Princeton University - Council of Science & Technology

POPE PRIZE

Essays 1 & 2
The Buzz on James Gould
Mission to Mars
Natalie R. Ram

Essays 3 & 4
Powering Princeton
Academics as Outlaws?
David Robinson

Essay 5
How Does Your Garden Grow?
Alexis Schulman

Essays 6, 7 & 8
Killing Cancer at its Root
Backpacking with Lee Silver
Avocado
Lauren C. Turner

Essay 9
Not with a Bang, but a Whimper
Joshua D. Younger

Killing Cancer at its Root

Egg salad. Thirty-four-year-old Randy Callihan thought it was the egg salad he had had for lunch. His stomach was gassy and painful, he felt lightheaded and nauseated. At first it seemed to be a case of food poisoning. But when Callihan’s warring stomach didn’t surrender to Pepto Bismal and his rectum began to bleed heavily, Callihan knew it wasn’t just a few bad eggs. Within two days he was in his family physician’s office in Pittsburg pleading for an explanation. Within four days he was lying on the crackling, cold paper of a doctor’s bed waiting for a colonoscopy to examine his entire colon. The walnut-sized tumor that the doctors found proved to be cancerous and within weeks, 18 inches of Callihan’s colon were surgically removed. After the surgery, Callihan underwent chemotherapy for six months. His body became raw. He felt tired and sore. His hair fell out. After six months the oncologists could no longer detect cancer. But a year and a half later, his liver was cancerous. Surgeons removed half his liver and the chemotherapy started again. Like many cancer victims, Callihan was left wondering when the cycle would end and when new and less painful treatments would be made available. For most patients there are very few options for cancer treatment: surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy are still the most common forms of treatment. But recent discoveries by researchers at Princeton University, Stanford University and Cornell University suggest that a new form of treatment might be available in years to come—treatment that kills cancerous cells from the inside out with the fundamental glue of the cell, the genes. Funded by the National Institute of Health, the researchers are working to locate, isolate, and understand the role of tumor-suppressing genes (growth constraining cells) and oncogenes (growth promoting cells) in the development of cancer. Cancer can form when the balance of tumor suppressors and oncogenes is disrupted and the cell loses control of its division process. The researchers have found that the tumor-suppressing genes that all cells have are not “turned-on” in tumors but are active in healthy cells. Many of these tumor-suppressing genes and their oncogene counterparts have already been isolated and are being studied further to understand how and why they work. Researchers at Princeton University have been attempting to locate the genes since 1997 when Professor Daniel Notterman, Ph.D., began working in Princeton’s Levine Laboratory. Like their colleagues at Stanford and Cornell, Notterman and his team are using microarray technology to locate these genes. First developed by scientists at Stanford’s Brown Laboratory in the early 90s, microarray technology was created to detect thousands of genes simultaneously. It allows scientists to determine which genes are expressed in a particular cell type. Standard techniques are often highly focused and target only one specific gene or genetic region at a time. Such techniques do not shed light on global gene expression. Microarray technology works to show the detail while still focusing on the bigger picture. Over a million human expressed sequences, or order of subunits in a genetic chain, have been tagged. Fifty to ninety percent of all human genes, therefore, are available on the public database. To do this, Notterman obtains human colon cancer cells and healthy colon cells from a local hospital involved in the Cooperative Human Tissue Network. He then tests the tissues using microarray technology. Notterman specifically locates and analyzes RNA (ribonucleic acid) and cDNA (deoxyribonucleic acid that is complimentary to RNA) in the samples. In the past, researchers used microarray technology to analyze only DNA. Notterman’s technique, therefore, is uncommon but necessary to give a fuller picture of cancerous cell life. “I’m using a model system within tumor biology, a clinical system which is not typical to Princeton,” says Notterman. He places single-stranded complementary DNA sequences onto a glass slide at discrete, noted places. Messenger RNA (mRNA) is then isolated and labeled with a fluorescent dye to allow scientific view from a microscope. When a cell expresses a gene, mRNA for the particular gene