Shrinking the Cat: Genetic Engineering Before We Knew About Genes
By Sue Hubbell
Houghton Mifflin, 175 pages, $25
What does it take to make a good teacher?
A mastery of one’s field. A talent for lucid explanation. A lively curiosity. And, just as important, a sense of humor, for even the most-devoted student’s eyes are likely to glaze over if you can’t work a wry remark into your disquisition once in a while.
When good teachers appear on the horizon, it’s only natural to want to clone them. And if international tensions weren’t running so high just now, I’d have said that our top national priority should be to clone nature writer Sue Hubbell as soon as possible and deposit her in classrooms and lecture halls all around the country.
Hubbell has a raconteur’s knack for bringing almost any branch of biological science to life. Whether she’s investigating the life cycles of bugs (“Broadsides From the Other Orders”), delving into the mysteries of the invertebrate world (“Waiting for Aphrodite”), or recounting her own beekeeping activities in the Ozark Mountains of southern Missouri (“A Country Year,” “A Book of Bees”), Hubbell casts her information in such entertaining and choicely phrased terms that it’s difficult to say where fun leaves off and learning begins.
In her new book, “Shrinking the Cat,” she’s in stellar form. She’s also on a mission: to bridge the gap between citizens alarmed by the notion of genetically altered crops (“Frankenfood”) and the scientists who are doing this “transgenic engineering.” The public, Hubbell points out, needs to know why “putting a gene from one kind of life into another [isn’t] such a stretch,” while scientists — who have written about their accomplishments “in words so obscure and papers so technical” that few lay readers can make head or tail of them — need an interpreter.
Hubbell is well-positioned to serve as an intermediary. Few readers are likely to dismiss her as a shill for corporate agriculture. Indeed, her former beekeeping enterprises (she has retired from them) place her on the side of small-business enterprise, while her writings reveal her as a nature lover. Yet she’s ever on the lookout for the bigger picture and the longer perspective, which are exactly what “Shrinking the Cat” provides.
In the book, Hubbell contends that the human race is such an inveterate manipulator of its natural surroundings that Homo mutans makes a better name for us than Homo sapiens. “Artifice is our nature,” she says more than once, and cites four examples — two plant crops, one moth, one house pet — that illustrate how, for millenniums, Homo mutans has been a genetic engineer, even if he had no idea what genes were.
The crops are corn and apples. The moth is Bombyx mori, which, in its cocooning phase, spins the filaments from which silk is made. And the house pet is the shrinking cat of the book’s title. Hubbell’s test of how natural these items are is whether any of them would still be flourishing if little green men were to whisk all humanity off the planet one day and return us only after 5,000 years of “good behavior.”
The answer, in the case of corn and silk, is, “No.” Silkmoths and corn plants can’t exist without us. The moths are too fat to fly and therefore unable to escape their predators. Corn kernels, wrapped in “unnaturally tight husks,” are unable to reseed themselves. Cats and apples would still be around, but perhaps not in the purringly familiar form or juicy-flavored varieties to which we’ve grown accustomed.
In all four instances, Hubbell delves back thousands of years to the plants’ and animals’ prehistoric origins. Corn, she reminds us, “is basically a grass” that had to be bred intensively before it became the upright stalk we think of as a corn plant. Such breeding, in corn and other domesticated plants, was really “close inbreeding,” which decreased the plants’ vigor while bringing out “traits we liked.” Any such plant needed constant, knowledgeable pampering.
So did silkworms, whose precious secretions inspired many a farmer’s pipe dream. For centuries, the secret of silk manufacture was guarded by China, where it originated, but even after the secret was revealed, the finicky nature of the creatures themselves made silkworm farming the most dubious of get-rich schemes.
Hubbell’s chapter on apples takes readers to the “wild apple forests of Central Asia” and emphasizes how unpredictable the behavior of any given apple seed is. “[N]early every apple tree that grows up from a seed,” she writes, “is a new variety, one whose fruit is not at all like that of the tree from which the seeds came.” As a consequence, orchardists turned to cloning desirable apple trees by grafting branches from them onto already existing trees. Hubbell calls this “an ingenious way humankind discovered to make an end run around apple genetics.”
Of the four items subjected to Hubbell’s scrutiny, domestic cats had the most active hand in their own genetic selection. “[C]onsidered zoological opinion,” she tells us, believes “it was the cat who came to man, not the man who gathered in the cat, . . . and disciplined it into being a good mousing machine.” Cats accepted into ancient Egyptian households (where the earliest human-feline relationships are recorded) tended to be the smaller, less-fearful and most-attractively marked representatives of their species. “All of these qualities,” Hubbell points out, “are controlled by various genes or combinations of genes.”
For all four of her animal/plant examples, Hubbell cites specific genetic histories — re-creating the steps by which “biologically calm animals” may have been bred to order, or tracing the routes by which particular varieties of apple traveled from one corner of the world to another. Her richly furnished mind invites an eclectic array of opinionators for comment. Thoreau waxes ironic on wild apples (“good only when eaten while walking outdoors on a cold day”), Chaucer writes dotingly about the cat (“fostre him wel with milk,/And tendre flesh, and make his couche of silk”), and an impressive lineup of Romans — Pliny the Elder, Seneca, Tacitus, Augustus, Tertullian — has absolutely nothing good to say about silk. Tacitus fumes that ” ‘silk degrades a man,’ ” and Tertullian has a particular man in mind when he envisions Alexander the Great being ” ‘softened, quenched, in floating silk.’ “
Along with tidbits of erudition, the book comes spiced with Hubbell’s personal anecdotes about her own beloved animal companions, her discovery of remnants of a silkworm enterprise on her Ozarks farm and recollections of her brother’s misguided boyhood attempts to raise and tame a raccoon kitten. She also includes such lively historical tales as that of the Chinese princess who, newly married to a Mongol prince, smuggled a whole future branch of the silk industry out of China by concealing some silkworm eggs in her hairdo. “Shrinking the Cat” has the happy side effect, as well, of expanding your vocabulary. My two favorite new words: “multicaulismania” (“the dream of growing rich by growing silkworms”) and “miaw” (the ancient Egyptian for “cat,” according to Hubbell).
When pondering contemporary genetic engineering, Hubbell is decidedly more optimistic than some observers regarding our abilities to outpace insects’ and bacteria’s growing resistance to whatever we throw at them. She even goes so far as to say, apropos of our advances in genetic engineering and our simultaneous growth in environmental awareness, “This is an interesting and hopeful time in which to live. . . . Our grandchildren are lucky.”
Her vigorous, can-do outlook may not persuade every reader. But Hubbell’s chief aim isn’t to sort out all the controversies surrounding genetic engineering. Instead, it is to place them in a historical context. And this she does magnificently.
