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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 and forest was giving way to 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 analog 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 car. No wonder an uneasy silence reigned; they were in the presence of the sacred. And the last ten 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 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.”

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’ll be interesting to have here.”

Homo sapiens is a species that exhibits sexual dimorphism. It’s more than a matter of bodies; the archeological record seemed to Frank to support the notion that the social roles of the two sexes had deviated 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 was in 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 coauthored 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.

But she was so intense about it. A kind of Puritan of science, rational to an extreme. And yet of course that was all a front, as with the early Puritans; the hyperrational coexisted 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 a kind of Mr. Spock, the rational side foregrounded and emphasized while the emotional side was denied.

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, and he liked her. His discomfort came not from any of her irritating habits, not even the nitpicking or hairsplitting that made her so strikingly eponymous (though no one dared joke about that to her); no, it was more the way her hyperscientific 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 self that he allowed others to see, of course, but rather 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, file cabinets, and crammed bookshelves that one found in scientific offices everywhere. The decor was standard beige for everything, indicating the purity of science.

In this case it was all rendered human, and even handsome, by the big windows on the interior sides of every room, allowing everyone to look across the central atrium and into all the other offices. This 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 architect’s instinctive grasp of what would get the best work out of the building’s occupants.

He sat down at his desk, gazed out across the atrium. He was near the end of his year-long stay at NSF, and the workload was becoming less and less important to him. Piles of articles lay in stacks on every horizontal surface, and his computer contained hundreds of proposals for his evaluation. He had a lot of work to do. Instead he looked out the window.

The colorful mobile filling the upper half of the atrium was a painfully simple thing, basic shapes in primary colors, very like a kindergartner’s scribble. Frank’s many activities included rock climbing, and often he had occupied his mind by imagining the moves he would need 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 looking at photos on screens, or talking. Mostly talking. If this place were all you had to go on, you would have to conclude that doing science consisted mostly of 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, or 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.

The smell of Anna’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.”

Meanwhile Aleesha, her assistant, was on her phone as well, patiently explaining something in her rich D.C. contralto. Unraveling some misunderstanding. It was an obvious if seldom-acknowledged fact that much of NSF’s daily business got done by African-American women from the area, 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 skeptical politeness Frank had ever heard.

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 checked, 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 hesitated. “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 noncommittally. 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 programs in their area of expertise for periods of a year or two. The grant proposals came pouring in by the thousands, and program 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, actually far more than enough.

Anna, watching him, said, “I suppose it’s a bit of a rat race.”

“Well, no more than anywhere else. At 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 an honor, though unpaid—indeed one often had to subscribe to a journal just to get copies of what one had edited. It was another of science’s many noncompensated 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 toward 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?”

“I know one of the guys on this jacket. The P.I. 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. And it looks like his contract there is about over now.”

“That’s fine, then. Go for it.”

No part of the scientific community could afford to be too picky about conflicts of interest, or they’d never find anyone to peer-review anything. Hyperspecialization made every field so small that everyone knew everyone. So as long as there were no current financial or institutional ties with a person, it was considered okay to evaluate their work in the various peer reviews.

But Frank had wanted to make sure. Yann Pierzinski was a very sharp young biomathematician, one of those doctoral students whom one watched with the certainty one would hear from them again. Now here he was, and with something Frank was particularly interested in.

“Okay,” he said to Anna. “I’ll put it in the hopper.”

He began to read it. “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, a mystery that presented a considerable blockage to any robust biotechnology. The three billion base pairs of the human genome encoded some hundred thousand genes; most of the 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 some genes created different proteins in different circumstances—all this was very poorly understood, or completely mysterious. This ignorance made most biotechnology an endless, very expensive matter of trial-and-error. A key to any part of the mystery could be very valuable. As in lucrative.

Frank scrolled down the pages of the proposal with practiced speed. Yann Pierzinski, Ph.D. biomath, Caltech. Still doing a postdoc with his advisor there, who was a real credit hog. Interesting to see 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.

Frank dug into the substance of the proposal. The algorithm was one Pierzinski had been working on even back in his dissertation. The chemistry of protein creation was a sort of natural algorithm, Yann was suggesting. Frank considered the idea operation by operation; this was his real expertise, this was what had interested him from childhood, when the puzzles he 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 behavior. So far that quest had not succeeded, as so little in human behavior was susceptible to controlled experiments, which meant that theories could not be tested. That was a shame. He badly wanted 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, also 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 hungry. He felt quite sure there was some real potential in the work. And that was giving him ideas, strange ideas in some respects, and yet …

He got up stiffly. It was midafternoon already. If he left soon he would be able to hack through the traffic out to Great Falls. By then the day’s heat would have subsided, and the gorge walls would be nearly empty. He could climb till sunset, and do some more thinking about this algorithm, in the only place in the D.C. area left with a touch of nature to it.

