He believes in himself.

"We're ushering in a new era of regenerative medicine," he says. "The future of medicine is human proteins and human genes."

And Haseltine believes he is the one person who can grasp the omnipotent power, the burning glory of gene-based drugs. He believes he is the one chosen to lead humankind into the promised land.

He may be. After all, he is the latest in an astounding line of renowned scientists. The pictures of his mentors hang on the wall of his office: Chemist George Pimentel, who has a hall named after him at the University of California, Berkeley; James D. Watson, who won the 1962 Nobel Prize for medicine for his discovery of the molecular structure of DNA; Walter Gilbert, who won the 1980 Nobel Prize for chemistry; and David Baltimore, who won the 1975 Nobel Prize for medicine.

A "very, very serious" freshman in Berkeley in 1962 -- "I polished my shoes and wore a jacket and tie to class" -- Haseltine was among the "15 brightest students" selected by Pimentel to have a weekly lunch with Nobel laureates. "I was headed toward medicine," Haseltine says. "Pimentel turned me toward science."

At nearly every juncture in his scientific ascent, Haseltine made a decision or a discovery or a dumb mistake that moved him closer to his destiny.

In graduate school at Harvard, he studied the properties of bacteria in the lab of Watson and Gilbert. Haseltine was instructed by his masters to discover how bacteria reproduce. He remembers the intense battle to see who could discover the conditions first. He was competing with a professor in the lab next door. "The professor even sent his grad student in to read my notebooks," Haseltine recalls. "Gilbert was even telling the professor what I was doing."

When Haseltine asked his adviser for protection, Gilbert said, "This way, Bill, the answer will come faster. You may get it. He may get it. But science will be the better."

Haseltine and a colleague won the race.

He says with a wide grin, "I could re-create part of life."

He shakes his head, "It took me 24 hours a day, 6 1/2 days a week. I wore the same pair of brown corduroy pants for a year and half. Never washed them."

"That's the one time in my life that I felt I really worked to capacity."

This exploration of how an organism regulates its behavior foreshadowed the work he does today.

In the lab of David Baltimore, Haseltine studied retroviruses.

"I made a number of novel and startling discoveries," he says.

For one thing, he says, with some delight, "I proved Harold Varmus wrong about the means by which a virus begins its replication process. He said it was one thing, we said it was another. We were right; he was wrong."

Today Varmus is head of the National Institutes of Health. He refused to talk about Haseltine for this story.

"Really great people believed in me all the way," Haseltine says. "I picked them, I guess they had to pick me."

Standing on the shoulders of these giants, Haseltine had a chance to strut his wide-ranging stuff -- intelligence, discipline, skepticism and a go-for-the-jugular competitive streak.

For 17 years Haseltine taught and researched at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard University. In 1979, while collaborating with Robert Gallo, Haseltine discovered the way the first known human retrovirus caused leukemia. "I was already known for my work on bacteria and DNA damage and repair, but that made me very famous," he says. "I was a pretty well-known guy."

With Gallo and a few others, Haseltine in 1982 created the hypothesis that AIDS was caused by a retrovirus. They turned out to be correct.

"I did a lot of novel work on the AIDS virus," Haseltine says.

Gallo says, "Bill needs to say how good he is when it's evident."

But Gallo remembers those years fondly. "He provided a considerable amount of momentum, energy and leadership."

He adds, "Bill has his quirks."

As Haseltine, the resolute researcher, hassled with test tubes and Bunsen burners, he watched his mentors and friends, one by one, branch out from academia into private enterprise. "We had a car that was so dented, you had to climb in through the window," he recalls.

The scientists, he recalls, were extremely territorial. "We fought over offices that were the size of broom closets."

Research took him to Houston in 1981. When he walked into the spacious lobby of an oil company, he was struck by the absurdity of it all -- oil companies feasted while hard-working academic scientists squabbled over crumbs. Scales fell from Haseltine's eyes.

