Einstein's Bridge

by Cramer, John

  George thought for a moment. He had an idea. “The superconductor metallurgy group has a scanning electron microprobe. It scans an energetic electron beam over a surface, and records the x-rays produced at each spot. It can label any feature of a scan picture with its chemical composition of elements. Maybe we can schedule some time on it to find out what the clusters are.”

  Wolfgang pursed his lips and nodded. “Ja, good idea.” he said.

  George took out his cellphone and called Jerry Walton, the superconductor metallurgy group leader. George reserved two hours of microprobe time in the next blank spot in the schedule, Friday, June 18th. It was frustrating to have to wait more than a week, but there were no openings sooner. Jerry promised to call George or Wolfgang if anyone canceled.

  They spent the rest of the afternoon moving the STM probe around on the micro-landscape of the detector, finding other blown FETs and clusters of speckles but learning nothing more.

  At the end of the day, after a quick meal in the cafeteria, George returned to his room at the SSC Hostel feeling depressed. He spent the evening watching second-rate movies on the room’s TV wallscreen.

  CHAPTER 4.2

  Elvis Sighting

  ROGER stroked his chin again as he studied the papers and diagrams on Susan’s laboratory desk. Susan was very excited about her work, and her enthusiasm had caught him up too. And it was interesting. He thought about the implications of her neuro-protein. If it worked, it could change the world. Again he felt the dull ache in the pit of his stomach, an ache related to how badly his own work had been going lately. Her protein, when it was available, could even change theoretical physics, he thought. It could change his theoretical physics.

  Susan laughed.

  Roger looked up inquiringly. Had he done something amusing without realizing it?

  “You always stroke your chin when you’re thinking hard,” she said. “Elvis seems to be imitating you. Perhaps he’s considering going into particle theory.”

  Roger walked over and looked in at Elvis, the rhesus monkey in the laboratory cage on the cart in front of Susan. “There are some fairly odd animals in the field already,” he said. “I suppose we could accommodate one more.” He wondered if imitating humans was an indication of intelligence. He watched the movement of Elvis’ eyes, studying Roger, then flicking away . He could believe there was intelligence behind those eyes.

  Roger turned to Susan and again felt the pull of her attraction. He liked her very much. After a pleasant Tuesday evening dinner at the Four Seasons in Dallas they had driven the short distance to her laboratory at Mitocon. Susan had told him that she was concerned that the person on the evening shift had called in sick, and she had decided to give Elvis his next shot and checkup herself. Roger was pleased to finally get a look at her laboratory and at Elvis, one of her favorite topics of conversation. He had been seeing a lot of Susan in the past week and a half, but this was his first visit to her lab.

  “I wonder ...,” he said, watching Elvis and thinking again about what Susan’s drug might do for humans. “Do you have any quantitative measure of how much this new protein has improved his intelligence?” he added lamely. He didn’t want to bring up the topic of human experimentation again. He had already heard Susan’s strict views on the subject.

  She removed a felt-tipped pen from the pocket of her white lab coat and scribbled on a pad. “It’s a matter of interpretation,” she said. “I have superconducting magnetometer measurements showing a significant increase in electromagnetic brain activity after we gave him synaptine, but there’s no way, at present, to relate that to intelligence. His reactions are faster. His basic reaction time is down to about 70% what it was before the treatments.”

  Roger nodded and inserted a long cylindrical greenish “monkey chow” pellet into a mesh opening of Elvis’ cage. The animal snatched it to his mouth with a lightning-fast motion.

  “There are also the sequence learning tests,” said Susan. “Before we started him on synaptine it took about four repetitions before he learned a new sequence. Now he always gets them after the second repetition and often after the first. Is that a 100% increase in IQ? Or a 50% increase? Or is it nonsense to apply a one-dimensional measure like IQ to a characteristic with as many independent variables as intelligence seems to have? All I can say is that I’m sure Elvis is much brighter than he was a few weeks ago.”

  Roger nodded. “How long does a dose of synaptine last? Or is it permanent?”

  “The protein is metabolized, so it has to be replaced. With Elvis an intramuscular dose lasts about twelve hours. But there’s some evidence of residual benefits that last much longer. With the rats it’s more difficult to tell, because the effect is so much smaller.”

  “Smaller in rats ...” Roger mused, trying to recall what she had said about the tests. “Oh, yes, you were doing trials with rats until a few weeks ago, weren’t you?” If the increase in intelligence is small in a rat and bigger in a monkey, what would it be for a human, he wondered.

  She nodded. “That series was disappointing. Synaptine didn’t do much for rats, for some reason,” she said. “In low doses it made them meaner, and in large doses it gave them seizures, but the effect of what should be a normal dose was only a slight improvement in their T-maze running performance.”

  “Any theories as to why?”

  “We did some autoradiographs of brain tissues with carbon-14-labeled synaptine. The stuff is quite selective. It’s active mainly in the prefrontal brain areas of primates, and rats don’t have any prefrontal development to speak of. Probably there are different versions of the same basic molecule that operate with different types of neurons.”