increases in number directly dependent on the degree of expression of the gene. Scientists know that cDNA is specific to one mRNA because of base pairing—they attract each other like magnetic puzzle pieces. Scientists can determine which genes are expressed in the cells by relating the amount of RNA that is expressed on the discrete spots on the glass slide. If the cell expresses a great deal of gene X then the fluorescent labeling will be obvious to the scientists under a microscope. Sometimes cancerous cells do not express certain genes that healthy cells do and thus the fluorescent tagging does not appear. “In tumors you don’t see the tumor-suppressing genes expressed,” accounts Notterman. “And when you clone the gene and put it into the tumor cells it kills the [cancerous] cells. We’re still conducting research, but it does offer hope.” The lack of tumor-suppressing gene expression explains why oncogenes have not been restricted in their cellular, carcinogenic reproduction. Without limits, children go out of control and test every undefined boundary. So it also is with cancerous cells: without tumor-suppressor genes, cells go out of control and oncogenes test every undefined reproduction boundary. The microarray technology helps locate these imbalances. “The complex sample of fluourescently labeled mRNAs allow researchers to generate genome-wide transcription profiles of thousands of genes in one experiment,” comments Jennifer Greenman, a fourth-year Princeton student conducting the research with Notterman. However, the human mind alone cannot digest the bulk of information that results from microarray technology. The DNA and RNA tests are sent to computational molecular biologists who use computers to create color maps to string the data of gene expression together. It’s hard to imagine just how complex these maps are without seeing them, and Notterman’s lab is the perfect place to do so. “Color maps organize and keep the data,” explains Notterman, his back facing poster-sized color maps that hang framed on his wall, like works of art. “For example, 40 specimens could lead to 300,000 data points. Humans just can’t keep track,” he says. Seemingly inspired by the artist Mondrian during Christmas time, the color maps show Tetris-like blocks of red and green. The blocks form choppy color strands where genes are expressed. Red bits indicate where particular gene expression is highest in cell tissue and green bits show where gene expression is lowest. As he sips coffee from a beaker-like mug, Dr. Notterman explains that his research is focused almost exclusively on the gene expression in colon cancer, although his techniques should apply to most forms of cancer. “I’m using colon cancer because it’s incredibly common and important. There are 120,000 new cases each year.” Colon cancer is, in fact, the second most common cancer in America. Notterman and his research team have recently found interesting expression of genes within such malignant cells. “When comparing expression patterns from colon carcinoma and normal tissue samples,” says Greenman, “the group detected nineteen transcripts that had at least four-fold higher mRNA expression in malignant samples. Among these, expression of the uncharacterized KIAA0101 gene ranked nearly highest.” Along with the data of tumor-suppressors, “this supports the concept that genome-wide expression profiling may permit a molecular classification of solid tumors,” writes Notterman in a scientific abstract of his research. One gene that the Princeton Levine Laboratory is investigating is the GC-C (Guanine-Cyclase C) receptor and the protein that binds to it. This receptor is particularly interesting because it can be used as a protein marker to detect the extent and spread of colon cancer in the body. Because the GC-C receptor is expressed on the epithelial inside tissue of the colon, when colon cancer cells spread to other tissues, researchers can easily track the binding guanine protein with an imaging marker. Hopeful, Greenman says, “although this would take years of testing, I think the next logical step is to conjugate a cell-killing drug to this protein marker so that if injected into an individual with metastasized colon cancer, the most lethal stage of the cancer, it could specifically [target] the cancer cells and kill them. In other words, the GC-C receptor is a potential target at which to shoot so-called cellular missiles.” Like other cancers, the earlier a person detects colon cancer the better the chances for survival. By the age of 70, 50% of the western population develops a colorectal tumor and 10% of the cases turn malignant. Ninety-one percent of patients who detect the