Marc van Roosmalen is one of the most famous biologists in the Amazon. *

Photo: Stanley Greene * Motoring up Brazil's Arauazinho River during the rainy season is like navigating a lake full of trees. The rust-colored water escapes its banks and spreads out across the rain forest, leaving the channel indistinguishable from the jungle around it. Marc van Roosmalen, however, seems to sense the river's course. Perched on the bow of our small aluminum boat, the primatologist confidently directs our pilot up the main artery, and we head deeper into the Amazonian wilderness with every turn.

Thin and leathery, with a deep tan and a goatee, Van Roosmalen looks younger than his 60 years. A Dutch-born naturalized Brazilian, he first came to this remote and untouched area of the Amazon more than a decade ago to study a biological El Dorado, a treasure of rare and undescribed biodiversity. For many researchers, discovering a single new species is a career maker. Van Roosmalen has discovered at least 10 — fantastical-sounding creatures like the dwarf marmoset and the giant peccary. His work along the Arauazinho and the Aripuana has earned him a reputation as one of the world's greatest living naturalists.

The boat edges around another curve, and Van Roosmalen's longtime field aid, Francis Correêa, shouts and points at an enormous anaconda, thick as a palm tree, curled on the bank. "Francis has such a keen eye," Van Roosmalen says as the snake eases into the water and underneath the boat.

A few minutes later, our engine quits. "I think I'll have a swim," Van Roosmalen announces, grabbing a snorkel out of his bag. "This water is really nice. The only problem is the electric eels. And the anacondas. And the sting rays, but that's only in the dry season." He doffs his blue button-down and yellow T-shirt and jumps into the water. I'm dubious, but he persuades me to join him, narrating the river's features as we paddle among the submerged tree trunks.

Eventually the pilot gets the motor going, but only barely. We beach the boat and strike out overland. The hike is slow going because Van Roosmalen pauses to note every fruit and tree, every monkey scratch in the bark. He picks up a large, hollowed-out nut. "This is a new species in the Brazil nut family that I'd like to describe," he says wistfully. "In the old days, I would collect this and then later return for the flowers."

He walks a few steps and then stops abruptly. "Automatically I put it in my pocket," he says, pulling out the nut and dropping it to the ground. "If I forget and go back to Manaus" — the capital of the state of Amazonas — "they can throw me in jail."

He may sound paranoid, but he's actually facing a bleak reality. In the summer of 2007, Brazilian authorities put him into one of the country's most dangerous prisons for two months, the beginning of what was supposed to be a 14-year sentence. They called him a traitor and a biopirate and convicted him of stealing the country's natural resources. As a result, Van Roosmalen was fired from his job at the government scientific institute where he'd spent two decades. He became estranged from his family, mired in debt, and afraid for his life. Even as we trudge through the Arauazinho, he awaits the verdict on his final appeal. If he loses, he goes back to prison to serve out his term.

No one disputes that Van Roosmalen is a talented researcher, or suggests that he is any sort of common criminal. When he ran afoul of Brazil's own paranoia over the theft of natural resources, important science lost out to bureaucracy, xenophobia, and cynicism. But Marc van Roosmalen is a polarizing figure here. Some see him as an environmental hero; others believe he is the nations's biggest biopirate. The same monomania and hubris that made him a great researcher also helped bring about his own demise. He could have become one of the most innovative conservationists of his generation. Now he may end up nothing more than a cautionary tale — or, if his worst fears come to pass, a martyr.

Three-fifths of the Amazonian rain forest and 13 percent of all animal and plant species are in Brazil.

Photo: Stanley GreeneBiopiracy is what watchdog groups and government officials call the plundering of biological organisms for profit. Over the past decade, developing nations have increasingly protested such incursions into their sovereignty. They come primarily in the form of "bioprospecting" researchers and pharmaceutical companies that scour areas of natural diversity and indigenous knowledge seeking the next cancer treatment or face moisturizer.

Those fears, at some level, are warranted. In the 1950s, the rosy periwinkle, a plant native to Madagascar, became the source of a lucrative leukemia drug for Eli Lilly; the island nation received nothing. In the mid-1990s, a US company filed for a patent involving the neem tree, long known in India as a source of antifungal medicines. The neem patent was later overturned, and in 2005 the Indian government started building a database of traditional knowledge to compare to international patents — with an eye toward fighting any overlaps.

