Fifteen dollars for a salad?
Christina gulped when she looked at the lunch menu on display and reminded herself that the biotechnology giant Bactofuels was picking up the tab. Surely the company rep knew this place was pricey when he chose it for his meeting with Dr. Chen. But did he know he’d be paying for a graduate student, too?
The menu for The Restaurant at the Getty Center extolled the virtues of local, sustainable food, but Christina knew the real reason you needed a reservation to eat here was the view. The Getty Center Museum was a stunning architectural masterpiece in the Santa Monica mountains of Los Angeles, perched nine hundred feet above the 405 freeway which snaked away southward below them. On a clear day like today, the view from The Restaurant was breathtaking, trumping even the exquisite collection of European art on display inside the Getty’s Italian travertine walls.
This was not Christina’s first visit to the Getty. The world-class attraction was only a three-mile bike ride from the UCLA campus. Thanks to the philanthropy of J. Paul Getty and his ten billion-dollar trust, the tram ride up the steep slope from the parking lot, and admission into the gardens and museum, were free. For an intellectual young woman on a grad student budget, that added up to an irresistible deal. She visited several times a year.
But she’d never eaten at The Restaurant. Standing in the sun outside the entrance, Christina checked the time: five minutes past their reservation. The restaurant was busy, and the hostess turned away a middle-aged couple who complained loudly in some foreign language as they marched toward the long line for the cafeteria. Christina fretted that The Restaurant would give away their table. She searched the crowd for Dr. Chen and Jeff Trinley, their contact from Bactofuels.
She spotted her boss and promptly forgot any concerns she had about being underdressed in her Lycra skort. Dr. Chen was wearing R.E.I. hiking shorts and a T-shirt with a biochemical pathway cartooned on the back. His companion was also in shorts but his Tommy Bahama camp shirt was significantly more stylish.
“Parking lot was full,” Dr. Chen said. “We had to use the remote lot and ride the shuttle. It would’ve been faster to walk from the lab.”
Christina knew Dr. Chen disliked driving, and the only reason he’d arrived by car was because Trinley had picked him up. She, on the other hand, had come on her bike an hour earlier to enjoy the museum for a while.
Dr. Chen smiled and put his hand on Christina’s shoulder. “Jeff, I want you to meet Miss Christina Gonzalez, Ph.D. candidate in my lab. Since the fiasco with the tar sands project, I’m putting her to work on E. coli isobutanol.”
Trinley glanced at her with a vacant expression. She offered her hand and said, “It’s nice to meet you.”
He didn’t bother to make eye contact when he gave her a limp handshake.
I guess he didn’t know the graduate student was coming. She felt intensely awkward.
The hostess led them to their table. Christina politely took her seat on a chair with its back to the glorious windows so the others could enjoy the panoramic view. The seat was also in the sun, which felt good. She was dressed for summer biking, not for air conditioning, and the restaurant seemed excessively cold.
Trinley ordered a beer and looked out at the landscape, his gaze passing through Christina as if she were as invisible as the glass windows themselves.
“So Robert, what happened with the Syntrophus project?” Trinley asked.
Dr. Chen grimaced. “Not much to tell, Jeff. You know we had an experimental model set up in an underground gasoline storage tank. We put our bacterial cultures in and let it cook. Then it blew up.” He made a poof gesture with his hands.
“CaliPetro couldn’t have been too happy about that.”
“No, Jeff, they weren’t,” Dr. Chen said with a sigh. “Neither was I, nor was Christina. Disappointing, for sure.”
“Especially since the microbiology worked really well,” Christina said, trying to join the conversation. “I’m sure it was just the engineering that failed.”
Trinley gave her a cold look. “Just the engineering? You’ll find that when you want to scale up a laboratory project to an industrial level, practical problems with design and production are far from trivial. In fact, they often make the basic science look easy.”
He turned to Dr. Chen. “Bactofuels has a lot of experience with this kind of thing, Robert. Large-scale production of proteins and enzymes is what we do best, and we’ve got customers in industry, agriculture, and medicine. I can’t say I’m surprised that CaliPetro wasn’t up to the challenge. They may know how to drill for oil, but what do they know about microbiology?”
