense, including tissue Highest Tides 2 Atlantic Ocean Halifax regeneration initiatives for facial and On Earth Peggy’s Cove Nova Scotia will be paid to the genital injuries, both of which have Daystop Overnight Two Nights been endemic among American sol- Caravan welcomes you to the Canadian Maritimes first person to disprove “The AP Theory” diers injured in recent wars. Last year, researchers led by Atala announced the formation of water and our solar system the successful implantation of vaginas +H`;V\Y$1395 CONTEST RULES engineered using the patients’ own Visit Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and 1. 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Theory: www.aptheory.info most of the digital revolution, takes Day 4. Ferry ride en route to Cape Breton. Comments: Enjoy two nights at the French-speaking place at a time when humans are able Acadian fishing village of Chéticamp. [email protected] to “fab”—essentially 3-D print—anything they need: drugs, computers, Day 5. Thrilling whale watching cruise. no purchase necessary Look for fin, minke and pilot whales. clothing. They are constrained only by their imagination. And yet hunched Day 6. Explore the Cabot Trail's rugged over Jackson’s poster, I found myself cliffs and breathtaking ocean views. SMITHSONIAN; MAY 2015; Volume 46, Number 2 Smith- Enjoy two nights in charming Baddeck. sonian (ISSN 0037-7333) is published monthly (except thinking that even Gibson hadn’t pre- for July/August issue) by Smithsonian Enterprises, 600 dicted this: living fl esh, on demand. Day 7. Journey back in time as you visit Maryland Ave. S.W., Suite 6001, Washington, D.C. 20024. I walked over to Atala’s offi ce. Sun- the 18th century Fortress of Louisbourg. Periodical postage paid at Washington, D.C. and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: send address changes to light splashed across the floor and Day 8. Learn about Nova Scotia's First Smithsonian Customer Service, P.O. Box 62060, Tampa, a tall set of bookshelves, which dis- Nation people and visit Peggy's Cove. FL 33662-0608. Printed in the USA. Canadian Publication Enjoy two relaxing nights in Halifax. Agreement No. 40043911. Canadian return address: Brokers played photos of Atala’s two young Worldwide, PO Box 1051, Fort Erie, ON L2A 6C7. sons and several copies of his textbook, Day 9. Stroll along the historic Halifax We may occasionally publish extra issues. ©Smithsonian Principles of Regenerative Medicine. waterfront. Visit the Maritime Museum. Institution 2015. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or He’d been in the operating room all Day 10. Return with great memories! in part without permission is prohibited. Editorial offices are at MRC 513, P.O. Box 37012, Washington, D.C. 20013 (202- morning (he’s also the medical school’s Visit Caravan.com to read full itinerary. 633-6090). Advertising and circulation offices are at 420 chairman of urology) and did not ex- Affordable Guided Vacations + tax, fees Lexington Ave., New York, NY 10170 (212-916-1300). MEM- pect to head back home until late in the BERSHIP DUES/ SUBSCRIPTION Prices: All subscribers to Guatemala, Tikal, Antigua 10 days $1295 evening, but he was cheery and bur- Costa Rica 9 days $1095 Smithsonian are members of the Smithsonian Institution. Panama Tour with Canal 8 days $1195 United States and possessions: $39 a year payable in U.S. bling over with energy. I asked him if 5V]H:JV[PH 7ᅧ,ᅧ0ᅧ KH`Z funds. Canada add $13 (U.S. funds) for each year. Foreign he ever considered giving up his prac- Canadian Rockies, Glacier 9 days $1595 add $26 (U.S. funds) for each year. Ninety-nine percent of .YHUK*HU`VU)Y`JLAPVU KH`Z dues is designated for magazine subscriptions. Current tice and focusing solely on research. California Coast, Yosemite 8 days $1295 issue price is $6.99 (U.S. funds). Back issue price is $7.00 He shook his head. “At the end of 4[ᅧ9\ZOTVYL@LSSV^Z[VUL KH`Z (U.S. funds). To purchase a back issue, please call or email the day, I went into medicine to take 5L^,UNSHUK-HSS-VSPHNL KH`Z James Babcock at 212-916-1323 or [email protected]. care of patients,” he said. “I love having Mailing Lists: From time to time we make our subscriber “Brilliant, affordable pricing” that relationship with families and pa- ·(Y[O\Y-YVTTLY;YH]LS,KP[VY list available to companies that sell goods and services we believe would interest our readers. If you would rather not tients. 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ISS Blows a Bubble with pressurized breathable air, push- ables will accommodate crews of up Like the rest of us, astronauts could al- ing the envelope out to form a rigid to six people, with space for research, ways use a little more breathing room— outer layer of a shock-absorbing, Kev- storage, sleeping and living quarters. the trouble is lugging it into space. Now lar-like weave. The habitat will debut Mike Gold, Bigelow’s director of D.C. NASA thinks it has found a solution, in the in space later this year on the CRS-8 operations, believes that these systems form of a shiny new addition to the Inter- mission, under NASA’s contract with could replace ISS after the program national Space Station: an infl atable den. Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, and an ends in 2024. Expandable modules The Bigelow Expandable Activity astronaut will set foot inside an infl at- could be docked together to form a Module (BEAM) is a tentlike structure able habitat for the very fi rst time. “space complex” supporting future mis- that fi ts inside a rocket nose cone, then The manufacturer, Bigelow Aero- sions to the moon, Mars and beyond. Be- expands to 565 cubic feet , about the space, is already working on roomier cause the architecture of the structures size of a minivan. After it berths with lodgings, about 12,000 cubic feet , for is fl exible, he says, “you don’t have to —VICKY GAN

