Juggling Two Worlds; Richard Jefferson is bringing together scientists from rich and poor countries to fuel the interplay of ideas.

Byline: Karen Lowry Miller

It takes a pretty odd molecular-biology student to spend hours each day juggling in a troupe, but that's only one of many ways Richard Jefferson has demonstrated his independence. (Like performers, "really great scientists have to expose themselves to the scorn of the world," he says.) As a graduate student at the University of Boulder, in Colorado, Jefferson was "my most difficult student ever," says former lab supervisor David Hirsh. While biologists in the 1980s were making one discovery in genetics after another, Jefferson obsessed over the bland study of research methods--and then promptly invented a technology scientists still use to mark when a gene is present in a cell.

In the two decades since, Jefferson has focused on a less obscure research problem: how to feed the hungry. His solution? Make the basic tools of biotechnology available to all, on the assumption that if farmers had access to the latest techniques they might be able to increase yields and make their crops hardier. In 1992, he founded CAMBIA, a nonprofit research center in Australia, where he has set up a Web site identifying and explaining more than 1 million agricultural biotech patents. The site now gets 10,000 hits a day.

There Jefferson developed a method for inserting genes into plants that gets around a thicket of patents, and he plans to make it widely available through his most radical move yet. Last month he launched the BIOS initiative to set up a protected commons in which scientists all over the world can collaborate on new ideas--much like what is happening now with open-source software. The thinking is that scientists in developed countries may have solutions to the kind of problems their counterparts in poor countries want to solve. "The idea that we should feed the world is paternalistic, patronizing silliness," says Jefferson. "The world can feed itself if we can lower the cost of innovation."

Jefferson first became attuned to the needs of the developing world when he was in graduate school, where he and some friends drew up a mock business plan to harvest the ocean to feed the poor. He then held positions ...