Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
This genre of blue-sky research wouldn't surprise anyone looking at the biography of the
institute's founder, Tom Slick Jr., a Texas wildcatter, inventor, and committed cryptozoolo-
gist. He paid for three separate expeditions to Nepal to search for the Abominable Snowman
of the Himalayas. He tried to get permission from the Nepalese government to use tracking
bloodhounds, but the country refused to let the dogs in. Slick died in a private plane crash
in 1962 at the age of forty-six, but his dream institute, SwRI, thrived, with brilliant scient-
ists and engineers flocking to San Antonio. Today it has a staff of three thousand, one of the
largest nonprofit applied-research institutes in the nation.
Slick's passion for mythic cryptids was surely an embarrassment for behavioral scientists at
SwRI, who were deeply ensconced in training projects with real-world species. Yet something
of his spirit lives on in their work. The institute's honeybee research in 2001, for instance,
falls into a similar category. Even before 9/11, SwRI scientists were working on “a controlled
biological system”—that's institute-speak for a cooperative critter—to detect bombs. Dogs
aren't the only creatures who can be harnessed to help humans. The scientists trained the bees
of twelve hives, giving them sugar-water rewards. The worker bees performed beautifully in
field tests, buzzing right to their bomb targets and ignoring nearby flowers. Nor did their del-
icate bees' feet trigger explosions. SwRI researchers even put radio transmitters the size of a
salt grain on the bees' backs, to track them as they honed in on distant TNT. The researchers
thought they might be on to something big.
It was an inspiring experiment, but bees have their limits. They tend to die sooner than
dogs, with a life span of about six weeks during high pollen season. They hate the cold, the
dark, the rain. Using them at an airport security checkpoint isn't practical. I know this be-
cause David and I keep hives in our yard in North Carolina. Our bees hate three things we
love: garlic, wine, and bananas. We can't consume any of those products before inspecting the
hives, or we risk their displeasure. We love our bees, and need them for pollination, but I'd
rather train Solo than a bee.
The idea that bees might have potential in both war and peace was the continuation of
a long tradition, not just at SwRI but nationwide. The tumultuous early to mid-1970s were
an enormously fertile time for detection research generally and research using animals for de-
tection in particular. The Vietnam War was winding down. At the same time, Department
of Defense-funded researchers noticed the skills of military dogs and wondered what else
dogs might be capable of. There was enough intellectual and experimental curiosity—and
money—to percolate from the military labs on the East Coast clear to San Antonio, Texas.
Nick Montanarelli, now retired but then a project manager at the U.S. Army Land War-
fare Laboratory, remembers that era clearly: It was just a few years before he went on to co-
develop the bulletproof Kevlar vest with Lester Shubin, an invention that continues to save
thousands of lives. But at the time, Nick and a small cadre of other researchers across the
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