Perfect swish

One of the ways you can tell I am a geek is that I watch science programs on TV. This week I was glued to the screen watching to see if NASA's Phoenix lander would beat the odds and reach the polar Martian surface in one piece, then phone home. Nice trick--sort of like throwing a perfect swish from mid-court in Montana through a basket located in the Canton High School gym. It takes a certain cast of mind. A few years ago I took the Boeing factory tour and was impressed by the fanatic level of organization. The tool cart area was marked out on the assembly floor with precise grid lines, and each rectangular cart was aligned in the center of its grid area, square to the lines. The tools on each cart were likewise perfectly aligned with the sides of the cart. All down the third of a mile long production line, there was not one thing out of place.

Amoeba greets Phoenix lander.

I shared this techno-utopian vision with my biologist friend David in a little New York taqueria. He said, "That's the difference between technology and life. Living things are always right on the edge of falling apart. Biology is like a Marx Brothers movie." I asked him why we couldn't build a simple single-celled creature from scratch, once we had the entire genome decoded. "Information is not the same as knowledge;" he said, "only a cell knows how to make another cell." I guess it's like the difference between having the script to A Night at the Opera and living inside Groucho's head. It comforts me to think that out there in some underground "clean room," greater geeks than I are grinding their teeth in frustration at the genius of the amoeba.