Lunch was supposed to be casual. Mikey Dickerson ’01 was in Chicago catching up with Dan Wagner, a friend who’d been in the trenches with him on Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency in 2012. Wagner had since gone on to found a company, Civis Analytics; Dickerson was a site reliability engineer at Google, one of the people who make sure that the search engine never, ever breaks down.

This was October of 2013, no time for the President’s geekiest loyalists to have a little fun. Healthcare.gov, the sign-up website that was the signature element of President Obama’s signature initiative, was a technological disaster. People couldn’t sign up even if they wanted to—the site would break, or fail. Delays were interminable. Information got lost. Customer service was about as good as you’d expect from a cable TV company. The Department of Health and Human Services, responsible for the new health care system, couldn’t seem to get it working.

“So, we got this phone call yesterday,” Wagner told Dickerson. “HHS is looking for help with healthcare.gov. Can I list you as an advisor or consultant?”

“Yeah, sure. If it’s any value to you, list me,” Dickerson replied. It seemed innocuous enough. Today, he smiles at his own naïveté. “I had no idea what I was getting into,” he says. About a week later, Dickerson found himself on a 5 a.m. conference call with a van full of technologists in Washington D.C., headed over to HHS. With him in the White House motor-pool car was Todd Park, the U.S. chief technology officer. And Park, whom Dickerson didn’t know, was selling the group as a team of experts who could solve any tech problem. Dickerson realized: They’re saying I can fix healthcare.gov.

Without really meaning to, Dickerson had become an anchor of the Obama administration’s “tech surge,” a Silicon Valley-powered push to fix the bugs in the healthcare.gov system. But the system was more than just software. In D.C., Dickerson and his new team found an organization in bureaucratic and technological meltdown, unable to execute what any e-commerce start-up would consider basic prerequisites for being in business.

The crazy part is, they fixed it.

To a Connecticut native like Dickerson, good at math and computers but with no desire to attend a big university, Pomona shows itself off pretty well—especially on a campus visit in May, when Dartmouth might still have slush on the ground. It’s not that he was so avid about computer science—in those days, as a major, CS really ran out of Harvey Mudd anyway—it’s just that Dickerson was an ace. He felt like he was cheating just a little. “It seemed dumb to be spending all that money on something I was already good at,” he says. In fact, Dickerson was already coding for various companies while in school. After graduation, he ended up working in Pomona’s computer lab.

Then the 2000 presidential election came around, with its photo finish in favor of George W. Bush. “It was a trauma for me,” Dickerson says. “That razor’s edge. All that was intensely painful. Almost anything would have moved those last 200 votes.” So in 2004 Dickerson volunteered with a poll-watching group … and caught the politics bug. Four years later he was working at Google, where CEO Eric Schmidt was (and remains) a multimillion-dollar Obama supporter. During campaign season an email went to a mass-distribution list that Dickerson was on, looking for people who could manage big databases for the Obama campaign.

Hey, Dickerson thought. I manage a group that runs large databases. And that was it. He worked as a volunteer in Chicago, one of a small group of techies who, during their long nights, idly wondered if maybe they could do something useful for the campaign with better records of people’s voting history. When the 2012 campaign came around, he was still on the campaign organizers’ list. This time, though, he was no newbie—though still technically a volunteer, his experience made him a trusted veteran. Those vague ideas about leveraging voter lists went into practice, and Dickerson’s group became the analytics team, credited by some political analysts as having been the key to Obama’s re-election. Once the campaign was over, Dickerson went back to managing a site reliability engineering team at Google, but he stayed in touch with his friends—which is why Dickerson was at lunch with Wagner on October 11.

The tech team’s first stop, in Virginia on October 17, was PowerPoint Hell. Technically, it was a large IT firm working as a government contractor. “They scheduled a three-hour meeting and sent a VP with, I shit you not, a 130-slide PowerPoint presentation,” Dickerson says. Over beers in a bar on San Francisco’s Embarcadero, about a block from Google’s offices, Dickerson wears the uniform of the coder—hoodie, Google ID badge, Google T-shirt, close-cropped hair and unshaven chin. In San Francisco, that’s stealth armor. In Washington’s blue-sports-coated, khaki-pantsed hallways, he was an alien.

