Green Earth

“No.” She looked surprised.

“You should. He loves stuff like this, and, you know, he’s a working scientist himself. He still keeps his lab going even while he’s doing all the chancellor stuff.”

Now Eleanor was nodding. “I’ll do that. He has been very supportive.”

“Right. And look, I hope you and Marta keep collaborating. Maybe there’s some aspect of hormone regulation you’ll spot that we’re not seeing.”

“I doubt that, but thanks.”

Soon after that, Leo got an e-mail from Derek, asking him to join a meeting with a representative of a venture capital group. This had happened a few times back when Torrey Pines was a hot new start-up, so Leo knew the drill, and was therefore extremely uncomfortable with the idea of doing it again—especially if it came to a discussion of “rapid hydrodynamic insertion.” No way did Leo want to be supporting Derek’s unfounded assertions to an outsider.

Derek assured him that he would handle any of this guy’s “speculative questions”—exactly the sort of questions a venture capitalist would have to ask.

“And so I’ll be there to …”

“You’ll be there to answer any technical questions about the method.”

Great.

Before the meeting Leo was shown a copy of the executive summary and offering memorandum Derek had sent to Biocal, a venture capital firm from which Derek had gotten an investment in the company’s early years. This document was very upbeat about the possibilities of the hydrodynamic delivery method. On finishing it Leo’s stomach had contracted to the size of a walnut.

The meeting was in Biocal’s offices, located in an upscale building in downtown La Jolla, just off Prospect near the point. Their meeting room windows had a great view up the coast. Leo could almost spot their own building, on the cliff across La Jolla Cove.

Their host, Henry Bannet, was a trim man in his forties, relaxed and athletic-looking, friendly in the usual San Diego manner. His firm was a private partnership, doing strategic investing in biotechnologies. A billion-dollar fund, Derek had said. And they didn’t expect any return on their investments for four to six years, sometimes longer. They could afford to work at the pace of medical progress itself. Their game was high-risk, high-return, long-range investment. This was not a kind of investment that banks would make, nor anyone else in the lending world. The risks were too great, the returns too distant. Only venture capitalists would do it.

So naturally these guys’ help was much in demand from small biotech companies. There were something like three hundred biotechs in the San Diego area alone, and many of them were hanging by the skin of their teeth, hoping for that first successful cash cow to keep them going or get them bought. Venture capitalists would therefore get to pick and choose what they wanted to invest in; and many of them were pursuing particular interests, or even passions. Naturally in these areas they were very well-informed, expert in combining scientific and financial analysis into what they called “doing due diligence.” They spoke of being “value-added investors,” of bringing much more than money to the table—expertise, networking, advice.

This guy Bannet looked to Leo to be one of the passionate ones. He was friendly but intent. A man at work. There was very little chance Derek was going to be able to impress him with smoke and mirrors.

“Thanks for seeing us,” Derek said.

Bannet waved a hand. “Always interested to talk to you guys. I’ve been reading some of your papers, and I went to that symposium in L.A. last year. You’re doing some great stuff.”

“It’s true, and now we’re onto something really good, with real potential to revolutionize genetic engineering by getting tailored DNA into people who need it. It could be a method useful to a whole bunch of different therapies, which is one of the reasons we’re so excited about it—and trying to ramp up our efforts to speed the process along. So I remembered how much you helped us during the start-up, and how well that’s paid off for you, so I thought I’d bring by the current situation and see if you would be interested in doing a PIPE with us.”

This sounded weird to Leo, like Indians offering a peace pipe, or college students passing around a bong, but Bannet didn’t blink; a PIPE was one of their mechanisms for investment, as Leo quickly learned. “Private Investment in Public Equity.” And for once it was a pretty good acronym, because it meant creating a pipeline for money to run directly from their cash-flush fund to Derek’s penniless company.

But Bannet was a veteran of all this, alert to all the little strategic opacities that were built into Derek’s typical talk to stockholders or potential investors. Something like sixty percent of biotech start-ups failed, so the danger of losing some or all of an investment to bankruptcy was very real. No way Derek could finesse him. They would have to come clean and hope he liked what he saw.

