He jerked his head up. It was Marta, on her way out.
Oh, hi. Yeah Im okay.
Whats this, stalking me now?
No, then realizing this might be a little bit true: No!
He stared at her, getting angry. She stared back.
Im just catching some waves, he said, mouth tight. Youve got no reason to say such a thing to me.
No? Then why did you ask me out the other day?
A mistake, obviously. I thought it might do some good to talk.
Last year, maybe. But you didnt want to then. You didnt want to so much that you ran off to NSF instead. Now its too late. So just leave me alone, Frank.
I am!
Leave me alone.
She turned and ran into the surf, diving onto her board and paddling hard. When she got out far enough she sat up on her board and balanced, looking outward.
Women in wetsuits looked funny, Frank thought as he watched her. Not just the obvious, but also the subtler differences in body morphology were accentuated. He could tell the difference from as far away as he could see people at all. Every surfer could.
What did that mean? That he was in thrall to a woman who despised him? That he had messed up the main relationship of his life and his best chance so far for reproductive success? That sexual dimorphism was a powerful driver in the urge to reproduction? That he was a slave to his sperm, and an idiot?
All of the above.
His good mood shattered, he hauled himself to his feet. He stripped off the booties and long john, toweled off at his rental car, drove back up to his storage unit, and dropped off his gear. Returned to his hotel room, showered, checked out, and drove down the coast highway to the airport, feeling like an exile, even here on his own home ground.
Something was deeply, deeply wrong.
He checked in the car, got on the plane to Dallas. Waiting in Dallas he watched America walk by. Who were these people who could live so placidly while the world fell into an acute global environmental crisis? Experts at denial. Experts at filtering their information. Many of those walking by went to church on Sundays, believed in God, voted Republican, spent their time shopping and watching TV. Obviously nice people. The world was doomed.
He settled in his next plane seat, feeling more and more disgusted and angry. NSF was part of it; they werent doing a damn thing to help. He got out his laptop, turned it on, and called up a new file. He started to write.
Critique of NSF, first draft. Private to Diane Chang.
NSF was established to support basic scientific research, and it is generally given high marks for that. But its budget has never surpassed ten billion dollars a year, in an overall economy of some ten trillion. It is to be feared that as things stand, NSF is simply too small to have any real impact.
Meanwhile humanity is exceeding the planets carrying capacity for our species, badly damaging the biosphere. Neoliberal economics cannot cope with this situation, and indeed, with its falsely exteriorized costs, was designed in part to disguise it. If the Earth were to suffer a catastrophic anthropogenic extinction event over the next twenty years, which it will, American business would continue to focus on its quarterly profit and loss. There is no economic mechanism for dealing with catastrophe. And yet government and the scientific community are not tackling this situation either, indeed both have consented to be run by neoliberal economics, an obvious pseudoscience. We might as well agree to be governed by astrologers. Everyone at NSF knows this is the situation, and yet no one does anything about it. They dont try to instigate the saving of the biosphere, they dont even call for certain kinds of mitigation projects. They just wait and see what comes in. It is a ridiculously passive position.
Why such passivity, you ask? Because NSF is chicken! Its a chicken with its smart little head stuck in the sand like an ostrich! Its a chicken ostrich (fix). Its afraid to take on Congress, its afraid to take on business, its afraid to take on the American people. Free market fundamentalists are dragging us back to some dismal feudal eternity and destroying everything in the process, all while we have the technological means to feed everyone, house everyone, clothe everyone, doctor everyone, educate everyonethe ability to end suffering and want as well as ecological collapse is right here at hand, and yet NSF continues to dole out its little grants, fiddling while Rome burns!!!
Well whatever nothing to be done about it, Im sure youre thinking poor Frank Vanderwal has spent a year in the swamp and has gone crazy as a result, and that is true, but what Im saying is still right, the world is in big trouble and NSF is one of the few organizations on Earth that could actually help get it out of trouble, and yet its not. It should be charting worldwide scientific policy and forcing certain kinds of climate mitigation and biosphere management, insisting on them as emergency necessities, it should be working Congress like the fucking NRA does, to get the budget it deserves, which is a much bigger budget, as big as the Pentagons, really those two budgets should be reversed to get them to their proper level of funding, but none of it is happening or will happen, and that is why Im not coming back and no one in his right mind would come back either
The plane had started to descend.