The group fought its way out of the meeting and took over the office of someone who was on vacation. Then they went wandering, finding teams huddled in cubicles and asking them what they were working on, which bugs they were trying to fix. But they weren’t—mostly they were waiting for instructions. In their defense, it was hard to figure out what needed fixing. Engineers weren’t really allowed to talk to clients or users, and the people who created the healthcare.gov website hadn’t even built a dashboard, a way to monitor the health and status of their own system. If you wanted to know whether healthcare.gov was functioning, the only way to find out was to try to log on. “We thought this would be a targeted assessment and we’d spend a few days there,” says Paul Smith, another member of the team. “When we realized how bad things were, we just independently decided, we’re not going home. This is what we’re doing now, for an indefinite period of time, until it gets better.”

After a couple of days, Park asked them whether it could be fixed. “Todd, they have made all the mistakes that can be made,” Dickerson told him. “We can barely find a case where, when two decisions could be made, they made the right one. But low-hanging fruit isn’t the right metaphor. We’re stepping on the fruit.” The point was, some very simple fixes would yield some very big gains. Any improvement would be a massive improvement. Google site reliability engineers have a saying—they tell each other, if we have an outage that big it’ll be on the front page of The New York Times. Is that what you want? “But here’s the thing,” says Dickerson. “Healthcare.gov had been on the front page of The New York Times for four weeks. That was the silver lining. How much more could I screw it up?”

The group of coders decided that if no one was telling anyone what to do, they would. That’s when they started getting called “the Ad Hoc Team.” The name stuck. “We had a big stick, because we were the magical guys from the White House,” Dickerson says. “After a couple of days, we instituted a war room.” Every morning at 10 a.m., every team had to send a representative to a big meeting to explain what was going right, or wrong, and why. “It was an incredibly expensive thing to do—60 people in a room while we arbitrate disputes between two of them. But we made so much progress we stopped worrying,” Dickerson says. “Having a giant studio audience is better sometimes. It’s harder to say, ‘I didn’t do that because it wasn’t on my task order.’”

In other words, Dickerson had built into the system something no one had thought of: accountability. “What Mikey really excelled at was, if there’s a priority issue that needs to be addressed, how can people address it? What do they know? What do they need to know? What’s blocking them?” says Smith. “That’s just his demeanor and the way he operates.” The meetings were so productive and making so much of a difference in site performance that the Ad Hoc Team instituted a second one, making them twice a day, seven days a week.

When they weren’t in the war room, they coded. Problems started getting solved. A stupid little flaw that required the same kind of wait to connect to the database every time went away with the change of a couple of configuration settings, and poof! An eight-second response delay dropped to a two-second delay. “And that’s still terrible,” Dickerson says. The site stopped crashing. People actually started signing up for health care.

The work took a toll, though. Except for a quick trip back to California to pick up some clothes—Dickerson had come to the East Coast with a carry-on bag and a Google computer, expecting a short visit—he was in the greater D.C. area from mid-October through Christmas. Dickerson estimated he ran 150 war-room meetings in a row.

After a couple of moves to accommodate bureaucracy, Dickerson ended up working remotely, alone, from an operations center in Columbia, Md.—three hours from D.C. in what locals sometimes call “spook valley” for its preponderance of government contractors. Since healthcare.gov’s original creators hadn’t built a ship-in-a-bottle version of the software to test updates and fixes, everything the Ad Hoc Team fixed had to get changed on the live site, and the primary maintenance window was when traffic was lightest, between 1 and 5 a.m. “It was literally 20-hour days a lot of time. ” Dickerson says. “I was hallucinating by the end, hearing things.”

