I, Lobster: A Crustacean Odyssey

Chapter 4 | Life, Death, and Medical Conditions

April 10, 1982. Saturday Night Live, season 7, episode 16. A historic , inspirational, and notorious skit written and performed by Eddie Murphy. Murphy holds up, live and kicking, Larry the Lobster for judgment in the court of public opinion.Viewers are given two telephone numbers, both beginning with a 900 exchange, and told to vote by calling one number to spare, and the other number to cook, the lobster. Almost 500,000 calls come in, and at&t is nearly overwhelmed by the spike in traffic. It’s a pretty close call, but Larry is saved by some 12,000 votes. The Saturday Night Live episode was historic because polling an audience like that was unprecedented. It marked the beginning of interactive television. It was inspirational because five years later, after the televangelist Oral Roberts warned that if his loyal followers didn’t contribute to his medical missionary work,God would call him home.He raised $5 million. It was notorious because the outcome was a disaster for both Murphy and Larry. During the following episode, Murphy talked about the mail he’d received protesting Larry’s treatment, especially a nasty racist letter that read,“I didn’t even know you people liked lobster.” That letter prompted Murphy to rescind Larry’s stay of execution. Murphy showed everyone a boiled red lobster on a plate. And then he ate it. Among the many fables attributed to Aesop, there is one about a mother and daughter who are at the seashore, where the daughter sees the red shell of a lobster. She tells her mother she will never be happy until she is thus beautifully clothed, instead of being dressed like the rest of her kind, dull and undistinguished. The mother scolds her severely for being so vain and covetous Life, Death, and Medical Conditions Life, Death, and Medical Conditions , 57 and points out that such finery was won only by the poor victim’s death.1 Be careful what you wish for is the lesson of this fable. Red, for lobsters, is a question of life and death. They go into a pot of boiling water with dark, morosely colored shells and come out with a sassy red hue. The mysterious process is analogous to a renowned New England autumn event, the turning of leaves from green to a variety of stunning reds, yellows, and golds. Those colors are present in the leaves all summer, but the green of their chlorophyll is more dominant until the season changes. Similarly, a live lobster’s dark greenish shell, mottled brown or black, contains the pigment astaxanthin bound in protein chains. Cooking the lobster causes the protein chain to unwind the astaxanthin; thus liberated, it is able to reflect the wavelength we see as lobster red. The main source of astaxanthin is a form of microscopic algae found in the sea that is eaten by the seafood that the lobster feeds on. The us Food and Drug Administration has approved astaxanthin as a food supplement for humans. It begins to sound like a magic wand, an antioxidant with a multitude of effects that range from benefiting the cardiovascular system to fighting cancer. It may be useful in counteracting neurodegenerative diseases such as glaucoma and Alzheimer’s. Color is the most attention-getting feature of the cooked lobster , but the shell material of a lobster is remarkable in its own right—marvelous, really, from a structural perspective. Like other arthropod exoskeletons, its chief ingredient is chitin, along with various proteins. Chitin “is one of the, if not the most abundant structural biomolecule [an organic molecule produced by a living organism] found in nature.”2 Due to its dimensions—remember that lobster is the largest extant arthropod—Homarus america‑ nus provides the best shell to study, according to researchers at the Max Planck Institut. One goal of their research is to understand how nature arrives at so light, protective, and at the same time multifunctional a material as a lobster’s shell, so that scientists can design new structural materials inspired by biology. Max Planck scientists have looked at different parts of lobster shells with various tools, including electron microscopes. Among their discoveries is that the pattern and design of chitin in the 58 , i , l o b s t e r lobster’s shell contains anisotropic components. The opposite of something that is isotropic—in which elements such as fibers all go in the same...