Kim Stanley Robinson - Forty Signs of Rain

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 mid-afternoon 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 the day’s blanching heat would have started to subside, and the river’s gorge walls would be nearly empty of climbers. He could climb until well past sunset, and do some more thinking about this algorithm, out where he thought best these days, on the hard old schist walls of the only place in the Washington DC area where a scrap of nature had survived.

Mathematics sometimes seems like a universe of its own. But it comes to us as part of the brain’s engagement with the world, and appears to be part of the world, its structure or recipe .

Over historical time humanity has explored further and further into the various realms of mathematics, in a cumulative and collective process, an ongoing conversation between the species and reality. The discovery of the calculus. The invention of formal arithmetic and symbolic logic, both mathematicizing the instinctive strategies of human reason, making them as distinct and solid as geometric proofs. The attempt to make the entire system contained and self-consistent. The invention of set theory, and the finessing of the various paradoxes engendered by considering sets as members of themselves. The discovery of the incompletability of all systems. The step-by-step mechanics of programming new calculating machines. All this resulted in an amalgam of maths and logic, the symbols and methods drawn from both realms, combining in the often long and complicated operations that we call algorithms .

In the time of the development of the algorithm, we also made discoveries in the real world: the double helix within our cells. DNA. Within half a century the whole genome was read, base pair by base pair. Three billion base pairs, parts of which are called genes, and serve as instruction packets for protein creation .

But despite the fully explicated genome, the details of its expression and growth are still very mysterious. Spiralling pairs of cytosine, guanine, adenosine, and thymine: we know these are instructions for growth, for the development of life, all coded in sequences of paired elements. We know the elements; we see the organisms. The code between them remains to be learned .

Mathematics continues to develop under the momentum of its own internal logic, seemingly independent of everything else. But several times in the past, purely mathematical developments have later proved to be powerfully descriptive of operations in nature that were either unknown or unexplainable at the time the math was being developed. This is a strange fact, calling into question all that we think we know about the relationship between maths and reality, the mind and the cosmos .

Perhaps no explanation of this mysterious adherence of nature to mathematics of great subtlety will ever be forthcoming. Meanwhile, the operations called algorithms become ever more convoluted and interesting to those devising them. Are they making portraits, recipes, magic spells? Does reality use algorithms, do genes use algorithms? The mathematicians can’t say, and many of them don’t seem to care. They like the work, whatever it is .

Leo Mulhouse kissed his wifeRoxanne and left their bedroom. In the living room the light was halfway between night and dawn. He went out onto their balcony: screeching gulls, the rumble of the surf against the cliff below. The vast grey plate of the Pacific Ocean.

Leo had married into this spectacular house, so to speak; Roxanne had inherited it from her mother. Its view from the edge of the sea cliff in Leucadia, California, was something Leo loved, but the little grass yard below the second-storey porch was only about fifteen feet wide, and beyond it was an open gulf of air and the grey 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 greys filled the eye with the subtlest of gradations. The grey 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 anti-depressants 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 tyres 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 cholestorol’, would be a life-saver 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 read Bioworld Today onscreen. Higher through-put 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 they didn’t solve these problems, the idea and the industry based on it could go the way of nuclear power, and turn into something that somehow did not work out. If they did solve them, then it would turn into something more like the computer industry in terms of financial returns – not to mention the impacts on health of course!