Derek finished leading Bannet through a series of financial spreadsheets on his laptop, unable to disguise their tale of woe. Bad profit and loss; layoffs; sale of some subsidiary contracts, even some patents, their crown jewels; empty coffers.

“We’ve had to focus on the things that we think are really the most important,” Derek admitted. “It’s made us more efficient, that’s for sure. But it means there really isn’t any fat anywhere, no resources we can put to the task, even though it’s got such incredible potential. So, it seemed like it was time to ask for some outside funding help, with the idea that the financing now would be so crucial that the returns to the investor could and should be really significant.”

“Uh-huh,” Bannet said, though it wasn’t clear what he was agreeing with. He made thoughtful clucking sounds as he scanned the spreadsheets, murmuring, “Um hmmm, um hmmm,” in a sociable way, but now that he was thinking about the information in the spreadsheets, his face betrayed an almost burning intensity. This guy was definitely one of the passionate ones.

“Tell me about this algorithm,” he said finally.

Derek looked to Leo, who said, “Well, the mathematician developing it is a recent hire at Torrey Pines, and he’s been collaborating with our lab to test a set of operations he’s developed, to see how well they can predict the proteins associated with any given gene, and as you can see,” clicking his own laptop screen to the first of the project report slides, “it’s been really good at predicting them in certain situations,” pointing to them on the screen’s first slide.

“How would this affect the targeted delivery system you’re working on?”

“Well, right now it’s helping us to find proteins with ligands that bind better to their receptor ligands in target organ cells. It’s also helping us test for proteins that we can more successfully shove across cell walls, using the hydrodynamic methods we’ve been investigating for the past few months.” He clicked ahead to the slide that displayed this work’s results, trying to banish Brian’s and Marta’s names from his mind; he definitely did not want to call it the Popping Eyeball Method, the Exploding Mouse Method. “As you can see,” pointing to the relevant results, “saturation has been good in certain conditions.” This seemed a little weak, and so he added, “The algorithm is also proving to be very successful in guiding work we’ve been doing with botanists on campus, on algal designs.”

“How does that connect with this?”

“Well, it’s for plant engineering.”

Bannet looked at Derek.

Derek said, “We at TPG plan to use it to pursue the improvement of targeted delivery. Clearly the method is robust, and people can use it in a wide variety of applications.”

But there was no hiding it, really. Their best results so far were in an area that would not necessarily ever become useful to human medicine. And yet human medicine was what Torrey Pines Generique was organized to do.

“It looks really promising, eh?” Derek said. “It could be that it’s an algorithm that is like a law of nature. The grammar of how genes express themselves. It could mean a whole suite of patents.”

“Mm hmmm,” Bannet said, looking down again at Derek’s laptop, which was still at the financial page. Almost pathetic, really; except it must have been a fairly common story, so that Bannet would not necessarily be shocked or put off. He would simply be considering the investment on a risk-adjusted basis, which would take the present situation into account.

Finally he said, “It looks very interesting. Of course it’s always a bit of a sketchy feeling, when you’ve gotten to the point of having all your eggs in one basket like this. But sometimes one is all you need. The truth is, I don’t really know yet.”

Derek nodded in reluctant agreement. “Well, you know. We believe very strongly in the importance of therapies for the most serious diseases, and so we concentrated on that, and now we kind of have to, you know, go on from there with our best ideas. That’s why we’ve focused on the HDL upgrade. With this targeted delivery, it could be worth billions.”

“And the HDL upgrade …”

“We haven’t published those results yet. We’re still looking into the patent situation.”

Leo’s stomach tightened, but he kept his face blank.

Bannet was even blanker; still friendly and sympathetic enough, but with that piercing eye. “Send me the rest of your business plan, and all the scientific publications that relate to this. All the data. I’ll discuss it with some of my partners here. It seems like the kind of thing that I’d like to get my partners’ inputs on. That’s not unusual, it’s just that it’s bigger than what I usually do on my own. And some of my colleagues are into agropharmacy stuff.”

