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Traffic was not a good place to try to decide. Stop and go, stop and go, at a speed just faster than Frank could have walked. It had been a bad mistake to get on the Beltway in the first place. By and large Beltway drivers were defectors. In general, drivers on the East Coast were less generous than Californians, Frank found. Maybe this only meant Californians had lived through that many more traffic jams. In California cars in two merging lanes would alternate like the halves of a zipper, at considerable speed, everyone trusting everyone else to know the game and play it right. Here on the Beltway, on the other hand, it was always defect. That was what all the SUVs were about, everyone girding up for a crash. Every SUV was a defection. And so it was slow: unnecessarily, unobservantly slow. It made you want to scream.
And from time to time, Frank did scream. This was a different primate satisfaction: in traffic you could loudly curse people from ten feet away and they did not hear you. There was no way the primate brain could explain this, so it was an example of the “technological sublime.” And it was indeed sublime to lose all restraint and curse someone ferociously from a few feet away, and yet suffer no ramifications from such a grave affront.
So he crept forward in traffic, cursing. The Beltway was badly overloaded at this hour. It was so bad that Frank realized he was going to be late to work. And this was the morning when his bioinformatics panel was to begin! He needed to be there for the panel to start on time. The panel members were all in town, some would be gathering at this very moment in their third-floor conference room, ready to go, feeling that there wasn’t enough time to judge all the proposals on the docket. Frank had crowded the schedule on purpose so they would not have time to properly evaluate every proposal. To arrive late in this situation would be bad form indeed. There would be looks; he would have to make excuses. It might even interfere with his plan.
So coming to Route 66, he impulsively decided to get on it going east, even though at this hour it was reserved for High Occupancy Vehicles only. Normally Frank obeyed this rule, but now he took the turn and curved onto 66, where traffic was indeed moving faster. Every vehicle was occupied by at least two people, of course, and Frank stayed in the right lane and drove as unobtrusively as possible, counting on the generally inward attention of people in vehicles to keep too many people from noticing his transgression. Of course there were highway patrol cars on the lookout for lawbreakers like Frank, so he was taking a risk that he didn’t like to take, but it seemed to him a lower risk than staying on the Beltway, in terms of getting to work on time.
He drove in great suspense, therefore, until finally he could signal to get off at Fairfax. Then as he approached he saw a police car parked beside the exit, its officers walking back toward their car after dealing with another miscreant. They might easily look up and see him.
A big old pickup truck was slowing down to exit before him, and again without pausing to consider his actions, Frank floored the accelerator, swerved around the truck on its left side, using it to block the policemen’s view, then cut back across in front of the truck, accelerating so as not to bother it. Room to spare and no one the wiser. He curved to the right down the exit lane, slowing for the light around the turn.
Suddenly there was loud honking from behind, and his rearview mirror was entirely filled by the front grill of the pickup truck, its headlights at about the same height as the roof of his car. Frank speeded up. Then, closing on the car in front of him, he had to slow down. Suddenly the truck was now passing him on the left, as he had passed it earlier, even though this took the truck up onto the exit lane’s tilted shoulder. Frank looked and glimpsed the infuriated face of the driver, leaning over to shout down at him. Long stringy hair, mustache, red skin, furious anger.
Frank looked over again and shrugged, making a face and gesture that said, What? He slowed down so that the truck could cut in front of him, a good thing as it slammed into the lane so hard it missed Frank’s left headlight by an inch. He would have struck Frank for sure if Frank hadn’t slowed down. What a jerk!
Then the guy hit his brakes so hard that Frank nearly rear-ended him, which could have been a disaster given how high the truck was jacked up. Frank would have hit windshield first.
“What the fuck!” Frank said, shocked. “Fuck you! I didn’t come anywhere near you!”
The truck came to a full stop, right there on the exit lane.
“Jesus, you fucking idiot!” Frank shouted.
