FAIRFIELD – A week ago Saturday as Ernest “Ernie” Robson III sat in the east-facing building he and his wife built to house some of Fairfield’s growing high-tech businesses, he chewed over ideas for the title of a book that might someday be written about one of the most promising among them: neuroscientist Dr. Lawrence Farwell’s Brain Fingerprinting. “Monopoly on the truth,” Robson said aloud. He liked the harmony of the two words spoken together – “monopoly,” “truth” – and what he predicts they’ll say one day about an offbeat little company that does one thing very well: It seeks the truth scientifically, then applies its ability to do so to multiple markets.

Scientists for years have studied “p300 bumps,” the spike occurring in brain-wave activity upon recognition of specific stimuli. Farwell’s technology propels brain research further. While working in a Harvard University laboratory about 15 years ago, he discovered that a corresponding downward spike, which he patented under the name of MERMER (memory and encoding related multifaceted electroencephalographic response), almost always accompanies p300 bumps. When both a p300 and MERMER are present, the reliability of tests on crime-scene recognition, for example, is a small fraction less than 100 percent. Robson likens Farwell’s discovery to the “secret sauce” that takes a recipe from something ordinary to one that redefines culinary standards.

Intellectual property rights secured through a patent on the discovery itself, three patents on hardware, software and testing apparatus, and another dozen and a half patents pending, Farwell has offered the test as a criminal forensics tool. Macon, Mo., authorities used it in 1998 to tie up loose ends in a 15-year-old serial murder investigation. Two years ago, Brain Fingerprinting test results were ruled admissible as scientific evidence in an Iowa inmate’s appeal of a first-degree murder conviction.

Brain Fingerprinting President Robson, who as a partner in a Washington, D.C.-based lobbying firm helped broker a deal that helped AT&T not only survive but also thrive following deregulation, brings to Farwell’s company the business acumen needed to take it from quirky to profitable. Robson sees boundless potential for a company whose technology can take 99 percent of the guesswork out of criminal forensics, test the efficacy of Alzheimer’s disease treatment drugs, measure reactione to advertising campaigns and track insurance fraud.

Society and justice are well served, he says, if can be established whether individuals detained since the 2001 terrorist attacks in fact received al-Qaeda training, or if felons committed the crimes that sent them to Death Row. The admissibility hurdle cleared, Robson thinks the technology could save Iowa’s fiscally burdened court system hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Though actual plans for a book on the journey of Farwell’s company from a makeshift lab to a mainstream company are just a thought in the recesses of Robson’s mind, plenty else is being written and said about its potential influence in far-flung markets.

In November 2001, the new century a month shy of a year, Time magazine picked Farwell as one of its 100 top innovators for the 21st century, mavericks who may be “the Picassos or Einsteins” in years to come. The New York Times, ABC News, CNN, U.S. News & World Report, Psychology Today and the Discovery Channel have all profiled Farwell’s discovery; he wrote a treatise on the technology for the Journal of Forensic Scientists; PBS is producing a one-hour prime-time show on Brain Fingerprinting for its series “Innovation”; and the respected business magazine Forbes conducted an interview last week. In a 2000 interview that ignited the media blitz, Mike Wallace sat in Farwell’s home laboratory to tape a segment for CBS’s “60 Minutes.”

Bruce Lisanti, now the company’s chief operating officer, was watching television in his Houston, Texas, home on Dec. 10, 2000, the date the “60 Minutes” interview aired. Lisanti had three times taken start-up divisions at companies such as Ross Perot’s Electronic Data Systems Corp. and General Electric Co. to multibillion-dollar businesses, and he guided Rental Services Corp., a venture-capital-backed company, from a start-up through its initial public offering of $600 million.

He knew Robson from previous business dealings. He and his wife, Deborah, were also ready to move to a small community to raise their young children. Southeast Iowa had a special lure – as do up to 3,000 Fairfield residents, the Lisantis practice Transcendental Meditation – but it was the diverse potential of Farwell’s company that gave it pulling power.

The problem with some technology start-ups, Lisanti says, is that their success or failure is based on a single product, service or market. “When it’s done, you’re done,” he said. “This company has six or eight potential businesses – different vertical markets – each of which could be very substantial.

“I’ve been involved in start-up companies – great companies with good funding – but they didn’t have the long-term potential for entry into multiple markets that this company has,” he said. “The criminal justice pieces alone are potentially very big, stand-alone businesses.”

