When I drove into Summerland Key three months after the storm, debris still lined the main road, piled almost as high as the three-axle trucks rumbling in to retrieve and burn it.
Without them, Vaughan knew, the Florida Keys might not survive the next century. He and Slifka rushed downstairs, turned their backs on everything Vaughan owned, and got to work in the laboratory’s ground floor, rescuing thousands of tiny plaster plugs capped by dark dots the size of a pencil tip-genetically hacked coral polyps that the storm threatened to wash away. He had 40 minutes to save what he could before the back wall of the hurricane hit and another storm surge rushed in. Vaughan could see that his house’s roof had begun to collapse. When the storm’s eye passed directly overhead, the wind died and the storm surge sucked back out to sea.
Suctioning snail shit is where the rubber meets the road for the facility’s main mission: saving coral from extinction via a groundbreaking technique of genetic modification and cloning.
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