Maybe Frank had cut closer to this guy than he thought he had. Or maybe the guy was hounding him for driving solo on 66, even though he had been doing the same thing himself. Now his door flew open and out he jumped, swaggering back toward Frank. He caught sight of Frank still shouting, stopped and pointed a quivering finger, reached into the bed of his truck, and pulled out a crowbar.
Frank reversed gear, backed up and braked, shifted into drive, and hauled on his steering wheel as he accelerated around the pickup truck’s right side. People behind them were honking, but they didn’t know the half of it. Frank zoomed down the now-empty exit lane, shouting triumphant abuse at the crazy guy.
Unfortunately the traffic light at the end of the exit ramp was red and there was a car stopped there, waiting for it to change. Frank had to stop. Instantly there was a thunk and he jerked forward. The pickup truck had rear-ended him, tapping him hard from behind.
“YOU FUCKER!” Frank shouted, now frightened; he had tangled with a madman! The truck was backing up, presumably to ram him again, so he put his little Honda in reverse and shot back into the truck, like hitting a wall, then shifted again and shot off into the narrow gap to the right of the car waiting at the light, turning right and accelerating into a gap between the cars zipping by, which caused more angry honks. He checked his rearview mirror and saw that light had changed and the pickup truck was turning to follow him, and not far behind. “Shit!”
Frank accelerated, saw an opening in traffic coming the other way, and took a sharp left across all lanes onto Glebe, even though it was the wrong direction for NSF. Then he floored it and began weaving desperately through cars he was rapidly overtaking, checking the rearview mirror when he could. The pickup appeared in the distance, squealing onto Glebe after him. Frank cursed in dismay.
He decided to drive directly to a fire station he recalled seeing on Lee Highway. He took a left on Lee and accelerated as hard as the little fuel-cell car could to the fire station, squealing into its parking lot and then jumping out and hurrying toward the building, looking back down Lee toward Glebe.
But the madman never appeared. Gone. Lost the trail, or lost interest. Off to harass someone else.
Cursing still, Frank checked his car’s rear. No visible damage, amazingly. He got back in and drove south to the NSF building, involuntarily reliving the experience. He had no clear idea why it had happened. He had driven around the guy but he had not really cut him off, and though it was true he had been poaching on 66, so had the guy. It was inexplicable; and it occurred to him that in the face of such behavior, modeling exercises like prisoner’s dilemma were useless. People did not make rational judgments. Especially, perhaps, the people driving too-large pickup trucks, this one of the dirty-and-dinged variety rather than the factory-fresh steroidal battleships that many in the area drove. Possibly it had been some kind of class thing, the resentment of an unemployed gas-guzzler against a white-collar type in a fuel-cell car. The past attacking the future, reactionary attacking progressive, poor attacking affluent. A beta male in an alpha machine, enraged that an alpha male thought he was so alpha he could zip around in a beta machine and get away with it.
Something like that. Some kind of asshole jerk-off loser, already drunk and disorderly at 7 A.M.
Despite all that drama, Frank found himself driving into the NSF building’s basement parking with just enough time to get to the elevators and up to the third floor at the last possible on-time moment. He hurried to that floor’s men’s room, splashed water on his face. He had to clear his mind of the ugly incident immediately, and it had been so strange and unpleasant that this was not particularly difficult. Incongruent awfulness without consequence is easily dismissed from the mind. So he pulled himself together, went out to do his job. Time to concentrate on the day’s work. His plan for the panel was locked in by the people he had convened for it. The scare on the road only hardened his resolve, chilled his blood.
He entered the conference room assigned to their panel. Its big inner window gave everyone the standard view of the rest of NSF, and the panelists who hadn’t been there before looked up into the beehive of offices making the usual comments about Rear Window and the like. “A kind of ersatz collegiality,” one of them said, must have been Nigel Pritchard.
“Keeps people working, to always feel watched like this.”