Well, it would need revision. Mixed metaphors; something was either a chicken or an ostrich, even if in fact it was both. But he could work on it. He now had a draft in hand, and he would revise it and then give it to Diane Chang, head of NSF, in the slim hope that it would wake her up.
The plane turned for its final descent into Ronald Reagan Airport. Soon he would be back in the wasteland of his current life. Back in the swamp.
Back in Leos lab, they got busy running trials of Pierzinskis algorithm, while continuing the ongoing experiments in rapid hydrodynamic insertion, as it was now called in the emerging literature. Many labs were working on the delivery problem and, crazy as it seemed, this was one of the more promising methods being investigated. A bad sign.
Thus they were so busy on both fronts that they didnt notice at first the results that one of Martas collaborators was getting with Pierzinskis method. Marta had done her Ph.D. studying the microbiology of certain algae, and she was still coauthoring papers with a postdoc named Eleanor Dufours. Leo had met Eleanor, and then read her papers, and been impressed. Now Marta had introduced Eleanor to a version of Pierzinskis algorithm, and things were going well, Marta said. Leo thought his group might be able to learn some things from their work, so he set up a little brown-bag lunch for Eleanor to give a talk.
What weve been looking into, Eleanor said that day in her quiet steady voice, very unlike Martas, is the algae in certain lichens. DNA histories are making it clear that some lichens are really ancient partnerships of algae and fungus, and weve been genetically altering the algae in one of the oldest, Cornicularia cornuta. It grows on trees, and works its way into the trees to a quite surprising degree. We think the lichen is helping the trees it colonizes by taking over the trees hormone regulation and increasing the trees ability to absorb lignins through the growing season.
She talked about the possibility of changing their metabolic rates. Lately weve been trying these algorithms Marta brought over, trying to find algal symbionts that speed the lichens ability to add lignin to the trees.
Engineering evolution, Leo thought. His lab was trying to do similar things, of course, but he seldom thought of it that way. He needed to get this outside view to defamiliarize what he did, to see better what was going on.
Why speed up lignin banking? Brian wanted to know. I mean, what use would it be?
Weve been thinking it might work as a carbon sink.
How so?
Well, you know, people are talking about capturing and sequestering some of the carbon weve put into the atmosphere, in carbon sinks of one kind or other. But no method has looked really good yet. Stimulating plant growth has been one suggestion, but the problem is that most of the plants discussed have been very short-lived, and rotting plant life quickly releases its captured CO2 back into the atmosphere. So unless you can arrange lots of very deep peat bogs, capturing CO2 in small plants hasnt looked very effective.
Her listeners nodded.
So, the thing is, living trees have had hundreds of millions of years of practice in not being eaten and outgassed by bugs. So one possibility would be to grow bigger trees. That turns out not to be so easy, and she sketched a ground and a tree growing out of it on the whiteboard, with a red marker so that it looked like something a five-year-old would draw. Sorry. See, most trees are already as tall as they can get, because of physical constraints like soil qualities and wind speeds. So, you can make them thicker, ordrawing more roots under the ground lineyou can make the roots thicker. But trying to do that directly involves genetic changes that harm the trees in other ways, and anyway is usually very slow.
So it wont work, Brian said.
Right, she said patiently, but many trees host these lichen, and the lichen regulate lignin production in a way that might be bumped, so the tree would quite quickly capture carbon that would remain sequestered for as long as the tree lived.
So, given all this, what weve been working on is a kind of altered tree lichen. The lichens photosynthesis is accomplished by the algae in it, and weve been using this algorithm of Yanns to find genes that can be altered to accelerate that. And now were getting the lichen to export the excess sugar into its host tree, down in the roots. It seems like we might be able to really accelerate the root growth and girth of the trees that these lichens grow on.
Capturing like how much carbon?
