Sometime last spring I drove up to Lowell, Mass., that old mill town, to talk with Jeff Bizzaro, the founder and executive director of Bioinformatics.Org. As of October 2003, Bioinformatics.Org has close to eight thousand members and hosts about 140 bioinformatics projects.

I don't remember exactly when my trip to Lowell occurred in relation to my visits to the Whitehead and to the federation, but I remember getting lost on the way there because I was concentrating so hard listening to the live coverage of the war debate in Congress.

Lowell, Jack Kerouac's stomping ground, is an odd city trapped in a time warp, full of old diners, brick buildings, and hundred-year-old bridges over waterfalls. As a consequence of getting lost, I had the opportunity to see up close several old neighborhoods by the river, and it seemed to me that Lowell is architecturally and emotionally dominated by the massive mills and factories above the Merrimack -- even though nothing is made in them anymore. Nothing except designer molecules, that is. On the radio Congress voted to attack Iraq in order to neutralize the threat of its biological weapons.

Jeff Bizzaro met me at the entrance to the parking lot and walked with me to his laboratory. Jeff is a very soft-spoken guy, hesitant in speech, who dresses formally and acts formally, and espouses a philosophy that is fundamentally radical. Jeff is a proponent of open biology, a close cousin to open-source software. The driving imperative of the open-biology movement is to make freely available all techniques and results of genetic research. Bioinformatics.Org has servers that host research projects from around the world.

Although open biology is similar in spirit to the open-source software movement exemplified by Linux, it has a more urgent moral basis. After all, software is stuff that people write because they feel like writing it, but DNA defines the world we live in and who we are. Jeff Bizzaro founded Bioinformatics.Org as a bulwark against corporate appropriation of the very stuff of which we are made.

His laboratory was curiously derelict. There were some beakers and bottles and Bunsen burners, but there were also piles of dusty books and bench stations that looked as if they hadn't been used in years. Nor was there much in the way of computers. I was surprised, especially since Jeff's organization is in some ways at the precise zeta point of the zeitgeist, where anarcho-anticorporate egalitarian hackers battle the sinister Agent Smiths of the academic-pharma-government complex.

I had spent a lot of time in my wife's various labs at Purdue and the medical schools of Tufts and East Carolina, and I had always been charmed by their incongruously low-tech feel. But that was decades ago, and I had expected to find something hypermodern here in Lowell. Instead I found something that looked like some combination of the ancient labs of my high school and an abandoned books-and-plumbing warehouse. The only thing that let me know I was in 2003 was the poster on the wall that showed the logical maps of 23 human chromosomes.

There weren't any spare chairs in the lab, so we walked down to the departmental office and found a couch to sit on, and there we talked about the divide between private science and public science, and about the two-edged sword of openness. I asked Jeff how he had come to found his organization.

It came out of his experience at another graduate school before transferring to U-Mass Lowell. "It was largely out of disgust at personal politics in science... I had thought science was open," he said. "I thought that sharing information was the whole idea of science. But there is enormous pressure against sharing. Departments have agendas, universities have agendas, and individual professors have agendas. I guess I had a naive notion of science as a utopian world."

Scientists working for universities, he implied, were constrained by alliances between universities and corporations, and scientists working for corporations were simply lost to the commonweal. He decided to create a "back channel" where scientists could talk directly to each other without going through institutional filters.

Since we were within a zip code of my own bugaboo, I asked Jeff about the ethical choices each individual scientist implicitly faces. "When people consider ethics, they're usually concerned with applications of genomic research: stem cells, cloning, health insurance, all that. But very few scientists have considered how the availability of information affects how science is done." Citing Celera, he invited me to speculate on what the world would be like if all genetic research were done by corporations.

In his famous valedictory, Dwight Eisenhower gave two warnings. The first was, Beware the Military-Industrial Complex. Alas, we have not heeded this sage advice, but at least many people remember it. Eisenhower's second, largely forgotten warning was to watch out for federal research money dominating the universities, because that would lead to the federal government's takeover and corruption of science.

