The humble banana almost seems like a miracle of nature. Colourful, nutritious, and much cherished by children, monkeys and clowns, it has a favoured position in the planet’s fruitbowls. The banana is vitally important in many regions of the tropics, where different parts of the plant are used for clothing, paper and tableware, and where the fruit itself is an essential dietary staple. People across the globe appreciate the soft, nourishing flesh, the snack-sized portions, and the easy-peel covering that conveniently changes colour to indicate ripeness. Individual fruit—or fingers—sit comfortably in the human hand, readily detached from their close-packed companions. Indeed, the banana appears almost purpose-designed for efficient human consumption and distribution. It is difficult to conceive of a more fortuitous fruit.

The banana, however, is a freakish and fragile genetic mutant; one that has survived through the centuries due to the sustained application of selective breeding by diligent humans. Indeed, the “miraculous” banana is far from being a no-strings-attached gift from nature. Its cheerful appearance hides a fatal flaw— one that threatens its proud place in the grocery basket. The banana’s problem can be summed up in a single word: sex.

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On 21 February 2003, a physician in Hong Kong was feeling particularly unwell. He must have had an inkling that something serious was amiss, for his symptoms closely matched those of a number of patients he had treated in recent weeks: fever, aching muscles, headache, a dry cough, and shortness of breath. An alarmingly high proportion of these people had become critically ill, with inflamed, fluid-saturated lungs. Breathing was rendered somewhat difficult, and death frequently followed.

Although the sixty-four year old nephrologist resided in the Guangdong region of southern China, he was enjoying time away for a family wedding when the worst of the symptoms struck. Sketchy reports of a mysterious respiratory illness had been filtering out of his home province for several months, but the official channels gave no indication of anything untoward. The day he arrived in Hong Kong he felt well enough to check into his room on the ninth floor of the Metropole Hotel, and he even did some sightseeing and shopping later in the afternoon. But the following morning his condition had worsened, and he was forced to seek care at the territory’s Kwong Wah Hospital. There he told staff he feared he had contracted “a very virulent disease,” and suggested immediate isolation. Yet the damage had already been done.

Back at the Metropole Hotel, globetrotting guests from the ninth floor were preparing to leave for Canada, Singapore, and Vietnam. Soon, they too would fall ill. In less than a week, the world would be left poised on the brink of a pandemic. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) had arrived. While the occupants of the western hemisphere often remember the events in the context of an overblown media frenzy, many epidemiologists today regard the outbreak as a near-miss for humanity– one which might have become one of history’s most unpleasant epidemics had it not been for the quick thinking and selflessness of a few individuals.

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Early one Sunday morning in September 1949, throngs of people started to gather around the runway of the Bristol Aeroplane Company factory in the west of England. Curious Bristolians occupied every available vantage point, while workers and their families crowded into special enclosures alongside the airfield. The ten thousand or so bystanders were joined by two hundred and fifty reporters from all corners of the globe, all present in anticipation of an historic event. The message had gone out: “It’s going to be today!”

A huge contraption lay poised on the threshold of the runway: a flying machine far larger than any that the ordinary onlooker would have seen before. With elegant curves and a smooth stressed-metal skin, she looked impressive enough, but there may have been doubts among the spectators regarding the aircraft’s ability to leave the ground. Many had watched the giant plane incessantly track back and forth along the runway over the last two days, with no sign of a take-off. But now the taxi-trials were complete.

At ten o’clock their patience was finally rewarded. To the throaty roar of eight powerful Centaurus piston engines, and the delight of the crowd, the Bristol Brabazon– the largest and most advanced airliner of its day– sped down the runway and took to the air for the very first time. As the graceful behemoth slipped the surly bonds of the Earth, it’s said that the captain, test pilot Bill Pegg, uttered the words: “Good God- it works!” But for all of the splendor surrounding its maiden voyage, the massive aircraft was soon relegated to the scrap heap of aviation history.

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Humanity’s home is far from factory-fresh these days. Frankly, the Earth has received its share of scratches and dents, including large asteroid impacts, megavolcanoes, earthquakes, ice ages, and heat waves. It’s to be expected. There are over four billion years on the clock, after all.

