Forty signs of rain - Kim Stanley Robinson [52]
Before Francesca could collect herself and start again, Frank said, “Well, we could go round and round on that, but we’re out of time on this one, and it’s late. Those of you who haven’t done it yet, write down your scores, and let’s finish with one more from Alice before we go to dinner.”
Hunger made them nod and tap away at their consoles, and then they were on to the last one for the day, “Ribozymes as Molecular Logic Gates.” When they were done with that, Frank stuck its Post-it on the whiteboard with the rest. Each little square of paper had its proposal’s averaged scores written on it. It was a tight scale; the difference between 4.63 and 4.70 could matter a great deal. They had already put three proposals in the “Fund” column, two in the “Fund If Possible,” and six in the “Do Not Fund.” The rest were stuck to the bottom of the board, waiting to be sorted out the following day. Pierzinski’s was among those.
That evening the group went out for dinner at Tara, a good nearby Thai restaurant with a wall-sized fish tank. The conversation was animated and wide-ranging, the mood getting better as the meal wore on. Afterward a few of them went to the hotel bar; the rest retreated to their rooms. At eight the next morning they were back in the conference room doing everything over again, working their way through the proposals with an increasing efficiency. Thornton recused himself for a discussion of a proposal from someone at his university, and the mood in the room noticeably lightened; even when he returned they held to this. They were learning each other’s predilections, and sometimes jetted off into discussions of theory that were very interesting even though they were only a few minutes long. Some of the proposals brought up interesting problems, and several strong ones in a row made them aware of just how amazing contemporary work in bioinformatics was, and what some of the potential benefits for human health might be, if all this were to come together and make a robust biotechnology. The shadow of a good future drove the group toward more generous strategies. The second day went better. The scores were, on average, higher.
“My Lord,” Alice said at one point, looking at the whiteboard. “There are going to be some very good proposals that we’re not going to be able to fund.”
Everyone nodded. It was a common feeling at the end of a panel.
“I sometimes wonder what would happen if we could fund about ninety percent of all the applications. You know, only reject the limited-discussions. Fund everything else.”
“It might speed things up.”
“Might cause a revolution.”
“Now back to reality,” Frank suggested. “Last jacket here.”
When they had all tapped in their grading of the forty-fourth jacket, Frank quickly crunched the numbers on his general spreadsheet, sorting the applicants into a hierarchy from one to forty-four, with a lot of ties.
He printed out the results, including the funding each proposal was asking for, then called the group back to order. They started moving the unsorted Post-its up into one or another of the three columns.
Pierzinski’s proposal had ended up ranked fourteenth out of the forty-four. It wouldn’t have been that high if it weren’t for Francesca. Now she urged them to fund it; but because it was in fourteenth place, the group decided it should be put in “Fund If Possible,” with a bullet.
Frank moved its Post-it on the whiteboard up into the “Fund If Possible” column, keeping his face perfectly blank. There were eight in “Fund If Possible,” six in “Fund,” twelve in “Do Not Fund.” Eighteen to go, therefore, but the arithmetic of the situation would doom most of these to the “Do Not Fund” column, with a few stuck into the “Fund If Possible” as faint hopes.
Later it would be Frank’s job to fill out a Form Seven for every proposal, summarizing the key aspects of the discussion, acknowledging outlier reviews that were more than one full place off the average, and explaining any “Excellents” awarded to nonfunded reviews; this was part of keeping