Forty Signs of Rain

  “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: the callipygosity, the shorter torso-to-leg ratio, the 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio—whatever it was, it was different, and it drew his eye like a magnet. 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 while he was still here on his own home ground.

  Something was deeply wrong.

  He checked in the car, robotted through the routines to get him on his plane to Dallas. Sat in a window seat looking down at the view as the plane roared off. Point Loma, the ocean blue from up here, the waves breaking on the coast, perpetually renewing their white tapestry. Bank, turn, Mount Soledad, up through the cloud layer, fly up and east.

  He fell asleep. By the time he woke up again they were descending into Dallas. It was strange to watch the process of falling toward the Earth, the buildings and cars like toys at first, quickly growing to real things that sped by. Then standing, disembarking into the big curves of the Dallas airport, on to its rail shuttle, over to another arc, to sit and wait for the plane to D.C.

  Grimly 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 to hear only what made it seem sensible to behave as they behaved. 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 (on the aisle this time, because the view didn’t matter), feeling more and more disgusted and angry. NSF was part of it; they weren’t doing a thing to help. He got out his laptop, turned it on, and called up a new word processing 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 planet’s carrying capacity for our species, badly damaging the biosphere. Neoclassical 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 ten 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 neoclassical 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 don’t try to instigate the saving of the biosphere, they don’t 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! It’s a chicken with its smart little head stuck in the sand like an ostrich! It’s a chicken ostrich (fix). It’s afraid to take on Congress, it’s afraid to take on business, it’s 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, and yet we have the technological means to feed everyone, house everyone, clothe everyone, doctor everyone, educate everyone—the 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, I’m sure you’re thinking poor Frank Vanderwal has spent a year in the swamp and has gone crazy as a result, and that is true but what I’m 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 it’s 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 to get the budget it deserves, which is a much bigger budget, as big as the Pentagon’s, 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 I’m not coming back and no one in his right mind would come back either

  The plane had started to descend.

  Well, it would need a little 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 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.

  He hit the SAVE button for the first time in about an hour. 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 Leo’s lab, they got busy running trials of Pierzinski’s 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 didn’t notice at first the results that one of Marta’s collaborators was getting with Pierzinski’s 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 Pierzinski’s 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 we’ve been looking into,” Eleanor said that day in her quiet steady voice, very unlike Marta’s, “is the algae in certain lichens. DNA histories are making it clear that some lichens are really ancient partnerships of algae and fungus, and we’ve 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 suprising degree. We think the lichen is helping the trees it colonizes by taking over the tree’s hormone regulation and increasing the tree’s ability to absorb lignins through the growing season.”

  She talked about the possibility of changing their metabolic rates. “Lately we’ve been trying these algorithms Marta brought over, trying to find symbiotes that speed the lichen’s ability to add lignin to the trees.”

  Evolutionary engineering, Leo thought, shaking his head. 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?”

  “We’ve 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 we’ve 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 hasn’t 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 with a red marker she sketched a ground and a tree growing out of it on the whiteboard, 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, or”—drawing more roots under the ground line—“you 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 won’t 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 we’ve been working on is basically a kind of altered tree lichen. The lichen’s photosynthesis is accomplished by the algae in it, and we’ve been using this algorithm of Yann’s to find genes that can be altered to accelerate that. And now we’re 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, we’ve calculated different scenarios, with the altered lichen being introduced into forests of different sizes, all the way up to the whole world’s temperate forest belt. That one has the amount of CO2 drawn down in the billions of tons.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yes. And pretty quickly too.”

  “Watch out,” Brian joked, “you don’t 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.”

  “True.”

  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. That’s very interesting.”

  “I know it doesn’t help you with your delivery problem.”

  “No, but that’s okay, that isn’t what you do. This is still very interesting. It’s 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, he’s a working scientist himself. He still keeps his lab going even while he’s doing all the chancellor stuff.” This gave him credit to burn all over the town’s scientific community.