“Sure,” Derek said, handing over a glossy folder of material he had already prepared. “I understand. We can come back and talk to them too if you like, answer any questions.”

“That’s good, thanks.” Bannet put the folder on the table. With a few more pleasantries and a round of hand-shaking, Derek and Leo were ushered out.

Leo found he had no idea whether the meeting had gone well or poorly.

CHAPTER 7

TIT FOR TAT

“Money is the mother’s milk of politics,” said Jesse Unruh long ago, but he might have been quoting something tapped in cuneiform on the tablets of Ur. Money is power; politics is the fight for power; politicians need money to stay in office; and so they all congeal together. Influence is the sour milk of politics.

Spending money on political campaigns is legal as part of the First Amendment’s right to free speech, or so it has been asserted, most notably by the Roberts Supreme Court. So rich people are very loud speakers. This was something Phil Chase noticed every time he attended a fund-raiser, which happened on average twice a day. Some days his staff gave him a pass or failed to find suitable events, but other days were packed with half a dozen events, sequenced meticulously and carried out like commando operations. Cutting cash out of the heart of capital. Phil called it charm piracy, but only in conversation with his most trusted staffers. They laughed and told him to do his job.

Phil was one of the least wealthy senators, and had famously funded one of his earliest campaigns by asking supporters to send him all the change on their dressers and elsewhere in the house. “You’ll be glad to get rid of it,” he said. “Just be sure to pay the shipping costs too, or else I’ll pay more in mail costs than I take in.” Which was true; but mostly people paid for the postage, and he took in many tons of cash. Photos of him standing chest-deep in coins were popular.

Now it wasn’t like that anymore. Breakfasts, lunches, dinners, cocktail parties, mixers, seminars, meetings, soirées: each was important to the people there, so Phil had to gear up and perform, be there, be on. Luckily he enjoyed it. This was what made him good; he liked talking to people, he liked to perform. He thought if you gave him a chance, he could persuade you. Most people get over that, after experience teaches them otherwise, but Phil had the pigheadedness of his convictions.

Teachers’ union, Chamber of Commerce, environmental NGO, liberal think tank, a pod of whales (he was friends with many big donors); this was just one day. The science of any given Wednesday. “So look,” he would say, looking the donors in the eye, “anything you give the campaign will get well spent. You know my beliefs, and I’ll never deviate from pursuing those beliefs, that’s my promise.” He thought it helped that he himself made the ask. His development people (i.e., his fund-raisers) weren’t so sure, but he was the boss. And money kept coming in. Two fund-raisers a day, every day; thus seven hundred a year; thus 4,200 events in each term as senator. Money is speech; people like to talk; and loud people have things to say. Getting rich gave them lots of opinions. Phil was happy to let them speak through him.

Although sometimes, late at night, being driven back through the great dark capital, he would lean back in his seat and murmur, “Campaign finance reform. Roy, look into that again, will you?”

“Sure thing boss.”

“What have we got tomorrow?”

“Breakfast with the Finance Reform Investment Group.”

“Really? Breakfast?”

“Phil, you’ll eat those guys for breakfast.”

“True. But I hate the taste they leave in my mouth. Campaign finance reform, Roy. Write me up a bill about that. Pull out the file.”

“Sure thing boss.”

“Then who’s for lunch?”

“You don’t want to know.”

Anna flew through the blur of a midweek day. Up and off, Metro to the office; pound the keys, the spreadsheet work eating up hours like minutes. Stop to pump, then to eat at her desk (it felt a little too weird to eat and pump at the same time), all the while data wrangling. Then a look at an e-mail from Drepung and Sucandra about their grant proposals.

Anna had helped them to write several proposals, and that had been fine, as they did all the real work, while she just added her expertise in grant writing, honed through some tens of thousands of grant evaluations. She definitely knew how to sequence the information, what to emphasize, what language to use, what supporting documents, what arguments. Every word and punctuation mark of a grant proposal she had a feel for, one way or the other. It had been a pleasure to apply that expertise to help the Khembalis.