the space station, the BEAM will ﬁ ll long-term missions. These expand- keep reinventing the wheel.” AEROSPACE BIGELOW

100 SMITHSONIAN.COM | May 2015 HEALTH INNOVATIONSSPONSORED CONTENT MD Anderson Cancer Center MAKING CANCER HISTORY® HOW A TOP AMERICAN MEDICAL CENTER IS BEATING CANCER AT ITS OWN GAME

TANNING BED BAN ICES MELANOMA RISK THE SUPERCOMPUTER THAT THINKS LIKE AN ONCOLOGIST UNLEASHING THE IMMUNE SYSTEM’S ATTACK DOGS CAN NEW MATH SWEEP UP MORE OVARIAN CANCER? BEYOND GENES: PROTEIN TESTS THAT PREDICT THE FUTURE © agawa288 At MD Anderson Cancer Center, we are focused on Making Cancer History.® As a recognized leader in the fight against cancer, MD Anderson continues to pioneer new approaches in cancer treatment. Using the latest genetics-based research, we can develop targeted treatments, personalized to the individual patient. To learn more about how we are raising the bar for cancer care worldwide, call toll free 1-855-894-0145 or visit MakingCancerHistory.com.

Ranked one of the top two hospitals for cancer care in the nation for 25 years by U.S. News & World Report. SPONSORED CONTENT

THE MOON SHOTS PROGRAM

MD ANDERSON’S BOLD PLAN TO CRUSH CANCER BY 2023 Imagine a future without America’s most-feared disease. By current estimates, 40% of us will develop cancer in our lifetime; 80% will watch it ravage a relative or friend. This year, cancer will kill nearly 600,000 men, women and children in the U.S. And over the next decade it will take an estimated 100 million lives worldwide. But at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, an unprecedented research initiative called the Moon Shots Program is

