by Warren Esby
Since it was almost lunch time when I finished checking in and being assigned my desk, I asked Astrid where I could get something to eat. She said that they had a pretty good cafeteria and it had an outdoor area that you could sit at and look at the Pacific Ocean. I learned then that the Salk Institute is such a great place that even peonage has its privileges. We had a very nice lunch during which I asked her where people who didn’t make too much money lived since everything in San Diego seemed so expensive except for the laundromat which wasn’t open all night. She said that most people shared an apartment or house in one of the beach towns further north, as I had suspected, and that she shared a house with a couple of girls fairly close to the beach in a town called Encinitas up the coast. I explained my predicament about spending all my money to fix my car and not having enough to live on until I got paid and asked whether the beach in Encinitas was somewhere I could sleep. She offered me her couch for a few nights until I could get settled, and I gladly accepted. She didn’t have a boyfriend as it turned out, and she was kind of a free spirit so it was only a few nights later that I ended up in bed with her big sister. Both her roommates had boyfriends and they slept over most night, especially weekends. Astrid confessed that she didn’t like to lie there, especially on the weekends, and listen to her roommates having fun bouncing on their squeaky beds which she could hear since the walls were so thin. She didn’t seem to mind me bouncing on her squeaky bed with her big sister, especially on the weekends. That was something she seemed to tolerate pretty well.
I was happy to be working at the Salk Institute because it was so prestigious and working there would help my future career. Once you get into one of those prestigious places it’s like getting your foot in the door if you are a salesman. Once you get into one, then you’re acceptable at another. That’s why I was able to go from MIT to the Salk Institute. It wasn’t like being at Brandeis for example. Although Brandeis is a fine institution, it is a little lower on the prestige ladder than MIT or the Salk Institute. On the other hand, the one thing that Brandeis had that Salk Institute didn’t have was very good coffee, at least the kind I got used to at Brandeis, the kind that was so strong it would dissolve the spoon if you left one in it too long. On the good coffee ladder, Brandeis had it all over the Salk Institute. What the Salk Institute did have that the other two didn’t was good tea, at least so I am told. Instead of serving coffee, they decided to have afternoon tea and tried to make good tea the sine qua non of prestigious Institutions in the United States. It may work in England at places like Oxford and Cambridge, but I don’t think it will ever make it in the U.S. where Starbucks is the national non-cola drink. I started to go to the afternoon teas because I heard they also had cheese and crackers along with the cookies and sometimes little cakes that I was now allergic to. It was also practically the only place I ever got to see the head of my research laboratory, and that was only on a few occasions when I caught a glimpse of him leaving through another door with a plateful of cookies, and he didn’t even stop when I caught his eye. I guess he really didn’t have the time or was concerned there would be a problem with the Pacific Ocean if he didn’t keep it constantly in his sight.
I finally had to stop going to the teas when they made a terrible addition to the tea menu. They started having pâtés and serving them with little wedges of toast, you know the ones that are a quarter of a piece of bread toasted or allowed to go stale or whatever. That was just too unbearable for me. The combination of having tea and toast on the same table was more than I can tolerate. The reason tea and toast is so intolerable to me is that is what my mother would give me as a child if I was sick or she thought I was getting sick. She would bring me hot tea and buttered toast and wouldn’t let me have anything else until I got better. To me having tea and toast meant I was sick. Pretty soon, after being conditioned throughout my childhood, being served tea and toast immediately made me feel sick. As I grew older as a child, I would try to get out of eating it when my mother brought it to me since it would make me sick even if I wasn’t. But she always had the final argument. I tried to play on her sympathy by saying,
“But mom, I’m not that sick.” She wouldn’t listen. “But mom, I’m really hungry.” She would just ignore me.
I finally had to stop asking her, “Do I have to?” because she would use the two little words that I couldn’t argue with.
She would say, “And how.”
Any time I would ask if I really had to do something I didn’t want to do, she would say, “And how.”
“Do I have to go to bed now?”
“And how.”
“Do I have to eat my spinach?”
“And how.”
She also used those words to emphasis something my dad said, like when he would say,
“The traffic really is heavy.”
“And how.”
“The Red Sox are really bad this year.”
“And how.”
Those two little words were such an important part of my childhood as I was growing up, and I still don’t know what they mean.
