All-new "Deleted Scene" from the Secret Big New Thriller
As promised, I'm back with an all-new "deleted scene" from the SBNT. These were pages that appeared early in the book as I was introducing our bright heroine, her expertise, and some of the stressors in her life. In retrospect, though, getting so far into her head was more for my own benefit than the readers'.
Personally I find this kind of perspective fascinating. Science! Industry! Politics! But a big yaaaaaawn is what it gets from lots of folks. I mean, it ain't Justin Bieber's spanky new video, right? Who cares! Worse, it's TWO PAGES LONG!!! "Boooooo-ring!" Aha ha ha ha. A thriller must thrill, so onto the cutting table it went. Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy this sneak peek a rough draft that no longer exists:
It had been a time of wild ups and downs in the field. Emily had been hired not long after after the completion of the Human Genome Project, which had been the largest undertaking in the history of genetics and saw an influx of capital both from the private sector and from several governments around the world. A complete set of human DNA was comprised of three billion base pairs, each of which repeated the same four basic building blocks thousands of times in unique patterns. To decode the full genome, it was necessary to work through every possible permutation of those patterns. That meant a single gene consisted of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits of information even if more than fifty percent of it was repeats and inactive codons, so-called "junk DNA."
The Human Genome Project had taken more man-hours and computing power than any single lab or company could provide, but once the project was done, where were all of those highly trained workers supposed to go?
In the United States, many of them had been absorbed by the DOE, the Department of Energy, where they found themselves working on exotic bioenergy projects. Other labs became dependent on private investors or collapsed altogether.
[Company name redacted] lost in the rush to become a federally-funded institution. Years later, they were controlled by a board of venture capitalists who owned a sixty percent stake in the company. These men wanted short-term returns. They'd put a freeze on salaries and new hires — and now [company name redacted] was insolvent. The easy money of the tech boom had dried up before Emily earned her Ph.D. She'd been lucky to get a job at all, much less a slot near her parents and her sister with what had been one of the premier companies on the West Coast.
By the same token, they were lucky to have next-generation biologists like her. The Human Genome Project was ancient history as far as Emily was concerned. The future was geeks like her. Only her ability to combine thousands of data sets gave [company name redacted] a chance to make a splash before the company was shut down, broken up, and auctioned off to meet their debts.
It was proteomics, the study of the chemistry and behavior of a body's proteins, that truly spoke to life function. Old guys like Ray didn't understand what she was doing. He'd actually studied under one of the first pioneers in genetics. Way back in the seventies, this dinosaur had spent four years decoding a grand spanking total of ten genes with nothing more than gel electrophoresis and a few jugs of enzymes.
Computational biologists like Emily churned through millions of bits of genetic code every hour every day. The origins of life itself were being laid bare and most researchers sent their results to silos like NCBI, the National Center for Biotechnology Information, a data universe where Emily was free to gather what she needed.
There was nothing top secret in genetics. Anyone with the education and the technology could run their own experiments using samples from people right on the street. Proprietary information came from the interpretation of gene codes, not the code itself, which was where most scientists got lost.
Emily likened gene codes to music. Until you could read it and hear the sound yourself, you had no idea if you'd isolated Beethoven or Green Day.
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