  Roger peered closely at Elvis again. “Any evidence of side effects with this guy?” he asked, walking around to the side of the cage. Untested experimental drugs could be dangerous, he knew.

  “Nothing obvious, certainly,” Susan answered. “His weight has been a constant six kilos, his appetite is good, and his coordination, like his reaction time, has improved. Synaptine is a natural protein, if a rare one. Primates already have some quantity of it in their brain tissue, so raising the concentration wouldn’t be expected to do unpleasant things, unless the dose was very large. That’s the argument we’re using to persuade the Food and Drug Administration, so they’ll approve our application for preliminary human trials on certain retarded children, Alzheimer’s patients, and others that show evidence of a synaptine deficiency.”

  Morons and the hopelessly senile, he thought. What a waste. “Is it going to be expensive as a drug?” he asked.

  Susan grinned. “All the market will bear, as we money grubbing bio-tech business folk say.” Then she grew more serious. “In my experience, Roger, you physicists with your big federal grants don’t have much appreciation for the realities of commercial research. We have a huge research overhead here,” she gestured at the long racks of electronic and chemical equipment in the laboratory, “which has to be supported from the profits of our relatively few commercially successful products. If we can’t do that we go out of business, and the research stops. Mitocon has made it as a successful business so far. We’ve survived two biotech shakeouts in which many similar companies were liquidated or bought out. Appropriately enough, biotechnology is a very Darwinian business.”

  “I think it also helps to have an instinct for the jugular,” said Roger, looking at her. It helps in theoretical physics, too, he added silently.

  “Perhaps,” said Susan. “Since you asked, the actual production costs of synaptine will be fairly low. For a neuroprotein, it isn’t very complicated. A good solid-phase synthesizer could sequence a batch of it in a few weeks if necessary, but we have better ways. We’ve already located the coding sequence in human DNA and inserted it into e coli bacteria. If necessary we could produce it by the ton. Synaptine is very stable at room temperature and doe
sn’t even need to be refrigerated. There are none of the usual storage problems, which lowers the cost.”

  She picked a vial of bright yellow liquid from a nearby rack half-filled with similar ones and held it up to the light. “Now I’m going to give Elvis his booster shot.”

  Roger walked over to the rack. There were many vials there.

  “By the way, Roger,” Susan said. “Would you count those vials for me? A new batch arrived just before quitting time, and apparently the carton had been dropped in shipment. A number of the vials were smashed. My technician cleaned up the mess, but he didn’t have time to do a new inventory before he had to leave. Just write the count here.” She indicated a clipboard on the table, pointing to a blank line on a printed form.

  “Glad to,” said Roger. As she worked, he moved between her and the long rack of synaptine vials. “And you discovered synaptine? Yourself? I’d wager there’s a good story there,” he said. His index finger moved along the rack as he counted.

  She smiled. “Perhaps,” she said. “I owe it all to your fellow countryman Francis Crick, actually. I’m sure you must know about neural networks. Uh, the electronic kind, I mean.” She removed a very thin disposable syringe from a drawer, stripped off the sterile wrapper, attached a needle, and inserted it in the pink top seal of the synaptine vial.

  “Of course,” said Roger, writing a number on the clipboard. “The computer that doesn’t need a program. Our experimenters at the Super Collider have trained neural nets to distinguish good data events from garbage. The circuits have solved many problems of pattern recognition in situations where conventional computers have failed miserably. And I seem to recall that molecular biologists trained them to predict protein folding.” He watched as she withdrew about half a milliliter of the vial’s contents. “Doesn’t take much,” he observed.

  She nodded. “Some years ago when neural nets were first being investigated, Sir Francis Crick of DNA fame publicly objected to calling them ‘neural’ networks. He pointed out that the electronic ‘neural networks’ were using an external procedure to adjust the transmission weights between the connections of the net depending on the net response to a stimulus, the so-called back-propagation algorithm, and that there were no similar processes in natural networks of real neurons.

  “Since the two types of networks obviously operated on different principles, Crick contended that it was misleading, even intellectually dishonest, to call the electronic device a ‘neural’ network, which carried the implication that it was an electronic model of the brain.” She slipped the needle beneath the skin of the animal’s pink buttocks. Elvis squealed in protest, but it was a mild protest.

  “I perhaps read that somewhere,” said Roger. “But I suppose the terminology was too firmly entrenched by the time Crick complained. People still call them neural networks.”

  “So it seems,” said Susan. “For a long time I’ve been interested in brain function, and occasionally I’ve thought about Crick’s argument. A couple of years ago, while I was driving along the Nantucket coast after a conference, I happened to consider it from a different perspective. I had a wonderful insight.” She smiled and seemed to be recalling the thrill. “Electronic neural nets work very well. If the method of weight adjustment they employ is so useful,” she said, raising her eyebrows and looking inquiringly at Roger, “why doesn’t nature use a similar process in real neurons?” She smiled at him, waiting for his answer.

  Roger rubbed his chin. “Tricky question ...,” he paused. “Perhaps there wasn’t an evolutionary path that could lead ... No, wait a minute ...,” He stopped, then grinned at her. “Maybe there is such a mechanism in real neurons, but no one had found it yet, so Crick didn’t know about it.”