But no country has taken biopiracy as more of an affront than Brazil. Here, anger over biopirataria started with Henry Wickham, an Englishman who smuggled thousands of rubber tree seeds out of Manaus at the height of Brazil's rubber boom in the late 19th century. Transported to Southeast Asia, the saplings allowed British colonies to flood the rubber market, crushing Brazil's economic fortunes. (Wickham likely purchased the seeds legally and then exaggerated his own daring, but the story stuck.)

The most infamous modern biopiracy incident involved Brazil and Squibb Pharmaceuticals. The US-based company turned the venom from a Brazilian viper into a blood-pressure treatment that was worth $1.1 billion in sales in 1996 alone — none of which ended up in Brazilian hands.

Lately, international firms have been accused of trademarking the ae7ai, a native Brazilian fruit, and patenting other Amazonian fruits and oils for cosmetics. Yet the true extent of biopiracy in Brazil is unclear. According to Mário Lúcio Reis, acting superintendent for Brazil's environmental division (known as Ibama, the initials of its Portuguese name), only six biopiracy cases were pursued last year in the Amazon. Most involved simple animal trafficking — cases more about pets than patents.

Nonetheless, the Brazilian government has portrayed biopiracy as a national crisis, setting off a kind of biological McCarthyism. Dozens of researchers — many of them foreign — have been slapped with the biopirataria label by authorities and even their own colleagues. Usually the cases amount to nothing, although occasionally the accused are paraded in front of federal committees or fined. Into this tempest blundered Van Roosmalen.

Van Roosmalen grew up in the Netherlands in the 1960s, a radical leftist hippie who fell in love with biology. "While other people were walking their dogs, he and my mother would walk their monkeys," says his eldest son, Vasco.

For his PhD, Van Roosmalen studied the feeding strategies of spider monkeys in Suriname, just to the north of Brazil. He had a natural gift for fieldwork, and his Field Guide to the Fruits of the Guianan Flora has been used by botanists for 20 years. The book caught the eye of Brazil's Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amaz4nia (INPA), which hired Van Roosmalen to conduct a similar survey for the Brazilian Amazon.

"The guy is a brilliant researcher," says Russ Mittermeier, who worked alongside Van Roosmalen when they were PhD candidates in Suriname and is now president of the US-based environmental group Conservation International. "He knows more about the relationships between primates and other forest mammals, fruits, and trees than probably anyone else alive. He's really a great explorer."

Van Roosmalen relished the free-spirited adventure of jungle research, often traveling by dugout canoe or walking barefoot through the forest for weeks or months, foraging for food and stringing up a hammock in local villages. On one trip, he picked up leishmaniasis, a parasite-borne fever, and he's had several bouts of malaria. He loved it all, even when two near-fatal spider bites persuaded him to give up the barefoot trekking.

In Brazil, Van Roosmalen continued a habit he had begun in Suriname. He set up animal rehabilitation centers — first outside Manaus and then in his family's backyard, in the heart of the city — for monkeys, tapirs, peccaries, margays, and whatever other creatures came his way, orphaned by hunting or deforestation. "Most came from the authorities, confiscated from the illegal markets," he says. "Many animals went through my hands, but you never knew where they came from."

In 1996, a local showed up at his door with a tiny live monkey in a powdered-milk can. "When I opened it," Van Roosmalen says, "I immediately saw that it was something totally new." He spent months traveling up and down the rivers around Manaus, stopping at villages to show pictures and ask whether anyone had seen the foot-long barefaced critter.

Finally, in a small village not far from the mouth of the Arauazinho River, he found the land of the "dwarf marmoset," as he eventually named the monkey in a paper coauthored with Mittermeier. As it turned out, this was not just a new species but the first new primate genus discovered in nearly a century. Van Roosmalen surveyed the area and began to find other undiscovered mammals. He made headlines globally and was even profiled in Sports Illustrated. The biologist had found a new calling: species hunter of the Amazon.

Van Roosmalen opposed shooting animals to collect as specimens, preferring instead to question locals about what they had encountered. He acquired specimens by trading for orphaned monkeys or by asking for the remains of hunted animals. The methods worked: He published his discovery of a remarkable five new monkey species in peer-reviewed journals, along with a previously unknown peccary, porcupine, tapir, and deer.

