The 2004 Wired Rave Awards

He put 70,000 screaming computer-generated soldiers onscreen, and 70 million wildly animated fanatics cheered in multiplexes, chat rooms, and at awards ceremonies around the globe. At the box office, The Lord of the Rings trilogy has netted $2.5 billion and counting. The films have also turned Jackson's New Zealand-based effects shop, Weta, into one of the foremost f/x factories on earth. So what's a filmmaker to do after the triumphant Return of the King? How about a remake of a little art house flick called King Kong. – Jennifer Hillner

| Photo by Art Streiber The hobbit king faces off with the original stop-motion animation skeleton used in the 1933 King Kong.

WIRED: The Lord of the Rings trilogy has reached its conclusion. How are you feeling? JACKSON: It's every emotion. Relief that it's over. Pride that we ended with something bigger than we ever thought in terms of success. It was a very risky venture.

What was it like to make three f/x blockbusters end-to-end for seven years? We were developing by the seat of our pants. There were two shots of Gollum in Fellowship. We kept him in the shadows – he wasn't good enough for dialog or a close-up in daylight. We worked on him for another year, and he was in 300 shots in Two Towers. A month before delivery of that film, [visual effects supervisor] Joe Letteri insisted on redoing all of it because we'd finally gotten the code for Gollum right. Even so, after Two Towers, we still weren't happy with the subtlety of Gollum.

Did that mean more pressure from the studio? After the first film, they could have said, Well hey, you have the audience, we want to spend a minimum on the next two. But they kept their hearts in the movie. We were supposed to have 400 effects shots in Return of the King. It ended up being 1,500.

What were you like on the set? It's a strange process this filmmaking. It starts with some imaginative vision of what the film is to be. I have an image in my head and I try to list practical steps so that we end up with that on film. Then others get involved and it morphs into being the collective imagination of several people. When you work on a project for 15 months, it's no longer a job,it's a lifestyle.

What did you do for fun? We flew in helicopters with a list of locations that Tolkien had described, trying to find locations to shoot. He gave us very vivid mental pictures of what Middle-earth looked like. New Zealand has a familiar yet primitive quality that doesn't feel like it's in the industrial age. The landscape isn't tamed; the hand of man hasn't marked it yet. I'd never flown in a helicopter before. It's not the most natural way to fly. They don't feel like they belong there, in the sky, but they get up there. When the pilot zooms down canyons and riverbeds, it's like a roller-coaster ride.

How did you become interested in special effects? I grew up watching the British TV series Thunderbirds. It was the first thing I ever watched that I realized I was looking at special effects. I understood that it wasn't real, it was magic. I wanted to become the magician who did those tricks. From the age of 7, I was making models and cardboard spaceships and monsters with wire to animate frame by frame. As I went through my teenage years, my interest shifted with an understanding that the storytelling was really the fun thing to do – ideally, with monsters and special effects.

Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles, Dead Alive – your early work features some of the bloodiest scenes ever filmed. What do these movies say about you? They all represent the type of film I would be entertained by. That's why you make movies. Because you're interested in a genre. I'm a huge horror fan and I always will be. My horror movies were made on the backs of films like Evil Dead that were extremely graphic. I had to top those films. I had to be more outrageous and more extreme. Not that I'm competitive with others, but when filmmakers raise the bar in terms of portraying something in a way you've never seen before, it's inspirational.

So where do you see movies heading? I can't wait for films to get sold in high definition. I think at that point, we're going to see a plateau in the format that will last for 20 years. Laserdiscs and DVDs have been stops along the way to getting a system in the home that will be of sufficient quality to rival the cinema experience. Once that happens, studios will have to ask themselves, How on earth do we get people back in the cinema?

Why remake King Kong? King Kong is my favorite movie – I love the original. It was initially the escapism that drew me to it. The adventure. Being swept onto an island. But it's 70 years old, and there is a generation of kids who don't have the tolerance for old black-and-white films. This will be a new vision. I'm trying to recapture what I loved about the film when I saw it when I was 9.

If you weren't a director, what else would you do? I wish I could spend all day doing miniatures.

