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

air and the gray foaming ocean, eighty feet below. And not that stable a cliff. He wished that the house
had been placed a little farther back on its lot.

Back inside, fill his travel coffee cup, down to the car. Down Europa, past the Pannikin, hang a right and
head to work.

The Pacific Coast Highway in San Diego County was a beautiful drive at dawn. In any kind of weather it
was handsome: in new sun with all the pale blues lifting out of the sea, in scattered cloud when shards and
rays of horizontal sunlight broke through, or on rainy or foggy mornings when the narrow but rich palette
of grays filled the eye with the subtlest of gradations. The gray dawns were by far the most frequent, as
the region’s climate settled into what appeared to be a permanent El Niño—the Hyperniño, as people
called it. The whole idea of a Mediterranean climate leaving the world, even in the Mediterranean, people
said. Here coastal residents were getting sunlight deficiency disorders, and taking vitamin D and
antidepressants 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 tires 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 cholesterol,” would be a lifesaver 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 readBioworld Today on-screen. Higher throughput 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