Interacting with the natural world, we are denied certainty. And always will be.

How then can young people gain experience of the natural world? Ideally, by spending some time in a rain forest-those vast, uncomfortable, alarming, and beautiful environments that so quickly knock our preconceptions aside.

NOT FINISHED

MICHAEL CRICHTON

August 28, 2008

The Seven Graduate Students

Rick Hutter Ethnobotanist studying medicines used by indigenous peoples. Karen King Arachnologist (expert in spiders, scorpions, and mites). Skilled in martial arts. Peter Jansen Expert in venoms and envenomation. Erika Moll Entomologist and coleopterist (beetle expert). Amar Singh Botanist studying plant hormones. Jenny Linn Biochemist studying pheromones, the signaling scents used by animals and plants. Danny Minot Doctoral student writing a thesis on “scientific linguistic codes and paradigm transformation.”

Prologue

Nanigen 9 October, 11:55 p.m.

West of Pearl Harbor, he drove along the Farrington Highway past fields of sugar cane, dark green in the moonlight. This had long been an agricultural region of Oahu, but recently it had begun to change. Off to his left, he saw the flat steel rooftops of the new Kalikimaki Industrial Park, bright silver in the surrounding green. In truth, Marcos Rodriguez knew, this wasn’t much of an industrial park; most of the buildings were warehouses, inexpensive to rent. Then there was a marine supply store, a guy who made custom surfboards, a couple of machine shops, a metalworker. That was about it.

And, of course, the reason for his visit tonight: Nanigen MicroTechnologies, a new company from the mainland, now housed in a large building at the far end of the facility.