THE OTHER NOMINEES Danny Boyle 28 Days Later Sofia Coppola Lost in Translation Jacques Perrin Winged Migration Andrew Stanton Finding Nemo

For imagining iTunes and Finding Nemo (then ditching Disney) • Renegade of the Year: Steve Jobs

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Steve Jobs has always prided himself on thinking different. Now the rest of the world is coming around.

| Photo courtesy Apple/Michael O�Neill/Corbis/Outline Apple CEO Steve Jobs

As CEO of both Apple and Pixar, Jobs is setting the agenda in digital entertainment. At the start of 2003, the recording industry chastised Apple for promoting piracy with the iPod and its "Rip. Mix. Burn." ad campaign – which one record executive told Wired was like saying "Fuck you, record labels." But Jobs convinced the industry that technology was its friend. Last April, he launched the iTunes Music Store with support from the five major labels. By October, Apple had a Windows version and was on its way to a catalog of half a million songs. Sales by year's end: 30 million songs. Jobs has made the world safe for legal downloads; we will never look back.

Across San Francisco Bay, Pixar is having an even better run. Finding Nemo – the highest-grossing animated film and best-selling DVD of all time – has raked in $850 million at the box office. This success made Jobs wonder just what his distributor, Disney, was bringing to the table. He publicly mocked Disney for the quality of its recent animated films, then brashly ended their 13-year relationship – and all but pushed CEO Michael Eisner out of the Magic Kingdom. With two anticipated films in the pipeline and studios scrambling to devise a Pixar-friendly arrangement, Steve Jobs has suddenly become the hottest man in Hollywood. – Jeffrey M. O'Brien

THE OTHER NOMINEES Burt Rutan founder, Scaled Composites; designer, SpaceShipOne Linus Torvalds Fellow, Open Source Development Labs Niklas Zennstr�m & Janus Friis cofounders, Skype

For rewriting the history of modern technology • Books: Rebecca Solnit

| Photo by Robyn Twomey Rebecca Solnit

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"In the spring of 1872 a man photographed a horse." In that moment, Eadweard Muybridge caught all four fast-moving hooves off the ground. That same instant, the beginning of Rebecca Solnit's transfixing River of Shadows, launched a career whose restless genius set the tone for the 20th century. Muybridge's stop-motion images settled a minor scientific debate (and a legendary $25,000 bet between railroad baron Leland Stanford and some East Coast businessmen). More important, his breakthrough revolutionized photography, laid the groundwork for motion pictures, and forever changed concepts of time and distance. Solnit's tale is part biography, part history lesson, and part meditative essay. In Muybridge, she finds the forefather of the Silicon Valley spirit. He was an indefatigable entrepreneur, she writes, "selling and inventing himself at the same time that he was inventing and selling his photographs." – Blaise Zerega

From River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West

| Photo courtesy of Corbis

In the eight years of his motion-study experiments in California, he also became a father, a murderer, and a widower, invented a clock, patented two photographic innovations, achieved international renown as an artist and a scientist, and completed four other major photographic projects.

THE OTHER NOMINEES Bill Bryson A Short History of Nearly Everything Michael Lewis Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game Christopher Paolini Eragon (Inheritance, Book 1) Neal Stephenson Quicksilver (Volume One of the Baroque Cycle)

For bending our minds with PowerPoint slides • Art: David Byrne

| Photo by F. Scott Schafer David Byrne

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PowerPoint is best known for mind-numbing presentations that transform bumbling salespeople into confident, corporate warriors. But David Byrne used the software to produce evocative – and controversial – art. Here are a few bullet points, as told to Blaise Zerega, about Byrne's PowerPoint conversion and his book/DVD Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information:

• A big part of American culture is business culture. I owe it to myself to acknowledge it, to say, OK, this is part of my life, part of my work, part of the world I live in. • PowerPoint can make almost anything appear good and look professional. Quite frankly, I find that a little bit frightening. • Slickness is not always something that is desired. It's just trying to knock you over, trying to hype you up. That's a danger if there's actually nothing there. • Sometimes when you put on the mask or the clothes of a character, you take on some of the aspects of the character. I guess that's what happened to me. I found that I was enjoying it. • In one of my favorite images, lots of overlapping words are tightly layered on top of each other. One of the few recognizable words is overwhelmed. • Galleries are my obvious venue, but I find that my presentations work very well in public, non-art spaces, places where people who work in offices can interact with it. They gasp and say, "Oh my god, that's done with PowerPoint!"

