Backroom Boys

by Francis Spufford

  I want useful people around me, if they’re no use to me I just drop ’em. Yeah, like me. You’re different. I been dropped a long time ago. So why hang on? I think I’ve got your son, haven’t I? … I’m on the train … Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you-oo, happy birthday to you … Hi, mum! You said you’d be back by eleven. It is eleven, isn’t it? No, it’s quarter to twelve. Adrian’s watch stopped working … I’m on the train … All right? Who’s that? It’s Jay. Oh, OK. Have you got? What d’you want? A louis and a twenty-stone. I haven’t got the twenty-stone. None at all. Just the louis then? OK. Can I meet you? Yeah. You on foot? No, I’m in the car. I’ll see you in the park at the back of the bus station in twenty. OK. See ya, star … I found your wedding ring in a box of screws … I’m on the train, I’m on the train, I’m on the train …

  And behind all these words, tender or profane or dismal in the usual proportions that come out of human mouths, lay the wordless poetry of the physical model which made them all audible. It isn’t a category mistake, or an idle compliment, to call PACE2 poetry. Engineering is poetic, in the ancient sense of the original Greek word our ‘poetry’ derives from. Poesis meant making. And so every maker is a kind of poet; everyone who wants to subject ideas to the tempering of existence, and is willing to stay with the process as the ideas are changed by being realised, and cares enough to labour until the creation comes right. The words that might be used to describe a piece of engineering are secondary things, limping attempts to convey an act of making that didn’t happen in the medium that’s now being asked to express it. The poetry isn’t in the description. It’s in the numbers, it’s in the algorithms, it’s in the system design. It’s intrinsic.

  ‘We used to quote the joking definition of art,’ John Causebrook told me. ‘“An art is a science with more than seven variables.” So we used to say, yeah, we’ve got more than seven variables. We must be artists.’

  *As if directing attention towards a footnote that would read: don’t live here.

  Five

  The Gift

  Friday 8 May 1998

  Diddley-diddley-dee. Diddley-diddley-dee. Michael Morgan was in a black London taxi when his mobile phone rang. It was his PA. ‘Michael, I’ve just had a call from Jim Watson at Cold Spring Harbor. He says it’s urgent, and could you ring him back immediately?’

  Jim Watson was Watson as in ‘Crick and Watson’, as in The Double Helix, as in the co-discoverer of DNA; by definition, the elder statesman of molecular biology. Morgan moved the paperwork on his knee onto the seat next to him and dialled the United States, his mind still half absorbed in the planning problem he had been on his way to discuss at the Inns of Court. He was a stocky, droll man in his fifties, with a dependable family-doctor face that gleamed from time to time with mischief. His GSM phone found the base station nearest to the taxi, and the mobile network stitched together a channel for him that seemed to stretch seamlessly all the way across the Atlantic, from the grey runnel of Gower Street, London wc1, to the shores of Long Island, where the maple trees were in fresh green leaf. ‘Hello? Cold Spring Harbor laboratory? Would you put me through to Professor Watson, please? This is Michael Morgan of the Wellcome Trust in London; I’m returning his call … Ah – Jim. What’s up?’ Watson told him. Morgan removed the mental finger that had been keeping his place in what he thought had been going to be the day’s main task and paid his whole attention.

  *

  Meanwhile, in an executive lounge at Dulles Airport in Washington, the news that had just reached Michael Morgan indirectly, through the bush telegraph of academic biology, was being delivered face to face. That morning, it had reached Harold Varmus, the head of the National Institutes of Health, a huge grant-giving public-sector body which is the American equivalent of the Medical Research Council; and now a summons had been sent out to Dr Francis Collins, the director since 1993 of the National Centre for Human Genome Research, through which the NIH channelled its contribution to the single largest project on its books, the effort to read all three billion of the chemical bases that make up the genetic code of human beings. Since the genome project officially began in 1990, the NIH had spent several hundred million dollars. A map of all the known features of the twenty-three chromosomes was almost ready, but it had been decided that large-scale crunching of the actual Gs, As, Ts and Cs of the genome should wait until the technology for doing it had moved on another stage. So far, only 10 per cent of the sequence had been roughed out; only 3 per cent had been completed. The target date for finishing the genome was 2005.

