The Gene Machine by Venki Ramakrishnan

Author:Venki Ramakrishnan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oneworld Publications

CHAPTER 11

Coming Out of the Closet

IT’S ONE THING TO VISIT a foreign country for a year and quite another to burn your bridges and move there. All countries have their peculiarities, but we become used to our own, whereas those of other countries strike us as strange. So in America, I had become used to the idea that lots of otherwise reasonable people own guns for no good reason, public transport is virtually non-existent in most places, and many people live in suburban sprawls and drive everywhere. During our sabbatical in England, we had noticed things like rigid bureaucratic rules administered with an earnest smugness, queues for almost anything forming in ways that were impenetrable to foreigners so you were never actually in line, customer service that was an oxymoron, or – my favourite – locals feeling that ‘we’ve always done it that way’ was a perfectly reasonable response when questioned about some completely silly practice. But things that had seemed charming and quaint if a little odd during our sabbatical were annoying when they became a permanent part of our lives.

We had sold our five-bedroom house overlooking the Salt Lake valley and the Wasatch Mountain Range and were renting a place owned by the MRC. From the very first week, we started looking to buy a house. Before committing to the job, I had enquired what a modest terraced house would cost in Cambridge and figured we could just about afford one. Between the decision and the move, prices had risen by almost 50 per cent and were continuing to rise almost weekly. For a while, we were outbid on virtually every house, and our inability to buy anything at all added to Vera’s unhappiness about leaving her friends and nice home in Utah. It probably didn’t help that right from the start, I had a near obsessive focus on the 30S structure.

Normally a move would have slowed us down considerably, but for a couple of reasons we may actually have speeded up our progress instead. Since we had collected the data we needed for this phase of the work, I could not have moved at a better time because the LMB had excellent computing facilities. This meant that I could speed up the work by trying lots of calculations in parallel, see what worked, and then use that as a guide to do the next set of calculations.

It turned out that virtually every compound Bil had soaked into the 30S crystals was useful. The seventeen-atom tungsten cluster was the only one whose signal was large enough to see directly as peaks in sections of the Patterson maps. But although it wasn’t obvious from a direct inspection of the Patterson maps, all the other compounds had also bound to the 30S subunit.

When the signal is weaker, there are programs that can find the heavy atoms in a nearly automatic way. One of them was a program called SOLVE, written by Tom Terwilliger from Los Alamos. Tom is one of

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