How far we have come, and how quickly. Too far, too quickly? The pace has always excited me: my own small part in it, yes, but also the larger scientific world. I avoid newspapers, but I always study the current periodicals; and not only in my own field. I love the broader, unspecialised journals: Nature, Science, Scientific American. Especially the American: a journal so glossy, so sensuous it’s almost … edible. Science for the gourmet.
Or is it science for the voyeur? It comes wrapped in a kind of confidential brown paper envelope that I rip off each month with great joy. Science-porn, some might call it — in the sense that it never quite delivers what it promises. Science is not quite as beautiful and elegant as the illustrations in Scientific American suggest.
Not quite, but very nearly. Artificial intelligence, moon landings, the neurology of the mind: we have travelled very far, in many directions. But who could have seen the dodo coming?
Two years ago the bird was dead, had been dead and buried for four hundred years. The vast waddling flocks that once covered a handful of islands in the Indian Ocean had shrunk to a few scattered bits and pieces: a single head and foot somewhere in a museum in Oxford; a foot (from the same bird?) in the British Museum; another head (presumably not from the same birds floating in a jar of preserving spirits in Copenhagen.
Plus a blizzard of feathers scattered through the tourist booths of Mauritius and Reunion, most of which looked suspiciously like chicken.
All this is well-known, but worth repeating: the stuff of the headlines that arrived without warning, without faintest inkling, eighteen months ago. DODO WALKS AGAIN. BIG BIRD’S SECOND COMING. GENETIC MIRACLE. For a week or so — longer than a regional war, shorter than a Royal Wedding — there was talk of little else. A thickset, waddling bird, a kind of coarse-looking, big-billed turkey, could be viewed on every television screen on the planet, nightly. Even I, largely immune to news, and television, watched, and read. And waited eagerly for the scientific journals. I also heard the jokes; these were inescapable. Dodo jokes traversed the planet almost as quickly as those first satellite transmissions. The importance of the event, its hold on deeper parts of the mind, its dislocation of yet another small certainty, the celebration (or was it dread?) of technology — all these could be heard in the jokes. Why did the dodo cross the road? What do you get when you cross a chicken and a mother-in-law?
1993. The date of Resurrection now seems as firmly lodged in my brain as others:1066, 1492, 1788, 1969. As is the recipe for preparing the bird. Anyone who glanced at a newspaper or a television screen that week could recite it backwards. The gourmet magazines — Scientific American chief among them — went into a little more detail, their photography was a little more mouth-watering. Take one dozen still-warm pigeon eggs. Lightly whisk a piece of mummified dodo foot, separate the broken filaments of DIVA from a hundred million dead, disintegrating cells. Zip together a single strand, multiply in a frothy yeast of PCR. Select the fittest-looking genes, mix with yolk, add a dash of cellcycle enzymes. Carefully, ever so carefully incubate …
The dodo made — is no doubt still making — Stanford University millions. And put the face of the boy-genius responsible — William Scanlon, Californian Wunderkind — on the covers of magazines everywhere.
Dodo clones came waddling out of their cuckoo-yolks: awkward, helpless cartoon birds marching off to Japan, to Germany, even back home to Mauritius, at many millions of dollars apiece. Not all the hatchlings were successful. Dodos emerged without feet, without wings, without heads. Gargoyle dodos died in ovo, or survived, bizarre genetic freaks, no more than a handful of minutes after hatching. But dozens of normal, healthy chicks were soon waddling about.
Within months no zoo could respect itself without a dodo on display. One dodo, not two — there was no point in two, except, perhaps, to maintain gender appearances on a Noah’s Ark.