Chick Flick Page 8

  I hoped he’d take charge of the conversation for a while.

  “I had an interesting week,” he said. “Lots of new tech out there. Everyone is blogging.”

  “Do you ever get any news from France?” I asked.

  “France?”

  “Oui. Do you read blogs from all over the world?”

  “Yes. My searches cover everything in English, so it doesn’t matter where the news is coming from. A lot of my sources are actually from Hong Kong, Singapore, places like that.”

  “Are the bloggers all anonymous?” I asked.

  “Some are; some aren’t. Some work for companies and leak inside information about a product that is about to come out, so those guys are obviously anonymous and really paranoid about being found out. Why do you ask? About France, I mean.”

  I told him about the conference call we were going to schedule with NavoLogic.

  “A different injection company?” William asked.

  “No, actually. NavoLogic doesn’t have an injection machine, but they have all the other equipment and everything for the hatchery. Todd wants us to open up a line of communication with them so that we can start to build up competition among our potential buyers.”

  “Seems like good news to me,” he said, and shrugged. “So why the long face, kid?”

  “I’m not sad,” I said. “Just a little overwhelmed. I feel like I have so many ‘bosses’ all of a sudden. I report to my angel investor. I report to someone from the injection company we’re working with. And now, I may have to report with someone at NavoLogic. I also need to report to my partner, Todd, who handles the business end. And when something comes up for him, it’s always an ASAP-kind of thing.”

  He nodded. “It’s a luxury to just answer to one boss,” he said, sipping his beer. “In my case, yours truly.”

  I sighed, playing with my fork and the few crumbs of crust left on my plate.

  “I know it is a privilege that there’s so much interest in our small company. I had hoped that people would be interested in what I wanted to do in the lab, but now that they are all interested, they all want to hear about my progress. And I feel I’m not progressing fast enough to have something to report about so often, you know? It’s a creative process, and it takes its time.”

  “Ever think about blogging about your progress?” William asked with a chuckle. “Then, you wouldn’t have to issue so many separate reports!”

  “Oh, great,” I said, “now you’re laughing at my problems.”

  “Easy, easy,” he replied with a wink. “You wanted to be popular. Now that a handful of people are interested, you’re already overwhelmed. How do you think people who run giant corporations feel?”

  “Honestly, William, I don’t know how they do it. I have a hard time keeping things straight as it is,” I said.

  “You’ll be fine; I have faith in you,” he said.

  “I wish I had your confidence.”

  “You might, soon enough. I have more news for you about RICPCom,” he said, leaning closer and lowering his voice.

  “Really?” My eyes lit up.

  “Really, truly.”

  “Tell!”

  “OK, so that thing I told you about before? It’s as good as inked now,” he said. “There’s a huge pharma company looking to acquire RICPCom. There are serious negotiations going on as we speak.”

  “When are they set to sign something?” I asked.

  “Well, there’s a holdup,” he said. “The pharmaceutical company apparently wants a chick-sexing application or, they said, the deal might be a nonstarter. They know the injection patent is about to expire, and they want something new.”

  “So we were right in assuming this is important,” I said, a shiver of disbelief running down my spine. This was amazing news.

  “Yup,” he said. “Not only is it important, it might be make-or-break. It seems like RICPCom’s assay isn’t ready, either.

  My head felt like it was swimming, and I was still as sober as a judge; the only thing I’d downed was the pie—although it had been the best I’d ever tasted. When he said, “There’s one more thing,” I thought I might faint.

  “My sources say they’d had another product in their pipeline, which they had hoped would provide them with an edge, but I guess that fell through recently,” he said.

  “Did it have to do with amino acids?” I asked.

  “That’s what it sounded like,” he said, briefly consulting some scribbled notes scratched on a steno pad. “I couldn’t make heads or tails of that. What do you know about it?”

  I halted, thinking of how to explain it to a layperson. But William was no ordinary nonscientist.

  “Amino acids are building blocks of protein,” I said, borrowing his pen and scribbling on a cocktail napkin. “If you inject certain amino acids into the egg, this prompts the chicks to then grow more rapidly while still in the egg and in the few first weeks of life. This way, they weigh more when they reach slaughtering age at six to eight weeks, and since they are sold by the pound, it becomes more profitable. I didn’t like the idea of force-feeding, them in the egg, plus, if you mess around with Mother Nature, the chick may get too big and you might get fractured eggs or eggs that hatch too early. This may be a cause of death for the newly hatched chicks.”

  “Well, seems like your hunch about the process’s flaws might be correct,” he said, “because it fell through. RICPCom had sunk a lot of money into that, and it failed. And now they’re desperately looking for a sexing application.”

  Once again, and without so much as a peck on the cheek, William had made my night. I practically floated home at the end of our encounter.

  Joel and I got straight to work and planned our experiments to see how low we could go in terms of the amount of DNA that we could detect. He joked that it was like limbo dancing.

