Forty Signs of Rain

But no one had replied.

He went out onto the bas-relief balcony, into the sultry late afternoon. Another two months and he would be going home, back to resume his real life. He was looking forward to it. He wanted to float in the Pacific. He wanted to walk around beautiful UCSD in its cool warmth, eat lunch with old colleagues among the eucalyptus trees.

Thinking about that reminded him of the grant application from Yann Pierzinski. He went inside to his laptop and googled him to try to learn more about what he had been up to. Then he re-opened his application, and found the section on the part of the algorithm to be developed. Primitive recursion at the boundary limit … it was interesting.

After some more thought, he called up Derek Gaspar at Torrey Pines Generique.

‘What’s up?’ Derek said after the preliminaries.

‘Well, I just got a grant proposal from one of your people, and I’m wondering if you can tell me anything about it.’

‘From one of mine, what do you mean?’

‘A Yann Pierzinski, do you know him?’

‘No, never heard of him. He works here you say?’

‘He was there on a temporary contract, working with Simpson. He’s a post-doc from Caltech.’

‘Ah yeah, here we go. Mathematician, got a paper in Biomathematics on algorithms.’

‘Yeah, that comes up first on my google too.’

‘Well sure. I can’t be expected to know everyone who ever worked with us here, that’s hundreds of people, you know that.’

‘Sure sure.’

‘So what’s his proposal about? Are you going to give him a grant?’

‘Not up to me, you know that. We’ll see what the panel says. But meanwhile, maybe you should check it out.’

‘Oh you like it then?’

‘I think it may be interesting, it’s hard to tell at this stage. Just don’t drop him.’

‘Well, our records show him as already gone back up to Pasadena, to finish his work up there I presume. Like you said, his gig here was temporary.’

‘Ah ha. Man, your research groups have been gutted.’

‘Not gutted, Frank, we’re down to the bare bones in some areas, but we’ve kept what we need to. There have been some hard choices to make. Kenton wanted his note repaid, and the timing couldn’t have been worse, coming after that stage two in India. It’s been tough, really tough. That’s one of the reasons I’ll be happy when you’re back out here.’

‘I don’t work for Torrey Pines any more.’

‘No I know, but maybe you could rejoin us when you move back here.’

‘Maybe. If you get new financing.’

‘I’m trying, believe me. That’s why I’d like to have you back on board.’

‘We’ll see. Let’s talk about it when I’m out there. Meanwhile, don’t cut any more of your other research efforts. They might be what draws the new financing.’

‘I hope so. I’m doing what I can, believe me. We’re trying to hold on till something comes through.’

‘Yeah. Hang in there then. I’ll be out looking for a place to live in a couple of weeks, I’ll come see you then.’

‘Good, make an appointment with Susan.’

Frank clicked off his phone, sat back in his chair thinking it over. Derek was like a lot of first-generation CEOs of biotech start-ups. He had come out of the biology department at UCSD, and his business acumen had been gained on the job. Some people managed to do this successfully, others didn’t, but all tended to fall behind on the actual science being done, and had to take on faith what was really possible in the labs. Certainly Derek could use some help in guiding policy at Torrey Pines Generique.

Frank went back to studying the grant proposal. There were elements of the algorithm missing, as was typical. That was what the grant was for, to pay for the work that would finish the project. And some people made a habit of describing crucial aspects of their work in general terms when at the pre-pub stage, a matter of being cautious. So he could not be sure about it, but he could see the potential for a very powerful method there. Earlier in the day he had thought he saw a way to plug one of the gaps that Pierzinski had left, and if that worked as he thought it might …

‘Hmmmm,’ he said to the empty room.

If the situation was still fluid when he went out to San Diego, he could perhaps set things up quite nicely. There were some potential problems, of course. NSF’s guidelines stated explicitly that although any copyrights, patents or project income belonged to the grant-holder, NSF always kept a public-right use for all grant-subsidized work. That would keep any big gains from being made by any individual or company on a project like this, if it was awarded a grant. Purely private control could only be maintained if there had not been any public money granted.

