Green Earth

Traffic was not a good place to try to decide. Stop and go, stop and go, at a speed just faster than Frank could have walked. It had been a bad mistake to get on the Beltway in the first place. By and large Beltway drivers were defectors. In general, drivers on the East Coast were less generous than Californians, Frank found. Maybe this only meant Californians had lived through that many more traffic jams. In California cars in two merging lanes would alternate like the halves of a zipper, at considerable speed, everyone trusting everyone else to know the game and play it right. Here on the Beltway, on the other hand, it was always defect. That was what all the SUVs were about, everyone girding up for a crash. Every SUV was a defection. And so it was slow: unnecessarily, unobservantly slow. It made you want to scream.

And from time to time, Frank did scream. This was a different primate satisfaction: in traffic you could loudly curse people from ten feet away and they did not hear you. There was no way the primate brain could explain this, so it was an example of the “technological sublime.” And it was indeed sublime to lose all restraint and curse someone ferociously from a few feet away, and yet suffer no ramifications from such a grave affront.

So he crept forward in traffic, cursing. The Beltway was badly overloaded at this hour. It was so bad that Frank realized he was going to be late to work. And this was the morning when his bioinformatics panel was to begin! He needed to be there for the panel to start on time. The panel members were all in town, some would be gathering at this very moment in their third-floor conference room, ready to go, feeling that there wasn’t enough time to judge all the proposals on the docket. Frank had crowded the schedule on purpose so they would not have time to properly evaluate every proposal. To arrive late in this situation would be bad form indeed. There would be looks; he would have to make excuses. It might even interfere with his plan.

So coming to Route 66, he impulsively decided to get on it going east, even though at this hour it was reserved for High Occupancy Vehicles only. Normally Frank obeyed this rule, but now he took the turn and curved onto 66, where traffic was indeed moving faster. Every vehicle was occupied by at least two people, of course, and Frank stayed in the right lane and drove as unobtrusively as possible, counting on the generally inward attention of people in vehicles to keep too many people from noticing his transgression. Of course there were highway patrol cars on the lookout for lawbreakers like Frank, so he was taking a risk that he didn’t like to take, but it seemed to him a lower risk than staying on the Beltway, in terms of getting to work on time.

He drove in great suspense, therefore, until finally he could signal to get off at Fairfax. Then as he approached he saw a police car parked beside the exit, its officers walking back toward their car after dealing with another miscreant. They might easily look up and see him.

A big old pickup truck was slowing down to exit before him, and again without pausing to consider his actions, Frank floored the accelerator, swerved around the truck on its left side, using it to block the policemen’s view, then cut back across in front of the truck, accelerating so as not to bother it. Room to spare and no one the wiser. He curved to the right down the exit lane, slowing for the light around the turn.

Suddenly there was loud honking from behind, and his rearview mirror was entirely filled by the front grill of the pickup truck, its headlights at about the same height as the roof of his car. Frank speeded up. Then, closing on the car in front of him, he had to slow down. Suddenly the truck was now passing him on the left, as he had passed it earlier, even though this took the truck up onto the exit lane’s tilted shoulder. Frank looked and glimpsed the infuriated face of the driver, leaning over to shout down at him. Long stringy hair, mustache, red skin, furious anger.

Frank looked over again and shrugged, making a face and gesture that said, What? He slowed down so that the truck could cut in front of him, a good thing as it slammed into the lane so hard it missed Frank’s left headlight by an inch. He would have struck Frank for sure if Frank hadn’t slowed down. What a jerk!

Then the guy hit his brakes so hard that Frank nearly rear-ended him, which could have been a disaster given how high the truck was jacked up. Frank would have hit windshield first.

“What the fuck!” Frank said, shocked. “Fuck you! I didn’t come anywhere near you!”

The truck came to a full stop, right there on the exit lane.

“Jesus, you fucking idiot!” Frank shouted.

Maybe Frank had cut closer to this guy than he thought he had. Or maybe the guy was hounding him for driving solo on 66, even though he had been doing the same thing himself. Now his door flew open and out he jumped, swaggering back toward Frank. He caught sight of Frank still shouting, stopped and pointed a quivering finger, reached into the bed of his truck, and pulled out a crowbar.

