Great Expectations

Word comes that the Egyptian government is rebuilding the Library of Alexandria, a $354 million project which will open this Spring, if not on the original site (since no one knows exactly where that was) or with the original holdings (since those have been lost for more than 1000 years), then with the original spirit: to take every available bit of knowledge from as much of the world as can be compassed, and assemble it in one place.

The new Library is meant to add to the scholarly wherewithal of modern Egypt, an intention that no reasonable person could oppose; and yet something seems wrong about the whole endeavour, in tone if not in essence. There is, first of all, a lot to be said for allowing the past to exist as the past. The destruction of the original Library is among the most famous of history's irretrievable losses, and the attempt to resuscitate it in name alone looks clumsy and superficial - as if the statue of Ozymandias had been rebuilt somewhere in the desert, using Shelley's poem as a blueprint. Better to learn from the thing being gone.

Some have grumbled, too, about the lapses in the new Library's design: the letters from all the world's languages carved into the outside wall in an arrangement that spells out... gibberish, actually; and the building's cylindrical 'lighthouse' structure, which opens northward across the Mediterranean towards Europe, suggesting that whatever symbolic beacon it throws is meant to be seen by the West, not by Egypt's southern and eastern neighbours. It all seems a little tone deaf.

More importantly, it's singing a spurious tune. Yes, Euclid studied at the original Library, and so did Archimedes and countless others, but the place was never a paradigm of freedom and learnedness, inclusivity and cooperation. Or rather, it was that, but more: it was also, very obviously and unapologetically, a continuation of war and imperialism by other means.

The Library of Alexandria was the Empire's reading room and not above asserting its privileges. Its acquisitions were made by demanding scrolls from collections around the Mediterranean, copying them, and then keeping the originals and sending back the copies; passing ships were seized and searched, and the same practice applied to whatever writing was found on board. Nor did it lend in return - parchment was invented when one of Ptolemy's successors issued a ban on the exportation of Egyptian papyrus, in order to thwart the growth of a rival collection in Pergamon.

There were Library Wars in those days, and the collection at Alexandria lived by them and then died by them, piece by piece, over a period of centuries: first when Julius Caesar set fire to a storage annexe by the harbour in an attempt to torch his brother-in-law's fleet; then in various internecine wars; then again by Christians trying to obliterate Pagan writing in the fourth century AD; and again by Muslims in the seventh century, who had the last of the library's holdings burned as fuel to heat their baths. The point is not that the original Library was less than perfect, or that its destroyers were more than contemptible, but only that the stakes were high and everyone knew it: the same combination of ambition, aggression and limited opportunity that made the place so legendarily prodigious, made successive cultures hell-bent on burning it down.

And, of course, those stakes no longer exist: by far the greater part of any contemporary collection of books is neither exclusive nor unique; and the public library, in its benignity and benevolence, is as close to perfect as any institution, in any culture, has ever been. Lucky for us, less so for the new Library of Alexandria. Because however worthwhile a project it may be, it has no more real claim to the principles of its model than the concrete, full-scale replica of the Parthenon in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, has to the ruins on the Acropolis.

Needless to say, projects comparable in scope and scale are exceedingly uncommon. In recent generations, the Manhattan Project qualifies, as does the space programme, and so, I think, does the Human Genome Project, which is concluding as we end the century

By the time the HGP is done, in 2003 or thereabouts, it will have taken 15 years and $3 billion for a consortium of researchers in 19 countries to produce a complete representation of human genetic content. It's been an enormous effort, but the result will be the basis for medical research into the foreseeable future: a massive code-book of sugars and phosphates, wound around 3 billion base pairs of adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine, to form 140,000 genes, arranged on 23 pairs of chromosomes. You can go take a look at http://gdbwww.gdb.org/gdb/report.html if you want to see the results so far.

Get it quick: last week a private company called Celera Genomics Group announced that they expect to decode the same information much more quickly and much less expensively, to finish a year or two sooner, to patent it if they can, and to sell it as proprietary knowledge. If they succeed, they will nullify much of the work of the public HGP, even if the latter comes up with the same sequencing a year or two later.

All of which suggests that the HGP is our very own Library of Alexandria. It will be a vast and unprecedented storehouse of knowledge that draws upon the skills and learning of a broad federation, under the aegis of its most prominent power. And that power will struggle with the obvious moral advantage of treating knowledge as public property, and the equally obvious strategic and financial advantage that accrues to information's keepers, exploiting the mixed motives and ambiguous advantages of Big Science and Big Business. There's even a lending asymmetry: members of the public consortium are bound by the Bermuda Agreement, which requires them to send their results to a publicly accessible database every 24 hours; private corporations can tap into that database to further their own research, but need not contribute what they have discovered themselves. 'Information wants to be free', goes the slogan of the Internet world. But research wants to be very, very expensive and very profitable.

So we will see Genome Wars, very much like the Library Wars waged 2000 years ago. They won't be as violent, or as vivid, but they'll be every bit as fierce. The revived Library of Alexandria will no doubt be a splendid place and a considerable benefit to the country that's sponsoring it; and that is as it should be. But if we really wanted to re-create the conditions that made the contents of the original Library worth collecting, worth stealing and worth destroying, we would build a monument to the Human Genome project, and all that it represents.