In a Western Town, A Dead End World

On bad days Toby said he worked as a “pipette bitch.” … Supposedly Toby was at the center of an economic revolution in biotech. The most-wanted jobs of the new millennium were in genomics; cities like San Francisco were developing vast office parks full of proto-wet lab spaces and special cold rooms for all the code-crunching clusters. Journalists who had once written clueless stories about sticky Web sites during the dot-com boom were penning enthusiastic odes to proteomics and bioinformatics.