Essay on the death of
a beetle
John Janovy, Jr.
In his
truly magnificent best-seller book, Lives
of a Cell, Lewis Thomas, nationally acclaimed cancer researcher and
president [at the time] of Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, included
a chapter entitled “Death in the Open.”
He begins this chapter with a discussion of road kills: “Seen from a car
window they appear as fragments, evoking memories of woodchucks, skunks . . .
etc.” His essay addresses death as a
natural phenomenon, and ends with a comment on humanity: “Less than half a
century from now, our replacements will have more than doubled the
numbers. It is hard to see how we can
continue to keep the secret, with such multitudes doing the dying.” The secret he is talking about is that of the
death of our fellow human beings, a truly “vast mortality” of some 50 million a
year.
Whenever I
develop an undergraduate laboratory exercise that involves death of an animal,
even a beetle or an earthworm, and especially one in which students are assigned
the task of doing the killing, Thomas’ words come back to me, along with those
of E. O. Wilson (On Human Nature) and
Paul Fussell (Wartime). In his chapter on aggression, Wilson talks
about the dehumanization of fellow humans as a prelude to violence, especially
in times of social conflict. Fussell is
more explicit, using WWII as an example, and citing ways in which we
dehumanized our enemies, thus desensitizing not only our soldiers, but also our
citizens back home. In my Field
Parasitology course at Cedar Point, in which we routinely sacrifice animals in
order to discover “who’s infected with whom,” the basic observations necessary
to analyze any parasitic relationship, I often end the semester with an
extended discussion of Thomas, Wilson, and Fussell, as well as some more modern
cases involving massive human destruction (Rwanda, Kosovo, Persian Gulf War,
etc.) There is a simple reason why I
often feel that such a discussion is necessary: when you come to know an
insect, snail, or “minnow” rather intimately, and build your reputation on the
scientific study of their parasites, then it is not so easy to dehumanize these
lowly creatures. These organisms with
which your do your first real research project, show someone you are truly
capable of conducting an original scientific investigation, earning your
guaranteed-get-in letter of recommendation to med school, suddenly become
valuable to you. They are no longer
worthless trash, they are no longer repulsive, they are no longer something you
have absolutely no feelings whatsoever for, but instead they become a part of
your emotional and intellectual library.
They’ve given their lives, yes, but they’ve also given you analytical
powers, the irreplaceable power of experience, and the intellectual sophistication
that comes from doing research, that you would never have been given had you
not set about to study their parasites.
We choose
beetles, this week, because we grow them in large numbers, they are not
endangered, no permits are required for their use, and they are not like us
[furry, warm, with large eyes]. For most
of you, this week’s lab will be the first, and perhaps the only, original
experience you will have with the distribution of infectious agents in a
population until you graduate from medical school, get into practice, and deal
with a flu or head louse epidemic. If
this prediction turns out to be true, then I hope you remember your lessons
well. And if, as a “health care
professional,” you find yourself caught up in a military adventure, then you
will probably find yourself wishing you had studied the biology of infectious
organisms over and over again and been somewhat less enamored of reproductive
physiology, cancer, and cardiovascular function.
This discussion leads, of course, to
my rather smart-aleck comments about dead birds at the base of city buildings,
and my perhaps unwise advice to simply pick up a stunned bird and kill it. Those comments were intended to accomplish
one thing and one thing only: to vastly increase your sensitivity to death at
the population levels, and put into some kind of rational perspective our use
of beetles this week in lab. Actually, I
was a little bit shocked at the class’s reaction to those comments; I did not
expect laughter. By way of comparison to
the migratory bird situation, about 32,000 Americans die each year of gunshot
wounds. Another 42,000 die in automobile
accidents. From a biologist’s
perspective, especially a biologist who studies small organisms, the clearing
of tropical forests at the rate of 50-100 acres a minute for the past 20 years, results in the death of
uncountable, but truly beautiful and wondrous, organisms. 14,000 deer were struck by automobiles in
Iowa last year, at a cost of about $3000 per incident ($42 million a year in
damage). A friend of mine who regularly
rode a bicycle along a country highway and counted road kills, then
extrapolated that sample to the national level, estimated that at any moment
there would be 75 million birds lying dead on America’s highways. I read a report (unconfirmed) that house cats
in Great Britain killed an estimated 60 million song birds a year. The Kearney arch has cost one human life, and
not too many years ago the Omaha World-Herald reported that the increase in
speed limits from 55 MPH to 65 MPH on I-80 resulted in approximately one
additional human life a month. The speed
limit is now 75 MPH. A visit to a
packing plant makes your hamburger and bacon look quite different than before
the visit. And, of course, I have not
addressed the issue of quality of life for those still living who, for various
reasons, do not have access to the humanizing influences of quality education,
a safe place to sleep at night, adequate health care, and meaningful
employment. Into this latter category
fall millions of Americans and billions of other human beings around the world.
I’m not condemning anyone for
contributing to the above figures; I am, however, simply reminding us that just
by living our normal, 21st Century, human lives, we contribute to
the death of vast numbers of organisms and generally ignore the deaths of vast
numbers of human beings, all except, that is, the ones closest to us. Thus it does not bother me very much to use
beetles to provide young people, many of whom will become physicians, with
their first scientific experience with infectious organisms [we all have
non-scientific experiences with infectious organisms].
On a more personal level, I do
appreciate the fact that an intimate encounter with death, as when you cut the
head off a meal worm, or separate a beetle’s head from its body, can produce an
emotional reaction. In this particular
case, you have chosen to terminate a life in order to study something that most
people find repulsive (a parasite), even though that repulsive organism is
living the most common way of life on earth.
I only ask that you remember this week’s lab when your kid comes home
from day care with lice or pin worms and you wonder how to cure the infection (it’s
not terribly difficult, at least in the case of pin worms).
Finally, as a philosophical aside,
as part of your overall education as a biological sciences major, I strongly
recommend a personal examination of your own reasons for reacting as you do to
the welfare of other organisms, be they insects or fellow humans. I’m guessing that the closer an organism is
to you personally, or the closer in appearance and demeanor to humans in
general, or the younger the organism, then the stronger will be your reaction
to its death. This principle figures
prominently in politics and government regulation surrounding the use of
animals in research and teaching. Thus
the death of a baby cocker spaniel has an infinitely higher emotional content
than the death of a mosquito or cockroach, at least to the average person. And if you contribute to that death, then the
puppy’s will probably linger in your mind for a lifetime, whereas the mosquito
and cockroach will be forgotten as soon as you get over the pleasure, and probably
smug satisfaction, of having killed them.
