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Then one day she had taken Nick down to the daycare centre – it was the routine by then – and he didn’t cry when she said good-bye, didn’t even seem to care or to notice. But for some reason she had paused to look back into the window of the place, and there on his face she saw a look of unhappy, stoical determination – determination not to cry, determination to get through another long lonely boring day – a look which on the face of a toddler was simply heartbreaking. It had pierced her like an arrow. She had cried out involuntarily, even started to rush back inside to take him in her arms and comfort him. Then she reconsidered how another goodbye would affect him, and with a horrible wrenching feeling, a sort of despair at all the world, she had left.
Now here was that very same look again, on the face of this young man. Anna stopped in her tracks, feeling again that stab from five years before. Who knew what had caused these people to come halfway around the world? Who knew what they had left behind?
She walked back over to him.
He saw her coming, composed his features. ‘Yes?’
‘If you want,’ she said, ‘later on, when it’s convenient, I could show you some of the good lunch spots in this neighbourhood. I’ve worked here a long time.’
‘Why, thank you,’ he said. ‘That would be most kind.’
‘Is there a particular day that would be good?’
‘Well – we will be getting hungry today,’ he said, and smiled. He had a sweet smile, not unlike Nick’s.
She smiled too, feeling pleased. ‘I’ll come back down at one o’clock and take you to a good one then, if you like.’
‘That would be most welcome. Very kind.’
She nodded. ‘At one, then,’ already recalibrating her work schedule for the day. The boxed sandwich could be stored in her office’s little refrigerator.
Anna completed her journey to the south elevators. Waiting there she was joined by Frank Vanderwal, one of her programme officers. They greeted each other, and she said, ‘Hey I’ve got an interesting jacket for you.’
He mock-rolled his eyes. ‘Is there any such thing for a burnt-out case like me?’
‘Oh I think so.’ She gestured back at the atrium. ‘Did you see our new neighbour? We lost the travel agency but gained an embassy, from a little country in Asia.’
‘An embassy, here?’
‘I’m not sure they know much about Washington.’
‘I see.’ Frank grinned his crooked grin, a completely different thing than the young monk’s sweet smile, sardonic and knowing. ‘Ambassadors from Shangri-La, eh?’ One of the UP arrows lit, and the elevator door next to it opened. ‘Well, we can use them.’
Primates in elevators. People stood in silence looking up at the lit numbers on the display console, as per custom.
Again the experience caused Frank Vanderwal to contemplate the nature of their species, in his usual sociobiologist’s mode. They were mammals, social primates: a kind of hairless chimp. Their bodies, brains, minds and societies had grown to their current state in east Africa over a period of about two million years, while the climate was shifting in such a way that forest cover was giving way to open savannah.
Much was explained by this. Naturally they were distressed to be trapped in a small moving box. No savannah experience could be compared to it. The closest analogue might have been crawling into a cave, no doubt behind a shaman carrying a torch, everyone filled with great awe and very possibly under the influence of psychotropic drugs and religious rituals. An earthquake during such a visit to the underworld would be about all the savannah mind could contrive as an explanation for a modern trip in an elevator. No wonder an uneasy silence reigned; they were in the presence of the sacred. And the last five thousand years of civilization had not been anywhere near enough time for any evolutionary adaptations to alter these mental reactions. They were still only good at the things they had been good at on the savannah.
Anna Quibler broke the taboo on speech, as people would when all the fellow-passengers were cohorts. She said to Frank, continuing her story, ‘I went over and introduced myself. They’re from an island country in the Bay of Bengal.’
‘Did they say why they rented the space here?’
‘They said they had picked it very carefully.’
‘Using what criteria?’
‘I didn’t ask. On the face of it, you’d have to say proximity to NSF, wouldn’t you?’
Frank snorted. ‘That’s like the joke about the starlet and the Hollywood writer, isn’t it?’
