Especially in Star Trek, where life is dirt cheap: if every planet is not capable of harboring life, then at least every second is! It takes quite a special mind to fight for the protection of something that faces no threat of extinction. Marcus wouldn't be an environmentalist if protecting the microbes of a random desert world - she would be a religious nutcase. Timo Saloniemi
All kidding aside, do we know that the criteria for where and when Genesis could be used came from Marcus? As the project leader, she clearly had say in how the device was used, but isn't it possible the "no life at all" dictum was handed down to her by the Federation Council? It's easy to read too much into her statements to Terrell about not being able to use a site where even the most rudimentary microbes lives, but it does seem that her reiterations of the project guidelines were a reflection not of her own ideas about how her project would be used but of how the Federation believed it should be used. That Genesis later became a hotbed for controversy because of the circumstances under which it was created only made the situation worse. The Federation Council stood to be embarrassed by a project they sanctioned because they lost control of it, a loss of control resulting in multiple deaths, the loss of two ships, and endless posturing by the Klingons. It's not clear if that embarrassment trickled down to Marcus. She's never seen again after TWOK, but given the scrutiny surrounding the Enterprise crew merely because they were there, it's hard to believe she came away unscathed. --Sran
Good points all. But ST2 seems to play up the passion and devotion of the Marcuses, and ST3 sort of continues this by making it so personal for David that he feels he's forced to cheat, in secrecy, and on an issue he knows will ruin his career. There's thus reason to believe that the project was under close scrutiny and external pressure, but not enough of it to prevent David from doing things that wouldn't show up on the official progress reports. Carol's thing with microbes IMHO falls closer to the "passion" than "pressure" end of the scale, as she's the "clean" one, not tempted to cheat despite being the formal project leader. Timo Saloniemi
And it's strongly implied that David knew more about the actual nuts and bolts of the project than his mother did. Genesis was David's chance to make a name for himself, but his mother was already an accomplished scientist who probably oversaw the project because her name and reputation (before TWOK) gave the project credibility it otherwise wouldn't have had. Indeed, the Myriad Universe novel "The Chimes at Midnight" actually states that David conceived the Genesis Wave himself by running a series of computer simulations while helping his mother work at an Andorian research lab: this material isn't cannon, however. The story's main protagonist isn't David or Kirk, but Thelin, the Andorian Starfleet Officer who became Kirk's closest friend and executive officer in the reality where Spock was killed at the age of seven. The story depicts a fourteen-year-old Marcus running a complicated computer simulation when a picture of the Genesis Wave suddenly appears on his computer monitor, drawing the attention of the scientists working in the lab. The story comes full circle later when Thelin works with David to protect the Enterprise from the Genesis blast radius: in the story, Thelin doesn't sacrifice himself as Spock did but devises a method of preventing the ship from being absorbed when Reliant explodes, relying on knowledge he gained watching David run the computer simulation several years earlier, as he was in the same laboratory at the time. But I digress... Whether Carol knew about David's actions in using the proto-matter isn't clear (I'm inclined to think she didn't know), but as the official face of the endeavor, it would not have served her best interests to cut corners with any aspect of the project. Such feelings could easily manifest in her comments to Terrell. It's too bad there was never a conversation between Saavik and Carol on screen after TSFS. Kirk may have known what David did ("I went wrong," "Genesis doesn't work"), but there's no way to know if he told Carol. --Sran