Forty Signs of Rain. Kim Stanley Robinson

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СКАЧАТЬ to counteract the effects, even though ten miles inland it was a cloudless baking desert all the year round. The June Gloom had come home to roost.

      Leo Mulhouse took the coast highway to work every morning. He liked seeing the ocean, and feeling the slight roller-coaster effect of dropping down to cross the lagoons, then motoring back up little rises to Cardiff, Solano Beach and Del Mar. These towns looked best at this hour, deserted and as if washed for the new day. Hiss of tyres on wet road, wet squeak of windshield wipers, distant boom of the waves breaking – it all combined to make a kind of aquatic experience, the drive like surfing, up and down the same bowls every time, riding the perpetual wave of land about to break into the sea.

      Up the big hill onto Torrey Pines, past the golf course, quick right into Torrey Pines Generique. Down into its parking garage, descending into the belly of work. Into the biotech beast.

      Meaning a complete security exam, just to get in. If they didn’t know what you came in with, they wouldn’t be able to judge what you went out with. So, metal detector, inspection by the bored security team with their huge coffee cups, computer turned on, hardware and software check by experts, sniff-over by Clyde the morning dog, trained to detect signature molecules: all standard in biotech now, after some famous incidents of industrial espionage. The stakes were too high to trust anybody.

      Then Leo was inside the compound, walking down long white hallways. He put his coffee on his desk, turned on his desktop computer, went out to check the experiments in progress. The most important current one was reaching an endpoint, and Leo was particularly interested in the results. They had been using high-throughput screening of some of the many thousands of proteins listed in the Protein Data Bank at UCSD, trying to identify some that would activate certain cells in a way that would make these cells express more high-density lipoprotein than they would normally – perhaps ten times as much. Ten times as much HDL, the ‘good cholestorol’, would be a life-saver 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 drank his coffee and read Bioworld Today onscreen. Higher through-put screening robotics, analysis protocols for artificial hormones, proteomic analyses – every article could have described something that was going on at Torrey Pines Generique. The whole industry was looking for ways to improve the hunt for therapeutic proteins, and for ways to get those proteins into living people. Half the day’s articles were devoted to one of these problems or the other, as in any other issue of the newszine. They were the recalcitrant outstanding problems, standing between ‘biotechnology’ as an idea and medicine as it actually existed. If they didn’t solve these problems, the idea and the industry based on it could go the way of nuclear power, and turn into something that somehow did not work out. If they did solve them, then it would turn into something 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.

      ‘Good morning guys.’

      ‘Hey Leo.’ Marta aimed her pipette like a power-point 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. ‘No. You’re kidding.’

      ‘I’m not kidding.’

      ‘Oh not really. Not really.’

      ‘Really.’

      ‘How could he?’

      ‘Press release. Also calls to his favourite 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 Roadrunner 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! He 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 haemophilia A whipped?’ Brian said.

      ‘Please.’

      ‘Remember the time he put out a press release saying he had decapitated mice at a thousand r.p.m. 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 why why?’

      It was a rhetorical question, but Marta and Brian were now standing in the doorway, and Marta was implacable: ‘I tell 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 СКАЧАТЬ