Anna wrinkled her nose at this, surprising Frank; although she was proper, she was not prudish. Then he got it: her disapproval was not at the joke, but at the idea that these new arrivals would be that hapless. She said, ‘I think they’re more together than that. I think they’ll be interesting to have here.’
Homo sapiens is a species that exhibits sexual dimorphism. And it’s more than a matter of bodies; the archaeological record seemed to Frank to support the notion that the social roles of the two sexes had diverged early on. These differing roles could have led to differing thought processes, such that it would be possible to characterize plausibly the existence of unlike approaches even to ostensibly non-gender-differentiated activities, such as science. So that there could be a male practice of science and a female practice of science, in other words, and these could be substantially different activities.
These thoughts flitted through Frank’s mind as their elevator ride ended and he and Anna walked down the hall to their offices. Anna was as tall as he was, with a nice figure, but the dimorphism differentiating them extended to their habits of mind and their scientific practice, and that might explain why he was a bit uncomfortable with her. Not that this was a full characterization of his attitude. But she did science in a way that he found annoying. It was not a matter of her being warm and fuzzy, as you might expect from the usual characterizations of feminine thought – on the contrary, Anna’s scientific work (she still often co-authored papers in statistics, despite her bureaucratic load) often displayed a finicky perfectionism that made her a very meticulous scientist, a first-rate statistician – smart, quick, competent in a range of fields and really excellent in more than one. As good a scientist as one could find for the rather odd job of running the bioinformatics division at NSF, good almost to the point of exaggeration – too precise, too interrogatory – it kept her from pursuing a course of action with drive. Then again, at NSF maybe that was an advantage.
In any case she was so intense about it. A kind of Puritan of science, rational to an extreme. And yet of course at the same time that was all such a front, as with the early Puritans; the hyper-rational co-existed in her with all the emotional openness, intensity and variability that was the American female interactional paradigm and social role. Every female scientist was therefore potentially a kind of Mr Spock, the rational side foregrounded and emphasized while the emotional side was denied, and the two co-existing at odds with one another.
On the other hand, judged on that basis, Frank had to admit that Anna seemed less split-natured than many women scientists he had known. Pretty well integrated, really. He had spent many hours of the past year working with her, engaged in interesting discussions in the pursuit of their shared work. No, he liked her. The discomfort came not from any of her irritating habits, not even the nit-picking or hairsplitting that made her so strikingly eponymous (though no one dared joke about that to her), habits that she couldn’t seem to help and didn’t seem to notice – no – it was more the way her hyper-scientific attitude combined with her passionate female expressiveness to suggest a complete science, or even a complete humanity. It reminded Frank of himself.
Not of the social self that he allowed others to see, admittedly; but of his internal life as he alone experienced it. He too was stuffed with extreme aspects of both rationality and emotionality. This was what made him uncomfortable: Anna was too much like him. She reminded him of things about himself he did not want to think about. But he was helpless to stop his trains of thought. That was one of his problems.
Halfway around the circumference of the sixth floor, they came to their offices. Frank’s was one of a number of cubicles carving up a larger space; Anna’s was a true office right across from his cubicle, a room of her own, with a foyer for her secretary Aleesha. Both their spaces, and all the others in the maze of crannies and rooms, were filled with the computers, tables, filing cabinets and crammed bookshelves that one found in scientific offices everywhere. The decor was standard degree-zero beige for everything, indicating the purity of science.
In this case it was all rendered human, and even handsome, by the omnipresent big windows on the interior sides of the rooms, allowing everyone to look across the central atrium and into all the other offices. This combination of open space and the sight of fifty to a hundred other humans made each office a slice or echo of the savannah. The occupants were correspondingly more comfortable at the primate level. Frank did not suffer the illusion that anyone had consciously planned this effect, but he admired the instinctive grasp on the architect’s part of what would get the best work out of the building’s occupants.