He was also transforming from scientist to conservationist. In 1999, he founded the Amazon Association for the Preservation of High Biodiversity Areas, or AAPA. Its goal was not just to raise money for his research but to buy and protect habitats. The innovative idea, linking scientific discovery to environmental protection, quickly attracted money and recognition. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, who in 1997 had awarded Van Roosmalen the country's highest scientific accolade, contributed the equivalent of $100,000 to purchase land. The organization bought an 18,500-acre parcel near the Arauazinho and 49,000 acres farther north. In 2000, Time magazine named Van Roosmalen one of its "heroes for the planet."

Van Roosmalen's rise coincided with what Brazilians perceived as a growing threat to their biological heritage. In the mid-1990s, the pace of genetic and pharmacological discoveries in areas of high bio-diversity — like rain forests — was accelerating. At the same time, international environmental groups were raising millions of dollars to enter Brazil and protect the Amazon, with or without Brazilian help. The government tightened biological-collecting laws, creating a byzantine permit bureaucracy. Today, researchers have to declare the type and number of specimens and document where they're going to end up — it's not exactly conducive to exploration or discovery.

Brazil holds three-fifths of the Amazonian rain forest and one-fifth of the world's flowering plants. An estimated 13 percent of the animal and plant species on Earth live there; it is the planet's most important living laboratory. Yet, as a percentage of GDP, the government spends just over a third of what the US does on research. "The politicians are very good at selling dreams — that in the Amazon we will find all the cures to our diseases," says Efrem Ferreira, a Brazilian ichthyologist at the INPA. "There are billions of dollars of promise, but it is just that: promise. You have to spend the money and the time."

Meanwhile, red tape has effectively smothered science. Foreign biologists tend to shun the country in favor of relatively easygoing locales like Peru and Costa Rica, and indigenous scientists are unable to make up the difference. One botanist estimates that there are only five plant taxonomists covering Brazil's 1.9 million square miles of jungle.

"If working biologists were held rigorously to the law at the moment, we would all be arrested," says George Shepherd, a plant taxonomist at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas. "The law was framed with good ends in mind, but they didn't actually think about the disastrous effect it would have on the scientific community."

Van Roosmalen himself has little stomach for the paperwork required for scientific collecting. "I tried several times to advise him about the need to obey the INPA's rules," says Rogerio Gribel, former head of botany for the institute. As Van Roosmalen garnered international awards and media attention for his work, he became increasingly scarce at the INPA. He founded a series of nonprofit organizations to raise his own research money. And he drifted away from institute activities, says Gribel, who believes his "egocentric, nondiplomatic behavior" may have rubbed others the wrong way.

In fact, Van Roosmalen's ventures often seem to end in some sort of crisis. His animal-rescue centers were shuttled from one property to the next as disagreements with some funder or partner surfaced. But the real trouble started with one particular blowup. In 1996, he became a consultant for a British production company called Survival Anglia. Founded by nature documentarist Nicholas Gordon, the outfit wanted to shoot three films about Amazonian animals and gave Van Roosmalen money to buy land for an animal-rehab center. Three years later, as the filming wound down, Van Roosmalen became embroiled in an argument about finances with Gordon and his fiancée. They complained to Ibama, the environmental enforcement agency, which opened an official inquiry.

In July 2002, Van Roosmalen was returning from a research trip north of Manaus when he stopped to refuel. Ibama agents boarded his boat, where they found some common orchids and four monkeys on deck — orphans he claimed to have rescued from a village in exchange for frozen chickens. He lacked permits for any of them. After a night of interrogation at the police station, he was fined $3,000 and released — minus the monkeys.

Two days later, the arrest hit local papers, and over the ensuing weeks the national press jumped on the story. "Law of the Jungle: Scientest Accused of Biopiracy," blasted the national newsweekly, Veja. "I was already crucified," Van Roosmalen says.

Soon after, a member of the Brazilian parliament named Vanessa Grazziotin took an interest. It was an election year, and Grazziotin was heading up an inquest into biopiracy. She subpoenaed Van Roosmalen's computers and phone records and called him to testify in front of Parliament. When he failed to appear — Van Roosmalen says that lawyers told him his testimony was optional — she sent the federal police to bring him back to the capital.

Van Roosmalen's public grilling lasted four hours. It turned out that the INPA had opened an inquiry into his methods soon after the raid on his boat, and Grazziotin used the results — which even Van Roosmalen hadn't seen — to pick at obscure details from his research history. What was his relationship with Ford, sponsor of Time's Hero for the Planet award? How had Van Roosmalen's son Tomas, a graduate student in genetics at Columbia, obtained monkey feces for DNA analysis? Van Roosmalen sounded flustered and evasive.