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THE OTHER NOMINEES Matthew Barney The Cremaster Cycle Olafur Eliasson The Weather Project Takashi Murakami Superflat Gail Wight The Evolution of Disarticulation

For reinventing the book by day and moonlighting as a rocketeer • Business: Jeff Bezos

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Once upon a time, Amazon.com sold new books. Now it offers new and used music, videos, electronics, clothing, jewelry, food – and profitability. Perfect time to launch Search Inside the Book, an audacious project to digitize Amazon's entire catalog. Bezos has set his own sights even further out: His private jet propulsion lab, Blue Origin, aims to "create an enduring presence in space." To infinity and beyond. – Jeffrey M. O'Brien

| Photo by David Ash Jeff Bezos

WIRED: How do you push for change with the promise of instant riches all but gone? BEZOS: We've created an environment where builders can build. The people here like to do new things. There's even more innovation than you see, like the way we configure software in fulfillment centers, tweaking algorithms.

How did you know it was time to get started on Search Inside the Book? Five years ago, it would have been prohibitively expensive. But disk space and bandwidth are getting twice as cheap every 12 months. As technology – the fundamental raw ingredients – gets cheaper and cheaper, it creates an opportunity to be imaginative.

What's the next transformative trend? With computers and display devices getting less expensive, when will half of households have four or five computers? Assuming they all have always-on broadband, this will eliminate a lot of friction in using the computer. I put a computer in my kitchen and it doubled my Amazon purchases! [Guffaws.]

Google has a product search engine, Froogle, and book search capability. I hear Amazon has a search engine on the way. Are you headed for a dogfight? If you're competitor-focused, you can watch your competitor go down blind alleys and you don't have to invest there. That can lead to success but not a lot of innovation. We have a pioneer strategy. Ten years from now, customers will still want choice, selection, and the lowest price. If you base your strategy on foundational needs of customers, even if the world is swirling around you, you can keep your head down and don't have to worry about it.

THE OTHER NOMINEES Marc Benioff Salesforce.com Sergey Brin, Larry Page & Eric Schmidt Google Diane Greene VMware Brian Roberts Comcast

For electrifying the grass roots • Politics: Joe Trippi & Scott Heiferman

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Polls, attack ads, talking heads – it seems like just another election year. But the primary season was anything but politics as usual. Consider Joe Trippi, former head of Howard Dean's presidential machine, and Scott Heiferman, cofounder and CEO of Meetup.com, two men who used the Internet to rewire grassroots organizing.

| Photo by Lloyd Ziff Joe Trippi

It wasn't just fundraising. "A lot of the political establishment now views the Net as 'Cool, it can raise money,'" Trippi says. "They don't understand the community-building that can get people to not just contribute but actually take action."

Trippi had been in presidential politics since the 1980s. But he spent the boom years in Silicon Valley. "I was always fantasizing about what would happen if you took an open source approach to building a political campaign," he says. "There were companies that had huge Web-based communities following their technology. If that could happen, why couldn't you build the same kind of community nationwide?" When Trippi heard that Dean supporters were using a Web site called Meetup to connect, he had his answer.

Heiferman, who sold his online ad agency itraffic in 1999, had his epiphany while in line for opening night of The Fellowship of the Ring – the costumed elves and hobbits there had used the Net to mobilize. "When people increase their sense of community, it strengthens things," he says. "And frankly, I wanted to do something that would help people more than advertising does." That became Meetup. By last winter, the activists scheduling gatherings for Dean, Clark, Kerry, and even Bush by far outnumbered the Middle-earthlings.

| Photo by Matt Gunther Scott Heiferman

Sure, Dean flamed out. But so what? Revolutions eat their young; blogs and the Web are now indispensable political tools. The children of the Internet finally have a name for their decentralized, networked, bottom-up philosophy. It's called democracy. – Adam Rogers

THE OTHER NOMINEES Joan Blades & Wes Boyd MoveOn.org Ted Costa People's Advocate; California recall organizer Ira Magaziner Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative Tim Muris Federal Trade Commission

For changing the public face of JetBlue and Bloomberg • Industrial Design: Antenna Design: Sigi Moeslinger & Masamichi Udagawa

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What do JetBlue's new check-in kiosk and Bloomberg's streamlined computer terminal have in common? An extreme makeover, courtesy of Antenna Design's Masamichi Udagawa and Sigi Moeslinger, who nip and tuck pedestrian consumer products into hands-on fine art.

| Photo by Aliya Naumoff Sigi Moeslinger & Masamichi Udagawa

Though best known for tech projects with the likes of Fujitsu, IBM, Sony, and Verizon, Antenna has also designed space-age subway cars for New York City and created an interactive art installation for the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

When it came to putting a new face on the Bloomberg terminal, they morphed it from a nondescript box to something more sculptural and akin to sleek executive furniture. There's also a wry new feature called Squawk for instant voice communication (think "Sell, sell, sell!").