melanoma, breast, ovarian and three types of leukemia. More will be added along the way. The Moon Shots Program is among the most formidable endeavors Getting there will be “the fight of the 21st mounted to date by MD Anderson. It is an century,” acknowledges MD Anderson institution ranked as one of the top two President Ronald A. DePinho, M.D., who hospitals in cancer care nationwide for announced the ten-year, $3 billion Moon 25 years by U.S. News & World Report’s Shots Program in 2012, on the 50th anni- Best Hospitals Survey and a research versary of President John F. Kennedy’s center at the forefront of exploration for proclamation that America would send a breakthroughs in cancer prevention and man to the moon. The goal: Slash cancer treatment for nearly 75 years. Anderson Algorithm, an early success death rates. “Humanity urgently needs “Nothing on the magnitude of the story to emerge from the Moon Shots bold action to defeat cancer,” DePinho Moon Shots Program has been attempted Program. The algorithm, adopted as a says. “The Moon Shots Program signals by a single academic medical institution,” standard protocol in 2013 by the center’s our confidence that the path to curing notes Frank McCormick, Ph.D., professor 21 gynecologic cancer specialists, relies cancer is in clearer sight than at any other emeritus at the University of California, on independent assessments by two time in history.” San Francisco Cancer Center and past surgeons via a laparoscopic exam to The Moon Shots Program is taking president of the American Association determine which women with advanced aim at cancer’s deep complexities in new for Cancer Research, who led a review high-grade serous ovarian cancer should ways. Innovative research engines are panel that helped determine the project’s have surgery right away—and which need under development to put personalized first cancer targets. “Moon Shots takes chemotherapy first to reduce the size of treatment options at doctors’ finger- MD Anderson’s deep bench of multi- the tumor prior to surgery. tips—and draw on patients’ experiences disciplinary research and patient care In the past, many underwent major to bring new treatment possibilities to resources and offers a collective vision surgery immediately, even though it light. Multidisciplinary collaborations on moving cancer research forward.” removed all visible traces of cancer from are teaming laboratory scientists, front- Here’s how the program’s innovations the abdominal cavity for just 20–30%. Now the success rate has risen to 88% CANCER PREVENTION: TEEN BAN ON TANNING BEDS at MD Anderson—an advance that For Texas teenagers, a trip to the tanning salon before the junior prom can improve survival. A year after her may be a thing of the past. In 2013, the state legislature banned the procedure, the Texas teacher was use of tanning beds by anyone under the age of 18. The new law cancer-free and back to running races. was a response to an advocacy campaign that joined leaders from “The approach worked for me,” she told MD Anderson with those from other major health organizations. reporters. “I hope it works for everyone.” Anil Sood, M.D., professor and THE MOON SHOTS PROGRAM’S ROLE: Provide data on links between vice chair for Translational Research indoor tanning and skin cancer. Use of tanning beds before age 18 in the Department of Gynecologic boosts risk for melanoma, the deadliest skin cancer, by 85%. Tanning beds expose skin to a concentrated source of UV radiation, damaging Oncology & Reproductive Medicine DNA within skin cells. So far, 11 states have enacted similar laws and at MD Anderson, expects women’s the momentum continues to build. survival times to improve as a result. “This is a much smarter, much line oncologists, IT professionals and are yielding results today—and moving more personalized approach that’s even lawmakers to translate what we us all closer to a world without cancer. allowing [us] to make a huge differ- know—and are learning—about cancer ence,” he says. Other cancer cen- into real-world tactics (such as gene tests COLLABORATION: ters are paying attention to the new for breast- and ovarian-cancer survivors Ovarian Cancer’s New Math approach. “It’s been a huge change in and a new Texas law limiting teenagers’ Ovarian cancer accounts for just 3% of the way we provide care. Every time use of tanning beds) that accelerate the all cancers in American women. But it’s we present the information from this prevention, detection and treatment of ferociously lethal, taking more than algorithm, there is a tremendous amount cancer. Immunotherapy agents are un- 14,000 lives annually. “It’s a scary of interest.” leashing the power of the body’s immune diagnosis,” notes a schoolteacher and system to confront this disease, leading marathon runner who came to CANCER GENOMICS: to the launch of the world’s first “intent MD Anderson in Houston in 2013 with Finding Hidden “Previvors” to cure” clinical trial for prostate cancer. stage 3C ovarian cancer—an advanced One Moon Shot focuses on high-grade The project’s inaugural focus is on form of the disease her own doctors ini- serious ovarian cancer (the most eight cancers responsible for more than tially mistook for gastrointestinal trouble. malignant form of the disease) and