Frank reversed gear, backed up and braked, shifted into drive, and hauled on his steering wheel as he accelerated around the pickup truck’s right side. People behind them were honking, but they didn’t know the half of it. Frank zoomed down the now-empty exit lane, shouting triumphant abuse at the crazy guy.

Unfortunately the traffic light at the end of the exit ramp was red and there was a car stopped there, waiting for it to change. Frank had to stop. Instantly there was a thunk and he jerked forward. The pickup truck had rear-ended him, tapping him hard from behind.

“YOU FUCKER!” Frank shouted, now frightened; he had tangled with a madman! The truck was backing up, presumably to ram him again, so he put his little Honda in reverse and shot back into the truck, like hitting a wall, then shifted again and shot off into the narrow gap to the right of the car waiting at the light, turning right and accelerating into a gap between the cars zipping by, which caused more angry honks. He checked his rearview mirror and saw that light had changed and the pickup truck was turning to follow him, and not far behind. “Shit!”

Frank accelerated, saw an opening in traffic coming the other way, and took a sharp left across all lanes onto Glebe, even though it was the wrong direction for NSF. Then he floored it and began weaving desperately through cars he was rapidly overtaking, checking the rearview mirror when he could. The pickup appeared in the distance, squealing onto Glebe after him. Frank cursed in dismay.

He decided to drive directly to a fire station he recalled seeing on Lee Highway. He took a left on Lee and accelerated as hard as the little fuel-cell car could to the fire station, squealing into its parking lot and then jumping out and hurrying toward the building, looking back down Lee toward Glebe.

But the madman never appeared. Gone. Lost the trail, or lost interest. Off to harass someone else.

Cursing still, Frank checked his car’s rear. No visible damage, amazingly. He got back in and drove south to the NSF building, involuntarily reliving the experience. He had no clear idea why it had happened. He had driven around the guy but he had not really cut him off, and though it was true he had been poaching on 66, so had the guy. It was inexplicable; and it occurred to him that in the face of such behavior, modeling exercises like prisoner’s dilemma were useless. People did not make rational judgments. Especially, perhaps, the people driving too-large pickup trucks, this one of the dirty-and-dinged variety rather than the factory-fresh steroidal battleships that many in the area drove. Possibly it had been some kind of class thing, the resentment of an unemployed gas-guzzler against a white-collar type in a fuel-cell car. The past attacking the future, reactionary attacking progressive, poor attacking affluent. A beta male in an alpha machine, enraged that an alpha male thought he was so alpha he could zip around in a beta machine and get away with it.

Something like that. Some kind of asshole jerk-off loser, already drunk and disorderly at 7 A.M.

Despite all that drama, Frank found himself driving into the NSF building’s basement parking with just enough time to get to the elevators and up to the third floor at the last possible on-time moment. He hurried to that floor’s men’s room, splashed water on his face. He had to clear his mind of the ugly incident immediately, and it had been so strange and unpleasant that this was not particularly difficult. Incongruent awfulness without consequence is easily dismissed from the mind. So he pulled himself together, went out to do his job. Time to concentrate on the day’s work. His plan for the panel was locked in by the people he had convened for it. The scare on the road only hardened his resolve, chilled his blood.

He entered the conference room assigned to their panel. Its big inner window gave everyone the standard view of the rest of NSF, and the panelists who hadn’t been there before looked up into the beehive of offices making the usual comments about Rear Window and the like. “A kind of ersatz collegiality,” one of them said, must have been Nigel Pritchard.

“Keeps people working, to always feel watched like this.”

On the savannah a view like this would have come from a high outcrop, where the troop would be surveying everything important in their lives, secure in the realm of grooming, of chatter, of dominance conflicts. Perfect, in other words, for a grant proposal evaluation panel, which in essence was one of the most ancient of discussions: whom do we let in, whom do we kick out? A basic troop economy, of social credit, of access to food and mates—everything measured and exchanged in deeds good and bad—yes—it was another game of prisoner’s dilemma. They never ended.

Frank liked this one. It was very nuanced compared to most of them, and one of the few still outside the world of money. Anonymous peer review—unpaid labor—a scandal!