  However, for me, it was more like juggling while limbo dancing. I was now working on three projects. I was working on developing the biological reaction that would identify the sex of the chicks. Using the same idea, I was working a bit on the human project, which was a generalization of the chick sex determination. Then, I also drove every other day to Joel’s lab, which was, unfortunately, half an hour away, to work on his detector.

  I bought eggs for my experiments from my farmer friend, which I would then incubate for twenty-one days, drawing samples at days ten and eighteen to see if I could predict the sex. But then at three weeks, after the eggs had hatched, I had baskets full of jumping chicks on my hands. Because of agricultural laws that restricted farmers from accepting chicks that weren’t incubated on their land, I couldn’t bring them back to the farmer I bought them from, and I certainly wasn’t going to send them to their deaths.

  Instead, I found a group of farmers living off the grid, out in the woods beyond my city’s limits. They were always happy to receive the chicks, but asked me how they would feed them. Sometimes, I would even see chickens around the woods and ask myself if I had checked their sex when in the egg, but I never asked the farmers what they did with the chicks, as I was so grateful that they’d accepted them.

  The first time I took the eggs out of the incubator to get them ready for hatching, I prepared two shoe boxes with six separations and I put an egg in each partition. I had marked each one with a number and wanted to compare the chick’s sex with the sample I had tested a few days prior in the lab to see if my predictions were right. A scientist at the veterinary institute had taught me how to carefully put a hole in the shell to reach a tiny blood vessel located on the inner side of the eggshell without touching the embryo.

  On day twenty-one, I opened the incubator to find that the chicks and their feathers were still wet and they were half out of the egg. I decided I would go home to sleep and come in the next morning to drive them out to the farmers. Their feathers need to be dry for feather sexing anyhow and there was no point in driving out there at night.

  When I came in the next morning, opened the incubator and looke
d into the shoe boxes, I found two chicks playing together in one area, three on top of each other in another part of the box, one sitting by itself in its own partition, one still struggling to get out of the shell and its friend eating the shell, trying to help it come out. It was a mess; they had jumbled themselves up to be together and I couldn’t match the numbers with the chicks. The chicks seemed to be playing, warm and happy, but my experiment went kaput. I had to return to the farmer for more eggs and wait another twenty-one days.

  One of the chicks was so cute, I took it home. I simply couldn’t let this one go. These chicks grow so quickly, it is remarkable. In a few days it was getting so big, it was very hard to keep up with around the apartment, much less, cuddle with. It was hopping all over and making funny noises, but the best part was that as soon as I came home, it would follow me around as if I were its mother. I would go to the kitchen and it would follow me. I would go to the living room, and it would jump on the couch beside me as I sat down. At the end of the night, it would follow me to my bedroom, making a nest out of the pillow beside me. It was adorable beyond belief—so much so, that after a few days, I had trouble going to work every day because I felt guilty leaving it alone in the apartment.

  After a few weeks, though, the chicken was getting too big. I knew I had to give it away, but not before I determined its sex. As I had predicted, it was a female. I took her out to the farmers in the woods and asked them to keep an eye on her and leave her for laying eggs, and they agreed not to harm her. I asked them to take care that she did not get cold at nights, as that was the most important thing to me. Then, I would visit her when I came, and she seemed happy to play outside and be free. A chicken like that can live for two to three years, happily laying eggs. I felt she was my lucky charm; I had predicted her sex correctly with my method.

  Roseword suggested that for PR purposes it would help to get some local academics to act as an advisory board and support the project. Perhaps, he suggested, they’d have helpful tips as well. He was willing to pay them for their opinion, above and beyond the start-up costs he had committed to.

  The first advisor that I acquired was Professor Jayson Frolev, who had responded positively from the first contact. For three hours, we just sat and geeked out over biology; I explained my work, and he was kind enough to say that he wished that all of his students were as curious as I was and were able to come up with such biotechnology. I appreciated the compliment, and it more than made up for the fact that I had been rejected by the other two professors I had approached for the advisory board. Professor Frolev agreed to read the proposal and to come to the meetings, but I was still down two advisors. I’d have to acquire those before we went much further.

  Things were coming along nicely after we’d received the initial investment. Todd wasted no time in getting a meeting with NavoLogic. Even though I knew how efficient he was, I was still surprised when he managed to get a conference call with the CTO in two weeks. I was overjoyed when he called me with the news.

  “You’re not pulling my leg?”

  “I’m completely serious,” he said. “And no worries about the language barrier.”

  I had been worried that my high school French wouldn’t be up to snuff.

  “Thank you so much. That’s too kind of you, monsieur,” I joked.

  Judging by how quickly things had been moving so far, we knew from experience that two weeks would fly by all too fast. We decided to meet with Joel to loop him in as we finished and fine-tuned the material we would present on the call.

  The three of us met in Joel’s office. We talked over the problem of the samples being transferred from egg to plate reader with regard to size discrepancies. Joel showed us how his machine was progressing, and explained how each part had to be specifically manufactured from scratch, giving us a better idea of what might be involved if we had to change any one piece. Joel was always transparent with regards to his work and his progress and it was very comforting.

  “Do you think this seems like a possibility?” I asked after everyone was through sharing their part.