He sat down at his desk. He had angled his computer screen away from the window so that when necessary he could focus on it, but now he sat in his chair and gazed out across the atrium. He was near the end of his year-long stay at NSF, and the workload, while never receding, was simply becoming less and less important to him. Piles of articles and hard-copy jackets lay in stacks on every horizontal surface, arranged in Frank’s complex through-put system. He had a lot of work to do. Instead he looked out the window.
The colourful mobile filling the upper half of the atrium was a painfully simple thing, basic shapes in primary colours, very like an infant’s scribble. Frank’s many activities included rock climbing, and often he had occupied his mind by imagining the moves he would need to make to climb the mobile. There were some hard sections, but it would make for a fun route.
Past the mobile, he could see into one hundred and eight other rooms (he had counted). In them people typed at screens, talked in couples or on the phone, read, or sat in seminar rooms around paper-strewn tables, looking at slide-shows, or talking. Mostly talking. If the interior of the National Science Foundation were all you had to go on, you would have to conclude that doing science consisted mostly of sitting around in rooms talking.
This was not even close to true, and it was one of the reasons Frank was bored. The real action of science took place in laboratories, and anywhere else experiments were being conducted. What happened here was different, a kind of meta-science, one might say, which coordinated scientific activities, or connected them to other human action, or funded them. Something like that; he was having trouble characterizing it, actually.
The smell of Anna’s Starbuck’s latte wafted in from her office next door, and he could hear her on the phone already. She too did a lot of talking on the phone. ‘I don’t know, I have no idea what the other sample sizes are like … No, not statistically insignificant, that would mean the numbers were smaller than the margin of error. What you’re talking about is just statistically meaningless. Sure, ask him, good idea.’
Meanwhile Aleesha, her assistant, was on her phone as well, patiently explaining something in her rich DC contralto. Unravelling some misunderstanding. It was an obvious if seldom-acknowledged fact that much of NSF’s daily business was accomplished by a cadre of African-American women from the local area, women who often seemed decidedly unconvinced of the earth-shattering importance that their mostly Caucasian employers attributed to the work. Aleesha, for instance, displayed the most sceptical politeness Frank had ever seen; he often tried to emulate it, but without, he feared, much success.
Anna appeared in the doorway, tapping on the doorjamb as she always did, to pretend that his space was an office. ‘Frank, I forwarded that jacket to you, the one about an algorithm.’
‘Let’s see if it arrived.’ He hit CHECK MAIL, and up came a new one from aquibler@nsf.gov. He loved that address. ‘It’s here, I’ll take a look at it.’
‘Thanks.’ She turned, then stopped. ‘Hey listen, when are you due to go back to UCSD?’
‘End of July or end of August.’
‘Well, I’ll be sorry to see you go. I know it’s nice out there, but we’d love it if you’d consider putting in a second year, or even think about staying permanently, if you like it. Of course you must have a lot of irons in the fire.’
‘Yes,’ Frank said noncomittally. Staying longer than his one-year stint was completely out of the question. ‘That’s nice of you to ask. I’ve enjoyed it, but I should probably get back home. I’ll think about it, though.’
‘Thanks. It would be good to have you here.’
Much of the work at NSF was done by visiting scientists, who came on leave from their home institutions to run NSF programmes in their area of expertise for periods of a year or two. The grant proposals came pouring in by the thousand, and programme directors like Frank read them, sorted them, convened panels of outside experts, and ran the meetings in which these experts rated batches of proposals in particular fields. This was a major manifestation of the peer review process, a process Frank thoroughly approved of – in principle. But a year of it was enough.
Anna had been watching him, and now she said, ‘I suppose it is a bit of a rat race.’
‘Well, no more than anywhere else. In fact if I were home it’d probably be worse.’
They laughed.
‘And you have your journal work too.’
‘That’s right.’ Frank waved at the piles of typescripts: three stacks for Review of Bioinformatics, two for The Journal of Sociobiology. ‘Always behind. Luckily the other editors are better at keeping up.’
Anna nodded. Editing a journal was a privilege and an honour, even though usually unpaid – indeed, one often had to continue to subscribe to a journal just to get copies of what one had edited. It was another of science’s many non-compensated activities, part of its extensive economy of social credit.