With 12 days left before the deadline, Dickerson was ready to go home. He gave a speech listing the five mission-critical things remaining, and attempted to flee back to California. But the bosses panicked. The Ad Hoc guys can’t go home, they said. They gave him the service-to-your-country pitch. They begged. So Dickerson agreed to stay through to the end—with some conditions. He got to set the specific technical goals for what his team and the rest of the government coders would do. And he got to hire whomever he wanted, without arguing the point. He wanted to be able to trust the new team members, so he chose them himself. Eventually a rotating team of Google site reliability engineers started coming through to keep the project on track.

Dickerson got to dictate those terms because he was getting results. He had become indispensable. “Mikey is an incredible talent who was seemingly built in a lab to help fix healthcare.gov,” Park says. “It’s not just the fact that he’s got a sky-high tech IQ, honed over years as a star site reliability engineering leader. He’s also got tremendous EQ, enabling him to step into a tough situation, mesh well with others, and help rally them to the job at hand.”

The real bummer, of course, is that healthcare.gov, while an unprecedented attempt to link government services, private insurers and identity verification, shouldn’t have been that hard to build. “It’s basically a distributed, transactional, retail-type website, and we’ve been building those for years,” says Smith. “In the private sector, we know how to do that. We’re not forging new computer science ground here, right?”

By April of 2014, just a few days after Dickerson and I spoke, the Obama administration announced that over 7 million people had signed up for private health care through federal and state exchanges, and 3 million had signed up for Medicare. The program had made its numbers—barely, to be sure—because people, in the end, could actually use the website.

Dickerson is back at Google, but as he says, “you can never unsee the things you see in the federal government.” He has become an outspoken advocate for reform in the ways government builds technology, concentrating especially on trying to convince young technologists to go work for government. “You’re gonna eat free food and drink free soda in micro-kitchens and work on another version of what we’ll say, for argument’s sake, lets people share pictures of what they ate for breakfast, and tens of thousands of people will die of leukemia because we couldn’t get a website to work,” Dickerson says. “These are real people’s lives that will end in 2014, and you’re going to sit at your desk working on picture sharing.”

The problem isn’t competence. People who work on websites for the government are every bit as competent as the ones who work at Google or Facebook. “The mechanisms by which you do a contract with the federal government are so complex that it requires expertise in and of itself,” says Jennifer Pahlka, founder and executive director of Code for America, a group that connects software developers with local governments. “Fundamentally the process in government has evolved to meet government needs. A federal project has dozens of stakeholders, none of whom represent the user.”

That’s why Code for America focuses on local governments, Pahlka says. The feds are too hard to crack, and anyway, most people’s interactions with government are at the state and city level—think DMV, local parks, or trash pick-up. So Dickerson has started stumping for Code for America, giving speeches at their events. And he is lobbying Eric Schmidt and his other bosses at Google to develop programs that would allow—maybe even encourage—software developers there to take time to work on government projects. Consider: The feds paid $700 million for healthcare.gov, and it didn’t work. Imagine being able to bid for that contract at a tenth the price. “I don’t have to appeal to your altruism or desire to serve your country,” Dickerson says. “I can just say, ‘Do you want to make a ton of money?”

Pahlka thinks the pitch might actually work—and not just because of capitalism. “The consumer internet has influenced the way a generation feels about doing things together,” she says. “You have a generation of people who value collective intelligence and collective will—not necessarily collective political will, but the ability to actually do things together.” Software designers and engineers are already political, Pahlka and Dickerson are saying; it’s just that the web generation is ignoring the greater good. Going to work at Twitter is a political choice just as much as going to work for the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“I give the worst sales pitch,” Dickerson says. “I tell people, ‘This is what your world is going to be like: It’s a website that is a Lovecraft horror. They made every possible mistake at every possible layer. But if you succeed, you will save the lives of thousands of people.’”

The weird part: Almost everyone says yes.

