Хэнк Грин - A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

The enthusiasm vanished. “It’s ‘cleopatra,’ lowercase c . But it’s not good. We’ve been having weird outages for over a month now.”

“I think I read about that!”

“Honestly, you don’t want to get me started. Carson has given me a refund, but people expect coffee shops to have internet. This isn’t 2007. I’m really sorry.”

“Do they know what’s causing it?”

“Aside from incompetence?” His voice rose a little. “I’m sorry, I’m just frustrated. No, they say they’ve hired somebody who knows these systems from the top all the way down, but apparently even they’re stumped. I’m looking into getting satellite internet, but it’s more expensive and slower. I understand it’s complicated, but they’ve figured out how to do it everywhere else, I don’t get why it’s not working here.”

“Well, I guess I’ll get my latte to go then!” I said. He looked despondent, so I continued, “You’re the only shop in town, so as long as I’m here, caffeine is more important than internet.”

I left the coffee shop with my latte and did something that any trained professional would agree was a worrying sign that I was not recovering well from my loss. I stalked cable repair trucks.

MIRANDA

Constance Lundgren is a legend. Her list of research awards is short only compared to her list of teaching awards. Back in the nineties there was a lot of shouting about her not being named on a Nobel Prize that built on her work, and the only person in the materials science world who didn’t say a thing about it was Constance Lundgren. Getting her as an advisor was like getting an internship with Yoda. I had imagined her as a kind of idol to science before I met her, but after I’d worked under her for a year, she had mostly become a person. She was thoughtful and methodical and always a little tense. Every tendon stood out on her sun-browned, age-freckled hands, which she often pressed to her lips as she thought, like she was praying to her own mind. Which, why not. But she was also forgiving and sweet and would invite students to go hiking with her, which I had done. There was literally no one else in the world who I respected more, and leaving her lab to go chase after the weirdness of the Carls was the hardest decision I’ve ever made. Her keeping my place open to return to is a gift I won’t ever be able to repay, but at the same time, I was lost. I was angry and sad and having a harder and harder time finding my work meaningful. If I was ever in need of advising, it was now.

“Professor Lundgren?” I asked, knocking on her open door a couple days after I first read the article about Peter.

“Miranda!” She slid a small book she had been staring at to the side of her desk. “How are the Toms?”

Tom is what I named my first lab rat, who had … passed on several years ago. Some of my classmates found out that I’d named him, and they’d never let me live it down. So now all of my rats were named Tom and there had been several dozen since. I don’t love the part where we experiment on animals, especially because it only ever goes one way for the animal in the long run. If there was another way, I would take it, but there isn’t.

I smiled. “The Toms are good. Six weeks now and no sign of rejection, even among those with no maintenance therapy. But that’s not why I came in. I wanted to ask you about this.”

I handed her a physical copy of the magazine with the Peter Petrawicki article. “Have you heard about this lab?”

Science can be a small town. People in the same field, especially at the top of the field, all know each other. And they certainly know when people are leaving tenured university positions for high-paid jobs that didn’t exist six months ago.

Dr. Lundgren looked up at me and said, “I know this has to suck for you. Even I got angry when I found out who was tied up with that business. But yes, I’ve heard about it.”

She was quiet for a moment as she thought and then she continued, “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but they offered me a position. I was talking to my husband seriously about moving until I found out who was involved.”

She looked me in the eyes as she said, “I told them to go fuck themselves.”

It has never taken much to make me cry, but it takes even less since the warehouse. So I sat down and lost it a bit.

She grabbed some tissues from inside her desk. Crying students weren’t that unusual. “Thank you,” I said after a moment. “Not for the tissues but …”

“It wasn’t because of you.”

“Good, but still, thanks.”

She smiled at me, and then I asked my real question: “Do you know what they’re doing there?”

“No. They weren’t going to tell me any details until they had a contract. But you read that article, so you have some idea, right?”

“Yeah, yeah. Some of it is confusing. Why so many computers? Why AI researchers? But optoelectronics, biomedical engineering, cellular neuroscience? They figured it out, didn’t they?”

“They figured something out, yes. What ‘it’ is, I don’t know.”

“Yes you do. Some kind of high-bandwidth interface, right? It has to be. I’m sitting over here with the Toms, stimulating one or two nerve clusters at a time. They’re down there in Puerto Rico getting ready to dump people’s immortal consciousnesses into a computer or something, and you could be there ! But instead we’re here, a decade behind wherever they are, and you didn’t go.”

She clasped her hands together and brought them up to her lips. I’d seen that face a hundred times before. Every time we were confused, when the spectrometer wasn’t booting up, when a Tom was suddenly having seizures.

“Miranda, I have been at this a while. I’ve seen revolutions in science, and I know that sometimes moving fast and breaking things is how progress gets made. But it’s also how things get broken, and sometimes those things are people. This is not the strategy of careful scientists. I agree, they are likely messing with the human mind. I don’t know what they’re doing, but if they weren’t close to human tests, they wouldn’t be scaling up so fast. And they’re setting this up in Puerto Rico, which tells me they’re trying to avoid health and safety regulations. These men—sorry, but it usually is men—don’t care who gets hurt because they’re telling themselves a story in which they’re the hero. I’ve listened to that story too many times to see anything in it but vanity.”

“But isn’t ambition how all of this gets done? I’m ambitious. I think you are too.”

“That’s a good point, Miranda. I don’t have anything against ambition. Wanting to work hard to achieve something great, yes. Yes! You’re so young and you’ve already done that. You should stay hungry. But what does ‘great’ mean to you?”

“It means something better than good.” That sounded a little stupid, so I kept at it. “So good it improves the lives of more people than I will ever hope to meet.”

“Good. That is what it means for you. But for some people, ‘great’ just means ‘big,’ and if it’s big enough, they’ll convince themselves either that it’s good or that it’s inevitable, so it might as well be their names that get into the history books.” Her voice was getting louder.

She sucked in sharply through her nose and looked at the ceiling before she continued, more quietly.

“I can smell that kind of ambition. It’s not about making the world better, it’s about using marvelous potential and intelligence to …” She paused to think. “To feel like they matter. I won’t work with people like that, because if they don’t think they matter despite being some of the most successful, important, influential people on earth, what must they think of the rest of us?”