Biogenesis (5 page)

Dr. Akedera pressed for the culturing and analysis of other tissue fragments preserved in the liquid nitrogen, but after a heated argument, Dr. Sakakibara and Mr. Tamura rejected his proposal. It appears that Dr. Akedera desired to perform a tissue antibody staining to clarify the light-emitting
mechanism, but the failures in culturing to date had made everyone else overcautious. The relationship between Drs. Sakakibara and Akedera would become rather strained after this.

Dr. Akedera wished to continue his research by extending his stay yet again, but Dr. Sakakibara judged that further analysis would prove difficult and believed, furthermore, that if the current specimens were to die, freezing them whole rather than preserving tissue fragments served as a safe exit plan.

There is some basis for believing that what motivated Dr. Akedera’s research was a fear of death.

“What are these feelings of superiority and inferiority that the living choose to harbor regarding the dead? Words like ‘extinction’ and ‘death’ betray the self-centered logic of the living. It would seem that simple death is all that there is for the dead, and even if genetic material is left behind, even if cells are left behind, it does not equal leaving behind living descendants that
resemble the self. Individual memories disappear, and seeking the self’s latent existence in descendants is almost materialistic. Probably all that remains to humans who have no religion is such materialism.”

Similar disquisitions on life and death occur everywhere in Dr. Akedera’s journal. Meanwhile, essayistic passages bearing on the experiments and observations themselves grow sparse with the passage of time. Likewise, the log kept at the research lab begins to limit itself to factual observations, with extremely few analytic entries.

Of the personnel who were involved, only Drs. Sakakibara and Akedera seem to have been present at the precise moment the winged mice became extinct. The pair’s deaths were so sudden that by the time Mr. Tamura, the other staff members, and Mr. Miura came running, the dissection of the animals had already begun as though to underscore
the bizarre turn of events.

Mr. Tamura recalled, “There had been no particular change in the weather, so perhaps there was a problem with the food or water, because they suddenly started to grow weak. In a very short time Ponta and Ai stopped eating almost entirely. What was strange was that they weakened in the exact same way even though they’d been separated, with even their food and water coming from different sources.”

Mr. Miura also had detailed memories of the conditions at the time of the mice’s demise. “I had a phone call from Dr. Sakakibara at eight in the morning. By the time I arrived, the winged mice were no longer in their cages. Both Dr. Akedera and Dr. Sakakibara were in the pathology lab. The winged mice lay dead on the dissection table. Incredibly, with Ai in particular, all of the organs including the brain had already been extracted, leaving only the skin. The organs, cut up to harvest cells and steeped in saline in plastic Petri dishes, no longer resembled their original forms.”

The foremost concern of Mr. Tamura, ultimately responsible for whatever happened at the center, was how to break the dire news.

“The worst-case scenario, I thought. I’d never expected both of them to die at once. To be honest, at one point I considered covering it up, for the time being. If we arranged things so that the mice had died, say, a week apart, people might be more accepting. Since this was early autumn in Hokkaido, there was a possibility that a flaw in our air-conditioning system or some such accusation might be leveled at us” (Mr. Tamura).

Indeed, the passing of rare small animals that have attained a degree of popularity is not always reported in a timely manner. Confusion is cited as the reason, and holding a press conference only after a postmortem has confirmed the cause of death is considered acceptable by that industry.

In the end, however, as soon as Dr. Akedera’s procedures were completed, local newspaper and television staff were summoned for a press conference.

Mr. Tamura also touched upon the surrounding confusion as follows. “Although the consensus was that the deaths were natural, since the details would be beyond me, I requested Mr. Miura, Dr. Sakakibara, and Dr. Akedera to discuss the matter. There were some harsh exchanges and I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. The conference needed to wait until a streamlined statement could be submitted by Dr. Sakakibara, and now it was the mass media’s turn to give me a hard time.”

From the transcript of that day’s conference as published by the local newspaper: “We have the unfortunate responsibility to report that this morning, at 4:22, the winged mouse Ponta died, followed by Ai at 4:23. The cause of death is still unknown and will have to await the pathology results. No significant changes in the condition of either of the pair had been reported.”
⁹

Center Director Sakakibara was also in attendance at the conference. He fielded the questions that required expertise, and the reporters naturally
wanted to know why both had died. He responded, “There may have been an environmental factor, but as for human error it seems unlikely, and I think that’s probably a negative since no changes occurred in any of the other animals in the Center’s charge.”