————-

EDITOR’S NOTE: Shortly before this magazine went to press, Dickerson announced that he’s going to practice what he preaches, full time. He is leaving Google to join the Obama administration as administrator of the U.S. Digital Service, a newly created office overseeing government spending on information technology. And after signing on, he discovered that the lead designer on the initial staff for U.S.D.S. is another Pomona grad, Mollie Ruskin ’08.

Expert witnesses at contentious trials can expect to be challenged, even discredited. But when he took the stand last year in a complex biotech patent case, Pomona Biology Professor Lenny Seligman never anticipated that his groundbreaking work at Pomona would be relegated to the “ash heap of failure.”

That attack line echoed from start to finish during the high-stakes federal trial in Maryland between two rival companies in the cutting-edge field of genetic engineering. The dismissive salvo was fired in the opening statement by the attorney for Cellectis, a large French firm that filed suit for patent infringement against its smaller U.S. competitor, Precision BioSciences, which had hired Seligman for its defense.

Seligman was more than just an expert witness. His research at Pomona had become a cornerstone for the case. Both sides cited Seligman’s work as a basis for the science on which their businesses had been built. Ironically, the plaintiff then found itself in the awkward position of having to undermine the validity of his work. It did so by claiming he had not actually produced anything concrete in his college lab that would invalidate the firm’s far-reaching claims.

“I don’t hold that against him,” said the counselor. “This is very complicated technology. It does not surprise me that he wasn’t able to do it. What does bother me is Precision attempting to rescue his (work) from the ash heap of failure.”

Seligman left court that day thinking, “Ouch! Did he really say that?” When cross-examined by that same lawyer, Paul Richter, Seligman found an opportunity to sneak in a mild retort, saying on the stand, “That was not very nice.” Considering the attack still in store, the lawyer might have mused, “If you thought that was bad, wait until you hear my summation.”

In those final arguments, though, Seligman’s side fired back with outrage and eloquence. Following a week of mind-numbing technical testimony, David Bassett, an attorney for Precision, rebutted the now infamous line. The court reporter transcribed the original reference as “ashes of failure,” but Seligman and others clearly remember it as a heap, and that’s the phrase that stuck.

To say Seligman’s work belonged in the “ash heap of failure” was “as incorrect as it is offensive,” said Bassett. “To the contrary, Professor Seligman’s article represented a monumental success from a small lab at Pomona College where (he) does his research with undergraduate students, 18 to 22-year-olds. And it paved the way for companies like Cellectis and Precision to do their work. … The real difference is that Professor Seligman was teaching the world what he had done and hoping that others would follow his blueprint.”

In the end, Precision won the infringement case and Seligman’s work was vindicated. The attack strategy against the likeable professor’s little-lab-that-could appeared to have backfired.

“I think that statement bit them in the ass,” he said. “Because even the jury kind of cringed when the lawyer said it. I mean, that’s really aggressive. And then when they got to know the witness—what a sympathetic guy I am—it was like, why would you do that? You could have made the point without going for the jugular like that.”

Indeed, it may have been the professor’s disarming, down home charm that won the day, as much as all the technical testimony about the DNA and microscopic structures called meganucleases. Beneath the complex science ran a compelling narrative that must have appealed to the federal jury empaneled in the district court of Delaware.

It was, in the end, a classic American underdog story.

The synopsis: Powerful and imperious European firm with raft of lawyers and battery of full-time scientists is defeated by scrappy U.S. start-up and its folksy professor with his one-man lab and part-time student assistants.

Seligman relished the role. In a PowerPoint presentation of the case presented recently to campus groups, he portrays the litigants as Team France v. Team USA. He uses slides to illustrate the uneven competition between the two companies and their dueling expert witnesses. For Cellectis, we see the flattering portrait of an award-winning genetics researcher from a big university. For the other side, we have Lenny Seligman, but the slide shows a picture of Homer Simpson.

The visual gets a big laugh.

A year after the verdict, Seligman still expresses astonishment when recalling the whirlwind experience of being a central figure in an intense international dispute about science. Interviewed in his office at Seaver Hall, where he presides as Biology Department chair, he also reflected on the awesome amounts of money circulating in science today, and what it means for those trying to teach and do research at a small, liberal arts college like Pomona.