‘Okay,’ Anna said. ‘I just wanted to see if we could tempt you. That’s how we do it, you know. When visitors come through who are particularly good, we try to hold on to them.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Frank nodded uncomfortably, touched despite himself; he valued her opinion. He rolled his chair towards his screen as if to get to work, and she turned and left.
He clicked to the jacket Anna had forwarded. Immediately he recognized one of the investigators’ names.
‘Hey Anna?’ he called out.
‘Yes?’ She reappeared in the doorway.
‘I know one of the guys on this jacket. The PI is a guy from Caltech, but the real work is by one of his students.’
‘Yes?’ This was a typical situation, a younger scientist using the prestige of his or her advisor to advance a project.
‘Well, I know the student. I was the outside member on his dissertation committee, a few years ago.’
‘That wouldn’t be enough to be a conflict.’
Frank nodded as he read on. ‘But he’s also been working on a temporary contract at Torrey Pines Generique, which is a company in San Diego that I helped start.’
‘Ah. Do you still have any financial stake in it?’
‘No. Well, my stocks are in a blind trust for the year I’m here, so I can’t be positive, but I don’t think so.’
‘But you’re not on the board, or a consultant?’
‘No no. And it looks like his contract there was due to be over about now anyway.’
‘That’s fine, then. Go for it.’
No part of the scientific community could afford to be too picky about conflicts of interest. If they were, they’d never find anyone free to peer-review anything; hyper-specialization made every field so small that within them, everyone seemed to know everyone. Because of that, so long as there were no current financial or institutional ties with a person, it was considered okay to proceed to evaluate their work in the various peer-review systems.
But Frank had wanted to make sure. Yann Pierzinski had been a very sharp young bio-mathematician – he was one of those doctoral students whom one watched with the near certainty that one would hear from them again later in their career. Now here he was, with something Frank was particularly interested in. Frank’s curiosity was piqued.
‘Okay,’ he said now to Anna. ‘I’ll put in the hopper.’ He closed the file and turned as if to check out something else.
After Anna was gone, he pulled the jacket back up. ‘Mathematical and Algorithmic Analysis of Palindromic Codons as Predictors of a Gene’s Protein Expression.’ A proposal to fund continuing work on an algorithm for predicting which proteins any given gene would express.
Very interesting. This was an assault on one of the fundamental mysteries, an unknown step in biology that presented a considerable blockage to any robust biotechnology. The three billion base pairs of the human genome encoded along their way some hundred thousand genes; and most of these genes contained instructions for the assembly of one or more proteins, the basic building-blocks of organic chemistry and life itself. But which genes expressed which proteins, and how exactly they did it, and why certain genes would create more than one protein, or different proteins in different circumstances – all these matters were very poorly understood, or completely mysterious. This ignorance made much of biotechnology an endless and very expensive matter of trial-and-error. A key to any part of the mystery could be very valuable.
Frank scrolled down the pages of the application with practised speed. Yann Pierzinski, PhD bio-maths, Caltech. Still doing post-doc work with his thesis advisor there, a man Frank had come to consider a bit of a credit hog, if not worse. It was interesting, then, that Pierzinski had gone down to Torrey Pines to work on a temporary contract, for a bioinformatics researcher whom Frank didn’t know. Perhaps that had been a bid to escape the advisor. But now he was back.
Frank dug into the substantive part of the proposal. The algorithm set was one Pierzinski had been working on even back in his dissertation. Chemical mechanics of protein creation as a sort of natural algorithm, in effect. Frank considered the idea, operation by operation. This was his real expertise; this was what had interested him from childhood, when the puzzles solved had been simple ciphers. He had always loved this work, and now perhaps more than ever, offering as it did a complete escape from consciousness of himself. Why he might want to make that escape remained moot; howsoever it might be, when he came back he felt refreshed, as if finally he had been in a good place.
