I’ve expected this for a while but it still hurts. The “Life Sciences Verification Program.” It breaks my heart to know that biological knowledge will be locked down and gatekept like this. I want to take a moment to mourn, because I believe this marks an end for open science as I knew it. I think back to my education. I owe so much to the open-access literature. I'm so deeply thankful to the culture of transparency among scientists. All the free knowledge I've been given. The free GenBank sequences. The free PDB structures. The education and know-show that my colleagues shared with me for the pure love of learning. The Life Sciences Verification Program will kill that spirit. The most important biology tools of the next decade will be locked down and controlled. Some fragments of the old literature will remain free, but the real heart of where science happens will not be free. Frontier knowledge will belong only to people who the authorities decide deserve it. I want to fight this, but I don’t think I can. I don’t believe bioterrorism is a serious threat, but convincing people of that is not realistic. The fear is embedded too deep in the psyche. If I tried, there are armies of internet trolls eager to accuse me of evil things. It would become my entire online life. There is a growing and well funded fear-industrial complex dedicated to the idea that Bio-AI is a terrible risk and the people who practice it need to be monitored and policed. Hundreds of full-time professionals whose salary depends on their belief that biology presents a dire threat. What hope do I have of arguing with them? On the other side, the traditional defenders of free information are historically weak. Biology professors are struggling just to keep the lights on. The last thing they want is to be called reckless enemies of national security. They aren’t going to fight this - I’m sure many of them are already signing up to ask for permission to be on the list. So I’m writing this to bear witness. This is how it ended. Biology isn’t going to be free going forward. That was an idea of the pre-AI era and it is over now. The fight now isn’t over free access to information. It’s over who gets verified access to the closed information. Big pharma companies get permission, of course. So do professors at elite universities. But we can petition Anthropic to expand that list. Maybe they might allow access for high school teachers, medical students and nurses? I hope they will approve farmers, iGEM teams, community biolabs, birdwatchers, park rangers and community gardens. Will Anthropic allow those people to study biology at the frontier? As of today, the power officially belongs to them. We can only ask.