cancer while it is still localized, before it has spread to surrounding tissue, are still alive five years later. Unfortunately, only 37% of colon cancer cases are detected at this stage. Although exercise, a low-fat diet and regular check-ups can help prevent colon cancer, faulty genes can cause the disease and so discoveries like Notterman’s could prove very beneficial. Microarray technology and the identification of tumor-suppressing genes have the potential to affect many areas of medicine. Microarray technology may lead to the identification of complex genetic diseases, or to drug discovery and toxicology studies, or to mutation analysis and gene expression comparison over time. The research could even lead to preventative medicine or an ability to subtype diseases and design drugs to treat disease causes and not just symptoms. It is, of course, more effective to kill a weed at its roots than at its petal. With the work of commercial drug manufacturers, microarray technology could also lead to the creation of genotype or population-specific drugs. Such drugs could be hugely beneficial in the treatment of diseases like AIDS. Genetic testing for colon cancer and other cancers could be made more easily available if microarray technology is able to fulfill the hopes and desires of its researchers. Such progress, however, is far away as more research must be conducted to understand why and how specific tumor-suppressing genes work and how they can be woven into the fabric of cancer treatment. Laboratories like the one at Princeton cannot create drug treatments. Research labs at universities do not have the necessary facilities and supply of patients for drug design and extensive clinical trial. But this does not diminish the possibility of new treatments. With enough research at the molecular level by scientists like Notterman, commercial drug companies could develop new treatments. It’s still too early to tell. But cancer patients like Callihan can remain hopeful. Eventually science will kill cancer at its root.

Backpacking with Lee Silver

Where the Wild Things Are Camels; teacup-like basket boats; human-pulled rickshaws and elephants: Lee Silver is an unconventional explorer. He has traveled the crevasses of the world and of himself and has used ways often unknown to men. His passport is well stamped and decorated with honors. And his worldly travels include a myriad of experiences that metaphorically mirror his personal journey. “We went to a lot of villages,” the Princeton University professor and scientist says of his family’s recent eight-month backpacking trip. Traveling across Southeast Asia and India, Silver, his wife, Susan, and their three children, Rebecca, Ari, and Max went everywhere between Bali and Burma, Sumatra and Singapore. They planted baby rice with locals outside of Yogyakarta, slept on a near-freezing bed of desert on the Pakistan border, and listened to Balinese villagers tell stories and sing 60s pop with heavy accents. Cremation “The ashes float up to heaven,” Silver says. Around the burning bamboo logs and woman’s ashing body, local Balinese men play cymbals and drums joyously and “painfully loud.” Silver’s sons Max and Ari join the band as the old woman’s body burns onto the next world. “I’m giving up my lab and getting out of science,” Silver says about the end of the 2002 academic year. He speaks without regret. “To be a molecular biologist today means putting all your efforts into some detail of how life works. If you do experimental science you’re focusing your attention on some detail. I got bored with that…” Another reason Silver is leaving science is that he feels science is becoming restrictive. “Biologist are often prevented from having thought experiments,” Silver says. “Biologists do things that can affect people directly. Physicists can say something like, ‘Consider a person falling into a black hole at the speed of light, his body stretching a mile and being pulled apart,” he says raising his arms to show the ‘mile apart.’ “And no one questions the thought of this being done because chances are it’s not going to happen. But if a biologist says, ‘consider what might happen if we put seven mutations into an embryo and it grew all different arms and legs,’ people don’t even want to hear about it. They think it’s bad to even think about it.” “…It’s all details,” Silver continues. But it’s details, gene-specific details, that have won Silver acclaim in his field of behavioral and developmental mouse genetics. Research in the Silver Laboratory is “directed at the discovery and characterization of genes in mice—and, by extrapolation, people—that predispose individuals [to] the expression of various types of behaviors.” Silver’s lab analyzes abusive use of addictive substances (like nicotine and alcohol) and particular aspects of emotion (like aggression, anxiety and—no surprise—curiosity). Curiosity in his field has gained Silver election to multiple governing boards like the Genetics Society of America and the International Mammalian Genome Society. It has won him countless awards and invitations to lecture worldwide and has heightened his influence over regional and national bioethical public policy. In addition to writing over 160 scientific articles, Silver has written two college-level molecular biology textbooks. Textbooks. …He goes on: “I like the big picture. What it comes back to is my search for the soul.” It’s time for Silver’s ashes to rise and move on—again. Silver is still that little Philly boy who won’t accept “Because!” for an answer. He studied physics at the University of Pennsylvania to understand the universe better. But when physics couldn’t explain everything he went and earned himself a PhD in biophysics at Harvard. Then he went into biochemistry. And when Silver cleaned that plate he started eating the different fields of biology. “I moved into whatever I felt interested me. Whenever I see something interesting, I start to devour the field.” Now he wants some good old soul food. Aristotle and Plato offer just that, save the black-eyed peas of course. Silver has been studying the human soul—“whatever that might mean”—his entire life and within academia for three or four years now. It’s the ancient Greek philosophers (not the modern “esoteric” ones) who grab Silver’s interest. “They were struggling to understand the meaning of life, morality, and the nature of the individual human being,” he says empathetically—empathetically because he’s in the same boat. “I’ve found that some of the things I learned growing up just don’t make sense.” But Silver has never been one to just study books. He’d rather study you. Talking with Silver is like interrogating a mirror: as you ask him questions, he examines, analyzes and secretly interviews you. He tries to catch your thoughts on “soul” (even if you’re not really thinking about it). He watches you closely, hoping his response will buy him a piece of your own brain candy. Lee Silver wants to figure you out. And as he talks to you he listens to your every response: how you cross your legs at the word abortion or how your eyes light up at the mention of how happy his son Ari’s smile makes him. Silver wants to know your angle, however obtuse it is. Red Macaques “At one point in the jungle, we came across a troop of beautiful red macaque monkeys…A few seconds later, the monkey family decided they didn't want us around. They started to pelt us with small fruits, and two of the monkeys intentionally tried to pee on us.” “I won’t talk about anything that isn’t controversial. If it’s not controversial, it’s boring to me,” Silver comments smoothly. And he’s not kidding. He openly discusses issues like cloning, gamete donation, stem cell research and when it is that life begins. “He says some pretty funky stuff,” says student Carlton Wynne ‘02 of Silver’s “Genetics, Reproduction and Public Policy” class. “Like how what you sneeze into a Kleenex is the same stuff as a fetus. A fetus!” The student’s eyes bulge in disbelief. Silver’s book, Remaking Eden, discusses the inevitability of cloning and other forms of genetic engineering that will transform the American family. He writes about a not-too-distant future society radically divided not by race and culture but by natural birth (the good old fashioned way) and artificial birth. He argues that our great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren will either be of the “Natural” class or the “GenRich” class: people whose genes—from book smarts to long legs—are “rich,” hand-chosen before sperm and egg even meet. “By the end of the third millennium,” Silver writes, “the GenRich class and the Natural class will become the GenRich humans and the Natural humans—entirely separate species with no ability to cross-breed, and with as much romantic interest in each other as a current human would have for a chimpanzee.” It’s controversial but thrilling. “When I took his class,” exclaims student Debbie Jacobson ‘03, “I was like YES! I just think he’s brilliant.” Many of his colleagues—regardless of personal beliefs—also find Silver exciting and sometimes amusing. Princeton President and molecular biologist Shirley Tilghman says, “Shortly after I arrived in Princeton, Silver was quoted in the newspaper saying that there was no serious impediment to men having babies…[So] when his wife had a child, all of his