The final parliamentary report, issued in early 2003, concluded — without offering direct evidence — that he had sent genetic material out of the country. Grazziotin passed the results on to federal prosecutors to build a criminal case. The state government of Amazonas filed environmental-crime charges of its own. In February 2003, Ibama raided Van Roosmalen's home and confiscated 23 monkeys he had living there, citing a lack of permits. In April, INPA fired him for ignoring administrative rules, like traveling abroad to accept awards without institute permission.

Six months later, Van Roosmalen's wife discovered he was having an affair and left him. His son Vasco ousted him from the presidency of the AAPA, and the organization sold off its research boat and 4x4s. The status of the land it had bought was thrown into legal limbo. Everything had crumbled.

In 2006, Van Roosmalen was exonerated of the state charges against him, but eventually a federal court tried him for largely the same thing. The judge convicted him in absentia — his lawyer was AWOL. On June 15, 2007, police officers arrived at his home in Manaus and arrested him.

Weirdly, the federal conviction had little if any connection to biopiracy. In fact, the most serious offense, carrying the bulk of his sentence, had nothing to do with biology; it was for embezzlement. Back in 1996, Survival Anglia — the documentary-filmmaking outfit with which Van Roosmalen's troubles had begun — had shipped 5 tons of scaffolding tower from the UK to help shoot footage in the jungle canopy. Van Roosmalen's INPA credentials had exempted the company from paying a customs duty. In return, the company pledged to donate the equipment to the INPA when filming was complete. But the scaffolding disappeared, and the feds said Van Roosmalen took it. To where, nobody knew. The press claimed he had used it for his monkey cages, but that was probably false: He'd had the cages for years before the scaffolding disappeared. No one seems willing to sort out what actually happened. Filmmaker Nicholas Gordon died of a heart attack in Venezuela in 2004, and Gordon's wife, Antonieta, now living in England, says that no one asked her to testify at the trial.

The government also convicted Van Roosmalen of lacking the proper permits for his backyard rescue operation. But he showed me documents indicating that on three separate occasions he had applied for permits to keep rescued monkeys — and the rules allowed him to proceed if he didn't receive a response after 45 days.

And, finally, Van Roosmalen was found guilty of illegally auctioning off, via his Web site, the naming rights to species he had discovered. Prosecutor Edmilson da Costa Barreiros acknowledges that scientific tradition gives the discoverer of a new species the right to name it. But he maintains that Van Roosmalen "cannot claim that those species belong to him." Offering to name a monkey for donations amounts to stealing, in Barreiros' words, "the national patrimony."

Van Roosmalen had indeed made the offer on his Web site but never completed an auction. Even if he had, it's hard to see how the law could equate selling naming rights with owning the animals themselves.

The judge — in defiance of the special arrangements usually accorded convicts with higher degrees — deemed the crimes so severe that Van Roosmalen had to serve his sentence at Raimundo Vidal Pessoa Penitentiary in downtown Manaus, a dumping ground for the Amazon's most dangerous and destitute.

In January, I visited the moldy concrete cell block where he had ended up. He spent two months there in constant fear of a riot in which he might be seen as a valuable hostage. He says he saw two fellow prisoners murdered (which prison administrators deny). The prison eventually transferred him to a cell with five other inmates, two of them violent crack addicts. Van Roosmalen says he smuggled in cash to pay his companions' drug debts. Ricardo Hin, a friend who visited Van Roosmalen, remembers finding him wild-eyed and desperate. "It was shocking," Hin says. "He told me, If I stay here much longer, I will be killed.'"

Outside, Van Roosmalen's second wife, Vivian, used family money to hire new lawyers. Supporters started a Web site in the Netherlands to raise legal funds. His ex-wife, son, and brother offered money, but they demanded he change lawyers. By then he had begun to see enemies everywhere — among other conservationists, even among his own family. He sent them away, later accusing them of blackmail. Last August, attorneys finally obtained his temporary release while the case is on appeal.

Van Roosmalen and I spend the afternoon exploring the Arauazinho River forest, and then we hike down to the newly repaired boat and head for home. He points out places where the riverbanks are marred by freshly cut roads. The recent discovery of gold has driven a flurry of road building here, with the accompanying deforestation and malaria. "This sustainable development is a bunch of crap," he says. "It just gives carte blanche to the loggers."

