dward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh could have been generals.
The record states that they were paleontologists, two 19th-century scientists who roamed the Western United States amassing fabulous collections of dinosaur bones that would transform the young science.
But the men - passionate enemies - conducted their fieldwork like guerrilla warfare. They paid spies, attempted to recruit each other's best bone spotters, and sent telegrams East to announce each tiny victory. At one point, their teams hurled rocks at each other as they vied for the best hunting ground in southern Wyoming.
''There was a lot of bone envy,'' said Michael Novacek, director of scientific research at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Minus the rock-throwing, their rivalry is repeated time and again throughout the sciences. The landing of a man on the moon, the decoding of the human genome, and most recently a Massachusetts company's disputed claim last week to have cloned a human cell - all were fueled as much by the desire to beat a competitor as by the desire to discover.
''The first things that make a scientist are their need to know and their sense of beauty, but it's the rivalry that stirs them into working late at night in the lab,'' said Michael White, author of ''Acid Tongues and Tranquil Dreamers: Tales of Bitter Rivalry that Fueled the Advancement of Science and Technology.''
Science is a quest for knowledge, but it is also a heated, high-stakes competition. And today, with more research being done by private biotechnology companies such as Advanced Cell Technology, which announced the cloning experiment, scientists said that there is even more pressure to be first - not just for professional prestige or lucrative patent rights, but to raise the investment money needed to keep the research going.
Rivalries, sometimes bitter, have been an essential part of science since its early days, White said. From the start, scientists have built their reputations on the prestige that comes with being the first to make a discovery.
Early on, this came in the form of presentations before organizations of other scientists. Over time, the process became more formal, with regular publications such as Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in London. Publication in the Transactions, the precursor of today's scientific journals, became a kind of currency - proof that a scientist was worthy of respect, and perhaps the support of wealthy patrons.
From the beginning there were controversies. Isaac Newton, one of history's greatest scientific thinkers, was notoriously prickly about his reputation. When the Royal Society refused to accept a paper he had written on optics, Newton was so enraged that he refused to let the society publish his work for three decades, White said. Newton also had a long-running battle with Leibniz, a German mathematician, over the invention of calculus - a branch of mathematics that has become an essential foundation of modern science. It is suspected that Leibniz's progress pushed Newton to perfect calculus - a dynamic that is still an essential part of science.
''If you are working on something important, there is a high chance that other groups are working on the same thing,'' said Kevin Davies, editor-in-chief of scientific-journal publishers Cell Press.
The Human Genome Project, a massive government-sponsored campaign to decode the entire DNA sequence of humans, moved much faster because of competition, said Davies, who is author of ''Cracking the Genome.'' When the biologist J. Craig Venter announced that his company, Celera Genomics, would decode the genome on its own, the public project kicked into a higher gear, partly adopting Venter's assembly-line approach to the task.
Venter's announcement also brought more funding for the public project - another benefit of competition. The race to build an atomic bomb and the race to put a man on the moon are dramatic examples of how keen competition can inspire both better funding and more innovation.
But competition can also push science to the breaking point, said Bill Brinkman, a former vice president for research at Bell Laboratories and president-elect of the American Physical Society. In 1989, two teams of physicists believed that they had discovered a method for achieving ''cold fusion'' - a potentially revolutionary way to generate energy - and both teams knew the other was rushing to publish first.
''Both were very premature, and both were very wrong,'' Brinkman said. The result was a scientific debacle that embarrassed the researchers involved - and remains a standing joke in the science world.
Even the much-lauded genome discovery was something less than a purely scientific moment - the announcement of a ''tie'' in June 2000 was as much a public-relations decision as a genuine completion date for the project, which still had some distance yet to go.
''They negotiated a joint premature release,'' said Everett Mendelsohn, a professor of the history of science at Harvard.
The rise of privately sponsored research has made the terrain more complex than ever, according to Mark Speers, a managing director of Health Advances, a consulting firm based in Weston that evaluates new medical technologies.
Scientists are always confronted with the difficult decision of when to go public with their work. Too soon and it won't be accepted for publication by a prestigious journal, but too late and they could be preempted by rivals. With biotech companies, Speers and others said, the calculation is even more complex because an announcement could help a company's competitors - but could also bring in more outside investment.
ACT announced its advance with a scientific paper in a relatively obscure journal and stories arranged ahead of time in Scientific American and US News and World Report. The company drew criticism from biologists who said ACT was overpromoting a small scientific step.
''The real question is why did they make an announcement at this time. And that may have more to do with being in the corporate world,'' said Rex Chisholm, director of the Center for Genetic Medicine at Northwestern University.
Of course, not all scientists, not even all great scientists, feel the pressure of competition, because there are some questions that nobody ever thought to study before. Einstein's realization that the speed of light is constant - and that time is not - was so radical that nobody else had even considered it.
And Robert Langer, a tissue engineering pioneer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he has faced little competition in his work because ''often when I come up with these ideas, people think they are crazy.''
But that is not the day-to-day reality of most scientists, who can spend years on projects under the constant threat that somebody will beat them to the answer and the glory.
''You realize that is going to happen and you accept it,'' Chisholm said. ''You just try to win the race next time.''
