Science

Then it was the future, though what’s arrived isn’t what we had in mind, all chrome and cybernetics, when we set up exhibits in the cafeteria for the judges to review what we’d made of our hypotheses. The class skeptic (he later refused to sign anyone’s yearbook, calling it a sentimental degradation of language) chloroformed mice, weighing the bodies before and after to catch the weight of the soul, wanting to prove the invisible real as a bagful of nails. A girl who knew it all made cookies from euglena, a one-celled compromise between animal and plant, she had cultured in a flask. We’re smart enough, she concluded, to survive our mistakes, showing photos of farmland, poisoned, gouged, eroded. No one believed he really had built it when a kid no one knew showed up with an atom smasher, confirming that the tiniest particles could be changed into something even harder to break. And one whose mother had cancer (hard to admit now, it was me) distilled the tar of cigarettes to paint it on the backs of shaven mice. She wanted to know what it took, a little vial of sure malignancy, to prove a daily intake smaller than a single aspirin could finish something as large as a life. I thought of this because, today, the dusky seaside sparrow became extinct. It may never be as famous as the pterodactyl or the dodo, but the last one died today, a resident of Walt Disney World where now its tissue samples lie frozen, in case someday we learn to clone one from a few cells. Like those instant dinosaurs that come in a gelatin capsule—just add water and they inflate. One other thing this brings to mind. The euglena girl won first prize both for science and, I think, in retrospect, for hope.