hands.
âVery good, my dear. Now: you will keep alert for anything that goes against your intuition as to how the market should behave, wonât you? And I suppose youâre keen to get back to work, so thank you for your time.â
It was 11.25.
He logged on, getting his password wrong a couple of times. The queue of orders filled one and a half screens. Jordan closed his eyes and breathed deeply, flexed his fingers and got to work. He didnât think about anything.
Â
Janis hardly listened to herself as she rattled through the outlines of what she knew of the project. She was thinking that there was something oddly disproportionate about her part in it: the more she thought about it, the more important it seemed, and that didnât jibe at all with the level of resources appliedâ¦You didnât want a struggling post-doc on this, you wanted a team, lots of lab techs, equipment thrown at it like ammunition. She might be part of a team without knowing it â that was her favoured hypothesis at the moment. With every government nervously restricting biological research, confining it to F S Zees and science peaks, with big corporations looking over their shoulders at consumer groups and junk-science lawsuits, and with green terrorists topping up the restrictions with direct action â with all that, life science was itself becoming an underground guerilla activity. (Sheâd often wondered just what molecule or compound was responsible for hysteria and ineducability in the middle classes: it must have seeped into the food-chain sometime in the nineteen-sixties, and become ever more concentrated since.)
Hell, maybe the backers were poor, maybe there wasnât some giant corporation or institution behind this after allâ¦maybe the three men in front of her were the whole thing ; what the front concealed was that it wasnât a front; What You See Is What You Getâ¦True enough, the rest of the project was almost virtual â robot molecular analyses, computer molecular designs, automatic molecular production. It relied heavily on two techniques, parallel but almost precisely opposite. Genetic algorithms enabled random variations to be selected, varied, selected again in an analogue of Darwinian evolution, against a model of known chemical pathways in the human brain, which ICI -Bayer rented out at a few marks a nanosecond; like, cheap. Polymerase chain reactions enabled the selected molecules to be replicated in any necessary quantity, a process so thoroughly automated that the only human intervention required was washing out the kit.
But, ultimately, the product had to be tested in a living animal, and raw stuff from nature had to be tried out for potential; and at both ends of the cycle stood herself and a lot of white mice.
âSo perhaps you could give us a demonstration of your methods, Doctor Taine?â
Janis had a momentary fellow-feeling with a mouse in a maze: trapped and frantic. She had removed the door from the lab, lugged it to a skip, made sure the representatives of her sponsors entered by the side of the block away from the damaged wall. It wasnât that she intended to fudge the results, ignore the contamination and hope for the best. She fully intended to sacrifice the mice and start afresh. It was just that there wasnât time to do it before she had to demonstrate her competence, and she was afraid that, if she had nothing to demonstrate, the sponsors would sacrifice her and start afresh. She saw a fleeting, mad vision of what she would do if they ever found out â throw it all up and become a creep, wear plastic and live off the land and break into psychology labs and free the flatworms, blow up whale-ships to save the krillâ¦
Three men in dark suits looked at her. She tried not to think of the many jokes beginning There was a Pole, a German and a Russian â¦Gently, she took a mouse from one of the cages and placed it in the entry to the
âVery good, my dear. Now: you will keep alert for anything that goes against your intuition as to how the market should behave, wonât you? And I suppose youâre keen to get back to work, so thank you for your time.â
It was 11.25.
He logged on, getting his password wrong a couple of times. The queue of orders filled one and a half screens. Jordan closed his eyes and breathed deeply, flexed his fingers and got to work. He didnât think about anything.
Â
Janis hardly listened to herself as she rattled through the outlines of what she knew of the project. She was thinking that there was something oddly disproportionate about her part in it: the more she thought about it, the more important it seemed, and that didnât jibe at all with the level of resources appliedâ¦You didnât want a struggling post-doc on this, you wanted a team, lots of lab techs, equipment thrown at it like ammunition. She might be part of a team without knowing it â that was her favoured hypothesis at the moment. With every government nervously restricting biological research, confining it to F S Zees and science peaks, with big corporations looking over their shoulders at consumer groups and junk-science lawsuits, and with green terrorists topping up the restrictions with direct action â with all that, life science was itself becoming an underground guerilla activity. (Sheâd often wondered just what molecule or compound was responsible for hysteria and ineducability in the middle classes: it must have seeped into the food-chain sometime in the nineteen-sixties, and become ever more concentrated since.)
Hell, maybe the backers were poor, maybe there wasnât some giant corporation or institution behind this after allâ¦maybe the three men in front of her were the whole thing ; what the front concealed was that it wasnât a front; What You See Is What You Getâ¦True enough, the rest of the project was almost virtual â robot molecular analyses, computer molecular designs, automatic molecular production. It relied heavily on two techniques, parallel but almost precisely opposite. Genetic algorithms enabled random variations to be selected, varied, selected again in an analogue of Darwinian evolution, against a model of known chemical pathways in the human brain, which ICI -Bayer rented out at a few marks a nanosecond; like, cheap. Polymerase chain reactions enabled the selected molecules to be replicated in any necessary quantity, a process so thoroughly automated that the only human intervention required was washing out the kit.
But, ultimately, the product had to be tested in a living animal, and raw stuff from nature had to be tried out for potential; and at both ends of the cycle stood herself and a lot of white mice.
âSo perhaps you could give us a demonstration of your methods, Doctor Taine?â
Janis had a momentary fellow-feeling with a mouse in a maze: trapped and frantic. She had removed the door from the lab, lugged it to a skip, made sure the representatives of her sponsors entered by the side of the block away from the damaged wall. It wasnât that she intended to fudge the results, ignore the contamination and hope for the best. She fully intended to sacrifice the mice and start afresh. It was just that there wasnât time to do it before she had to demonstrate her competence, and she was afraid that, if she had nothing to demonstrate, the sponsors would sacrifice her and start afresh. She saw a fleeting, mad vision of what she would do if they ever found out â throw it all up and become a creep, wear plastic and live off the land and break into psychology labs and free the flatworms, blow up whale-ships to save the krillâ¦
Three men in dark suits looked at her. She tried not to think of the many jokes beginning There was a Pole, a German and a Russian â¦Gently, she took a mouse from one of the cages and placed it in the entry to the
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