The Library of Maynard-Smith: My Search for Meaning in the Protein Universe

I'll never forget reading Jorge Luis Borges' short story “The Library of Babel” when I was working in Madrid in the summer of 1976. I was thrilled by Borges' description of this collection of all possible books, and deeply struck by the despair of the librarians, who searched for meaning in the essentially infinite stacks of “senseless cacophony, verbal nonsense, and incoherency.” I found it delicious that the librarian's certainty that one of those books contained the answers to all the fundamental mysteries of mankind was accompanied by the unbearable realization that he could never locate such a treasure. He had to accept finding a few phrases embedded in typographical gibberish as the sum of his life's work. I could not imagine spending life wandering that desolate maze.