Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science (25 page)

A
FTER HE LEFT
C
ELERA
, Craig Venter went sailing. He still had some assets left, including shares in a company called Diversa, which he had cofounded years earlier. He had also sold
Sorcerer
(the yacht in which he’d won the Transatlantic Challenge) and he had gotten a few million dollars from that. He took some of the money and bought a used sailing yacht, a ninety-four-foot sloop, named it
Sorcerer II,
and outfitted it as a marine research vessel. He raised federal and private funding, hired a crew, and went on a voyage to circumnavigate the earth, following the idea of the HMS
Challenger
expedition of the 1870s, when the British sailing ship went on the first oceanographic expedition to explore the depths of the earth’s oceans. “I was telling people that all I hoped to get out of this deal was a bigger yacht,” he said.

The
Sorcerer II
sailed thirty-three thousand miles. Every two hundred miles, Venter and his colleagues stopped the boat and took samples of seawater. These bottles of water were sent back to the laboratory of a nonprofit foundation called the J. Craig Venter Institute, in Rockville, which Venter had established and ran.

Seawater is loaded with viruses, bacteria, and single-celled organisms. Therefore it’s a soup with DNA floating around in it. The samples of seawater were run through DNA-sequencing machines, and the resulting fragments of DNA code were assembled in a supercomputer that looked for patterns. Venter was probing the sea, the heart of the earth’s ecosystems, for undiscovered genes. To the great surprise of biologists, Venter’s expedition revealed that the oceans are filled with millions of distinctly different and previously unknown species of microorganisms. The sea contained a vast, almost incalculable number of unknown life-forms, invisible to the eye. Especially viruses. The oceans of the earth appeared to contain perhaps a hundred million different kinds of viruses, virtually none of which were known to science, as well as countless millions of species of bacteria and single-celled organisms that had never been seen before.

Meanwhile, Craig Venter and Claire Fraser, who was the head of
TIGR
, had a divergence in their love lives and got divorced. Fraser left
TIGR
and moved to the University of Maryland, and eventually
TIGR
was merged into the J. Craig Venter Institute. This institute became a respected force in genomics. It had five hundred employees. Many of them, including Hamilton Smith, had exited from Celera en masse to follow Venter wherever he went.

Craig Venter had never given up sequencing the human genome. In the fall of 2007, he published a superaccurate and complete version of his own genome. Craig Venter’s genome had both sets of chromosomes in it (humans have a double set of chromosomes in each cell). This was a so-called diploid human genome, and it had more than six billion letters in it. It was twice as long as the Human Genome Project’s human genome. Craig Venter’s genome was the most finished, accurate, complete image of the human DNA that will likely be published.

Craig Venter’s yacht
Sorcerer II,
sailing to windward in search of unknown genes.
Courtesy of the J. Craig Venter Institute

He made his entire DNA code available for free on the Internet, as well. Thus anyone who wanted to know how Craig Venter, as an example of the human species, was constructed could read his blueprint on the Web site. The government may have thought it was only cruising, but Venter had never stopped racing.

C
RAIG
V
ENTER’S
latest project was to create life in a test tube. He called it synthetic biology. The leader of the synthetic biology effort at at the J. Craig Venter Institute was Hamilton Smith. Smith, who had made and lost millions in the Celera venture, had finally sold his ’83 Mercury Marquis and replaced it with a white Cadillac. Now Smith, Venter, and their colleagues were creating artificial genes—making stretches of DNA in the laboratory, rather like typing words with a typewriter. They were putting the machine-made DNA into bacteria. Their goal was to create synthetic organisms, microbes made by man to serve man. These laboratory-made bacteria, Venter and Smith hoped, would be able to digest cellulose plant material, such as in grass and pulpwood, ultimately turning it into ethanol, which could be used to power automobiles in place of gasoline.

Venter had founded a private company—for profit—called Synthetic Genomics. “We have some major deals with companies, such as one with BP [British Petroleum] to develop synthetic bacteria that would metabolize coal and turn it into natural gas,” he said. “We’re developing bacteria that can convert carbon dioxide that’s been sequestered from the burning of coal and turn it into methane [for use in natural gas]. We’ve engineered a cell line”—a strain of living cells—“that could produce a new biological fuel that would replace jet fuel,” he said. In this way, Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith hoped to help reduce global climate change while getting rid of America’s dependence on foreign oil, all made possible by advances in the reading and writing of DNA. Along the way, Venter and his colleagues decoded the DNA of the dog. The dog DNA came from Shadow, one of Craig Venter and Claire Fraser’s poodles. The last I heard, Shadow was living with Claire and doing fine. “I have visitation privileges with Shadow but see him rarely,” Venter said.

