My revelations are still a few hours away when I reach Union Square on a warm, bright Saturday morning. I feel excited to be on my way to the Moscone Convention Center to make sense of this mess. And I am just the man for the job. I have been in the biotechnology business since there was a biotechnology business to be in. As a result I have no illusions about the altruism quotient of scientists. We're just folks, people like everybody else. As I trundle across Market Street at Fourth, I look up Market past the Palace Hotel toward 555. When I joined Biotechnology Nation in 1980, 555 Market was still Chevron corporate headquarters and it was truly a weird scene inside the gold mine. It was almost 25 years ago today when, as a freshly minted Ph.D., I stepped into the eye of a hurricane.

I couldn't know it in 1980, but big oil and biotech had just decided to fake a shotgun wedding that would help kick industrial biology into high gear. This decision was fueled by a socioeconomic hat trick involving fossil fuels, new life forms and the free market pizzazz of a future pitchman for Viagra.

The first scoring maneuver evolved from the 1973 Arab oil embargo. Influential journals predicted that the United States was about to fall into a dangerous "energy gap." We would literally be out of gas by 2000. Following the 1979 revolution in Iran, corporate fear escalated into naked terror, driving the price of oil to all-time highs. This inspired the federal government to impose a windfall profits tax on big oil in 1980, and the ensuing economic turmoil created an industry with enormous taxable profits desperate to diversify. Score goal No 1.

Goal No. 2 hit the net when the Supreme Court affirmed the right to patent genetically engineered microorganisms. The problems involved with the ownership of one life form by another remains at the center of our national bioethics debate and the stance against it is certainly the most scientifically coherent and politically astute mantra of the counter-BIO forces.

The final goal was scored with the Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed patenting of government-sponsored research in universities. Passed into law in 1980, Bayh-Dole immediately turned colleges into major players in the hi-tech intellectual property arena. Professors Stanley Cohn and Herb Boyer discovered the basic manipulations that allowed scientists to isolate and clone genes to create recombinant life forms. As of 1980, these life forms were legally patentable.

Driven by the forces of diversification and windfall profits, virtually every major oil company in the U.S. had a biotech group by the early '80s. But a business based on the creation of new life forms was controversial from the jump. Dissenting voices, serious and strident, raised vigorous objections to the existence of an industry that required the safe practice of a highly unnatural form of sex, one that violated 4 billion years of procreational tradition. A wild party was about to begin, so it was no surprise to find the San Francisco Bay Area at the forefront of consensual cloning.

I am abruptly hauled back from my dreams of test-tube sex to the press registration desk at Moscone West. The possibility of total understanding has just vanished. The short version is that I will not be allowed to register for press credentials. The deadline for Web-based registration passed two weeks ago and no college journals, freelancers or online publications will be credentialed onsite. I toss out a few pro forma objections. What's wrong with online journals? Freelancers embody the entrepreneurial spirit of BIO. I have my passport with me. I am a college professor, not a college student. I even point out that, in this other incarnation, I am a member of BIO.

But the post-9/11 environment combined with the presence of anti-BIO forces has apparently turned San Francisco into Switzerland. The rules are the rules, next person. Except that there is no next person. The central hall is empty of registrants at 11 a.m. on Saturday. But I do notice two security guards tacking toward me from opposite sides of the entrance. As becomes a doctor of genetics, I beat a dignified retreat to a nearby Starbucks and consider my options. For the sake of verisimilitude, I put in a call to BIO's president, Carl Feldbaum, at the organizaiton's headquarters in Washington but no one is answering the phone on a Saturday. Anyway, Carl is in San Francisco and something tells me that, even though I have met him on several occasions, he is not going to return my call. The obvious answer is to conduct a controlled experiment. I will determine if I have a similar problem registering with the opposition.

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