  Joel was thoughtful, as usual—considering his response before offering it.

  “I’d have to see. If you want to cover a larger reading area, you’ll need a bigger laser, and it might take more time to read the whole result,” he said. “Although you might be able to read a lot more samples at a time.”

  I immediately went into problem-solving mode, trying to focus and solve one problem at a time.

  “Do you think it would be easier to get the robotic arm to change positions or to get a bigger laser? And how would your machine fit into all this?” I asked.

  He answered that if I could get him better estimates for the different sizes of the egg trays, he could perhaps give me a better idea of what we could get done.

  “I’m not sure I understand though,” Joel said. “If you end up needing my machine, would it really be better for you? On the one hand, we can sell this machine as is upon charging for each egg that it separates. But on the other hand, the companies might prefer a biological method they can use with already standardized equipment—less hassle for them.”

  “Yes, we are trying to figure that out,” I conceded. “But RICPCom hasn’t reached the point where they have a reliable biological test that they can use with the standard equipment, and neither have we, for that matter.”

  “Either way, we need to be the first to provide a solution,” said Todd.

  “I can get working on that estimate to see how we could customize our machine to read the egg trays.” Joel said.

  “Plus, if we cater to their egg-tray needs, then we should be able to maintain the lead for some time. If we manage to get our machines into the hatcheries, we will have nailed it; they will stay there for a long time,” Todd said.

  “I agree,” I said.

  “If you can get together an estimate, I will add it to our proposal,” Todd told Joel, giving him the timeline for our conference call with NavoLogic.

  Todd and I traveled to his house to go over our presentation. It felt good to be in a family home—a big house, big enough for his four kids to run around in. Downstairs, in the finished basement, there was an open-concept space that the kids used as a playroom, with a movie screen, a stereo system, and a library full of books, in addition to the typical toys. It contained everything a kid could need or want, I thought.

  It was past their bedtime, though, so naturally, the kids were fast asleep, and the usually rowdy space was calm and quiet. In the right corner of the space was Todd’s office, consisting of a desk, a chair, and a copier. The walls were decorated with lots of drawings made by his kids. His wife brought us coffee, then went back upstairs to curl up with a book and enjoy a rare moment of quiet. Then we got to work.

  Todd had begun to work on an outline with his numbers and figures, but didn’t want to get too ahead of things without me. I appreciated that he always waited for my input; we were equal partners. His outline included the key value proposition (chick sexing in ovo), the explanation of the problem, and, of course, our proposed technology. This was followed by cost projections, market potential, and our business model, followed by the scientific results and possible additional applications. Finally, there was a section marked off for concluding remarks and acknowledgments.

  “How do you want to get started?” Todd asked.

  “Well, let’s think about our key audience, right?”

  He smiled, and I knew I had gotten this right. My on-the-job business education was starting to sink in, and I had Todd and Roseword to thank for that.

  “Exactly,” he said. “Our audience is poultry-industry people who specialize in hatchery equipment.”

  “Well, let’s start by telling them that we both have a vested interest in the poultry industry,” I said.

  Todd spoke aloud as he typed: “We’re here to develop technologies to provide economic benefits to the industry, as well as improve the daily tasks of breeders through automation.
”

  “That’s good,” I said, “but let’s not forget: we are also thinking about the birds.”

  I watched Todd’s fingers hover over the keys as he tried to find a way to tactfully address this subject. I knew that the birds were my passion, not Todd’s. He respected that passion, but I didn’t expect him to share it. He knew I wasn’t going to let it go.

  We wish to confront the problem of chick sexing, he wrote, highlighting the end of that slide in bright yellow, and moving on to the next slide in our presentation.

  “You must admit, Todd,” I said, as I watched him roll his eyes while he was typing, “that initiating the highly energy-consuming process to create a life solely for the purpose of trashing it exemplifies mankind’s hubris in the most horrible way. No animal would ever do that.”

  One slide down, nineteen more to go. My mind had already started to wander to more comfortable places, namely, the lab. It felt so far away! I had to push through the pain of attending to the business side of things; I owed it to Todd.

  “The next one is easy,” I said, trying to lift myself into a more positive frame of mind. “The problem is that sorting is done manually.”

  “But some people don’t see that as a problem,” said Todd, reminding me that, all too often, businesses will just stick with what works—what has been done in the past. “So we need to tell them our motivations and goals for changing it.”

  “We want to automate the process, save on incubation space and electricity, and decrease the handling of chicks,” I said. “The handling point is important because it just means room for spread of disease and contamination. They should like that: efficiency!”

  I also made sure Todd included some cute pictures of fuzzy chicks underneath the words HUMANE MOTIVATION and GO GREEN in bold. Once we settled on a comfortable way to represent the massive killing of newborn chicks at two billion per annum, I was satisfied, and we could proceed with describing our biological assay. Speaking of efficiency, I thought, wouldn’t it be efficient to donate and deliver the male chicks to feed the hungry instead of letting them die and go to waste? I knew that in some countries, they even eat cooked chicks while they are still in the egg!