Frank scrolled down the pages of the application with practiced speed. Yann Pierzinski, Ph.D. in biomath, Caltech. Still doing postdoc work with his thesis advisor there, a man Frank had come to consider a bit of a credit hog, if not worse. It was interesting, then, that Pierzinski had gone down to Torrey Pines to work on a temporary contract, for a bioinformatics researcher whom Frank didn’t know. Perhaps that had been a bid to escape the advisor. But now he was back.

Frank dug into the substantive part of the proposal. The algorithm set was one Pierzinski had been working on even back in his dissertation. Chemical mechanics of protein creation as a sort of natural algorithm, in effect. Frank considered the idea, operation by operation. This was his real expertise; this was what had interested him from childhood, when the puzzles solved had been simple ciphers. He had always loved this work, and now perhaps more than ever, offering as it did a complete escape from consciousness of himself. Why he might want to make that escape remained moot; howsoever it might be, when he came back he felt refreshed, as if finally he had been in a good place.

He also liked to see patterns emerge from the apparent randomness of the world. This was why he had recently taken such an interest in sociobiology; he had hoped there might be algorithms to be found there which would crack the code of human behavior. So far that quest had not been very satisfactory, mostly because so little in human behavior was susceptible to a controlled experiment, so no theory could even be tested. That was a shame. He badly wanted some clarification in that realm.

At the level of the four chemicals of the genome, however—in the long dance of cytosine, adenine, guanine, and thymine—much more seemed to be amenable to mathematical explanation and experiment, with results that could be conveyed to other scientists, and put to use. One could test Pierzinski’s ideas, in other words, and find out if they worked.