Getting back to the Salk Institute and how prestigious it is. It was designed that way. Jonas Salk was interested in designing an institute where a lot of prestigious people would come and associate with him, and he considered himself to be prestigious. He had a prestigious architect design a beautiful institute in a beautiful location to attract those other prestigious people. I guess that was so that he wouldn’t be thought of as having a deficiency of prestige by being at a prestigious institute all by himself. He invited a lot of important scientists and Nobel Prize winners to come and be there either permanently or on occasion. He wanted the Salk Institute to be the prestige center of San Diego, and I think he succeeded to a large extent, but I’m not sure since I think many people think the doctor who had the most prestige in San Diego was Dr. Seuss, and I know that he made a lot more money in his lifetime than Dr. Salk did. However, there is no doubt that a lot of Nobel Prize winners passed through the prestigious halls of the Salk Institute and apparently had no trouble drinking the tea because I never heard of any of them getting sick by doing so. And the Salk Institute, to foster its prestige, recorded all those Nobel Prize winners who came through and put their names on a big plaque. I remember going by and reading that plaque and thinking to myself, wow, this plaque reads just like a list of noted Nobel Prize winners. Of course Jonas Salk’s name was not on the list. He was only guilty by association.
Chapter 14
The next month or so was fairly uneventful for me, and I began to relax in my new environment and stopped looking over my shoulder for black Buick Regals, although I wouldn’t have minded seeing Olga again if I could have done so safely. She had a bit more appeal for me by herself than Astrid and her big sister had together. I got back to the business of doing experiments and killing animals. As I’ve said before, I am good at what I do and people at the Salk Institute began to realize it. A lot of people, not only in our laboratory, but in other laboratories would come to me to help them with their animals. I helped a lot of people with injections, with drawing blood and with sacrificing of animals. That’s the scientific jargon, sacrificing, which means the animal has to sacrifice its life for the good of science, or for the bad of science if it’s bad science which it sometimes is. My expertise did not go unnoticed by my research leader. Actually it did go unnoticed since he never came into the laboratory and only sat in his office. So he wasn’t in the laboratory to notice. But other people noticed and he noticed that they noticed that I was really good at my job, and he invited me to go to lunch with him one day after I had been there a month or so. He took me to his favorite Chinese restaurant which was called, A Taste of China.
Did you ever stop to think how many restaurants are named a taste of something, like A Taste of China, or A Taste of India, or A Taste of Thai, or A Taste of Japan, or A Taste of Kyrgyzstan or, well you get the picture. And they never qualify what that taste is. They don’t say A Good Taste of Chin
a, so you don’t know if it’s a good taste or a bad taste. Most of it is a bad taste, but they can’t actually say that because that would not be good advertisement and they are dependent on fooling you into thinking you will be getting a good taste of whatever they’re selling and after you get that good taste, you generally leave with a bad taste in your mouth. That’s why I never go to a restaurant that has a taste of something in its name unless I’m invited and someone else is paying, like my erstwhile research leader.
Now this particular Chinese restaurant had some features that many restaurants do not have. For one thing they had a coupon system that had the unwritten goal of bringing in new customers every week by offering a two for one special in the paper with a coupon you had to cut out and bring in. What they didn’t print on the coupon was the fact the coupon was only for new customers. So if you came in with a coupon and the surly waiter recognized you, and he had surliness down to a science, he would say, “You here before. Coupon not for you.” You could finally convince him that he had to honor the coupon and after much argument he did, but he would get even and he would cuff you. No, he didn’t hit you which is conventional cuffing. Cuffing was a special procedure that he had perfected better than anyone else. He would roll his sleeves halfway up his arm to supposedly get them out of his way, but he wouldn’t tuck his cuffs in so the cuffs hung down well below his arms. As he served the food and drink, he would make sure that those cuffs were dragged through all the plates of food and dipped into all the drinks and he made it look like it was inadvertent. Have you ever tasted Szechuan flavored Coke or Spicy Garlic ice tea? Well you could taste those flavors at A Taste of China.
The research leader had an ulterior motive for inviting me for Chinese food. He wanted me to meet with a colleague of his who was a well-known local entrepreneur and with whom he had collaborated to start a new biotechnology company. This is common in San Diego. You have the guy in the inside and the guy on the outside collaborating to make a killing. The guy on the inside makes a lot of new discoveries using government grants, private donations and university or non-profit institute resources. Once the discovery is made, it is then licensed to the guy on the outside whose job is to set up a company to exploit the new discovery and make money. The guy on the inside looks like he is doing all his research for altruistic reasons, like to help humanity and to help push back the frontiers of science, but he is really doing it to make money for himself, lots of money, while appearing to keep his hands clean. The guy with the dirty hands sets up the company, promotes it, raises money and does the development work, and if the new discovery actually works, which it seldom does, then they both make money although they usually make money anyway on the promise that they will make money for others. They do this by selling stock in the company to other investors who want to make money and don’t realize that both the inside guy and the outside guy, who is really considered an insider, will generally make money for themselves no matter whether the investors make money or not. And then they do it all over again and are called serial entrepreneurs, and that is like being serial killers without really killing anything except maybe an investor’s net worth. The word for this kind of research development effort is translational work, although they use two words to describe it. When I was first told about it, I thought you had to be proficient in another language to translate the work into, and I said it was not for me because I didn’t know any language but English. Then I was told that the only language I needed was the language of greed and since I had passed the exam in that language, I qualified. It’s funny about this since the guy with the dirty hands is very upfront about it while the one with the clean hands is not. It’s as if the guy with the dirty hands is clean while the guy with the clean hands is dirty.
