Forty Signs of Rain Read Online Free

that address. “It’s here, I’ll take a look at it.”
    “Thanks.” She turned, then stopped. “Hey listen, when are you due to go back to UCSD?”
    “End of July or end of August.”
    “Well, I’ll be sorry to see you go. I know it’s nice out there, but we’d love it if you’d consider putting in a second year, or even think about staying permanently, if you like it. Of course you must have a lot of irons in the fire.”
    “Yes,” Frank said noncommittally. Staying longer than his one-year stint was completely out of the question. “That’s nice of you to ask. I’ve enjoyed it, but I should probably get back home. I’ll think about it, though.”
    “Thanks. It would be good to have you here.”
    Much of the work at NSF was done by visiting scientists, who came on leave from their home institutions to run NSF programs in their area of expertise for periods of a year or two. The grant proposals came pouring in by the thousands, and program directors like Frank read them, sorted them, convened panels of outside experts, and ran the meetings in which these experts rated batches of proposals in particular fields. This was a major manifestation of the peer-review process, a process Frank thoroughly approved of—in principle. But a year of it was enough.
    Anna had been watching him, and now she said, “I suppose it is a bit of a rat race.”
    “Well, no more than anywhere else. In fact if I were home it’d probably be worse.”
    They laughed.
    “And you have your journal work too.”
    “That’s right.” Frank waved at the piles of typescripts: three stacks for
Review of Bioinformatics
, two for
The Journal of Sociobiology
. “Always behind. Luckily the other editors are better at keeping up.”
    Anna nodded. Editing a journal was a privilege and an honor, even though usually unpaid—indeed, one often had to continue to subscribe to a journal just to get copies of what one had edited. It was another of science’s many noncompensated activities, part of its extensive economy of social credit.
    “Okay,” Anna said. “I just wanted to see if we could tempt you. That’s how we do it, you know. When visitors come through who are particularly good, we try to hold on to them.”
    “Yes, of course.” Frank nodded uncomfortably. Touched despite himself; he valued her opinion. He rolled his chair toward his screen as if to get to work, and she turned and left.
    He clicked to the jacket Anna had forwarded. Immediately he recognized one of the investigators’ names.
    “Hey Anna?” he called out.
    “Yes?” She reappeared in the doorway.
    “I know one of the guys on this jacket. The P.I. is a guy from Caltech, but the real work is by one of his students.”
    “Yes?” This was a typical situation, a younger scientist using the prestige of his or her advisor to advance a project.
    “Well, I know the student. I was the outside member on his dissertation committee, a few years ago.”
    “That wouldn’t be enough to be a conflict.”
    Frank nodded as he read on. “But he’s also been working on a temporary contract at Torrey Pines Generique, which is a company in San Diego that I helped start.”
    “Ah. Do you still have any financial stake in it?”
    “No. Well, my stocks are in a blind trust for the year I’m here, so I can’t be positive, but I don’t think so.”
    “But you’re not on the board, or a consultant?”
    “No no. And it looks like his contract there was due to be over about now anyway.”
    “That’s fine, then. Go for it.”
    No part of the scientific community could afford to be
too
picky about conflicts of interest. If they were, they’d never find anyone free to peer-review anything; hyperspecialization made every field so small that within them, everyone seemed to know everyone. Because of that, so long as there were no current financial or institutional ties with a person, it was considered okay to proceed to evaluate their work in the various peer-review systems.
    But