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After almost a decade of study, a panel of medical experts declared that an obscure low-calorie form of sugar that Levin has latched onto is safe to use in food.

Biospherics has collected $2.5 million by licensing rights to make the sugar to a Scandinavian dairy cooperative, but the food safety panel's decision has the potential to open the spigot on what could become a gushing stream of royalty revenue on every pound of the product that goes into any food.

It'll be at least two years before consumers can eat anything sweetened with the stuff, but investors didn't wait to buy Biospherics stock.

The shares jumped more than 25 percent last Wednesday, to $8.86 a share from $7 a share. Even after slipping back to $8.70 on Thursday, Biospherics stock is up 74 percent for the year, making it one of the top performing local issues. More than 950,000 shares were traded Wednesday, a staggering volume for a stock with a daily volume of 20,000 to 30,000 shares, and volume topped 350,000 on Thursday.

Biospherics' stock has taken such leaps before, in what turned out to be premature celebrations of success in Levin's quixotic search for the sweetener of his dreams.

This time it could be real.

The key word is still "could," however, because there is no way of predicting whether food manufacturers will be as excited as Levin is about the sweetener called tagatose. It's a natural product, a chemical cousin of familiar sugars such as sucrose, fructose, dextrose and lactose. Tagatose, like table sugar, is a white crystal; it is 90 percent as sweet as ordinary sugar, but has one-third the calories.

Tagatose could be the product that converts Biospherics into what most people have always thought it was: a biotech company.

The business is bio only in the name and in Levin's dream. (And it won't even be in the name for long.) For two decades, Biospherics has generated its revenue by running various kinds of information services and customer contact operations for government agencies and private firms. Biospherics' phone banks in Beltsville and Cumberland handled information requests for the National Institutes of Health, reservations for the National Park Service, prescription drug inquiries and calls about clinical trials for pharmaceutical companies.

Go on the Internet to reserve a campsite at Yosemite National Park and you hook into Biospherics' computer system, said David Affeldt, the company's president. "Call 1-800-LIPITOR and the phone rings right here," where Biospherics fields calls for Pfizer Inc., the maker of the popular cholesterol-reducing drug Lipitor, he said.

Under Affeldt, 36, who has been anointed to take over when Levin retires, the information services operations has turned around dramatically in the past year. After a restructuring and a $5 million loss in 1999, revenue grew 33 percent last year and the company earned a profit after two year of losses.

"The cash cow has turned into a bull," said Levin, crediting Affeldt, who was recently promoted to chief operating officer.

Affeldt's end of the business produces 99 percent of Biospherics revenue, generating enough cash to finance the biotech research that is clearly Levin's passion. Last year the company took in $17 million in revenue and generated a modest profit of $411,000 after spending $281,000 on biotech research.

Just as the bio in Biospherics is starting to mean something, the company is changing its name. If shareholders approve at the annual meeting next month, the company is to be renamed Spherix Inc. There are to be two divisions, Infospherix and Biospherix.

The annual meeting notice reveals that in February, Biospherics adopted an anti-takeover defense. An unfriendly acquisition attempt is unlikely now because Levin and his wife, Karen, 81, Biospherics' vice president for communications, own 24 percent of the stock. But upon their deaths, the company has agreed to buy back a portion of their stock to cover estate taxes. That could reduce insider control and leave the firm vulnerable.

The biotech division last year began marketing a safe-for-human-consumption pesticide to control flies under the brand name Flycracker, but its big bet is on tagatose. Tagatose is most closely related to fructose, the sugar that's in honey, fruits and corn, Levin explained in an interview Friday. The chemical formulas for fructose and tagatose are identical. The two molecules look the same, but in tagatose, one atom of carbon juts off to the left of the main structure instead of off to right as it does in fructose.

Left-leaning sugars have fascinated Levin for more than 20 years. He first got interested in one that is a mirror image of table sugar. Think of the sugar molecule as a coil that curls around to the right. A backward sugar molecule that turns to the left was Levin's first interest. Levo-sugar it's called, for left-handed.

Levo-sugar is a confusing chemical to the human body. To the tongue, it tastes just like regular sugar. But the body has never swallowed left-handed sugar and can't digest it.