He also liked to see patterns emerge from the apparent randomness of the world. This was why he had recently taken such an interest in sociobiology; he had hoped there might be algorithms to be found there which would crack the code of human behaviour. So far that quest had not been very satisfactory, mostly because so little in human behaviour was susceptible to a controlled experiment, so no theory could even be tested. That was a shame. He badly wanted some clarification in that realm.
At the level of the four chemicals of the genome, however – in the long dance of cytosine, adenine, guanine and thymine – much more seemed to be amenable to mathematical explanation and experiment, with results that could be conveyed to other scientists, and put to use. One could test Pierzinski’s ideas, in other words, and find out if they worked.
He came out of this trance of thought hungry, and with a full bladder. He felt quite sure there was some real potential in the work. And that was giving him some ideas.
He got up stiffly, went to the bathroom, came back. It was mid-afternoon already. If he left soon he would be able to hack through the traffic to his apartment, eat quickly, then go out to Great Falls. By then the day’s blanching heat would have started to subside, and the river’s gorge walls would be nearly empty of climbers. He could climb until well past sunset, and do some more thinking about this algorithm, out where he thought best these days, on the hard old schist walls of the only place in the Washington DC area where a scrap of nature had survived.
TWO In the Hyperpower (#ulink_195df8ad-51e7-5bd8-8ea8-826d474486c5)
Mathematics sometimes seems like a universe of its own. But it comes to us as part of the brain’s engagement with the world, and appears to be part of the world, its structure or recipe.
Over historical time humanity has explored further and further into the various realms of mathematics, in a cumulative and collective process, an ongoing conversation between the species and reality. The discovery of the calculus. The invention of formal arithmetic and symbolic logic, both mathematicizing the instinctive strategies of human reason, making them as distinct and solid as geometric proofs. The attempt to make the entire system contained and self-consistent. The invention of set theory, and the finessing of the various paradoxes engendered by considering sets as members of themselves. The discovery of the incompletability of all systems. The step-by-step mechanics of programming new calculating machines. All this resulted in an amalgam of maths and logic, the symbols and methods drawn from both realms, combining in the often long and complicated operations that we call algorithms.
In the time of the development of the algorithm, we also made discoveries in the real world: the double helix within our cells. DNA. Within half a century the whole genome was read, base pair by base pair. Three billion base pairs, parts of which are called genes, and serve as instruction packets for protein creation.
But despite the fully explicated genome, the details of its expression and growth are still very mysterious. Spiralling pairs of cytosine, guanine, adenosine, and thymine: we know these are instructions for growth, for the development of life, all coded in sequences of paired elements. We know the elements; we see the organisms. The code between them remains to be learned.
Mathematics continues to develop under the momentum of its own internal logic, seemingly independent of everything else. But several times in the past, purely mathematical developments have later proved to be powerfully descriptive of operations in nature that were either unknown or unexplainable at the time the math was being developed. This is a strange fact, calling into question all that we think we know about the relationship between maths and reality, the mind and the cosmos.
Perhaps no explanation of this mysterious adherence of nature to mathematics of great subtlety will ever be forthcoming. Meanwhile, the operations called algorithms become ever more convoluted and interesting to those devising them. Are they making portraits, recipes, magic spells? Does reality use algorithms, do genes use algorithms? The mathematicians can’t say, and many of them don’t seem to care. They like the work, whatever it is.
Leo Mulhouse kissed his wife Roxanne and left their bedroom. In the living room the light was halfway between night and dawn. He went out onto their balcony: screeching gulls, the rumble of the surf against the cliff below. The vast grey plate of the Pacific Ocean.
Leo had married into this spectacular house, so to speak; Roxanne had inherited it from her mother. Its view from the edge of the sea cliff in Leucadia, California, was something Leo loved, but the little grass yard below the second-storey porch was only about fifteen feet wide, and beyond it was an open gulf of air and the grey foaming ocean, eighty feet below. And not that stable a cliff. He wished that the house had been placed a little farther back on its lot.