colleagues, of course, wanted to know why he hadn't been the one to carry the child to term.” Controversy can certainly have its moments. Sitting in his Princeton University office in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy, Silver says, “Cloning is going to happen. It will have absolutely no impact on human culture. It will only be of use to 40-something aging women wanting to have babies without men.” He glances at a favorite picture from his travels—a colorfully dressed young Vietnamese girl laughing and enjoying an ice cream cone. With ease he goes on: “Cloning is an intermediate stage that will be overcome by other technologies. We can make sperm from skin and eggs from skin already.” Well that would explain the student’s fetus comment. If you haven’t already realized it, you might not like what Lee Silver has to say. But he’s going to say it anyway. He wants to provoke you. “If you force people to probe their religious beliefs,” he says for example, “most people find the beliefs just fall apart.” Silver wants you to get angry. He wants to make you really think. Continuing he says, “It’s only when a person’s angry that he really starts to question his beliefs and conceptions.” But Silver doesn’t have all the answers and he doesn’t claim to them. “I approach everything through a telescope of logic. I try to weed out all the illogical ideas people have. I’m not afraid to challenge people. I try to explain the basis of controversy. I never find solutions. I just look at both sides and show why they’re wrong.” And according to Silver “nothing is as it seems and everything is wrong. Nothing has a right answer.” But Silver does a good job of provoking people to at least question the unanswerable questions. When people curse his views—when students suddenly stand up and yell at him during lecture or when leftist Green Peace complains about genetically modified plants—he enjoys the chance to beat them at their own game. He reacts oppositely: calm, confident, and collected. And he never breaks a sweat. He wins arguments just by knowing the game of argumentation. Silver doesn’t fear confrontation. Instead, he wants you to confront him. Say whatever you want, he’ll listen. He’ll let you step off the base just enough to provoke you to steal second. But he always knows where your argument is: at second base he’s already waiting for you with the ball behind his back. “If you want to critique something,” he says, “you have to really know what you’re critiquing. Like these anti-scientists, they don’t even know the science they’re against. You have to know their argument and make them look like fools.” Silver succeeds in argumentation with more than just his knowledge. Using sharp, perfected confidence, he’ll intimidate and distract your argument. And sometimes he smirks. “He’s an arrogant sonofabitch,” says one student who wishes to remain anonymous. Silver gets lots of hate mail. But to him “it’s no big deal” now. Water Buffalos “When we were hiking in an open field near a jungle in Sumatra, I was charged by a water buffalo.” Silver was scared. “I just kept running and running into the jungle where the water buffalo would be too big to get through the trees. Turns out I had walked between the mother water buffalo and her calf.” Silver grew up in a Jewish part of Philadelphia called Oak Lane, where his parents still live. Everyone was Jewish and he was too. Now he’s not—religiously, at least. But he did meet his wife Susan at a Rosh Hashanah service (“Corwin Hall,”—Princeton University the year he arrived—“September 26th, 1984”). She sat next to him at the service and he asked her out the moment it ended. Still, Silver and his wife want their children to know their cultural roots. They send fourteen-year-old Rebecca, eleven-year-old Ari and nine-year-old Maxwell to religion school and light candles at Chanukah. Maxwell is the most atheistic of them all and has been since he was seven (this greatly upsets Silver’s parents). At dinner each night, the family discusses neurobiology, God, the concept of soul, and technologies like the Mars Probe. The family meal, in other words, is a repast of reason, a time of rationality over rations. “I’m questioning everything they hear,” Silver says. “Like alternative medicine, which is mostly nonsense.” Silver daily reads articles from the New York Times and Time Magazine with his children and tries to makes sense of the world with them. “Like this war in Afghanistan, for example. One Afghan official will say something and another Afghan official will say something completely contradictory. Who do they believe and why?” he asks. “I have them look at all the claims and try to figure out who’s