50% of all cancer deaths: lung, prostate, Her treatment engaged the new triple-negative breast cancer (a partic- © Randy Faris/Corbis SPONSORED CONTENT ularly aggressive form likely to spread BIG DATA ANALYTICS: literature. We have those already. What and recur) patients and their fami- Training IBM’s “Watson” this does is take information about your lies. People with either of these can- Since its 2011 victory on the TV show patient—their clinical story, the character- cers are now offered genetic screen- Jeopardy!, IBM’s Watson computer has istics of their specific cancer, treatments ing for mutations in the BRCA1 and slimmed down by 90% (shrinking from they’ve had in the past, medications they BRCA2 genes, which elevate a person’s the size of a master bedroom to three take for other conditions—and synthesize risk for both cancers. A woman with a stacked pizza boxes) and become 24 times it with available literature to suggest indi- BRCA mutation has a 50–85% lifetime faster. But teaching Watson to think like vidualized treatment options.” chance of having breast cancer and a an oncologist so the supercomputer could OEA™ will never replace your doctor, 27–44% chance of getting ovarian cancer. power the Moon Shots Program’s new DiNardo is quick to add. “We hear all the If she has already been diagnosed with MD Anderson Oncology Expert Advisor™ time that the future will be robots and breast cancer, she has a 40–60% chance (OEA™) system is no small undertaking. computers, we won’t need doctors at all. of getting cancer in the other breast. Learning from MD Anderson’s cancer But the ultimate treatment decision rests If patients test positive, their sisters, specialists in weekly meetings, IBM in the hands of the physician, and patients. daughters and other relatives may have engineers are deploying Watson’s natural There’s always a human dimension to the same inherited mutation. So find- language processing and analytic skills to patient care beyond the data. Personal ing mutations can help survivors side- learn all about leukemia. Over 18 months, preferences…logistical and financial con- step new cancers and protect family the world’s smartest computer digested cerns…all of these are in the realm of the members, too. “We encourage patients data on 10,000 leukemia patients as well as patient-physician relationship. If there are to communicate their results with other hundreds of thousands of pages of medical two equivalent therapies and one is given family members, offer our help in facili- research. End result: the September 2014 daily as a pill, the other as an injection less tating that communication and also offer debut of the OEA™ Leukemia solution, a frequently, the choice is up to the doctor them genetic screening,” says Moon Shot first-of-its-kind cognitive clinical decision and patient. OEA™ can’t answer that ques- flagship project leader Banu Arun, M.D., support system that offers 24/7 on- tion.” It can’t handle patient consent forms professor of breast medical oncology. demand access to expert opinions for acute or contraceptive advice either, she adds. Now it’s allowing more women to make leukemia treatment and management, It will give patients new hope. “One lifesaving decisions. One hundred and with at-your-fingertips scientific and important aspect of the MD Anderson fourteen of the first 1,644 cancer patients Oncology Expert Advisor™ is that it will in the Moon Shots’ REACH (Research, not solely rely on established cancer care Education and Awareness of Cancer pathways to recommend appropriate family History) program tested positive treatment options,” notes Lynda Chin, for BRCA mutations. Forty-five enrolled M.D., professor and chair of Genomic in an outreach program that identified Medicine and scientific director of the at-risk relatives. Carriers—including can- Institute for Applied Cancer Science at cer survivors and “previvors ” (those with MD Anderson, who is the visionary driver a genetic predisposition who do not have behind development of the OEA™ system. cancer)—are offered lifesaving options. “The system was built with the under- Surgery and cancer-prevention medica- standing that what we know today will not tions can lower risk for future cancers, be good enough for many patients. There- while stepped-up screenings may catch fore, OEA™ will automatically screen breast cancer earlier. Removal of the ova- every patient for appropriate clinical trials, ries can reduce ovarian cancer risk by 95%, clinical evidence to help physicians make so participating in clinical trials will not be while taking oral contraceptives may low- the best decisions in patient care. OEA™ a last-resort option but an up-front option er odds by 50%, says Karen Lu, M.D., pro- system development is now expanding to that physicians and patients can consider.” fessor and chair of Gynecologic Oncology. the Lung Cancer Moon Shot. Ultimately, In a nutshell, the OEA™ system is a tool “If we catch more people before the OEA™ team hopes it will give doctors to augment, not to replace, physicians. they’re diagnosed or before a second worldwide access to the best care options We believe that a system like that will unrelated breast cancer, and we can for individual cancer patients. expand/spread MD Anderson’s exper- affect their families, then that is a true The OEA™ system works by suggesting tise far beyond Houston to the 14 million disease-free benefit,” says Jennifer “the most personalized appropriate people around the world who get a cancer Litton, M.D., an associate professor of evidence-based therapies out there,” says diagnosis each year, says Chin. “OEA™ breast medical oncology. Courtney DiNardo, M.D., an assistant can democratize expertise in cancer Breast and ovarian cancer patients professor of leukemia, whose background care, taking it to people who do not have found to have the mutations are offered in biostatistics adds a new dimension to access to the expertise today and are treatment in clinical trials of PARP her OEA™ training as a subject matter therefore at risk of not receiving the inhibitors, drugs that target defects expert (SME). “It’s not just a Google most effective care right now.” In turn, caused by BRCA mutations. search or an analysis of published research the infrastructure and network built to SPONSORED CONTENT

PROTEOMICS: READING CANCER’S FINGERPRINTS Genetic tests reveal what a cancer may do. In contrast, cancer proteomics measures actual proteins on the surface of and within tumor cells—giving researchers and doctors clues about cancer processes and about why a treatment succeeds or fails. One of the Moon Shots Program’s most innovative research engines, the proteomics platform is deploying high-tech tests to help ﬁnd ways to detect cancer earlier and to overcome treatment resistance.

