Jean Pennycook, Penguins and the Scientific Agenda

Also published in Infozine.

Onstage at the KC Zoo’s lobby auditorium theater, Jean Pennycook is dwarfed by the towering IMAX screen. Even her slides about penguin research occupy only a fraction of the visual space – an apt analogy for her work, which itself occupies a tiny sliver of the vast universe of all human science.  

Pennycook is part of a group which studies “factors regulating population size and colonydistribution of Adelie Penguins in the Ross Sea,” a decade-long project with a budget well under two million dollars. The job begins in mid-October when she departs from central California to live four months in minus-10 degree cold, two and a half months of which are spent sitting on a rock watching penguins. All day, every day.

Even to a couch-potato like me, it doesn’t sound fun: After a brief period of staging their gear, the team moves from the larger research station to the field station, where the living room for four people is about the size of a small mobile home, containing a propane heater which she admits “doesn’t make much difference if you’re standing farther than two feet away.” The food there is dried, canned or, of course, frozen, and they’re not allowed to leave behind any trace of their presence – not even a drop of urine. Thus, when they depart, all the gear and human waste (collected in little blue bags) is flown out by helicopter.  I can’t help secretly wondering, while she describes this, if, after 75 days with no showers, it’s hard to tell the field researchers from the little blue bags.

Seeing Pennycook in person – an attractive, middle-aged woman with a burst of red hair and a slightly worried expression – it’s difficult to imagine she’s got what it takes to tough-out four months in the last real wilderness left on our planet. But it makes perfect sense when you learn that she taught high school science for “a long time” before taking a fun trip to the very deep south to see what 'real' science is like.

Twelve years passed and she’s gone back every time, having abandoned what most people regard as normal life. Her school district in Fresno, California, sensed that having an active researcher (an Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow at that) on the science staff might be a good thing, and allowed her to stay on as a developer, teaching teachers and putting curriculum together. But unlike other school personnel, she’s also obligated (and apparently delighted) to present penguin research in dozens of public talks each year at zoos, schools, colleges, church groups, Rotary clubs, scout troops, and pretty much any other venue where people want to know more about penguins or living conditions in Antarctica.

Why is it important to know about that part of the world, I ask. “Antarctica’s a very important continent as far as our climate. Because it’s covered with ice, it reflects a lot of solar radiation. And as that ice gets smaller and smaller, that radiation isn’t going to be reflected – it’s going to be absorbed, which means our world will continue to heat up more. So the amount of ice is very important.”

That was the part of her answer I expected. But then, she said something that surprised me: “The other thing about Antarctica is that it’s an untapped continent as far as resources. Right now, nobody’s allowed to do anything with the resources, but that could become more and more important as time goes on, I believe.” She went on to say that something about the fact that it has no internal borders, no military or indigenous people, but I was back on the “resources” part. What did that mean? Which resources? The ice? Was there coal under the ice? Or oil? Do penguins poop out gold nuggets? Or are they, like one of my college roommates, an amazing and endless source of natural gas?

Jean’s statement about the importance of Antarctic research pretty much sums up what modern science is all about. Scientists like to say their work is not political – that the knowledge they produce has intrinsic value. But who determines the agenda? By what mechanism is it decided to learn about the factors affecting penguin life or, alternately, whether precious metals are cached a mile beneath their rocky  nests?

The enterprise of science, which drives human beings to the farthest reaches of existence, is the most powerful and transformative that humans have ever developed. But is the science that warns us of environmental threats to adorable penguins also the same science that created the environmental threats? If so, then this is a many-headed dragon, one that brings delightful gifts and also terrifies and kills, all under the banner of knowledge for the sake of knowledge, as though mankind had no motive other than curiosity.

The NationalScience Foundation wisely requires that the research it funds, including that of the team Jean Pennycook is part of, disseminate broadly the methods involved and the knowledge acquired. And Pennycook, a born teacher, takes obvious pleasure in doing so. But is this arrangement part of a larger program – one that delivers products to you (knowledge of penguins, pictures of the Martian surface, replacement organs, nuclear energy, etc.), with the implicit understanding that you won’t ask to become part of the process of deciding what comes next?