Forty signs of rain - Kim Stanley Robinson [49]
“Everybody got that? Okay, hand those forms down to me, then. We’ll have a couple of people step outside for some of the proposals today, but mostly we’re clear as far as I know, is that right?”
“I’ll be leaving for the Esterhaus proposal, as I told you,” Stuart Thornton said.
Then they started the group evaluations. This was the heart of their task for that day and the next—also the heart of NSF’s method, indeed of science more generally. Peer-review; a jury of fellow experts. Frank clicked the first proposal’s page onto his screen. “Seven reviewers, forty-four jackets. Let’s start with EIA-02 18599, ‘Electromagnetic and Informational Processes in Molecular Polymers.’ Habib, you’re the lead on this?”
Habib Ndina nodded and opened with a description of the proposal. “They want to immobilize cytoskeletal networks on biochips, and explore whether tubulin can be used as bits in protein logic gates. They intend to do this by measuring the electric dipole moment, and what the P.I. calls the predicted kink-solitonic electric dipole moment flip waves.”
“Predicted by whom?”
“By the P.I.” Habib smiled. “He also states that this will be a method to test out the theories of the so-called quantum brain.”
“Hmm.” People read past the abstract.
“What are you thinking?” Frank said after a while. “I see Habib has given it a ‘Good,’ Stuart a ‘Fair,’ and Alice a ‘Very Good.’”
This represented the middle range of their scale, which ran Poor, Fair, Good, Very Good, and Excellent.
Habib replied first. “I’m not so sure that you can get these biochips to array in neural nets. I saw Inouye try something like that at MIT, and they got stuck at the level of chip viability.”
“Hmm.”
The others chimed in with questions and opinions. At the end of fifteen minutes, Frank stopped the discussion and asked them to mark their final judgments in the two categories they used: intellectual merit and broader impacts.
Frank summed up the responses. “Four ‘Goods,’ two ‘Very Goods’ and a ‘Fair.’ Okay, let’s move on. But tell you what, I’m going to start the big board right now.”
He had a whiteboard in the corner next to him, and a pile of Post-it pads on the table. He drew three zones on the whiteboard with marker, and wrote at the top “Fund,” “Fund If Possible,” and “Don’t Fund.”
“I’ll put this one in the ‘Fund If Possible’ column for now, although naturally it may get bumped.” He stuck the proposal’s Post-it in the middle zone. “We’ll move these around as the day progresses and we get a sense of the range.”
Then they began the next one. “Okay. ‘Efficient Decoherence Control Algorithms for Computing Genome Construction.’”
This jacket Frank had assigned to Stuart Thornton.
Thornton started by shaking his head. “This one’s gotten two ‘Goods’ and two ‘Fairs,’ and it wasn’t very impressive to me either. It may be a candidate for limited discussion. It doesn’t really exhibit a grasp of the difficulties involved with codon tampering, and I think it replicates the work being done in Seattle by Johnson’s lab. The applicant seems to have been too busy with the broader impacts component to fully acquaint himself with the literature. Besides which, it won’t work.”
People laughed shortly at this extra measure of disdain, which was palpable, and to those who didn’t know Thornton, a little surprising. But Frank had seen Stuart Thornton on panels