It Rained

The moment my alarm sounded, I reached down beside the bed, feeling in the dark for my Palm Pilot to check the radar. I pushed the "on" button and the screen filled the room with a pale blue light. A couple of taps here and there, and as the radar map loaded, the blue changed dramatically to green. I didn't even have to see the map to know what that meant. I lifted myself up on one elbow and peered out the window. The street was still dry, but there was a long line of rain ahead of a cold front bearing down on the city at 30 mph. I thought about it. I checked the street again. I studied the radar again - and again. There just wasn't any way around it. If I went out, even for a quick ten-mile sprint, I was going to get wet, cold, and probably blown right off the road, assuming I didn't get two flats and have to walk back home in the rain. I made a mental note to reserve a spot in the evening Spin class and shuffled off to the kitchen to make some coffee.

Half an hour later, with absolutely perfect timing, the rain started at precisely the moment I would otherwise have been walking out the door.

So I'm presently sitting here at the office waiting on a couple of return phone calls because the president wants to set up a meeting with Dr. Francis Collins who will be on campus next week to give a couple of talks (and pitch his book). Now, although I may not share all of Collins' theological views, his tenure at the National Human Genome Research Institute was an exciting time for people like me who were interested in molecular biology, and since his predecessor in that position had been none other than James Watson of "Watson and Crick" fame, it all kind of reminded me of my previous life. When Waston and Crick published their famous letter in Nature describing, remarkably accurately, the structure of DNA, I was probably about nine months from being born. By grad school Watson's book "The Molecular Biology of the Gene" was a standard textbook for the rapidly growing field of molecular biology. Even so, every time I read that letter the hair on the back of my neck stands up and a grin spreads across my face. I can't imagine how exciting it must have been when researchers around the world read for the first time, "In other words, if an adenine forms one member of a pair, on either chain, then on these assumptions the other member must be thymine; similarly for guanine and cytosine. The sequence of bases on a single chain does not appear to be restricted in any way. However, if only specific pairs of bases can be formed, it follows that if the sequence of bases on one chain is given, then the sequence on the other chain is automatically determined......It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." Here we are, less than a generation later, with the entire human genome, along with those of numerous other creatures, completely sequenced. It's all turned out to be incredibly more complicated than anyone imagined at the time, of course, but that little article was truly a watershed event.

See what happens when I don't have a training ride to write about?