Now she was pleased again to find that they had heard back from three of them, two positively. NSF had awarded them a starter grant in the “Tropical Oceans, Global Atmosphere” effort; and the INDOEX countries had agreed to include a big new monitoring facility on Khembalung. Altogether it meant funding streams for several years to come, tens of millions of dollars all told, with infrastructure built, and relationships with neighboring countries established.

“Very nice,” Anna said, and cc’d the news to Charlie, sent congratulations to Drepung, and then got back to work on her spreadsheet.

After a while she remembered about some sheets she had printed up, and went around the corner to the Department of Unfortunate Statistics. She found Frank inside, shaking his head over the latest.

“Have you seen this one?” he said, gesturing with his nose at a taped-up printout of yet another spreadsheet.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“It’s the latest Gini figures, do you know those?”

“No?”

“They’re a measurement of income distribution in a population, so an index of the gap between rich and poor. Most industrialized democracies rate at between 25 and 35, that’s where we were in the 1950s, see, but our numbers started to shoot up in the 1980s, and now we’re worse than the worst third-world countries. Forty or greater is considered to be very inequitable, and we’re at 52 and rising.”

Anna looked briefly at the graph, interested in the statistical method. A Lorenz curve, plotting the distance away from perfect equality’s straight line, which would tilt at forty-five degrees.

“Interesting … So this is for annual incomes?”

“That’s right.”

“So if it were for capital assets—”

“It would be worse.” Frank shook his head, disgusted. He had come back from San Diego in a foul mood. No doubt anxious to finish and go home.

“Well,” Anna said, “the Khembalis have gotten a couple of grants.”

“Very nice, did you do it?”

“I just pointed them at things. They’re turning out to be good at following through. And I helped Drepung rewrite their grant proposals. You know how it is, after doing this for a few years, you do know how to write a grant proposal.”

“No lie. Nice job. Good to see someone doing something.”

Anna returned to her desk, glancing after him. He was definitely edgy these days. He had always been that way, of course. Dissatisfied, cynical, sharp-tongued; it was hard not to contrast him to the Khembalis. Here he was, about to go home to one of the best departments in one of the best universities in one of the nicest cities in the world’s richest country, and he was unhappy. Meanwhile the Khembalis were essentially multigenerational exiles, occupying a tidal sandbar in near poverty, and they were happy.

Or at least cheerful. She did not mean to downplay their situation, but these days she never saw that unhappy look that had so struck her the first time she had seen Drepung. No, they were cheerful, which was different than happy; a policy, rather than a feeling. But that only made it more admirable.

Well, everyone was different. She got back to the tedious grind of wrangling data. Then Drepung called, and they shared the pleasure of the good news about the grant proposals. They discussed the details, and then Drepung said, “We have you to thank for this, Anna. So thank you.”

“You’re welcome, but it wasn’t really me, it’s NSF.”

“But you piloted us through the maze. We owe you big-time.”

Anna laughed despite herself.

“What?”

“Nothing, it’s just that you sound like Charlie. You sound like you’ve been watching sports on TV.”

“I do like watching basketball.”

“That’s fine. Just don’t start listening to rap, okay?”

“You know me, I like Bollywood. Anyway, you must let us thank you for this. We will have you to dinner.”

“That would be nice.”

“And maybe you can join us at the zoo when our tigers arrive. Recently a pair of Bengal tigers were rescued off Khembalung after a flood. The papers in India call them the Swimming Tigers, and they are coming for a stay at the National Zoo here, and we will have a small ceremony when they arrive.”

“That would be great. The boys would love that. And also—” An idea had occurred to her.

“Yes?”

“Maybe also you could come upstairs and visit us here, and give one of our lunchtime lectures. That would be a great way to return a favor. We could learn more about your situation, and, you know, your approach to science, or to life or whatever. Something like that. Do you think Rudra would be interested?”

“I’m sure he would. It would be a great opportunity.”

“Well not exactly, it’s just a lunchtime series of talks that Aleesha runs, but I do think it would be interesting. We could use some of your attitude here, I think, and you could talk about these programs too.”

“I’ll talk to the rimpoche about it.”

“Okay good. I’ll put Aleesha in touch.”