Well, weve calculated different scenarios, with the altered lichen being introduced into forests of different sizes, all the way up to the whole worlds temperate forest belt. That one has the amount of CO2 that would be drawn down in the billions of tons.
Wow.
Yes. And pretty quickly, too.
Watch out, Brian joked, you dont want to be causing an ice age here.
True. But that would be a problem that came later. And we know how to warm things up, after all. But at this point any carbon capture would be good. There are some really bad effects coming down the pike these days, as you know.
They all sat and stared at the mess of letters and lines and little tree drawings she had scribbled on the whiteboard.
Leo broke the silence. Wow, Eleanor. Thats very interesting.
I know it doesnt help you with your delivery problem.
No, but thats okay, that isnt what you do. This is still very interesting. Its a different problem is all, but that happens. This is great stuff. Have you shown this to the chancellor yet?
No. She looked surprised.
You should. He loves stuff like this, and, you know, hes a working scientist himself. He still keeps his lab going even while hes doing all the chancellor stuff.
Now Eleanor was nodding. Ill do that. He has been very supportive.
Right. And look, I hope you and Marta keep collaborating. Maybe theres some aspect of hormone regulation youll spot that were not seeing.
I doubt that, but thanks.
Soon after that, Leo got an e-mail from Derek, asking him to join a meeting with a representative of a venture capital group. This had happened a few times back when Torrey Pines was a hot new start-up, so Leo knew the drill, and was therefore extremely uncomfortable with the idea of doing it againespecially if it came to a discussion of rapid hydrodynamic insertion. No way did Leo want to be supporting Dereks unfounded assertions to an outsider.
Derek assured him that he would handle any of this guys speculative questionsexactly the sort of questions a venture capitalist would have to ask.
And so Ill be there to
Youll be there to answer any technical questions about the method.
Great.
Before the meeting Leo was shown a copy of the executive summary and offering memorandum Derek had sent to Biocal, a venture capital firm from which Derek had gotten an investment in the companys early years. This document was very upbeat about the possibilities of the hydrodynamic delivery method. On finishing it Leos stomach had contracted to the size of a walnut.
The meeting was in Biocals offices, located in an upscale building in downtown La Jolla, just off Prospect near the point. Their meeting room windows had a great view up the coast. Leo could almost spot their own building, on the cliff across La Jolla Cove.
Their host, Henry Bannet, was a trim man in his forties, relaxed and athletic-looking, friendly in the usual San Diego manner. His firm was a private partnership, doing strategic investing in biotechnologies. A billion-dollar fund, Derek had said. And they didnt expect any return on their investments for four to six years, sometimes longer. They could afford to work at the pace of medical progress itself. Their game was high-risk, high-return, long-range investment. This was not a kind of investment that banks would make, nor anyone else in the lending world. The risks were too great, the returns too distant. Only venture capitalists would do it.
So naturally these guys help was much in demand from small biotech companies. There were something like three hundred biotechs in the San Diego area alone, and many of them were hanging by the skin of their teeth, hoping for that first successful cash cow to keep them going or get them bought. Venture capitalists would therefore get to pick and choose what they wanted to invest in; and many of them were pursuing particular interests, or even passions. Naturally in these areas they were very well-informed, expert in combining scientific and financial analysis into what they called doing due diligence. They spoke of being value-added investors, of bringing much more than money to the tableexpertise, networking, advice.
This guy Bannet looked to Leo to be one of the passionate ones. He was friendly but intent. A man at work. There was very little chance Derek was going to be able to impress him with smoke and mirrors.
Thanks for seeing us, Derek said.
Bannet waved a hand. Always interested to talk to you guys. Ive been reading some of your papers, and I went to that symposium in L.A. last year. Youre doing some great stuff.
Its true, and now were onto something really good, with real potential to revolutionize genetic engineering by getting tailored DNA into people who need it. It could be a method useful to a whole bunch of different therapies, which is one of the reasons were so excited about itand trying to ramp up our efforts to speed the process along. So I remembered how much you helped us during the start-up, and how well thats paid off for you, so I thought Id bring by the current situation and see if you would be interested in doing a PIPE with us.