For JetBlue, Udagawa and Moeslinger followed their curiosity, taking inspiration from classic sci-fi films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and old computer equipment like the IBM mainframe. The updated kiosk looks surprisingly ready to launch passengers on their own space odyssey. Currently, there are 20 of the boxes at JFK's Terminal 6, and there will be another hundred-plus at airports across the US by the end of the year.

"With products, people don't care what's happening with the technology inside," says Udagawa. "Design should make only the magical part of tech available to people." – Laura Moorhead

THE OTHER NOMINEES Yves B�har Birkenstock Footprints Laurene Leon Boym Baby Zoo Rug Collection and Goodnight Nightlight Rob Haitani, Jeff Hawkins, Phil Hobson, Dave Hoenig, Greg Shirai, Mike Yurochko, Peter Skillman & Cathal Loughnane Treo 600 Kenichi Sugino Game Boy Advance SP

For taking rock & roll to the fifth dimension • Music: The Flaming Lips: Steven Drozd, Wayne Coyne & Michael Ivins

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Record an album. Tour to support it. Repeat. After more than a decade of making eccentric indie rock, the Flaming Lips decided to challenge the notion of what albums and concerts could be. "Not because it needs to be done," frontman Wayne Coyne says. "Just out of curiosity."

| Photo by Michele Aboud The Flaming Lips: Steven Drozd, Wayne Coyne & Michael Ivins

So the Lips remastered their previous album in DVD-Audio and Dolby 5.1 Surround and took the music to the next dimension. Remixed to flow out of six speakers, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots 5.1 envelops the listener in a cocoon of warm, sweeping psychedelia so perfectly realized that it's hard to imagine it wasn't recorded that way in the first place. (The new Yoshimi also includes an extra disc of outtakes and brilliantly imaginative videos.)

The band has been throwing curveballs at fans for years: The 1997 release Zaireeka, for instance, consists of four CDs meant to be played on four different stereos simultaneously. But in the past year the Lips also transformed their already mesmerizing performances into celebrations complete with balloons, confetti, and fans dancing onstage in fuzzy animal costumes provided by the band. (Disclosure: I was a bunny at New York's Roseland Ballroom in early 2003.) To top it off, they released two EPs with remixes that take their tripped-out rock for a spin on the dance floor.

And this blurry, Technicolor revision of rock is actually attracting more fans. "We're a band that makes whatever music we want and presents it to an audience any way we want," Coyne says. "People think when you go up there with balloons and animal costumes, that's not rock 'n' roll." He pauses. "But rock 'n' roll can do all this." – Robert Levine

THE OTHER NOMINEES OutKast Speakerboxxx/The Love Below The Postal Service Give Up The Neptunes The Neptunes Present Clones The White Stripes Elephant

For rebuilding the art of building • Architecture: Zaha Hadid

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During the '90s, Zaha Hadid's ambitious, competition-winning designs never made it from concept to construction, and critics assailed her as a paper architect with unbuildable ideas. All that changed with last year's unveiling of the long-awaited Rosenthal Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati. New York Times critic Herbert Muschamp proclaimed it simply "the most important American building to be completed since the end of the cold war."

| Photo by Nathan Kirkman Zaha Hadid

The $35 million structure, her first in the US and her largest project to date, is classic Hadid: She plays with space, blurring inside and outside by extending the sidewalk into the lobby, and connecting the galleries by a long snaking ramp (made by a roller-coaster manufacturer). "The concept is a jigsaw of diverse exhibition spaces, long, short, broad, and tall, each with different lighting conditions," Hadid says. "I think architecture can influence the making of art as well as the experience of viewing it, and I hope this space offers a new sense of possibility for artists."

