Think Bank

"Think Bank" is an article that was published in a supplement to the May 31, 1999 edition of Forbes magazine called Forbes ASAP, which focused on the rise of biotechnology.

Summary

Most investors in biotechnology know so little about the field that they may as well be playing slot machines. They bet not on what science will accomplish in the long run, but what other investors will do in the coming weeks. That said, currently many people—"nerds, if you like"—absorb themselves in cracking the codes in chemistry and physics that produce living beings. Unlike musicians and other performers, they need only their own brains for an audience, which can make them "maddeningly absentminded mates or parents". Vonnegut's late brother Bernard spoke of his brain as if it were separate from him, like an instrument. Had he been in biochemistry, he might have made discoveries that made stockholders millions. Instead, his brain music was about violent weather and when he died, he was a leading theorist about what electrical charges did in the "seeming chaos of thunderstorms". Indeed, his head was, in many ways, in the clouds.

Working at General Electric in the late 1940s, Vonnegut came to know other "nerds" who created valuable patents for the company by working on whatever personally amused them. Usually they were uninterested in what others were doing, already having enough on their minds. One, Dr. Irving Langmuir, who won a Nobel Prize for chemistry, was the model for Dr. Felix Hoenikker in Cat's Cradle. He really did once tip his wife after breakfast and abandon his car in a traffic jam. Such people add to the species' "keen and delighted appreciation of how nicely Creation works". Humans are now the means by which the universe knows itself, the center of the solar system "as far as thinking goes". The modern world's magicians are no longer frauds like King Arthur's Merlin, but really can harness power once only contained in stars and "manipulate the very seeds of living things".