Unfortunately, it is exactly such genealogical wizardry that has sucked the diversity project--and, by extension, all genetic surveying--into a widening maelstrom of political and religious controversy.

"I don't need somebody to look at my genes [to tell me where I came from] I have my my own origin stories... Who are they to tell us where we came from? Don't they understand that's sacrilegious."
--Nilo Cayuqueo, director of Abya Yala Fund, an indigenous organization that opposes the diversity project.

The almost magical ability of science to peek through the keyhole of history, potentially debunking long-cherished beliefs about heritage and identity, is an unsettling prospect for even the most worldly of people. But for many of the tribes that are being asked to participate in the massive study, the idea can seem soul killing.

"I don't need somebody to look at my genes. I have my own origin stories," said Nilo Cayuqueo, a Mapuche Indian from Argentina and the director of the Abya Yala Fund, an indigenous organization in Oakland that opposes the diversity project on philosophical grounds.

A member of Argentina's small remnant of 50,000 Indians, Cayuqueo said that gene hunters had already marched through the Mapuche's dusty cinder block villages, drawing blood that ended up at U.S. universities. He angrily denounced them, despite their best intentions, as the latest in a long line of outsiders coming to chip away at eroded native cultures and cosmologies.

"Imagine the arrogance of coming in and giving tribal people a machete or 15 bucks for their blood, then telling them, 'Well, you're from so-and-so place 1,000 years ago,' " he said. "Who are they to tell us where we came from? Don't they understand that's sacrilegious?"

The architects of the diversity project insist that the global survey would never happen that way.

"You don't just parachute in with some syringes," said John Moore, a University of Florida anthropologist who is helping design the sampling effort. "You invest time with people, you build relationships, you respect local beliefs."

Moore says that new ethics protocols would require scientists to explain why blood is being collected and obtain letters of informed consent. Contracts also would guarantee that the ownership of the DNA remains with the donors.

"What people don't realize is that this research will continue with or without the project," he said. "With the project, we can address sensitive issues in an organized way. Without it, the scattershot collecting goes on."

Moore is betting--like most scientists--that officials at the National Academy of Sciences will agree, thus opening the door to funding from agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Still, the huge size of the project and the fact that it was planned essentially without public input has alienated many of the very people whose DNA it hopes to preserve.

In 1992 when project anthropologists hammered out a tentative list of populations to be sampled--a boggling roster of minority cultures that included Sherpas, Apaches, Tuaregs and the last six members of Chile's Ona Indians among 700 other groups--the response from the international indigenous community was at first disbelief and then outrage.

The World Council of Indigenous Peoples promptly called on its members to boycott the DNA survey, accusing the scientists of being more interested in rescuing exotic genes than people. The notion of warehousing humanity in gene banks, they said, was ghoulish. The $2,500 cost of maintaining each of the 10,000 cell lines, they added, could be much better spent on health clinics or schools in tribal areas.

Since then, in fiery manifestos and Internet postings, native activists from the Philippines to Peru have jumped on the bandwagon, pounding the project as "immoral," "illegal," and, in a supreme irony for diversity scientists, "racist."

"The (project scientists) might be big brains, but when it comes to public relations, they're clueless," said Craig Benjamin of Cultural Survival-Canada, a native-rights group monitoring the stormy debate. "A lot of tribal groups were shocked to see their names on that list because absolutely nobody had been consulted."

Of all the hostility stirred up by the project, nothing stings researchers more than the dire rumors that their data could somehow be harnessed for weapons research.

Though scientifically improbable, the allegation gathered steam last May when a well-publicized U.S. Army workshop on 21st Century warfare included a "genetically targeted superpathogen" in its arsenal.

Such news drives diversity project scientists nuts. They insist that the macabre notion of genetic weapons ignores the double enigma of human variation--that we are far too identical and our tiny genetic differences are far too independent of ethnicity--to make a racial bomb work.

"That just betrays the activists' own paranoia and racism," said exasperated project geneticist Kidd. "There is no particular 'race gene' for a genetic weapon to zero in on. The whole idea is ludicrous."

Other diversity researchers, however, empathize with the fear, noting that tribal peoples have been the victims of biological warfare dating to the days when the U.S. cavalry began handing out measles-infected blankets to Plains Indians. Troubled by the protests, the scientists promise to broaden the sampling to include larger human populations.

"In retrospect, we made a big mistake early on by overemphasizing endangered cultures to build up public interest," Weiss said. "Now, everybody forgets that we want to test all sorts of populations--even big groups like the Han Chinese."

So far, the activists aren't buying it. In September, they picketed a Montreal genetics conference where project planners stumped for their grand vision: to create genetic life rafts for the sinking Titanic of human variation.

About 30 protesters, many of whom were not indigenous, stood outside on a chilly sidewalk and waved placards that taunted, "Check Your Ethics At the Door."