Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
Less knowledge is not the answer. Better knowledge is. Chemical
processes are not the problem. They're the rules of the game.
It's elementary: your life is chemistry. [Powers 2001, p. 153]
And whatever the cause of Laura's cancer, chemistry is a big part of the
attempted cure. She is given taxol, manufactured by Bristol-Myers
Squibb - “but Clare sells them cheap materials”, her doctor tells her. “I
thought the stuff was made with tree bark”, Laura says. The doctor
replies,
It used to be. Now they use artificial tree bark. Used to take six mature
hundred-year-old Pacific yew trees to treat you. Pretty expensive, when
you figure yew trees can only be harvested by clear-cutting […] that's
exactly where the science comes in. One of our home-team chemists has
figured out how to make, in a test tube, what used to cost an arm and a
leg and half a dozen yew trunks. The molecule that does all the good
work is so complex that synthesizing an imitation was supposed to have
taken years. But so many people were willing to pay so much for it that
science has produced a substitute in record time […] If you just get out
of people's way, they'll figure out how to make what people need. [Pow-
ers 2001, p. 151f.]
Thus taxol becomes the analogue of DeLillo's Dylar, the “benign coun-
terpart of the Nyodene D menace” as Jack Gladney puts it. More than
this, even - for Laura's son Tim comes to see that 'better chemistry' is
the solution as well as the problem. He changes gradually from a college
drop-out who stages annual hunger vigils in front of the Clare headquar-
ters to a computer scientist at MIT who writes a program that predicts
protein folding from sequence data. With that capability at their disposal,
people might create molecules to do anything. The team found itself star-
ing at a universal chemical assembly plant at the level of the human cell.
Together with a score of other machines just then coming into existence,
their program promised to make anything the damaged cell called out
for. [Powers 2001, p. 355].
And in the exhausted depths of her terminal illness, Laura herself sees
that, even if Clare products did cause her condition, that is not ultimately
where the problem lies. She is one of the millions who have willed
companies like Clare into existence. These companies do no more and no
less than make things, and this is what everyone wants them to do.
