Lightning Laser Tower: The True Story of the Hurricane Katrina Lightning-Laser Memorial and the Peg-Leg Biologist

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The True Story of the Hurricane Katrina Lightning-Laser Memorial and the Peg-Leg Biologist

Joe Davis is telling me about his design for a 110-foot lightning-laser tower that will literally seize a hurricane’s force, bottle it up and hurl it angrily back into the sky. It’s intended as a memorial for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Davis—whose official role at MIT is research affiliate associate in the biology department—plans to name the tower "Call Me Ishmael." I ask him why, but before I finish the question, he smashes his steel peg leg down onto the table.

Good answer.

When Davis’ proposed 110-ft. memorial lightning tower is finished, it will be only the most recent instance of his lifelong unusual art-science repertoire. As a younger lad, he caught single-cell organisms using full-sized fishing tackle, built an ornithopter powered by real electrically stimulated frog legs, and in the 1980s became the first man to transmit the sound of a contracting vagina into space.

Davis put together the vagina compilation to protest Carl Sagan and Frank Drake's curious (and arguably sexist) omission of female genitalia from the images included in the famous Arecibo message, a signal beamed toward the Great Cluster in 1974, and the Pioneer and Voyager plaques:

In response, Davis recorded the vaginal contractions of the Boston Ballet (don’t ask how), translated them into the 46 phonemes of English speech and beamed the sounds toward Tau Ceti, Epsilon Eridani, and two other nearby star systems using commandeered radar equipment at MIT.

"People censored all the messages transmitted to extraterrestrials; scientists removed external female genitalia from the messages we sent into space,” Davis told me. “We had textbook female anatomy systematically removed from the record, from [Voyager and Pioneer’s] plaques—it was insane. It was so ‘man and Barbie doll.’ So I put together ...

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