Though it has long been clear that Earth 1.0 is in need of an upgrade, it was not until a few years ago that someone began to take the notion seriously. In 2004, at a respected international design exhibition called the Venice Architecture Biennale, a young artist and architect named Christian Waldvogel displayed his plans for total global annihilation and the creation of Earth 2.0.

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Every year around the end of the October, the red crabs of Christmas Island begin their march. Up to 100 million individuals leave their burrows in the forest and head to the shore in a scarlet tide of legs, claws and carapaces extensive enough to be seen from the air. They are driven by the most basic of biological imperatives: to spawn.

The islanders take the crustacean migration in good humour, closing roads and erecting diversions in an effort to curtail crab casualties and the tattering of motor vehicle tyres. After all, the annual show is a symbol of the distinctiveness of the Indian Ocean territory, and a big draw for tourists, naturalists, wildlife photographers, and documentary-makers worldwide.

Many visitors are impressed both by the size of the migration and by the islanders’ obvious concern for the crabs. Indeed, an outsider could be forgiven for believing that the spectacle has been an annual occurrence at Christmas Island since time immemorial, one surely destined to astonish countless future generations.

But the grand scale of the annual march– if not its very existence– is threatened by a foe far more ferocious than road traffic or the clumsy feet of camera-wielding tourists. And the origin of the migration itself is perhaps more recent, and more tainted, than many would believe. The story is one of inter-species meddling, conflict, and extinction, set in the context of a fragile island ecology. It involves protagonists of a two-legged, four-legged, six-legged and eight-legged variety.

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The Soviet engineers gazed into the abandoned tunnel with dismay. It was 1974 and work was scheduled to resume on the construction of the Baikal-Amur Magistral (BAM), a railway line in north-eastern Siberia. The Dusse-Alin Tunnel had been completed in an earlier phase of the undertaking, as evidenced by the inscription “1947-1950” over the entrance and the busts of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin that earlier workers had hewn out of the nearby rock. But the harsh climate and intervening years had not been kind to the permafrost-piercing passage. Peering into the gaping hole, the worried workers could see something glinting inside. The BAM project, perhaps the greatest civil engineering endeavour the world has ever seen, had encountered yet another problem.

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The passenger manifest for British South American Airlines (BSAA) flight CS-59 might have made a perfect character list for a murder-mystery. Aboard were two businessman friends touring South America on the lookout for trade opportunities: a fun-loving Swiss and a self-made English executive. Also travelling were a Palestinian man who was rumoured to have a diamond stitched into his jacket, and a South American agent of the Dunlop tyre company who had once been the tutor to Prince Michael of Romania. The oldest passenger was in her seventies, a widow of German extraction returning to her Chilean home after an inconvenient World War had unexpectedly extended her stay abroad. And to add a whiff of espionage, a member of a select corps of British civil servants known as King’s Messengers joined the flight, carrying a diplomatic bag bound for the UK embassy across the border.

The date was August 2nd, 1947, and the flight was scheduled to depart from Buenos Aires, Argentina, bound for Santiago, Chile. The intrepid voyagers were to fly in the Star Dust, a shiny Lancastrian aircraft derived from the legendary Avro Lancaster World War II bomber. Its aircrew were ex-Royal Air Force to a chap, and the machine was captained by an experienced and decorated wartime flyer named Reginald Cook. Traversing the Andes Mountains in atrocious winter weather was an undertaking that would demand all his knowledge and skills, yet the journey should have been well within the capabilities of both man and machine.

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On October 1st 1890, William B. Coley, a young bone surgeon barely two years out of medical school, saw one of his first patients in private practice at the New York Memorial Hospital. Although he’d only finished his residency earlier the same year, he’d already gained a good reputation and many considered him a rising star of the New York surgical scene.

The seventeen year old patient had a painful, rapidly growing lump on the back of her right hand. She had pinched the unlucky appendage between two railway carriage seats on a transcontinental trip to Alaska some months before, and when the bruise failed to heal she assumed the injury had become infected. However the bruise turned into a bulge, the pain steadily worsened, and her baffled doctors were eventually compelled to call for Dr. Coley. As a surgical man, Coley would never have guessed that this innocuous referral would take his career in a totally new direction– into an unusual branch of medicine now known as cancer immunotherapy.

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