On the savannah a view like this would have come from a high outcrop, where the troop would be surveying everything important in their lives, secure in the realm of grooming, of chatter, of dominance conflicts. Perfect, in other words, for a grant proposal evaluation panel, which in essence was one of the most ancient of discussions: whom do we let in, whom do we kick out? A basic troop economy, of social credit, of access to food and mates—everything measured and exchanged in deeds good and bad—yes—it was another game of prisoner’s dilemma. They never ended.
Frank liked this one. It was very nuanced compared to most of them, and one of the few still outside the world of money. Anonymous peer review—unpaid labor—a scandal!
But science didn’t work like capitalism. That was the rub, that was one of the many rubs in the general dysfunction of the world. Capitalism ruled, but money was too simplistic and inadequate a measure of the wealth that science generated. In science, one built up over the course of a career a fund of “scientific credit,” by giving work to the system in a way that could seem altruistic. People remembered what you gave, and later on there were various forms of return on the gift—jobs, labs. In that sense a good investment for the individual, but in the form of a gift to the group. It was the non-zero-sum game that prisoner’s dilemma could become if everyone played by the strategies of always generous, or at the least, firm-but-fair. That was one of the things science was—a place that one entered by agreeing to hold to the strategies of cooperation, to maximize the total return of the game.
In theory that was true. It was also the usual troop of primates. There was a lot of tit-for-tat. Defections happened. Everyone was jockeying for a project of their own. As long as that was generating enough income for a comfortable physical existence for oneself and one’s family, then one had reached the optimal human state. Having money beyond that was unnecessary, and usually involved a descent into the world of hassle and stupidity. That was what greed got you. So there was in science a sufficiency of means, and an achievable limited goal, that kept it tightly aligned with the brain’s deepest savannah values. A scientist wanted the same things out of life as an Australopithecus; and here they were.
Thus Frank surveyed the panelists milling about the room with a rare degree of happiness. “Let’s get started.”
They sat down, putting laptops and coffee cups beside the computer consoles built into the tabletop. These allowed the panelists to see a spreadsheet page for each proposal in turn, displaying their grades and comments. This particular group all knew the drill. Some of them had met before, and most had read each other’s work.
There were eight of them sitting around the long, cluttered conference table.
Dr. Frank Vanderwal, moderator, NSF (on leave from University of California, San Diego, Department of Bioinformatics)
Dr. Nigel Pritchard, Georgia Institute of Technology, Computer Sciences
Dr. Alice Freundlich, Harvard University, Department of Biochemistry
Dr. Habib Ndina, University of Virginia Medical School
Dr. Stuart Thornton, University of Maryland, College Park, Genomics Department
Dr. Francesca Taolini, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for Biocomputational Studies
Dr. Jerome Frenkel, University of Pennsylvania, Department of Genomics
Dr. Yao Lee, Cambridge University (visiting George Washington University’s Department of Microbiology)
Frank made his usual introductory remarks and then said, “We’ve got a lot of them this time. I’m sorry it’s so many, but that’s what we’ve received. I’m sure we’ll hack our way through them all if we keep on track. Let’s start with the fifteen-minutes-per-jacket drill, and see if we can get twelve or even fourteen done before lunch. Sound good?”
Everyone nodded and tapped away, calling up the first one.
“Oh, and before we start, let’s have everyone give me their conflict-of-interest forms, please. I have to remind you that as referees here, you have a conflict if you’re the applying principal investigator’s thesis advisor or advisee, an employee of the same institution as the P.I. or a co-P.I., a collaborator within the last four years of the P.I. or a co-P.I., an applicant for employment in any department at the submitting institution, a recipient of an honorarium or other pay from the submitting institution within the last year, someone with a close personal relationship to the P.I. or a co-P.I., a shareholder in a company participating in the proposal, or someone who would otherwise gain or lose financially if the proposal were awarded or declined.
“Everybody got that? Okay, hand those forms down to me, then. We’ll have a couple of people step outside for some of the proposals today, but mostly we’re clear as far as I know, is that right?”