ONE PROMISING APPLICATION: Moon Shots researchers have support the OEA™ system in democrati- and co-leader of the Moon Shots Program. launched a first-of-its-kind clinical zation will facilitate aggregation of lessons He leads APOLLO. “We need to think trial for a particular treatment- learned by oncologists from all over the longitudinally—how patients’ conditions, resistant prostate cancer. They’re country and the world, which will lead to treatments and tumors change over time— combining two drugs—abiraterone even better cancer care for all. “If we can and be smarter about how we collect and and enzalutamide—to block the begin to learn from more patients,” Chin use that information.” resistance pathways that arise in says, “research will be more effective, be- By seamlessly blending patient data each drug alone. The goal is to cause conclusions from our studies will be with the latest research insights and best decrease the levels of testosterone more applicable to a larger population.” practices in clinical care, and analyzing it that drive the cancer. Christopher over time, APOLLO will help researchers Logothetis, M.D., professor and chair of Genitourinary Medical Oncology APOLLO: The “N of All” improve patient care by understanding at MD Anderson, calls it “the first Every research project involving hu- factors that determine treatment intent-to-cure clinical trial for man subjects has an n—the number of response, resistance, toxicity and survival. prostate cancer.” people in the study. Chin is enthusiastic “We’re building an engine to accelerate about the potential and is enthusiastic the translational process,” Futreal says. about MD Anderson potential to create “Every cancer research institution on the of Immunology and executive director an “n of all” approach to research and planet is struggling with this right now. of the immunotherapy platform. care—that is, the ability to aggregate in- Raising the quality of our information is Allison’s basic science research formation from, and learn from, every going to benefit everyone.” on the biology of T cells—the attack patient treated at the center. The dogs of the immune system—laid the engine behind this is APOLLO (Adaptive IMMUNOTHERAPY: foundation for the development of the Patient-Oriented and Longitudinal Learn- Unleashing the Body’s Attack Dogs drug. Ipilimumab works by blocking a ing and Optimization). The five-year survival rate for advanced molecule that normally keeps T cells on APOLLO creates an efficient system melanoma, the deadliest of skin cancers, a short leash. The drug can silence mela- for longitudinal collection and aggrega- has hovered at a dismal 10–20%—until noma for years in 22% of patients, Allison tion of patients’ high-quality tissue and the recent discovery that the break- says. Immunotherapy is now a validated blood samples for genomic and molecular through drug ipilimumab (Yervoy) takes standard-of-care treatment for cancer analyses. The data are linked to complete the brakes off the immune system so it patients and is an established modality, a clinical medical record of the patients can recognize and extinguish malignan- along with surgery, chemotherapy, and centralized in the institution’s big-da- cies. The applications of this exciting new radiation and targeted therapy. Now the ta platform. Analytics can then draw upon treatment extend to many other cancers, Moon Shots Program is initiating crucial such a treasure trove of patient big data including several Moon Shot focuses. clinical trials in melanoma and breast, to generate hypotheses for research and “Immune checkpoint blockade treats lung, colon and pancreatic cancers. insights for care. The OEA™ system is an the immune system, not the tumor, Early research using ipilimumab and a example of a cognitive analytic application so there’s a strong basis for expecting second immunotherapy agent, nivolumab, that will draw from such big data. this approach to succeed across cancer is yielding impressive responses for the “A central theme of the Moon Shots types. Clinical trials at MD Anderson majority of melanoma patients. DePinho Program is to learn as much as we can are exploring that possibility right now, says there’s a “solid likelihood” that this from every single patient,” says Andy Fut- and there will be more to come,” says Jim therapy will reduce advanced melanoma real, Ph.D., professor of genomic medicine Allison, Ph.D., MD Anderson’s chair mortality by 50% in the next ten years. •