“Well, you raised me well,” Ashton said, putting on his most persuasive tone. “I think I’m responsible enough to stay home alone.”
Jane stayed impervious to flattery. “Well, the state of California respectfully disagrees with you and dutifully takes on the responsibility of your education. You’re going to school.”
“The state government is an obsolete mechanism that continues to force the antiquated institution of school onto children when it has ceased to be the most relevant form of education for our children,” Ashton recited.
“Antiquated institution?” Jane repeated, surprised. “Ashton, you’re twelve years old. Where are you getting this stuff?” Jane asked
“It’s from Bryce Kandari,” he replied. “He’s the Einstein of the 21st century.” There was true admiration in his voice.
Jane did a quick lookup on her mobi.
“The video game developer?” Jane asked incredulously. “You’re getting your viewpoints on education from the guy who sells you video games? In my book, that’s just one step down from selling drugs.”
“No one reads books anymore, Mom,” Ashton said condescendingly. He pulled up a vid link from his mobi and sent it over to his mother with a flick of his finger. A video icon popped up on Jane’s screen letting her know she had received a video.
“Here’s a vid of his talk about Creation. It’s not just a video game, Mom. Promise you’ll take a look?”
“Beep beep,” her mobi insisted.
Argh, sometimes she really hated tech. “That’s your bus, Ashton.” She glanced at her mobi. “It’ll meet you at the corner in two minutes. We’ll finish this conversation later.” She got up and threw the dishes in the sink for later. “I need to get going as well.”
************
Ten minutes later, Jane was walking down the sidewalk towards 3rd Street. Her mobi had uploaded her location and her destination to the bus network while she was reading the news this morning. It now told her that a bus would be routed to the corner of 4th and Benton in five minutes. She slid open her mobi and checked her dropoff point. A map popped up showing the bus route into the city. It would drop her off a ten minute walk from her office. She checked her other options. Another bus that would be able to drop her off five minutes from her office could be routed to pick her up, but it would take another ten minutes to get here. She decided to stay with her mobi’s first choice.
There was one other person waiting at 3rd and Crystal Springs Road when she got there. Two minutes later, the bus arrived, gliding in on near-silent electric motors. The bus was already almost full. She squeezed in near the front next to an older gentleman who was napping against the window. She glanced at her mobi. There would be ten more stops before she reached her destination. ETA: twenty-five minutes. She snapped her wireless headphones into her ears and closed her eyes, relaxing to the classical sounds of U2.
Before she knew it, her song was interrupted by a pleasant chime. “Arrival in thirty seconds,” her mobi said. She glanced outside to see the bus slowing as it reached the corner of 7th and Lincoln. She shivered as she stepped outside. It was chilly in San Francisco though it was only October. As she walked towards the lab, her mind drifted to that plasmid. She didn’t know why it bothered her so much. Her lab-assistant, Mai-lin, dismissed it as a dead end, and Mai was usually right about everything.
She glanced up to see that she had reached her destination. Her bioengineering lab was located in the Medical Research building at the back of UCSF’s Parnassus campus. The lab itself was a joint venture between the medical school and the pharmacy school. Though Jane wasn’t particularly interested in medicine, she had ended up at the lab straight out of graduate school and now found herself directing its daily activities. The lab had contacted her after graduation because her research looked promising as a new way to approach bioengineering, and the University was interested in exploring bioengineering for medicinal and pharmaceutical applications. Of course she wanted to work on global ecosystem research, but no one was offering funding for that. She took the job, hoping that the lab’s research focus would shift over time. It had. Now, twelve years later, they had dropped any medical research and focused solely on pharmaceuticals, at least officially.
Instead of walking through the lobby doors, she crossed the street to the Wilcox building. She climbed up the two flights of stairs to reach to her daily affirmation: a gorgeous glass walkway that spanned the asphalt chasm to connect to her building. The walkway was constructed using four nearly invisible metal supports that ran along the bottom and top edges. The floor, ceilings, and walls were all made from glass. She loved the feeling of walking through the air, free from concrete or brick. Below her feet, she could see cars zip by, unaware that there was an angel gliding over them. Floating across the glass walkway was her morning ritual, signifying her passage from her life as a mother, to her life as a researcher.
The front door to her lab was at the end of the walkway. She badged in and walked into the cool, sterile environment that she called home. The lab was built as one large space, loosely partitioned into several key areas. Natural sunlight peaked in through frosted skylights in the twenty-foot ceiling. Being on the top floor had its privileges. Today was one of those rare sunny days in San Francisco, so thin blinds had been drawn over the skylights to diffuse the light.
Four large white workbenches with granite tops dominated the center of the lab. An assortment of small test equipment, microscopes and computers were spread among the workbenches. A young Asian woman was staring intently into one of the microscopes. Several other people in white lab jackets were milling about. To the right, several large pieces of equipment were arranged along the wall, from humidity chambers and ovens, to light boxes, and special environmental chambers. Jane smiled. Somehow this lab felt more like home than her apartment. She had only lived in California for ten years. She had been playing with test tubes and growing fungus colonies in petri dishes since she was a little girl. Both her parents were biologists, and she had inherited their curiosity about life. But Ashton...she couldn’t seem to get him interested in anything that wasn’t made of bits and bytes.