Reporter Masayuki Nagamine of the
Kitasorachi News
, who had been following the winged mouse story with a great deal of interest from the outset, posed an astute question: “Why do we see, both now and in past cases, deaths of two winged mice occurring at the same time?”

On this point, Dr. Sakakibara attempted an inarticulate response that stressed the element of coincidence and replied only that it was an issue going forward.

Yet somehow, even a year later, let alone an academic presentation, no postmortem results were forthcoming –– nor has a single paper, Drs. Sakakibara and Akedera having passed away in the interim, been published to this day. There are only a few newspaper articles and a review.

It was Dr. Sakakibara who compiled Dr. Akedera’s research results after the latter passed away, but none of it was published. All of that is currently in my possession, and among them is also the initial draft of a paper that was clearly meant to satisfy the prerequisites of English-language journals such as
Nature
and
Science
. It was only after Dr. Sakakibara’s passing, in turn, that I was able to read the manuscript, and why he failed to present the material to the world remains unclear.

Normally, content of this caliber should be submitted to an appropriate English-language venue rather than be made public via the present report. However, the paper is critical to understanding what about the winged mouse so excited academic interest in Dr. Akedera, so with the permission of his family and in a manner that will not preclude a subsequent presentation, I will be discussing just its abstract.

The paper concerns the lifespan of winged mice and belongs more to natural history than to Dr.
Akedera’s field of molecular biology. The original is in English, but the gist is that the winged mouse boasts a stupefying lifespan.

The conjecture is really a simple application of the observations made by Drs. Ishikawa and Sakakibara. Dr. Ishikawa had discovered minute markings reminiscent of year rings on the backs of the animal’s wings and reported the morphological feature with accompanying photographs. Dr. Sakakibara also maintained a detailed photographic record of the winged mice every year
⁶
, and Dr. Akedera’s discovery was based on the photos on display within the center. After a detailed analysis, Dr. Akedera concluded that the concentric pattern grew by a few millimeters per year. Furthermore, he held that the rule fit all of the patterns as photographed over the years.

Now and then a discovery will occur only when a surfeit of evidence is viewed through some hypothesis, prior to which the facts are, as it were, seen yet unseen. Observation and analysis are completely different beasts, and making a certain observation does not always lead to extracting
the truth of the matter. The wing markings are precisely an instance of this, and examining Dr. Akedera’s journal retrospectively, we see that it was only a few days before the mice’s demise that he began speculating about their lifespan.

What is more, he speculated that the markings on Ponta’s and Ai’s wings indicated a difference of more than two hundred years, arithmetically speaking. Of course, this did not establish that a winged mouse had a lifespan of more than two hundred years. In the case of Ponta, if the center of the vortex really marked the beginning of his life, it put his age at more than five hundred years. This postulate, however, has no other basis than an orally transmitted report of the capture, during World War II, of a tiny winged mouse with the shortest of markings. As that mouse also died within two years, it would seem to be an utterly vague basis.

The paper includes a fact that never shows up in the experiment logs and that Mr. Miura was unaware of. Although I have already noted how successive generations of the winged mouse’s skin
cells failed to culture, when tissue fragment was re-deposited whole without reducing it to cells, any that grew out and divided died, but those that stayed within the fragment continued to survive without dividing. This was considered evidence on a cellular level of the longevity of winged mice.

Furthermore, single cells isolated and observed using a limited dilution method divided into two cells and suffered cell death after a certain period. The paper also notes, interestingly, that if the cells were separated soon after dividing, they stayed alive as long as the procedure was repeated.

Given that it was possible to culture a tissue fragment (in which cells remained together and division was halted), Dr. Akedera seemed to think that some signal indispensable for continued survival existed in the nervous system. He speculated that once the signal was interrupted and altered by cell division, etc., it was recognized as a death signal, necessitating single-cell culturing beyond that point.

