Micro

Walking down the hallway, Vin Drake rattled off bits of information about each lab: “Proteomics and genomics…chemical ecology…Phytopathology, including plant viruses…stochastic biology…electrical signaling in plants…insect ultrasound lab…phytoneurology, that’s plant neurotransmitters…Peter, here’s venoms and toxins…Arachnid and coleoptid volatiles…behavioral physiology, that’s exocrine secretion and social regulation, ants primarily…”

“What’re all the electronics for?” someone asked.

“For the robots,” Drake said. “They need to be reprogrammed or repaired, after each trip in the field.” He paused, looked at the group. “I see a lot of puzzled faces. Here, come inside, let’s take a closer look.”

They filed into the laboratory to the right. It smelled faintly of earth, decaying plant matter, desiccated leaves. Drake led them to a table where several foot-square flats of earth were laid out. Above each square was a suspended video camera on a jointed arm. “Here are examples of the material we bring back from the rain forest,” he said. “We are working on different projects for each, but in every case the robots are at work.”

“Where?” Erika asked. “I don’t see-”

Drake adjusted the light, and the video camera. On side monitors, they saw a tiny white object in the soil, magnified many times. “As you see, it’s a burrowing and collecting machine, working on a microscopic scale,” Drake said. “And it has much to do, because a flat of soil like this holds a vast and interconnected world that is yet unknown to man. There’s trillions of microorganisms, tens of thousands of species of bacteria and protozoa, nearly all of them uncatalogued. There can be thousands of miles of wispy fungal hyphae threads in a patch of soil this big. There can be a million microscopic arthropods and other tiny insects, too small for the naked eye to see. There are dozens of earthworms of various sizes. In fact, there are more small living things in this little square of earth than there are large living things on the entire surface of our planet. Think about it. We humans live on the surface. We think that’s where the life is. We think in terms of people and elephants and sharks and forests of trees. But our perceptions are wrong. The truth of life on our planet is very different. The real bedrock fundamental life-teeming, burrowing, breeding, continuously active-is down here, at this level. And this is where the discoveries are going to be made.”

It was an impressive speech; Drake had given it before, and audiences were always awed into silence. But not this group; Rick Hutter immediately said, “And what’s this particular robot discovering?”

“Nematodes,” Vin Drake said. “Microscopic roundworms that we think have important biological properties. In a flat of soil like this, there are about four billion nematodes, but we want to collect only those which have not yet been discovered.”

Drake had turned to a line of windows that looked into a laboratory where a handful of researchers were working at banks of machines. Complicated machines. “What we’re doing in that room,” Drake said, “is screening. We’re screening thousands of compounds, very rapidly, using high-speed fractionation and mass spectrometry-those are the machines you see. We’ve already found dozens of totally new drug candidates. And they’re natural. Mother Nature’s best.”

Amar Singh had been quite impressed by the technology, but there were still things he didn’t understand. One of them was the robots. The robots were really small. Too small, he thought, to have much of a computer in them. Amar said, “How can those robots sort through the worms and pick them out?”

“Oh, they do it easily,” Drake said.

“How?”

“The robot has the intelligence to do it.”

“But how?” Amar indicated a flat of soil, where a tiny robot was rooting feverishly in the dirt. “This machine can’t be more than eight or nine millimeters in length,” Amar said. “It’s the size of my little fingernail. You can’t put any computing power in such a small dimension.”

“Actually, you can.”

“How?”

“Let’s go to the conference room.”

Four huge flat-panel screens glowed behind Vin Drake. The screens showed images in deep blue and purple that looked rather like waves on the ocean, as seen from an airplane. Drake paced in front of the screens, his voice amplified by the lapel microphone clipped to his jacket. He gestured to the purple screens. “What you are looking at,” he said, “are convection patterns in magnetic fields approaching sixty Tesla in strength. These are the highest magnetic fields generated by man. To give you some perspective, a sixty Tesla magnetic field is two million times greater than the strength of the earth’s own magnetic field. These fields are created by cryogenic superconduction using niobium-based composite materials.”