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 contraindicated,” 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 Pines 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.”
“Like the assembly line choosing what to make,” Marta said.
“Right. Thus the idiocy of business management theory in our time.”
“I’ll send him an e-mail,” Leo decided.
So Leo sent Derek an e-mail concerning what Brian and Marta persisted in calling the exploding mice problem. Derek (according to reports they heard later) swelled up like one of their experimental subjects. It appeared he had been IVed with two quarts of genetically engineered righteous indignation.
“It’s in the literature!” he was reported to have shouted at Dr. Sam Houston, his vice president in charge of research and development. “It was in
The Journal of Immunology
, there were two papers that were peer-reviewed, they
got a patent for it
! I went out there to Maryland and checked it all out myself! It worked there, damn it. So
make it work here.”
“ ‘Make it work’?” Marta said when she heard this story. “You see what I mean?”
“Well, you know,” Leo said grimly. “That’s the tech in biotech, right?”
“Hmmm,” Brian said, interested despite himself.
After all, the manipulations of gene and cell that they made were hardly ever done “just to find things out,” though they did that too. They were done to accomplish certain things inside the cell, and hopefully later, inside a living body. Biotechnology,
bio techno logos;
the word on how to put the tool into the living organism. Genetic engineering meant designing and building something new inside a body’s DNA, to effect something in the metabolism.
They had done the genetics; now it was time for the engineering.
So Leo and Brian and Marta, and the rest of Leo’s lab, and some people from labs elsewhere in the building, began to work on this problem. Sometimes at the end of a day, when the sun was breaking sideways through gaps in the clouds out to sea, shining weakly in the tinted windows and illuminating their faces as they sat around two desks covered by reprints and offprints, they would talk over the issues involved, and compare their most recent results, and try to make sense of the problem. Sometimes one of them would stand up and use the whiteboard to sketch out some diagram illustrating his or her conception of what was going on, down there forever below the level of their physical senses. The rest would comment, and drink coffee, and think it over.
For a while they considered assumptions the original experimenters had made:
“Maybe the flushing dose doesn’t have to be that high.”
“Maybe the solution could be stronger, they seem to have topped out kind of low.”
“But that’s because of what happens to the …”
“See, the group at UW found that out when they were working on …”
“Yeah that’s right. Shit.”
“The thing is, it does work, when you do everything they did. I mean the transference will
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 contraindicated,” 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 Pines 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.”
“Like the assembly line choosing what to make,” Marta said.
“Right. Thus the idiocy of business management theory in our time.”
“I’ll send him an e-mail,” Leo decided.
So Leo sent Derek an e-mail concerning what Brian and Marta persisted in calling the exploding mice problem. Derek (according to reports they heard later) swelled up like one of their experimental subjects. It appeared he had been IVed with two quarts of genetically engineered righteous indignation.
“It’s in the literature!” he was reported to have shouted at Dr. Sam Houston, his vice president in charge of research and development. “It was in
The Journal of Immunology
, there were two papers that were peer-reviewed, they
got a patent for it
! I went out there to Maryland and checked it all out myself! It worked there, damn it. So
make it work here.”
“ ‘Make it work’?” Marta said when she heard this story. “You see what I mean?”
“Well, you know,” Leo said grimly. “That’s the tech in biotech, right?”
“Hmmm,” Brian said, interested despite himself.
After all, the manipulations of gene and cell that they made were hardly ever done “just to find things out,” though they did that too. They were done to accomplish certain things inside the cell, and hopefully later, inside a living body. Biotechnology,
bio techno logos;
the word on how to put the tool into the living organism. Genetic engineering meant designing and building something new inside a body’s DNA, to effect something in the metabolism.
They had done the genetics; now it was time for the engineering.
So Leo and Brian and Marta, and the rest of Leo’s lab, and some people from labs elsewhere in the building, began to work on this problem. Sometimes at the end of a day, when the sun was breaking sideways through gaps in the clouds out to sea, shining weakly in the tinted windows and illuminating their faces as they sat around two desks covered by reprints and offprints, they would talk over the issues involved, and compare their most recent results, and try to make sense of the problem. Sometimes one of them would stand up and use the whiteboard to sketch out some diagram illustrating his or her conception of what was going on, down there forever below the level of their physical senses. The rest would comment, and drink coffee, and think it over.
For a while they considered assumptions the original experimenters had made:
“Maybe the flushing dose doesn’t have to be that high.”
“Maybe the solution could be stronger, they seem to have topped out kind of low.”
“But that’s because of what happens to the …”
“See, the group at UW found that out when they were working on …”
“Yeah that’s right. Shit.”
“The thing is, it does work, when you do everything they did. I mean the transference will
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