Iraqi-born, London-based Hadid, who worked with Rem Koolhaas in the late '70s, finds right angles boring and remains determined to stretch architectural boundaries. Her next projects: the Contemporary Art Center in Rome, a BMW plant in Leipzig, Germany, and a $23 billion, 20-year master plan for Singapore. – Jessie Scanlon

THE OTHER NOMINEES Pierre de Meuron & Jacques Herzog Prada Tokyo Norman Foster Swiss Re Headquarters, London Jeanne Gang Starlight Theater,Rockford, Illinois Frank Gehry Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles

For unleashing fast, free swarming downloads • Software: Bram Cohen

| Photo by Chris Mueller Bram Cohen

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In 2001, at the height of the dotcom bubble, Cohen decided to take some time off. "I was feeling frustrated professionally," says the freelance code jockey and co-organizer of the hacker conference CodeCon. "I wanted to write something that got deployed on as many machines as possible – a general-purpose tool." Two years later, he had created an open source P2P program with a totally new transfer protocol that increases a user's effective bandwidth a thousand-fold, effectively ending traffic jams for popular downloads. Today his file-sharing software, BitTorrent, is running on an estimated 10 million machines. The principle is simple: The more you share, the faster your speed. BitTorrent requires users to upload what they download, meaning the more people who want a file, the more there are to serve it out. And because bits of the file are pulled from dozens of computers simultaneously, the result is lightning-quick copies of Linux distros, Phish concerts, and, yes, first-run movies.

"Historically, if you look at the movie industry, whoever controls distribution ends up controlling the product," notes Cohen. "But BitTorrent makes the cost of distribution very, very small." MPAA be warned. The program's two-year development was funded almost entirely by Cohen's savings and, now, by donations from grateful users. It's not lucrative, but that's beside the point: "It's pretty megalomaniacal to think that you can change the world just by hacking in your house for a little while," Cohen says, "but I like to think that I've made a small part of the promise of the Internet come true." – Adam Fisher

THE OTHER NOMINEES Jonathan Abrams Friendster Toivo Annus, Janus Friis, Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, Jaan Tallin & Niklas Zennstr�m Skype iTunes Music Store team iTunes Music Store Dave Winer RSS

For reinventing how to be a player • Games: Richard Marks

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"Avoid missing ball for high score." The complete instructions for Pong and its basic up-down controller are hard to beat for simplicity. But Marks, special projects manager for Sony R&D and creator of the company's EyeToy, gave it his best shot. "I wanted a game you can jump in and have fun with immediately, something you could play with your grandparents."

| Photo by Robyn Twomey Richard Marks

Marks chucked knobs, joysticks, and buttons in favor of motion detection. Hook the EyeToy cam to a PlayStation 2, aim it your way, and watch onscreen as your mirror image interacts with objects in the game. Wave your hands in the air to scroll through menu options, then start slapping around ninjas, heading soccer balls, or wiping suds off windows.

Marks' first R&D gig was in the early '80s at his parents' game shop in Mishawaka, Indiana. "It was my job to know how to play all the games. Atari 2600, Coleco, Intellivision very rough for a 10th-grader." Fast-forward to a PhD in aeronautical-astronomical engineering at Stanford, where he developed "eyes" for deep-sea robots. "The robot could track a fish or gauge its surroundings and hold a position regardless of currents."

The debut EyeToy: Play was a smashing success, selling 2 million copies in Europe since autumn and 500,000-plus in the US since Christmas. The follow-up EyeToy: Groove is due in April. Marks can't discuss his work for the upcoming PS3 console, but he's bullish on direct interaction with onscreen events. Will we ever be able to ditch our desks and juggle windows the way Tom Cruise does in Minority Report? Marks says they're already doing it at Sony R&D. "Cruise was wearing these gloves with bright blue dots. We have a simpler device." – Chris Baker

THE OTHER NOMINEES Takehiro Izushi Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising Petri Jarvilehto Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne Hideki Kamiya Viewtiful Joe Yannis Mallat Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

For making the Cartoon Network safe for adults • Television: Mike Lazzo

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High-school dropout. Forty-six years old. Obsessed with cartoons. Mike Lazzo is your guy if you want grown men to watch TV in the middle of the night. His brainchild, the Adult Swim programming block on Cartoon Network, regularly ranks number one in its time slot among cable viewers 18 to 34.

| Photo by Ian White Mike Lazzo

There's no doubt the senior vice president puts bodies in Barcaloungers during the wee hours – and Adult Swim's wild success is prompting Lazzo to expand the block's airtime to six hours a night (11 pm to 5 am), Saturday through Thursday, and add a half-dozen shows to the 20 or so already in the lineup.

Lazzo's trademark is bringing dead toons back to life. He got his big break when he created the cult hit Space Ghost Coast to Coast in 1994 by splicing new celebrity interviews into old animated footage. Last year, Futurama and Family Guy reruns did so well that it's likely both shows (which Fox killed in prime time) will produce new episodes.