"The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present, and is gravely to be regarded." Eisenhower said. "Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite."

It is this tendency that Bioinformatics.Org, in its own small volunteer way, resists. Genomic science is largely financed through tax dollars awarded to researchers at universities; these researchers and their institutions are increasingly bound to private money-making corporations that benefit only from proprietary advantage. This advantage, in an age when biology is becoming a subdiscipline of information science, often comes down to bioinformatics software.

At this point in the conversation we were joined by one of Jeff's professors, who had a more benign view of things. "Corporate influence on academia is not all bad," he said. In fact, there were many benefits to all parties, especially the public. The profit motive facilitated the transfer of technology from isolated laboratories out into the real world, where it could help people. And although the university had relationships with corporations, certainly he had never felt any pressure to keep his results secret. After chatting for 10 minutes, the professor moved on, and I asked Jeff how he felt about what the guy had said. "I have no reason to doubt him," Jeff said, then added after a pause, "but he is the founder of a major bioinformatics software company."

There are laws and processes designed to make sure that publicly funded research benefits the public, but gray areas and temptations abound. Bioinformatics.Org takes the direct route to protecting the public interest: It posts the sources.

But there's a downside to that, I said. With all this information available to everybody, when all the techniques are public, and all the genomes are public, what's to stop some Saddam, or some alienated script kiddie, for that matter, from whipping up a batch of Ebola or anthrax or some new custom bug that's 10 times more sinister than either of them, and unleashing it just to see what happens? After all, scientists have already created a polio virus from scratch from off-the-shelf parts, using its published genome as a cookbook. How long before anthrax, Ebola, or worse are similarly constructed?

There was no way to prevent the evil use of this information, Jeff said. He was pretty pessimistic. As computer power increases, and as the Internet becomes ubiquitous, and as the NCBI publishes the genome for organism after organism, from the polio virus to human beings, "the trend is for individuals to have more and more power. There's no telling how common lethal technologies will be in the future." Wow, I thought, weapons of mass destruction as common as e-mail viruses.

Yet if the information were closed, we would be at the mercy of governments and corporations -- and all meaningful freedom would end. But if information is open, then terrorists and malefactors can get to it just like anybody else. Bizzaro's unhappy conclusion: "Eventually we're going to have to choose between living in a total surveillance state, or in anarchy, where any suitcase might contain a bioweapon that can kill a million people."

There was a third alternative, I said. It was the one being advocated by Bill Joy, the godfather of Berkeley Unix, Sun Microsystems, and the Java programming language, and the author of a much discussed article in Wired magazine, "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us." Namely, declare some areas of research off limits to humanity until we come up with a way to make sure we can handle whatever we discover. Coincidentally, this is the position that has been advocated since 1999 by Judith Knight, the founder of ARB, the Association for Responsible Biotechnology. Dr. Knight is a character in my novel.

"That's never going to happen," Jeff said, and he didn't need to say any more.

Finally, I asked him about his own area of research. It turns out that he's interested in the three-dimensional structure of DNA, and how it is mediated by proteins that manipulate proteins. He's working with the DNA of the parasite Toxoplasmosis gondii -- although he said, he knew little about the organism itself and nothing about the disease it caused. Eventually his research might lead to ways to combat the organism, but that wasn't the object of his study. He just wanted to understand more about the function of UTRs, the untranslated regions of DNA.

I, on the other hand, would have been happier if he had been working on a drug to kill the goddamn thing -- even if he were working with proprietary tools and information in the bowels of some multinational pharmaceutical corporation. For it was toxoplasmosis protozoans that ate good portions of my son's brain, eyes, and nervous system when he was a fetus, and that remain lodged inside him 20 years later, waiting for a weakening of his immune system -- like sleeper cells of little suicide bombers waiting for the signal.

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