Despite Van Roosmalen's outrage, the entire region is a nature reserve now (albeit one that's often encroached upon). That change in status is largely a result of Van Roosmalen's own research into the area's unique ecology. In fact, it is illegal for us to be here without government permission.

In a perverse way, his case has helped open up a discussion in Brazil about true biopiracy. Some collecting rules have recently been loosened, and there is debate on proposed legislation that many researchers say could make Brazil one of the more progressive places for scientists to work and collaborate. "Everybody saw in his case exactly what we didn't want to see, which was the prosecution of researchers and not of criminals," says Rita Mesquita, a former student of Van Roosmalen's who helped establish the reserve. "So he — of course at a very high cost in his life — ended up being a perfect example of the misuse of a regulation."

When the police came to arrest him the last time, they found a plastic bag filled with skins and skulls he had gathered without permits. Once, I asked him why he continued to collect, even when he knew he was being watched. "Fuck them," Van Roosmalen said. "I wanted to go on publishing new things and just laughing at them. It was stupid, OK. I just consider this whole thing a circus." He paused. "I was always a rebel and I always will be. There was nothing wrong in my whole attitude during the 20 years that I worked for the government. They should have been proud of me. The real crooks are on the street in this country, the people who really are responsible for large-scale destruction of the rain forest. And I'm not one of them."

On the river, the motor conks out again; this time we've blown a spark plug. Running on half an engine, we'd have to spend the night out on the river, exposed. Our pilot decides to flag down a passing gravel barge for help.

"There used to be just two gravel barges on the river. Now there are 10 ships a day," Van Roosmalen grouses. "It's all illegal. They bribe the authorities for the permits."

The prison cell in downtown Manuas where Van Roosmalen served part of his sentence.

Photo: Stanley Greene Luckily, our captain knows the barge pilot and arranges to borrow a spark plug. It's the kind of personal grease upon which South America, and indeed the world, operates. It's also the kind of trade-off that Van Roosmalen always believed was beneath him. "Compromising myself with the devil," he once said, "is the last thing I would do."

As we fire up the outboard and race toward home, the cloudy skies open up and release a driving rain. Van Roosmalen tucks himself under a plastic tarp. Suddenly, he looks older. I ask him jokingly if the weather makes him miss these expeditions. "It was always like this," he says, hunching his knees under his chin. "Sometimes in the Amazon, you can really get a chill from the cold."

Van Roosmalen's house in Manaus is a red two-room building with a corrugated aluminum roof. The stove and oven sit out on the porch while the kitchen remains a half-built cinder-block shell, its completion long ago sacrificed to lawyers fees. The wide lawn is dotted with fruit trees and fronted by a 13-foot-high concrete wall with metal gates. Two closed-circuit cameras scan the perimeter. If an unknown visitor rings the bell, Van Roosmalen sits quietly watching the monitors, girding himself for a dash into the jungle behind the house.

When I first contacted Van Roosmalen in November 2007, three months after his release from prison, he had only recently stopped living on the run. Just after his release from Raimundo Vidal, he said, gunmen masquerading as federal police came to the house to finish him off. He and Vivian fled to friends' houses, relocating every two days. They scrounged up enough money to double the height of their wall and top it with surveillance cameras. Then they felt safe enough to go home.

These days, Van Roosmalen says, he and Vivian live off fees for consulting on the occasional nature documentary and a small advance from a Dutch publisher for his memoirs. Help Marc van Roosmalen, the organization dedicated to paying his legal costs, shut down months ago. Tens of thousands in legal bills remain unpaid. Vivian is training to become an armed guard to supplement their income.

On my final visit, I find Van Roosmalen more jittery than usual. He hands me a grainy printout from his security cameras. That morning, he says, two men arrived in a white Nissan pickup and banged on the door, lingering when no one answered. "You don't want to interpret," he says, "but they were very persistent."

A few weeks later, he emails me from a new address. He has confirmed, he says, that the men were ex-police sent to kill him. "Looking at the tape over and over," he writes, he could see the men putting revolvers in their belts before they approached the door. "It is crystal clear," Van Roosmalen says. "They would have killed me point-blank if I had opened the door." He and Vivian fled the house; now they live on the run. They have no plans to return to Manaus. The outcome of his appeal, in the end, may not matter. "They will never catch me again," he told me once. "Never."

Contributing editor Evan Ratliff (www.atavist.net) wrote about cellulosic ethanol in issue 15.10.