The reason I was invited to meet the outside guy was because of the reputation I was gaining about being one of the best laboratory animal researchers who had come into town in a long time and my talents were in demand. The new company the two had started needed such talent for what they planned to do. And I was very flattered when I actually was introduced to the outside entrepreneur because I had even heard of him before I ever came out to San Diego. His name was Dr. Lorenzo Toro. Dr. Lorenzo Toro was a legendary figure in the San Diego biotech community. He had a great deal of success starting up two previous companies that had been full of promise that never materialized for their investors but nevertheless had given Dr. Toro the opportunity to sell stock at various stages of each company’s life and had made him personally well off. He was one of those larger than life figures, both figuratively and literally. He was well over six feet tall and close to three hundred pounds with a very large head, big round face and engaging smile that made his appearance not unlike the look of a happy bulldog. He wore his hair in a similar fashion to my friend Tommy, but they must have needed a large soup tureen to accomplish the correct shape. He also had a small mustache that barely extended to the corners of his mouth and was tightly curled at either end with the help of mustache wax. He was notorious for his love of expensive jewelry. He always wore a heavy and wide gold necklace with very large links. It barely fit around his very large neck like a dog collar and accentuated the similarity in his appearance to that of a bulldog. His love of jewelry and its representation of how successful he was led him to wear, not one, but two large gold Rolex watches, one on each wrist. He was right handed so the watch on his left wrist was worn face up and the one on his right wrist was worn face down. He could tell you the time whether both hands were palm down or palm up. He couldn’t, of course, tell the time when the left hand was palm up and the right hand was palm down, but he could in all other situations. This and his legendary status was the reason he had acquired his well-known and well justified nickname of Legendary Lorenzo Toro, the Two-fisted Time Teller which everyone knew him by, or his initials which people used when they didn’t have time to say it all, LLTTTT shortened even further to L2T4. And no, the rumors that he would play himself in the new Star Wars sequel as the Grand Eloquent Chief Entrepreneur of the planet Hype World were not true, even though he did have star quality. They had already promised that role to R2D2. Lorenzo did complain to several of his close friends because he thought that he outranked R2D2 because he had a four after his second initial along with the two after his first whereas R2D2 only had twos after both his initials. They tried to tell him it didn’t work that way, but he wouldn’t listen. Listening was just not one of his skills or a skill he valued. He listened as little as possible and talked as much as he could. I guess you can’t do both well, and you certainly can’t listen very well if you are busy talking and you tend to say, “Huh? Huh?” a lot if you try to listen and talk at the same time.
It became clear during lunch that my talents were very much needed for the new company that Double LT4, which was the new nickname he wanted to be known as after they chose R2D2 for that role, had started with my research leader. The new company was called HypeTech and it was started to develop a new vaccine technology that both founders were very excited about. The development of vaccine technology involves experimenting with vaccines by first injecting them into animals to make sure they are safe, then drawing blood from the animals to make sure there is evidence in the blood sera that the vaccine was working, observing whether the vaccine was having the effect it was designed to have and, finally, helping the laboratory animal make its ultimate sacrifice for science. They spent the next hour telling me the whole idea behind the company and I was very impressed. HypeTech was developing a vaccine against fat. You know if you want to prevent polio, as Jonas Salk had done, you take a killed polio virus and mix it in a concoction that will stimulate the immune system to destroy any polio virus it comes across. HypeTech wanted to do the same thing with fat to cure obese people, although I don’t think obesity is caused by a virus as some people who are obese claim it is as a way of ridding themselves from guilt, which I think is a disease unto itself. The whole idea was not to immunize against all fat, because you do
need some fat in your body, especially in your brain. The idea was to immunize only against the bad fat like saturated fat and triglycerides and whatever all the advertisements tell you are the bad fats. His idea, which was simple in its brilliance, was to mix bad fat in a concoction and immunize people against bad fat so they will only have good fat and be pleasantly plump rather than badly obese.
