Pay a visit to the Biologic Institute and you are liable to get a chilly reception. "We only see people with appointments," states the man who finally responds to my persistent knocks. Then he slams the door on me.

I am standing on the ground floor of an office building in Redmond, Washington, the Seattle suburb best known as home town to Microsoft. What I'm trying to find out is whether the 1-year-old institute is the new face of another industry that has sprung up in the area - the one that has set out to try to prove evolution is wrong.

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Last week I learned that following his communication with New Scientist, Weber has left the board of the Biologic Institute. Douglas Axe, the lab's senior researcher and spokesman, told me in an email that Weber "was found to have seriously misunderstood the purpose of Biologic and to have misrepresented it". Axe's portrayal of the Biologic Institute's purpose excludes religious connotation. He says that the lab's main objective "is to show that the design perspective can lead to better science", although he allows that the Biologic Institute will "contribute substantially to the scientific case for intelligent design".

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The message is clear. If ID supporters can bolster their case by citing more experimental research, another judge at some future date might conclude that ID does qualify as science, and is therefore a legitimate topic for discussion in American science classrooms. This is precisely the kind of scientific respectability that research at the Biologic Institute is attempting to provide. "We need all the input we can get in the sciences," Weber told me. "What we are doing is necessary to move ID along."

Axe appears to be one of the prime movers in this latest version of the anti-evolution enterprise. In a Discovery Institute strategy paper that was leaked on the internet in 1999, Axe is identified as heading up a molecular biology programme that has the aim of undercutting the scientific basis for evolution. At that time he was funded by the Discovery Institute and working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Protein Engineering, a research centre in Cambridge, UK, funded by the Medical Research Council, under the supervision of protein specialist Alan Fersht of the University of Cambridge.

Fersht says he did not at first know about the Discovery Institute's support for ID. "People do work in labs on external funding. Basically he [Axe] had a fellowship from what I thought was a bona fide research institute," he says. When another researcher in his lab pointed to the Discovery Institute's agenda and suggested that Axe be asked to leave, Fersht refused. "I have always been fairly easy-going about people working in the lab. I said I was not going to throw him out. What he was doing was asking legitimate questions about how a protein folded."

In 2000 Axe published a paper about protein mutations (Journal of Molecular Biology, vol 301, p 585). The paper itself makes no mention of ID, but William Dembski, a philosopher and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, cites it as peer-reviewed evidence for ID (see "Building a case").

By 2002 it was becoming clear that Axe and Fersht were in dispute with each other over the implications of work going on in Fersht's lab. At the time Fersht was preparing to publish a retraction of a paper in which he and three colleagues had claimed to have caused one enzyme to evolve the functionality of another (Nature, vol 403, p 617). Axe interpreted the fact that problems had surfaced with the result as evidence that there were problems with the theory of evolution. "I described to Alan preliminary results of mine that seemed to challenge the ability of spontaneous mutations to produce proteins with fundamentally new structures, and I suggested that the struggling projects under his direction might actually be pointing to the same conclusion," Axe told me in an email. Fersht disagreed with the suggestion. The problem result "didn't show anything of the sort", he says. "It showed there were inadequacies in our knowledge."

In March 2002, Axe left Fersht's lab to work as a visiting scientist at the structural biology unit of the Babraham Institute, also in Cambridge. His work there, again funded by the Discovery Institute, led to the publication of a second paper in 2004 (Journal of Molecular Biology, vol 341, p 1295) that was again cited by ID proponents as evidence in its favour.

Since 2004 Axe has resurfaced in Washington state, where he has set up shop at the Biologic Institute, a short drive away from the Discovery Institute. Weber told me that Biologic was a "branch of Discovery". Both Axe and Discovery spokesperson Rob Crowther insist that it is a "separate entity".

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In addition to protein and cell biology, Biologic is pursuing a programme in computational biology which draws on the expertise of another of its researchers, Brendan Dixon, a former software developer at Microsoft. According to Axe, "On the computational side, we are nearing completion of a system for exploring the evolution of artificial genes that are considerably more life-like than has been the case previously."

Dixon also declined to speak with New Scientist, but there are reasons why the computational arena might be of interest to the anti-evolution movement. Starting in 2001, Robert Pennock at Michigan State University in East Lansing and colleagues wrote a computer program that behaves like a self-replicating organism able to mutate unpredictably and evolve (Nature, vol 423, p 139). The experiment demonstrates how natural selection and random mutation give rise to increasingly complex organisms.

For anti-evolutionists, this was a discouraging result. "That one really got to them," says Barbara Forrest, a philosopher at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond who studies the anti-evolution movement. It would not be surprising if Biologic wanted to challenge the impact of Pennock's work by finding a counter-example in which a computer simulation fails to produce complexity by random mutation alone. Such a counter-example, once published, would be available for citation by proponents of ID. Even if the citations do not appear in peer-reviewed literature, says Forrest, they could still have an influence on politicians and school board officials, who might not be sensitive to this distinction.

Miller agrees that work of this kind would help anti-evolutionists politically. "If Axe can produce a few more papers in good journals they will be able to cite a growing body of evidence favouring ID," he says.

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