"Kim Stanley Robinson - Forty Signs of Rain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

“Okay,” he said now to Anna. “I’ll put it in the hopper.” He closed the file and turned as if to check out
something else.

After Anna was gone, he pulled the jacket back up. “Mathematical and Algorithmic Analysis of
Palindromic Codons as Predictors of a Gene’s Protein Expression.” A proposal to fund continuing work
on an algorithm for predicting which proteins any given gene would express.

Very interesting. This was an assault on one of the fundamental mysteries, an unknown step in biology
that presented a considerable blockage to any robust biotechnology. The three billion base pairs of the
human genome encoded along their way some hundred thousand genes; and most of these genes
contained instructions for the assembly of one or more proteins, the basic building blocks of organic
chemistry and life itself. But which genes expressed which proteins, and how exactly they did it, and why
certain genes would create more than one protein, or different proteins in different circumstances—all
these matters were very poorly understood, or completely mysterious. This ignorance made much of
biotechnology an endless and very expensive matter of trial and error. A key to any part of the mystery
could be very valuable.

Frank scrolled down the pages of the application with practiced speed. Yann Pierzinski, Ph.D. in
biomath, Caltech. Still doing postdoc work with his thesis advisor there, a man Frank had come to
consider a bit of a credit hog, if not worse. It was interesting, then, that Pierzinski had gone down to
Torrey Pines to work on a temporary contract, for a bioinformatics researcher whom Frank didn’t know.
Perhaps that had been a bid to escape the advisor. But now he was back.

Frank dug into the substantive part of the proposal. The algorithm set was one Pierzinski had been
working on even back in his dissertation. Chemical mechanics of protein creation as a sort of natural
algorithm, in effect. Frank considered the idea, operation by operation. This was his real expertise; this
was what had interested him from childhood, when the puzzles solved had been simple ciphers. He had
always loved this work, and now perhaps more than ever, offering as it did a complete escape from
consciousness of himself. Why he might want to make that escape remained moot; howsoever it might
be, when he came back he felt refreshed, as if finally he had been in a good place.

He also liked to see patterns emerge from the apparent randomness of the world. This was why he had
recently taken such an interest in sociobiology; he had hoped there might be algorithms to be found there
which would crack the code of human behavior. So far that quest had not been very satisfactory, mostly
because so little in human behavior was susceptible to a controlled experiment, so no theory could even
be tested. That was a shame. He badly wanted some clarification in that realm.

At the level of the four chemicals of the genome, however—in the long dance of cytosine, adenine,
guanine, and thymine—much more seemed to be amenable to mathematical explanation and experiment,
with results that could be conveyed to other scientists, and put to use. One could test Pierzinski’s ideas,
in other words, and find out if they worked.



He came out of this trance of thought hungry, and with a full bladder. He felt quite sure there was some
real potential in the work. And that was giving him some ideas.

He got up stiffly, went to the bathroom, came back. It was midafternoon already. If he left soon he
would be able to hack through the traffic to his apartment, eat quickly, then go out to Great Falls. By then