Читать книгу Green Earth - Kim Stanley Robinson - Страница 20

A few days after Frank dropped by, Leo turned on his computer when he came in to the lab and saw there was an e-mail from Derek. He opened and read it, then the attachment that had come with it. When he was done he forwarded it to Brian and Marta. When Marta came in about an hour later she had already done some work on it.

“Hey Brian,” she called from Leo’s door, “come check this out. Derek has sent us a new paper from that Yann Pierzinski who was here. He was funny. It’s a new version of the stuff he was working on when he was here. It was interesting.”

Brian had come in while she was telling him this, and she pointed to parts of the diagram on Leo’s screen as he caught up. “See what I mean?”

“Well, yeah. It would be great. If it worked … Maybe crunch them through this program over and over, until you see repeats, if you did … then test the ones with the ligands that fit best, and look strongest chemically.”

“And Pierzinski is back to work on it with us!”

“Is he?”

“Yeah, he’s coming back. Derek says we’ll have him at our disposal.”

“Cool.”

Leo checked this in the company’s directory. “Yep, here he is. Rehired just this week. Frank Vanderwal came by and mentioned this guy, he must have told Derek about it too. Well, Vanderwal should know, this is his field.”

“It’s my field too,” Marta said sharply.

“Right, of course, I’m just saying Frank might have, you know. Well, let’s ask Yann to look at what we’ve got. If it works …”

Brian said, “Sure. It’s worth trying anyway. Pretty interesting.” He googled Yann, and Leo leaned over his shoulder to look at the list.

“Derek obviously wants us to talk to him right away.”

“He must have rehired him for us.”

“I see that. So let’s get him before he gets busy with something else. A lot of labs could use another biomathematician.”

“True, but there aren’t a lot of labs. I think we’ll get him. Look, what do you think Derek means here, ‘write up the possibilities right away’?”

“I suppose he wants to get started on using the idea to try to secure more funding.”

“Shit. Yeah, that’s probably right. Unbelievable. Okay, let’s pass on that for now, damn it, and give Yann a call.”

Their talk with Yann Pierzinski was indeed interesting. He breezed into the lab just a few days later, as friendly as ever, and happy to be back at Torrey Pines with a permanent job. He was going to be based in George’s math group, he told them, but had already been told by Derek to expect to work a lot with Leo’s lab; so he arrived curious, and ready to go.

Leo enjoyed seeing him again. Yann still had a tendency to become a speed-talker when excited, and he still canted his head to the side when thinking. His algorithm sets were works in progress, he said, and underdeveloped precisely in the gene grammars that Leo and Marta and Brian needed from him; but that was okay, Leo thought, because they could help him, and he was there to help them. They could collaborate, and Yann was a powerful thinker. Leo felt secure in his own lab abilities, devising and running experiments, but when it came to the curious mix of math, symbolic logic, and computer programming that biomathematicians dove into, he was way out of his depth. So Leo was happy to watch Yann sit down and plug his laptop into their desktop.

In the days that followed, they tried his algorithms on the genes of their “HDL factory” cells, Yann substituting different procedures in the last steps of his operations, then checking what they got in the computer simulations, and selecting some for their dish trials. Pretty soon they found one version of the operation that was consistently good at predicting proteins that matched well with their target cells—making keys for their locks, in effect. “That’s what I’ve been hunting for the past year at least!” Yann said happily after one such success.

As they worked, Pierzinski told them some of how he had gotten to that point in his work, following aspects of his advisor’s work at Caltech and the like. Marta and Brian asked him where he had hoped to take it all, in terms of applications. Yann shrugged; not much of anywhere, he told them.

“But Yann, don’t you see what the applications of this could be?”

“I guess. I’m not really interested in pharmacology.”

Leo and Brian and Marta stood there staring at him. Despite his earlier stint there, they didn’t know him very well. He seemed normal enough in most ways, aware of the outside world and so on. To an extent.

Leo said, “Look, let’s go get some lunch, let us take you out to lunch. I want to tell you more about what all this could help us with.”