"Who would've thought that a cartoon network would be doing some of the smartest programming on TV today?" says the admittedly biased Matt Groening, creator of Futurama and The Simpsons. "Their promos are smart and funny and don't insult the intelligence of viewers." What's more, Lazzo says Adult Swim's promos were created on a Macintosh "for $5."

His latest project: an original cartoon called Squidbillies. Loosely autobiographical, Squidbillies stars a family of backwoods cephalopods stranded in the Georgia mountains when the ocean recedes from the Ohio Valley. "We have to write what we know," explains Lazzo, who grew up in the South. "We like seafood and we're rednecks, so we think we've got the tonality down." – Rebecca Smith Hurd

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THE OTHER NOMINEES Ricky Gervais The Office (BBC America) Ronald Moore Battlestar Galactica (Sci Fi Channel) George Clooney, Steven Soderbergh K Street (HBO) Jon Stewart The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (Comedy Central)

For nailing SARS. Next up: malaria and the common cold • Medicine: Joseph DeRisi

| Photo by Robyn Twomey Joseph DeRisi

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Some kind of super-pneumonia was making patients – and doctors – drop dead in Southeast Asia. Even the World Health Organization whiz kid who gave the deadly outbreak a name – severe acute respiratory syndrome – succumbed to it. The Centers for Disease Control obtained a sample of a victim's infected tissue and needed a diagnosis fast. There was just one man for the job: UCSF biochemist and biophysicist Joe DeRisi. He's the brains behind the microarray known as the virus chip, a glass slide embedded with 12,096 snippets of viral DNA. (Extra geek credit: DeRisi designed and built a robot in his lab to imprint the chip. Supergeek cred: He wrote the software, too.)

Within 24 hours, the virus chip produced a snapshot of the pathogen's genetic makeup. "It was a novel coronavirus, staring us in the face," DeRisi says. "It was just a blatant result."

DeRisi stands at the intersection of the disciplines driving the life sciences – genomics, bioinformatics, virology, materials science, and computer engineering. Wiry and hyper, the onetime black belt in aiki-jujitsu sees nothing especially daunting about taking on – even curing – the common cold, which he's investigating. He's also out to crush malaria, which each year kills more than a million people, mostly children. Last year, for the first time, his lab cracked the genetic code that drives the disease's distinctive 48-hour fever cycle. Just another blatant result. – Mark Robinson

THE OTHER NOMINEES Cynthia Kenyon aging research, UCSF Robert Lanza stem cell research, Advanced Cell Technology Erin Lavik spinal cord regeneration research, Yale Tommy Morris Telemedicine & Advanced Technology Research Center

For cracking the spine of the science cartel • Science: Public Library of Science: Michael Eisen, Harold Varmus & Patrick Brown

| Photo by Robyn Twomey Michael Eisen Photo by Richard Ballard Harold Varmus Photo by Robyn Twomey Patrick Brown

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If science is a search for universal laws of nature, why do scientific journals copyright the papers they publish and charge as much as $20,000 a year for a subscription?

"It's insane that the scientific community has allowed publishers to limit the impact of our research," says UC Berkeley geneticist Michael Eisen. Starting in the late '90s, Eisen and two of his colleagues, Stanford molecular biologist Patrick Brown and Nobel Prize-winning oncologist Harold Varmus, tried to work with traditional publishers to make research more widely available on the Web, but the publishers wouldn't cooperate. So the three scientists devised an end run: the Public Library of Science. In October 2003, PLoS published the first open source, peer-reviewed journal, PLoS Biology.

The key concept is what Eisen calls "open access." PLoS posts new research online, making it available to everyone from high school students to scientists in the developing world. Authors agree to let anyone annotate, excerpt, link, and otherwise add value. And that's not all: Online readers pay nothing. Funders of research – usually government agencies – cover the cost of publication up front.

The goal isn't to put old-line publishers out of business but to force them to embrace open access. "We'd be happy if every publisher shifted to open access tomorrow," Eisen says. "But they're not going to do it on their own. The scientific community has to take matters into its own hands." – Ted Greenwald

THE OTHER NOMINEES Charles Bennett astrophysics, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Boldizs�r Jank� physics, University of Notre Dame J. Craig Venter Center for the Advancement of Genomics Alessandro Vespignani theoretical physics, Universit� Paris-Sud

The 2004 Brain Trust

• The experts & visionaries who helped select this year's Rave Awards nominees

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