Levin spent the better part of the 1980s tinkering with left-handed sugar, attracting a lot of attention to Biospherics stock, but ultimately leaving a bad taste in the mouths of investors. The problem was that the company was never able to find a way to make left-handed sugar at a low enough price to give the company a high stock price. Every once in a while, Biospherics would announce some development in sweetener research, the stock would jump, and then it would drift back down.

The pattern continued in the 1990s after Levin shelved levo-sugar and shifted his team of researchers to tagatose.

The result has been an erratic stock with poor long-term performance. A $100 investment in Biospherics on Dec. 31, 1995, had grown in value to $151 at the end of 1998, but by the end of last year was back to $111. As a benchmark, a $100 investment in a Standard & Poor's 500-stock index mutual fund was worth $232 at the end of last year.

Levin acknowledges that he's "had people throwing things at me" at some annual meetings, but predicts the shareholders will be happier when they hear their update on tagatose at the meeting next month at the company headquarters near Interstate 95 in Beltsville.

Biospherics' partner in the sweetener business is Arla Foods, a cooperative based in Sweden that is one of the world's largest producers of cheese, milk and other dairy products. Rights to manufacture, market and distribute tagatose as a food product were originally sold in 1997 to the Danish company MD Foods Ingredients, which later was acquired by Arla.

The raw material for making tagatose is whey, a watery byproduct of cheese-making. Usually whey is dried into a protein powder that's used for animal feed.

Seeking a more lucrative use for the cheese byproduct, the Scandinavians built a pilot plant to produce tagatose and took over the job of gaining U.S. regulatory approval to use the sugar in food.

Under Food & Drug Administration regulations, Arla recruited a panel of scientific experts to assemble and review all the scientific research on tagatose and then decide whether it is "generally regarded as safe," which is the government standard for food products. The panel issued its decision last week, which opens the way for marketing of tagatose in the United States. The regulatory approval process is proceeding n Europe and through multinational agencies that represent less-developed nations. In some countries, no approval is needed because tagatose is simply considered another form of sugar.

Unlike drugs, foods don't have to be tested on humans, Levin explained. But Biospherics obtained a Maryland Industrial Partnership grant to finance human studies at the University of Maryland Medical School, which produced promising results for potential use by diabetics.

Diabetics can eat foods sweetened with tagatose without getting the unhealthful changes in their blood glucose levels that are caused by eating sugar.

The studies did, however, find that patients who consumed large amounts of tagatose experienced gastrointestinal distress, including diarrhea, nausea and flatulence. The intestinal problems apparently result because most tagatose passes through the digestive tract without being absorbed -- a key reason why it's lower in calories.

Those lower-bowel symptoms weren't a problem for most people who ate small amounts of the sweetener and Levin said he does not expect the reaction to be a problem for the uses Arla has in mind for tagatose.

"They're not going to sell it to sprinkle on cereal," he said. At a projected price of $2 a pound, tagatose will be too expensive for that anyway. The target products include diet health bars, candies, chewing gums, ice-cream substitutes and diet soft drinks.

Besides having the advantage of being a natural product, Levin explained, tagatose is "full bulk" like sugar, not highly concentrated like aspartame. Tagatose can be substituted for sugar in recipes in which intense sweeteners don't work.

The company has kept the rights to use tagatose in non-food products -- such as toothpaste -- and in drugs. The University of Maryland research suggests potential for treating diabetes, but winning approval of a new drug is far more difficult than getting a food ingredient declared safe.

All food uses of tagatose have been licensed to Arla under terms that are still secret. Aside from reporting $2.5 million in upfront payments, Biospherics has disclosed only that it will collect royalties on all sales. All Levin will say is that the royalty payments depend not only on how much tagatose is sold, but also on what it is used in.

Levin said independent studies project a potential multibillion-dollar market for tagatose-sweetened foods. But without knowing how much of that money would trickle back to Beltsville, it is impossible to translate the size of the market into the price of Biospherics stock. No Wall Street analysts follow the company.

The Scandinavian partner is a farmer-owned cooperative, not a public company, so it does not have to disclose details of its finances, Levin said. Shrugging and smiling about the potential payoff, Levin said, "If anyone wants to invest in the future of tagatose, the only direct play is Biospherics."

Jerry Knight's e-mail address is knightj@washpost.com. Knight delivers a daily stock market wrap-up on washingtonpost.com