Intuition Read Online Free PDF

Marion. He had arrived in Cambridge with a Pan Am flight bag, one suitcase, and a formidable arsenal of lab techniques.
    Feng kept a punishing schedule. He chose his problems well, and he worked constantly. He seemed to live the life of a scientific ascetic—except that he was so funny. That was the odd thing about Feng. He was driven like few Marion had ever seen, but his manner was entirely bubbly. He wore glasses, but he also sported a mustache. A demon for accuracy, he kept meticulous records but downplayed the effort. He'd spent years beating his head against intractable problems, but this did not discourage him. He did more than any other postdoc in the lab, but he expected nothing. He worked with a kind of gallows humor to which the others could only aspire. Deliciously self-deprecating, he dismissed his own results as minor, or even accidental. “It's random luck,” he'd say whenever he published an article or research note, and this, along with myriad other sayings of Feng's, had become a catchphrase in the lab. “Fungi,” the other postdocs called them. To Marion's secret amusement, the researchers collected Fungi in their lab books. For the past six months or so the postdocs had been compiling a lexicon that included such classic definitions as:

    Successful grant proposal (idiom): “major disaster, long-term”
    Analyze (verb): “to flounder”
    Hypothesis (noun): “highly flawed thinking”
    Conference (noun): “cancer junket”
    Government Appropriations for Cancer Research: GAC (acronym): “sick tax”
    Breakthrough (noun): “artifact”

    Feng kept his sense of humor, and he stayed calm. When progress stalled and it seemed to Marion the others wallowed in self-pity, Feng persevered.
    He nodded to her as she opened the door, and together they faced the cages that filled the windowless white room. Five steel racks held between twenty and thirty cages each. Over one hundred cages, almost three hundred mice. A living library of the hairless creatures. And yet the room was almost silent. The animals had been bred for quiet, as they had been bred for so many other conveniences. Only once in a great while did the faintest squeak escape from any of the mice living there together.
    “What did you find?” Marion asked Feng.
    “We'll see.” Feng opened his record book. Cage number, mouse number, weight, condition. Each was neatly marked in columns on the pale green and white page. Finding his place in the record, Feng took two of Cliff's cages from their rack and carried them to the high stainless steel worktable. Then Feng turned on the laminar flow hood, a mechanism that blew a constant stream of air over his work surface and sucked away contaminants. Under the hood, Feng picked up and turned the experimental mice one by one. Their skin rippled and wrinkled with every move. The creatures seemed nearly transparent under the examining light. Their organs showed lavender and purple through their thin skin, and the blood vessels in their ears were clearly visible, like the red veins in budding leaves. In some ways the animals acted like normal mice, nosing their food curiously, standing up on hind legs and cleaning their front paws—but without fur, the mice looked like wizened little men. They seemed fussy and careful. They strained to reach the edges of their cages when the lids were removed; they tried to chin themselves up over the side; but it never occurred to them to dash around wildly, spring into the air, and make a break for it, as an ordinary mouse would do. The nudes were rarefied creatures. Outside the animal facility, no field mouse would recognize them.
    These animals were already quite sick. Tumors bulged grotesquely, as if the mice had swallowed marbles. By Marion's reckoning, most of the tumors were close to the institute's mandated one-centimeter limit. Cancer had deformed the animals entirely. Indeed, there was the first fatality, a small body lying in the corner of a cage. As Marion