Dry Storeroom No. 1 (22 page)

The young schistosome man, David Johnson, who takes me around the laboratory, has an undertone of admiration when he talks about these cunning organisms. The larvae are quite specific about the snail hosts they will infect: the
S. mansoni
species group goes for the snail
Biomphalina,
while the
S. haematobium
group will take up residence in another snail called
Bulinus,
of which there are about forty species. Interestingly, some
Bulinus
species seem able to “resist” infection by schistosomes, and some current research is trying to find out how. To eliminate the disease, people could eliminate the snail, or stay out of the water, neither of which is a practical solution in many poor countries. It is certainly a good idea to find out as much as possible about the foe. Many human parasites arose in Africa alongside our own emerging species, whence they spread around the world following the human diaspora. When the molecular evidence for the relationships of bilharzia parasites came out in 2000, the surprise was that the Asian species seemed to be the most primitive, rather than the African species. Just to prove that this links in with the systematic purpose of the Museum, this discovery also resulted in the “sinking” of an exceedingly inelegant generic name,
Orientobilharzia,
which had been given to the Japanese species. It is now considered that human colonization by schistosomes happened independently in the three main infecting species. Current research is focussing on the molecular identification of snails and the parasites they contain—each snail is like a sample bag containing its infecting schistosome, whose DNA can quite easily be extracted. The sequencing of the full genome of
S. mansoni
is in prospect, which may help with finding a novel target for a vaccine. The Museum is collaborating with a research station in Zanzibar, where there are apparently two species of
Bulina,
one of them being a resistant form. It seems that the distribution of the snails themselves is caused by water chemistry—and maybe this offers the prospect of a different kind of control. After all, if a resistant snail could be favoured, the parasite would be at a disadvantage. The questions continue, as they should.

Near the laboratory there is a living collection—tray after tray and tank after tank of water snails—more like a zoo than a museum. It is very hot, to keep these tropical species happy. The snails I see are planispiral—they are curved like a Cumberland sausage rather than spiralling upwards. My father called them “ramshorns.” They are fed on nothing more exciting than lettuce. David Johnson tells me they are very fussy about their water, which must not have any heavy metals in it. There is a special Museum borehole to bring up pure water from the depths in plastic pipes to keep the thousands of little creatures happy. I cannot tell which ones are infected with schistosomes just by looking at them. But in this part of the laboratory infection can be experimented on under controlled conditions. This may one day lead to the relief of much human misery.

I have described the work of this part of the hidden Museum in some detail to show that taxonomic research does link directly with global issues of human health. This does not necessarily make the research more important, but it certainly does make it more fundable. The schistosome facility in the Natural History Museum secured the future of much of the molecular laboratory as a whole; it was set up using funding from the Wellcome and Wolfson Foundations, organizations that are interested particularly in health issues. The research staff is wholly admirable. If medieval saints demonstrated selfless compassion by washing the sores of lepers, then their modern equivalents could be those who attempt to improve the lives of thousands of people whom they have never met by wading through mosquito-infested swamps crawling with infected snails.

While offering a digression on saints, one is naturally reminded of sinners. Where the molecular laboratory now stands there was once a whale room; only the London brick walls of the old building remain, for inside all is now gleaming steel and machines. One of the Museum’s great sinners used to hide there, Peter Purves, the whale man. Whales
^*10
were once an important part of the Museum’s research programme. Whenever an interesting whale was beached on British shores it would find its way to the whale room. The origin of this rich source for the collections goes back to a statute of the time of Edward II, establishing that whales and porpoises are Fishes Royal, belonging to the Crown. By June 1912 this ancient right had mutated to become a directive from the Board of Trade to all Receivers of Wrecks that the Museum should be informed of strandings. The Museum prepared an identification guide to help the men in the field. And the Trustees then asked the Treasury for permission to buy a pair of whaler’s overalls—they ran a tight ship in those days when it came to expenditure of public money. I should say that the Directors of the Museum had an impeccable record when it came to alerting the authorities about the dangers of over-exploiting whales. Sir William Flower had delivered a speech in 1885 about the avaricious short-sightedness of the Atlantic and Australian whaling industry. Sir Sidney Harmer repeatedly drew the attention of the Trustees to the wholesale slaughter of the great whales in the Antarctic, including the largest animal of them all, the blue whale (
Balaenoptera musculus
). The model of this whale on display to the public in the Whale Hall was completed in 1938 and for a while was the largest in any museum. For commercially hunted animals the conservation argument is often not much more sophisticated than the warning in the fairy story about not killing the goose that laid the golden egg, and there is something very depressing about hearing arguments for continued exploitation today that would have been familiar to Flower and Harmer. Whales deserve to live simply because they are wonderful animals, and never mind the trade in ambergris. However, bulky stranded whales are not exactly easy specimens to deal with. You cannot pickle them, nor dry more than fragments. Anyone who has been downwind of a rotting whale carcass will know that, as they rot, they stink. Hence they were mostly preserved as skeletons. But when there was a new arrival in the whale house it imparted to the back arcade a very singular atmosphere. People did not linger. In the old days there was a “whale pit” at the western end of the building, where blubbery bodies could be buried to rot in their own time. Later, evil cauldrons of alkaline potions speeded up the whole business of decay.

