Biology of Wonder_ Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science ( PDFDrive.com )

until he needed the plug, and then he became very impatient. For half a
week, I toiled day and night and still only had a partially working
prototype. The probe he ended up inserting into the rabbit’s brain by
means of the stereometric device was not even half of what he had
hoped to use. Instead of the 36 working electrodes he wanted, it had
only 13.
Still, I did not consider quitting my job. Not that summer. I wove my
absurd creation of copper hairs and hoped it would lead me to more
knowledge about the living. I wanted to know, and I believed in the
professor, with his unkempt hair, reading glasses down on his nose tip
and sparkling wit that emerged in his remarks from time to time. I
would know, if only I followed him. He was an outsider after a great
idea, or so I thought. I considered him to be rather benevolent. That
summer, I did not make any connection between what I did and the
wailing dogs in the basement of the faculty of medicine, which I heard
every time I walked to the students’ restaurants with my buddies. Their
barking sounded like the fruitless screams of medieval prisoners in
dungeons deep under a tower.
I did not make any connection with the sparkling, green tiger beetles
in my secret path in the Kaiserstuhl hills, southwest of Freiburg. They
lived on a trail between the high walls of soft white loess with wild
grapevines hanging down from the sides, where I could not help but
walk barefoot to feel the utter softness and warmth of the sand between
my toes. The tiger beetles also seemed to love the soft, warm sand. This
path was my secret rescue place when I was feeling down. When I went
there one late summer afternoon, they had started to tar it all over. The
beetles were not to be found. It smelled of bitumen. Machines were
parked among the vines. I did not go back for years.
But I did not make the connection then. I wanted to know what life
was and what sat in the center of its irresistible magic that lent the
world its melodiousness. I believed at the time that I was on the right
track in my medieval garret among the summer scent of the firs.
9:03 a.m. The professor has adjusted a lens above the hole in the
skull of the rabbit. Ines turns the ratchet knob and starts to lower the
spindle carrying the electrode. She has connected the plastic plug with
my twisted wire brush to a cable. The monitors quiver. The professor,
looking through the eyepiece of the magnifying glass, waves his hand