For thirty years, George Venable has been an expert at drawing insects. As the premier illustrator for the Smithsonian Museum's entomology department, he has produced volumes and volumes of taxonomic bug books that scientists around the world use to identify unfamiliar species. Venable, however, has given up his sable brushes in favor of the latest versions of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. And he's thrilled with the Smithsonian's new scanning electron microscopes, which can render in five minutes what it takes him as many days to draw, and present the results in rotating 3D.

Technology has been late in penetrating taxonomy, a discipline so reactionary that plants are still described in Latin, and the classification of an animal proceeds much as it did in Darwin's day. That goes a long way to explain why, even though we have managed to map the human genome, just 2 million of the earth's estimated 10 million to 100 million species have been identified. The All Species Foundation, with the help of modern technology, aims to change that. The goal of the privately funded initiative is to take all of the world's taxonomic projects and synthesize them into one über-catalog of every living thing on earth -- plants, beetles, mammals, sea slugs, bacteria, and even viruses -- within the next twenty-five years. "Unless we speed up the process, we'll lose half of what we're trying to record," says Kevin Kelly, an All Species co-founder who also helped launch Wired magazine.

Skeptics abound. The cost of the project is estimated at more than $2 billion, but so far the group has just $1.2 million in its coffers. And while its academic credentials are impressive (E.O. Wilson, for one, sits on the science board), All Species has just four full-time employees and a few consultants who are not only trying to create complicated computer databases, but are strategizing to get new taxonomic projects off the ground. A small group for a vast task, which is why Kelly, in particular, is banking on new technology to accelerate the pace of discovery radically. Lepidopterists, for example, now have access to the pattern recognition software currently used to spot known terrorists at airports; it can identify thousands of varieties of butterfly by wing markings alone. On larger animals, dissections have been replaced by tomographic scans, which provide 3D models of an animal's internal organs. And somewhere down the road is the ultimate fieldworker's species identification tool: the disposable gene sequencer.

The new Internet-friendly tools, Kelly believes, will also open the doors of taxonomy to citizen scientists. Identifying species used to involve laboriously working through a hundred-step branching questionnaire (Does your beetle have wings?). Now an interactive database allows even amateurs to ID an animal in five questions or fewer.

Venable, for his part, is currently brainstorming with researchers on how to create an All Species image library for CD-ROM. "I do miss the smell and feel of the paper," he says, a bit wistfully. "But I always tell my students, 'The music's not in the piano.'"
-- Jennnifer Kahn

Commonly found around garbage dumps and poking up through cracks in parking lots, a small scraggly weed in genus Arabidopsis is no stranger to bizarre genetic testing. The plant has been engineered to bioaccumulate plastics, to grow in salty conditions, and to sprout flowers in place of leaves. Now it may be heading to Mars, where it will be tended by robotic gardeners. (It will also glow courtesy of jellyfish genes.) The experiment is one of forty-three that NASA is considering for its $300 million mission to Mars in 2007. "It will be the first time that life from earth will grow on another planet," says Chris McKay, a scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center.

If the plants survive, McKay imagines a day when Arabidopsis might "grow on the whole planet, not just in small greenhouses." His vision is not yet a done deal, however. As a signatory to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, the United States must adhere to certain environmental principles during its extraterrestrial explorations, among them the avoidance of what the United Nations calls "the harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies." Whether turning the red planet green with mutant Dumpster weeds constitutes "harmful contamination" is still open to debate.
-- Sarah Osterhoudt