“Part of me is happy with how things turned out,” he says. “At one level, it would have been great to be able to continue working on the I-CreI project without competition. However, we would never, at Pomona College, in my lab, have gotten to the point these two companies got to in five years. They were putting products out there, they were making enzymes that cut specific DNA sequences. It would’ve taken us so long to get there. So in the big picture, this is great. These companies are doing it, and they’re still graciously referencing our early work. It’s all good.

“We just have to find something new to do.”

Court and Class

Watching Seligman’s PowerPoint presentation about the case, posted online, gives viewers a flavor of his teaching style. He is engaging, enthusiastic and funny in a self-deprecating way. He’s also informal, standing casually at a podium with his shirttail hanging out and joking about wearing a suit only for court. But most importantly, he has a knack for explaining complex concepts to scientific novices, like college freshmen—or jurors.

The concepts in this case involved the business of protein engineering using meganucleases, which have been described as “extremely precise DNA scissors.” Scientists have developed ways to alter these naturally occurring enzymes and make them cut DNA segments at specific, targeted locations, with potentially lucrative uses in medicine and agriculture.

“Court is interesting because it’s kind of like a class,” Seligman says. “But it’s not like a class at Pomona where someone’s going to raise their hand and ask a question and stop you. When I’m in a class and I’m lecturing off-the-cuff and I can see that I’m losing students, I’ll stop and I’ll ask them certain questions. You can’t do that when you’re an expert witness, but you can still kind of get the visual cues. You still could get a sense that (the jurors) were with you, and I really felt that they were. They weren’t glazing over.”

Neither were the lawyers. They were ready to pounce on every word, eager to point out the smallest inconsistency or weakness. And Seligman was trying to make sure he didn’t slip up.

So there was no Homer Simpson on the witness stand. In court, Seligman’s easy-going, spontaneous classroom persona was restrained. The transcript of his testimony shows a witness who is cautious, serious and coldly factual. By then, he had been through hours of grueling depositions, and he knew the name of the game—Gotcha!

“Well, the whole idea (of pre-trial depositions) is for them to get a sound bite that they can use in trial,” he says. “So they ask questions really quickly. The thing that was hard, especially for someone who’s not a lawyer, is that they move from one aspect of the case to another, rapid-fire. …Your mind is over here and they’re trying to get you to slip up, so they can say to the jury, “But didn’t you testify that…?”

Seligman pounds on his office desk to impersonate an intimidating attorney.

“I felt really guarded. In class, when I get a question and don’t know the answer, the first thing I say is, ‘I don’t know.’ And so that’s my default mechanism, because I’ll figure it out, and we’ll talk about it next lecture. But if you’re getting deposed, you can’t fall back on that answer because lawyers will shoot back, ‘You don’t know? Well, on page 285 of your third report, didn’t you write this?’” Here, his tone mocks a Perry Mason moment. “So you feel you have to be on your toes all the time, and really be thinking about everything you’ve ever written.”

At times, the legal wrangling was so contentious, even the judge sounded exasperated. During one testy confrontation, U.S. District Court Judge Sue L. Robinson threatened to give the lawyers “a time out,” like an angry parent with misbehaving kids.

Underneath, Seligman perceived a bitter dislike between the two companies. It was like a battle to the death. He speculates that Cellectis’s strategy was to put Precision, the much smaller firm, out of business, bankrupted by legal fees. So Precision could win the battle and still lose the war.

Call it the ashes of success.

“Cynically, a lot of us (supporting the U.S. company) thought this was all about trying to bleed them.”

Money and Science

The experience was not all cutthroat and high anxiety, however. Seligman also recalls the excitement of being swept up into the high-flying world of international business and high-priced corporate lawyers. He describes it with the wide-eyed wonder of a kid who grew up in Claremont and still uses the nickname he was given in kindergarten, rather than his full name, Maurice Leonard Seligman.