right.” Deductive reasoning at dinner: even controversy has its place in the kitchen. Few professors talk about their children with students, fewer do so in lecture, and practically no professors put their children’s pictures in Monday morning’s Power Point slideshow. But sit down in one of Silver’s classes and you just might see a picture of Ari smiling next to a picture of a chimp or Rebecca at age four wearing Mickey Mouse ears. Silver wants you to see the resemblance between species, but what becomes most obvious is how rooted Silver is in his family. “Et comme toujours, à la femme de ma vie et mes enfants,” Silver writes in dedication to his family in Remaking Eden. He speaks fluent French (the local Vietnamese delighted in this) and the dedication’s translation confirms how much Silver loves his family. They truly are his everything. “I don’t go anywhere for more than a week without the kids. I take them with me,” he says. “The children will bid for the trip. ‘I call Paris!’ one of them will say. Another will say, ‘I call San Francisco!’” He took them out of school for six months to go to Asia, didn’t he? Controversoul Trail End If you’re looking in travel books like Fodor’s or Lonely Planet for the route Silver took, you won’t find it. Silver and his family returned to America on January 31st, 2000. But he still backpacks across a world of ideas and the world of himself. He doesn’t plan on ever leaving academia, though. “It’s impossible to leave Princeton,” he says with genuine interest. “Where else could you get paid to think? At a top Ivy League university like Princeton, professors can do whatever they want.” Lee Silver doesn’t pretend to be someone he’s not—except maybe a Muslim to get into a Cambodian mosque or a non-writing biologist to get past Burmese customs (writers and lawyers aren’t allowed into Burma, sorry). And, being short himself, he’d give his boys the tall gene if it were available (tall men are statistically more financially successful than short men, Silver claims—though he proves this wrong too). He might cause you to rethink yourself and how you think, he might interview your soul without you knowing, and he might make you stand up in lecture and scream. But he only does it because he wants you to get between the cracks of yourself, to where you’ll find your most real self. And maybe to keep things interesting.

Avocado

For a dollar-twenty-five this week at Wegmans Supermarket you can buy a cocktail garnishing, skin moisturizing, tortilla chip topping aphrodisiac. The avocado is deceiving: it looks humble but its resume is astounding. Like all good seeds it has ripened with the times, keeping its image fresh. Once merely a side-dip on a Super Bowl or New Year’s platter, the avocado has evolved from guacamole and salads into smoothies and mousses. It has won over the natural beauty market with its natural oils and water-holding humectants and has helped conquer tired-eye puffiness. Recently hitting the bar scene, the avocado now graces martinis as the “Avotini” and its rich vitamins of A, C and E are thought to be sexual stimulants. In fact the avocado was once considered an erotic and forbidden fruit. Two thousand years ago, young Aztec women were actually kept inside when avocados were harvested. Avocados have, in fact, been thriving for many centuries. The fruit seems to have originated in Central America and Mexico where the Aztecs called it ahuacatl. From Aztec and Mayan temples it spread to Peru where it influenced pre-Incan culture and diet (~900 A.D.). In 1519, the Spaniard Hernando Cortez discovered Mexico City and fell in love with its buttery, pear-shaped delicacy. With increased popularity, the avocado spread throughout Central America and overseas to the West Indies. The mild-winter and warm, dry climate suited the avocado well. Eventually, three groups of avocados formed: the West Indian, the Guatemalan and the Mexican. Now, hundreds of varieties of avocado exist—most of which are hybrid crosses between the three groups. And as the avocado migrated, it picked up new names at every port: “Palta” in Ecuador; “Custard Apple” in West Africa; “Abogado” in Spain; “Avocat” in France and even “Alligator Pear” and “Midshipman’s Butter” in the United States. Americans first began planting alligator pears in the late 1840s in Azusa, California, an area just east of Los Angeles. Today California boasts six thousand avocado growers. However, California’s avocado industry was not born until 1911 when twenty-one-year-old Carl Schmidt left America in search of Mexico’s best avocado trees. Finding them in Mexico City, Puebla and Atlixco, Schmidt cut buds from the trees and sent them home to