"Knowledge comes from universities," he says. "Drugs come from pharmaceutical companies."

Haseltine began to dip his toe in entrepreneurial waters. While still teaching at Harvard, he helped launch a handful of biotech companies. One day a venture capitalist in New York called. "I've finally found something to get you out of Harvard."

Haseltine flew to Washington. Over hamburgers and Cokes at the food court above the Bethesda Metro, he met a scientist from the National Institutes of Health. J. Craig Venter was developing a way to identify and sequence genes.

Venter had also been involved in the Human Genome Project -- a federally funded effort to map human DNA and to explore the causes of genetically linked diseases. In his quiet way Venter explained his process to Haseltine.

"It took me about 10 minutes to see the future," Haseltine says today. And the future was Human Genome Sciences, a company that would use sophisticated computer programs and specially designed robots to look at genes in a different way from the Human Genome Project. Whereas the project was interested in studying how genes cause disease, Haseltine says, HGS would study how genes can cure disease. And make a mess of money in the process.

Sold on the dream, Venter left NIH and the two men went to work together. Venter isolated the genes and Haseltine, using robotics and computers, discovered their purposes.

The partnership was unlikely.

"There was conflict from the very beginning," says Cook-Deegan.

Razzle-dazzle Haseltine, the high-on-himself hotshot from Harvard, and Venter the quiet, studious former surfer, never adapted to one another.

Founded in 1992, the company was high-profile. So was the inevitable divorce in 1997. Venter continues to explore the structure of genes at his lab called the Institute for Genomic Research.

About Haseltine, Venter would not comment.

Of Venter, Haseltine says, "He doesn't really care about alleviating human suffering. He's in it for the science . . . the evolution."

That debate, Haseltine adds, was at the heart of their split. "We had different goals."

Capital Investment

Washington, William Haseltine says, is the perfect place for him to be. He finds the city full of bright, fascinating people. And not all of them are politicians.

He says that "20 percent of America's high-technology companies are in the mid-Atlantic region. My being in Washington is part of that."

And the socializing that he and Hayman do, he says, is for pleasure, not for networking.

Haseltine and Hayman lead a swirling social life in New York and in Washington.

They run in celebrity circles -- supping with actor Michael York, drinks with developer and publisher Mortimer Zuckerman, lunching with his dealmaking superlawyer Lloyd Cutler and Cutler's wife, Polly Kraft, a painter.

"I do not qualify for my brother's social set," says Florence Haseltine.

Polly Kraft says, "Bill's a great, great guest. His interests are very catholic and wide. He reads. He has opinions on just about everything, from Cezanne to cloning. Gale is involved in a completely other world. She's a very good marketer. She's written her own book about beauty. Both are full of life."

Still, Haseltine says, it's hard for him to carry on conversations in Washington. "The way I talk is not the way others talk," he says. "I always question. That's not polite."

On this night at Mortimer's, a small Upper East Side Manhattan cafe where CBS honcho Don Hewitt dines near movie producer Alan J. Pakula, Haseltine and his wife look right at home.

"Gale has super-glitz," says Haseltine.

"I love talking to scientists," says Hayman. "They question you, they listen to you."

At first glance, she seems like a trophy wife, a noble prize for the research scientist turned entrepreneur. But Hayman is every bit as ambitious as her husband.

They met in Hollywood at a black-tie dinner. He was a power-driven professor at Harvard; she a stylish businesswoman. Mortimer Zuckerman was president of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute board of trustees while Haseltine was there. Of Haseltine and Hayman, Zuckerman said: "Their success outside the academic world turned the people of Cambridge various shades of green."

Haseltine delights in recounting his wife's amazing past -- nearly as amazing as his own. An only child, Hayman grew up in New York in a brownstone on East 54th Street. Her father, a soldier and a model for Brylcreem, died when she was a year old. Hayman was trained as a ballerina at the American School of Ballet. She also posed as a model for Simplicity patterns. She remembers skating at Rockefeller Center and going to St. Thomas's Episcopal Church.

