"Paul Levinson - The Copyright Notice Case" - читать интересную книгу автора (Levinson Paul)

as a possibility when research scientists were involved. I'm
not talking about dressing up a lover's quarrel or cutthroat
professional competition with a fatal malfunction in a
laboratory like they do in the movies. I've had experience with
things much worse. The public had no idea.
But what was the agent of death here?
Words on a screen?
They made sense neither as a weapon nor a lethally
malfunctioning piece of equipment.
"You have any idea what those words were?" I asked.
She looked up at me and her eyes re-focused, as if my voice
had pulled her away from some contemplation deep and distant.
"No," she said. "The screen was blank when I arrived."
So now I knew she was probably lying about at least one
thing.
***
Some of her facts were easy to verify. Jenna had been
telling the truth about Chaleff's last call to her apartment.
And there was no sign of anyone entering Chaleff's apartment
between the time of that call, and the time Jenna arrived, about
45 minutes later, when she said she'd found Chaleff dead.
Her story about the special section of the human genome
project took more work to confirm. She'd told me the MIT Media
Lab had a piece of the research action. Nic Negroponte, head of
the Lab, was an old friend of mine. He didn't know much about
that part of the project, but put me in touch with an associate
who did.
"Ralph Hertzberg here," the voice on the phone said. "Nic
told me to expect your call."
"Great," I said. "Ok. Let me start by trying to explain to
you what I think you're working on -- what I understand and what
I don't -- and you tell me where I'm wrong."
"Shoot."
"Ok," I said. "DNA is commonly said to be a genetic
language, but that's not quite right. It's really a recipe for
the construction of other proteins into cells that have specific
properties -- heart cells, brain cells, and so forth in humans
-- cells and organs and systems that come into being during
gestation."
"That's right," Hertzberg said.
"Ok," I said. "So in fact, DNA isn't really a language at
all -- it's really an arrangement of proteins that causes other
proteins to develop in a certain way, into heart cells, etc. So
really DNA is a catalyst for the development of living
organisms. But we say as a shorthand that it's a code or a set
of instructions. Am I on the right track here?"
"Very much so."
"Good," I said. "All right, then. So tell me this: How
do we get from DNA, which isn't really a language -- or is only
a language in a metaphoric sense -- how do we get from that to