To Lenny, it was a thrill just being in New York for the deposition and looking out onto that breathtaking Manhattan skyline. He often punctuates his story with youthful expressions, like “awesome” and “oh, my gosh!” He breathlessly describes the “war room” where a battalion of lawyers in a suite of offices prepared for testimony. (“Oh, my gosh!”) And he recalls how lawyers worked through the night preparing challenges even to illustrations planned for court the next day, putting pressure on a graphics guy to create instant substitutions. (“Oh, my gosh!”)

“And you mix that with all this adrenaline and dread of being deposed—it was really exciting,” he says.

When it came to how much the defense paid him, the response might also be, “Oh, my gosh!” That pesky attorney made a point of making him divulge the fee in court: $400 an hour. “It was more money than I had ever made in a short amount of time,” he recalled in the interview. “It was a lot of money for me.”

The amount of money these companies dumped on this lawsuit raises larger concerns about the corrupting influence of big profits on basic research.

“The whole privatization of science is something that’s certainly to be looked at carefully,” agrees Seligman. “Did I ever think to put a patent out? I’m glad I didn’t, in retrospect. If somebody wanted to choke me like they tried to choke Precision, they would serve me and I would say uncle. There’s just no way I would have the resources to fight. But beyond that, there’s just something that’s really special about open science, where everyone is sharing everything and building on each other. And once it gets into the industry, it’s not open science. They’re protecting it. They’re hiding it until they get the patent issued.”

Bringing it all back home, Seligman sees implications for his future work at a small college. How can his little research lab compete with wealthy companies, often with ties to large universities.

“That’s what we worry about all the time in a place like Pomona College,” Seligman says. “You want to do interesting science, but it’s got to be small enough that you’re not doing the same thing that the big labs are doing because we don’t have the same resources.”

Focus on Students

Beyond doing good science, Seligman and his colleagues at liberal arts colleges have another mission to worry about—teaching undergraduates. In his own lab, he notes, research must also be a teaching tool, a training ground for future scientists. In this regard, he says, Pomona is in a perfect position to compete.

The work on meganucleases is a prime example. In the early days, before big money entered the fray, much of the research was being done by students at Lenny’s lab. Today, they all have their names—as full-fledged co-authors—on those important research papers that figured so prominently in the trial.

These were not graduate students or post-docs. They were undergraduates like Karen Chisholm ’01, Adeline Veillet ’03, Sam Edwards ’99 and Jeremiah Savage ’98, who co-authored Seligman’s pioneering 2002 paper, marking the first time researchers described making mutations in a meganuclease, called I-Cre1, that altered the site where it cleaved DNA. Two years later, Steve Fauce ’02, Anna Bruett ’04 and Alex Engel ’01 co-authored another of Seligman’s key research papers, along with Dr. Ray Monnat of the University of Washington, where Seligman got his Ph.D. and did his first work on meganucleases as a post-doc in Monnat’s lab. Finally in 2006, five other Pomona undergrads—Laura Rosen ’08, Selma Masri ’02, Holly A. Morrison ’04, Brendan Springstubb ’05 and Mike Brown ’07—co-authored a third paper in which new mutant meganucleases were described.

Many former students praise Seligman as a great mentor who inspired them to pursue science in graduate school. At least 10 of these 12 student co-authors went on to get doctorates in biological sciences or M.D.’s.

“He really fostered a good environment for learning and being productive,” recalls Morrison, who got her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in molecular and cell biology. “He had several students in there at any one time, and everybody was really good about helping each other. It was not at all cutthroat competition. It was very much a supportive team mentality and there was also a camaraderie about it.”

Today, Seligman speaks about his former students as if they were his kids. He makes a point of mentioning them in his PowerPoint presentation, and even notes who got married and who just had a baby.

“We are so lucky to be a place that gets such great students,” he says. “It’s our job to work with them, to get them excited about science and keep them excited about it. I have no doubt they’re going to do really amazing things.

“And I’m going to sit back and smile.”