After that Anna worked on the stats again, until she saw the time and realized it was her day to visit Nick’s class and help them with math hour. “Ah shit.” Throw together a bag of work stuff, shut down, heft the shoulder bag of chilled milk bottles, and off she went. Down into the Metro, working as she sat, then standing on the crowded Red Line Shady Grove train; out and up and into a taxi, of all things, to get to Nick’s school on time.

She arrived just a little late, dumped her stuff, and settled down to work with the kids. Nick was in third grade now, but had been put in an advanced math group. In general the class did things in math that Anna found surprising for their age. She liked working with them; there were twenty-eight kids in the class, and Mrs. Wilkins, their teacher, was grateful for the help.

Anna wandered from group to group, helping with multipart problems that involved multiplication, division, and rounding off. When she came to Nick’s group she sat down on one of the tiny chairs next to him, and they elbowed each other playfully for room at the round low table. He loved it when she came to his class, which she tried to do on a semiregular basis.

“All right Nick quit that, show the gang here how you’re going to solve this problem.”

“Okay.” He furrowed his brow in a way she recognized inside the muscles of her own forehead. “Thirty-nine divided by two, that’s … nineteen and a half … round that up to twenty—”

“No, don’t round off in the middle of the process.”

“Mom, come on.”

“Hey, you shouldn’t.”

“Mom, you’re quibbling again!” Nick exclaimed.

The group cackled at this old joke.

“It’s not quibbling,” Anna insisted. “It’s a very important distinction.”

“What, the difference between nineteen and a half and twenty?”

“Yes,” over their squeals of laughter, “because you should never round off in the middle of an operation, because then the things you do later will exaggerate the inaccuracy! It’s an important principle!”

“Mrs. Quibler is a quibbler, Mrs. Quibler is a quibbler!”

Anna gave in and gave them The Eye, a squinting, one-eyed glare that she had worked up long ago when playing Lady Bracknell in high school. It never failed to crack them up. She growled, “That’s Quibler with one b,” melting them with laughter, as always, until Mrs. Wilkins came over to join the party and quiet it down.

After school Anna and Nick walked home together. It took about half an hour, and was one of the treasured rituals of their week—the only time they got to spend together, just the two of them. Past the big public pool, past the grocery store, then down their quiet street. It was hot, of course, but bearable in the shade. They talked about whatever came into their heads.

Then they entered the coolness of their house, and returned to the wilder world of Joe and Charlie. Charlie was bellowing as he cooked in the kitchen, an off-key, wordless aria. Joe was killing dinosaurs in the living room. As they entered he froze, considering how he was going to signify his displeasure at Anna’s treasonous absence for the day. When younger this had been a genuine emotion; sometimes when he saw her come in the door he had simply burst into tears. Now it was calculated, and she was immune.

He smacked himself in the forehead with a Compsognathus, then collapsed to the rug face-first.

“Oh come on,” Anna said. “Give me a break Joe.” She started to unbutton her blouse. “You better be nice if you want to nurse.”

Joe popped right up and ran over to give her a hug.

“Right,” Anna said. “Blackmail will get you everywhere. Hi hon!” she yelled in at Charlie.

“Hi babe.” Charlie came out to give her a kiss. For a second all her boys hung on her. Then Joe was latched on, and Charlie and Nick went into the kitchen. From there Charlie shouted out from time to time, but Anna couldn’t yell back without making Joe mad enough to bite her, so she waited until he was done and then walked around the corner into the kitchen.

“How was your day?” Charlie said.

“I fixed a data error all day long.”

“That’s good dear.”

She gave him a look. “I swore I wasn’t going to do it,” she said darkly, “but I just couldn’t bring myself to ignore it.”

“No, I’m sure you couldn’t.”

He kept a straight face, but she punched him on the arm anyway. “Smartass. Is there any beer in the fridge?”

“I think so.”

She hunted for one. “There was some good news that came in, did you see that? I forwarded it. The Khembalis got a couple of grants.”

“Really! That is good news.” He was sniffing at a yellow curry bubbling in the frying pan.