Also, the PI on the proposal was Pierzinski’s advisor at Caltech, battening off the work of his students in the usual way. Of course it was an exchange – the advisor gave the student credibility, and a licence to apply for a grant, by contributing his name and prestige to the project. The student provided the work, sometimes all of it, sometimes just a portion of it. In this case, it looked to Frank like all of it.

Anyway, the grant proposal came from Caltech. Caltech and the PI would hold the rights to anything the project made, along with NSF itself, even if Pierzinski moved afterwards. So, if for instance an effort was going to be made to bring Pierzinski to Torry Pines Generique, it would be best if this particular proposal were to be declined. And if the algorithm worked and became patentable, then again, keeping control of what it made would only be possible if the proposal were to be declined.

That line of thought made him feel jumpy. In fact he was on his feet, pacing out to the mini-balcony and back in again. Then he remembered he had been planning to go out to Great Falls anyway. He quickly finished his cottage cheese, pulled his climbing kit out of the closet, changed clothes, and went back down to his car.

The Great Falls of the Potomac was a complicated thing, a long tumble of whitewater falling down past a few islands. The complexity of the falls was its main visual appeal, as it was no very great thing in terms of total height, or even volume of water. Its roar was the biggest thing about it.

The spray it threw up seemed to consolidate and knock down the humidity, so that paradoxically it was less humid here than elsewhere, although wet and mossy underfoot. Frank walked downstream along the edge of the gorge. Below the falls the river recollected itself and ran through a defile called Mather Gorge, a ravine with a south wall so steep that climbers were drawn to it. One section called Carter Rock was Frank’s favourite. It was a simple matter to tie a rope to a top belay, usually a stout tree trunk near the cliff’s edge, and then abseil down the rope to the bottom and either free-climb up, or clip onto the rope with an ascender and go through the hassles of self-belay.

One could climb in teams too, of course, and many did, but there were about as many singletons like Frank here as there were duets. Some even free soloed the wall, dispensing with all protection. Frank liked to play it just a little safer than that, but he had climbed here so many times now that sometimes he abseiled down and free-climbed next to his rope, pretending to himself that he could grab it if he fell. The few routes available were all chalked and greasy from repeated use. He decided this time to clip onto the rope with the ascender.

The river and its gorge created a band of open sky that was unusually big for the metropolitan area. This as much as anything else gave Frank the feeling that he was in a good place: on a wall route, near water, and open to the sky. Out of the claustrophobia of the great hardwood forest, one of the things about the East Coast that Frank hated the most. There were times he would have given a finger for the sight of open land.

Now, as he abseiled down to the small tumble of big boulders at the foot of the cliff, chalked his hands, and began to climb the fine-grained old schist of the route, he cheered up. He focused on his immediate surroundings to a degree unimaginable when he was not climbing. It was like the maths work, only then he wasn’t anywhere at all. Here, he was right on these very particular rocks.

This route he had climbed before many times. About a 5.8 or 5.9 at its crux, much easier elsewhere. Hard to find really difficult pitches here, but that didn’t matter. Even climbing up out of a ravine, rather than up onto a peak, didn’t matter. The constant roar, the spray, those didn’t matter. Only the climbing itself mattered.

His legs did most of the work. Find the footholds, fit his rockclimbing shoes into cracks or onto knobs, then look for handholds; and up, and up again, using his hands only for balance, and a kind of tactile reassurance that he was seeing what he was seeing, that the footholds he was expecting to use would be enough. Climbing was the bliss of perfect attention, a kind of devotion, or prayer. Or simply a retreat into the supreme competencies of the primate cerebellum. A lot was conserved.

By now it was evening. A sultry summer evening, sunset near, the air itself going yellow. He topped out and sat on the rim, feeling the sweat on his face fail to evaporate.