Altadena, California. After two years of difficulties, a bud from the Atlixco garden of Alejandro Le Blanc miraculously flourished after surviving the “Great Freeze of 1913.” This avocado tree, now known as the “Fuerte” (Spanish for strong and vigorous) later became the Eve of all American avocado trees. The Hass avocado is one such descendant of Mother Fuerte. Californian avocados make up over eighty-five percent of America’s current avocado crop and at least seventy-five percent of these are Hass avocados. The original Hass tree—now an eighty-foot, beaming seventy-six-year-old—was actually a mistake. The seedling was meant to grow into the “Lyon” variety but didn’t. Rudolph Hass, a postman and casual grower of avocado trees, took a liking to his new fruit (and to the fact that the tree could produce year-round—the only variety to this day to do so) and a new marketplace wonder was born. The original Hass tree has directly and indirectly produced fifteen million trees around the world. The tree proudly stands in a quiet suburban neighborhood with a plaque at her feet: “California Historical Landmark.” “We mostly sell the Hass here, but I like the Floridian variety better,” says Oscar Rodriguez, Produce Manager of Wegmans Supermarket in Princeton, NJ. “The ones from Florida,” the West Indies variety, “are so much bigger. Plus I grew up on them.” One by one the El Salvadorian examines the leathery, purple-black Mexican avocados on display. “See this? It’s too ripe,” he says of a soft, dark piece. “Sometimes they ripen too fast when they’re being shipped….What you want is a hard, really green one. Then you leave it away from light and let it ripen over two to three days.” The skin of the avocado is remarkably important—and does bare a striking resemblance to that of an alligator’s. “Look!” Oscar says, his eyes bright and excited as he pulls out a knife from under his white manager’s coat and slices open a “too-ripe” avocado (which doesn’t turn out to be so bad). The skin holds most of the oil—enough oil to make it the second-leading oil producer of fruits (olives are first). Oscar’s cut reveals two green and yellow halves, curvaceous and shaped like pears. The flesh is smooth and soft, not mealy or textured. The dark skin transitions into a rich Irish-field green, then, closer to the center, turns into a light green and then into butter yellow. At the center of one half is the heart of the fruit: an acorn-brown bulbous seed one and a half inches in diameter. Radiating from the seed is a taste of butter that strengthens with approach to the oily endoderm. The avocado is always mildly pleasant—a clear compliment to spicy dishes and main ingredient of dips like guacamole. Oscar’s family recipe of guacamole includes onions and hard-boiled eggs. Recipes call for ingredients ranging from a splash of lime to a splash of vermouth, from cranberries to cayenne pepper. Last Super Bowl, Americans consumed 13.2 million pounds of guacamole, the equivalent of twenty-six million avocados, according to the California Avocado Commission. Certainly not everyone likes their guacamole the same. Matthew Pecht watched the Super Bowl while eating guacamole with Worchester sauce and chili peppers. A student at Princeton University and lifetime resident of a southern California avocado ranch, Pecht keeps guacamole ingredients, a bowl and spoon on his dorm room dresser in case a craving hits. And apparently cravings hit more than just home-sick freshmen. Southern California—San Diego County especially—has reported a rise in illegal cravings over the years, cravings that result in avocado theft. We’re not talking about young boys hopping fences to grab an avocado to eat on the way to school—we’re talking Grand Theft Avocado. Selling for up to two bucks a pop, avocado theft is far more profitable than other fruit felonies. Thieves, sometimes drug addicts looking to support their habits, storm avocado ranches at night, taking anywhere from grocery bags to trucks full of the buttery fruit. “The crime is so profitable,” says L.A. Times columnist Pat Morrison on National Public Radio, “that San Diego County enlisted a volunteer posse of avocado cops on dirt bikes to patrol the hillsides and canyons where the trees grow best. One rancher patrolled his property by plane.” Matthew Pecht’s father once galloped on horseback to catch his midnight thieves. But it’s avocados that have stolen the approval of taste buds worldwide. Their evolution has produced delicacies for hundreds of years and thousands of menus, while their popularity spans from Super Bowls to super spas. À la mode or matched with the season’s hottest fares, avocados are in good taste whatever the season.