 Harper Audio presents, Signature in the Cell, DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, by Stephen C. Meyer, performed by Derek Shetterly. Prologue. Dad, that's you! My fourteen-year-old son exclaimed as he looked at the newspaper while we stood waiting to check out at the tiny general store. His shock at seeing my face in the front section of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, when he just went to look for baseball scores, was no doubt compounded by his awareness of our location. The general store on Shaw Island, one of the most remote in the San Juan chain north of Puget Sound, was the only commercial establishment on the island. This irony was not lost on my wife, whose raised eyebrow said it all. I thought we were coming here to get away from all of this. We were, but then how was I to know that the local Seattle paper would re-run the previous day's front page story from the New York Times about the program of scientists I directed and the controversy surrounding our work? The controversy about the origin of life and whether it arose from an undirected material process or from some kind of designing intelligence is not new. It goes back in western civilization at least as far as the ancient Greeks, who produced philosophers representing both schools of thought. But the controversy over the contemporary theory of intelligent design, or ID, and its implied challenge to orthodox evolutionary theory became big news beginning in 2004 and 2005, and, for better or worse, I found myself right in the middle of it. Three events sparked intense media interest in the subject. First, in August 2004, a technical journal housed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., called The Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, published the first peer-reviewed article explicitly advancing the theory of intelligent design in a mainstream scientific periodical. Through the publication of the article, the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History erupted in internal controversy as scientists angry with the editor and evolutionary biologist with two earned PhDs questioned his editorial judgment and demanded his censure. Soon the controversy spilled over into the scientific press as news stories about the article and editor's decision appeared in science, nature, the scientist, and the chronicle of higher education. The media exposure fueled further embarrassment at the Smithsonian resulting in a second wave of recriminations. The editor, Richard Sternberg, lost his office and his access to scientific samples and was later transferred to a hostile supervisor. After Sternberg's case was investigated by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, a government watchdog organization, and by the U.S. House Committee on Government Reform, a congressional committee, other questionable actions came to light. Both investigations found that senior administrators at the museum had interrogated Sternberg's call. Sample complete. Ready to continue?