There was a kayaker, below in the river. A woman, he thought, though she wore a helmet and was broad-shouldered and flat-chested – he would have been hard-pressed to say exactly how he knew, and yet he was sure. This was another savannah competency, and indeed some anthropologists postulated that this kind of rapid identification of reproductive possibility was what the enlarged neocortex had grown to do. The brain growing with such evolutionary speed, specifically to get along with the other sex. A depressing thought given the results so far.

This woman was paddling smoothly upstream, into the hissing water that only around her seemed to be recollecting itself as a liquid. Upstream it was a steep rapids, leading to the white smash at the bottom of the falls proper.

The kayaker pushed up into this wilder section, paddling harder upstream, then held her position against the flow while she studied the falls ahead. Then she took off hard, attacking a white smooth flow in the lowest section, a kind of ramp through the smash, up to a terrace in the whitewater. When she reached the little flat she could rest again, in another slightly more strenuous maintenance paddle, gathering her strength for the next salmonlike climb.

Abruptly leaving the strange refuge of that flat spot, she attacked another ramp that led up to a bigger plateau of flat black water, a pool that had an eddy in it, apparently, rolling backward and allowing her to rest in place. There was no room there to gain any speed for another leap up, so that she appeared to be stuck; but maybe she was only studying her way, or waiting for a moment of reduced flow, because all of a sudden she attacked the water with a fierce flurry of paddle strokes, and seemingly willed her craft up the next pouring ramp. Five or seven desperate seconds later she levelled out again, on a tiny little bench of a refuge that did not have a pushback eddy, judging by the intensity of her maintenance paddling there. After only a few seconds she had to try a ramp to her right or get pushed back off her perch, and so she took off and fought upstream, fists moving fast as a boxer’s, the kayak at an impossible angle, looking like a miracle – until all of sudden it was swept back down, and she had to make a quick turn and then take a wild ride, bouncing down the falls by a different and steeper route than the one she had ascended, losing in a few swift seconds the height that she had taken a minute or two’s hard labour to gain.

‘Wow,’ Frank said, smitten.

She was already almost down to the hissing tapestry of flat river right below him, and he felt an urge to wave to her, or stand and applaud. He restrained himself, not wanting to impose upon another athlete obviously deep in her own space. But he did whip out his cell phone and try out a GPS-oriented directory search, figuring that if she had a cell phone with a transponder in the kayak, it had to be very close to his own phone’s position. He checked his position, entered thirty metres north of that; got nothing. Same with the position twenty metres farther east.

‘Ah well,’ he said, and stood to go. It was sunset now, and the smooth stretches of the river had turned a pale orange. Time to go home and try to fall asleep.

‘In search of kayaker gal, seen going upstream at Great Falls. Great ride, I love you, please respond.’

He would not send that in to the free papers, but only spoke it as a kind of prayer to the sunset. Down below the kayaker was turning to start upstream again.

It could be said that science is boring, or even that science wants to be boring, in that it wants to be beyond all dispute. It wants to understand the phenomena of the world in ways that everyone can agree on and share; it wants to make assertions from a position that is not any particular subject’s position, assertions that if tested for accuracy by any sentient being would cause that being to agree with the assertions. Complete agreement; the world put under a description – stated that way, it begins to sound interesting.

And indeed it is. Nothing human is boring. Nevertheless, the minute details of the everyday grind involved in any particular bit of scientific practice can be tedious even to the practitioners. A lot of it, as with most work in this world, involves wasted time, false leads, dead ends, faulty equipment, dubious techniques, bad data, and a huge amount of detail work. Only when it is written up in a paper does it tell a tale of things going right, step by step, in meticulous and replicable detail, like a proof in Euclid. That stage is a highly artificial result of a long process of grinding.

In the case of Leo and his lab, and the matter of the new targeted non-viral delivery system from Maryland, several hundred hours of human labour, and many more of computer time, were devoted to an attempted repetition of an experiment described in the crucial paper, ‘In Vivo Insertion of cDNA 1568rr Into CBA/H, BALB/c, and C57BL/6 Mice’.

At the end of this process, Leo had confirmed the theory he had formulated the very moment he had read the paper describing the experiment.

‘It’s a goddamned artifact.’