  Collins sat uneasily on one of the ox-blood leather armchairs of the United Airlines Red Carpet Club. He had been asked to come and meet Mike Hunkapiller and Craig Venter, and it was not at all clear what the combination of those two men boded. Hunkapiller was president of Applied Biosystems, the Californian company which made most of the world’s gene-sequencing machines. Craig Venter was a former NIH scientist who had not been able to get NIH funding for his favoured genome strategy. In frustration, he had jumped sideways and set up a privately sponsored outfit called The Institute of Genome Research or TIGR, pronounced ‘tiger’. But he didn’t seem frustrated now. In fact, he was beaming. He looked rather the way he did in the pictures he encouraged press photographers to take, of him riding the big statue of a tiger outside the door of TIGR, rodeo-style, arm in air. Yee-ha!

  OK, said Mike Hunkapiller. We will be issuing a press release tomorrow and we wanted to give you a heads-up first. Applied Biosystems’ parent group Perkin-Elmer has decided to found a private corporation to sequence the human genome in three years. We’ll be equipping it with about 300 of our next-generation capillary sequencers, and we believe that with sufficient data-processing back-up, it should be possible to carry out Craig’s idea and to perform a shotgun assembly of the whole genome, skipping the mapping stage altogether. Craig has agreed to run the new company; he’ll also have a slice of the equity in it. We see an opportunity to provide the scientific community with the human sequence far sooner than anticipated, and at an estimated cost to us of only about $150–200 million. We envisage the sequence being put online in a database accessible by subscription. The company will aim to be the definitive source for genomic data; we’ll be in the information-delivery business, like Bloomberg or Reuters, enabling the work of scientists everywhere, so we don’t see ourselves patenting more than a few hundred of the most interesting genes. Naturally, we’re anxious to make sure that our efforts are integrated as much as possible with the work of the NIH. We want to give you the chance to get the maximum benefit from what we’re doing, and we’re eager to discuss ways in which this initiative can free up your resources for complementary projects.

  Great news! Glad tidings! That was what Craig Venter’s beaming face kept declaring. Of course, in the immediate sense, it was great news for him, not for Varmus and Collins; but surely, his demeanour implied, Collins could see the big picture, he could see how the greater good was being served. Now the NIH didn’t have to spend that huge heap of taxpayers’ money on the human genome. They could go away and do something different with it – perhaps they’d like to sequence the mouse, instead? – confident in the knowledge that free enterprise was taking care of all the Gs, As, Ts and Cs that spelled Homo sapiens, and naturally doing a better job of it than Varmus and Collins’ elaborate public-sector coalition could. It was a gift, this move, if Varmus and Collins would but see it: a gift from a generous capitalism which was sweeping all before it, in 1998, and which more and more people were coming to believe could manage any task, any task at all, better than the dreary old government. Consider the times. All of capitalism’s ideological enemies were defeated, and as if in celebration, the world was just climbing the first radiant upslope of the technology bubble. Every stock-market index everywhere was trending skyward. Bottomless wells of venture capital were available to back new technologies. What had been a rare opportunity for Vodafone to grow on cheap investment capital, onl
y a few years earlier, suddenly seemed to have become universal. There was money, seemingly, to realise any daring idea the human spirit could conceive. If the mind could frame it, and the heart could desire it, then someone, somewhere would devise a way to profit from it, and that one all-sufficient incentive would bring it, whatever it was, rushing into existence. What could be more appropriate than for the quicksilver intelligence of the market to accomplish this, and to decipher the operating code of humanity itself?