CHAPTER 2
IN THE HYPERPOWER

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 an aspect of the world, its structure or recipe.

Over historical time humanity has explored farther and farther 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 math and logic, with 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. Within half a century the whole genome was read, base pair by base pair. Three billion base pairs, forming the genes that serve as instruction packets for protein creation.

But despite the fully explicated genome, the details of gene expression are still very mysterious. Spiraling pairs of cytosine, guanine, adenosine, and thymine: we know these are instructions for the development of life. 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 math 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.

Leo Mulhouse kissed his wife Roxanne and left their bedroom. The light was halfway between night and dawn. He went onto the balcony, heard the rumble of surf against the cliff. Out there lay the vast gray plate of the Pacific.

Leo had married into this clifftop house, so to speak; Roxanne had inherited it from her mother. Its view was something Leo loved, but the little grass yard below the second-story porch was only about fifteen feet wide, and beyond it was an open gulf of air and the gray 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, down to the car. Down Europa, past the Pannikin in Leucadia, 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 the sun with all the blues of the sea gleaming, in low clouds when shards and rays of horizontal sunlight broke through, or on rainy or foggy mornings when the narrow but rich palette of grays filled the eye. The gray dawns were the most frequent these days, 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 was leaving the world, even in the Mediterranean. Here coastal residents were getting sunlight deficiency disorders, and taking vitamin D and antidepressants to counteract the effects, even though ten miles inland it was a cloudless baking desert all the year round. The June Gloom had come to stay.

Leo took the coast highway to work every morning, enjoying the slight roller-coaster effect of dropping down to cross the lagoons, then rising back up to Cardiff, Solana Beach, and Del Mar. These towns looked best at this hour, deserted and as if washed for the day.

Then up the big hill onto Torrey Pines, past the golf course, quick right into Torrey Pines Generique. Down into its garage, into the biotech beast.

Complete security exam, metal detector, inspection by the bored security team, hardware and software check, sniff-over by Clyde the morning dog, trained to detect signature molecules: all standard in biotech now, after some notorious incidents of industrial espionage. The stakes were too high to trust anybody.

Then Leo was inside the compound, walking down long white hallways. He turned on his desktop screen, went out to check the experiments in progress. The most important current one was reaching an endpoint, and Leo was particularly interested in the result. It was a high-throughput screening of some of the proteins in the Protein Data Bank at UCSD, trying to identify ones that would make certain cells express much more high-density lipoprotein than they would normally. Ten times as much HDL, the “good cholesterol,” would be a lifesaver 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 read Bioworld Today on-screen. Robotics, artificial hormones, proteomic analyses—the whole industry was looking for therapeutic proteins, and ways to get those proteins into people. They were the recalcitrant problems, standing between “biotechnology” as an idea and medicine as it actually existed. If they didn’t solve these problems, the industry could go the way of nuclear power. If they did solve them, then it would be 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.

“Morning guys.”

“Hey Leo.” Marta aimed her pipette like a PowerPoint cursor at the small window on a long, low refrigerator. “Ready to check it out?”

“Sure am. Can you help?”

“In just a sec.” She moved down the bench.

Brian said, “This better work, because Derek just told the press that it was the most promising self-healing therapy of the decade.”

Leo was startled to hear this. “You’re kidding.”

“I’m not kidding.”

“No, please. Not really.”

“Really.”

“How could he?”

“Press release. Also calls to his favorite reporters, and on his webpage. The chat room is already talking about the ramifications. They’re betting one of the big pharms will buy us within the month.”

“Please Bri, don’t be saying these things.”

“Sorry, but you know Derek.” Brian gestured at one of the computer screens glowing on the bench across the way. “It’s all over.”

Leo squinted at a screen. “It wasn’t on Bioworld Today.”

“It will be tomorrow.”

The company’s website BREAKING NEWS box was blinking. Leo leaned over and jabbed it. Yep—lead story. HDL factory, potential for obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, heart disease …

“Oh my God,” Leo muttered as he read. “Oh my God.” His face was flushed. “Why does he do this?”

“He wants it to be true.”

“So what? We don’t know yet.”

With her sly grin Marta said, “He wants you to make it happen, Leo. He’s like the Road Runner and you’re Wile E. Coyote. He gets you to run off the edge of a cliff, and then you have to build the bridge back to the cliff before you fall.”

