70 Science & technology The Economist January 8th 2022
ers, and sweeter flavours, brighter colours
or thinner peel, favoured by consumers.
Plucked from their progenitors by selective
breeding and added to cultivars, such mu
tations are worth millions. Mutagenesis,
then, is an important business.
And it is one that StarLab Oasis, a firm
in Abu Dhabi that was spun out of a Texan
enterprise called Nanoracks in 2021, reck
ons it may be able to perform better. As the
firm’s name hints, the plan is to do the job
using the natural radiation of space. Its re
searchers intend to start sending payloads
of seeds to the International Space Station
(iss) later this year. Once there, those seeds
will be cultivated by astronauts on board
the station and allowed to grow and breed.
Subsequent generations of seeds re
sulting from this breeding will be returned
to Earth and germinated in StarLab Oasis’s
greenhouses. They will then be subjected
to ills including drought, pathogens, poor
soil, excessive heat and voracious insects.
Those which best endure these assaults
will be bred from in their turn, in the hope
that something valuable emerges.
A cutdown version of this approach,
launching packets of seeds on satellites
and returning them to Earth after a period
of exposure to cosmic radiation, has had
some success. China says it has conducted
more than 30 such missions, and that
these have yielded at least 200 improved
crop varieties. StarLab Oasis’s boss, Allen
Herbert, believes, however, that his firm is
the first private organisation set up to take
this route and, in particular, actually to
raise plants in space for the purpose.
Mutagenesis is not, moreover, the only
facility offered by space which may be of
interest to botanists. The stress responses
themselves also yield useful information.
Robert Ferl and AnnaLisa Paul are joint
heads of the Space Plants Lab at the Univer
sity of Florida, Gainesville, which already
has experiments on board the iss. These
are studying how Arabidopsis thaliana, a
species of cress that is botany’s equivalent
of animal scientists’ mice and fruit flies,
responds to the rigours of orbital free fall.
The answer is that the plants switch on
some genes which would normally remain
dormant, while switching off others that
would normally be active.
In particular, as Dr Ferl, Dr Paul and
their colleagues have found, spacefaring
specimens frequently divert resources
away from tasks, such as strengthening the
rigidity of cell walls, which are less perti
nent when the directional pull of gravity is
missing. Conversely, in a bid better to de
termine which way is “up”, they become
more sensitive to light. As Dr Paul puts it,
plants “reach into their metabolic toolbox”
to cope with the unusual stress. In doing so
they pull out tools that may be used rarely
on Earth, but which plant breeders might
be able to deploy in advantageous ways byimproving gas exchange, inducing better
root growth or reducing stem size.
The isswill not, though, last for ever.
And Nanoracks is involved in a proposal to
replace it. As the name of its progeny in
Abu Dhabi also suggests, this is Starlab, a
putative crewed space station planned by a
group led by Lockheed Martin.
Starlab is intended to be a commercial
enterprise, with plant breeding as one ofits sources of revenue. It is not planned to
go into orbit until 2027, and the schedule
for such projects is in any case almost al
ways optimistic. But if it does get off the
ground, the idea that one of its modules
might, in effect, be a plantgrowing annex
to the main living space, akin to a conser
vatory on Earth,hasa pleasing domesticity
to it. Perhaps thecrewwill relax there after
a hard day’s work.nO
nedayin 1936 EdwardWilson,a
budding sevenyearold naturalist,
was out fishing. He hooked a pinfish,
which has sharp spines down its back.
He pulled too hard. As the fish came out
of the water, one of its spines went into
his right eye. Keen not to cut short a day
outdoors, he soldiered on without going
to hospital. As a result, he lost most of
the sight in that eye.
This loss of vision was not the only
reason he turned from vertebrates to
ants. But it gave him a nudge: “I noticed
butterflies and ants more than other kids
did, and took an interest in them auto
matically.” A long and productive career
saw him write hundreds of papers and
publish dozens of books, collect two
Pulitzer prizes, and make fundamental
contributions to ecology, conservation
and evolutionary biology.
But it was insects in general, and ants
in particular, that were his first love. He
began as a muddybooted field biologist
of the old school, tramping across Aus
tralia, Fiji and New Guinea, collecting
and cataloguing new species. As biology
became more technical, in the wake ofthediscoveryin 1953 ofthedoublehelix
chemical structure of dna, he moved
with the times. Recognising the need to
sharpen his mathematical skills, the
tenured Harvard professor enrolled
himself in calculus classes alongside his
own undergraduate students.
As with all the best scientists, he
delighted in drawing connections. Ants
are biological robots, their behaviour
controlled by chemicals called phero
mones. (Some of Wilson’s early work was
in decoding these signals; learning, as he
put it, to speak to another species.) But
from those simple chemicals arises an
astonishing variety of behaviour. Ants
march in columns like Roman legion
aries, practise agriculture, form living
rafts to survive floods, and run complex
societies in which the individual good is
subservient to that of the colony.
Exploring the evolutionary principles
underlying that behaviour got him think
ing about how they might apply to other
species, a topic he explored in 1975 in a
book called “Sociobiology: The New
Synthesis”. The chapters that applied
biological reasoning to the behaviour of
other animals were uncontroversial. But
when, at the end, he extended the analy
sis to humans he was denounced by
some of his leftwing Harvard col
leagues, compared to the Nazis, and
physically attacked at a lecture.
Wilson’s crime was not error, but
heresy. Over a century and a half after
Darwin’s elucidation of natural selec
tion, Homo sapiensremains an animal
with a tendency to think itself semi
divine, or at least somehow above that
sort of evolutionary messiness. Time has
proved Wilson right. These days few
dispute that human behaviour is at least
partly shaped by genes. But while the
principle is (mostly) accepted, the mech
anisms remain obscure. Untangling
exactly how, and how much, genes affect
human behaviour remains a piece of vast
and fascinating unfinished business. An obituaryofEdwardWilsonAn inordinate fondness for ants
The world’s first sociobiologist died on December 26thAmyrmecologist’s myrmecologist