  Susan grinned back and kissed him on the cheek. “Very good for an amateur!” she said. “That’s exactly what I concluded. So I decided to look more carefully to see if I could localize an agent that might be causing the synapse transmission strengths to change. I was able to use some new tricks, real-time MRI micro-imaging, for example. And I found that in primate brain tissue whenever the synapse connections changed their transmission strengths, a certain protein was always present.

  “That’s how I found synaptine. It’s the protein agent that provides Crick’s missing mechanism. It adjusts the connection strengths at synaptic junctions, just the way the back-propagation calculations do at the connection nodes of a neural network.”

  Roger, whose hands had been behind his back, brought them forward and grasped both of hers. “That’s a great story. You’re wonderful,” he said, and kissed her slowly and purposefully. As they kissed he could feel the four slim glass cylinders he had slipped into the tight back pocket of his slacks, pressing against his buttocks. He’d stolen the drug from Susan. Stolen it! When the act of theft had occurred, it had been very smooth, as if he was watching someone else, some skilled thief who had effortlessly pocketed the vials and made the bogus entry on the clipboard. He could still slip the vials back in the rack, he thought, but he made no move to do so. He recalled the time in King’s Lynn when he’d been caught stealing a sweet at the grocer’s. He’d been perhaps seven at the time, but the shame of being caught still brought a flush to this cheeks.

  Was he crazy? Yes, he did seem to be rather crazy just now. He needed the synaptine, and Susan had so much that she would never miss what he had taken. If this was a crime, it was one that lacked a victim. Roger’s feelings of guilt were not diminished by this rationalization, but he decided, guilt or no, that he was keeping the drug. He had to. He kissed Susan with rising urgency, guilt transmuting to desire.

  They left soon after and, with some haste, returned to Susan’s apartment.

  Two hours later the empty laboratory was very quiet. Elvis was feeling very strange. The street sounds that came to his ears seemed to have dangerously sharp edges. The light from the window seemed to have an aura of fruity taste about it. The familiar smells of the laboratory seemed each to have an individual musical ring. He began to shake, then to rock slowly back and forth.

  He fell to the floor of his cage, his back arching, his mouth stretched in a rictus grin. An electrical fire danced in his brain.

  Elvis was having his first petit mal epileptic fit.

  CHAPTER 4.3

  Snark

  GEORGE looked at the large wallscreen display mounted on the SSC counting house wall. The beam luminosity was stabilizing nicely. The SSC beam had been late in the ramp-up on Tuesday evening and was not at full energy until well after midnight. LEM had limped into operation but now was finally recording data smoothly.

  He glanced over at Alice, who was seated at a nearby table, busily transcribing handwritten notes into her laptop workstation. It was almost 3 AM. She seemed to be holding up very well. He realized that he really liked having her here with him.

  He looked at the colorful flatscreens of the LEM counting room. The data acquisition computers continuously sampled the data stream and selected a few of the events for display. All events were also recorded on ultra high-density holographic optical platters for later analysis.

  The displays showed several views of the LEM detector and the paths of the reconstructed particle tracks that signaled the occurrence of a head-on collision between two 20 TeV protons, particles so highly accelerated that their rest mass represented only a part in 20,000 of their mass-energy. The beam monitors showed that tonight the twin proton beams had been ramped to a new SSC record for luminosity.

  A brush-like fan of varicolored particle tracks from a new event was traced on the screen, while numerals below the picture indicated the quantities of energy deposited in the various calorimeters. George smiled. The LEM experiment, constructed with the efforts of almost a thousand physicists and perhaps two thousand technicians, for once seemed to be functioning properly.

  He seated himself at one of the consoles and studied t
he oscilloscope traces of signals from electronics units thirty stories below that were processing the massive flow of data from each event. Everything seemed OK.

  He directed the signals from the vertex detector into the analog signal bus and checked the overview monitor of the pixel detectors. The number of dead pixels from radiation damage had increased slightly since the beam had come on. Well, at least the chips should be usable through the end of this data collection period.

  Without warning, the digital oscilloscope signal trace changed. The smooth up-and-down bump of a single particle passing through the detector was replaced by a rise to the saturation level of the amplifier chip, as a section of the pixel detector was overwhelmed with ionization and charge.

  “What the ... ?” he said aloud. The numerical display showing the number of tracks in the detector, which normally registered the few hundred tracks from a normal event, was now registering over a thousand. And from the tracking display, most of them were not coming from the vertex of the collision. One particle, indicated in purple because of its heavy ionization, traced across the detector in a path that was almost undeflected by the 2 Tesla field of the toroidal magnet. Emanating from this particle were jets of secondary particles that seemed to occur every centimeter or so along the path.

  George glanced at the numerals along the bottom edge of the display. The calorimeters were indicating an impossibly high energy. They had received far more energy than could be supplied by any proton-proton collision, more even than from several superimposed collisions.

  “What the hell is that?” George demanded in a loud voice. The dozen physicists and technicians also in the counting room all reacted at once.

  “Holy shit! Was that a spark?”

  “Could that have been a computer glitch?”

  “How did it get past the fucking trigger?”