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 [email protected]. 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