In my spare time I do cancer research. Not a lot of people know that I'm actually part of a worldwide team involved in an Oxford University project. It's run by an organisation called United Devices. What we do is 'help scientists characterise therapeutic targets and identify and assess drug candidates, by performing automated docking of flexible ligands to a protein's binding site'. We are a key part of current cancer re-search. And I don't even know what a ligand is, or where a protein keeps its binding site.
Oh, all right, I'll come clean. This is an arts column. I've never met or talked with an Oxford cancer research scientist. Actually it's my computer that does the re-search. Every time it's turned on and I'm not using it - and that includes the fractions of a second between key strokes, as well as the prolonged pauses for thought and meditation that are such crucially important parts of a writer's work - the computer is doing cancer research.
When it's finished one batch of research, it waits for the next time I go on the internet, then sends what it's done to Oxford and downloads another lot. It doesn't consult me and I don't ask what it's doing. If I want to, I can look at attractive pictures of the protein it's currently assessing. I can't tell a neutron from a quasar. But the computer can.