Marta and Brian sat there staring at the print-outs. Marta had killed a couple hundred of the Jackson Lab’s finest mice in the course of confirming this theory of Leo’s, and now she was looking more murderous than ever. You didn’t want to mess with Marta on the days when she had to sacrifice some mice, nor even talk to her.

Brian sighed.

Leo said, ‘It only works if you pump the mice full of the stuff till they just about explode. I mean look at them. They look like hamsters. Or guinea pigs. Their little eyes are about to pop out of their heads.’

‘No wonder,’ Brian said. ‘There’s only two millilitres of blood in a mouse, and we’re injecting them with one.’

Leo shook his head. ‘How the hell did they get away with that?’

‘The CBAs are kind of round and furry.’

‘What are you saying, they’re bred to hide artifacts?’

‘No.’

‘It’s an artifact!’

‘Well, it’s useless, anyway.’

An artifact was what they called an experimental result that was specific to the methodology of the experiment, but not illustrating anything beyond that. A kind of accident or false result, and in a few celebrated cases, part of a deliberate hoax.

So Brian was trying to be careful using the word. It was possible that it was no worse than a real result that happened to be generated in a way that made it useless for their particular purposes. Trying to turn things that people have learned about biological processes into medicines led to that sort of thing. It happened all the time, and all those experimental results were not necessarily artifacts. They just weren’t useful facts.

Not yet, anyway. That’s why there were so many experiments, and so many stages to the human trials that had to be so carefully conducted; so many double-blind studies, held with as many patients as possible included, to get good statistical data. Hundreds of Swedish nurses, all with the same habits, studied for half a century – but these kinds of powerful long-term studies were very rarely possible. Never, when the substances being tested were brand-new – literally, in the sense that they were still under patent and had brand names different from their scientific appellations.

So all the little baby biotechs, and all the start-up pharmaceuticals, paid for the best stage-one studies they could afford. They scoured the literature, and ran experiments on computers and lab samples, and then on mice or other lab animals, hunting for data that could be put through a reliable analysis that would tell them something about how a potential new medicine worked in people. Then the human trials.

It was usually a matter of two to ten years of work, costing anywhere up to five hundred million dollars, though naturally cheaper was better. Longer and more expensive than that, and the new drug or method would almost certainly be abandoned; the money would run out, and the scientists involved would by necessity move on to something else.

In this case, however, where Leo was dealing with a method that Derek Gaspar had bought for fifty-one million dollars, there could be no stage-one human trials. They would be impossible. ‘No one’s gonna let themselves be blown up like a balloon! Blown up like a goddam bike tyre! Your kidneys would get swamped or some kind of oedema would kill you.’

‘We’re going to have to tell Derek the bad news.’

‘Derek is not going to like it.’

‘Not going to like it! Fifty-one million dollars? He’s going to hate it!’

‘Think about blowing that much money. What an idiot he is.’

‘Is it worse to have a scientist who is a bad businessman as your CEO, or a businessman who is a bad scientist?’

‘What about when they’re both?’

They sat around the bench looking at the mice cages and the rolls of data sheets. A Dilbert cartoon mocked them as it peeled away from the end of the counter. It was a sign of something deep that this lab had Dilberts taped to the walls rather than Far Sides.

‘An in-person meeting for this particular communication is contra-indicated,’ said Brian.

‘No shit,’ Leo said.

Marta snorted. ‘You can’t get a meeting with him anyway.’

‘Ha ha.’ But Leo was far enough out on the periphery of Torrey Pine Generique’s power structure that getting a meeting with Derek was indeed difficult.

‘It’s true,’ Marta insisted. ‘You might as well be trying to schedule a doctor’s appointment.’

‘Which is stupid,’ Brian pointed out. ‘The company is totally dependent on what happens in this lab.’

‘Not totally,’ Leo said.

‘Yes it is! But that’s not what the business schools teach these guys. The lab is just another place of production. Management tells production what to produce, and the place of production produces it. Input from the agency of production would be wrong.’

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