“It went against common sense, so I had no idea Dr. Akedera had persisted under such conditions. Thinking back on it, even after the transfers failed, he kept working on some culture, and when he was going back to Tokyo, I saw him place a T-flask filled with culturing medium into a cooler. I don’t know why he concealed these facts from everyone else, though” (Mr. Miura).

Yet the manuscript, complete with photographs of cells subsisting in tissue fragment in the exact same form at one, six, and twelve months, as well as pictures of the single cells, does not appear to be a work of fiction on Dr. Akedera’s part. Naturally, no other known cells share such properties.

In the end, after reading Dr. Akedera’s paper, Mr. Miura regretted that the failure to maintain cell lines was “the result of following existing schemes of cellular propagation and survival.”

Reading through the paper, one surmises that Dr. Akedera came to suspect that winged mice live not just for five hundred years but literally forever.

In any case, perhaps because he himself remained unconvinced by such an outrageous hypothesis, the paper was never published. Alas, current Species Preservation Center Director Yoshio Inoue, who has been involved in numerous environmental protection initiatives as a lawyer, has declared, “There are no plans for further attempts at culturing as of this date.” Our prospects for settling the issue one way or another are slim.

The whole mystery surrounding the winged mice was revealed by Dr. Sakakibara as he stared death in the face. Suffering from an illness of an unknown cause that pervaded his entire nervous system, Dr. Sakakibara lacked the strength to swallow his own saliva, but even as spittle dripped constantly down his chin, and emitting inchoate growls, he attempted communication with the aid of a word processor keyed to his ocular movements.

Dr. Sakakibara recognized as criminal, and regretted
until the moment of his death, the fact that he had seconded Dr. Akedera’s proposal to conduct a certain experiment in secret. Dr. Akedera had been unambiguous and persistent. He wished for a breeding experiment with Ai and Ponta in the same cage. Various types of evidence supported Dr. Akedera’s calculations for pairing them at a heretofore-neglected time of year. At first, in order to encourage estrous while eliminating the risk of infection, a special plastic divider would be employed to block bacteria and viruses, but not light and smells, so that the two animals could become aware of each other. Though the center’s director, it would have been difficult even for Dr. Sakakibara to acquire the committee and the city council’s consent to restart a breeding plan that had been discontinued after recognized authorities had failed. What ultimately persuaded Dr. Sakakibara was Dr. Akedera’s reasoning that if the previous simultaneous deaths had been caused by something other than an infectious disease, the experiment would confirm that. Yet, a possibly fatal experiment involving the two extant specimens of an endangered animal was obviously inappropriate. “I should have opposed it,” Dr. Sakakibara
wrote on his hospital bed.

At the time, Drs. Sakakibara and Akedera were intensely at odds over the hypothesis of “a catching death.” Dr. Sakakibara asserted that “a hypothesis arrived at via inference starting from another hypothesis” held no credibility for him. While Dr. Sakakibara criticized the hypothesis’ lack of physical evidence, Dr. Akedera blamed Dr. Sakakibara for not permitting the experiments that might yield such evidence.

Dr. Sakakibara’s journal includes a suggestive passage from around that time: “Positions that are finally wholly antithetical are, not uncommonly, both correct at the process stage.”

As for the experiments, as I indicated at the outset I will be relying on a modified version of Dr. Sakakibara’s detailed account.

At 11:30 p.m. on September 1, 1989, “the simplest and most startling experiment of all those I have ever performed” (Dr. Sakakibara) began unbeknownst
to any but the two. The security guard made his final rounds and locked the doors to go home at 11:00 p.m. Thirty minutes later, Drs. Sakakibara and Akedera removed the winged mice from their booth. Transferring Ponta and Ai to transparent mobile cages and placing them in proximity to each other was a simple enough operation, but even the center’s director should not have been taking the winged mice out of their booth without permission. To prevent anyone from finding out, they did so in the dark using only a flashlight. Moreover, to keep any light from spilling outside, the actual experiment was conducted in the director’s office, under a single lamp. The two winged mice were made to face each other across a plastic divider. Their behavior was observed until the security guard’s return at six in the morning. It was a simple experiment that required a lot of patience. Apparently, to avoid raising any suspicions, they made sure to get some work done in the morning before taking a nap, and thus they continued their allnight vigils.