One of the problems with whales is trying to work out how old an individual is when he or she is stranded. For effective conservation one needs to know how many years it takes a whale species to grow up, and at what age individuals can reproduce. It was discovered that whales lay down waxy layers in the inner ear, almost like the growth rings on trees. Peter Purves was extremely skilled at the delicate operation necessary to extract this information. A young whale man told me that in his opinion Purves did much of the work that helped a more famous Museum mammal scientist, F. C. Fraser, achieve election to the Royal Society in 1966. Nobody really knows the truth of this, but what is not in doubt is that Peter Purves was an inveterate drinker. As
The Sun
might put it, he was a “hell-raiser.” In the 1970s he would weave his way down the front steps and out of the Museum at about the time that most of us were having our afternoon tea break. He had that rather delicate, cantilevered gait of the experienced toper. I could never work out the origin of his accent; it could have been Irish—but then again it could have been Scottish. He had the deliberate delivery of the habitually sozzled, a series of short barks separated by significant pauses. When he spoke, his sentences always made rather ponderous sense. But in this condition he could perform the delicate slicing necessary to age whales. Apparently he was much less adept while sober. It could be argued that alcohol was necessary to help him survive a life in the whale room with its overwhelming pong. It was reported that he had half-bottles of Bushmills tucked away in the blubber, but few people would have cared to poke around the rotting carcasses to find out. He was a short, dapper man, always rather well-dressed. He remained trim to the end. There was a Museum club, The Tetrapods, of which Peter was a member, which met periodically above a pub called the Goat in the evenings. After a vaguely relevant lecture on some aspect of natural history, nearly everybody got drunk, but in some strange way, Purves would stay on his feet long after other members were looking much the worse for wear; practice, I suppose. His boozing did land him in trouble on a number of occasions. Once he fell into the “stripping tank” in the whale room and suffered serious burns; he said afterwards that he would never have survived had he been sober. He was always in demand to show his dissection techniques. He was once invited by Professor Pillari in Berne to dissect the rare blind river dolphin. He fell to talking and drinking while on the leisurely railway journey through France. From the Gare de Lyon in Paris he knew that the train went straight to Geneva. Eventually he fell asleep in a stupor. When the train stopped, he woke with a start, assumed that he must have arrived at his destination, and woozily got off the train. He was actually at a border post, for the train had made an extra, unscheduled stop just outside Switzerland. The train moved on, leaving him standing on a small station in the middle of nowhere with little documentation, still drunk and late for a scientific engagement. He was arrested by the police, who fortunately found his letter of invitation from Pillari. In due course he was sent on his way. It is good to think that once upon a time this behaviour did not constitute the persistent and gross moral turpitude that would result in the removal of an employee from his post.

Purves working on a whale carcass in the late 1930s

Whale research disappeared as a priority during the Museum’s reorganization. Purves retired, a little early, but died at the age of eighty in 1995, thus providing an example to us all. The zoologists moved to the Darwin Centre, leaving behind only their molluscan colleagues where they had always been. I would like to take you into every office on the seven floors, for every expert in this building will have a story to tell, but that would take a book longer than this one. We will just poke our heads into one or two. Although an era of wood and brick has given way to one of glass, it is consoling to find that some of the curators’ and researchers’ offices still retain much the same feel as they always did. They are little nests lined with books and specimens, tucked away inside the glass exterior, homely as always. A microscope will stand on a bench, and maybe a stack of drawers from the collection. There is still that sense of continuity with the previous generations of taxonomists. I tend to see frequently the zoologists who work on the living crustaceans because these animals are included with my trilobites in the same Phylum Arthropoda. We are like second cousins. The crustacean people know more about living copepods than anyone alive. Professor Geoff Boxshall and Rony Huys are devoted students of these small, often planktonic crustaceans. This is no arcane study, for copepods make up a major component of the total marine biomass—all its life weighed together—and they are possibly even more important to the health of the sea than the much more familiar “shrimps” known as krill. The copepod
Oithona
may even be the most abundant animal on the planet. Copepods feed on tiny plankton, and in their turn provide the next important course in the food chain of the oceans. I recall seeing the sea almost black with them, swimming like so many animated peas, when I was working on the island of Spitsbergen, north of Norway. Arctic terns gorged on them, and the ground was stained pink with the bird droppings. Copepods are found in underground waters, even in temporary pools, and there is a mass of species in Lake Baikal—a “species flock” like the cichlid fish I described previously. New species are routinely discovered. They need to be made known to the world. There is evidence that copepods are sensitive to pollution and, being close to the bottom of the food chain, any decline they suffer will be mirrored in a fall in numbers of their predators. As with so many of the specializations I describe in this book, knowing about copepods is no obscure academic study: it’s about feeding the world.

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