On the left, some glass-walled offices looked out over the main lab. The room on the left was her office. The other was a conference room that was used for important visitors and team meetings. The Asian woman at the workbench looked up when Jane walked into the room.
“Good morning Professor,” she said.
“Good morning, Mai-lin,” Jane responded. “How are things?”
“As well as they can be considering the carelessness of the staff,” Mai-lin responded as she pulled out one of her omnipresent sanitation wipes and delicately cleaned off the keyboard before swiping her finger across the biometric unlock. “It’s like working in a monkey house.”
Jane looked around. The lab was spotless, but she had learned long ago that Mai could see dirt particles that no one else could, as if her antiquated glasses somehow gave her eyes an advantage over those of her laser-corrected peers. “What’s the latest on the gene transfer?” she asked.
Mai-lin sighed, reflexively smoothing out the nonexistent creases in her finely starched lab coat. “Last night we incubated one petri dish of soybean cells with the agrobacterium plasmids, despite a near disaster when Michael tripped over his own untied shoelaces.”
“I heard that Boss,” Michael called out from across the room.
“You were meant to,” Mai-lin said in her normal, crisp voice. Jane might be the director of the lab, but Mai-lin was the taskmaster. Michael once sarcastically called Mai-lin “Boss,” and the nickname stuck. “Proper maintenance of footwear in the lab is critical to lab safety.”
“Proper footwear?” Michael scoffed. “Like your pink Hello Kitty sneakers?”
“These tennis shoes provide good support and excellent traction, and the rare velcro fasteners help me avoid untied shoelaces,” Mai-lin retorted. “Now stop wasting Jane’s time, and get back to wor
k.”
“Yeah sure, Boss,” Michael mumbled.
“As I was saying before the interruption,” Mai-lin continued, “the cells were incubated in the environmental chamber at 80 degrees Celsius with an 80% nitrogen and 20% hydrogen mix. As expected, the new strain of agrobacterium we developed thrived in this environment.”
Mai-lin tapped through some folders on the computer and flipped the screen so that Jane could see. A time lapse video showed several large squarish cells surrounded by a dozen small black and white cells that looked like grains of rice. The small cells flitted about the screen as the time stamp on the bottom of the screen sped through the hours. The small cells grew bigger and then approached the large cells, eventually merging into the cells and disappearing completely.
“As you can see, incorporation into the soybean cells occurred normally,” continued Mai-lin. “However, when I checked this morning, none of the soybean cells exhibited the engineered trait. The results are consistent with our last trial.” If Mai-lin was disappointed, it did not show on her face. Jane reflected that she had never seen Mai-lin express joy or elation either. She kept her expressions as tight as her hair, which never strayed from its practical bun.
“I’m uncertain as to the root cause, but I can conclude that the current process is not improving incorporation rates. As that is the project goal, I recommend that we scrap the plasmids and work on another strain of agrobacterium. Otherwise we’ll have nothing to write about for the quarterly funding review.”
Mai-lin’s recommendation was as rational as she was, and yet something just didn’t feel right to Jane. “We’re missing something here,” she said. “There’s no reason for the enriched environment to weaken the plasmid. In fact, it appears to grow stronger in the early phases. There’s something else going on here, and I’m not willing to just ignore it.” Jane bit her lip. Of course the funding review board would probably think differently. “How many more cultures of the gene-carrying Agrobacterium plasmids do we have prepared?” she asked.
“We should have enough for about 30 more petri dish experiments,” Mai-lin replied, “assuming Zimofsky’s people didn’t filch any off of us.” Her words carried far more disdain than her face let on.
“Let’s run all of them. We need more data to figure this thing out,” Jane said.
“All of them?” Mai-lin asked. “A standard batch is only 10.”
“Yes,” Jane said determinedly. “Get Michael to help you.”
“Michael’s a bit clumsy,” Mai-lin said. “He’s better at desk work.”
She was right of course. “Then get Steve to help,” Jane said. “I want to look at the results this afternoon.”
************
Jane sat at her desk and started to work through the stack of grant proposals she had to write. Being promoted to director of the lab had felt like a wonderful achievement at the time. But in reality, the job was mostly administrative paperwork. Beyond her duties as a researcher, she was now also responsible for acquiring funding. Between grant proposals and lab tours to possible donors, she had little time for actual research.
Several mind-numbing hours later, she had reached her limit. She looked up at the four-inch glass globe that sat on her desk. The shrimp in the ecosphere had long since died, followed soon after by the algae. Jane kept the ecosphere around as a reminder of what she was working towards. She sighed, stretched her arms out and reflexively pulled out her mobi, looking for a distraction.
The video icon was still on her screen. Sensing that she was now paying attention, the icon sprouted arms and started waving them. Ashton had given the video a high priority flag, so it was trying not to be ignored. In fact the video icon now pulled out that red flag and started waving it. “Well, why not,” she asked herself and clicked on the icon.