When she was a teenager, her mother moved to California. Hayman enrolled in a ballet school there, but discovered the first day that the studio was shoddy and the teacher was tipsy. Eventually she married and she and her first husband opened Giorgio, the chi-chi shop in Beverly Hills that put the styles in the lifestyles of the rich and famous. In 1981, she created the Giorgio fragrance that soared to yearly sales of $100 million.

"When we got married," Haseltine is quick to say, "I had made millions, too."

Haseltine, the chemist, explains that Hayman's perfume was "built to project." It was the right fragrance for the right time, he says, because as baby boomers age, "the older women lose their sense of smell, so they put on more fragrance. That's why we associate old women with strong perfume."

After Hayman divorced, Giorgio was sold to Avon Products. She started her own company, Gale Hayman Beverly Hills. In 1996 she published a beauty book, "How Do I Look? From Cosmetics to Confidence." Today Hayman sells her wares on Home Shopping Network and writes a syndicated newspaper column.

Looks matter to Haseltine and Hayman. At one point the conversation turns to a possible cooperation between the two companies -- Human Genome Sciences and Gale Hayman cosmetics.

"We're interested right now in medical uses, not cosmetic uses," Haseltine says. But he says that genes can be developed in his lab to create healthier, younger, smoother skin. Or to cure baldness.

"Our fields may actually converge," he says, "five or 10 years from now."

He believes that a human's natural life span is 120 years, "if we don't get disease and keep ourselves in good shape." We are already becoming a "society of older, still-productive people," he says. "People care about how they look when they're in their seventies."

As if on cue, a turbaned older woman at the next table rises and wishes them good night. She's Leah Maria, the wife of Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

With Hayman, as with nearly everyone, Haseltine is terminally pedagogical. He finishes her sentences. She doesn't seem to mind.

"He has an amazing memory," she says. "He remembers every minute detail."

They share an appreciation for fine things. One night, for kicks, they thumbed through a stack of Sotheby's catalogues, perusing thousands of items. They each picked their 50 favorite objets d'art. "We were concordant on 45," he says.

They also differ. "Bill is totally against capital punishment," Hayman says. "I have a question mark."

"I like rough-and-tumble intellectual arguments," he says. "She likes smoother conversations."

And they differ on the Big Question. "I like to think there's a higher power," Hayman says. "I don't question it that much."

Asked if he's seduced by his wife's faith, Haseltine says, "Not particularly."

"I'm not religious," he says at one point, "I'm philosophical." He's fascinated by man's relationship to the universe. But he loses interest "at the point at which it becomes religion."

"If there is a God, He's not interested in man. So what difference does it make?"

As a result, he adds, man must take matters into his own hands.

He Rests

On the shuttle flight from Boston to Washington, Haseltine sits in the emergency exit row. He enjoys the extra leg room and doesn't mind the added responsibility.

It's been a good day. He's made the rounds among venture capital firms. He's seen evidence at St. Elizabeth's of Joseph Isner's astounding work. He's learned from the home office that the Food and Drug Administration has approved initial clinical trials of the first of what he hopes could be hundreds of new gene-based drugs. He's hitting winners right and left.

"This is a red-letter day," he says.

The world he is returning to in the evening has changed significantly from the world he left in the morning. He glances at a newspaper and at a recent issue of Science magazine. Both publications are alive with stories of genetic discovery.

He is asked what it is like to be both admired and disliked.

Taking a deep breath, he gets philosophical for a moment. "Do not care about your enemies," he says. What is done is done for the sake of advancing science. "We are trained to compete in a brutal and vicious way."

Far below the plane, lights twinkle and members of the human race move about like unexplored stars.

William Haseltine leans back in his seat. He dreams.

Staff writer Rick Weiss contributed to this report.