The Lost Unicorn

I
N
1998,
THE
C
LOISTERS
—the museum of medieval art in upper Manhattan—began a renovation of the room where the seven tapestries known as
The Hunt of the Unicorn
hang. The Unicorn Tapestries are considered by many to be the most beautiful tapestries in existence. They are also among the great works of art of any kind. In the tapestries, richly dressed noblemen, accompanied by hunters and hounds, pursue a unicorn through forested landscapes. They find the animal, appear to kill it, and bring it back to a castle; in the last and most famous panel, “The Unicorn in Captivity,” the unicorn is shown bloody but alive, chained to a tree surrounded by a circular fence, in a field of flowers. The tapestries are twelve feet tall and up to fourteen feet wide (except for one, which is in fragments). They were woven from threads of dyed wool and silk—some of them gilded or wrapped in silver—around 1500, probably in Brussels or Liège, for an unknown person or persons, and for an unknown reason—possibly to honor a wedding. A monogram made from the letters
A
and
E
is woven into the scenery in many places; no one knows what it stands for. The tapestries’ meaning is mysterious; the unicorn was a symbol of many things in the Middle Ages: Christianity, immortality, wisdom, lovers, marriage.

For centuries, the Unicorn Tapestries were in the possession of the La Rochefoucauld family of France; they hung in the family’s château in Verteuil, a town in Charente, north of Bordeaux. François, the sixth duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680) was a famed author of maxims. Among them is this one: “There is something in the misfortune of our friends that does not displease us.”

In 1789, during the French Revolution, a mob of peasants looted the La Rochefoucauld château while the family fled. The family eventually returned to the château, but the Unicorn Tapestries had disappeared. Two generations later, in 1855, the then duc de La Rochefoucauld sent word around town that he’d like to buy the Unicorn Tapestries from anyone who might still have them. Some local farming people came forward and sold the tapestries back to the family. It turned out that the farmers had been using the Unicorn Tapestries to cover heaps of potatoes inside barns and to wrap fruit trees during the winter to keep them from freezing. Nevertheless, the tapestries were still in good shape. In the early 1920s, the La Rochefoucauld family, needing money, put the tapestries on display with an art dealer in Paris, and in 1922, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., bought them for just over a million dollars. He kept them in his apartment on Fifth Avenue, and in 1937 he gave them to the Cloisters. Their monetary value today is incalculable.

As the construction work at the Cloisters got under way, the tapestries were rolled up and moved, in an unmarked vehicle and under conditions of high security, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns the Cloisters. They ended up in a windowless room in the museum’s textile department for cleaning and repair. The room has white walls and a white tiled floor with a drain running along one side. It is exceedingly clean and looks like an operating room. It is known as the wet lab, and is situated on a basement level below the museum’s central staircase.

In the wet lab, a team of textile conservators led by a woman named Kathrin Colburn unpacked the tapestries and spread them out facedown on a large table, one by one. At some point, the backs of the tapestries had been covered with linen. The backings, which protected the tapestries and helped to support them when they hung on a wall, were turning brown and brittle, and had to be replaced. Using tweezers and magnifying lenses, Colburn and her team delicately removed the threads that held each backing in place. As the conservators lifted the backing away, inch by inch, they felt a growing sense of awe. The backs were almost perfect mirror images of the fronts, but the colors were different. Compared with the fronts, they were unfaded: incredibly bright, rich, and deep, more subtle and natural-looking. The backs of the tapestries had been exposed to very little sunlight in five hundred years—even, apparently, during the time when they had been used to cover potatoes. Nobody alive at the Met, it seems, had seen the backs of the Unicorn Tapestries in all their richest color.

A tapestry is woven from lengths of colored thread called the weft, which are passed around long, straight, strong threads called the warp. The warp runs horizontally and provides a foundation for the delicate weft, which runs vertically. Medieval tapestry weavers worked side by side, in teams, using their fingertips and small tools to draw the delicate weft threads around the tougher warp. When they switched from one color to the next, they cut off the ends of the weft threads or wove them into the surface of the tapestry. The Unicorn weavers had been compulsively neat. In less well-made tapestries, weavers left weft threads dangling on the back of the tapestry in a shaggy sort of mess, but the backs of these were almost smooth. Kathrin Colburn recalled that as she and her associates stared into the backs of the Unicorn Tapestries, it “felt like a great exploration of the piece.” She said, “We simply got carried away, seeing how the materials were used—how beautifully they were dyed and prepared for weaving.” An expert medieval weaver might have needed an hour to complete one square inch of a tapestry, which meant that in a good week he might have finished a patch maybe eight inches on a side. The weavers were generally young men, and each of the Unicorn Tapestries had likely had a team of between four and six working on it. They wove only by daylight, to ensure that the colors would be consistent and not distorted by candlelight. One tapestry would have taken a team at least a year to complete.

The curator in charge of medieval art at the Metropolitan and the Cloisters is a thoughtful man named Peter Barnet. When he heard about the discovery, he hurried down to the wet lab for a look. He got a shock. “The first of the tapestries—‘The Start of the Hunt’—was lying in a clear, shallow pool of water,” Barnet said. The lab is designed to function as a big tub, and had been filled about six inches deep with purified water to bathe the tapestry. “Intellectually, I knew the colors wouldn’t bleed, but the anxiety of seeing a Unicorn tapestry underwater is something I’ll never forget,” he said. When Barnet looked at the image through the water, he recalled, “the tapestry seemed to be liquefied.” Once the room had been drained, it smelled like a wet sweater.