A video started playing on her mobi’s screen. She tapped it against the monitor on her desk, and the video transfered immediately to the larger screen. She leaned back in her chair and watched curiously. Jane wondered if this video could help her understand and reconnect with Ashton.
In the video, a dark-skinned man that looked to be in his early thirties was walking back and forth across a large stage. He was dressed comfortably in a plain long-sleeved button down shirt and jeans. Behind him, a large projection screen showed just one simple word on a black backdrop: Kandari.
“The human being is a learning machine,“ Bryce Kandari said, gesturing broadly with his hands. “We learn by trying, experiencing, and discovering. People love to learn. In fact, all video games are built on this one, simple fact. In a video game, the player discovers a new world. He learns the rules of this new world, and then he learns how to bend them. The best players are creative problem solvers. They enhance games beyond the creator’s intent. And they work in teams to achieve this.”
Bryce paused to take a sip of water, took a deep breath, and then spoke in a softer voice. “But parents complain. They say that their kids don’t focus on their school work. Video games distract them. They say that their kids aren’t interested in sports. They’re only interested in video games. They say that their kids aren’t hanging out with other kids. They only play video games. But what parents are really saying is, why aren’t our kids like us?”
Bryce stopped pacing and stood still for a moment. “But I ask, why should they be? Your childhood was different than your parents’ childhood. And the world your children are growing up in is fundamentally different from the world you grew up in. And I must say, this is a challenging world we live in today.” He took another sip of water. “Just think for a moment... What would happen if we didn’t think of video games as a problem, but as a solution.” Jane couldn’t help but snicker just slightly.
“For instance, let’s look at friendships.” The image behind him changed to show a picture of a typical white boy laughing in a park with another equally generic looking child. “This is how we remember our childhood friendships.” Then the image changed to a picture of a group of children in a circle pointing and laughing at a smaller child in the middle. “But maybe this is closer to the reality. The truth is that childhood society is all about fitting in. It’s about being like everyone else and acting like everyone else. The sad truth is that the values you learn are dictated mostly by where you happen to live and where you happen to go to school.”
“But what do friendships look like in the virtual world?” asked Bryce.
Bryce pointed at the screen, and the image changed to show some digital characters interacting in a video game environment. “One of the earliest games I created was called Better Life,” he explained. “Here you can see that the characters are doing normal human things, like going to the store, visiting friends, and playing games with each other. When this game first came out, many critics called it escapism. They were worried that people would use this simulated world to indulge in their vices and engage in violent acts. But a decade after release, Better Life did not in fact descend into lawless anarchy. No, instead we found that people in a virtual environment act much like people in this one. Values, accountability, and morality applied in this virtual world just as much as they applied in the real world.”
Now the screen changed to show a bar graph with a bell shaped curve overlaid on top. “A team of researchers at MIT did a study on gamer interactions in ‘Better Life.’ They followed a group of 100 children from the ages of 11 and 15 and studied their game play over a span of one year. The graph on the left shows a distribution curve of the average number of peers a child interacted with frequently over a one month period, or simply put, the number of friends a child had. As you can see, the median is somewhere around twelve.”
“Nearly twenty years ago, Stanford University did a remarkably similar study on children in the same age range, except these 148 children were physically interacting with each other in twenty schools across the country. The same graph of their peer interactions looks like this.” Another set of bars appeared
on the same graph. The peak of the graph was taller and much further to the left. “As you can see, the average number of ‘friends’ found in this study for the same age group, is only six.”
Bryce waved his hands in front of him. “Now, now, I know quantity isn’t the only metric that matters. The MIT study also looked at different types of interactions and created a numerical scale from 1 to 10. Casual interactions such as simple greetings rate as a 1. Cooperating and working together rates a 5. Sharing deeply personal feelings rates a 10.” Now the screen showed another graph with blue bars. “The MIT study found that gamers had a wide breadth of interaction types with the average interaction level at around 5. Gamers were not only interacting in the game, they were using chat and IM to have truly meaningful discussions.”
Another set of bars in red faded into the graph. “And here is the same data for the Stanford study. The bell curve is shifted significantly to the left, with the majority of interactions at a level of around 3 or 4. This data shows that video games enable children to have both more friendships as well as more meaningful friendships.”
“Doctor Ingram?”
Jane paused the video and looked up to see Mai-lin at her door. “What is it?”
“Doctor Vanderhorne is here to see you.”
Was it 2:00 already? As head of the lab, it was her duty to give lab tours to important guests. Apparently the spoiled teenage daughter of an extremely important donor to the university was in town and wanted to see what a real lab was like. As her dad, Mr. Pizner was the CEO of the second largest pharmaceutical company in the world, she was getting the VIP treatment, including a personal escort by the department head. Jane wouldn’t be surprised if Walter showed up carrying her handbag.
“I’ll be right there,” Jane responded.
************
Just inside the lab doors, a portly gentleman with graying hair and a matching gray suit stared at his watch and tapped his right foot impatiently. A slender girl, maybe sixteen years old, with long blond hair that reached down to her waist, stood next to him. She wore jeans, a lacey top that resembled lingerie more than a shirt, and a vapid smile.