  Now Eleanor was nodding. “I’ll do that, thanks. He has been very supportive.”

  “Right. And look, I hope you and Marta keep collaborating. Maybe we can get you here to Torrey Pines. Maybe there’s some aspect of hormone regulation you’ll spot that we’re not seeing.”

  “Oh I doubt that, but thanks.”

  Soon after that, Leo got an e-mail from Derek, asking him to attend an appointment with a representative of a venture capital group, to explain the scientific issues. 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 again—especially if it came to a discussion of “rapid hydrodynamic insertion.” No way did Leo want to be supporting Derek’s unfounded assertions to an outsider.

  Derek assured him that he would handle any of this guy’s “speculative questions”—exactly the sort of questions a venture capitalist would have to ask.

  “And so I’ll be there to …”

  “You’ll be there to answer any technical questions about the method as we’re using it now.”

  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 that Derek had gotten an investment from in the company’s early years. This document was very upbeat about the possibilities of the hydrodynamic delivery method. On finishing it Leo’s stomach had contracted to the size of a walnut.

  Later that week, on the day of the meeting, Leo drove down from work to Biocal’s 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 didn’t expect any return on their investments for four to six years, sometimes longer. They could afford to work, or had decided 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 loaning world. The risks were too great, the returns too distant. Only venture capitalists would do it.

  So naturally their 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 on 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 table—expertise, 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. I’ve been reading some of your papers, and I went to that symposium in L.A. last year. You’re doing some great stuff.”

  “It’s true, and now we’re on to 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 we’re so excited about it—and 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 that’s paid off for you, so I thought I’d bring by the current situation and see if you would be interested in doing a PIPE with us.”

  This sounded weird to Leo, like Indians offering a peace pipe, or college students passing around a bong, but Bannet didn’t blink; a PIPE was one of their mechanisms for investment, as Leo quickly learned. “Private Investment in Public Equity.” And for once it was a pretty good acronym, because it meant creating a pipeline for money to run directly from their cash-flush fund to Derek’s penniless company.

  But Bannet was a veteran of all this, alert to all the little strategic opacities that were built into Derek’s t
ypical talk to stockholders or potential investors. Something like sixty percent of biotech start-ups failed, so the danger of losing some or all of an investment to bankruptcy was very real. No way Derek could finesse him. They would have to come clean and hope he liked what he saw.

  Leo gazed out the window at the foggy Pacific, listening to Derek go on. Unbroken waves wrapped around La Jolla Point and pulsed into the cove. The huge apartment block at the end of La Jolla Point blocked his view west, reminding him that big money could accomplish some unlikely things.

  Derek finished leading Bannet through a series of financial spreadsheets on his laptop, unable to disguise their tale of woe. Bad profit and loss; layoffs; sale of some subsidiary contracts, even some patents, their crown jewels; empty coffers.

  “We’ve had to focus on the things that we think are really the most important,” Derek admitted. “It’s made us more efficient, that’s for sure. But it means there really isn’t any fat anywhere, no resources we can put to the task, even though it’s got such incredible potential. So, it seemed like it was time to ask for some outside funding help, with the idea that the financing now would be so crucial that the returns to the investor could and should be really significant.”

  “Uh-huh,” Bannet said, though it wasn’t clear what he was agreeing with. He made thoughtful clucking sounds as he scanned the spreadsheets, murmuring “Um-hmmm, um-hmmm,” in a sociable way, but now that he was thinking about the information in the spreadsheets, his face betrayed an almost burning intensity. This guy was definitely one of the passionate ones, Leo saw.

  “Tell me about this algorithm,” he said finally.

  Derek looked to Leo, who said, “Well, the mathematician developing it is a recent hire at Torrey Pines, and he’s been collaborating with our lab to test a set of operations he’s developed, to see how well they can predict the proteins associated with any given gene, and as you can see”—clicking his own laptop screen to the first of the project report slides—“it’s been really good at predicting them in certain situations,” pointing to them on the screen’s first slide.