Laertes ducks his head. "At thine advisement, I've been reading on the properties of cells," he says. "Claudius's research tends toward the biological sciences, and mine toward the chemical and the physical--but though he's far beyond me, I hope to travel his road and thine at least a little way. It makes me glad to imagine each cell like a tiny scriptorium, with a monk at its nucleus scribing the secret language of our bodies in letters of acid."