In 1990, A&M's Institute of Biosciences and Technology established the center as an ethics-focused counterpoint to their genetic research endeavors. To run the center, the administration tapped Paul Thompson, a philosopher with a background in agricultural biotechnology.

Thompson envisioned dual missions for the center. Besides fostering research into the ethics of science, especially biotech, Thompson wanted to bring these ethical questions to researchers. Last year Thompson left for Purdure University and Priest took over, but the center's missions remain unchanged.

Surviving as a center with such an interdisciplinary agenda is tough. Funding from two of the center's institutional sponsors, the Institute for Biosciences and Technology and A&M's Research Foundation, appears solid, but the third major source, the university's College of Liberal Arts, has not made a commitment.

Despite this uncertainty, the center survives, largely through outside funding. The most recent coup: a National Science Foundation grant to study cross-cultural differences in bioethics. Thompson, Priest, and another colleague at A&M, Tarla Rai Peterson, will use the grant to look for differences between academics' views of bioethics and the public's concerns about it. At a conference in 1999, they plan to compare notes with European colleagues. "We want to see how ethical concerns shape opinion both in the U.S. and in Europe," Thompson says. "There is a remarkable difference in terms of the way the public in Europe and the public in the United States resonate with these kinds of ethical concerns."

Priest, a mass communications researcher by trade, is in charge of measuring public opinion of biotech for the project. It's a topic she's been interested since her 1989 dissertation, which explored how science news is presented. Since then, she's produced a dozen journal articles and several book chapters. The essential message of her research: what the public thinks and feels about biotech is just as important as the experts' viewpoints.

Priest says corporate and government biotech boosters tend to ignore public opinion, blazing forward while chanting the "all progress is good progress" mantra. She calls it the "deficit model" of science communication, with the deficit located squarely on the heads of those who disagree with the scientists. "They never come out and say, 'We think people are stupid,'" Priest says about the camp of vocal biotech boosters. "But it's easy for them to fall into the habit of saying that if people do not agree with our research, they must not understand it. And that's not always the case."

An extreme example of the folly of the deficit model has become urban myth. A decade or two ago, the story goes, a nuclear-power-industry-sponsored doctor decided that fear of nuclear power was more than a political position: it was a mental disease. "I'm certain that defining people who disagree with you as irrational, and more than that, sick, is not going to get us anywhere," Priest says. The example helps her emphasize a point she likes to make: "It's not fair to discount public opinion about biotechnology just because the people who hold those opinions do not have a complete knowledge of the science."

It takes scientists years to understand the minutiae of biotech; the famous "educated lay person" can't be expected to understand it by opening a newspaper. This knowledge gap creates misunderstandings that both Priest and Thompson think need to be addressed in the open.

"I really think that there has to be much more public discussion about what the new biology means, what its broad implications are," Thompson says. "Lacking that public discussion, I'm not that optimistic" about the future uses, or abuses, of biotech.

One nightmare scenario concerns the globalizing economy. "Globalization is what's going on in the world economy. Biotechnology is what's going on in the world food supply," Priest intones. Together, they spell a shifting balance of global winners and losers. For Priest, it looks like the developing countries will be the losers, the multinationals the winners. Thompson frames it as a questions: "What's crucial is who's going to control this [genetic] information. Who's going to control these goods?"

Huge multi-nationals like Monsanto, as well as enterprising start-ups like Sequana Therapeutics, want control. They are among the companies and governments searching the world for genetic clues to and cures for AIDS, cancer, and myriad other diseases. Agribusinesses are developing pest- and weather-resistant crops using DNA from plants, like the Indian Neem tree, that harbor those traits. In the U.S., at least, products or processes resulting from these DNA searches can be patented.

Herein lies one ethical dilemma. "If I crack your DNA code, I could patent the results," says Priest. "It would belong to me, not you. It's bizarre. It doesn't make logical sense."

In the same way, corporations can patent genes from mysteriously disease-resistant populations or bug-resistant plants. These corporations argue they would not look for cures if they could not patent the results. But what about the people or countries where those money-making genes came from? Don't they deserve a cut of the profits?

"We need to ask whether it's right to exploit science in a way that privileges our own economic position at the expense of the economic positions of the developing world," Priest says. "If our motivation to do biotechnology is to solve the world food shortage and ease environmental distresses, maybe we need to put more resources into understanding why there are food shortages and understanding the ecological consequences of biotechnology. . . ."

She writes about these consequences in email. "At a minimum, globalization of the economy certainly does not help the developing world." Extreme economic and technological dependence, and possible destruction of native economies and cultures, are the worst cases she envisions. The amount of damage done depends on who hits the genetic jackpot--who owns the genes. Priest says that despite the legal jargon and high-tech magic, the ownership question boils down to ethics.

She shares that viewpoint with Jeremy Rifkin, noted biotech naysayer. "The debate over life patents is one of the most important issues ever to face the human family," he writes in an April 13 cover story in The Nation "Life patents strike at the core of our beliefs about the very nature of life and whether it is to be conceived of as having intrinsic, or mere utility, value."

Though Thompson thinks Rifkin is notoriously one-sided, he agrees that we need to examine the concept of biological ownership. Thompson worries that the issue is getting trampled in the rush for discovery. He also worries that public outcry against biotech will discourage scientists, drain public research funding, and lead to science being done as a strictly commercial venture.

Meanwhile, Rifkin sounds almost gleeful about such a backlash. "Feminists, farmers, animal rights groups, consumer organizations, health advocates and social justice organizations around the world are coalescing into a new and powerful countervailing force to the growing genetic commerce that trades in the blueprints of life," he writes.

Are Priest and the center part of that backlash? "I am not anti-science," Priest says. "But there may be times we need to slow down or change the direction of scientific research in response to social priorities, not just economic priorities. We need to further engage in this debate about what our social priorities are."

Thompson echoes that sentiment. "My real concern is that the pace of innovation in biology is going to outrun society's ability to adapt to and adjust to it in a rational fashion. We really don't have the mechanisms in our society to come to terms with these fundamental discoveries."