  Under the recessed halogen lights of the Red Carpet Club, very little contradicted this perspective. There were logos woven into the carpet, and printed onto the porcelain of the coffee cups. No one was gross enough to demand actual cash for the coffee, or for the orange juice in the glass jug on the snowy linen cloth. People paid business-class fares to avoid the scrum out on the Dulles concourses, where you had to buy a burger or a taco in order to sit down. This was a room for the new masters of the universe. Out there, beyond the smoked-glass windows, everything existed in order to be bought and sold, from thousand-acre lots of edge-city building land down to (as it turned out) the order of the nucleotides in every human cell; everything existed in order to be divided, packaged, transformed, exchanged, shifted between the multiplying warehouses of proliferating business parks, and gently squeezed, gently milked for the margin that you then paid to be admitted back into little bubbles of quiet corporate utopia like this, where the flight announcements were delivered at a sympathetic murmur and every article you read in the free copies of Fast Company and Business 2.0 in the magazine rack confirmed that moving goods through the market was the one, the true, the only occupation of mankind.

  Collins sat stunned. (As Varmus had done a few hours previously.) He made polite replies, trying to adjust to the sudden new shape of the situation. There was a law on the US statute books called the Bayh-Dole Act, which was usually taken to mean that the federal government must never compete against private industry. Did the Bayh-Dole Act cover this? If so, the fait accompli was complete. ‘We’ll have to consult our colleagues,’ he said, numbly.

  *

  But Hunkapiller and Venter had forgotten something, and it didn’t leap to the minds of Varmus and Collins, reeling as they were. If, from a business-class lounge, it was easy to think in 1998 that all the world was business, it was also easy to imagine, lulled by the imperious certainties around you, that all the world was America, except perhaps for a tiny outer rind, irrelevant for all practical purposes.

  Jim Watson, however, had remembered. As he knew very well from his own life history, human genetics had been a British-American collaboration from the start. It was in Cambridge that he and Francis Crick had deduced the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953, at the Cavendish lab. It was the Eagle on Benet Street that the two of them burst into to celebrate. He went home to New England after that, but he remained an Anglophile and he kept up his cross-Atlantic friendships. The Medical Research Council’s Laboratory for Molecular Biology in Cambridge remained one of the world’s very best genetics centres – the model for his own campus at Cold Spring Harbor, in some ways. At the LMB in the 1970s, Fred Sanger had invented the sequencing method that was automated in Mike Hunkapiller’s machines. And although most of the countries that had originally expressed an interest in keeping the Human Genome Project international had since dropped out of large-scale sequencing, unable to raise the ante required for this very expensive scientific game, Britain had not. As of May 1998, the UK was slated to do one sixth of the genome. The funding for that sixth did not depend on the US Congress. Varmus and Collins did not administer it. It was out of range of the Bayh-Dole Act; and out of range too, to some extent, of the pressures of American culture.

  The money did not come from the British government either. The Medical Research Council had helped fund the earlier stages of the British genome effort, but by 1995 the classic moment had arrived, so traditional in the history of promising projects in Britain. The price for doing a significant share of the genome rose beyond the point at which it fitted comfortably and uncontentiously into a budget, and the MRC, which had already spent millions, blinked. It blinked, it hiccuped, it hesitated, it experienced griping pangs of advance anxiety about the political will required to carry through something so unapologetically big. And it declined to play. Which would have been the end of the matter, in absolutely traditional style, if the MRC had been the only agency involved. But it wasn’t. The other portion of the early funding for the British genome effort came from the Wellcome Trust, and when the MRC stepped down, Wellcome stepped up. Most medical charities rely on an uncertain stream of public donations. This one entered the world, back in 1936, as the owner of a pharmaceutical company. Wellcome the company had had a very good run over the previous decade, developing the anti-AIDS drug AZT and the anti-herpes drug Zovirax, and Wellcome the charity prospered accordingly, in effect riding the success of the British pharmaceutical industry, another sector where small brilliant teams could create the products – this time, molecules with desirable effects on the human body – and manufacturing was pretty much an afterthought, just a matter of putting pills into packets. The Trust started to diversify its portfolio in the 1980s. Then, in 1992, it floated a quarter of Wellcome on the stock market, and its income rose to £200 million a year; and rose again, by 40 per cent, each year that followed. The same booming market that made Venter and Hunkapiller’s private-sector venture conceivable made the Wellcome Trust the richest charity in the world. It could do what it liked. And what it liked, with two well-disposed directors in a row, and Michael Morgan as its man for molecular biology throughout, was the idea of keeping the human genome in the public domain. The Wellcome Trust was committed. In fact, by a glaring coincidence, its board of scientific governors was due to meet the following Wednesday to consider upping the British share of the genome again, from one sixth to one third of the whole thing.