Back inside, fill his travel coffee cup, down to the car. Down Europa, past the Pannikin, hang a right and head to work.
The Pacific Coast Highway in San Diego County was a beautiful drive at dawn. In any kind of weather it was handsome: in new sun with all the pale blues lifting out of the sea, in scattered cloud when shards and rays of horizontal sunlight broke through, or on rainy or foggy mornings when the narrow but rich palette of greys filled the eye with the subtlest of gradations. The grey dawns were by far the most frequent, as the region’s climate settled into what appeared to be a permanent El Niño – the Hyperniño, as people called it. The whole idea of a Mediterranean climate leaving the world, even in the Mediterranean, people said. Here coastal residents were getting sunlight deficiency disorders, and taking vitamin D and anti-depressants to counteract the effects, even though ten miles inland it was a cloudless baking desert all the year round. The June Gloom had come home to roost.
Leo Mulhouse took the coast highway to work every morning. He liked seeing the ocean, and feeling the slight roller-coaster effect of dropping down to cross the lagoons, then motoring back up little rises to Cardiff, Solano Beach and Del Mar. These towns looked best at this hour, deserted and as if washed for the new day. Hiss of tyres on wet road, wet squeak of windshield wipers, distant boom of the waves breaking – it all combined to make a kind of aquatic experience, the drive like surfing, up and down the same bowls every time, riding the perpetual wave of land about to break into the sea.
Up the big hill onto Torrey Pines, past the golf course, quick right into Torrey Pines Generique. Down into its parking garage, descending into the belly of work. Into the biotech beast.
Meaning a complete security exam, just to get in. If they didn’t know what you came in with, they wouldn’t be able to judge what you went out with. So, metal detector, inspection by the bored security team with their huge coffee cups, computer turned on, hardware and software check by experts, sniff-over by Clyde the morning dog, trained to detect signature molecules: all standard in biotech now, after some famous incidents of industrial espionage. The stakes were too high to trust anybody.
Then Leo was inside the compound, walking down long white hallways. He put his coffee on his desk, turned on his desktop computer, went out to check the experiments in progress. The most important current one was reaching an endpoint, and Leo was particularly interested in the results. They had been using high-throughput screening of some of the many thousands of proteins listed in the Protein Data Bank at UCSD, trying to identify some that would activate certain cells in a way that would make these cells express more high-density lipoprotein than they would normally – perhaps ten times as much. Ten times as much HDL, the ‘good cholestorol’, would be a life-saver for people suffering from any number of ailments – atherosclerosis, obesity, diabetes, even Alzheimer’s. Any one of these ailments mitigated (or cured!) would be worth billions; a therapy that helped all of them would be – well. It explained the high-alert security enclosing the compound, that was for sure.
The experiment was proceeding but not yet done, so Leo went back to his office and drank his coffee and read Bioworld Today onscreen. Higher through-put screening robotics, analysis protocols for artificial hormones, proteomic analyses – every article could have described something that was going on at Torrey Pines Generique. The whole industry was looking for ways to improve the hunt for therapeutic proteins, and for ways to get those proteins into living people. Half the day’s articles were devoted to one of these problems or the other, as in any other issue of the newszine. They were the recalcitrant outstanding problems, standing between ‘biotechnology’ as an idea and medicine as it actually existed. If they didn’t solve these problems, the idea and the industry based on it could go the way of nuclear power, and turn into something that somehow did not work out. If they did solve them, then it would turn into something more like the computer industry in terms of financial returns – not to mention the impacts on health of course!
When Leo next checked the lab, two of his assistants, Marta and Brian, were standing at the bench, both wearing lab coats and rubber gloves, working the pipettes on a bank of flasks filling a countertop.
‘Good morning guys.’
‘Hey Leo.’ Marta aimed her pipette like a power-point cursor at the small window on a long low refrigerator. ‘Ready to check it out?’
‘Sure am. Can you help?’
