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“We’re trying to figure out which genes from the swine influenza virus to incorporate into corn so those genes, when expressed, would produce protein,” said Hank Harris, professor in animal science and one of the researchers on the project. “When the pig consumes that corn, it would serve as a vaccine.”

This collaborative effort project involves Mr. Harris and Brad Bosworth, an affiliate associate professor of animal science working with pigs, and Kan Wang, a professor in agronomy, who is developing the vaccine traits in the corn.

According to the researchers, the corn vaccine would also work in humans when they eat corn or even corn flakes, corn chips, tortillas or anything that contains corn, Mr. Harris said. The research is funded by a grant from Iowa State University’s Plant Sciences Institute, and is their Biopharmaceuticals and Bioindustrials Research Initiative.

If the research goes well, the corn vaccine may be possible in five to seven years. In the meantime, the team is trying to expedite the process. “While we’re waiting for Wang to produce the corn, we are starting initial experiments in mice to show that the vaccine might induce an immune response,” Mr. Bosworth said.

Mr. Harris said the team still needs more answers. “The big question is whether or not these genes will work when given orally through corn,” he added. “That is the thing we’ve still got to determine.”

This part doesn’t: Within moments, three black sport-utility vehicles drove up, a half-dozen men in suits jumped out and one said, “You just hit our line.”

Whose line, you may ask? The guys in suits didn’t say, recalled Aaron Georgelas, whose company, the Georgelas Group, was developing the Greensboro Corporate Center on Spring Hill Road. But Georgelas assumed that he was dealing with the federal government and that the cable in question was “black” wire — a secure communications line used for some of the nation’s most secretive intelligence-gathering operations.

“The construction manager was shocked,” Georgelas recalled. “He had never seen a line get cut and people show up within seconds. Usually you’ve got to figure out whose line it is. To garner that kind of response that quickly was amazing.”

Black wire is one of the looming perils of the massive construction that has come to Tysons, where miles and miles of secure lines are thought to serve such nearby agencies as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Counterterrorism Center and, a few miles away in McLean, the Central Intelligence Agency. After decades spent cutting through red tape to begin work on a Metrorail extension and the widening of the Capital Beltway, crews are now stirring up tons of dirt where the black lines are located.

“Yeah, we heard about the black SUVs,” said Paul Goguen, the engineer in charge of relocating electric, gas, water, sewer, cable, telephone and other communications lines to make way for Metro through Tysons. “We were warned that if they were hit, the company responsible would show up before you even had a chance to make a phone call.”

So far, so good, Goguen added. But the peril remains for a project that will spend $150 million moving more than 75 miles of conduit along the three-mile stretch of routes 123 and 7 that run through Tysons.

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Georgelas, the developer whose company was overseeing the work in 2000 when the Chevrolet Suburbans drove up to the Greensboro Corporate Center, said he figured that the government was involved when an AT&T crew arrived the same day to fix the line, rather than waiting days. His opinion didn’t change when AT&T tried to bill his company for the work but immediately backed down when his company balked.

“These lines are not cheap to move,” Georgelas said. “They said, ‘You owe us $300,000.’ We said, ‘Are you nuts?’ ”

A battle with the group was one of the biggest hurdles biggest hurdles GM faced in orchestrating a quick exit from Chapter 11.

The Obama administration plans to usher GM into bankruptcy court Monday as part of its ambitious effort to remake the American car industry at the tail end of its decades-long decline. President Barack Obama is expected to announce the government’s plans for GM in a speech that will try to convey the message that the government can rebuild GM and Chrysler and salvage some of the taxpayers’ investments.

The auto maker, living on U.S. government loans, faces a Monday deadline imposed by the Obama administration. GM announced Friday that Chief Executive Fritz Henderson would give a press conference on Monday in New York outlining proceedings that would likely take place.

Initially, the company said getting bondholders to agree to a debt swap was its best chance for avoiding Chapter 11. But the latest plan is designed to expedite a bankruptcy filling more than to avoid it. As part of the agreement, bondholders pledged not to oppose GM’s reorganization in court.

The gene, FOXP2, was identified in 1998 as the cause of a subtle speech defect in a large London family, half of whose members have difficulties with articulation and grammar. All those affected inherited a disrupted version of the gene from one parent. FOXP2 quickly attracted the attention of evolutionary biologists because other animals also possess the gene, and the human version differs significantly in its DNA sequence from those of mice and chimpanzees, just as might be expected for a gene sculpted by natural selection to play an important role in language.

Early warnings signs of this scenario include surging government bond yields, a slumping U.S. dollar, and the fading of the bear market rally in U.S. stocks.

Optimists hope that a fragile two-month rally in world stock markets, a rise in U.S. Treasury yields from record lows during the depths of the crisis in late 2008, and some less scary economic data all signal that a recovery is around the corner.

But gloomy analysts insist that thinking is delusional.

Once Credit Crisis Version 2.0 ramps up, foreign investors may punish the U.S. government for borrowing trillions of dollars too much by refusing to buy its debt until bond prices plunge to much cheaper levels.

The telling harbinger is benchmark Treasury note yields’ surge to six-month highs around 3.75 percent this week, as investors began to balk at the record U.S. government borrowing requirement this year.