Dr. Chen shifted in his chair. “They know enough, Jeff, and as their consultant, I gave them good advice. I still don’t understand why the reaction was so unpredictable.”
“I’m not going to argue with you,” Trinley said, waving his hand to symbolically sweep away Chen’s affiliation with the other sponsor. “But I suppose this incident leaves a bit of a gap in your institute’s finances.”
“In the short term, yes.”
“Then you’ll be happy to know Bactofuels is prepared to fill the gap. We’re very optimistic about the progress you’ve made on the photosynthetic E. coli. By devoting more resources to the project, we hope to speed it up. With additional funds, perhaps you can even hire a qualified assistant.”
The comment, though not overtly directed at her, made Christina burn. Who does this guy think he is? I may be the student today, but I’ll be the professor tomorrow.
Dr. Chen perceived the slight as well. “Christina will be on this project full-time from now on. She’s an outstanding scientist and I know we can count on her to do things right.”
“I’m sure,” Trinley said, and turned to address her directly for the first time. “Miss Gonzalez, do you know what Bactofuels does?”
Sensing a test, Christina marshaled her considerable academic talents and answered him. “You sell enzymes and bacterial cultures. Farmers use them to break down manure. Hobbyists use them to clean their fish tanks. Your genetically-engineered bacteria manufacture human proteins for use in pharmaceuticals. Organic farmers buy your biopesticides. And now you’re working on biofuels.”
“Very good, all true,” Trinley said with a hint of honest praise. “But I want to emphasize the overall theme of our work. Bactofuels is a world leader in synthetic biology.”
“The application of engineering principles to living systems,” Christina interrupted, unafraid to assert her competence. “For example, taking a naturally occurring biochemical pathway, or series of enzymatic reactions, and altering it to produce something useful to humans.”
“Or even designing and manufacturing a living cell from scratch,” Trinley said. “We’re not there yet, but this photosynthetic E. coli project is the closest we’ve come. The project is very important to us.”
The waiter placed a beautifully arranged plate of baby salad greens, sliced heirloom tomatoes and fresh mozzarella cheese in front of Christina. She estimated the actual cost of the ingredients to be about two bucks.
“Fresh ground pepper?” the waiter asked.
“Please,” Christina replied.
As the waiter made a showy display of operating an oversized pepper mill, Trinley spoke to Dr. Chen.
“I’ll tell you the truth, Robert. We don’t really expect the isobutanol to be commercially viable. No matter what modifications you make, using bacteria to produce biodiesel will be too expensive compared to oil unless a major war breaks out in the Middle East. What Bactofuels wants is an organism that we can patent and use as a basic model for producing other, more costly chemicals. Escherichia coli is the best-understood bacterial species on the planet. It’s versatile, hardy, and generally harmless. By giving it the ability to use sunlight as an energy source, you’re creating the perfect biological factory. With the proper genetic modification, Bactofuels can use E. coli to manufacture just about anything.”
Christina listened with fascination. She thought producing ecologically-friendly fuel for vehicles like the X-car was the whole point of the project, but Trinley’s goal was even bigger. He wasn’t thinking about just one product, but about the process. Instead of selling biodiesel, he wanted to build a microbial factory with a genetic assembly line that could be tweaked to produce any number of different organic substances. She had to admit that was pretty smart. Gas sold for a few dollars a gallon, but some proteins were worth tens of thousands of dollars an ounce.
“With your financial support, I’m confident we can engineer these bacteria to meet your requirements,” Chen said. He winked at Christina.
“Thank you, Robert,” Trinley said, taking a bite of ahi tuna.
“And don’t write off the isobutanol yet,” Dr. Chen said. “The price of oil is volatile, and who knows what people might be willing to pay for solar gasoline?”
Christina couldn’t answer that question, but she did know that there was big money in oil. The museum complex around her cost a billion dollars to build, and that was only a drop in the bucket of the Getty Oil fortune. If Dr. Chen’s technology could siphon off even an infinitesimal fraction of the conventional fuel business, they’d be set for life.