  That was why Jim Watson was on the telephone. He had the kind of mind that revelled in the acquisition of new skills, from the art of writing a bestseller to the art of sweet-talking a Congressional committee. The skill he was exercising now he had picked up while trying to persuade Japanese institutions to join the genome project back in the early 1990s, when he was doing the job Francis Collins now had. It hadn’t worked out; the Japanese had not come in; but, to his surprise, he had discovered that some of the remarks he had made in the process had been elegantly exploited by his Japanese colleagues to carry points in disputes of their own. There was a special word for this, he learned: gaiatsu, or the art of using foreigners to make things happen. He made a mental note, as he made a mental note of almost everything. And now he was practising a spot of gaiatsu on his own account, not using American actions to make a difference in Japan, but using British actions to make a difference in America.

  Michael Morgan started making calls.

  Saturday 9 May 1998

  The next morning, as promised, the world was told what Mike Hunkapiller and Craig Venter planned. The press release popped up in the email in-tray of every news agency and wire service. ‘The new company’s goal’, it said, ‘is to become the definitive source of genomic and associated medical information …’ It wasn’t a scientific statement, although it was announcing a scientific programme. It didn’t obey the rules of scientific speech, which say that you should only claim what you are already sure of, what you have proved. Instead, it followed the rules of good PR, as taught by every investment bank presently engaged in guiding unprofitable companies along the short, beautiful road to a listing on the NASDAQ. These rules were different: you should claim everything you can, they said, that can’t be disproved. Claim Big, in other words, and Cover Your Back. Accordingly, the press release ended with the standard piece of legal boilerplate that insured against baulky behaviour by the future you’d just declared you were seizing. ‘Certain statements in this press release and its attachments are forward-looking. These may be identified by the use of forward-looking words or phrases such as
“believe”, “expect”, “anticipate”, “intend”, “should”, “planned”, “estimated”, “potential” and “will” among others … The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 provides a “safe harbour” for such forward-looking statements.’

  *

  Five miles south of Cambridge, one of the people Michael Morgan had rung up stepped out into his back garden and cast a quick eye over the progress of his vegetable patch. The green spears were coming up nicely in the black earth, and chlorophyll was pumping through the new foliage on the fruit trees. The fieldfares had flown back to Sweden but a solitary native thrush was hopping about on the lawn. Everything’s genes were busily expressing themselves, stipulating proteins that built cells that assembled into organisms. John Sulston finished his coffee, then got into the car and drove from Shelford to Whittlesford, from Whittlesford to Duxford, and from Duxford to Hinxton, and a campus of buildings on the sloping water meadows of the River Granta. For a while, he’d commuted to the Sanger Centre on a 550 cc motorbike, belting along the B-roads, but when he crashed it and broke his pelvis, the Wellcome Trust, not wanting to lose the director of their genome institute, had firmly enjoined him not to ride any more two-wheeled vehicles. (His family agreed.) Still, he had the workshop manual for the car, just as he’d had the manual for the bike. He knew how to take it apart and put it back together again. Knowing how things worked was one of life’s essential satisfactions, to him. He was a scientist, not an engineer, so he put knowing above making as the highest, the most central of motivations; but the kind of things he liked to know about were intricate systems that engineers would immediately have understood the attraction of. And the kind of knowledge he valued most always had a strong physical component to it. It involved seeing, drawing, touching, doing. He started as a boy, building things with Meccano, and then with batteries and wires and bells and electromagnets. Now he was working on coiled, miniscule wisps of nucleic acid that encoded the complete digital instructions for an organism in every cell in its body. In a way, you could say that cracking the genome amounted to an exercise in reverse engineering – the thing that industrial design departments do when they have a rival’s product but don’t know how it works. At the Sanger Centre, they were compiling a complete schematic of the human being so they could work backward from it and start deducing the function of all the billions of parts.