At the Mayan ruin of Uxmal, Mexico, bat researcher Kirsten Bohn bends down beside a narrow crack in one of the ancient limestone walls. “Do you hear them?,” she asks. “The twittering? That’s our bats, and they’re singing.”

I lean in, too, and listen. It takes a moment for my ears to adjust to the bats’ soft sounds, and then the air seems to fill with their birdlike trills, chirps and buzzes.

The twittering calls are the songs of Nyctinomops laticaudatus, the broad-eared bat—one of several species of bats that scientists have identified as having tunes remarkably similar to those of birds. Like the songs of birds, bats’ melodies are composed of multiple syllables; they’re rhythmic and have patterns that are repeated.

And like birds, these bats sing not during the dark of night, but in the middle of the day, making it easy for us to see them, too.

Bohn, a behavioral ecologist at Florida International University in Miami, presses her face against the crack in the wall, and squints. “Well, hello there,” she says. I follow her example, and find myself eyeball-to-eyeball with one of the bats that’s sandwiched inside. He scuttles back, but his jaws chatter at me, “Zzzzzzzz.”

“He’s telling us to back off, to go away,” Bohn says, translating. “He wants to get back to his singing.”

That suits Bohn, who has traveled to Uxmal to record the broad-eared bats’ tunes for her study on the evolution and function of bat song—research that may help decode what the bats are saying to one another with their songs, and even teach us something about the origins of human language.

Not so long ago, most animal scientists and linguists regarded the sounds that animals and humans make as markedly different. Language was considered to be something only humans possessed; supposedly it appeared de novo instead of evolving via natural selection. And animals were regarded as incapable of intentionally uttering any sound. Songs, barks, roars, whistles: These were involuntary responses to some stimulus, just as your knee jerks when your doctor taps it. But since the 1990s, the notion of language as a uniquely human skill has fallen to the wayside as researchers in genetics, neurobiology and ethology discover numerous links between animal vocalizations and those of humans.

Take grammar and syntax, the rules that determine how words can be combined into phrases and sentences. Most linguists still insist that animal calls lack these fundamental elements of language. But primatologists studying the vocalizations of male Campbell’s monkeys in the forests of the Ivory Coast have found that they have rules (a “proto-syntax,” the scientists say) for adding extra sounds to their basic calls. We do this, too. For instance, we make a new word “henhouse,” when we add the word “house” to “hen.” The monkeys have three alarm calls: Hok for eagles, krak for leopards, and boom for disturbances such as a branch falling from a tree. By combining these three sounds the monkeys can form new messages. So, if a monkey wants another monkey to join him in a tree, he calls out “Boom boom!” They can also alter the meaning of their basic calls simply by adding the sound “oo” at the end, very much like we change the meanings of words by adding a suffix. Hok-oo alerts other monkeys to threats, such as an eagle perched in a tree, while krak-oo serves as a general warning.

Scientists have found—and decoded—warning calls in several species, including other primates, prairie dogs, meerkats and chickens. All convey a remarkable amount of information to their fellows. The high-pitched barks of prairie dogs may sound alike to us, but via some variation in tone and frequency he or she can shout out a surprisingly precise alert: “Look out! Tall human in blue, running.” Or, “Look out! Short human in yellow, walking!”

Many animals use their calls to announce that they’ve found food, or are seeking mates, or want others to stay out of their territories. Ornithologists studying birdsong often joke that all the musical notes are really about nothing more than sex, violence, food and alarms. Yet we’ve learned the most about the biological roots of language via songbirds because they learn their songs just as we learn to speak: by listening to others. The skill is called vocal learning, and it’s what makes it possible for mockingbirds to mimic a meowing cat or a melodious sparrow, and for pet parrots to imitate their owners. Our dogs and cats, alas, will never say “I love you, too” or “Good night, sweetheart, good night,” no matter how many times we repeat the phrases to them, because they lack both the neural and physical anatomy to hear a sound and then repeat it. Chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest relatives, cannot do this either, even if they are raised from infancy in our homes.

