Intuition by Allegra Goodman

Author:Allegra Goodman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780440335887
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2006-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

5

CLIFF AND Feng spent Monday morning mocking up their poster for a conference at MIT. They stood at a table in the third-floor lounge with flowcharts detailing how R-7 entered and subverted cancer cells. The process was both simple and elegant in theory: the virus with covert forces in tow approaching, parachuting in behind enemy lines, and knocking off the cancerous sentinel, then donning the enemy uniform and proceeding to destroy the enemy infrastructure. Illustrating these war games accurately on paper was not easy, however. Cliff had prepared elaborate diagrams showing the genetic structure of R-7 and the genetic structure of the target cancer cell. Feng had typed up several pages of exposition explaining exactly how virus and cancer cell fit together. The two men now stood arranging and rearranging diagrams and notes on their foam core board.

“It's too cluttered,” Cliff said after some thought. “We should take these out.” He discarded two pages of Feng's description.

“I think we need those,” Feng said.

“They're too wordy.”

“I think,” said Feng, “the diagrams need a key.”

“They shouldn't need a . . .” Cliff caught his breath and sneezed. “What is that?” He rubbed his eyes. “I'm allergic to something in this room.” A bunch of flowers lay half dead on the side table near the couch. “Who left these here? God.” He tossed the wilted blossoms in the trash. “The diagrams should speak for themselves,” he said, quoting Sandy Glass.

“Accuracy is more important than elegance,” Feng retorted, quoting Marion Mendelssohn.

The two of them faced off for a moment, tense and almost rivalrous, like brothers, opposites in the same family, one taking after the father and one after the mother, neither willing to give way. Feng made his point, but Cliff knew that he was right. The poster was supposed to advertise, not explain. How many times had he been told that in grad school? The poster was a storyboard; the cartoon version. And so, with some authority, he set Feng's wordy pages off to the side.

Cliff was exerting control as he never had before, and control was his prerogative. Feng did not dispute that. Characteristically, he did not debate the issue further, but in that moment Feng resolved to work on something else. He needed something of his own, even if it was on the most trivial problem. In the lab, solitude had always been his friend, and obscurity meant freedom. Cliff's lexicon of Fungi made Feng seem merely cynical. The scrawled definitions: “axiom = assumption; assumption = confusion; confusion = status quo”—all those transcriptions of Feng's sayings hardly captured the contradictions in his character: his reticent imagination; the sublimation of self, masking independence. He was tired of Cliff and his famous discovery.

Restless, Cliff propped his poster on the couch, then on a chair, and finally on the counter against the microwave. He backed into the doorway to look at the result, considered his composition, and then paced a little in the hall. He just wanted to get the presentation right. All his thoughts and actions served R-7.

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