Lisanti joined Brain Fingerprinting six months ago, becoming the final key player in a management team that has deep contacts in business and criminal justice circles. The executive management team also includes Drew Richardson, the vice president of forensic operations, who just days before the 2001 terrorist attacks took early retirement from his job as an FBI point man for biological and chemical weapons. Farwell and Richardson were colleagues in the days when the MERMER technology was still just an idea with seemingly infinite potential; the two collaborated on the early testing that established the technology’s near-perfect accuracy when Richardson was assigned to the FBI Laboratory in Quantico, Va.

Even before he joined Brain Fingerprinting, Richardson heralded the technology as a forensic testing tool with broad applications, basing his assessment on 26 years in federal law enforcement. He thinks the technology is an appropriate testing tool in 70 percent of major crime investigations, and envisions a time in the next 20 years when investigators worldwide will be trained to record the elements of a crime scene for use in Brain Fingerprinting tests. “The potential for cost savings alone,” he says, “warrants the closest examination by every conscientious law enforcement professional.”

Having experts on board to handle the business side of the company frees Farwell to concentrate on science. “I wasn’t doing some of the things that needed to be done,” he said. “I had a great technology, and I had the desire and the ability to promote it, but I didn’t have the background to make it a successful business.

“Now, I have the right people on the bus in the right seats.”

The company has grown slowly by design. So far, it’s received $1 million in research contracts with the Central Intelligence Agency and $1.5 million from a limited offering of preferred stock. Investor opportunities made Brain Fingerprinting the first Iowa business to be certified for investment tax credits under the House File 2271, part of the Legislature’s 2002 venture-capital package. Second-round financing is currently under way with a $3 million private offering.

With this funding, the company expects to immediately spend $500,000 to shore up network security and other technical issues that stand in the way of multiple deals to use the technology in forensic applications in Central and Eastern Europe. Robson said he receives three or four serious inquiries a month from potential overseas clients. Also, he said, the company currently is in negotiations with two of the five largest U.S. pharmaceutical companies and is moving forward with an agreement with one of them to exchange proprietary information on the use of the technology to test the efficacy of drugs developed to treat Alzheimer’s disease.

By far, though, company officials expect federal, state and local governments to be Brain Fingerprinting’s golden goose. At the end of the period outlined in the company’s three-year business plan, Brain Fingerprinting projects more than $32 million in net revenues from criminal justice applications alone. The company’s success in that arena, however, hinges heavily on the technology’s acceptance by prosecutors and other court officers, who have been slow to embrace it. Though it’s true the tests could expose wrongful convictions, results most often would be used to broker plea bargains, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in trial costs, Robson said.

“We’re not trashing the criminal justice system,” he said. “The criminal justice system in America works well most of the time; however, it can work better, faster and less expensive.”

The release of Terry Harrington, the Iowa inmate who was serving life in prison for murder, has contributed to criticism of the technology. Though Brain Fingerprinting test results were ruled admissible in Harrington’s appeal hearing and Farwell is confident his tests would have exonerated him, Harrington’s conviction was overturned based on violations of constitutional rights the appeals court ruled so egregious that other evidence wasn’t considered.

“We don’t want to be perceived as getting people out of jail and working with the ACLU only,” Lisanti said. “Opposition to DNA [testing] originally was that prosecutors thought it was a tool of the defense. It was not a tool of the defense; it is just science.

“Now prosecutors love DNA because it gets at the truth,” he said. “It’s not denominational, and it’s very much useful from both sides.”

More accelerated growth would have been possible in areas fueled by big venture-capital pipelines, and Farwell has received offers of full funding from both East and West coast investors who want him to move his company and turn over some of its management functions. So far, Farwell has resisted, choosing not to sever his and his top executives’ strong ties to Fairfield. If nothing else, Robson said, that disproves the notion that “you can’t grow a high-tech business – a non-agricultural technology business – in Iowa.”

“We want to stay here,” Robson said. “On the other hand, if we can’t get funding – if we can’t get a job – we’ll have to go where the funding is, where the jobs are. We want a job, not a handout.”

Brain Fingerprinting hopes to attract in-state private investors with no interest in becoming involved in the company’s day-to-day operations, but such investors are very nearly as difficult to find in Iowa as venture capitalists, according to Lisanti. “What I hear about Iowa investors is, when they hear about a new technology, they’ll think about it,” he said. “If the company’s still around in a couple of years, they’ll look again.”

But the company has matured and national media coverage has familiarized Americans with its technology, and Lisanti thinks those developments remove some of the risk in Iowa investors’ minds, especially with the added security of the investment tax credit.

“This company has real legs,” he said. “It has products that can go in multiple vertical markets, and the potential to go there very big.”