“I’ll be leaving for the Esterhaus proposal, as I told you,” Stuart Thornton said.
Then they started the group evaluations. This was the heart of their task for that day and the next—also the heart of NSF’s method, indeed of science more generally. Peer review; a jury of fellow experts. Frank clicked the first proposal’s page onto his screen. “Seven reviewers, forty-four jackets. Let’s start with EIA-02 18599, ‘Electromagnetic and Informational Processes in Molecular Polymers.’ Habib, you’re the lead on this?”
Habib Ndina nodded and opened with a description of the proposal. “They want to immobilize cytoskeletal networks on biochips, and explore whether tubulin can be used as bits in protein logic gates. They intend to do this by measuring the electric dipole moment, and what the P.I. calls the predicted kink-solitonic electric dipole moment flip waves.”
“Predicted by whom?”
“By the P.I.” Habib smiled. “He also states that this will be a method to test out the theories of the so-called ‘quantum brain.’”
“Hmm.” People read past the abstract.
“What are you thinking?” Frank said after a while. “I see Habib has given it a Good, Stuart a Fair, and Alice a Very Good.”
This represented the middle range of their scale, which ran Poor, Fair, Good, Very Good, and Excellent.
Habib replied first. “I’m not so sure that you can get these biochips to array in neural nets. I saw Inouye try something like that at MIT, and they got stuck at the level of chip viability.”
“Hmm.”
The others chimed in with questions and opinions. At the end of fifteen minutes, Frank stopped the discussion and asked them to mark their final judgments in the two categories they used, intellectual merit and broader impacts.
Frank summed up. “Four Goods, two Very Goods, and a Fair. Okay, let’s move on. But tell you what, I’m going to start the big board right now.”
He had a whiteboard in the corner next to him, and a pile of Post-it pads on the table. He drew three zones on the whiteboard with marker, and wrote at the top “Fund,” “Fund If Possible,” and “Don’t Fund.”
“I’ll put this one in the Fund If Possible column for now, although naturally it may get bumped.” He stuck the proposal’s Post-it in the middle zone. “We’ll move these around as the day progresses and we get a sense of the range.”
Then they began the next one. “Okay. ‘Efficient Decoherence Control Algorithms for Computing Genome Construction.’”
This jacket Frank had assigned to Stuart Thornton.
Thornton started by shaking his head. “This one’s gotten two Goods and two Fairs, and it wasn’t very impressive to me either. It may be a candidate for limited discussion. It doesn’t really exhibit a grasp of the difficulties involved with codon tampering, and I think it replicates the work being done in Seattle. The applicant seems to have been too busy with the broader impacts component to fully acquaint himself with the literature. Besides which, it won’t work.”
People laughed shortly at this extra measure of disdain, which was palpable, and to those who didn’t know Thornton, a little surprising. But Frank had seen Stuart Thornton on panels before. He was the kind of scientist who habitually displayed an ultrapure devotion to the scientific method, in the form of a relentless skepticism about everything. No study was designed tightly enough, no data were clean enough. To Frank it seemed obvious that it was really a kind of insecurity, part of the gestural set of a beta male convincing the group he was tough enough to be an alpha male.
The problem with these gestures was that in science, one’s intellectual power was like the muscle mass of an Australopithecus, there for all to see. You couldn’t fake it. No matter how much you ruffed your fur or exposed your teeth, in the end your intellectual strength was discernable in what you said and how insightful it was. Mere skepticism was like baring teeth; anyone could do it. For that reason Thornton was a bad choice for a panel, because while people could see his attitude and try to discount it, he set a tone that was hard to shake off. If there was an always-defector in the group, one had to be less generous oneself in order not to become a sap.
That was why Frank had invited him.
Thornton went on: “The basic problem is at the level of their understanding of an algorithm. An algorithm is not just a simple sequence of mathematical operations that can each be performed in turn. It’s a matter of designing a grammar that will adjust the operations at each stage, depending on the results from the stage before. There’s a very specific encoding math that makes that work. They don’t have that here.”