“But it never works! Coyote always falls!”

Marta laughed at him. She liked him, but she was tough. “Come on,” she said. “This time we’ll do it.”

Leo nodded, tried to calm down. He appreciated Marta’s spirit, and liked to be at least as positive as the most positive person in any given situation. That was getting tough these days, but he smiled the best he could and said, “Yeah, right, you’re good,” and started to put on rubber gloves.

“Remember the time he announced that we had hemophilia A whipped?” Brian said.

“Please.”

“Remember the time he put out a press release saying he had decapitated mice at a thousand rpm to show how well our therapy worked?”

“The guillotine turntable experiment?”

“Please,” Leo begged. “No more.”

He picked up a pipette and tried to focus on the work. Withdraw, inject, withdraw, inject—alas, most of the work in this stage was automated, leaving people free to think, whether they wanted to or not. After a while Leo left them to it and went back to his office to check his e-mail, then helplessly to read what portion of Derek’s press release he could stomach. “Why does he do this, why?”

It was a rhetorical question, but Marta and Brian were now in his doorway, Marta implacable: “I told you—he thinks he can make us do it.”

“It’s not us doing it,” Leo protested, “it’s the gene. We can’t do a thing if the altered gene doesn’t get into the cell we’re trying to target.”

“You’ll just have to think of something that will work.”

“You mean like, build it and they will come?”

“Yeah. Say it and they will make it. That’s Derek.”

Out in the lab a timer beeped, sounding uncannily like the Road Runner. Beep-beep! Beep-beep! They went to the incubator and read the graph paper as it rolled out of the machine, like a receipt out of an automated teller—like money out of an automated teller, in fact, if the results were good. One very big wad of twenties rolling out into the world from nowhere, if the numbers were good.

And they were. They were very good. They would have to plot it to be sure, but they had been doing this series of experiments for so long that they knew what the raw data would look like. The data were good. So now they were like Wile E. Coyote, standing in midair staring amazed at the viewers, because a bridge from the cliff had magically extended out and saved them. Saved them from the long plunge of a retraction in the press and subsequent NASDAQ free fall.

Except that Wile E. Coyote was invariably premature in his sense of relief. The Road Runner always had another devastating move to make. Leo’s hand was shaking.

“Shit,” he said. “I would be totally celebrating right now if it weren’t for Derek. Look at this”—pointing—“it’s even better than before.”

“See, Derek knew it would turn out like this.”

“The fuck he did.”

“Pretty good numbers,” Brian said with a grin. “Paper’s almost written too. It’s just plug these in and do a conclusion.”

Marta said, “Conclusions will be simple, if we tell the truth.”

Leo nodded. “Only problem is, the truth would have to admit that even though this part works, we still don’t have a therapy, because we haven’t got targeted delivery. We can make it but we can’t get it into living bodies.”

“You didn’t read the whole website,” Marta told him, smiling angrily.

“What do you mean?” Leo was in no mood for teasing. His stomach had already shrunk to the size of a walnut.

Marta laughed, which was her way of showing sympathy without admitting to any. “He’s going to buy Urtech.”

“What’s Urtech?”

“They have a targeted delivery method that works.”

“What do you mean, what would that be?”

“It’s new. They just got awarded the patent on it.”

“Oh no.”

“Oh yes.”

“Oh my God. It hasn’t been validated?”

“Except by the patent, and Derek’s offer to buy it, no.”

“Oh my God. Why does he do this stuff?”

“Because he intends to be the CEO of the biggest pharmaceutical of all time. Like he told People magazine.”

“Yeah right.”

Torrey Pines Generique, like most biotech start-ups, was undercapitalized, and could only afford a few rolls of the dice. One of them had to look promising to attract the capital that would allow it to grow further. That was what they had been trying to accomplish for the five years of the company’s existence, and the effort was just beginning to show results with these experiments. What they needed now was to be able to insert their successfully tailored gene into the patient’s own cells, so that afterward it would be the patient’s own body producing increased amounts of the needed proteins. If that worked, there would be no immune response from the body’s immune system, and the patient would be not just helped, but cured.

Amazing.

But (and it was getting to be a big but) the problem of getting the altered DNA into living patients’ cells hadn’t been solved. Leo and his people were not physiologists, and they hadn’t been able to do it. No one had. Immune systems existed precisely to keep these sorts of intrusions from happening. Indeed, one method of inserting the altered DNA into the body was to put it into a virus and give the patient a viral infection, benign in its ultimate effects because the altered DNA reached its target. But since the body fought viral infections, it was not a good solution. You didn’t want to compromise further the immune systems of people who were already sick.