Via vocal learning, some species of songbirds acquire more than 100 tunes. And via vocal learning, the chicks of a small parrot, the green-rumped parrotlet, obtain their “signature contact calls”—sounds that serve the same function as our names.

A few years ago, I joined ornithologist Karl Berg from the University of Texas in Brownsville at his field site in Venezuela where he studies the parrotlets’ peeping calls. Although the peeps sound simple to our ears, Berg explained, they are actually complex, composed of discrete sequences and phrases. A male parrotlet returning to his mate at their nest, a hollow in a fence post, makes a series of these peeps. “He calls his name and the name of his mate,” Berg told me, “and then he’s saying something else. And it’s probably more than just, ‘Hi Honey, I’m home.’” Because the female lays eggs throughout the long nesting season, the pair frequently copulates. And so, Berg suspects that a male on his way home after laboring to fill his crop with seeds for his mate and their chicks, is apt to call out, “I’ve got food, but I want sex first.” His mate, on the other hand, is likely hungry and tired from tending their chicks. She may respond, “No, I want to eat first; we’ll have sex later.” “There’s some negotiating, some conversation between them,” Berg said, “meaning that what one says influences what the other says next.”

Berg discovered that parrotlets have names by collecting thousands of the birds’ peeps, then converting them to spectrograms, which he subsequently analyzed for subtle similarities and differences via a specialized computer program. And how does a young parrotlet get his or her name? “We think their parents name them,” Berg said—which would make parrots the first animals, aside from humans, known to assign names to their offspring.

Parrotlets aren’t the only animals that have names (or to be scientifically accurate, signature contact calls). Scientists have discovered that dolphins, which are also vocal-learners, have these calls, although these seem to be innate; the mothers aren’t naming their calves. And some species of bats have names, which they include when singing, and in other social situations.

Bats sing, for the same reason birds do: to attract mates and to defend territories. They’re not negotiating or conversing, but their lovelorn ditties are plenty informative nonetheless. After analyzing 3,000 recordings of male European Pipistrellus nathusii bats, for instance, a team of Czech researchers reported that the songs always begin with a phrase (which the scientists termed motif A) announcing the bat’s species. Next comes the vocal signature (motifs B and C), information about the bat’s population (motif D), and an explanation about where to land (motif E).

“Hence, translated into human words, the message ‘ABCED’ could be approximately: (A) ‘Pay attention: I am a P.nathusii, (B,C) specifically male 17b, (E) land here, (D) we share a common social identity and common communication pool,’” the researchers wrote in their report.

Bohn suspects that the tunes of her bats at Uxmal convey the same type of information. “The guys are competing for females with their songs,” she says, “so they can’t afford to stop singing.” She doesn’t yet know what the females listen for in the voice of a N.laticaudatus, but expects that something in a male’s intonation or his song’s beat gives her clues about his suitability as a mate.

But her focus is on another question: Are these bats long-term vocal learners, as are humans and some species of birds, such as parrots? “If they are,” she explains, “then they might be a good model for studying the origins of human speech”—which would make bats the first mammal ever used for such research.

Bohn had earlier recorded some of the bats’ songs, and digitally altered these so that they sounded like the refrains of different bats—strangers. At the wall, she attaches a pair of microphones and a single speaker to a tripod, and points the equipment at the fissure, where the bats sing. Pushing a button on her laptop, she broadcasts the remixed bat songs to the tiny troubadours, who respond with even louder twitters, trills, and buzzes. Bohn watches their responses as they’re converted into sonograms that stream across her laptop’s screen like seismic pulses. These are territorial buzzes and contact calls, Bohn explains. “They know there’s an intruder.” She’s silent for a moment, and then beams. “Yes! One of the guys is trying to match the intruder’s call. He doesn’t have it exactly right, but he’s close—he’s so close, and it’s hard.”

But there it was: the first bit of evidence that bats are life-long vocal learners. Just like us.