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PETER AND THE WOLF

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He leaves with deputy director Jonathan Kleinbard, a wry, smart pessimist whose background spans journalism, social work and University of Chicago administration. Kleinbard has his kitchen tap rigged for espresso; it takes him four cups every morning to reach Raven's energy level. "Peter doesn't have a bone of cynicism in him," sighs Kleinbard. "He sees the glass half-full; I say, "No, Peter, it's full of dirty water.'" Long pause. "I think I depress him."

Actually the two make a good team, arguing from amiably opposite corners. Still, the deputy director isn't even a botanist, let alone Raven's successor. "The Garden has a very unique structure," notes Kleinbard. "There's Peter Raven, and there's everybody else. In most organizations, that doesn't work; here, it does, because of his vision, his strength of personality, his almost maniacal attention to detail. There isn't anything he asks someone at the Garden to do that he doesn't turn around and ask someone else to do, too. He's not undercutting; he just can't rest. It's enough to drive you totally batshit."

Things do, however, get done. And if a project smacks into an obstacle, Raven makes an end run. (It took him years to find partners for Flora Mesoamericana, a catalog of all 18,000 species in Central America, but when he did, they made discoveries that traced Africa and South America to the same land mass. To finance the Japanese Garden, he managed to get state money by simply selling Missouri an easement.) "I keep a lot of footballs in the air," he grins, "so there are always some waiting to be caught."

He enjoys the metaphor, using it so often you want to hold his hands behind his back until all those footballs hit the ground. Raven's busyness was Fish's single hesitation about marrying him: "Will he ever be quiet long enough for me to have ideas? He can get on this frenzied path, moving so fast, trying to handle everything. He once said, "I've got a ratlike brain,'" she chuckles.

The effect can be intimidating. "His brain is always on," sighs daughter Alice. "Sometimes I'll be nervous around him and just babble. But he catches and corrects everything." He also interrupts everybody, including himself, until his comments seem like a Spirograph of tangents. In reality, says his longtime friend and textbook collaborator, George Johnson, "he's never left. He's thinking on all those levels at once, talking to you about one thing while he's thinking about something else. He's the only multilevel thinker I've ever met."

About the only thing Raven can't understand is why Europeans -- and environmentalists, and scientists he used to respect, and developing nations -- are so worried about biotech. "Since the beginning of agriculture, people have modified, captured, consumed and channeled living organisms," he reminded a worried audience in India, insisting that those techniques "are no different in principle from the ways we are talking about now."

DNA, says Raven, is DNA -- nothing special or mysterious, just "strings of bases which, in triplets, specify the amino acids that make up proteins. When people talk about taking genes from one distantly related organism to another, they talk as if every gene in a mouse had a little mouse on it and putting it somewhere else would be bizarre. A lot of different organisms use similar or nearly identical genes to do the same job. If you are just talking about sequence of bases, human beings are about 98.5 percent similar to chimpanzees. If you look at it by the genes' functions, a man and a mouse are essentially 100 percent identical. People talk as if they were incredibly different kinds of things."

It was the early hype that made us think of GM organisms as distinct, special commodities, he adds. "Once you can label GM stuff as a thing, it's going, "Ooh!' (he wiggles his fingers to the shrill sound) and it escapes." He resumes his normal tone. "There is nothing, to my mind, which has been shown, either practically or theoretically, which would make GM products dangerous or different."

The possibility that randomly inserted genes of other organisms could spread in the wild doesn't alarm him. "If they did slip into another organism, would that really be a bad thing?" he retorts. "While on the ecological side I wouldn't trivialize the possibility that some combination of genes might produce, say, a new weed, is that really an ecological disaster?"

Critics say it could be -- especially if people in power continue to be so blithe about the risks. "It's this very sanguineness that's worrisome," exclaims Ruth Hubbard, professor emeritus of biology at Harvard. "Traditional breeding is a very slow and conservative process. When you introduce foreign things, you don't know what you're doing. Genes function as part of a system. And they may function differently than you expect."

In Monsanto's labs, genetic engineering is relatively precise, because investigators are working under such controlled circumstances, in a petri dish of two or three proteins. Still, they're usually using an aggressive virus as a carrier, and they're inserting the new gene randomly, so nobody's sure where it will land. Then, once the modified organism enters the real world, its genes will interact with thousands of other proteins, under an unpredictable array of circumstances.

"Peter tends to think DNA is DNA is DNA," says Wes Jackson. "I take the position that it's context-dependent." In other words, the inserted gene brings a lot of possible interactions along with it, and if the background shifts, you'll see consequences you never anticipated. "Peter and I had a discussion at Monsanto, and I simply said this: I am not against all biotech. What I feel is that it's all right to move genes around within plant families, within the grasses or the legumes, but not from long evolutionary distance.

"The real danger of this enthusiastic biotech boosterism is that nothing really bad will happen for 20 years," continues Jackson. "By then, we will have, institutionally and biologically, set the stage for problems from which the exits -- if they exist at all -- will be painful. You carry your mistakes with you, and with biotech you're doing more than carry your mistake; you're carrying a shifted background of accommodation to that mistake.

"There is a place for it," he finishes, "but with fear and trembling. Not with trumpets blaring hosannas."

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