KEVIN WAS STILL DEJECTED when he met Marco in the university hospital cafeteria and told him about his meetings with Johnson and Singh.
“So you’re batting five hundred, yes?” said Marco.
“I guess so. But it’s more like my team acquired a walk-on and lost a top draft choice.”
“Oh, I thought you didn’t know anything about baseball?”
“Unfortunately, I do. I just don’t like talking about it—except when I’m angry.”
Marco laughed and stroked Kevin’s cheek.
“We’ll change the subject. You want to hear about my symposium?”
“Absolutely!”
“I know how science gets you aroused,” Marco whispered conspiratorially. “Are you sure you want to discuss it in public?”
Kevin finally smiled.
Marco’s symposium was a gathering of two groups with converging interests, his own laboratory at Berkeley, run by the cell biologist Isaac Goldstein, and the Wilmer laboratory on the Hill, which specialized in gene splicing—excising natural genes from a cell and inserting modified ones. In collaboration, the two groups might be the first to create a gene-knockout mouse by removing a normal gene from a mouse stem cell, replacing it with a gene that couldn’t function, and growing the altered stem cell into a mature adult mouse in which every cell had the faulty gene.
“Wilmer’s lab is in the same boat we are. They’re getting scooped by people at Oxford just like we were last month by the Cambridge group that published their paper in Cell on the same day Goldstein submitted our paper to Nature.”
“So the Brits are your common enemy?”
“Exactamente! Which is why Goldstein and Wilmer are ready to trust each other enough to join forces.”
“So, how did it go?”
“Querido, you would have loved it. When I get there, all the Wilmer people are sitting on one side of the room and our people are on the other. Nobody is talking. Complete silence.”
“Sounds unpleasant.”
“Right. So I sit down right in the middle of the Wilmer group who give me these uncomfortable social smiles. Then the data presentation begins. All the post-docs are edgy, trying to figure out what information is OK to give. They don’t want to reveal too much. It was like, how you say, a strip show. Then Goldstein takes the big leap. He puts some very hot, unpublished data on the overhead projector. The Wilmer people’s eyes get big. They lick their lips. I’m surprised nobody makes a wolf whistle. Then the anti-Brit jokes begin. After that, everybody is good buddies, sharing all their data.”
Kevin laughed.
“The best thing was that nobody picked at details, like whether enough replicate experiments had been done or the controls were adequate. People asked about what the data meant, which showed they really respected each other’s work. In no time, we came up with a consensus research plan.”
“And you promised you’d be faithful to me.”
“Aha! I knew that story would cheer you up.”
Well aware of what this collaboration implied for Marco, Kevin exclaimed, “What a fabulous opportunity for you!”
Marco beamed, and Kevin tipped his own coffee cup against Marco’s in a celebratory toast.