But science didn’t work like capitalism. That was the rub, that was one of the many rubs in the general dysfunction of the world. Capitalism ruled, but money was too simplistic and inadequate a measure of the wealth that science generated. In science, one built up over the course of a career a fund of “scientific credit,” by giving work to the system in a way that could seem altruistic. People remembered what you gave, and later on there were various forms of return on the gift—jobs, labs. In that sense a good investment for the individual, but in the form of a gift to the group. It was the non-zero-sum game that prisoner’s dilemma could become if everyone played by the strategies of always generous, or at the least, firm-but-fair. That was one of the things science was—a place that one entered by agreeing to hold to the strategies of cooperation, to maximize the total return of the game.

In theory that was true. It was also the usual troop of primates. There was a lot of tit-for-tat. Defections happened. Everyone was jockeying for a project of their own. As long as that was generating enough income for a comfortable physical existence for oneself and one’s family, then one had reached the optimal human state. Having money beyond that was unnecessary, and usually involved a descent into the world of hassle and stupidity. That was what greed got you. So there was in science a sufficiency of means, and an achievable limited goal, that kept it tightly aligned with the brain’s deepest savannah values. A scientist wanted the same things out of life as an Australopithecus; and here they were.

Thus Frank surveyed the panelists milling about the room with a rare degree of happiness. “Let’s get started.”

They sat down, putting laptops and coffee cups beside the computer consoles built into the tabletop. These allowed the panelists to see a spreadsheet page for each proposal in turn, displaying their grades and comments. This particular group all knew the drill. Some of them had met before, and most had read each other’s work.

There were eight of them sitting around the long, cluttered conference table.

Dr. Frank Vanderwal, moderator, NSF (on leave from University of California, San Diego, Department of Bioinformatics)

Dr. Nigel Pritchard, Georgia Institute of Technology, Computer Sciences

Dr. Alice Freundlich, Harvard University, Department of Biochemistry

Dr. Habib Ndina, University of Virginia Medical School

Dr. Stuart Thornton, University of Maryland, College Park, Genomics Department

Dr. Francesca Taolini, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for Biocomputational Studies

Dr. Jerome Frenkel, University of Pennsylvania, Department of Genomics

Dr. Yao Lee, Cambridge University (visiting George Washington University’s Department of Microbiology)

Frank made his usual introductory remarks and then said, “We’ve got a lot of them this time. I’m sorry it’s so many, but that’s what we’ve received. I’m sure we’ll hack our way through them all if we keep on track. Let’s start with the fifteen-minutes-per-jacket drill, and see if we can get twelve or even fourteen done before lunch. Sound good?”

Everyone nodded and tapped away, calling up the first one.

“Oh, and before we start, let’s have everyone give me their conflict-of-interest forms, please. I have to remind you that as referees here, you have a conflict if you’re the applying principal investigator’s thesis advisor or advisee, an employee of the same institution as the P.I. or a co-P.I., a collaborator within the last four years of the P.I. or a co-P.I., an applicant for employment in any department at the submitting institution, a recipient of an honorarium or other pay from the submitting institution within the last year, someone with a close personal relationship to the P.I. or a co-P.I., a shareholder in a company participating in the proposal, or someone who would otherwise gain or lose financially if the proposal were awarded or declined.

“Everybody got that? Okay, hand those forms down to me, then. We’ll have a couple of people step outside for some of the proposals today, but mostly we’re clear as far as I know, is that right?”

“I’ll be leaving for the Esterhaus proposal, as I told you,” Stuart Thornton said.

Then they started the group evaluations. This was the heart of their task for that day and the next—also the heart of NSF’s method, indeed of science more generally. Peer review; a jury of fellow experts. Frank clicked the first proposal’s page onto his screen. “Seven reviewers, forty-four jackets. Let’s start with EIA-02 18599, ‘Electromagnetic and Informational Processes in Molecular Polymers.’ Habib, you’re the lead on this?”

Habib Ndina nodded and opened with a description of the proposal. “They want to immobilize cytoskeletal networks on biochips, and explore whether tubulin can be used as bits in protein logic gates. They intend to do this by measuring the electric dipole moment, and what the P.I. calls the predicted kink-solitonic electric dipole moment flip waves.”

“Predicted by whom?”

“By the P.I.” Habib smiled. “He also states that this will be a method to test out the theories of the so-called ‘quantum brain.’”

“Hmm.” People read past the abstract.

“What are you thinking?” Frank said after a while. “I see Habib has given it a Good, Stuart a Fair, and Alice a Very Good.”