The U.S. Treasury plans to sell about $2 trillion in new debt this year to fund a $1.8 trillion fiscal deficit.

Heavy selling of U.S. dollar-denominated assets could trigger a full-blown currency crisis and usher in surging inflation, forcing mortgage rates and corporate bond yields up, undermining any rebound in economic activity.

“The financial crisis is a downward spiral with two twists,” said George Feiger, chief executive of Contango Capital Advisors in Berkeley, California.

First came the banking crisis and a huge contraction of credit, starting in mid-2007 which resulted in the stock market panic of 2008 which triggered the deepest U.S. recession in at least two decades.

“Once you have got a recession you have good old-fashioned credit losses,” Feiger said. “The second leg is now the consequences of the massive recession and it is just now working its way out,” he said.

Investors, many of them foreigners who own a large chunk of the U.S. Treasury market, are steadily demanding higher yields.

The price of the historic rescues of banks, insurers, manufacturers, and securities markets, to prevent a complete collapse during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, has meant a record U.S. government borrowing requirement.

But by issuing so much debt, the United States risks repulsing a critical buyer: foreign central banks, who own more than a quarter of marketable U.S. Treasuries. China recently overtook Japan as the biggest such buyer.

“We are getting into that stage which I call ‘the markets revenge'”, said Martin Weiss, president of Weiss Research Inc. in Jupiter, Florida.

Weiss, known for his especially pessimistic views on the banking system and economy, recently published a book entitled: “The Ultimate Depression Survival Guide”.

“The market attacked anyone who had the toxic assets,” he said.

Now, foreign investors’ primary target is the U.S. government because it has bought many of the tarnished securities from banks and some of the failing institutions itself, but the selloff will soon spread to all U.S. dollar-denominated assets, Weiss expects.

Selling could push up the 10-year Treasury note’s yield to about 6.0 percent Weiss warns. For now, he urges investors to stash much of their savings in short term Treasury bills, which carry minimal interest rate risk.

Foreign investors are running out of patience with the U.S. government’s debt issuance, he argued.

“What happened at the end of this month is the beginning of the end of that goodwill period,” Weiss said. “There could be a major near-term selloff in the dollar.”

This month, the euro has gained nearly 7.0 percent against the U.S. dollar. Meanwhile, the benchmark ten-year U.S. Treasury note’s yield has surged to six-month highs around 3.75 percent, nearly doubling from its lowest level in 50 years of 2.04 percent seen last December.

Ultimately, corporate bond yields, although still at very wide yield spreads of more than four percentage points above Treasuries according to Merrill Lynch data, will also spike again, Weiss warned. The S&P 500 stock index may fall to 500 points in this next phase of the crisis he added, down from 911 points early on Friday, he said.

On the other hand, many economists reckon the U.S. government and Federal Reserve have averted a rerun of the Great Depression by swiftly orchestrating financial rescues and monetary and fiscal stimulus to offset sagging consumer spending.

Yet even as the U.S. economy and banking system struggle to recover from two years of turmoil, Europe’s banks are even more debilitated, raising the threat of a second global systemic crisis spreading back across the Atlantic to the United States, some analysts fear.

The report highlighted that even as the government and major banks have scrambled to deal with the impaired securities the banks own, the institutions have been plagued by an unprecedented volume of old-fashioned loans going bad.

Of the entire book of loans and leases at all banks — totaling $7.7 trillion at the end of March — 7.75 percent were showing some sign of distress, the F.D.I.C. reported. That was up from 6.9 percent at the end of 2008 and from 4.1 percent a year earlier. It also exceeded the previous high of 7.26 percent set in 1990 and 1991, during the last crisis in American banking.

The F.D.I.C. has been collecting the figures since 1984.

Virtually the only encouraging news in the report was that the banks’ loan portfolio might be worsening more slowly than it was. While the increase of 3.65 percentage points in a year is the highest ever, the quarterly rise was smaller than in the fourth quarter of last year.

The figures, as shown in the accompanying charts, include loans that are more than 30 days behind in payments, a category that will include some loans that catch up and become current. But the percentage that are at least 90 days overdue, or on which the bank has stopped accruing interest or written off, is also higher than at any time since 1984.

As recently as mid-2006, the proportion of troubled loans was at a historic low, and bank regulators were confident that the institutions were well capitalized and could survive any likely economic downturn. They were wrong, it turned out.

This time it’s different because the Congressional Budget Office projects Obama’s spending plan will expand the deficit this year to about four times the previous record, and cause a $1.38 trillion shortfall in fiscal 2010. The U.S. will need to raise $3.25 trillion this year to finance its objectives, up from less than $1 trillion in 2008, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc., one of 16 primary dealers of U.S. government securities that are obligated to bid at Treasury auctions.

“The deficit and funding the deficit has become front and center,” said Jim Bianco, president of Bianco Research LLC in Chicago. “The Fed is going to have to walk a fine line here and has to continue with a policy of printing money to buy Treasuries while at the same time convince the market that this isn’t going to end in tears with fits of inflation.”

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The bond vigilantes are being led by international investors, who own about 51 percent of the $6.36 trillion in marketable Treasuries outstanding, up from 35 percent in 2000, according to data compiled by the Treasury.

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