The others nodded and tapped in notes at their consoles. Soon enough they were on to the next proposal, with that one posted under “Don’t Fund.”
Now Frank could predict with some confidence how the rest of the day would go. A depressed norm had been set, and even though the third reporter, Alice Freundlich from Harvard, subtly rebuked Thornton by talking about how well designed her first jacket was, she did so in a less generous context, and was not overenthusiastic. “They think that the evolutionary processes of gene conservation can be mapped by cascade studies, and they want to model it with big computer array simulations. They claim they’ll be able to identify genes prone to mutation.”
Habib Ndina shook his head. He too was a habitual skeptic, although from a much deeper well of intelligence than Thornton’s; he wasn’t just making a display, he was thinking. “Isn’t the genome’s past pretty much mapped by now?” he complained. “Do we really need more about evolutionary history?”
“Well, maybe not. Broader impacts might suffer there.”
And so the day proceeded, and, with some subliminal prompting from Frank (“Are you sure they have the lab space?” “Do you think that’s really true though?” “How would that work?” “How could that work?”) the time came when the full Shooting Gallery Syndrome had emerged. The panelists very slightly lost contact with their sense of the proposals as human efforts performed under a deadline, and started to compare them to some perfect model of scientific practice. In that light, of course, all the candidates were wanting. They all had feet of clay and so their proposals all became clay pigeons, cast into the air for the group to take potshots at. New jacket tossed up: bang! bang! bang!
“This one’s toast,” someone said at one point.
Of course a few people in such a situation would stay anchored, and begin to shake their heads or wrinkle their noses, or even protest the mood, humorously or otherwise. But Frank had avoided inviting any of the real stalwarts he knew, and Alice Freundlich did no more than keep things pleasant. The impulse in a group toward piling on was so strong that it often took on extraordinary momentum. On the savannah it would have meant an expulsion and a hungry night out. Or some poor guy torn limb from limb.
Frank didn’t need to tip things that far. Nothing explicit, nothing heavy. He was only the facilitator. He did not express an obvious opinion on the substance of the proposals at any point. He watched the clock, ran down the list, asked if everybody had said what they wanted to say when there was three minutes left out of the fifteen; made sure everyone got their scores into the system at the end of the discussion period. “That’s an Excellent and five Very Goods. Alice do you have your scores on this one?”
Meanwhile the discussions got tougher and tougher.
“I don’t know what she could have been thinking with this one, it’s absurd!”
“Let me start by suggesting limited discussion.”
Frank began subtly to apply the brakes. He didn’t want them to think he was a bad panel manager.
Nevertheless, the attack mood gained momentum. Baboons descending on wounded prey; it was almost Pavlovian, a food-rewarded joy in destruction. The pleasure taken in wrecking anything meticulous. Frank had seen it many times: a carpenter doing demolition with a sledgehammer, a vet who went duck-hunting on weekends … It was unfortunate, given their current overextended moment in planetary history, but nevertheless real. As a species they were therefore probably doomed. And so the only real adaptive strategy, for the individual, was to do one’s best to secure one’s own position. And sometimes that meant a little strategic defection.
Near the end of the day it was Thornton’s turn again. Finally they had come to the proposal from Yann Pierzinski. People were getting tired.
Frank said, “Okay, almost done here. Let’s finish them off, shall we? Two more to go. Stu, we’re to you again, on ‘Algorithmic Analysis of Palindromic Codon Sequences as Predictors of Gene/Protein Expression.’ Mandel and Pierzinski, Caltech.”
Thornton shook his head wearily. “I see it’s got a couple of Very Goods from people, but I give it a Fair. It’s a nice thought, but it seems to be promising too much. I mean, predicting the proteome from the genome would be enough in itself, but then understanding how the genome evolved, building error-tolerant biocomputers—it’s like a list of the big unsolved problems.”
Francesca Taolini asked him what he thought of the algorithm that the proposal hoped to develop.
“It’s too sketchy to be sure! That’s really what he’s hoping to find, as far as I can tell. There would be a final toolbox with a software environment and language, then a gene grammar to makes sense of palindromes in particular, he seems to think those are important, but I think they’re just redundancy and repair sequences, that’s why the palindromic structure. They’re like the reinforcement at the bottom of a zipper. To think that he could use this to predict all the proteins a gene would produce!”
“But if you could, you would see what proteins you would get without needing to do microassays,” Francesca pointed out. “That would be very useful. I thought the line he was following had potential, myself. I know people working on something like this, and it would be good to have more people on it, it’s a broad front. That’s why I gave it a Very Good, and I’d still recommend we fund it.” She kept her eyes on her screen.
“Well yeah,” Thornton said crossly, “but where would he get the biosensors that would tell him if he was right or not? There’s no controls.”
“That would be someone else’s problem. If the predictions were turning out good you wouldn’t have to test all of them, that would be the point.”
Frank waited a beat. “Anyone else?” he said in a neutral tone.
Pritchard and Yao Lee joined in. Lee obviously thought it was a good idea, in theory. He started describing it as a kind of cookbook with evolving recipes, and Frank ventured to say, “How would that work?”
“Well, by successive iterations of the operation, you know. It would be to get you started, suggest directions to try.”
“Look,” Francesca interjected, “eventually we’re going to have to tackle this issue, because until we do, the mechanics of gene expression are just a black box. It’s a very valid line of inquiry.”
“Habib?” Frank asked.
“It would be nice, I guess, if he could make it work. It’s not so easy. It would be like a roll of the dice to support it.”
Before Francesca could collect herself and start again, Frank said, “Well, we could go round and round on that, but we’re out of time on this one, and it’s late. Those of you who haven’t done it yet, write down your scores, and let’s finish with one more from Alice before we go to dinner.”
Hunger made them nod and tap away at their consoles, and then they were on to the last one for the day, “Ribozymes as Molecular Logic Gates.” When they were done with that, Frank stuck its Post-it on the whiteboard with the rest. Each little square of paper had its proposal’s averaged scores written on it. It was a tight scale; the difference between 4.63 and 4.70 could matter a great deal. They had already put three proposals in the “Fund” column, two in the “Fund If Possible,” and six in the “Do Not Fund.” The rest were stuck to the bottom of the board, waiting to be sorted out the following day. Pierzinski’s was among those.
That evening the group went out for dinner at Tara, a good nearby Thai restaurant with a wall-sized fish tank. The conversation was animated and wide-ranging, the mood getting better as the meal wore on. Afterward a few of them went to the hotel bar; the rest retreated to their rooms. At eight the next morning they were back in the conference room doing everything over again, working their way through the proposals with an increasing efficiency. Thornton recused himself for a discussion of a proposal from someone at his university, and the mood in the room noticeably lightened; even when he returned they held to this. They were learning each other’s predilections, and sometimes jetted off into discussions of theory that were very interesting even though only a few minutes long. Some of the proposals brought up interesting problems, and several strong ones in a row made them aware of just how amazing contemporary work in bioinformatics was, and what some of the potential benefits for human health might be, if all this were to come together and make a robust biotechnology. The shadow of a good future drove the group toward more generous strategies. The second day went better. The scores were, on average, higher.
“My Lord,” Alice said at one point, looking at the whiteboard. “There are going to be some very good proposals that we’re not going to be able to fund.”
Everyone nodded. It was a common feeling at the end of a panel. Rate of funded proposals was down to around ten or twenty percent these days.
“I sometimes wonder what would happen if we could fund about ninety percent of all the applications. You know, only reject the limited-discussions. Fund everything else.”
“It might speed things up.”
“Might cause a revolution.”
“Now back to reality,” Frank suggested. “Last jacket here.”
